Joe Stern is a consultant and program manager here at Salesforce. Though he has many interests—outdoor camping and shoe drops to start—Joe’s passion lies in being an advocate for those with neurodiversity. As someone diagnosed with ADHD at an early age, Joe has grown to appreciate the importance of addressing the impact that mental health can have on one’s ability to function successfully both in and out of the workplace. Now, he coordinates support for mental health in the workplace for others.
In the first part of this two-part episode, we begin our discussion with Joe about his path to becoming a developer and how neurodiversity has affected the trajectory of his life. We also discuss some of the trials he’s faced in the workforce and how getting therapeutic support for his mental health has positively impacted both his performance at work as well as his other various hobbies and responsibilities.
Show Highlights:
- How to define neurodiversity
- Where to find a community and resources for those that identify with neurodivergence
- Challenges of learning how ADHD can impact your work life
- Warning signs that mental health is negatively impacting your work life
- Benefits of finding treatment or help for mental health issues
Links:
- Joe on Twitter twitter.com/mrjoesterne
- Joe on LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/jamesjosephsterne
- Joe on Github https://github.com/joesterne
Episode Transcript
Joe Sterne:
Once you start kind of seeing that other people are suffering from the same thing that you are, then it’s a little bit easier for you to start finding ways to help cope with it.
Josh Birk:
That is Joe Sterne, a Salesforce consultant and program manager here at Salesforce. I’m Josh Birk, your host of the Salesforce developer podcast. And here on the podcast, you’ll hear stories and insights from developers, for developers. Today, we sit down and talk with Joe about one of his other passions, that’s being a neurodivergent advocate and somebody that likes to help coordinate support for mental health. Now, this is a long conversation, so it’s going to be another two part interview. We’re going to start our first part with his early years in particular, wait for it, his outdoor recreation degree.
Joe Sterne:
18 credit semesters for about three and a half years.
Josh Birk:
Yeah.
Joe Sterne:
One of my finals was actually going camping for a weekend and I’m not making that up.
Josh Birk:
No way.
Joe Sterne:
Yeah, I know. Right.
Josh Birk:
You found one of those degrees.
Joe Sterne:
Right.
Josh Birk:
That’s awesome.
Joe Sterne:
I did. I will say that major and minor is no longer offered, so if you’re trying to go get one of those, don’t do it at Ithaca.
Josh Birk:
Too late, too late.
Joe Sterne:
Yeah. You missed that boat.
Josh Birk:
That’s awesome.
Joe Sterne:
But yeah, as an Eagle scout, it was definitely, really cool, because I had it in my head I wanted to eventually be like a product manager for like a Mountain Hardware or something like that.
Josh Birk:
Oh, gotcha.
Joe Sterne:
And that just never really panned out. So, I spent a couple years in the quote, unquote, fashion industry, and oh boy, that’s probably a story for a different time. But, yes …
Josh Birk:
Well, what I was going to say, you were years ahead of your time because now camping is a lifestyle, is just what you do on Instagram.
Joe Sterne:
Right.
Josh Birk:
Right.
Joe Sterne:
Fair. Yeah.
Josh Birk:
The kids these days, they have it too easy. So then when did you start getting involved with like computers and computing?
Joe Sterne:
So I’ve always been a nerd. I would say that I was definitely one of those rare kids that I think my dad had like an Apple 2 or Apple SE or something. One of those Macs that go for ridiculous amounts of money these days. We were joking when we were planning for this podcast, as I sit around like five or six pairs of wireless headphones and multiple screens in front of me … I just, I don’t know, I really love playing with technology and seeing what it can do, especially from like the camera angle, I guess.
Josh Birk:
Interesting.
Joe Sterne:
Yeah. I’ve definitely been a photo enthusiast for a long time. So I would say that how I got into Salesforce was kind of by accident, which is more common than I was led to believe. But from what I’ve heard, it’s definitely not that unusual, but I was actually working out in the Bay Area for, they called themselves a startup, but they were around for like 10 years, so I don’t know if that’s really an accurate term. But essentially I got hired in the springtime and they lost a couple big clients in the summertime, right around the time I was moving out there. And by September they’re like, “Yeah, we don’t have the money to pay everybody here. And you’re the last person hired. So guess what? You’re the first person laid off.” And I’m like, “Fantastic.”
Josh Birk:
Were you ever going to move your desk back to your home state?
Joe Sterne:
Yeah, exactly. I’m like, “I got out here a couple months ago. What am I going to do?” So I ended up working for, and this is where this story gets kind of circular, I ended up getting hired as basically an entry level consultant for a company called Acumen Solutions, which Salesforce acquired in 2020.
Josh Birk:
Okay.
Joe Sterne:
So yeah, so I worked there for roughly five years.
Josh Birk:
Gotcha.
Joe Sterne:
Jumped to a smaller firm, was there for 18 months. Finally got a call back from Salesforce after trying to get into Salesforce for about five years. Somehow managed to get through the interview process. Here I am.
Josh Birk:
And here you are.
Joe Sterne:
And yeah, I would say roughly a year later, all of my former coworkers come join me, which was definitely some interesting news to get while I was on paternity leave, for sure. I was like, “I’m sorry, what just happened?”
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Joe Sterne:
Yeah, it was kind of buried in the announcement of us buying Slack because it was not nearly as much money, so it wasn’t as cool I guess.
Josh Birk:
Right, right. It didn’t have quite the shine to it. So you and I have a similar arc, because I was doing consulting for Model Metrics, got burned out, jumped, shipped over to Salesforce, and then like two years later they bought Adam Caplan and the rest of his company. And all of a sudden, not only do I have all my old friends who are now my current coworkers, but they all had tenure on me and I’m not bitter about that at all.
Joe Sterne:
Yeah, so about that, everyone that got purchased as part of the acquisition got tenure. And if you were at Acumen for more than seven years or so you got actually part of like, not stock options, but you basically got funds for being there that long as part of the purchase. So, I would say that I was burnt out and that cost me, I don’t know, at least 15 grand down the road that I didn’t know about, but yeah. So I’m not bitter either. But, it was definitely one of those things where … I mean, I would say that I left Acumen because I was just personally burnt out from trying to basically start a brand new department that is still around. It still exists. So I guess you could call that my legacy, but it was just something where, at the time ,I was getting lots of pushback about funding. And for somebody on the ground, I was putting two and two together. I’m like, “All right. So are we getting prepped to get bought?” And the official line was, “No. Shut up.” And then, two years later, I’m like, “Son of a …” Anyway, I feel like we’re going way off on a tangent there. Welcome to the ADHD mind of mine.
Josh Birk:
This will be the tangential episode, everybody.
Joe Sterne:
Yeah, exactly. So this is like what we like to call a deep dive. Anyway, but yeah, so it was something where I went to a smaller firm cause I just wanted to have a bigger impact as well as, at the time, and this was like 2018, it was fully remote. Which they weren’t really super thrilled about accepting, which is ironic considering your consultancy. But anyway …
Josh Birk:
But those were the days.
Joe Sterne:
It was nice to be fully remote way prior to the pandemic, because I could get, I don’t know, some of the kinks out of my work setup and all that other stuff prior to everyone working from home and people just like, “Oh my God, I don’t know how to do this.” And it’s like, “It’s really not that hard, it’s just that your office is in your house wherever that may be, and …”
Josh Birk:
Well, and you’re right. Like as consultants, you kind of start learning that gig a little bit earlier because a lot of the people you’re going to be working with aren’t going to be in the same room as you in the first place. And I want to say, for the record, I loved my time at Model Metrics, and I loved everybody I worked with. I was just getting to a point where it was like waking up at three in the morning because I know I’m getting bug emails from China that was not exactly what I thought was a sustainable lifestyle.
Josh Birk:
And same, I had had conversations with people at Salesforce, but the evangelist role was the first time. David Carroll was just like, “No, I want you in Chicago. I want you to stay at home and travel for me,” kind of thing. So I was like, “Okay. That’s a gig.”
Josh Birk:
But let’s talk … So I’m trying to think of the best way to frame this. I mean, you’re talking about burnout, you’re talking about ADHD, and we’ve talked about this offline. That it’s like we both have been the through these situations where it’s like we blew right past warning signs and just got ourselves into trouble. I’m just going to kind of hand the mic to you a little bit, I think. Actually, first of all, let’s level set a little bit for the audience. How would you define, for instance, neurodiversity?
Joe Sterne:
All right. So I would define neurodiversity as somebody who has atypical brain chemistry, and whatever that may manifest itself as, which can be anything from ADD and ADHD, to autism, to sensory processing issues, like whatever that may be. That’s how I kind of feel like the neurodiverse community accepts.
Joe Sterne:
I would say that one of my, and this surprises a lot of people for some reason, one of my great feeds of content is actually Instagram, because there’s a lot of people out there talking frankly, about ADD, ADHD, depression, anxiety, AKA like the dark trifecta, as I like to call it. As well as how autism fits into there as well, because it’s really close actually, if you start looking at symptom wise there. And that’s something that I just, I never realized as a kid. I always was just struggling to get by, even with medication. So I really wish I had something like that when I was younger and yes, I mean, there are some things that social media is bad about, but I would say that there are some things that social media is good for and learning more about ADHD, especially as an adult, it’s a really great place to start, at the very least, because you can get a lot of information, even via memes, that you then use to go talk to somebody else, whether that’s a therapist, a psychiatrist, your doctor, to help figure out like, is this something that I actually suffer from?
Josh Birk:
And when did you first realize, and I guess maybe this might be a question in two parts, because were you diagnosed with ADHD as a kid?
Joe Sterne:
Yep. I sure was.
Josh Birk:
But then you didn’t connect the dots to like … Sorry. I’m going to rephrase that because that sounds like it’s all your fault.
Joe Sterne:
I mean, technically you’re not wrong, but yes.
Josh Birk:
You were not provided the information about how that would follow you into adulthood. Is that a good way to put it?
Joe Sterne:
Yes. I was diagnosed with ADHD in the, I want to say, like middle to end of grade school, so like, I don’t know, fourth grade, third grade, fourth grade, and put on the classic individual education plan, or sorry, individual development plan, which definitely has a very negative connotation in the work world. Let me tell you that. Anyway, so I was put on that and then put on medication starting in, I believe, middle school, all throughout high school. I actually went off of it, not really by choice, but it was just extremely difficult to keep that prescription up while I was at school, plus a lot of those stimulants happened to be abused a lot in college, so it’s even tougher to actually convince a doctor that you’ve never met that it’s like, “Yeah, I’ve had this for a while. I need this stuff.” So I went off of it and I would say that, yes, it probably messed with my GPA a little bit, to be totally frank. But at the same time, I really didn’t have another option.
Joe Sterne:
And then I would say being medicated for depression and later anxiety followed a very similar track, in terms of time. But the medication was probably a little bit later, and I was on medication through middle school and high school. My parents divorced like right before that, which definitely did not help. And then post college, I would say that I went off of it just because I was moving around and wasn’t able to necessarily keep a doctor in the same state. And this was definitely prior to the telehealth revolution that’s gripped the nation over the last couple years.
Joe Sterne:
So eventually when I got to Ohio and settled down in a place for more than a couple years at a time, that’s when I was like, all right, I need to start looking for a therapist. And then my brother passed away unexpectedly in 2016, and that was kind of the kick in the pants where it’s like, yeah, I need to go find this now. And then I’ve been in therapy ever since, but it’s something where I’ve found that’s been especially helpful when you’re dealing with stressful work situations or something along those lines, because you’re literally technically paying somebody to listen to you vent at the very core. There’s other stuff involved, I know, don’t at me.
Joe Sterne:
But yeah, it’s nice that you can talk about those things and to a party that is arguably neutral esque, but really probably doesn’t know anything else. Like they’re not going to like run into these people or know them or anything like that, so it’s definitely a much more productive, semi anonymous venting session than, I don’t know, typing up something on Reddit.
Josh Birk:
So first of all, definitely because I don’t think people realize the power of being able to talk about some of this stuff in a safe place. And it’s like, people are like, “Well, you’re just talking.” And it’s like, you’re not. You’re also re-experiencing and you’re also, reliving trauma, but in a way that’s not going to like trigger you into a corner kind of thing. So I get you on the whole like just talking path, that it can be so, so powerful.
Joe Sterne:
Yeah, and that’s the hope, right?
Josh Birk:
Right, right. Also, odd side note, has your therapist ever had to have the what’s the protocol if I see you in real life conversation?
Joe Sterne:
The one I’m seeing right now, no. I have run into my prior therapist and the only reason I left him was because I went to Salesforce and he didn’t take Aetna as an insurance. But anyway, I did run into him at the grocery store a couple times.
Josh Birk:
Oh funny.
Joe Sterne:
So yeah, it was just like seeing somebody else that I knew on the street. Like, “Hi,” because it’s not like somebody else in the line’s going to be like, “How do you two know each other?”
Josh Birk:
Right. Exactly.
Joe Sterne:
None of your business, that’s how.
Josh Birk:
Exactly, exactly.
Joe Sterne:
But yes, I would say that … I don’t know. I’m definitely comfortable talking about it just because I grew up all around it, I would say. And even my wife’s been recently diagnosed with adult ADHD, and it’s something where part of my coping strategy is figuring out ways to mask it in public situations. And the interesting inverse of that is that I can also tell when other people are masking as well. So it’s one of those things where it’s like, “Hmm, I think you have ADHD. And here’s why.” Which, I guess you could say is armchair psychiatry, which it probably is, but it’s also something that’s like, “You’re exhibiting symptoms that either I have, or I’ve seen other people that are in the same situation have. And you may be slightly better or worse at masking those, but most likely, if you’re exhibiting a bunch of these at the same time over a small period of time, it’s like, all right, let’s put the math together. You may want to see if this can help you out.”
Josh Birk:
That’s kind of fascinating. And I guess I’ve seen some of it and it’s like, you don’t realize that you’re sort of looking into a mirror a little bit. It’s not like it’s pseudoscience, it’s just that like now, once you start realizing the tics and the behavior … And I am still astonished that I had such high generalized anxiety for so long without even thinking about it. And I think about back at that time, and I’m like how I not realize that shaking is not normal behavior? But you just do. It just sort of turns into the water in which you swim. When we’re talking about like warning signs, and we both confessed to blowing right past some of them, for you, what were some of the warning signs that you walked right past?
Joe Sterne:
Oh boy, there was probably more than I’d like to admit. But, yeah, so to start, I would say that the enjoyment factor of doing my job every day decreased over time to a point where it was almost physically painful to go to work, but definitely a pretty bad case of the Sunday scaries, as they like to call it, or just dreading the work day and dreading interactions with other people. And the interesting thing about that is that there’s definitely some times where I was really enjoying working with a client, but I was not enjoying working with some of my coworkers at the companies that I was at, and then vice versa.
Joe Sterne:
And I always found in consulting that you have to have support on one of those two sides. You either need to have a client that likes you if you’re dealing with a bunch of people that don’t like you internally, or you need to have a bunch of people that like you internally if you’re dealing with a client that hates you. If you don’t have both but one of those, and you have a client that doesn’t like you and people internally that don’t like you, you’re in for a rough ride.
Josh Birk:
You’re in … yeah. For sure.
Joe Sterne:
So, and that may not necessarily be any fault of your own. You could be doing the best that you can, but again, like if you don’t have any support mechanisms anywhere, it’s not going to be long before you trip and fall flat on your face.
Josh Birk:
Yeah. I’ve joked, it’s like, I don’t know how I blew past some of these warning signs because it’s like I was a crisis line volunteer for like half a decade. And the first two questions we always ask people is, “How are you eating and how are you sleeping?” Like is your day to day normal? And when you say the Sunday scaries, well, it’s hard to have a normal day to day when you’re having a fight or flight instinct kicked in with just the fact that it’s a Sunday. It’s not that there’s a panther in the room, it’s just that it’s Sunday. And I just, I feel like there’s so many people who don’t, especially now in the pandemic, like who’s sleeping correctly right now, right? With the world, as it is, everybody probably feels entitled to a certain level of anxiety. But at some point you have to realize your normal has gotten so abnormal that you are physically putting yourself at harm.
Joe Sterne:
Right, yeah. I would say that definitely in my later stages of burnout is when I started having sleep issues more on the insomnia side. And that was, I mean, obviously, not fun as somebody who enjoys sleep. But I’m also making sure that I don’t have any lingering sleep disorders because of fatigue I’ve had for years, which may or may not be related. I don’t know yet. But yes, I would say that sleep is definitely one. Food, for me personally, was never that big of an issue. I always managed to have an appetite, for sure.
Joe Sterne:
I would say that my alcohol tolerance has probably gone up over the pandemic, which is not something I’m a fan of. But, again, it’s … I would say that I’m definitely part of our sober force group on slack, because it’s something we’re … I’m like, all right, this is probably more than I should be drinking. Let me figure out some ways that I can help cut back, so it’s not necessarily starting to become a problem. Because I would say that as somebody who does suffer from ADHD, us ADHDers are running low on dopamine, so we’re always looking for dopamine hits and there’s various ways that you can get it, but unfortunately there are some ways that can be more toxic than others.
Josh Birk:
Yeah. Yeah. And it’s an interesting dichotomy because it’s like on one level, your brain doesn’t care. It just wants the dopamine. But then on the other level, it’s like, what’s the rest of your body going to do with this experience after you get done with it? So, you could do a lot of meth and get a lot of dopamine, but you would also not have as many teeth. So it’s balance, it’s all about the balance. And it’s like, I don’t know how alcohol affects your medication, but for me, with Lexapro, it’s not just the dopamine, but the alcohol and Lexapro are fighting for the same serotonin inhibitors, right. So it’s like, sure, if you want to take a couple drinks and relax a little bit, that’s fine. But then you got to realize you’re not letting your medication actually do its work.
Joe Sterne:
Yeah, exactly. And I think, for the record, we’re not recommending anybody do meth.
Josh Birk:
We are definitely not.
Joe Sterne:
I definitely want to put that out there, just straight up, because if I get that feedback on LinkedIn, it’s going to be really hard to explain away. But yes, and here’s an interesting example from my part that doesn’t deal with booze, is one of the things I ended up getting really into, A, because it was fun, but B, because it was kind of a version of gambling where I don’t necessarily lose everything was shoe drops.
Josh Birk:
Shoe drops.
Joe Sterne:
Yeah. So …
Josh Birk:
Oh, shoe drops. Gotcha.
Joe Sterne:
Yeah. So, Adidas or Nike or both of them actually, Reebok included, even New Balance these days, I’ve gotten into these limited edition and it’s like, hey, we’re going to make a limited edition run of these shoes. We’re going to either have a draw that you can enter early and the raffle process will go on and you’ll just get automatically notified if you win, or you have to like manually put in an order and just see if you’re lucky enough to get it.
Josh Birk:
Nice.
Joe Sterne:
So that to me was an interesting way to get a dopamine hit because I could just put it in there and be like, “Oh cool. I’m entered. I don’t think I’m going to win.” And then the oh crap moment comes a little bit later where it’s like, “Oh God, I did win these, and my wife is now asking why I have a $400 shoe bill.” And I’m sitting across the room from part of my collection right now. So it’s one of those things where I would say purchasing stuff for me definitely does trigger that dopamine hit to a certain extent.
Joe Sterne:
And that can definitely be problematic if you’re not paying attention or the fact that one of the things that I found after years and years of struggling with it is that apparently it’s very common for people that suffer from ADD and ADHD to have terrible finances. Because you’re not necessarily remembering some of the stuff that comes out every month or something that may have come up, but you’ve temporarily forgotten about it because it’s not at the forefront of your mind. And I always just thought that it was just because I was bad at math, which apparently is also another trait.
Joe Sterne:
But again, like it’s one of those things where once you start kind of seeing that other people are suffering from the same thing that you are, then it’s a little bit easier for you to start finding ways to help cope with it. Whether that’s some sort of cognitive behavioral therapy where that could be people making templates and programs for you to use or strategies for you that work for them that may work for you kind of thing.
Josh Birk:
Yeah. Yeah, so first of all, when you said shoe drop, the Jets kid in me honestly thought you were dropping shoes like off of a ceiling or off of a rooftop for some reason. And then I was like, oh right. No, no, the Nike thing. Gotcha. Yeah, yeah. But I think that awareness angle is really so … Because it’s like, yeah, you’re quasi gambling, but you’re also aware it’s quasi gambling and you’ve got the guardrails on it to kind of make sure that you’re not throwing your life savings away just to get a shoe. You just might have to explain to the spouse what’s going on kind of thing.
Josh Birk:
And, I feel like, so for me things like … Because you know the old joke, “Just do yoga,” right? Like everybody’s like, “Yeah, just do yoga. Learn some breathing exercises.” Well, that stuff doesn’t help, I think, unless you are aware of why you’re doing it and why those things can help. Like why is listening to your breathing going to reduce your anxiety? And it’s like, well, because you’re skipping down to the lizard brain and you’re telling it to relax so that you can try to have a rational conversation about what’s going on. And it’s like awareness of what you’re doing with your brain and what your brain is trying to do to you helps create that feedback loop so that you’re in a little bit more control over what the outcome’s going to be.
Josh Birk:
It’s just like, it’s funny because I still don’t think I do meditation correctly, but I can guarantee you I’m doing a lot more of it these days than I think I ever have in my entire life.
Joe Sterne:
And I mean, kudos to you because yoga and meditation are two things that I cannot slow my brain down enough to actually do correctly. It’s just something with me sitting still that my brain’s immediately like, “Hey, you should take a nap.” And it’s not wrong, but it’s hard when you’re trying to do other things where you’re trying to relax or find a new yoga pose and you’re like, “Mm.” Yeah, this really isn’t working for me, is it?
Joe Sterne:
And I would say that exercise in general can sometimes help. It’s usually more on like the depression and anxiety angle, if you can stomach it. But from an ADHD standpoint, I’m definitely one of those people that like, when I run, I have to listen to music because otherwise like, what am I going to do? Just listen to my own thoughts all by myself, for like hours at a time? Are you out of your mind? No.
Joe Sterne:
But like some people, for me, it’s just, I guess you could argue it’s a form of stimming, but for me, sometimes the music just fades into the background, and then I can actually focus because I’m just listening to something else. As opposed to trying to focus to extremely bright headlights on one thing, when they’re like arms lengths apart in your … It’s very hard to keep them in one direction kind of thing.
Josh Birk:
And that’s our show, and I want to thank Joe for the great conversation information, and as always, I want to thank you for listening. Tune in next week as we delve into even more advanced topics like Animal Crossing and roasting coffee. Now, if you want to learn more about this show, head on over to developer.salesforce.com/podcast, where you can hear old episodes, see the show notes, and have links to your favorite podcast service. Thanks again everybody, and I’ll talk to you next week.