Mid-Career Survival for People Who Don't Want to be an Attrition Statistic When They Grow Up: Talk Transcript

Hi! My name is Julie Pagano and today I will be talking about mid-career survival for people who don't want to be an attrition statistic when they grow up.

To start, I want to take you back to my life in early 2015...

when I hit some major life milestones.

I hit 10 years working professionally in tech.

I turned 30 years old.

And I had a pulmonary embolism and almost died.

For those of you who don't know, a pulmonary embolism is the sudden blockage of a major blood vessel in the lung, usually by a blood clot.

In my case, lots of blood clots in both of my lungs.

I started having trouble breathing and ended up driving myself to the emergency room where they performed lots of bloodwork and tests.

Eventually, the ER doctor came back to tell me that I had a pulmonary embolism. I knew this was bad, but just to really hit it home for me, he followed up by saying...

"Pulmonary embolisms kill young people."

This scared the crap out of me. I was no longer sure I would make it out of the hospital alive. Obviously, I did. I am here talking to you today, but...

I spent about a week in the hospital, including several days in intensive care. It was a really traumatic experience.

Note: this slide has been redacted to remove photos of me from the hospital.

I then spent about two months on medical leave trying to recover.

This gave me lots of time to think because I literally didn't have the energy to do anything else. And all that thinking led to a little bit of a...

...third life crisis. Admittedly, part of this was about that whole almost dying thing, but a lot of it was actually a...

career crisis. The reality is that I had been having a career crisis for a while. Probably at least a few years. But I kept ignoring it and pushing myself harder and harder hoping it would somehow resolve itself, and, of course, it didn't. When my life came crashing down last year when I got sick, I could no longer do that. I had to address it and deal with it.

That career crisis is tied with one of the other life milestones I mentioned.

10 years working professionally in tech. That number, ten, is significant because of a statistic that maybe you've heard.

41% of women leave technology companies after 10 years of experience.

I have heard this statistic hundreds, if not thousands, of times. I swear it's in every article about women in tech.

The more I thought about this, the more I realized it makes me feel the way that doctor did in the hospital. What it is really saying to me is...

You are statistically unlikely to survive this.

It almost sounds like a threat, and that doesn't feel good. The more I thought about that, the more I realized...

All I hear about being a mid-career woman in tech is that I have an expiration date. That doesn't help me if I'm having a hard time, but I'm not trying to leave.

The conventional wisdom doesn't help me either because it ignores the cost of being different. By different, I mean different from the homogeneous norm in tech, which is...

young, white, male, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-to-upper class, etc.

If you are different from these...

...the conventional wisdom is unlikely to help you.

In fact, the conventional wisdom can hurt you if you are different.

Advice for people who are different (if there's any at all, and there often isn't), is all in the pipeline.

Gives the audience a little time to look over the cartoon.

I drew this about 2.5 years ago, and I think it's a strong indicator of when my career crisis started.

When I talk about advice for the pipeline, what I'm talking about is this part. The beginning of the pipeline. Getting people into tech. That advice doesn't help me because I haven't been in the beginning of the pipeline for about a decade.

I'm actually over here. I'm in the leaky, acid-filled center of the pipeline, and I don't know what to do. I'm not even supposed to think about the rest of the pipeline because the expectation is that I will leave.

So I'm thinking about all of these things during my medical leave, and it triggers a really strong...

...fight or flight response in me. What am I going to do when my medical leave ends? Am I going to stay or go? What am I going to do?

I ended up choosing fight, to stay...

...for now. I say, "for now," because I have reconsidered that choice two or three times since I made it a year and a half ago. A realization I've come to is that...

I will be making that choice for my entire career.

Not every day or week or month, but a few times a year, I have to reconsider that choice. I also realized that it gets a...

...little...

...harder...

...every...

...time I do it.

That this trajectory is...

...unsustainable.

I realized I need survival techniques...

...to help level this out a little bit because...

I don't want to be an attrition statistic when I grow up.

Before I move forward, I want to drop a few disclaimers.

I am a queer woman with some invisible disabilities.

That is how I am different from the homogeneous norm in tech.

But I am also: white, cisgender, able-bodied, and I grew up middle class. This is how I am part of that homogeneous norm.

And I'm a software engineer.

I mention all of these things because it is going to color how I talk about this today.

I can't speak for all experiences. I only have 25 minutes, and speaking for experiences that are not my own is a really good way for me to mess up, so I'm going to try to avoid it.

I want to be clear that leaving is ok. This talk focuses on trying not to leave, but I don't want anyone to feel badly if they have left or considering leaving or leave a month from now. I think both leaving and staying are difficult choices, and I consider them equally valid.

I also want to be clear that leaving isn't easy. When people throw these statistics around, people can assume that it is, and I think that's wrong. It's a difficult decision for just about everyone who makes it.

Something people often don't talk about is that leaving isn't even an option for a lot of people for reasons I don't have time to get into today.

Before I move forward, I want to make you a promise. I am not going to tell you to "lean in" today. I think this is important to mention because Lean In is one of the few forms of advice available for mid-career women in tech. It has kind of taken over the conversation, and I think it's bad advice.

I could give an entire talk about why the advice is bad, but I want to focus on one thing today. A lot of the advice in Lean In encourages people to push themselves as hard as they can despite systemic issues hoping they will somehow get power over others and that's considered success?

I think that's a recipe for burnout, and, quite frankly, if you are from an underrepresented or marginalized group in tech, you are already intimately familiar with burnout, and you don't need me or Sheryl Sandberg encouraging you to make it worse.

I want to step back and dig into something I just mentioned: systemic issues. I want to underscore that all of the problems I'm talking about today, the things that contribute to these attrition statistics, are caused by...

...longstanding institutional and systemic problems. This is important to keep in mind because...

...those types of problems take a long time to get better. These things don't move in days or weeks or months. They move in years...decades even. And because that is the case...

I cannot plan for these things to be significantly better in the duration of my career. I can hope for it, and I can fight for it, but I can't plan for it. And neither can you. Because that is the case...

...I don't have something to make it all better today. I sincerely wish I did. For you and for me, but I don't. What I actually have for you is...

...a talk about harm reduction. Things you can do for yourself and those around you to reduce the harm of continuing in this industry because you're not ready to leave.

I want to be honest, that kind of sucks. A part of me feels badly that this is the talk I am giving today because I am putting more things on your plate to do to sustain yourself in a hard situation.

What I really want is for the institutions to get better. For the people from the homogeneous norm to take things off of your plate. That's what I want, but those changes aren't coming fast enough, and the status quo is slowly destroying people. So I'm trying to figure out how we can bridge the gap for ourselves and be honest with you about this because I'm so sick of people lying to us.

So let's move on to those survival techniques!

I'm going to start with therapy.

I want to be really clear that this is not accessible to everyone because of things like stigma, cost, and availability.

These are all things that kept me from going to therapy for a long time. I didn't start going to therapy until five or six years into my career. It's been helpful to me, and it might be for you too, but it's not available to everyone.

If therapy is accessible to you, I recommend it for two big reasons.

One. A therapist can give you individualized, professional advice.

I can't do this. I'm only talking to you for 25 minutes, I'm speaking from my experiences, I'm not a mental health professional, and I don't know most of you. A therapist will see you regularly, get to know you and your situation, and provide you with individualized advice that makes sense for you.

Two. Therapy can give you a relatively guilt-free place to vent. I say guilt-free because you are paying your therapist for their time. It is literally their job to listen to you complain if that's what you want to get out of therapy. It is totally one of the things I have gotten out of therapy.

Venting is critical for those of us who are different from the norm in tech. We accumulate a lot to vent about: microaggressions, macroaggressions, harassment, threats, problems at work. If you hold it all inside, you are liable to explode. It's important to have a place to release some of that steam. It doesn't have to be at therapy, but therapy is a good place for it.

On the less professional side of things, I recommend building a personal network. This isn't your network from LinkedIn. This is more along the lines of friends or acquaintances, depending on how you define those terms for yourself. This should be accessible to a much wider number of people than therapy.

I recommend two major criteria when considering people for your personal network.

First, people who get what you're going through. People who are in a similar part of tech and a similar place in their career. They don't have to be identical to you, but you want them in the same ballpark, so they get what you're going through.

Secondly, people who share your values. This one is often overlooked or replaced with things like location or demographics, and I think that is a mistake.

The things I'm talking about today, the stuff you need help with, is inherently political. Just because someone lives near you or shares some demographics with you does not mean they will be supportive. I have had to learn this one the hard way many times.

So I recommend prioritizing people who share your values. If you can also find people near you who share your demographics, that's awesome, just don't forget this part.

One of the reasons you want to build this personal network is that it can give you something a therapist or other people in your life can't. And that's to take the 101 work, explaining what it's like to work in this field, the difficulties you're going through, etc....

...and cut right through it. You don't have to explain this stuff because they get it. They're living it too. When you can cut through the 101 work, you get to jump to things you really need like...

Shared commiseration and venting.

Advice based on other people's lived experiences.

And, perhaps, most important of all, knowing you are not alone in what can be a really difficult situation. I cannot emphasize how important this is. It has made a world of difference for me.

Now this all sounds great, but unlike with a therapist, you can't look up a list of people online, call them up, and make an appointment. These are friendships and like other relationships, you have to work to build them.

Depending on who you are, where you live, and what you're looking for, these people aren't always easy to find. I spent most of my career in Pittsburgh, PA, which is not a big tech city and didn't have that many people who shared my values. I ended up building most of my personal network through a combination of twitter, IRC, and then later, at conferences and using slack. The internet was a great resource for me building my network, and it may be for you too. There's even more awesome online communities now than there were for me five or six years ago.

In addition to doing work to build these relationships, you must also do work to maintain them.

You should not treat these relationships like you would a therapist. These are friendships, and they should have a give and take to them. Everyone in this situation is having a hard time and needs support. The goal is harm reduction and that only works if you reciprocate.

A feature of your personal network is access to something called the whisper network.

Helpfully summarized by my friend Liz: Confirming your worst fears: yes, all women in tech do know each other and YES we do talk about you.

Your whisper network doesn't have to be all women, although it is for some people. The point of the whisper network is to warn you about sources of harm and where they live: people, places, employers, events, etc. This doesn't remove the harm, but it allows you to make informed decisions about where you put your time and energy, which can help you reduce harm for yourself.

This isn't ideal, but it's not safe to share this information more widely. Access to this information is one of the reasons it is important to build a personal network.

An important place to consider doing harm reduction is at work. A huge amount of the harm comes from work, largely because of time. We spend a lot of time at work. For most people, at least 40 hours a week. Let's be honest, for many of us, it's a lot more than that. As a result, a lot of harm can come from there.

This also means that you can get a lot of return on investment by doing harm reduction at work. Unfortunately, this is also one of the harder places to do harm reduction. There isn't really one thing you can do.

I like to look at it as a collection of variables you can play with. Dials you can turn. Buttons you can press. Et cetera.

How you should set those variables is very individualized. It requires a degree of introspection to figure out. You have to look at your career so far and think about: what has worked for you, what hasn't worked for you, where do you need more data to make a decision.

Once you figure out how you want to set those variables, you have to do the hard work of actually setting them, and that isn't always easy. It could require things like changing who you work for, the kind of work you do, or even where you live. This is not easy, but if the amount of harm it reduces is significant for you, then it can be worthwhile because it helps you stay in the industry longer.

I'll give you a few examples of some variables you can play with.

The variable I have heard recommended the most is working remotely. There's two big ways this can help with harm reduction.

The first is that working remotely allows you to avoid open workspaces, which study after study have shown are harmful for just about everyone. For certain kinds of people, that harm goes above and beyond. For example, certain kinds of non-neurotypical people and people with compromised immune systems are significantly harmed by open workspaces. Working remotely can be a huge form of harm reduction for them.

The other reason working remotely can help is by reducing harm from your coworkers, who are so frequently a source of harm for people who are different. It doesn't remove the harm, but it can reduce it by giving you a physical separation and distance from your coworkers. It removes harm that comes from sharing a physical space. It can reduce certain kinds of social situations that lead to harm. And lastly, it allows you to close your laptop and walk away when you're having a problem with somebody, which is so much easier than walking away when you're having a problem in physicality.

Some other variables you can play with include...

The size of the organization you work for.

The amount of vacation leave you get.

Your role.

Where you're located.

And hundreds, if not thousands, of other variables. I recommend sitting down and starting to make a list for yourself.

Another important place to reduce harm is reducing harm from burnout. You may have noticed, I keep saying reduce, not remove. This is another case of that.

If you are different from the homogeneous norm in tech, you may find that you have to...

...work twice as hard for half as much.

As long as that is the case, you will be dealing with a low level of burnout throughout your career. There's not a lot you can do about that, and it sucks, but you can make sure that you're not piling even more burnout on top of it.

The only way you do that is by saying "no!" This can be really hard, but it's the only way you reduce burnout. As long as you say yes to everything that is presented in front of you, you will be dealing with...

...ever...

...increasing...

...amounts...

...of burnout...

...until you spontaneously combust. You probably don't want that.

So you have to start saying "no" to things. I have a really specific recommendation for this one.

I think you should say "no" to corporate diversity work.

It is second shift work, work you are asked to do on top of your normal duties.

You will not be rewarded for it. In the rare case you are, it will never be proportional to the effort that you put into it.

Worst of all, this work often distracts from your technical accomplishments, which is how you are actually rewarded in this industry.

It is a one-way ticket to burnout.

I have a story about this one.

The large conglomerate I worked for when I got sick last year had a problem with this. I had asked about it, and the answer was always, "that doesn't sound good, but the answer is above my pay grade."

The day I returned from my medical leave, a c-level executive from the company was visiting my tiny branch office in Pittsburgh to give a townhall where anyone could ask a question. I thought to myself, "he's above all of their pay grades. I guess I should ask a question." So I did. I said..

The company says it cares about diversity, but a large portion of the diversity work is pushed on underrepresented employees who are already harmed by diversity-related issues. That work is largely unrewarded. Even worse, that work can distract from people getting promoted, which is how the company rewards people financially. What do you think about that?

His answer was...

"Diversity work should be it's own reward."

And I said, "but that leads to burnout."

And he said, "but everyone deals with burnout."

And the next day I quit.

This is a heavily redacted copy of my goodbye letter. I want to call out something I say in here. This was not the only reason I quit. I had been thinking about quitting for months for reasons personal, professional, technical, and, yes, related to diversity. There were a hundred reasons I quit. This was just the last one. This was the straw that broke this camel's back.

Note: slide is more heavily redacted than when originally presented.

I'm still angry about this answer, but there is something I appreciate about it. The honesty.

I think this is what most corporations believe. Because that is the case, I want you to remember this answer any time you are asked to do corporate diversity work, and I want you to strongly consider saying, "no."

In fact, I want you to remember this answer any time anyone asks you to do diversity work, and I only want you to say yes when you really want to do the work. When it makes you feel good. It enriches you. It makes you feel like you are helping people. Because that is the only reward you will ever get for it.

I want to remind you that your continued survival in this industry, flouting attrition statistics, is diversity work. It is hard diversity work, and it is the only diversity work you ever have to do if that's what you want.

Last, but not least, I want to give you something to watch out for. I'm going to argue this is harm reduction because a lot of the harm for me was in the surprise of it, and maybe if I warn you, it will hurt a little bit less.

I mentioned earlier that conventional wisdom can hurt you if you are different. I want to talk about an example of that.

A lot of people have been joking recently about the confidence of a mediocre white man. I like this joke. It's funny...until I think about it too much, and then I realize...

...it works because you're a white man.

For those of us who are different from the homogeneous norm in tech, confidence doesn't always come so easily. We often have to deal with things like...

...impostor syndrome...

...stereotype threat...

...working twice as hard for half as much.

For us, confidence is often hard-won. We might not find it until we progress in our careers. And when you finally find that confidence, you will learn that...

...your hard-earned confidence can, and will, be used against you.

The confidence that is exalted and rewarded in the mediocre white man will get you told...

...that you make people uncomfortable...

...that you're too aggressive...

...that you're too abrasive...

And you realize that you cannot fucking win.

It might break your heart a little.

This brings me to my last and final story of the day.

The story about the job I took after I left the conglomerate.

I ended up at an early-stage startup. The last place I expected to be, but they said all the right things. They convinced me they weren't like the other startups. And perhaps most importantly...

...they offered to pay for me to move to Portland, which I so desperately wanted to do.

I was there for about nine months, and it was ok. Not awesome. Not terrible. Okay. But at the end of those nine months, I was...

...pulled into a two and a half hour meeting with the founders of the company to tell me we had...

...a problem, and the problem was...

...me.

I had become a bad "culture fit." The reason I was a bad culture fit was my...

Negative vibes.

I didn't really know what this meant, so I asked for examples.

They couldn't give me any. They just repeated the phrase...

Negative vibes.

So I asked for actions I could take to improve the vibes.

Again, they could give me none. They just kept repeating this phrase...

Negative vibes. Negative vibes.

Finally, the conversation continued, and I got a sense of what they meant.

I was told I don't smile enough in the morning...before my first cup of coffee.

That I provided too much constructive feedback about ways to improve the company and our product.

What they actually wanted was for me to tell them how good they were at their jobs. "Good CEO!"

That I performed too much emotional labor for my teammates, especially the juniors on the team who I was concerned were not getting enough support.

What they actually wanted was for me to perform emotional labor for the founders.

That I was entitled for expecting professional behavior at work, like asking the founders not to joke about our lack of human resources when one of my coworkers was upset.

And last and most important to them...

I was ruining the fun, and the fun was the most important part of the startup for them. Not succeeding. Not building a great product or serving our customers. The founders having fun.

I was told I had roughly a month to fix my vibes or they would fire me for "culture fit."

So I fucking quit my job!

This brings me to my last, most controversial, and, admittedly, most privileged advice, which is...

...save some "fuck you money," so you have the ability to leave a bad situation.

One of the reasons that these attrition statistics exist is that people are stuck in broken, terrible, harmful situations for far longer than they can handle because they can't afford to leave. Eventually, those situations break them, and then they're gone. Forever. That's it. Giving yourself the ability to leave a bad situation could help you sustain yourself longer in this industry.

I want to remind you that one of the few forms of power you have in this capitalist system is the ability to...

...remove your labor.

This money isn't just for quitting your job.

You might need this money to take care of yourself and your family when you get fired for being different because people get fired for "culture fit" more often than anyone likes to talk about.

Or maybe you use this money to start your own business because you don't want to leave tech, but if you have to work for one more asshole, THAT'S IT.

Or maybe, you use this money to develop new skills, so you can leave because becoming an attrition statistic when you grow up isn't the worst thing when the system is this broken.

Thank you! <3

insert mic drop here

(I did not actually drop the microphone because I was afraid of breaking something, but I really wanted to.)