Opportunity Made Podcast Transcript, Episode 4

Eli Davidson, Engineering for Neurodiversity

[00:00:00] Eli: Now being able to accept myself, I'm really able to say, I don't have as easy of a time doing the things that everyone else does and that's okay. My brain is beautiful. I love the way that it works now that I understand how it works. And I will never shame myself for the way that it works. I will just do my best to respond to those emails as quickly as I possibly can.

[00:00:24] [music]

[00:00:51] Katherine: Hello everybody and welcome to the Opportunity Made Podcast. This is a podcast based on the idea that we can make new opportunities for ourselves and others on a regular basis, if we are willing to take chances, be intentional in our actions and invest deeply in our own lives. I am your host, Katherine Lewis, and we are talking all about engineering for neurodiversity, with software engineering student, Eli Davidson.

[00:01:18] I am going to give an audio description of myself. I am a European American woman with short blonde hair that is tied back. Today, I am wearing a white sweater and there is a white wall behind me. With that, Eli welcome!

[00:01:30] Eli: Hi, how are you? I'll go ahead and give my audio description as well. So I am biracial.

[00:01:36] I am a non-binary human. I use they, them pronouns. I have medium length black hair. It's shaved on one side. I'm wearing a blue shirt and my background has a blue light.

[00:01:48] Katherine: I love it. It looks great. Thank you for joining us today and welcome. Eli, you're a student at the Turing School of Software and Design in your third module. Tell me a little bit about the project you're currently working on.

[00:02:01] Eli: Yeah, absolutely. The group that I have is working on a project that we call Wish You Were Here.

[00:02:07] So because of COVID 19, a lot of places have gone completely remote, including, the Turing School. Uh, so the entire time that we have been learning software engineering, we have been remote and connected through Zoom. One of the things that we are not able to do since we're not able to go to campus, is we're not able to take a group photo together.

[00:02:28] So my group has decided that we are going to make a progressive web app that you can have on your phone. You take a selfie. That selfie gets uploaded to our server, and then, uh, in a collaborative space, those selfies are brought together. The backgrounds are automatically removed out of them. Uh, and we can place ourselves onto a virtual background as if we were all together there.

[00:02:52] Katherine: That is so cool. So do the users get to pick what background they want?

[00:02:57] Eli: Yeah, absolutely. Right now we have started with the best inspiration that we can in, in the way that we wanna demo it. We have a picture of the old campus where people used to go.

[00:03:07] In the future, we're going to connect that to other APIs where you can put other backgrounds up and then we may, as an extension, add the functionality for you to add your own virtual background. We really want to make it something that is, uh, a customizable tool for anybody that wants to be together with people when they're not able to be.

[00:03:28] Katherine: I'm curious, have you interviewed any users or any potential customers for this product or was this deeply rooted in your own experience?

[00:03:37] Eli: Yeah, so we haven't. The reason why is because we want to give it to our cohort as a gift. No one in the cohort knows that we're doing this. I'm sure that as soon as we are able to, uh, get that up and running, we will ask for feedback so that we can further iterate on it. My group is so passionate about this project. There is a really good chance that we're going to continue iterating on it, even after we're in our jobs and doing other things because we're just really having fun with it and it's not something where we're looking at like how much money can we make. It's more, how can we touch the hearts of the people that are around us. Lots of opportunity to continue with this. I'm really excited and I'm glad that you're excited as well.

[00:04:20] Katherine: Thank you for sharing with me. I love that it's a surprise for the rest of the cohort, especially where everyone is remote and they haven't had the opportunity to create those in person connections. I think this is going to be really special. I would love to know more of your story. How did you end up in Turing and what's a bit of your background?

[00:04:39] Eli: Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's a really, really good story, if I do say so myself. So, uh, when I was 13 or, or 14, I had a friend. His name was Dan and I have no idea why, but he decided that he wanted to learn coding which to me seemed like that's something that people in college do, something like way later and he showed me that it's actually pretty simple.

[00:05:00] Uh, and back then we started on BASIC. So that ran in DOS uh, just like command line, just basic commands if this, then that. And I loved it. We started building things that looked like they were doing things, even though they weren't. We made a little loading bar, uh, that was based on a timer. So it would look like, oh yeah, we're installing a program, but it was just printing out to the screen.

[00:05:24] And it was one of the ways that we really bonded and I just really loved it. When I started in the working world, I worked for Dish Network and I started off as a Technical Service Representative on the phones and started moving my way up. I ended up in a department called the Floor Efficiency Zone and their job was basically to monitor the amount of time that it took for our agents to get off of calls, run a bunch of reports and things like that.

[00:05:52] So I did a lot of stuff in Excel. This is the first time that I really dealt with Excel. And what ended up happening was it was a lot of copy and paste, like take it from this column, put it in that column. And I started having trouble. I wasn't able to focus on doing the same thing over and over.

[00:06:10] And I remember being questioned by my boss at, at that point of like, why are you not putting out the same amount of work as everybody else? And I, I really didn't have a good reason, right? At that point, I thought like, maybe I'm lazy. Maybe I'm stupid. I, I'm not sure. So, the only thing that I could think of was like, there has to be a way to teach the computer how to do this.

[00:06:30] I don't know exactly why my thought process was that, but I was like, there has to be a way to teach the computer to do this. And, uh, through a little bit of Googling, I found out about VBA. So that's Visual Basic for Applications. Turns out that you can write code on the back end of, uh, Excel to get it to copy from one side to another.

[00:06:49] And the great news there was look at that it's written in BASIC, which is the programming language that I've already looked at. I started building reports and automating them and putting out the same amount of work as everybody else. And a little bit later, I started putting out more work than everybody else.

[00:07:03] I kept moving up and as I kept moving up, the problems were a little bit larger and a little bit more tedious. And I found out that VBA is actually behind all of Microsoft office. So, in the Excel, I can actually make it open up Outlook and send out an email or I can read my emails and then put that into Excel.

[00:07:22] Or I can actually make that into a PowerPoint and then send that out. Or I can put that into an access database. All of a sudden, this entire new world was opened up to me and I just fell in love with the idea of automating the tedious tasks that I was doing. That continued me up the chain into corporate at Dish where I ended up in technical operations, where we monitored all of the TV signals for all of the customers all the time.

[00:07:48] At that point, I hit a wall where my VBA just wasn't cutting it for the amount of data that we had and the amount of speed that we had. Coincidentally in my department also was an engineer named Wyatt and Wyatt had actually gotten a CS degree. He learned C++ and all of these other languages.

[00:08:05] He saw like, oh, you know, VBA, have you ever seen VB.NET? And I said, no, what's VB.NET? Turns out VB.NET is the way to make applications, like full on applications, and with the amount of data that we had, we hooked that up to a Microsoft SQL server database and I also learned SQL. And all of this was not part of my job description or anything like that.

[00:08:27] It was just what I was doing because I couldn't do it on my own basically. Wyatt left Dish and went to Level Three Communications, which is now CenturyLink. When he got there, uh, his boss said, “Hey, do you know anybody else that has the skillset that you do? This is amazing!” And Wyatt was able to say, “yeah, actually Eli has the same skillset because I taught them.”

[00:08:48] So I moved over to Level Three Communications as a Financial Analyst working in mostly SQL, which at that point it was, it was a dream, right? Like I had no education or anything like this. I just taught myself, and now SQL is my primary way to make money.

[00:09:03] When I moved to Level Three Communications, I was a contractor. In the finance department they had a rule that nobody was allowed to be moved full-time unless they had a four year degree. I didn't have a four year degree, so I wasn't able to be put on full-time and Wyatt was, but there was another department that was Network Expansion.

[00:09:21] They were totally fine with me not having a degree and they loved the skillset that I had. So I moved over as a project manager for them and from there I started building full stack applications. I would build a front-end for the team to use that was connected to a SQL server database on the back end, which removed all need for the Excel sheets and all of this craziness with files that they had. It was a really, really large project that at the time I didn't know how to do, but I did know that I had the skills to find out how to do it.

[00:09:52] So once the project was approved, I was off and running. It went up and it was one of the best pieces of code that I ever made. CenturyLink bought Level Three Communications, and they basically did a reduction in force that I was affected by. I left there and moved over to T-Mobile.

[00:10:08] T-Mobile was making a product called TVision. It started off as TVision Home, and then became TVision and they wanted to start their own cable company from scratch. I had a little bit of experience with that. So I started as a Content Operations Coordinator and again, leveraging my coding skills, I eventually moved up to Content Operations Manager and was off and running again. Uh, at this point still just kind of moonlighting, kind of like doing things that I wasn't supposed to do, but it really interested me and that product ended up not working out.

[00:10:43] The TV industry is pretty saturated. T-Mobile kind of got in late to the game, so they shut down that project and now if you are a T-Mobile customer, you can get TVision through YouTube TV. I still recommend it. I love T-Mobile, but because the project was shut down, I again, was laid off. Ended up getting a very generous severance package.

[00:11:04] Again, love T-Mobile. It's great stuff and I was kind of in this crossroad. I said, look, I can go back into the business world. I can continue, you know, on this track that I'm doing, which is pretty lucrative and pretty nice and like moonlighting as a developer, or I can actually go and be a quote unquote, real developer.

[00:11:24] So I started doing a lot of research and found Turing. Immediately Turing like, it blew me away. It was kind of outta my budget, but it blew me away and I knew that I wanted to be a part of it. And luckily my mom was over here when I was looking at the schools and it's really touching to me because I remember telling her, like, I think that I need to go to this boot camp or that boot camp, because this is what I can afford on the severance that I have and the amount of time that I have. Is it possible that you would loan me the money for my tuition and she goes, yeah. Like without even skipping a beat, she's like, yeah, if that's a school that you wanna go to, go. I'm insanely grateful to my mom and I'm sure that my mom is listening to this at some point, but I'm, I, I just couldn't understate that.

[00:12:02] Um, so I started at Turing so that I can actually do software development as my actual career instead of kind of pretending. I'm learning JavaScript, I'm learning React, like we're doing so many things that are so beyond the skillset that I had over the last, you know, however long, a little bit more than a decade at this point, and I'm just absolutely loving it. Yeah, if anybody is looking to, uh, get into the tech space, I definitely recommend Turing as well.

[00:12:29] Katherine: I love so many parts of your story. One, I could imagine the decade of experience you're bringing to the Turing bootcamp has helped you with solving problems, thinking about how to create things, how to manage a project, I mean, there's so many skills that you already have that are going to elevate all you're going to get out of this bootcamp. So that's super cool.

[00:12:50] Eli: Yeah.

[00:12:51] Katherine: And then on top of that, in thinking about let's call it a traditional career path, people often think that we need to have an official title or an official position.

[00:13:03] I think what you highlighted really well there is, if you give yourself the skills, if you work hard, if you put yourself out there, if you add value and think about solving problems that other people aren't solving, or how can we make this even more efficient? How can we get this done even faster? That can also help you accelerate your career and open up new opportunities that a traditional path may not provide for you.

[00:13:32] Eli: mm-hmm . And one of the things that's really interesting in exploring this and for people that are a little bit more involved in the tech space, they'll understand that what coding is, it's just a series of abstractions getting to a higher and higher level. Learning originally on BASIC, you had a lot of control of the system from a really low level, but it did take a lot more knowledge to do a lot more of the complex things, where in JavaScript, there's a lot more packages and things that you can download.

[00:13:58] So what I like to tell people about the boot camp space is a while ago, it really did require a four year degree to do a career path like this. It was heavily in math and statistics and all of those things. So when people say like, maybe I'm not smart enough to be a developer or things like that, what they're really looking at is, you know, in the traditional space where it was a four year and I need to know calculus and all of this stuff, yeah, that might be a little bit, uh, beyond that skill set, but right now, um, we've opened up the tech space to where anybody can do it.

[00:14:27] They teach coding to children, to anybody. So really, I would say that it's more about love at this point. If tech is something that you love, it is something that you can do.

[00:14:35] Katherine: What do you think made the difference in how the tech industry was set up back then and the skills that were required versus now?

[00:14:48] Eli: Um, I honestly I think that it was mostly attributed to the developers of the time. I like to use the word hackers. Not the people that are going to break into your system and steal all of your data, but just the people that like love to sit in code and say, hey, what does this button do? What does that button do? They open sourced a lot of things.

[00:15:09] They made the code available to anybody and they kept making things easier. Oh, we need to make a calendar. Let me just make a thing so that anybody can just say calendar go and now it's there. As we progress as developers and as engineers, we're making it more and more accessible to anyone that wants to be involved in it and we're removing the limitations that they may have, like I'm not good with math or I have dyslexia or any of those things, we're going to make a way so that you can be a part of the tech industry with us.

[00:15:41] Katherine: That is true for you as well. You're a person with ADHD. How did you find out about that and how has that influenced your entry into tech?

[00:15:52] Eli: Yeah. So, uh, it's fun because I love to look at it in hindsight. Like it should have been obvious to me from an early age that I had ADHD, the way that I was in school, the way that my room was always messy, I was always disorganized. And again, I really attributed that to being lazy or disorganized. Because I had used tech and I'd used this automation to do my job as I moved up, I wasn't impacted that much on like my actual skill sets or my actual ability to maintain focus for a really, really long time.

[00:16:27] But because the things that I was doing were very, very powerful and things that people in my role didn't have the skillset to do, I kept getting promoted, which was great, but I ended up getting promoted into places that were really on the business side and really more, um, in a way that you would have a traditional business degree.

[00:16:46] So that involved me going to a lot of meetings, meeting a lot of people, people networking, being on time, a lot of the things that I couldn't do naturally, and I really didn't have a way of automating those things with code. Like how do I make a computer go to a meeting for me? At some point I'm probably gonna look back on this podcast and I'm gonna be like, I found a way, but what ended up happening is when I was at T-Mobile and right before the product got shut down, I actually got put on a performance plan by my boss where I wasn't performing the way that he wanted to and it's completely understandable. I absolutely wasn't.

[00:17:20] At the time I remember, uh, I had friends that had gone to college and they said, look, if people have problems focusing or whatever they take Adderall, right? And I was like, well, I don't really think that I have ADHD, but if taking this pill is gonna help me keep my job, then I'll go ahead and do that.

[00:17:35] So I went to a doctor and I said, hey, I would like to have some Adderall so that I can not lose my job and my doctor was she's really amazing. Um, she really heard what I was saying and like her ears perked up of like, what do you mean you're gonna lose your job because of the way that this is affecting you?

[00:17:56] And I told her, honestly, I said, yeah, you know, this, this and that. And, uh, she put me through all of the tests. So it was very, very, very thorough test. It took a long time to complete, and it turned out that I have ADHD and I have ADHD at a level that I am luckily protected by the Americans with Disability Act.

[00:18:13] I got a note that went back to my boss that said, hey, we're working on this, I'm now on medication, and I was able to keep my job which really meant so much to me at the time. Because I didn't think that I had ADHD and I was now diagnosed with it, I went and did a lot of research. I found out what neurodiversity is, what dopamine is, how all of that affects me.

[00:18:35] I realized looking back on my life that I had it the whole time and that it was something that I didn't know. At this point, if I wasn't on medication, I wouldn't be able to focus in Turing and basically, I would be on a path to where my life would be over, no matter how much I loved it, no matter how passionate I was, no matter how much I wanted to, my brain just didn't produce enough of the chemical that I needed to be able to do those things.

[00:18:57] That's how I found out is I went to try and get the thing that makes people focus and it turns out it's because I needed it.

[00:19:06] Katherine: What I love about that experience you had is you had a doctor who was willing to not only hear you verbally, hear the words that you were saying, but dig deeper and have more insight and hear the message behind the words and say, wait a second, I need to pause here and I need to see what else is going on because there's more to the story.

[00:19:28] And had you not had someone who was able to really hear you, it might have been a different story, but now you have learned more about yourself, you're able to work with yourself and help yourself work in ways that work for you. Whereas before that may not have been the case.

[00:19:46] Eli: Yeah, absolutely. I'm looking at the whole process and, and how unknowledgeable I was about it when I went into the doctor's office, it's kind of silly now, but Adderall is a very serious substance.

[00:20:00] The DEA takes it very seriously. Every time I get my prescription filled, they have a record that I am now in possession of those things. So I completely understand from the standpoint of anyone that doesn't need it, there's a huge, huge way to abuse those sort of things. But for people that do need it, it's a lifesaver. I understand the scrutiny and I'm really glad that I was able to be honest and say I don't know if I have this, but I want this medication and to have somebody that was really knowledgeable about what is going on and to be able to say, look, you are going to get it not just because you asked, but because it's actually going to help your life. And that's also the person that makes sure that people that don't need it, don't get it because they can really harm themselves if they're taking these medications and they don't need them.

[00:20:48] Katherine: How does technology affect your ADHD?

[00:20:52] Eli: This one's fun because there's a few different facets and it depends on the type of technology, it depends on what the use case is, but the whole point is that most of the technology that's out in the market right now is based on business.

[00:21:05] It's based on the bottom line. How much money can we get? How much ads can we push? So a lot of the user experience side of it is based on people with neurotypical brains, so people that don't have ADHD. What ends up happening is if I have a larger app that I want to deal with, like a Todoist, a to-do list app, I will open up the app and I will be... all of the customization in the world is open to me, which for people that are really organized, it's really good, but I'm not really organized. So I end up really overwhelmed or I'll get really, really excited about it and I'll put everything in my life in it, and then the next time that I look at it, it's so overwhelming that I never wanna look at it again.

[00:21:44] In fact, I have a Todoist right now that I probably haven't looked at forever and it just keeps reminding me that I haven't taken the trash out in 365 days, even though I have, I just haven't put it in the app. Some tech, it's too open to customization and I am not able to focus and really get a system down.

[00:22:02] And then there's other tech that's at the complete opposite end of the spectrum, things like TikTok or Snapchat or Facebook. Those want to grab your attention all the time, because part of the business side of it is how many active users do we have? When was the last time that they logged in?

[00:22:19] Push notifications and things like that are trying to get your attention. They're using techniques that come from classical conditioning and behaviorism that for a neurotypical brain, yes, it does get that effect. But for someone with ADHD, somebody that is really susceptible to, those flashes, those notifications, those sounds that yay, excitement, what, what does Facebook have for me today?

[00:22:45] I end up spending hours in those apps when I don't want to. I mean it's okay for my leisure time, but while I'm trying to work, while I'm trying to focus on things, it's not good for me to end up back in there. Facebook specifically, I realize that I have a pattern now that sometimes I will exit out of Facebook, like, okay, I need to get out of Facebook cuz I need to go check something else.

[00:23:09] Okay, I'm gonna open up this other thing. And then all of a sudden I realize I'm back in Facebook. I literally closed Facebook and my, my knee jerk reaction was well, I'm on my phone, so I must open Facebook. And I realized I didn't consent to that. I wanted to open Facebook at one point. I wanted to participate at some point, but now that I have this like invisible force behind me that I end up there, is something that's a little bit disheartening. It's like I no longer have control over these technologies and it's kind of a big thing in the tech industry where it's kind of predatory.

[00:23:45] The other one that's really interesting is Snapchat. So Snapchat will send notifications to you whenever somebody sends you a snap which is a very exciting thing, because it's always good to see all of the cool things that your friends are doing, especially, uh, when they want you to see it so they'll send it to you directly, but they send out a notification that looks almost exactly like that.

[00:24:04] It has the same icons and everything like that and when you go in there, cuz now you're excited, oh my gosh, my friends are doing something cool! You find out, oh, it's just team Snapchat letting me know, like it's St. Patrick's day. Thanks. So now I've wasted my time. I'm in your app, just so that you can say that I'm an active user. But at the same time, I'm not a happy user.

[00:24:25] I almost feel like I'm a used user or I'm a, a zombie user or something like that. So what I have to do is I actually have to turn off all notifications for everything. Anytime that I download anything notifications go off. I will set a specific time in the day, like during my lunch break, that's the time that I'm gonna go on Facebook.

[00:24:45] Any other time, any other notifications, anything like that, it can wait because if I open myself up to all those push notifications, I can't get anything else done no matter how hard I try.

[00:24:55] Katherine: That phrase, a used user is very interesting. I know that I found myself as well, going onto my phone to do one thing and then all of a sudden I'm somewhere else, and it's like, what was I doing again? So it happens, for sure. That is definitely part of the process. Are there certain apps that you absolutely can't use because it consumes so much of your attention or is so distracting.

[00:25:24] Eli: Yeah. Facebook in general is one that I've had to put additional protections up because of my habits. So in addition to push notifications, I had that knee jerk reaction of just opening it up. So I've had to uninstall the app. Then I found out, okay, now I'm logging into Facebook on my phone from my browser.

[00:25:44] So I needed to set up something on my browser to kick me out of that in the event that I go back into it. I'm, I'm babysitting myself with technology. I have to uninstall TikTok during the week and then during the weekend, when I have nothing better to do, I can go ahead and go back into it.

[00:26:00] TikTok is an amazing platform. I love it. It feels great, I guess is a good way to say it, but I can't trust myself to not open it up all the time and lose myself in it because they've done such a good job of making every second of their content so alluring.

[00:26:18] Katherine: You almost have to use technology to protect yourself against technology and some of the negative effects it has. That creates this middle man, right? You have to be the middle man for yourself, the babysitter, as you said. What should platforms change so that way they create user experiences that are more sensitive to people's different needs, so they can still have that user engagement, but now it feels like they're cared for, and they're a happy user.

[00:26:44] Eli: Yeah, and this is a really good one to bring up as well, because I'm fortunate that I decided that I like to code and that I have the ability to make a way around something, or I understand how to uninstall or any of those things. A lot of the typical users might not know how to do that.

[00:27:02] They only know how to download something from the app store, put in their username and password, and then they're putting their trust into the engineers that have set up the user experience from there. So if we have a situation where all of the notifications are on, like from the get go, and we of course from a business side would say they have the ability to turn them off if they want to go and seek that out, very similarly to something that Facebook dealt with a while ago, they have the opportunity to not share any data if they go and seek out how to not do that, I think that we're kind of ignoring our user base.

[00:27:37] Like by saying, we have a way through seven different drill downs to turn this off and anytime the app updates, it resets those and people should just know, most people that are using the app don't know that kind of thing. So one of the things that I really want to include in the applications that I put out in the future is a really, really good onboarding process that just slows everything down and gives the user an opportunity to make an informed decision to how they want to use that app.

[00:28:09] As soon as they go in we could say, hey, these are the notifications that we want to send you. This is about how much they're going to be sent. Do you consent to having those sent to you? Even if you say yes, they can also say here's how you turn that off in case you ever change your mind.

[00:28:25] Also an opportunity if we say no, here's how you turn them on if you ever want them in the future. But that really puts more of the power in the user's hand, rather than putting it into a spot where we know that we're going to get people hooked. We know that we're going to get people addicted. We know that we're going to have all of these numbers of this many active users.

[00:28:46] Redefining the idea of an active user. An active user may be somebody that opens the app, but perhaps in the future, we can start looking at as somebody that consents to using our service in the way that we want and they're left feeling better about themselves for using that service in the way that they wanted to.

[00:29:04] Katherine: You seem to be emphasizing the user experience that lends the user to feeling like their life has been improved by engaging with this technology. When I think about that, that's a different way of creating a product because often a product is created to meet the business needs, but really what you're speaking about is not only are we making money, we're solving problems, but we're making people better human beings.

[00:29:32] Eli: Yeah. Like I said, I've gone up in the business world and I have seen a lot of the meetings where the main focus is, how do we increase the bottom line? How do we increase revenue? How do we increase subscriber growth and so on, right? How do we get more? And I've also seen in those spaces where we have a lot of really great advocates for consumer protection.

[00:29:57] Over the years there have been a lot of laws that have gone into place. One of the biggest examples when I was at T-Mobile, we started talking about the way that we were handling user data. One thing that was very surprising to me at the time was that there's actually a law, there's actually protection around the way that you handle data if there's a possibility that the user is a child. There's a protection. You have to be anonymous and all of this stuff to protect the children. And no matter what the bottom line was, no matter what was going on that was the rule was no, we're not doing that. We're protecting the children.

[00:30:31] It was something that really touched my heart and made me even more confident in working on that product was, yes, we are looking for the bottom line. We are a business. That's what we do. Here's where we draw the line for humans. This is the amount of revenue that we're going to give up so that humans are left better using this product. So that we keep them for years, not just days.

[00:30:53] I really think that that is something that we need to look at as engineers is we're going to have a lot of push and pull from the business side when it comes to revenue and it's very easy to go black and white of say, this will make me a dollar and this won't, but it takes a little bit more courage to say, this will make me a dollar and it's not a good thing to do for humans.

[00:31:17] Ultimately we need to realize we are dealing with users, we're dealing with humans. We're interfacing them with computers. If you want to get into a backend system, servers talking to each other, make them do all the crazy things you want. That's totally fine. They don't even care. Make them be online all night. They don't care.

[00:31:33] But when we get to the front-end and we're talking about actual humans, we need to pause ourselves and say, how is it that I'm going to benefit this person? Not just, how am I going to take a dollar from them?

[00:31:44] Katherine: Yeah. Having a lot more empathy and thinking more long term, just not, what can I get from this moment and how many people can we keep online or engaged, but looking at the whole picture and saying, how does this add value to this person's life? Not just, how does it solve this problem, but imagining, okay, I'm a user who's using this on a daily basis or a monthly basis, whatever the cadence is, what else is going on in their life? And how does that affect them?

[00:32:15] I've been thinking about this in terms of apps having sleep modes and I think this is something that you've alluded to in terms of infinite scroll. Can you share more how infinite scroll can be harmful for people with ADHD?

[00:32:30] Eli: Yeah. I wanna start with I really empathize with the person that designed infinite scroll because on the surface it really, really does look like a good feature.

[00:32:40] Infinite scroll is basically when you get to the bottom of a page or near the bottom of a page, the application's going to automatically give additional content so you can keep scrolling as if it was there the entire time. The way that we had, uh set before is when you got to the bottom of a screen, you would have a whole bunch of pages and you would say, yeah, I want to go to the next page.

[00:32:59] What ended up happening when we made this design switch, was completely unintentional, um, getting to the bottom of the page and having to make that decision of, do I click on the next page also gives you a cue of how long have I been in here? What have I been doing? If you continually scroll and you don't have that queue to say, hey, am I being responsible right now? I personally experienced and several people around me have experienced I can find myself into 3:00 AM, 4:00 AM and not know why I wasn't able to get myself to stop.

[00:33:35] Furthermore, it sucks because a lot of the time people don't have the language or the understanding to know this is a design experience. Like they wanted you to stay, not in an evil way or anything unintentional. They just wanted you to have a good time and not be bothered by reloading, but I ended up beating myself up when I would end up in these apps for that amount of time, like, man, I'm so, this and that, because I just can't get myself to stop. Meanwhile, from a psychological standpoint, that was the design. I'm doing exactly what they wanted me to do.

[00:34:09] Not only does it affect my time, but it also affects my mental health and my view of myself about how capable I am in general. Things like infinite scroll are awesome, but again, I really think that we should put the power in the user's hands and say, do you want this experience? Do you want us every once in a while to say, hey, get back up and go to work. We've got your back kind of a thing versus we're only happy when you're in our app.

[00:34:33] Katherine: You're going to have so much more loyalty from users when you create that experience. So doing something like a sleep mode in an application where you can say, hey, if I'm going into this app at 10 o'clock at night, I wanna see everything else because maybe I'm here for a reason, but don't show me the feed, cuz I know that I'll be on it and I won't get to bed. And if you take care of me, when I'm trying to go to sleep, then it's more likely that I'll be on this application when I'm awake. So creating that loyalty.

[00:35:03] Eli: Yeah. And it's really interesting every once in a while I get these kind of spidey sense. I can already hear the engineers that are listening to this podcast that say, there are plenty of ways to do that. You can install Tasker, you can write these scripts, not everybody's an engineer. Not everybody knows that they can do that. So again, this goes back to, yes, it's gonna cause a little bit of work. It's going to take a little bit away from the bottom line, but giving more ability to users to, to control that kind of a thing of when do I wanna be on? When do I wanna be off? When do I want you to say, no, you're not allowed to be in here?

[00:35:34] All of those things would be really beneficial and really help people that are not as tech savvy. We talked about earlier, I use technology to defend against technology. Part of the reasons that I learned scripting was for that reason.

[00:35:46] If I go in here, kick me out. People shouldn't have to know how to code in order to have that experience. Like it, it feels like such a privilege. I have the ability to protect myself because I know coding. Let's give that ability to everybody.

[00:36:01] Katherine: Yeah. Very well said. What is the difference between stickiness and addiction?

[00:36:07] Eli: Yeah. So stickiness is the concept of having user loyalty, somebody that wants to come back. Addiction is they don't want to come back and they can't stop themselves from coming back. When it comes to revenue generation, the metric is the same. How often are they coming in? There's not really a metric for are they happy while they're doing it?

[00:36:31] Would we stop sending them notifications if they weren't happy? If they said, please don't make me come back in here all day, every day, would we allow that? If we're only looking at stickiness from like a business standpoint, it's really easy to lose that.

[00:36:46] I personally have a lot of brand loyalty to several brands that I still love, including my former employer, T-Mobile. I think that they're amazing and I'm not continuing to be a T-Mobile customer because I'm addicted to it. If Verizon or AT&T had a product that I was more passionate about, I would probably go there.

[00:37:08] For me, it's really not about price. It's about, I was in that culture and I really experienced how customer focused everyone was. Like not just as a thing, but we really loved customers and we built things for that.

[00:37:22] Having experienced that and having experienced all the things as a customer, all that giveaways that they give, all the we didn't have to do this, but we decided to disrupt the market so here you go. That just makes me happy to be there and I'm even willing to pay more, to have an experience that I'm happy with rather than like, oh, well I got the cheap one and they don't really care about me and their customer service is terrible and all of that, but I just can't live without it so yeah.

[00:37:51] It just doesn't feel good and I think that the tech industry has had a lot of reputation where a lot of things don't feel good and people have just thought this is the way that it is, and this is the way that it has to be forever. I don't think so. I really think that there's a possibility, there's an opportunity in the market to put out something that people are happier with.

[00:38:10] It may not get as many ad clicks or things like that, but if we're putting out things that people are happy with and it really does improve their lives, people will be amped to pay more for it and then we could all go to bed happy.

[00:38:24] Katherine: What does an engineer actually need to do to ensure that they're creating something that people are gonna be happy with?

[00:38:32] Eli: This one is tough because a lot of engineers don't have the ability to do design work. We will get a comp from a designer that the only thing that they're really looking at is I'm gonna use these bright colors, cuz it's attractive. I'm gonna use this sound. I'm gonna use this animation. And they pass that over to the engineer and a lot of the times the designer also can't really say much about that because it's all coming from the business side and it's all coming down to the bottom line. Am I saying that look at your ticket, if it, if you don't like it, then just don't do it. No, absolutely not.

[00:39:05] Definitely fulfill the responsibilities of your role, but also advocate. When there's a culture meeting or anything else going on in your company say, hey look, we built this thing and it's great, but have we thought about this?

[00:39:19] I think we're at a stage where it's all about sparking the conversation and that's one of the reasons why I'm so excited to have the opportunity to speak with you on this podcast, is it's all about starting the conversation to where the business side will agree, and it will roll down to the engineers and it'll roll down to the design department and we'll get that out.

[00:39:37] Again, going back to that example that I have, there are protections around the way that we handle children in the tech space and it's wonderful. So the business side will listen if there is enough of a conversation happening, and it requires as many people as we can to talk about it and to not just put their head down and continue with the status quo.

[00:40:01] Katherine: There are different recruitment programs out there for engineers who are neurodiverse. Microsoft has one, have you seen a couple others and what do you think about 'em?

[00:40:14] Eli: I have not. So I should be looking for a job right now. Um, I am having so much fun, like building the projects in Turing and making the friendships that I have in the cohort that I have definitely procrastinated that, also have I mentioned that I have ADHD, so I, I have not looked into all of the programs that are out there for neurodiverse people.

[00:40:35] But I do love the fact that that is something that is out there and one of the reasons that I think that that's out there is because a lot of the people that have built things up until now are neurodiverse. The idea that I fell in love with tech and decided to do it on my spare time is not a coincidence in the way that the tech industry is set up.

[00:40:54] So having something that explicitly says, if you're neurodiverse, we recognize you, we accept you, we love you, we want you to be a part of our team, that makes me want to apply for those companies, just from the standpoint of, I don't have to worry about fighting my boss for accommodations.

[00:41:14] I don't have to worry about reminding people all the time I'm sorry that I missed that email. I really wanted to respond to it. I got really deep into this ticket. You know, the idea that they have those recruitment practices makes me hope that they also have a culture of acceptance when people have different abilities.

[00:41:33] Especially with neurodiversity, neurodiversity is one of those things that is not readily apparent to people like other conditions or other disabilities that people would have. So a lot of the time, and this happened when I grew up of why can't you do what everyone else does, was always a conversation. And now being able to accept myself, I'm really able to say, I don't have as easy of a time doing the things that everyone else does.

[00:42:01] And that's okay. My brain is beautiful. I love the way that it works now that I understand how it works. And I will never shame myself for the way that it works. I will just do my best to respond to those emails as quickly as I possibly can. Having a culture that's in front of me, that also thinks that the way that I think is beautiful is something that I really look forward to being a part of when I start applying.

[00:42:25] Katherine: I love that you've come to this place of accepting your brain, you, the way that it works and not having shame around it. That's a beautiful place to be in, in life for any attribute of ourselves externally or internally. Was it just a matter of having a name for it that allowed you to accept yourself? Or was there more to the process to reach that place of acceptance?

[00:42:53] Eli: I'm so glad that you asked this question because it surprised me when it happened. So I went to the doctor. I got my diagnosis and I immediately surprised surprise, I posted it on Facebook. Right? So most of the time you would think that when you post on Facebook, hey, I got a diagnosis that now makes me an American with a disability, you would get comments back that are really sympathetic.

[00:43:18] Oh, no, we'll get through this. Sorry to hear it. Whatever. I started getting comments that were congratulations. And at the time I didn't understand it. By saying, hey, I have ADHD, I was contacted by other people that have ADHD or other types of neurodivergence.

[00:43:35] They had done the work to accept themselves and to see how beautiful their brains were. So it was no longer, hey, I got a diagnosis from a doctor and sad news. It was, hey, you now have an explanation for that thing that you used to think was laziness or that thing that was debilitating or you can't do what everybody else does.

[00:43:57] You have a place to point at to say, hey, this is gonna be a little bit different. Here are your strengths. Here are the things that you need to look at. A lot of it came from education. Once I was on the other side, I suppose, I educated myself on what ADHD is and how it works.

[00:44:12] And by the way, the YouTube channel, How to ADHD, if anyone has not gone there, one of the most amazing things ever, whether you're neurodivergent or not, please check out How to ADHD. Wonderful. You learn about yourself and, realize yeah, the things that have been difficult for me up until now, it makes sense that it was difficult.

[00:44:32] It's not because of me necessarily. It's not like I'm off the hook and I don't have to ever do those things, but now when I know I'm going into a two hour meeting and it's probably gonna be boring, okay, I'm going to bring maybe a fidget toy that I can put under the desk and not distract people.

[00:44:48] I know how to leverage the way that I think so that I'm productive and everyone around me is productive and happy. And that makes me like, if I didn't know what was going on with me, if I didn't know that I had ADHD and I wouldn't be able to use those tools, I don't know if I would've ever accepted how I am, because how I am would've been attached to a story of I'm lazy and, and all of that.

[00:45:13] Katherine: So having that education led you to a place of empowerment, not only in terms of preparation, if I'm going into a meeting, I'll do this, accommodation, hey, I work like this, but also empowerment internally of, hey, I no longer need to talk to myself in this way because it's not actually that I'm lazy or that I'm bad, or that I'm fill in blank here.

[00:45:36] Having that education and that empowerment has that changed your relationship with yourself, the quality of the work that you're doing, any of your output? What ripple effect has that had?

[00:45:50] Eli: Yeah, so kind of a boomerang like effect. One of the things about having ADHD that I found through a lot of research is all those times that I would tell everybody my whole life story right away is actually one of the things that happens with ADHD.

[00:46:04] As soon as I found out that I had ADHD, I started telling everyone that I had ADHD. And again, what I found was that people were supportive of it. In my cohort, it's one of the first things that I've ever told people is I speak computer better than I speak human. I'm ADHD. Sometimes there's going to be something that we're doing, the cohort's getting together, it's in this slack channel over here, I'm gonna completely miss it.

[00:46:30] And I have people that have heard that and will now, personally, IM me and say, hey, did you see this thing? Are you gonna be there? Cuz I know that you've already said that it's difficult for you to keep and manage that on your own.

[00:46:45] I'm starting to get a little choked up by, by thinking about this because the amount of effort that it takes from someone that doesn't experience ADHD, to validate that experience and then help in a way that they don't have to, going back to you know, from a business standpoint, you don't have to make these changes, but it might be good for humans.

[00:47:04] My cohort mates have made accommodations that I never even asked for. And it has helped me to be more social with them, to be more connected to them, to make bigger friendships because my experience in the tech world before was I'm going to build something on my own in the dark at night and push it out to people that don't really understand it.

[00:47:23] And now at Turing I'm doing a lot of things in group projects with like git workflow and all of this stuff that needs to be very organized. And I have people that are partnering with me for the things that I'm deficient in. And with that, it helps me to leverage my skills of hyper focusing or all of the experience that I have in other realms.

[00:47:44] Right now in our project, we had to build a backend. None of us have learned how to do that from Turing, but I've done it before or deploy a database or any of these other skills that I've had over the last several years and I wouldn't have that opportunity if my cohort mates didn't help me with the things that I was hard on myself for. All of our work is getting better because I'm able to really play to my strengths and with all of that happening, when I get to step back and see myself as I'm a part of a group that loves me and supports me and wants me to be a part of it, not just because I have knowledge that they don't, but because they really want me as a human, I don't think that I've ever felt as good to be me as when I've had those types of experiences.

[00:48:35] Katherine: That is so powerful to belong in that way, to share with everyone, hey, this is who I am. They're receptive, they're accepting, but not only both of those, they also say we're gonna take it one step further and we're gonna support you. We're gonna make sure that you don't miss out on something.

[00:48:55] We're gonna make sure that you are included, even if we need to communicate in a different way or communicate more often. Those bonds and relationships are still formed from a place of support, because it could be easy to exclude someone when they have different needs that if someone doesn't want to accommodate and would rather see as an inconvenience become inconveniencing.

[00:49:16] Eli: Yeah. Yeah. And I've seen it. I've seen it time and time again, where one of the easiest things for humans to say is it's not my problem, right? Doesn't affect me. In my opinion, it's a heartless thing to say that what's going on with the people that are on your team or next to you doesn't affect you.

[00:49:36] It's kind of, in my opinion, a cop out because what that person's going through is hard. And the whole reason that you don't want to look at it is because it's hard, but you know, speaking about myself, I can't turn it off. I cannot turn it off. I have to take a substance that many people out there try to make sure that I can't have, unless I absolutely need it.

[00:50:00] This is a very serious thing for me. If I could turn off my ADHD, if I could turn off, all of that stuff, I wouldn't need the medication or anything like that. Because it's something that I can't turn off by, like, I, I'm not saying that they have to make any accommodations or they have to go far outta their way, I'm so lucky that they have, but just to acknowledge it, just to say, yeah, it's valid. It's a real thing. Like you're not, you know, stupid or lazy or, or, or anything like that, it makes me feel more human. I can definitely say with neurodiversity, with having something that your brain works in a different way than everybody thinks it should, feeling inhuman is actually a pretty common thing.

[00:50:38] I really encourage people, even if you don't want to go out of your way to accommodate somebody like, oh, I don't wanna put extra work on my plate, you don't have to, you really don't, but just acknowledge that those people are valid and that their experience is real and that it's not as easy for them.

[00:50:54] Without having actually walked in everyone's shoes, I would say that I think everyone is deficient in something. A lot of times, people that have ADHD and neurodiversity have strengths that people with neurotypical brains don't have.

[00:51:08] And speaking for myself, I would love to share those skills. I would love to let you benefit from those skills. I really want you to, because I'm really excited about it. It gives me a lot of dopamine to show off that I can do it, and you're gonna be really happy, and it might just take you knowing that that email's gonna be late sometimes.

[00:51:28] Katherine: Thank you for sharing Eli. You are heading out after this next mod, your fourth mod, you are heading out into the world and getting ready to share those skills with an employer, with a team. What are you hoping to do? What's your big dream?

[00:51:42] Eli: Well, uh, the big, the big dream of course is to be employed, so that I can eat, um, that that's, that's always a good first step.

[00:51:52] The good news for me is I have a lot of experience on my resume in the business space and I don't have a shortage of employers wanting to seek me out and give me a good salary. So knowing that I stepped out of the business space and it wasn't for money, I'm looking for remote work.

[00:52:13] I think that it helps me to be a lot more versatile than being in person. It also really helps me as somebody with ADHD and anxiety that every once in a while I can just turn my camera off and be in the conversation, but not think about people looking at me. So remote work is going to be one.

[00:52:30] Beyond that, I really want to work on projects that benefit humans in the way that I've described here, in a way that my employer's wanting to benefit humans. I think that there's a lot of different opportunities in the tech space and with my skills, I really think that I can add to a lot of projects.

[00:52:47] So, yeah, right now, what I'm really looking for is a project that speaks to me and I'm gonna feel good about being a part of. At the end of the day, you know, if there's any potential employers listening to this, please ignore this part. I, I would probably take a smaller salary for that experience.

[00:53:05] Okay. You can listen again. Um, but yeah, really high salary is something that I would want. I think that I would love to work with some amazing people that come from all sorts of different diverse backgrounds so that I can understand their experience that I haven't had and are receptive to hearing the experience that I've had, that they haven't.

[00:53:24] Katherine: That's beautiful. The opportunity to learn from each other and continue to bulk up our experience, our skillset, the layers and the depth of who we are as people, because we're learning from each other, that's just such a magical experience.

[00:53:39] Uh, so I am excited. I know whatever you do is going to be fantastic. I know that because of your character, because of how you show up and your self acceptance. Thank you so much for being here. What would you like to leave with listeners?

[00:53:54] Eli: The tech space has been built by neurodiverse people and a lot of the times it's built in a way that doesn't really work for neurodiversity, which is a silly thing to do. In a lot of cases, people will do things for the bottom line.

[00:54:08] So just know that when you're sitting at your computer, when you have your command line up there, you have a lot of power. The phone that's in your pocket right now is more powerful than the computers that put a person on the moon. With any keystroke, you have an insane amount of power and, you know, as cliche as it is with great power comes great responsibility.

[00:54:29] I would ask that anyone takes a moment and looks at what we're doing from a big picture and errs on the side of human because at the end of the day, your bank account may be very proud of you if you have a billion users, but if those users are addicted zombies, I really don't know if you're going to be proud of yourself.

[00:54:50] I love everyone that is listening to this podcast. I'm so excited to have been on here. Thank you so much for your time. Um, just go out there and be good to each other.

[00:55:01] Katherine: Go out there and be good to each other. I love that, Eli. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of Opportunity Made. I loved hearing about your career journey and I'm just super pumped to see what comes next.

[00:55:15] To everyone who is listening, thank you for joining us. It is such a pleasure to meet with good friends and share new ways that we can create opportunities in this world. And I'm really excited to see more neurodiversity in tech. If you are someone who is neurodiverse, feel free to share your story with me @OpportunityMade on social media.

[00:55:33] I'd love to know your story and how you did it, and if it's going well. Eli, is there a place that people can connect with you and keep the conversation going?

[00:55:43] Eli: I am on LinkedIn. So you can do LinkedIn at Elijah Davidson. That's my full name is Elijah Davidson. Or you can get me on email EDavidson0@me.com.

[00:55:55] If you're listening this far in the podcast, you'll remember that I have some, uh, problems with responding to email. So if you do email me, I promise I will do my best, but please be patient.

[00:56:05] Katherine: I love that. Y'all err on the side of being human. Please be patient, take care of each other, we'll chat soon.