Episode: 2833
Title: HPR2833: Jeroen chats with Joep Piscaer
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2833/hpr2833.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 17:30:46

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This is HPR episode 2008-133 entitled, Geron Chats with dope biscay and is part of the series
Interview.
It is hosted by your own pattern and is about 20 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summer is interviewing dope biscay during low days in Antwerp and Belgium.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
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Music.
Music.
Music.
Hi there.
This is Geron Betton again with another podcast that I like to bring to you.
And this time I would like to talk about another event that I visited recently and it was called Low Days.
Low Days was something that happened in Antwerp in Belgium about the beginning of May this year and 2019 if you're really late at listening.
Low Days stands for Linux Open Administration Days and it's got a lot of talks, technical talks about in-depth stuff and actually pretty fascinating.
I learned a lot there.
On Saturday there were several talks about Zebix, how to configure as an example the low level discovery rules in Zebix.
Pretty fascinating.
And it was so fascinating that I completely forgot to interview people.
Yeah, I know it happened.
What can I say?
The next day on Sunday there was this one talk that in my book is pretty amazing.
It talks about how a lot of people suffer from the imposter syndrome.
The continuous notion that you think you're never good enough, that everybody else is better, that you have the feeling that you're faking it,
where truth be told, you're actually pretty good at your work, but you always feel just too inadequate, this imposter syndrome.
And there was this guy, his name was Yupp Skar and he was talking about the imposter syndrome.
And I couldn't wait for him to finish his talk so I could interview him.
And after that I kept on thinking about this interview, I kept on thinking about the subject.
So after the interview I'll return with some other sounds and snippets that triggered me when I heard him talk.
Anyway, without further ado and without me keep on braabbling, let me just stop for a minute and give the floor to Yupp Skar.
So here goes.
So now I'm at the low days event in Antwerp together with somebody who just made a pretty impressive talk.
We're going to interview him first. Tell me who are you.
So my name is Yupp Skar. I am from the Netherlands. I live in the region of Eindhoven.
And I work at a Jumbo as well as having my own company, helping people do DevOps properly as well as helping startups do marketing properly.
You just mentioned your company Jumbo, what is Jumbo?
So Jumbo is the yellow supermarket in the Netherlands and I work there at their tech campus, which is their software development capability within the company.
So I'm helping that part of the company actually grow from well basically zero people to three, four hundred people in about two years' time.
Okay. So that's what you do for a living, right?
Yeah, that's correct. So Jumbo is my main employer. I spend most of my time there.
But then I also have my own like side gigs like my own small company where I help startups and help organizations do DevOps.
And you help startups. Do you help startups in the region of Eindhoven you said?
Yes, but mostly most of the startups are actually in Silicon Valley or in Texas in Austin or in Boston.
Those are kind of the three tech hubs of the US. So I spend quite some time in the US and a couple of clients there that actually help do their marketing.
So I write content for them. I set out marketing strategies. I represent them on stage or in webinars or in some kind of PR role.
So I basically help them with their marketing.
That's a pretty impressive hobby next to your day job.
So do you do that once a year or how often do you travel to the States then?
More than I'd like to admit.
I think this year I'll be in the States about 10 times. Maybe a little bit more.
But a couple of years ago I was there like 15 times a year. So that that was a lot.
But now I have small kids. My kids are three and four and five.
So I want to be home a little bit more. So I'm kind of trying to do it remotely.
But still you have to go over there meet the people face to face.
That's that's so valuable to actually keep doing so that I'll keep doing that actually.
Okay. Great. Now about your talk.
Okay. I just saw it. To me it was pretty impressive.
But the audience of course has no idea what we're talking about now.
So can you sort of repeat the whole story again?
I can give me 15 minutes. I'll do the whole thing again.
So but basically my my talk is about my experiences.
Kind of a growing up quote unquote within the IT community.
And it's about imposter syndrome.
So the feeling that you know you judge yourself more harshly than others would judge you.
And so the issue with that is that you have this internal measuring stick in your head.
That helps you relate to how good you're in your work or in your social life.
And for many people that internal measuring stick is kind of broken.
It doesn't work as well. So you judge yourself more harshly than others would judge you.
And the issue with that is that you if you start to believe you're not as good as other people think you are.
Then you will you know not go for that next opportunity.
Not apply for that new job.
Not take up that new project at work or not quit your job and start your own company.
Or you know whatever form or shape it will it'll have.
But it will limit you in what you can accomplish because you believe you're just not so good at it.
And so talking about imposter syndrome for me kind of serves two purposes.
So on the one hand it helps me tell my own stories to overcome my own limitations.
But on the other hand it'll help other people to hopefully to realize that you know this is all very human.
You're all humans. Everybody deals with this in some way or another.
And you know especially in IT I've seen so many people struggling with this.
At some point I decided well it's very good for me to actually talk about this stuff to kind of help myself.
But at the same time help others figuring out this stuff too.
Yeah well during your talk you did a small exercise with the whole room.
And K tell a little bit about that.
Yeah sure. So the experiment I did the exercise was about giving and receiving compliments.
So what I've learned and maybe this is very personal maybe not.
But what I've learned in the last couple of years that giving good compliments is very hard to do.
It takes practice.
But actually receiving a compliment can be more difficult because it's really easy to kind of shrug off that compliment.
And think to yourself okay I know the compliment I just got isn't true or isn't relevant.
And then you kind of you don't internalize that compliment.
So the exercise I did with the room was really about giving a compliment.
As well as receiving the compliment as an exercise to show how hard it is from both sides.
But also to kind of prove that if you learn how to actually take a compliment at face value that you will learn to believe the other people's opinion.
So if they give you a compliment it is because they think you did something well.
So learning to accept that you actually did something well that's kind of part of the exercise.
Yeah learning to take a compliment right.
And early on in your talk you did another exercise with the audience where they had to raise their hands and you put some slides up.
Okay tell me a little bit about that.
Yeah so that's kind of to prove the relevance of the imposter syndrome thing.
Kind of to prove that everyone deals with it in some way or another.
So the slides were really about do you fear feedback?
Do you want to do things perfectly or don't do them at all?
Do you believe that it's hard to actually accomplish things?
Just to prove that everyone deals with imposter syndrome in their own unique way.
So you don't have to have all of the symptoms of imposter syndrome or all of the ones that you can google and can read about.
But that it's a really personal thing.
A personal thing you might have one thing, one symptom you might not have another.
But that doesn't matter because you will still deal with all imposter syndrome problem inside of your head anyway.
Yeah it astonishes me that about two thirds of the room raised their hand permanently with all those questions.
So it's something that really really sits with a lot of people.
You also mentioned a couple of sources for further,
which I like to put this for further reading and YouTube and Ted Talks.
Okay tell me a little bit more about that.
Yeah so there's a ton of information you can google and start reading.
But it's kind of like if you go googling like a medical issue you have you always end up being dead.
So the rabbit hole you go down is so big and is so negative that I gave a couple of recommendations like starting points to start your own search for your unique position of imposter syndrome.
So the three talks I recommend is the one by Mike Cannon Brooks who is the founder of Atlassian and he talks about his imposter syndrome.
This is a Ted Talk with I don't know a couple of thousand people in the room and he shares his story very openly.
So this is one of the biggest companies in the United Atlassian, the founder who actually started out in a garage in a very small office.
So he told a story where at some point the company needed to hire an HR person.
The company got so big they needed an HR person.
And so the guy the CEO of this big successful company was explaining that he was sitting at the interview table with the guy that they were trying to hire.
And he was thinking oh man but I don't know anything about HR I never worked at a company that had an HR person because he started a company out right from college.
So he was thinking oh yeah but I don't know what to ask I don't know if I can hire this person.
So he was really self-dotting himself but it was a symptom of him being successful because he had founded his own company which had grown so much they needed an HR person.
So that he gave such a good example and the whole talk is full of examples like this.
So it's really refreshing to see someone who is very successful, see him on stage talking about his doubts and his self-inflicted pains that he deals with.
The other example he gave is at some point he put out a tweet to Elon Musk of Tesla saying hey Elon we have this big energy problem in Australia where we have a lot of power outages and stuff like that.
So I challenge you to fix that problem within a hundred days and Elon said yeah okay we'll do that.
And so suddenly this guy from Atlassian Mike he was on like all of the big news networks in Australia he was interviewed a bunch of times about the energy transition problem which he knew nothing about but he just you know put out a tweet to Elon Musk saying well build that thing solve that problem.
And so now he was at all kinds of news stations talking about something he didn't know anything about.
So his imposter syndrome flared up again etc so it's a really good touch talk it's really funny.
So that's you know that's a good fun introduction to the imposter syndrome problem.
Then there's a second one I'll actually start with the last one which is basically everything by a woman named Brunei Brown.
She gave it to talk she has written books at this point too which is really about vulnerability.
So one of the issues with imposter syndrome is that you don't talk about it because you don't want to be vulnerable.
It's not something our culture does or the what certain culture does.
And so she kind of made the case will be vulnerable be open about yourself doubts about the things that bother you.
Because if you are not open about it if you're not vulnerable it'll never you'll never get to a point where you can solve your imposter syndrome.
And the second one is I have to think which one was that again.
And so the second the second to talk is about something called a procrastinator's brain which is a way of dealing with your self doubts.
So basically what happens that if you have to do something really important or really scary or something new or you know something that you haven't done before.
Then for a lot of people instead of actually doing the thing you'll go down a rabbit hole of cleaning your house watching YouTube videos for four hours.
You know do anything but the thing that you need to do.
Because if you do that then if you feel at the thing you need to do like write a paper for instance.
And if the paper isn't good so the end result kind of sucks then you can blame the lack of effort instead of blame yourself.
So it's kind of a way to protect yourself from failure.
And so the TED talk is about that procrastinator's brain so how that works internally why it works the way it does.
And also kind of flip it around to make sure people understand that you kind of have to break through that issue and each breaks through that and solves that in their own way.
But that second TED talk is really about you know solving that issue of not doing the effort because you're afraid of failure.
Yeah I think we just about cover the talk by now.
So I'd say well thanks a lot for a great talk and for this interview of course.
Thank you.
So after recording this talk I went home and I mixed it all together in an audacity and I kept thinking about there is something I need to add here.
There's really something I need to add here and I'm going to tell you what it is. There is this guy. His name is Ryan.
Kelly Geurie.
Kelly Geurie and sorry it's he can pronounce it a lot better than I do and he makes this podcast.
It's called Cut to Grab show.
The Cut to Grab show and he talks about mental resilience and and this guy.
If you listen to it he lots of times he is spot on his inspirational just as Jupiter.
Now this is originally where I wanted to include a clip his intro of his own podcast to show you what he sounds like and how he talks.
But well copyright laws and all being the way they are.
There is another version of this podcast out there with the clips but this is now the way it is.
So no clips here sorry let's continue.
So well this guy he I learn a lot from it podcast and I hope you do too if you spend some time listening to his episodes.
For one I can especially recommend episode 145.
It talks about mental resilience and he looks for the golden nuggets in how to be more happy, more effective, more productive.
There are so many things to learn from it podcast and there's one thing I want to leave you with today.
And that's at the end of episode 145 he inserts a fragment.
His name is Steve Harvey and he is clearly a minister or something in the US.
But he talks about the gift and how everybody has his own gift to share with the world.
And it's an inspirational story and I can't include everything but it's on YouTube and I put the link in the show notes for you to listen to.
So I leave you with a sample of his work.
Now this is originally where I wanted to include a clip his intro of his own podcast to show you what he sounds like and how he talks.
But well copyright laws and all being the way they are.
There is another version of this podcast out there with the clips but this is now the way it is.
So no clips here. Sorry let's continue.
Well all I can say is I like to include more but you know closed licensing.
I don't want to get into any legal hassles but the Steve Harvey Harvey and the way he talks about the gift.
It resonated with me and his stop tripping remark is I find it great.
Anyway I hope you enjoyed this podcast all I can say is still we meet again for another subject, another story, another I don't know something.
And in the meantime I will leave you and be you for well and maybe we'll meet again at Hacker Public Radio.
Okay see you bye bye.
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