Ten years later, I made it to forty. So much has happened in the intervening years. I earned the title principal engineer. I fell in love and got married. I bought a house. I stopped speaking to my parents. I dealt with the pain of losing beloved pets and the eventual joy of adopting new ones. I survived the early stages of a pandemic that killed millions. I cannot remember an uncomplicated year.

2025 brought us horrors that rhymed a little too much with a past oft forgotten or misremembered (or never learned about at all). There is so much unnecessary pain and suffering. Too many people on the precipice looking for an "other" to blame, and so often choosing those that couldn't be the cause if they tried. The phrase "one day, everyone will have always been against this" has stuck in my mind since reading the book. I want to believe that day will come soon, but I'm not so sure. People are still lionizing the architects of the horrors of my youth. It's complicated.

The field where it used to be easy for me to find a new job is now a wasteland. I was too young to experience the dot-com bubble and lucky enough to find my first stable job before the 2008 crisis. I like my job and hope it will be a port that protects me from yet another storm, but I cannot predict the behavior of these strange winds. I hope that the skills of a seasoned software engineer will still be valuable in the future despite the lofty promises of LLMs. It's complicated.

I am doing a lot of hoping these days. It reminds me of something I said in my last major talk.

I can hope for it, and I can fight for it, but I can't plan for it.

I was speaking about the glacial pace of systemic change in the tech industry, but this applies to so many things. I read Mariame Kaba's We Do This 'Til We Free Us (a collection of essays about prison abolition and organizing) as part of a book club this year. Her definition of hope is the only one that makes sense to me any more.

I always tell people, for me, hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism.

Hope is a discipline.

The future is uncertain. It feels like we are all dancing on the edge of a knife. Some will ignore this and stick their heads in the sand. Others will give up and choose nihilism. I am constitutionally incapable of the former, and a bit too stubborn for the latter. My middle-aged, cynical ass is trying to work on the discipline of hope.

I desperately wish for 2026 to be a better year. I can hope for it. I can fight for it. But I can't plan for it.

Moving into a house

My largest life event this year was buying my first (and plausibly last) home. I found the actual house-buying and moving process intensely stressful from start to finish. However, once we settled in, it has absolutely been a net positive.

Prior to moving, my partner and I lived in a one bedroom apartment in a downtown highrise. This was great when I worked in an office, and we had lots of things to do downtown. The pandemic changed that. Our bedroom had to pull double-duty as my home office, which was terrible for my sleep and work-life balance. Most of the things we enjoyed doing downtown were no longer accessible. Our world shrank down to the size of that apartment, and it proved to be too small.

We moved into a century home in a cozy city neighborhood that is so much better for our situation. I have a separate room for my home office. The kitchen reminds me I like to cook. The cats have space to chase each other like little furry hurricanes. We have a yard where we can enjoy fresh air on our own terms. We love walking around our neighborhood and seeing the greenery, flowers, and seasonal decorations. We even have space for hobbies (more on that later)!

Several months after moving in, it felt like we had been here forever — like it was home. For about four years, we were a bit like animals stuck in a too small enclosure. Moving into a bigger space with more options gave us room to grow.

It's not perfect. A house is basically a box you are obligated to put money into. The fridge broke two weeks after closing. It's drafty in the winter. We had to fix several things this year, and there's always going to be more. But it is our house. I'll take that over putting money into a landlord's pocket any day.

Obvious disclaimers here that not everyone can afford a home, and it is fucked up how out of reach it is for most people. That said, this is a "things I enjoyed" post, not my feelings about late capitalism.

Film

I continue to keep up with my love of film. I am behind on new releases because I cannot go to the theater, but that gives me the opportunity to look backwards. Below is a mix of films I enjoyed this year from a wide range of decades.

Catching up on classic horror

Last year I noted that I love horror, but have done very little exploration of older films. This year, I found at least three new-to-me horror classics.

I put off Rosemary's Baby for ages because of the director, but finally gave in when it was on The Criterion Channel. It is mystifying how a misogynist made a film that so effectively comments on women's bodily autonomy. I'm all for death of the author. Let's launch Roman Polanski into the sun.

I adored the Wicker Man (critically, the 1973 version). I never knew I wanted a diegetically musical horror film until seeing it. I most frequently find myself noticing Tarantino's not-so-subtle influences when watching older films, but this time I'm staring directly at Ari Aster.

I have no idea why it took me this long to see Candyman. I'm pretty good with the 90s onward. Thankfully, I fixed this glaring omission. I feel like I need to revisit it a few more times to have something effective to say beyond "damn, that's a good ass horror movie."

Body horror with a side of existential dread

This turned out to be a horror-heavy year. Two of the most challenging films I saw leaned hard into body horror, which is a tricky sub-genre for me. I like it best when it's in service to a more complex message and not solely there to gross me out.

Possession is a hell of a film. I don't really know what to say about it besides that I hope Isabelle Adjani is doing ok. I think it is worth going into without context, but wouldn't recommend it unless you like fucked up cinema.

The Substance made me a bit sad that I cannot go to the theater any more. I was screaming at the television through most of the final act, and I bet it would have been a blast with a crowd. The practical effects are so good it made me nauseous in parts, which is high praise that usually only Cronenberg can get out of me.

Three films from Yorgos Lanthimos

It's a bit on the nose that I watched three films from a director who put out a triptych this year. I swear it wasn't on purpose. This bit from my review for Kinds of Kindness summarizes my feelings.

I get why Lanthimos is a divisive director, but I appreciate his weird dark humor and the discomfort it makes me sit with. He's sort of in the same camp as Cronenberg, Lynch, and Ducournau in that way. I'm not always up for them, but when I am in the mood for their particular flavors of weird, it tends to hit the spot. All that said, I could really go with less violence against women and animals in Yorgos' films.

Poor Things was my favorite of the three. Kinds of Kindness did not live up to expectations, but gets bonus points for one of my favorite trailers of the year (that slap with the Eurythmics, chef's kiss). I love a good trailer, and they are so rare these days.

Action movies for everyone

On the less serious side of things, I had a lot of fun with action films this year. My partner and I went through an Arnold Schwarzenegger period where we rewatched a bunch of old favorites and filled in some we'd never seen.

On the new release side, The Fall Guy was a pleasant surprise. It's been ages since I enjoyed a blockbuster action film that wasn't part of the John Wick series. This explosive love letter to practical stunts put a giant smile on my face. In sad news, it was considered a box office flop, so I do not have high hopes for the near future of action movies.

Violence in the west

Last, but not least, I am attempting to tie three largely unrelated films together.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is my first foray into the spaghetti western, and I was immediately hooked. I really struggle with the western genre, but maybe the trick is to enjoy it by way of Italy. The Ennio Morricone score is perfection. I am hoping to get to the rest of the trilogy next year. P.S. I may have screamed "QUENTIN TARANTINO IS A CINEMATOGRAPHIC MAGPIE!" after watching this.

There Will Be Blood is another odd oversight for me, but I'm glad I caught up on it (thanks, Criterion Channel!). It's a beautifully shot descent into madness.

Love Lies Bleeding was a violent fever dream. Sometimes you just want to watch Kristen Stewart and her beefy girlfriend be gay and do crimes.

Music

This wasn't a huge year in new music for me. I spent a lot of time listening to old favorites, but there's a few notable additions.

Beyoncé and Halsey, artists I have enjoyed for many years, put out new albums that experimented with genre. I'm not that into country, but Cowboy Carter really works for me. The Great Impersonator stays closer to my musical taste, but I was most impacted by Halsey's meditations on the struggles of living with (and the risk of dying from) chronic illness.

I also enjoyed some new-ish to me artists this year. I know Charli XCX has been around a while, but this was the first time I listened to more than a single. Brat was my album of the summer, on repeat for weeks. The Last Dinner Party was completely new to me, and their debut album, Prelude to Ecstacy, was one of the best things I listened to this year.

Crochet

After settling into the house, I finally had space for a physical hobby again. I got into crochet over a decade ago, but never really left the beginner stage of making simple, single-skein scarves (try saying that three times fast). I paused the craft when Charlie was a chompy kitten and never managed to pick it back up until now.

I'm still a beginner, but I am slowly growing my repertoire. It turns out that I enjoy working in the round, which bodes well for my goal to learn amigurumi next year. Most importantly, crocheting is really good for my mental health. I cannot doomscroll and crochet at the same time. There's something really calming about methodically producing something with your hands.

Of course, I also enjoyed finding a way to computer at this hobby. I was pleasantly surprised by the Ravelry API being so easy to access after being burned by previous hobbies. I'm still grumpy about lack of API access with Letterboxd — my kingdom for the data exports to at least include TMDB ids.

Puzzle games with my partner

I like the idea of playing video games with my partner in theory, but in practice we've struggled with games that are intended to be played together. Co-op platformers can be really frustrating with screen management. Competitive games are a recipe for sadness. This year, we finally found a good fit in games that are theoretically single-player, but work really well with a collaborator: weird puzzle games.

We started with Lorelei and the Laser Eyes on the Switch with me driving and us working together on the puzzles. There is no way either of us would have finished this challenging game on our own. It turns out we're each good at very different sorts of puzzles, so our combined brainpower was critical. When we did get stuck, the engaging storyline helped us keep going. We made it through about 95% of the game before we got frustrated and looked a few things up, so we could find out what happened.

After finishing Lorelei, we wanted more games that scratched a similar itch. I'd already played Return of the Obra Dinn by myself, and Outer Wilds is guaranteed to make me nauseous, so the top recommendations were out. The Case of the Golden Idol, a point-and-click puzzle game, was a great fit. We just started the sequel, The Rise of the Golden Idol, which is a pleasant iteration on the game that keeps the good bits, but sands over a few of the sharper edges.

Solo video games

This was not a big video game year for me because I was so busy with everything else. However, I did play a catastrophic amount of Balatro across my laptop and phone. Apparently you can make me enjoy poker if you turn it into a roguelike deck-builder.

The other game that stuck out to me this year was Crypt Custodian. This cute but morbid metroidvania about pets in the afterlife has beautiful art, perfect ambient music, and just the right amount of story. I really appreciated some of the accessibility settings to help me power through the boss fights — without them I probably wouldn't have finished the game. The subject matter may be tricky if you're sensitive about the loss of a beloved pet, but I found it a helpful medium for processing some lingering grief.

Continuing to explore film

I loved movies when I was younger, but did not have the time and resources to learn about the history of film or dive into older movies. Over the years, the stress of work and the world deprived me of the time and attention to even enjoy watching films. During my sabbatical last year, I finally had time, and I used it to educate myself about the art form and watch a ton of movies.

I was employed this year, so I did not have as much free time, but I remembered the lesson from my break. Film is my favorite art form, it brings me joy, and I absolutely should make time and space to feel joy in these difficult times.

Barbie & PlayTime

One of my favorite lessons from The Film Experience course was the idea that films are in conversation with those that came before them. It's a relatively intuitive concept that applies to many art forms, but it did not fully click for me until I started watching older movies. I had this wonderful aha moment when I watched Lady Snowblood (1973) and loudly exclaimed "oh, that's where Tarantino got the inspiration for Kill Bill: Vol 1!"

I had a similar moment this year with Barbie. I wasn't that engaged by the plot or the 101-level feminism, but it was so beautiful to look at and quite funny in parts. I was really struck by the aesthetic of the lower level of the Mattel offices with the cubicles. A month later, I watched PlayTime (1967) and had this great "ohhhh, that's what Greta Gerwig was paying homage to" moment. I really want to finish going through her recommended watchlist of inspirations.

P.S. I loved the Barbie soundtrack and listened to the album a bunch. That Billie Eilish song was created in a lab to make you want to cry, and I'm not even mad about it.

The Criterion Channel

Despite my lack of film education, I've appreciated Criterion since I was a teenager. I own about a dozen physical Criterion films, but had put off signing up for their streaming service because I already had too many of those. The combination of a friend's nudging and wanting to see The Heroic Trio finally convinced me to give it a try. It's a great resource for engaging with older, arty, and more niche films. They have a solid rotating selection every month that often includes films I can't find elsewhere.

Suspiria (1977), in particular, knocked my socks off. I love horror, but my knowledge of the genre is rooted in a particular couple of decades in the US market with a little bit of Japanese horror scattered throughout. I really need to invest more time in older horror films from other countries.

Polite Society & John Wick: Chapter 4

I am not just into arty and older films these days. I love a good action movie. Unfortunately, the average Hollywood action films of the last decade or so bore me to tears. Thankfully, this year brought me two action films that kept my full attention.

Polite Society had me smiling and laughing from start to finish. It's got female friendships, teenage girls kicking ass, and some Edgar Wright inspired editing that really worked for me. Nida Manzoor did an amazing job for a feature debut, and I can't wait to see what she does next.

I slept on the John Wick films for ages because of the aforementioned disinterest in modern American action films. I'm so glad I finally gave them a try because they are a good example of what I love in an action film. They have fantastic choreography and set pieces that are functionally a beautiful, albeit violent, dance. I was worried they might lose steam, but the fourth (and final, as far as I'm concerned) film continued to live up to expectations.

T. Kingfisher and Sarah Gailey

I used to be an avid reader as a child. Similar to film, laboring under capitalism ground down my ability to read for fun. I've had less success at jump-starting my love of reading, but I'm trying. This year, I mostly focused on shorter, easier reads by known authors in genres I tend to enjoy, so it didn't feel like work. T. Kingfisher and Sarah Gailey were the largest contributors to that category and kept me reading throughout the year. Previously, I mostly read T. Kingfisher's lighter fantasy novels, so the horror snuck up on me, but I had a good time with it once I knew what genre I was in.

P.S. I just read All Systems Red (Murderbot Diaries #1), and I think that series will be a good continuation of this approach to reading next year.

Guts by Olivia Rodrigo & The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We by Mitski

Two great new albums from two very different artists. Olivia Rodrigo's sophomore album is a banger that I had in the rotation a lot this year. It took me longer to warm up to Mitski's most recent album, but once I got in the right headspace, it really worked for me.

Desire Pathway by Screaming Females

I'm super bummed this was their final album, but at least they went out on a good one.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

This wasn't a particularly gaming-heavy year for me, but I spent a lot of time with Tears of the Kingdom. I was hesitant at first because I slid off of Breath of the Wild after too many game mechanics frustrated me. I'm glad I gave it a try despite my reservations because I had so much fun exploring this world.

Rude Tales of Magic & This Ends at Prom

I was in the market for a new silly D&D podcast after losing interest in The Adventure Zone, and Rude Tales of Magic perfectly filled that niche. I added This Ends at Prom into the rotation of movie podcasts after enjoying the hosts on an episode of American Hysteria.

Taking a summer vacation

For the first time in my adult life, I gave myself a summer vacation. I still had some adult responsibilities (bills don't care if you want time off), but did my best to channel the child inside me that loved a summer off without responsibilities. After decades of capitalism leaving me with the crumbs of nights, weekends, and an occasional vacation, getting a whole season to myself was an indulgent treat. I had all the time in the world to take care of myself and enjoy my hobbies, which I desperately needed after the ongoing horrors of the last few years. I didn't get to travel because there's still a pandemic happening, but the long, restful staycation was glorious.

Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price

Early in my summer break, I read this book on the recommendation of a friend who found it helpful during their own break. It really helped me push past the Type A Puritan in my mind that never wants to stop working. I went into my vacation with a massive list of things I was going to do, and I'm really glad I did not hold myself to it. The point of my time off was to rest and recharge, not to overwork myself on hobbies and chores. I let myself be lazy, and my time off was better for it.

An anecdote in Laziness Does Not Exist really hit home for me. The author described someone who "was so mentally drained that she couldn’t sit through films anymore." I have loved film since I was a teenager, but I never cultivated it as a hobby in adulthood because of work. I did not take a single film class in college because it didn't fit into my grueling engineering curriculum. There were a few years early in my career when I frequented my favorite little neighborhood theater, but it was short-lived. At the height of my mid-career burnout, I was like the person in the anecdote. I could not make it through a new film. This brings me to one big project I did take on during my break.

The Film Experience

One of the rare benefits of the pandemic is that it gave me the time and space to reconnect with film. Knowing that I would not be able to travel or socialize much during my break, I decided to spend time learning more about it. I found The Film Experience (a free class from MIT OpenCourseWare) and ordered A History of Narrative Film (the textbook for the course).

I went through most of the material for the class (I only skipped the non-textbook readings) and watched a bunch of additional films from the periods covered in the course (roughly silent era through the early 70s), which I had rarely touched before. I also watched a bunch of films from later eras just for fun. It was wonderful to have the time and mental energy to watch several films every week. You can tell when I was unemployed just by looking at my letterboxd stats for the year.

Some of my favorite films from the class:

• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
• Modern Times (1936)
• Rashomon (1950) - this is one of the rare ones I'd seen before taking the class
• Rear Window (1954) - and a ton of other Hitchcock films
• Cabaret (1972)

Some of my favorite films outside the class:

• Metropolis (1927)
• The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
• Sunset Boulevard (1950)
• High Noon (1952)
• Lady Snowblood (1973)
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
• Nine to Five (1980)
• Tampopo (1985)
• Raising Arizona (1987)
• In the Mood for Love (2000)

Everything Everywhere All at Once

I had to wait what felt like ages to see this. It's not safe for me to go to a theater and early streaming mostly stopped when everyone started pretending the pandemic was over. It was well worth the wait because this film gave me feelings. It's beautiful and funny and weird in all the ways that I love. Michelle Yeoh is fantastic and deserves more roles that give her this much to do.

I watched the Daniels' prior film, Swiss Army Man, while I was waiting for this to come out. It was surprisingly good for something advertised as the "Daniel Radcliffe as a farting corpse" movie. That is technically what the film is, but it's also a lot more than that. I can see how they got from here to Everything Everywhere, and I'm so curious to see what they do next.

Barbarian and Bodies Bodies Bodies and X

I love a good horror movie. This year gave us a bunch of them trying different things.

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

This book is a cozy fantasy that is the literary equivalent of sipping a delicious mug of coffee while snuggled in a warm blanket. Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys fantasy and wants an easy read that will put a smile on their face from start to finish.

Vampire Survivors

I got this bullet hell survival game for about $3 when it was in early access and have played over a hundred hours. That might be the best cost per hour enjoyed I've ever gotten out of a video game. I don't normally enjoy bullet hell games, but the execution on this one works so well for me. It's a great "zone out while I listen to podcasts" game. There's a mobile version now, which is even better for filling that niche.

Stray

Me and my toxoplasmosis had been long anticipating this game where I got to play as a kitty. It wasn't quite what I expected, but I liked most of what I got (although I totally get why it didn't work for some people). They really nailed those delightful little moments of cat behavior that helped push through some of the slower bits. The storytelling and world building really worked for me. I even teared up a little near the end, which is impressive since I'm not much of a crier.

Bleed Out by The Mountain Goats

I'm doing this for revenge
I'm doing this to try and stay true
I'm doing this for the ones
They had to leave behind
I'm doing this for you

These lines from Training Montage have been echoing in my mind for most of the year. A lot of my success in life has been out of spite. I'm doing this for revenge. It's hard to be a high risk person still being careful when so many have returned to "normal" despite being surrounded by increasing disability and death. In many ways, this year of the pandemic was harder than the last despite all my time off. Mask mandates went away right before my break and Portland was in a covid surge for my entire time off. I'm angry, but I keep masking and being careful. Protecting myself and others isn't exactly for revenge, but I scream-sing along to that line every time I hear it.

The rest of the album is also really good.

Laurel Hell by Mitski

Yet another great album from an artist I've liked for a long time. Working for the Knife especially hit for me while processing all my feelings about work during my time off.

Growing Up by The Linda Lindas

What a debut album! I love them so much.

Cool Zone Media podcasts

A mix of podcasts from Cool Zone Media kept me company this year. I especially appreciate Margaret Killjoy's newer Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff as a more uplifting focus on people who kicked ass during difficult times.

Writing about my job search process

Last, but not least, I did a bunch of writing about my job search process. It was time consuming, but I got a lot out of the introspection and the writing practice. The job search itself was incredibly stressful because the tech market is doing weird things right now. The market continues to be challenging, so I'm glad I wrote this down to help others navigate their own searches.

Table of contents

• My background

• Levels are confusing

• Frustrations in my job search

• Organizational problems

  • One track for staff engineers
  • Only home-grown staff engineers
  • Backend only

• Prove it again

• Conclusion

My background

My official job title has been "principal" for roughly the last 4.5 years. I've been contributing at that level for much longer because most companies require you to perform at a level before they will promote you to it. That means I am a very experienced software engineer who has shown leadership as an individual contributor and had significant, company-wide impact.

Levels are confusing

Leveling is complicated because every company does it differently. Some companies use either "staff" or "principal" to mean roughly the same thing. Other companies have both, and "principal" is a level above "staff." Some companies use numbering systems. The supposed "bar" for these levels also varies pretty widely across the industry. It's very confusing and frustrating.

For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to use "staff" going forward in this post as shorthand for "very experienced, high impact, individual contributor software engineers with varying titles." I've seen that term used more commonly, so hopefully it will make sense to a wider audience.

The resources below provide some insight into what levels look like across the tech industry:

• levels.fyi
• progression.fyi

Frustrations in my job search

In my job search, I was hoping to find a staff-level role to reflect my level of expertise and the value I deliver. I found this a lot more difficult than I anticipated. I suspect it's partly because of the challenges in the market right now, but it's probably more than that. A common refrain I heard from recruiters and hiring managers included things like:

• We only have a really small number of staff engineers that have been at the company forever.
• We can't hire staff engineers externally.
• Our staff engineers don't really write code any more.
• We only hire backend engineers into staff positions.

If I talked to you about this during my job search, I swear I'm not picking on your specific company. I experienced variations of this at my last job and ran into it with several of the companies I interviewed with. I've also heard similar stories from people in my professional network. My suspicion is that this is a relatively common problem, but I don't have any data to back that up.

Organizational problems

I don't think this is a hiring manager, recruiter, or team issue. These comments are usually a reflection of organization-level decisions (or the lack thereof) that teams have to work within. For example:

• Inability or unwillingness to hire staff engineers externally.
• Requiring staff engineers to move into an architect-oriented role instead of having multiple options.
• Undervaluing the technical complexity of modern frontend development and the associated need for staff engineers with expertise in that area.

I'm going to spend some time digging into these various issues and why I think they are problematic for the company, teams, and engineers.

One track for staff engineers

A common pattern I see across these companies is only providing a single track for very experienced individual contributors that is more focused on "architect" work. Architects tend to spend less time hands-on with code and projects and more time in meetings and making high-level architectural decisions. Hence the "our staff engineers don't really write code any more" comments.

Architects are really valuable, especially at larger companies that need very experienced engineers to help coordinate, drive, and scale large, complex, cross-team projects and systems. I worked in this role for a couple years when I was at New Relic and had a lot of impact on company-wide projects and frontend development. I really appreciated the organizational and technical insight from architects when I was in other roles throughout my career.

While architects are useful, that is not the only way, or even necessarily the best way, to use staff engineers. Depending on the problems your company is solving, it can be immensely valuable to have very experienced engineers doing deeper, hands-on work with specific problems or projects. When you only have one archetype of what a staff engineer looks like, you are limiting options for career growth. You're essentially telling very experienced engineers who prefer hands-on work that they can't get promoted (and thus paid more) unless they stop doing that high value work and move into a role that is less suited to their skills, expertise, and/or preferences.

This reminds me of the bad old days when engineers had to become managers to progress in their career. It was a bad idea that led to some pretty negative outcomes. Thankfully, the industry learned from this, and most companies now treat engineering management as a separate role with a separate ladder and progression. I don't think architect needs to be spun off into a separate role, but I do think it needs to be considered one of multiple variations for staff level engineers. This enables individuals to find career progression where they can deliver a lot of value to the company in areas where they excel. Not providing this option, leads to results like:

• Losing experienced engineers to companies that handle this better.
• Engineers becoming architects to get promoted and then contributing less value to the company because it's not the best use of their skills.
• Engineers staying where they are to avoid becoming architects, becoming disgruntled about stagnation in their career (and their pay), and no longer delivering at the level they used to.

Even architect-focused staff engineers could really benefit from more hands-on time. Technology changes all the time, and people will struggle to keep up with it and provide solid technical leadership if they don't have time to touch code any more. I've seen myself and others burn out in this role because our day-to-day responsibilities did not leave space for tinkering, so we were doing it on nights and weekends to keep up with our areas of specialization. On the flip side, I've seen architects not do this and become increasingly out-of-touch, and thus less valuable to the company.

Only home-grown staff engineers

Some companies seem unwilling or unable to hire staff engineers externally. Instead they lean heavily on growing them internally from people who have been at the company a long time. Creating a pipeline to grow engineers internally and provide career progression is important, but it shouldn't be the only way to add more staff engineers to your company.

I think the unwillingness to hire externally and the requirement for staff engineers to be architects reinforce one another. Engineers in architect roles are often expected to have wide, complex organizational impact that relies on strong relationships and a breadth of knowledge of the organization's systems (both human and technical). A senior engineer who has been working with those people and systems for years may be more easily ramped up to a staff level than an external hire with staff-level skills can be ramped up and integrated into the organization. There can also be a lot of political issues around hiring externally for roles people are trying to grow into internally.

The down side of primarily growing your own staff engineers is that the majority of your most experienced engineers built their expertise at your company. If your company is trying to grow (and most tech companies are), that expertise is focused more on where you are than on where you are trying to go. Those staff engineers are incredibly valuable. They bring deep organizational expertise and historical understanding of your systems, but that's not enough by itself. Homogeneity can be really limiting. Hiring some staff engineers externally enables you to bring on people who have more experience with the challenges and scale you are working towards. The varying experiences and perspectives can lead to better results.

Of course, that returns us to one of my previous points. It's really difficult to bring on an external hire and expect them to rapidly get to know the organization, build influence, and make architectural decisions while sitting in meetings all day. I think there is a real benefit to bringing on staff engineers and letting them get their hands dirty for a while by working on a project and getting to know people before moving to more architect-oriented responsibilities. In fact, I think it's a good idea for some staff engineers to stay in hands-on technical roles indefinitely or to shift between roles depending on what the company needs.

I suspect that interviewing is another challenge to hiring at this level. Companies struggle with putting together the right combination of exercises and behavioral interviews to identify if someone matches their "bar" for staff engineer. This isn't a good reason not to hire staff engineers externally. Companies hire directors, VPs, and all sorts of other high impact roles externally all the time without a guarantee that they will be a good fit. Organizations need to figure out an interview process that is good enough and a process to handle bad hires, just like they do with other roles.

Backend only

While it is rarer than the other issues, I think it is worth mentioning companies that only have backend-focused engineers at the staff level. Sometimes this makes sense because the company is building software that doesn't have a significant user interface. However, the majority of modern software has a user interface, whether it be on web, mobile, command line, or all of the above.

There is a sentiment in some corners of the tech industry that only backend engineering is difficult and complex enough to justify a staff level. Anyone who believes this has clearly not spent much time on modern web or mobile development. Both of these specializations are complicated, especially at scale. They're just complex in different ways.

Organizations that make critical technical decisions and organizational investments without considering the entire stack are more likely to choose poorly because they're missing an important part of the picture. Staff engineers are more likely to be in meetings or consulted about these decisions. If all of your staff engineers are backend specialists, you're only getting input on the backend. Hopefully, you at least have some managers in the room that can advocate for frontend and mobile, but it's not the same as having people with recent, deep, hands-on experience in those areas.

Requiring someone to be a backend engineer to get promoted has similar negative side effects as requiring someone to become an architect. Valuable engineers with skills and aspirations that aren't aligned with the limitations of the company's career ladder may become disgruntled, leave for another company, or one followed by the other.

Prove it again

Now that I've explained the negative impact on companies, I want to return to how this impacts me and people like me. The issues I described create a situation where engineers are expected to come in at a sub-staff level and work back up to staff when we change jobs. This is a really hard pill to swallow.

At most companies, titles are associated with pay, so taking a title cut can also include a pay cut. A title cut can also mean you don't get access to the level of work and impact needed for learning and career progression. Instead of continuing to grow, you get to spend time proving over and over again that you are worthy of "staff" like you're in some terrible tech version of Groundhog Day.

This is especially frustrating because the promotion to the staff level is usually really challenging. It often depends on the perfect storm of good projects, a good manager, budget, and intense work. Many of those things are out of your control, promotions only happen occasionally, and a lot of companies want to see significant time in seat before promoting to that level. It's especially challenging to sign on for that in the current austerity-minded market where companies aren't handing out a lot of budget for promotions.

Having to prove yourself over and over again is exhausting for everyone, but it can have some additional frustrating dimensions for people from underrepresented and marginalized groups. There's a pattern called "prove it again bias" that comes up repeatedly in studies and articles about diversity and equity in STEM. If you already had to do twice as much work to justify the first promotion to staff, it feels even worse to have to do it again. No matter how many times someone says that "titles don't matter," they can make a significant difference if you are running into biases about what an experienced engineer looks like.

Conclusion

Some companies are struggling to figure out what to do with very experienced individual contributor software engineers. I strongly encourage companies to think about how they are hiring, growing, and utilizing staff engineers. Below are some recommendations for you to consider.

• Your staff engineers should not be a homogeneous group. This goes for internal/external hiring, areas of technical specialization, and the demographics of the people involved. Diverse teams lead to better outcomes, and this applies to your "team" of very experienced engineers.
• You should have more than one model for what a staff engineer looks like, both to better serve the company and to provide more options for career progression. Architect-focused roles are not the only way to use very experienced engineers.
• You should develop processes that make it possible for you to hire some staff engineers externally to support the growth of your organization.

I am not going to spend much time explaining how I approached the job search because I wrote a lot about that in the Anatomy of Julie's Job Search series. I will focus more on personal learnings, data analysis, and trends I noticed during the process.

This is a pretty long post, so feel free to take a look at the table of contents and jump around to the bits that interest you. I recommend reading this post on a larger screen, if you can. It would be a lot to take in on mobile.

Table of contents

• Disclaimers

• Stages of the job search

  • Reflecting

  • Preparing

  • Sourcing

    • Sources and the number of opportunities
    • Sources and market conditions
    • Pay ranges in job postings
    • Sources through stages of the job search
    • A rant about low-value sources

  • Screening

    • Recruiter screening

      • Working with in-house recruiters
      • More discussion of pay ranges

    • Manager screening

      • Interviewing is a two-way street

    • Take-home technical screening

      • Why I don't like technical take-homes any more

  • Interviewing

    • Virtual onsite

      • Some bullet points about onsites

    • Post-onsite follow-up

  • Deciding

  • Retrospecting

• Time investment

  • Tracked activities
  • Time per role
  • Estimated activities
  • Is it a full time job?

• Costs

• Takeaways

  • Challenging tech job market
  • Pay ranges discussed more openly, but values all over the place
  • Exhausted by technical take-homes
  • More time zone mismatches
  • Frustrations with hiring into staff/principal level

• Conclusion

• Attribution

Disclaimers

The disclaimers from my anatomy of a job search post also apply here. TLDR: this information is provided "as is." Use at your own risk.

I anonymized organization and role names to avoid calling out any specific companies while still providing relatively granular data about my search. The numbering of organizations is not alphabetical, and I will not be commenting on which companies are which, so please do not ask.

I am not sharing what my next job is until I start in mid-October. Even when I do, I will not be posting about it here. It is important to me to keep my personal content separated from my employer.

Stages of the job search

My mental model of the job search has seven stages. In past searches, I went through them informally. This time around, I was significantly more intentional because I was working on the job search series. That intentionality included a lot more data, which you will see throughout this post.

Reflecting

Reflecting was the first step of the process. I used this time to reflect on what I wanted out of my next job and what I brought to the table. In this job search, I was so thoughtful that I reflected twice.

My first reflection happened a few weeks into my summer break. It can take significant time to get headcount and funding for experienced engineers, so I hoped that communicating my plans ahead of time might improve my odds. A post with a clear "I'm not looking until August" was a helpful place to redirect people during my time off. The result was published in Available for work in late summer 2022. It included an airtable form where prospective employers could sign up to be contacted when I started my search.

My second reflection happened at the beginning of my official job search in early August. I did a lot of work the first time, and my feelings hadn't changed much over the summer, so this was more like a final draft than a brand new reflection. The result was published in Looking for Work (2022 edition) with an FAQ explaining what had changed since April. It included a new airtable form and an email alias as the recommended methods to contact me.

Preparing

I did a lot of preparation to set myself up for the complexity of my job search. I didn't start completely from scratch because I've done this a few times before. However, I struggled with the limitations of my tools last time and wanted to set up something more complex and aligned with my mental model.

I ended up doing something pretty complicated with Notion, a tool that provides a hybrid of spreadsheets, databases, and documents. I'm working on a template I can reuse in the future and potentially share. This may be too much overhead for people with simpler job searches, but it might be interesting to look at or remix for your needs.

I also spent some of my preparation time migrating my personal site from an old, creaky, hard-to-maintain version of Gatsby to a currently new version of Next.js that inevitably will become old, creaky, and hard-to-maintain when I don't spend enough time updating it.

Sourcing

Next up is sourcing, the actual searching part of the job search. This is where I start to have some interesting data for you! I sourced a total of 35 potential roles during this process that I tracked in Notion and spent some time researching. This number does not include every potential role that was sent to me during this time.

I did not do any significant tracking, analysis, or research for opportunities from LinkedIn messages and recruiter spam (unsolicited recruiting emails that seemed blissfully unaware of my public job search) because it was almost entirely noise. I did a quick analysis of the LinkedIn messages and email I tagged "recruiter spam" between August 1st and September 13th to get some rough counts for the purposes of analysis. Those numbers bring me up to 89 potential roles.

Sources and the number of opportunities

The table below provides a summary of the sources for job opportunities, what they are, and how many roles were sourced from them.

Below is a pie chart representation of the data above to help visualize the scale of the sources.

Sources and market conditions

I know it looks like there were a lot of opportunities based on the raw numbers, but the market felt significantly leaner this time around. Many of these opportunities weren't aligned with what I was looking for. I saw significantly fewer companies posting roles for staff level frontend developers or hiring engineers of any kind. In many cases, I saw the opposite — layoffs and hiring freezes.

Pay ranges in job postings

I saw more pay ranges in job postings this time around. That's not surprising because more localities are passing laws that require disclosing salary information. However, I still saw plenty of job postings that did not include meaningful information about compensation. I'm not sure how effective these laws are when companies face little-to-no consequences for ignoring them, but I'm happy to see things slowly moving in a helpful direction.

Sources through stages of the job search

The table and heatmap below show how many roles from each source made it through the stages of my job search. The previous data gave you a sense of the quantity provided by each of the sources. This helps provide a better sense of the quality.

A rant about low-value sources

It is notable that zero roles from LinkedIn and recruiter spam made it past the sourcing stage. That means they were so low value they weren't even worth an introductory call with a recruiter to learn more. These sources accounted for roughly 60% of the opportunities and 0% of the value. That's a horrible hit rate considering I was an experienced candidate actively looking for a job.

I did not judge these opportunities solely based on their sources. I read through the emails and messages. They did not progress because none of them were even sort of a fit for me. Many of them weren't even in the right ballpark — it still surprises me how many people will send me backend roles when the word "frontend" is right there at the top of my profile. A worrying number of them were for crypto companies. The rest were low value for reasons like low pay, office/travel/relocation requirements, products that aren't aligned with my values, and various red flags. Some of the other sources had similar issues, but none of them were 100% a bad fit at scale.

I feel a little bad complaining about recruiter spam because recruiters have a hard job and need to eat too. However, I'm getting really sick of having to sift through unsolicited, low-value opportunities in my inbox when I'm trying to get things done. LinkedIn messaging is nigh unusable for me if I allow InMail (messages from people I'm not connected to). I disabled it after this job search and do not plan on re-enabling it in the future.

I'm especially sick of the scale introduced by recruiting platforms and data brokers. Every piece of recruiter spam tends to have at least 2-3 automated follow-ups. I've even gotten a few bits of recruiter spam via text message, which I find incredibly invasive. At this point, these contacts are functionally indistinguishable from telemarketing. I feel bad that the telemarketers have to pay their bills too, but that doesn't make it ok that they are wasting some of the little precious time I have on this earth to send me unsolicited requests that are of little-to-no value to me.

Screening

I filtered the many potential opportunities down to ten that seemed like they might be a good fit. The screening stage helped me and those companies learn more about each other before investing additional time in the interview process.

Recruiter screening

The recruiter screen is usually a shorter, introductory call with a recruiter to learn more about the role and see if it's a good fit.

The table and chart below provide information about the number of recruiter screens completed during my job search and how long they took. The "planned" timing is based on the amount of calendar time scheduled for the call. The "total" timing is the actual amount of time I spent, including preparing beforehand and debriefing afterwards.

Working with in-house recruiters

I worked exclusively with in-house recruiters during this search, and they were all great. I wanted to call this out because I spent a lot of time earlier in the post complaining about recruiter spam.

I really like working with in-house recruiters, especially ones that have been there for a while. They tend to have significant familiarity with the company and solid relationships with the people and teams I'll be interviewing with. I also love working with them as an employee involved in hiring because they are solid partners in helping build and grow teams. I've been really disappointed seeing companies laying off a ton of recruiters this year. It's shortsighted, and they will regret it when they want to hire again.

As a candidate, a good recruiter feels like someone on your team helping you through the process to find a good fit. A bad recruiter can feel more like the stereotype of a sleazy used car salesman. I've had great experiences with external recruiters that match the former (I'm going to continue shouting out Jill Wohlner here!). I've also had terrible experiences with internal recruiters that match the latter (see my 2015 job search retrospective). However, I've generally had better experiences with internal recruiters, so that is who I prefer to work with unless the external recruiter has a really solid reputation.

More discussion of pay ranges

I mentioned earlier that I saw more pay ranges in job postings. I noticed a stronger trend in my conversations with recruiters. Almost every recruiter brought up compensation in early discussions. Many of them proactively shared salary ranges, and the rest did so without a struggle when I gently pushed back on sharing a number first. This felt like a big shift after years of guesstimating using anonymous salary sites and playing a game of "don't say a number first" chicken with recruiters.

I suspect this is an area where pay transparency laws are having a stronger effect. For example, California, a state where a lot of tech companies and software engineers are based, has required disclosure of pay scales during interviewing since 2018 (CA Labor Code Section 432.3). California just passed a law requiring pay scales in job postings (SB 1162), so I wouldn't be surprised if we see more movement there in the near future.

In a couple cases the salary numbers shared by the recruiter did not match the numbers included in job postings. The numbers from the recruiter were usually a little higher. I don't have enough information to speculate about why the numbers did not match.

Manager screening

The manager screen is usually an earlier interview with a hiring manager or someone else in leadership to evaluate if you are a good fit and worth moving on to the more time-consuming parts of the interview process.

The table and chart below provide information about the number of manager screens completed during my job search and how long they took. The "planned" timing is based on the amount of calendar time scheduled for the call. The "total" timing is the actual amount of time I spent, including preparing beforehand and debriefing afterwards.

Interviewing is a two-way street

I don't have any new takeaways here. However, I think it's worth reinforcing the fact that interviewing is a two-way street. A lot of people care about their relationship with their manager because it can have a huge impact on their quality-of-life at work. I like manager screens because they help me get a sense of how I vibe with someone I'm potentially going to spend a lot of time with who will have a degree of power over me.

Most people in management understand this is part of their job. I got along really well with the majority of managers and skip levels I talked to. The outliers seemed less aware that they needed to help me understand the role and why I should be interested in it. It also was really apparent when someone didn't read the notes from the recruiter or the TLDR from my job post. I understand that managers are busy and can't spend a ton of time on every candidate (I added the TLDR with them in mind), but a little effort goes a long way. A gold star to the managers who skimmed my post and came ready to discuss the trickier areas (e.g. travel, on call).

Take-home technical screening

The take-home technical screen is basically homework companies give you to prove that you can code. I don't like them, but had previously thought of them as a lesser evil compared to the stressful live coding technical screen. I think I dislike both of them equally after this job search.

The table and chart below provide information about the number of take-homes I completed during my job search and how long they took. The "expected" timing is based on the suggested timing provided with the instructions. The "total" timing is the actual amount of time I spent on the exercise.

Two companies allowed me to skip this step because I interviewed with them in 2020 and strongly communicated that I did not want to complete the take-home again. One company offered to let me re-use another take-home, but their exercise was sufficiently distinct that I was worried doing so would not give them adequate signal, so I completed the provided exercise.

Why I don't like technical take-homes any more

In my post about screening, I noted that take-home interviews should:

• Take no longer than 2 hours, including any learning time to work with the tools and technology.
• Be as close as possible to the kind of work you are being hired for.

All of the technical screens in this job search fulfilled the second requirement. Only one of them fulfilled the first. In fact, most of them were not even completed in the time recommended by the instructions for the exercise.

It's possible that these exercises took longer than expected because I am a very slow programmer who is bad at my job. At a low point, I briefly entertained that possibility, but I know it's not true. I did not code a lot over the summer, so I was a little slower than usual, but not enough to account for these differences. I lost some time to multitasking, but that's not a good justification for the extra time. Most people doing these exercises will need to multitask because they have jobs and lives outside of the interview process.

A large contributor to the time is language asking for a result similar to a pull request you would submit at work. For me, that includes a lot of things that can add up like: writing tests, ensuring code is readable and maintainable, and explaining my work and choices. It would be really helpful if companies would be explicit about how much or little they want of those things and plan accordingly for the time needed. For example, if you only care about seeing a couple unit tests, tell me that, so that I don't provide the level of coverage I would for real production code.

A contributor in several exercises was expectations around accessibility. Doing accessibility correctly can be time-consuming for certain kinds of UIs, especially for someone who is not an expert and often needs to do a little research and testing to get things right. Accessibility is important, and I think it's valid to test for it in interviews, but that time needs to be accounted for. I wonder if people less experienced with accessibility assumed this would be quicker stuff like checking for alt text on images and using semantic HTML tags.

Another likely contributor is that engineers aren't great at estimating how long things take. I don't think anyone is maliciously underestimating the expected time for these exercises. They're just being a little too optimistic. Unfortunately, messages like "we want to respect your time, so only take a few hours on this" start to feel frustrating when the exercise actually takes a day to complete. Most candidates won't provide feedback about this because they don't want to be perceived negatively for complaining or being slow at the task.

The only company that stayed within my recommended timing parameters was very explicit about the exercise being completed within the time allotted, and actually provided an exercise that was feasible to complete within that time span. A gold star to that company for being thoughtful about my time.

Technical take-homes were the most time consuming part of this job search. They took longer than the virtual onsites (although not by much). This is not a good use of my time as a candidate. I think I'd rather go back to the live coding because at least it takes less time. Mostly, I'm really sick of having to spend a lot of time and energy proving I can code over and over again after 15+ years of working professionally as a software engineer.

Interviewing

This stage of the job search is focused on the heavier set of core interviews that are often referred to as an "onsite" because historically they involved coming into the office for a single, grueling day of interviewing. Nowadays, these are more often given remotely, spread across multiple days, and sometimes referred to as "virtual onsites."

Virtual onsite

The table and chart below provide information about the number of virtual onsites completed during my job search and how long they took. The "count" indicates the number of interviews. The "planned" timing is based on the amount of calendar time scheduled for the onsite. The "total" timing is the actual amount of time I spent on the onsite, including preparing beforehand and debriefing afterwards.

The two roles with one hour onsites were companies I did a full interview panel with in 2020 and only required an abbreviated interview this time around based on my past performance. I listed seven roles as reaching the interviewing stage, but only six onsites are listed below because one of them was canceled after taking a job offer.

Some bullet points about onsites

I don't have any new takeaways from the onsite interviews. A lot of my feelings are already covered in my posts about preparing for interviews and interviewing. Below are some bullet points to reinforce the bits I hit this time around.

• Please stop asking trivia questions. They suck for candidates and aren't a good signal of job performance. Only a couple companies did this, so maybe it's going out of style. I really hope so.
• I love that interviewing remotely allowed me to spread interviews over a couple days. The full day onslaught was always way too much.
• I wish consecutive interviews had a little more breathing room. More than a few times, I had to cannibalize my question time at the end, so I could go to the bathroom before my next interview.
• I thought it was cool to see several of the companies including shadow interviewers, so that other team members could learn how to interview. This is refreshing because too many companies just throw interviewers into the deep end, which sucks for them and for candidates.

Post-onsite follow-up

Occasionally, myself or the company will request follow-up discussions to get information that was not covered in the onsite. In this case, these discussions were focused on learning more about potential teams with companies that did bundled hiring.

The table and chart below provide information about the number of post-onsite follow-ups completed during my job search and how long they took. The "planned" timing is based on the amount of calendar time scheduled. The "total" timing is the actual amount of time I spent, including preparing beforehand and debriefing afterwards.

Deciding

The penultimate stage of the job search was really stressful for me this time around. I put a lot of those feelings into the post about this stage because I wrote it after accepting an offer, but I have more to share here.

Two of the companies I thought would lead to offers early on declined to move forward, which made me really nervous. One liked me but couldn't afford a staff engineer, which made me even more anxious about the already scary job market. Another didn't provide an explanation, but I think it was because I interviewed poorly, which made me anxious about my ability to perform in interviews.

I was tired of the job search by the time I got to more virtual onsites. I was trying to juggle screening calls and interviews during the day. Then I had to balance take-homes, interview preparation, and personal responsibilities on nights and weekends. In my last job search, I finished all of my scheduled onsites and waited for offers before making a decision. I intended to do the same thing this time, but by the time I got two good offers, I really wanted to be done.

My decision-making process was different this time around because I was in a really different place. In 2020, I was looking for new work only a couple weeks after leaving a very stressful job that burned me out and then piled on an expectation to work nights and weekends during the early pandemic. Some of my core motivators as a software engineer are solving interesting problems and learning, but growth was scary when I was burned out. I was looking for a safer, more relaxed job where I could weather the storm. This time around, I'm not burned out. Taking the summer off was incredibly restorative. It put me in a place where I felt excited about taking on challenges again.

I noted that my gut is usually the least important factor in decision-making, but I think it played a bigger part this time around. I'd been in various stages of burnout mode for so long that the analytical part of my brain tried to optimize for that early in the process. As I got to job offers, something changed. I was talking to my partner about the various roles and surprised myself when I realized how excited I sounded about one of them. It wasn't the original frontrunner. My gut was reminding me that I could pick something challenging that sparked joy.

That level of excitement combined with liking everyone at the company I'd met, a helpful follow-up with my prospective skip level, and a very competitive offer made it easier for me to make a decision early and stop exhausting myself with the job search. I was really bummed about declining with the other company because they also had great people and interesting opportunities, but I could only take one job, and one of them was ultimately the better fit for right now.

Retrospecting

This is the part of the process where I write the post you are reading right now! It's really long, but I hope you're finding it helpful.

Time investment

I added some lightweight time tracking to my tooling for this job search, so I could get a better sense of how I was using my time. I focused on tracking the timing associated with the many activities that companies required me go through as part of the interviewing process. The tracked activities accounted for about 92 hours of work. The core job search (from start to signing an offer) lasted roughly 6 weeks. If you include the retrospective, it took two months.

You can play around with the visualization below to get a sense of the date ranges associated with the stages of my job search and the time commitments associated with various tracked activities.

Tracked activities

The table below provides a summary of the tracked activities, what they are, and how much time I invested in them.

Below is a pie chart representation of the data above to help visualize the scale of the activities.

Time per role

The table below provides a summary of how much time I spent on tracked activities for roles and the stage of the job search those roles ended in. Some of these companies took less time because I completed a full interview process with them in 2020 and was able to do a shorter process this time around based on past performance.

The percentages and totals don't quite add up because a couple activities counted against multiple roles at the same organization.

Estimated activities

I regret not tracking all of the time associated with my job search to get a full sense of the time investment. I estimated the amount of time I spent on additional activities to get that data.

Is it a full time job?

I often refer to looking for work as a full-time job. It certainly feels like one with all of the stress, effort, and multitasking. I was curious if the numbers supported my assertion. The table below shows some rough math based on a combination of the tracked and estimated activities minus the site migration and writing, which were more tangential to the job search.

This data suggests I was working a full four-day week during my job search. I did try to take Fridays off, so that's not inaccurate. However, this data doesn't account for everything. Looking for work, like many jobs, requires multitasking and smaller tasks that add overhead, but don't necessarily show up in time tracking. If you've ever worked a job with billable hours, you know what I'm talking about.

The "hours per week" in this table averages the time over six weeks, but that's not how it actually played out. In practice, I tended to have easier weeks at the beginning and then some really long weeks near the end when I was doing take homes and onsites.

Costs

Several of the tools I used in my job search had costs associated with them, so I wanted to be transparent about that. A breakdown of the costs can be found below.

Both Notion and Calendly provided a lot of value for a reasonable monthly price. I will likely pay for them again in the future. LinkedIn Premium provided little value for a lot of cost, and I regretted forgetting to cancel before the free trial ended.

Takeaways

I wanted this section to make sense in isolation for people who skipped around, so you may find a little repetition. I go into more depth, so it's totally worth continuing even if you read everything else.

Challenging tech job market

The tech job market right now is challenging. The last time I looked for work was in the summer of 2020, which was difficult because it was early in the pandemic. The market feels worse now. In 2020, companies were being cautious, but seemed willing to spend money on critical hires. In 2022, more companies are on austerity measures with layoffs, hiring freezes, and really tight budgets. Even the companies that are still growing are doing so really carefully. I didn't analyze any data, but it seemed like significantly fewer companies were posting roles for staff frontend developers.

In 2020, there were several cases where companies created headcount for me because I was an advantageous hire who is rarely on the market. I shared my availability in late April hoping something like that might happen again. Unfortunately, the market took a pretty sharp turn in May and hasn't really recovered yet. As far as I know, nobody was creating headcount for me this time around. At least one company tried, but couldn't make it happen, so I think this is more a reflection on the market conditions than on me.

I can't tell if the current market was harder or easier for me because I'm an expensive hire in a specialist role. I suspect it's a little of both. I could have applied to a larger number of roles if I was more open to fullstack work, but those roles likely had more competition. I've heard rough things about the job market in tech from people in a wide range of roles and levels of experience, so I don't think anyone is having a good time right now.

Pay ranges discussed more openly, but values all over the place

I noticed a lot more early discussions and transparency about pay ranges from companies this time around. Historically, it's been much harder. Recruiters often insisted that you give a number first, which puts you in a worse negotiating position. This time, recruiters offered numbers without me asking or in response to a gentle "what range are you targeting for this role?"

I can only speculate about why this has shifted. I might just have gotten lucky, but there is increased pressure on the industry to be more transparent. The growing amount of state legislation requiring pay scale transparency combined with increased remote hiring is a likely contributor. The market conditions and my level of experience may also have been factors.

While companies were transparent, the numbers were all over the place. Some of the individual companies shared numbers with wide ranges. The overall range across all the companies was over $100k. That was just base salary without even accounting for the messiness of equity.

The numbers were also less predictable than I expected. Many of the smaller, private companies mentioned significantly more competitive numbers than the larger, public companies, which is not what I experienced in my last job search. I know the job market was weird in a "competitive hiring" way before the market got weird in a "mass layoffs" way, so maybe that accounts for some of this. I'm really not sure what to make of it.

Exhausted by technical take-homes

In my last job search, the screening process had a mix of live coding and technical take-homes. This time, there was no live coding until I got to the onsites, and even those had very little. I suspect this is a reaction to people complaining about the stress of live coding interviews. Unfortunately, they've exchanged shorter, more stressful technical screens for much longer, moderately stressful ones.

This part of the job process feels fundamentally broken. Companies keep trying to find better ways to validate that people really know how to code, but the end result isn't noticeably better. It's mostly just different flavors of bad. More companies need to put together exercises that balance getting signal on a candidate's skills with respect for their time.

I don't have a great solution to this problem, but I have seen an approach a couple times (once in this search, once in the last one) that felt like a reasonable balance. This approach involved a coding exercise:

• Relevant to the work the candidate is being hired for.
• Timeboxed to two hours or less during a time of the candidate's choosing.
• That was actually feasible to complete in that amount of time.
• With a short (30-45 minutes) follow-up call to discuss the solution a day or so later.

This approach:

• Gets signal on the candidate's coding abilities in the exercise.
• Gets signal on the candidate's communication skills in the follow-up discussion.
• Is respectful of the candidate's time by taking a maximum of 2-3 hours.
• Is respectful of the interviewer's time by keeping the exercise to a relatively small problem and a short follow-up.

More time zone mismatches

Historically, I've found more companies to be heavy on Pacific time because there was such a large contingent of employees on the US West Coast. This worked great for me as someone who lives in Portland and is absolutely not a morning person, but I recognize it creates problems for people in other time zones. I ran into the occasional job that required early mornings because of collaboration with employees in Western Europe, but it wasn't common.

This job search, I ran into a lot more companies that were heavy on Eastern time, which is better for people closer to that time zone, but a drag for my night owl brain. I did not talk to enough companies for this to be a strong indicator of a shift, but I found it interesting. I wonder if the increase in remote work during the pandemic has evened out the distribution of employees.

The hardest part of these mismatches is when remote companies rely heavily on synchronous meetings. A company I was relatively interested in dropped to the bottom of the list when someone mentioned 8am daily standups. That's rough for me as a night owl. It would also be really challenging for people who need to drop kids off at school. It's been awesome to see a lot more companies shift to remote in the last few years, but there's still a lot of work to do around making it effective.

Frustrations with hiring into staff/principal level

My official job title has been "principal" for roughly the last 4.5 years. I was hoping to find a similarly leveled role to reflect my expertise and the value I deliver. I found this a lot more difficult than I anticipated. I suspect it's partly because of the challenges in the market right now, but it's probably more than that. I think some companies are struggling to figure out how to leverage very experienced individual contributor engineers, and that extends to hiring.

I decided to move this topic to a separate post after hitting over a thousand words. This retrospective is long enough already. Stay tuned for more on this topic soon! It's now available.

Conclusion

Unsurprisingly, searching for a new job continues to be stressful and time consuming. It gets a little easier with experience, but it is still unpleasant, and the current market conditions really aren't helping. Hopefully, my new job will be awesome, and I won't have to do this again any time soon.

Despite it adding overhead to my job search, I'm really glad I spent the time writing all of these posts about my process. It gave me a chance to get back into writing again, which is something I really missed. All of that introspection led to a more organized and effective job search. Hopefully, it will also be helpful to other people struggling to make their way through the labyrinthine interviewing process for software engineers.

Attribution

• Several of the visualizations in this post were created using the nivo component library.
• The icons used in this post are from Font Awesome.

My approach to looking for work is an exhausting, stressful full-time job. After months of preparing, interviewing, and making decisions, all I want is to be done. However, there's one more stage to complete before I'm truly finished. I need to reflect on how the process went and what I learned from it. Future Julie will appreciate it the next time I do this...hopefully in the distant future.

Table of contents

• My process
• Why it works for me
• Takeaways for job searchers
• Takeaways for employers

My process

The retrospective is the most informal part of my job search because it's mostly for me. Every other stage of the process is deeply intertwined with my ability to get a new job. I get to do the retro after I've finished all that hard stuff and signed a job offer. I can relax a little and think about how it all went.

I try to complete the retrospective within a couple weeks of signing an offer, so everything is still relatively fresh in my mind. This stage is kind of the inverse of the reflection I did at the beginning of my search. The retrospective helps me process what happened, learn from it, release some stress, and move forward.

I don't have a standard template for retrospectives, but they usually include answers to questions like:

• What did I do?
• What went well?
• What didn't go well?
• What did I learn?
• What do I want to change next time?

I say it's mostly for me, but I do usually publish a retrospective on my personal site. I feel an obligation to share the results after doing my search publicly, so people can learn from it. Below are links to the retrospective posts from my previous job searches.

• July 2020 - My previous job search.
• August 2015 - My first public job search.

I'm still working on the retrospective for my 2022 job search. I'm hoping to publish it within the next few days. Stay tuned!

Why it works for me

As I've noted throughout this series, the public part of my process is pretty specific to me and my situation. The same thing goes for publishing a public version of my retrospective. I do my best to be careful, but the amount of honesty could risk some professional consequences. I'm very careful not to identify companies to the general reader, but it's plausible that interviewers can identify their companies in the stories (sometimes this ends well).

Takeaways for job searchers

Just like the reflecting stage, the public part of my process may not be for most people, but the introspection part is good for just about everybody. Thinking about what went well, what didn't, and where you want you to improve is critical to getting better at interviewing. There isn't really a right or wrong way to reflect after your job search. The important part is that you do it.

Takeaways for employers

I don't have any general takeaways for employers on this stage because it isn't really for you. That said, I highly recommend reading my public retrospectives. I tend to share a lot of honest feedback about interviewing that you cannot get from most candidates because they're afraid of how it may impact future job prospects. As I've said throughout this series, hiring for software engineers is kind of broken. Maybe you'll get some ideas that help you fix it a little.

My job search process involves making a lot of decisions from start to finish, but the biggest decision comes near the end. Where am I going to work next?

Table of contents

• My process

  • Keeping people informed
  • Spinning the plates of time
  • Spinning the plates of excitement
  • Handling rejection
  • Receiving offers
  • Negotiating
  • Making a decision
  • Accepting an offer
  • Declining other offers
  • Offer details template

• Why it works for me

• Takeaways for job searchers

• Takeaways for employers

  • General takeaways
  • Takeaways for people who want to hire me

My process

I noted in my last post that interviewing is the most stressful part of the job search for me. Deciding is a close second. Near the end of my process, those two steps have a lot of overlap because I am interviewing with multiple companies. It feels like the job search equivalent of a plate spinning act. I'm trying to keep everything going well and everyone happy without letting anything hit the floor.

Keeping people informed

I do my best throughout this process to be transparent and honest with the people I am talking to. They know I am doing a public job search and talking to multiple companies. I've written a long blog post noting the things I care about. I try to avoid surprises.

As I get near the end of the process, I will do my best to share general timeline information (e.g. "I've got two onsites this week," "I have a job offer that I need to decide on by Friday"). I do not share the names of the other companies I am talking to, but, if asked, will share profiles to help them understand the shape of their competition (e.g. mid-stage startup; large public company).

Spinning the plates of time

One of the tricky parts of interviewing with multiple companies is trying to keep them on roughly the same timeline. Most companies want you to accept an offer within a week or two, so I really need offers to land at roughly the same time to be able to compare them and make a decision. This is challenging when onsites for a single company can take a day or two.

The times where I'm waiting for someone to get back to me can feel like forever. When I'm trying to juggle job offers, it can feel like everything is happening way too fast.

Spinning the plates of excitement

In addition to time, I also have to spin plates around expectations and level of interest in the roles. Companies want to hear that you are excited about working for them, and I certainly would prefer to end up in a role I am excited about. I do my best to be honest about how excited I am at a given point in time based on the information I have. Unfortunately, this can sometimes backfire if my feelings change based on new information.

In both my 2020 and 2022 job searches, the company I was most excited about for a large chunk of the search did not end up being where I landed. I wasn't being dishonest when I told these companies I was really excited and they were the frontrunners. That was absolutely true at the time we had those conversations. In both cases, they ended up in second place because the tradeoffs for another company were better when I had all the information.

It sucks to decline offers you were really jazzed about, especially when the recruiters, hiring managers, and other folks at the company put so much time and effort into it. Unfortunately, I can only take one job, and I have to pick what's best for me. Companies do the same thing when they have multiple candidates for a single role, and I imagine they do so with significantly less emotional handwringing.

Handling rejection

Not every interview leads to a job offer. One of my motivations for talking to multiple companies is to reduce stress and minimize the sting of failure. It helps to know I have more options, but an interview that does not lead to an offer still hurts. It can feel scary if I do not have any offers yet. What if they all turn out this way?

Failure to get an offer can happen for all sorts of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with me. This is especially common with the weirdness of the market right now where companies are tightening budgets and freezing hiring. I do really appreciate when companies are honest about the "why," but that's relatively rare, so I do not expect it. Three companies declined to move forward in my recent search and only one of them explained the reasoning (lack of funding for a staff level hire).

I try my best to politely handle rejection and maintain a positive relationship with the people I talked to. Just because things didn't work out this time, doesn't mean they won't be an option next time. Thankfully, these communications most often come in the form of an email, so I don't have to worry about managing my emotions on a live call.

Receiving offers

At least a couple interviews usually lead to a job offer. Initial offers generally come verbally from a recruiter or hiring manager. They normally come prepared with numbers for the various forms of compensation (e.g. base salary, equity, bonus) and the total annual compensation they add up to. For companies with discrete leveling, this conversation often includes job title.

Sometimes it is obvious what team the company plans to hire you for because you have interviewed for a specific team throughout the process. However, some companies do bundled hiring where you interview for comparable roles on multiple teams. Some of these companies will give you an offer for a specific team. Others will expect you to accept a general offer and do team matching later. I care a lot about who I will work with and the expectations of the role, so I tend to push back on the latter. In these cases, I often ask for a short follow-up with a hiring manager or skip level to understand the options and talk about where I will be placed.

Verbal offers often discuss potential start dates. I find that most companies want me to start asap, but are flexible. I take at least two weeks off after officially completing my stressful, time-consuming job search, so I can refresh and bring my best self to the new job. Sometimes there are also considerations around things like the timing of health insurance, company onboarding, and holidays.

If I have not received it yet, I will ask for a copy of the company's benefits packet to evaluate all the little annoying details about US-based, employer-provided health insurance. I hate that this is part of evaluating where I am going to work, but it can have a huge impact on me and my family.

I put together a template to list all of the things I care about when it comes to evaluating offers, so I can get all of my questions answered. I fill this in throughout the call and will use it as a reference to ask about anything the recruiter did not mention proactively.

This initial offer conversation can vary depending on the quality of the offer and the status of my job search. If I have other offers in hand or the offer is lower than expected, I may start negotiating.

After discussing the details of the offer, I will review where I am with the timing of my process, what timeline I need to make a decision, and when I will check in with them next. I have been lucky that most companies have been understanding about timeline and not pressured me too hard with exploding offers, but I am aware that is a thing that can happen.

Negotiating

I hate almost everything about negotiating. I hate doing it. I hate that some people use it as an excuse to blame women for the gender pay gap. I hate that women tend to get a more negative response when they do try to negotiate. I hate that it's a no-win situation.

I optimize my job search to not rely heavily on traditional negotiation because I know I'm not very good at it, and there's diminishing returns on growing those skills because of gendered bullshit. That said, my specific approach still relies on some of those techniques. I have found Patrick McKenzie's post about salary negotiation from 2012 to be a good resource even if I'm not great at following through on all the advice.

One downside of being unemployed while job searching is that I do not have a current job as negotiating leverage. My last job's title and salary are still good baselines to work from, but there's no threat of keeping my current job because I already left it.

The upside of being unemployed is that I have time to interview at a larger number of companies, so I hopefully end up with multiple offers. Alternative options for employment, especially when they offered me something more appealing, are the best negotiating leverage.

When negotiating competing offers, some companies will try to argue that I'm not comparing apples to apples (e.g. "It's not fair to compare us with companies like Google and Facebook."). I do not reveal the names of the other companies, but will mention a profile (e.g. mid-size SaaS company, small startup) to dismiss this argument. For example, I negotiated my title (and the associated salary) with a public company in my 2020 job search by noting that I had two competing offers from public companies of a similar scale.

Title and compensation are the places I have the most success negotiating. The size of companies I am usually interviewing with have whole departments that set company-wide policies on things like vacation, sick leave, health benefits, and conditions of employment. I'm sure it's possible to get one-off exceptions to these policies if you're an important enough hire, but it seems unlikely for an individual contributor software engineer. At tiny startups where this stuff is less codified, there is more space to negotiate the terms of employment, but I rarely work at early stage companies.

I probably leave money on the table by not going full "bidding war" when I have competing offers. My goal is usually to get the company I am most excited about for non-compensation reasons to offer me a number I am happy with, where "happy" is some mix of: more than my last job paid me, competitive for the market, and near the high end of my competing job offers. Trying to push past that to wring every possible dollar out of a company stresses me out. The peace of mind I get from being done with my job search is priceless.

Making a decision

If I have zero offers I am happy with (even with negotiation), the job search is not over. I hit this in "part 1" of my 2015 job search, which was the more traditional half of that job search where I was still employed. Part 2 was the first time I did a public job search. I have never run into a "no offers" situation during a public search, but if I did, I would likely go back to an earlier stage of the process and try again.

If I have one offer I am happy with, decision-making is easy! I accept that one offer. That is what happened in part 2 of that 2015 job search. Only a very small number of companies made it to the "interview" stage that time around because I focused more on accepting the first offer I was excited about than spending a lot of time interviewing. It was the right choice at the time, but these days I prefer to interview with more companies to evaluate my options. If I ended up with only one offer I liked during this process, I would still accept it, but I do my best to end up with multiple options.

Ideally, I end up with a few offers to choose from, so I can compare them and select the job that is the best fit for me right now. If I interview serially, I have to evaluate a job against a potential better offer I might get in the future, and who knows if that will happen. When I interview in parallel, I can compare a job against real jobs I definitely have offers from. I'm able to make better decisions when it isn't "all or nothing" with hypotheticals.

That's not to say that picking your next job from multiple offers is easy. During my 2020 job search, I ended up with five offers. It was a difficult decision that I spent significant time thinking about. They were all interesting opportunities from companies I was happy to work for, so there wasn't an obvious "winner." There was a lot of variability in the types of work, responsibilities, stage of the company, and more. Some people pick the company that offers them the most money, and while money matters to me, it's not the only part of my decision.

The question I ask myself when comparing offers is the same question I ask when evaluating technical decisions. "What are you optimizing for?" Thankfully, I reflected on that and wrote it all down at the beginning of my job search. My decision-making often involves a combination of:

• Comparing offers with one other.
• Comparing offers with my reverse job posting.
• Pro/con lists.
• Negotiation.
• Chatting with my partner or a friend to work through my thoughts (basically, the job offer equivalent of rubber duck debugging).
• Gut feelings — this is usually the least important to my overly analytical brain, but it can help with tie-breakers.

For example, in 2020, I was able to identify that one of the companies was the best fit for what I was looking for at the time, but the title and offer wasn't quite right. I was able to do some difficult negotiation to get them up to a title and associated salary that was commensurate with my skill level (and two competing offers from similarly sized companies) and accepted that offer.

Accepting an offer

Once I am ready to accept an offer, I need it in writing in an employment agreement signed by myself and the employer before I consider it real. I've heard too many bad stories about things going sideways without getting things in writing.

Some companies rescinded written job offers during the market troubles this year. I don't know how to avoid that besides avoiding companies known for doing it. I imagine those companies will regret the reputation when they are interested in hiring again.

Declining other offers

Once I have everything signed and in writing, it's time to politely decline any remaining offers and cancel any scheduled interviews. I usually send a polite email to the recruiter or hiring manager thanking them for their time and asking to stay in touch in the future. If I spent this much time interviewing with a company, even if they weren't the best fit this time around, they are likely somewhere I would consider working in the future. Declining their offer is hopefully a "not right now" instead of a "never."

As I mentioned earlier, it can be a real bummer to decline with companies that were frontrunners earlier in the process. I try my best to be honest with them about why they lost out and share any general information that would help them with hiring in the future.

For example, one of the companies I declined in 2020 sounded like a really cool growth and learning opportunity with a lot of room for ownership. In a different time, I would've accepted the offer, and it probably would have been a fun adventure, but 2020 was a challenging year. The early hours needed to collaborate across time zones would have been difficult for me at a time when my sleep was already impacted by the numerous overlapping local, national, and global catastrophes. I ended up selecting a role with more flexible hours, which I really appreciated as the year wore on living in downtown Portland.

Offer details template

Below is the template I use for offer discussions to make sure I get all of the information I need.

Basics

• Title
• Team
• Tentative start date
• Offer expiration date

Compensation

• Base salary
• Equity
  • Type (e.g. ISOs, RSUs)
  • Number of shares
  • Vesting schedule
  • Estimated value
  • Exercise window
• Bonus
  • Frequency (e.g. annual, quarterly)
  • Dependencies (e.g. personal performance, company performance)
  • Estimated value
• Retirement
  • 401k
  • Match
• Other compensation
  • Home office setup budget
  • Monthly stipends (e.g. internet, phone, food, gym)
  • Professional development budget
  • Miscellaneous
• Total annual compensation (this is usually an estimated value because things like equity and bonus can have significant variability)

Time off

• Vacation policy (e.g. PTO with 15 days, flex time off)
• Sick leave
• Holidays
• Other time off (e.g. company-wide breaks, 4 day work week)

Health care

• When does it start? (e.g. first day of employment, first of month after start date)
• Do I have a copy of the benefits packet? If not, ask for it!
• Medical
  • Insurance provider options
  • Monthly cost for insurance
  • Estimated annual costs based on deductibles, out-of-pocket max, copays, etc.:
    • In a good year.
    • In a bad year.
  • Can my family keep all of our doctors?
• Dental
  • Insurance provider options
  • Monthly cost for insurance
  • Estimated annual costs based on deductibles, out-of-pocket max, copays, etc.:
    • In a good year.
    • In a bad year.
  • Can my family keep our dentist?
• Vision
  • Insurance provider options
  • Monthly cost for insurance
  • Estimated annual costs based on deductibles, out-of-pocket max, copays, etc.:
    • In a good year.
    • In a bad year.
  • Can my family keep our optometrist?

Employment agreement

• Are there limitations on what I can do in my free time using personal resources? If so, what are they?
• Are there limitations on my ability to contribute to open source during my free time?
• Is there a non-compete? If so, for how long and how extensive is it?
• Anything else notable in the agreement?

Miscellaneous

• Anything else I should know about taking this job?

Why it works for me

The combination of interviewing with a larger set of companies and being experienced enough that there is less competition for roles puts me in a position to be more likely to have multiple job offers. Interviewing with multiple companies in parallel is a full time job, so it would be very difficult to accomplish if you were still employed.

My level of experience and approach to the job search allows me to push back on things that people in different situations might not be able to. For example, a lot of folks don't get a choice of teams in bundled hiring situations.

I think there's a possibility I burn some bridges interviewing the way I do, which makes me a little anxious. However, I don't think I'm doing anything wrong. The reality is that companies treat candidates this way (or often worse) all the time. They interview lots of people for small numbers of roles. They make you jump through hours of hoops to prove you can do the job. Rejections are usually a polite form email without reason or feedback. Open roles suddenly disappear because of changing priorities. I've seen, heard, and personally experienced so many job search horror stories that any negative side effects of my process feel trivial in comparison. I'm trying to optimize for a process that works well for me, and I'm pretty honest about what that looks like up front.

Takeaways for job searchers

Do your best to handle rejection and declining offers with grace. Just because things didn't work out this time, doesn't mean they won't in the future. Leaving people with a good impression of you can pay off in a future job search. This doesn't mean you shouldn't feel your feelings. I certainly had a few sad and angry rants with my partner during my job search. This advice is specifically about the professional face you put on for potential employers. By all means, work through your justifiable frustration with friends, family, and the backchannel.

Evaluate offers against the expectations you reflected on at the beginning of the process. Just because a job opportunity sounds good does not mean it is the right fit for you and your current situation. The most money is not always the right answer because that money comes attached to a job you are going to spend a lot of your time doing. I strongly recommend thinking through all of the tradeoffs of the job before making a decision.

Make sure you get things in writing. Even this may not be enough in the current job market, but it's the best you can do, and most companies will not revoke a written employment agreement.

Takeaways for employers

General takeaways

Be careful with how you approach negotiation when hiring. It is one of the easier places for inequity to leak into your company.

Do not rescind job offers (especially ones you've put in writing) unless you are willing to make good with the employee with something akin to severance. You may have no legal obligation to do so, but people talk. Companies that rescind written offers are not trustworthy, and you may find it difficult to hire candidates in the future.

I have a lot of additional thoughts for employers around the later stages of interviewing based on my recent search, but I am going to save them for my job search retrospective. Stay tuned!

Takeaways for people who want to hire me

I am not going to play negotiation games with you. I've put some cards on the table in this post by being honest about how I approach this. I am also being honest that I will likely have multiple job offers. You may not be competing against my current employer, but you will be competing against other companies who want to hire me. I've made it easier for you by sharing what I care about up front. Make me a good offer, and you make my decision easier.

Many steps of the job search involve interviewing. I wrote about some of them in my post about the screening phase of my job search. This post is focused on the heavier set of core interviews that are often referred to as an "onsite" because historically they involved coming into the office for a single, grueling day of interviewing. Nowadays, these are more often given remotely and spread across multiple days. I've heard several companies refer to this new variation as "virtual onsites."

Table of contents

• My process

  • Scheduling
  • Preparing
  • Before interviews
  • During interviews
  • After interviews

• Why it works for me

• Takeaways for job searchers

• Takeaways for employers

  • General takeaways
  • Takeaways for people who want to hire me

My process

This is the most stressful part of the job search for me. It often involves long days of nerve-wracking interviews that leave you completely exhausted. By the time I get here, I am really interested in the potential jobs. This makes it a lot harder to follow my advice from earlier stages about staying calm by not getting overly invested. I try to get a little of that calm back through preparation and organization.

Scheduling

When these were truly on site interviews, you usually had to do a long, grueling day of interviewing, often after a flight and a poor night's sleep in a hotel. Even lunch is often part of the interview, so you don't get any down time to relax. I hate this approach because it does not set people up for success.

One of the very few benefits of the pandemic is that more companies are willing to do these interviews remotely, which provides more flexibility for a lot of people. For example, it makes it easier to spread the interviews across multiple days, so you can fit it into a busy schedule and get a breather between interviews. You can get a proper night's rest in your own bed!

One of the tricky bits about interviewing remotely is that it is easier for schedulers to accidentally make mistakes around time zones like forgetting to leave you a break for meals. I make sure to review schedules for these sorts of things and advocate for myself when I need adjustments. Nobody benefits from me attempting to live code while I'm hangry and need to pee because I had back-to-back interviews that didn't allow me to eat lunch or take a bio break.

I try to get as much information as I can about the panel of interviews, what they involve, and who I will be talking to while figuring out the schedule. This information may come from the recruiter, the hiring manager, the scheduler, or some combination thereof. This information enables me to prepare ahead of time, which helps me reduce stress and perform better during my interviews.

Preparing

See my post about preparing for interviews for more detailed information about the kinds of interviews I often experience and how I prepare for them. In my recent experiences, the onsites included 4-8 hours of interviewing comprised of some combination of the following:

• Behavioral or discussion-based interview with the hiring manager or a stand-in for them (e.g. a peer engineering manager, a skip level).
• Technical interviews including a combination of:
  • Coding
  • System design
  • Technical quizzes
• Behavioral interviews with people in a variety of roles, often including:
  • Engineers I might work with
  • People in partner roles (e.g. design, product, support)
  • People in management that are not the hiring manager
• The day often ends with a more informal chat with the recruiter to talk about how things went, timeline, etc.

I use the template I created in the preparing stage to set up a place for taking notes during the interviews. This helps me keep track of all the people I will be talking to and the questions I want answered. I often tag specific questions for specific people in the interview panel based on who would be best to answer them (e.g. a designer might be best suited to tell me about collaboration between frontend devs and designers).

I will often look up a teeny bit of information about people I'm interviewing with, especially if I wasn't given much context. Usually just the basics you can get from LinkedIn like their role and title, so I have context for who they are and what we might discuss in an interview.

Before interviews

I do my best to get a good night's sleep before an interview. Sleep deprived Julie is not the best version of Julie, and interviews are stressful enough as it is. This is so much easier with virtual onsites where I can sleep in my own bed and avoid jet lag.

I make sure I have a relatively quiet space available with decent internet, headphones, and a microphone, so I can focus and communicate well with my interviewers. I regret the time I did not use headphones and my deaf, elderly cat screamed throughout an entire difficult coding interview like a terrible banshee who did not want me to have a job, so I could afford her vet care.

I set up my laptop to be in a good state to share my screen and collaborate if needed. I have a two screen setup, so I can keep notes and other information I do not want to share on my secondary screen. I make sure I have any necessary development environments set up for interviewing. Sometimes this means loading up the results of a technical take home. Sometimes it means setting up a skeleton project to work in during a live coding exercise.

I make sure I have a few beverages on hand to stay hydrated and caffeinated. Taking a sip of a drink gives you an opportunity to briefly pause to collect yourself, if you need it. I do my best to make sure I have space for bio breaks, so I do not suffer any bladder-related consequences for over-hydrating.

During interviews

I usually let the interviewer know I have a second monitor I'm taking notes on, so it is clear why I am typing or looking to the right during our time together. If there are any risks of interruptions (e.g. there was some risk of a power outage in Oregon this week because of wildfires), I will warn the interviewers ahead of time.

I do my best to stay calm and keep my cool during interviews. I am not always successful at this (see prior story about the screaming cat). This is one of those areas where I don't have a lot of helpful insight into how I do this because it's a skill I've slowly built over decades. I suspect the work I did around public speaking is a big factor because it also requires keeping your calm while performing for an audience. At the end of the day, that's really what interviews are. A performance to prove that you're telling the truth on your resume and will be good at your job.

One of my weaknesses in interviewing is talking a lot, so I do my best to keep an eye on time, try not to ramble too much, and give interviewers a chance to move on to another question. My interviews often run long, so I think there's still work I could do to improve here.

One of my mixed features in interviewing is a bit of meta-interviewing because I have experience on the other side. This often looks like me asking if someone got the signal they needed or digging into the question behind a question before answering. Some interviewers love this because I'm helping them get what they need. Other interviewers find this annoying because it can feel like I'm trying to game the interview. I get more positive than negative responses to it, so I think it's mostly a useful thing. I do my best to get a read on the interviewer and scale it back if they don't like it.

I take a lot of notes during interviews, especially when learning anything about the company, team, role, etc. that might impact my interest in working there. This helps me ensure I have all the information I need when making decisions at the end of my process without relying on the fallibility of human memory.

After interviews

I try to spend a little time debriefing shortly after interviews while everything is still fresh in my mind. This usually involves a combination of reviewing the notes I took during interviews, cleaning them up, and adding any additional context that I think is useful. I will also summarize my general sentiment about the job based on what I learned.

I will evaluate if there are any important questions about the role that were not answered. If so, I will reach out to the recruiter or hiring manager to see if they can be answered via email or in a follow-up discussion.

In the past, you were expected to send "thank you" cards/emails/whatever, but this has largely fallen out of favor in our field, so I don't tend to do it anymore. However, if I am super excited about the role, I will send a brief email to the hiring manager or recruiter communicating how excited I am about the team and that I look forward to hearing back from them. In most cases, I will wait to hear from the recruiter to hear how things went and if they want to move forward with an offer.

Why it works for me

This is probably the part of the process where I have the most in common with everyone else. Interviews stress me out and make me anxious just like many other people. They are easier than they were earlier in my career because of practice and experience, but I still do not like doing them. The biggest benefit I have is the scale I keep referencing. My anxiety is reduced a little bit knowing that if I mess up this interview, I have other options.

Interviewing while unemployed gives me a lot more flexibility in my schedule for interviewing. I don't have to worry about burning vacation days or cramming them in between meetings at work.

I am lucky enough to have a relatively quiet space in my apartment where I can do interviews largely uninterrupted (screaming cats notwithstanding). Our bedroom doubles as my office, so it isn't ideal, but it's a better setup than many people have. It does force me to be extra mindful of making the bed and keeping laundry neat because they're in the background of my calls.

Takeaways for job searchers

You are not alone in finding interviews stressful. They suck. If I had to pick a single takeaway from this entire set of posts, it would probably be "job searching sucks," and interviews are a huge part of that.

Identify things that help you focus and reduce stress during interviews. This will look different for everyone. For me, even small things like having a cool drink to sip on and something to fidget with can help me keep my cool a little bit. This isn't magic, and it doesn't make me not anxious, but even taking things down a few notches really does help.

Be prepared. It looks good to the interviewers and can help you feel more confident and reduce stress.

Takeaways for employers

General takeaways

Be thoughtful when scheduling interviews for candidates. Are you giving them enough time to do things like go to the bathroom, eat lunch, take medications, and attend to other personal needs? Some candidates may be anxious about pushing back on schedules that do not account for these things and will not be able to perform their best during interviews as a result.

Be respectful of the time of both the candidates and your team members. Long, full day interviews are A LOT for everyone. Focus on what you really need signal on to make a good hire, and try to get it in half a day.

Be clear with candidates ahead of time about the interview schedule, including who they will be meeting with, when, and what the interview topics will be. This helps candidates know what they're going into and prepare ahead of time. This is critical if you expect them to have anything set up ahead of time for technical interviews.

Takeaways for people who want to hire me

Expect me to take notes on a second screen during the interview process. This is what is happening if you can hear me typing on my mechanical keyboard (I have silent reds, so hopefully you can't hear it too much) or see me looking to the right at my second screen.

Expect me to dig a little into what you want signal on in an interview. I'm not trying to cheat and game the interview. I'm trying to understand what information is important to you, so that I can provide it to help you make a decision about hiring.

Leave me time to ask questions. Interviewing goes both ways, and I want to learn what I am signing up for, so I can evaluate the job against what I am looking for.

In addition to the general preparation I wrote about earlier, I usually spend a good amount of time preparing for interviews.

Table of contents

• My process

  • Discussion interviews
  • Behavioral interviews
  • System design interviews
  • Technical quiz interviews
  • Coding interviews
  • Technical interviews unrelated to my work
  • Personality tests, puzzles, riddles, and other nonsense

• Why it works for me

• Takeaways for job searchers

• Takeaways for employers

  • General takeaways
  • Takeaways for people who want to hire me

My process

Interviewing for software engineering roles is a skill unto itself. I am sure there are people who come to it naturally and need no preparation, but I am not one of those people. You probably aren't either. I rarely exercise some of these skills in my day-to-day job, so I have to practice to warm up my brain. When it comes to real interviews, this helps me identify a pattern, tell my brain "I know this," and focus more on solving the problem at hand than spiraling into anxiety doom.

Below are some examples of the kinds of interviews I often see, and how I attempt to prepare for them (or not).

Discussion interviews

This is my catch-all for conversational interviews that do not fall into a more specific category. They often come up in early interviews with recruiters and hiring managers and later interviews with engineering partners (e.g. designers, product managers, support).

Between years of public speaking and roles that require significant communication, this is one of the areas where I need less practice. The primary preparation here is knowing the story I want to tell about myself and what I am looking for in a job right now. Thankfully, I did a lot of that preparation in the reflecting step of my process.

For a specific interview, I will usually refresh my memory about the company, the role, and the person I will be talking to. This helps me communicate well for my specific audience, talk about why I am interested in the role, and ask thoughtful questions.

Behavioral interviews

Behavioral interviews ask questions based on past experiences to theoretically determine the likelihood of future behavior. The idea is that people are more honest and realistic when talking about real, lived experiences than when discussing hypotheticals. I dislike hypotheticals, so it works for me.

Similar to discussion interviews, I do not need a ton of practice for these. However, there are a few common questions that can be tricky to answer well extemporaneously, so I will often think a little about them ahead of time. I do not memorize answers, but I think about some stories I may want to tell to make a good impression.

Examples include:

• Tell me about a time you had a conflict with someone and how you handled it.
• Tell me about a time you had to work through a challenge.
• Describe a time when you had to influence others and how you approached it.
• What are your strengths? Weaknesses? Tell me about how they have impacted your work.

System design interviews

System design interviews involve talking through the design of a technical system. They often include a mix of verbal discussion and some light notes or diagrams to visualize the system.

One variation of the system design interview is to talk about a system you worked on. I like this version of the interview because it is grounded in real work I did on a real system where I had time to think through the problem collaboratively with my coworkers. Similar to the behavioral interviews, I prepare by thinking about a story I want to tell. I will often practice talking through the system using the tools I would use in an interview (e.g. I like draw.io for diagramming remotely) to get comfortable ahead of time.

The other variation of the system design interview is to work through design of a system on the fly based on a prompt from the interviewer. These can range from a pleasant collaboration on a problem in your area of expertise to a hellish ordeal where you try to guess at the right solutions to arcane problems while a stranger silently judges you. Usually they fall somewhere in the middle. Sometimes I will find a practice problem online to work through, but I don't spend much time here because I get practice with system design on the job.

Technical quiz interviews

Some companies will ask you a set of technical questions with the expectation that you will be able to answer them quickly from memory. These can range from mildly annoying to interviewing malpractice. I do not think they are a particularly good source of signal for interviewing as either a candidate or an interviewer.

At their best, these questions focus on topics I should be able to speak about from memory in my day-to-day job. At their worst, they focus on trivia, edge cases, or other minutiae that many engineers (myself included) do not waste time memorizing when the internet is right there.

At their best, these interviews are given by people familiar with the subject matter, so they can clarify the intent of the question and understand nuances in answers. At their worst, they are given by people who have little-to-no familiarity with the technical context of the questions and can only accept answers written down for them ahead of time.

I do a little prep work for these by googling for lists of "frontend interview questions" and running through a few of them to see how I fare. The outcomes are usually a mix of questions that:

• I understand and can competently answer right away.
• I understand, but am not great at communicating to others. I may do a little work practicing answers to these.
• I understand and can explain competently after a tiny bit of googling because I forgot the fancy technical term. I may do a little practice trying to remember the terminology.
• I do not understand and have to google to find the answer. If this is an area where I've fallen behind on something relevant, I'll take the time to catch up. Some are niche questions I'll choose to ignore.
• I understand, but do not know the answer off the top of my head and think it's bullshit I'd be expected to. If asked these in an interview, I would respond with something like "I'd look it up at <trusted resource>" or "I'd type it into the console to see what happens."

Coding interviews

My area of specialization (frontend web) changes constantly, so I usually start preparing for coding interviews by catching up on the latest and greatest in case I missed anything important. This usually involves skimming through the backlog of tech newsletters in my email archive, collecting a list of topics, and then digging into them.

My preferred form of coding interview involves pairing on the implementation of a simple (for the sake of time) UI using React (my framework of choice) using my personal setup because this is a good approximation of the kind of work I am being hired for. I usually practice for this sort of interview by doing a timeboxed implementation of a common UI (e.g. a todo list) while speaking aloud about what I am doing.

Coding interviews sometimes focus more on general programming and algorithms using JavaScript (my language of choice). I will often practice a handful of easy-to-medium LeetCode questions to get familiar with these. If I'm feeling festive, I'll practice with Advent of Code questions from the early weeks before things get really tricky.

I don't spend a ton of time here because I code regularly at work and have been programming for decades. The practice is mostly to work on being comfortable coding while under the artificial pressure of an interview. For interviews that need practice for the technical part, see the next section.

Technical interviews unrelated to my work

"Unrelated to my work" is my nice way of referring to the type of interviews made popular by very large, well-paying tech companies that usually involve regurgitating undergraduate computer science curricula from memory onto a whiteboard. I took those classes to get my computer engineering degree, but use very little of it in my day-to-day job, so my brain does not keep it in active memory.

I think that these types of interviews are time consuming, stressful, gatekeeping bullshit for the majority of software engineering roles. It feels like hazing at this point. We suffered through it, so the people after us have to suffer too. Just because I can pass these interviews (with significant time and effort) does not mean that I should have to. My willing participation in them encourages companies to keep giving them, so I will do my best to decline interviews that require them at this point in my career.

In my 15+ years of working as a software engineer, I have never needed to implement mergesort from memory to solve a problem on the job, but I was required to do so to be hired at Google. I was much earlier in my career and had significantly less options at the time. Working at Google taught me a lot and opened a lot of doors, so I do understand why people are willing to slog through these interviews. If you are one of those people, below is some circa 2012 advice based on my experience:

• You likely need CS fundamentals like data structures and algorithms to pass these interviews. If you learned them already, you probably need a refresher. If they are new to you, you need significantly more time to learn and practice them.
• If you are not fresh out of studying algorithms or do not use them in your day-to-day job, you will probably need to study. I made flashcards and practiced implementing common algorithms from memory.
• Most people need to practice to get good at these interviews. Plan accordingly. I practiced a bunch using the book Cracking the Coding Interview. These days, a lot of people practice exercises using LeetCode — so much so that they're often referred to as "leetcode questions."
• Practice in the medium you will use in the interview (or an approximation). For example, I worked with pencil and paper to approximate a whiteboard.
• Practice solving problems without looking anything up. These usually aren't "open book" interviews.
• Practice talking aloud, asking questions, and describing your thought process while you solve problems.
• If possible, get a buddy to do mock interviews with you and give you feedback.
• Get comfortable with failure. These interviews tend to have a high false negative rate.

Personality tests, puzzles, riddles, and other nonsense

I do not prepare for these. I am frustrated that companies still ask them. They do not in any way select for high quality software engineers. I am seriously considering ending the interview if I get asked one this time around because it is a waste of my time and a sign the company is probably not a good fit for me.

Why it works for me

The scale of the public job search and having an in demand background means I can be a little picky. I can bail on companies doing certain kinds of interviews because I know I have other options. People who are only interviewing with a couple companies at a time, are earlier in their careers, or otherwise have less options are less able to pick and choose. Part of the reason I want to stop participating in these interviews is to discourage companies from giving them, so that hopefully nobody has to go through them in the future.

I am not trying to get a job at a FAANG company, so I can skip studying algorithms and grinding leetcode. I have done those things in the past, so I have some historical practice I can lean on if I get questions on the easier end of things. Having a traditional computer science background also helps with some kinds of interviews.

I am comfortable with the verbal communication needed for many interviews, so I do not spend a lot of time practicing that part. This was not always the case. I spent decades of work on public speaking and professional development to get to the point where this is easier for me.

Takeaways for job searchers

Interviewing for a software engineering job truly is an exercise in sadness. Many parts of the interview process bear only a passing resemblance to the work you do at your job. Interviewing is, in many ways, a separate skill you have to build in your own time. This is bullshit, but you need a job, just like I do. I'm sorry.

Given limited time and energy, you cannot practice every piece of interviewing forever until you are perfect at it. I focus my practice on the intersection of interviews I am likely to get and areas where I struggle. If you are planning to interview at a FAANG-style company that does really difficult algorithms interviews, I recommend giving yourself significant extra time to prepare.

Be wary of people selling you the "one true way" or "this one weird trick" for being awesome at interviewing. They sometimes include some useful advice, but they do not know you and your situation. For example, you do not need to leetcode hard algorithms problems until you bleed from the eyes unless you are trying to work at a very specific set of companies.

Takeaways for employers

General takeaways

Your interview process should focus on evaluating the skills and behaviors you expect a candidate to use in their day-to-day job. Interviews that test other things will lead to losing out on potentially great candidates for dubious reasons. The interview process is already stressful and time-consuming enough. Why are you making it unnecessarily worse?

Takeaways for people who want to hire me

Please be up front about what your interview process entails, so I can evaluate if it is worth my time and yours. I am disinclined to participate in interviews that are completely divorced from the work you are hiring me to do (e.g. leetcode-style hard algorithms, coding on a whiteboard, riddles).

After sourcing potential opportunities, it is time for me and the associated organizations to evaluate if there is a potential fit. The core interviewing process is very time consuming for me and for their employees, so we only want to move forward if it is worth the effort.

Table of contents

• My process

  • Filtering and prioritizing results
  • Recruiter screen
  • Manager screen
  • Take-home technical screen
  • Live technical screen
  • Third-party technical screens
  • Contracting technical screen
  • Personality tests, puzzles, riddles, and other nonsense

• Why it works for me

• Takeaways for job searchers

• Takeaways for employers

  • General takeaways
  • Takeaways for people who want to hire me

My process

Filtering and prioritizing results

The methods I use for sourcing potential jobs tend to cast a wide net. This is awesome because it gets a bunch of opportunities in front of me, including interesting ones I would not have found on my own. The downside is that I also tend to get a bunch of roles that aren't a great fit, so I need to spend some time separating the signal from the noise.

Below are some examples of responses I tend to filter out. I do my best to send a polite "no thanks" email to people who took the time to send me these.

• Ignores my dealbreakers (e.g. must relocate to San Francisco, crypto).
• Not aligned with my skills and interests (e.g. backend-leaning, management).
• Companies I really do not want to work for (e.g. Meta, Amazon, Coinbase).
• Companies building a product I don't feel good about or would feel embarrassed telling my friends I work on.
• Contacts from third-party recruiters I do not have a relationship with.

Once I filter out the jobs I'm definitely not interested in, I spend time researching the remaining roles to get a sense of how they align with what I'm looking for. I rate the roles to indicate my level of interest. This helps me prioritize the order I email people and start setting up calls to learn more. Those emails usually lead to screening conversations.

Recruiter screen

A phone or video call with a recruiter is frequently the first part of the screening process. These are usually shorter, low-key conversations. I learn more about the company and available opportunities. They learn more about me and my potential fit for those opportunities.

Sometimes the recruiter will ask some lighter behavioral interviewing questions to determine if it's worth passing me on to a hiring manager. This is totally reasonable.

Occasionally, they will ask technical questions from a list prepared by hiring managers or engineers. I dislike this because recruiters often do not have the technical context to answer clarifying questions or understand nuances in answers that don't quite match what's written down for them. It can go wrong in a bunch of unhelpful ways and isn't a great experience as a candidate. I also doubt it's fun for the recruiters.

Recruiter screenings usually do not give me enough signal to have strong feelings either way about a role. They are set up to answer general questions about the company and provide some details about the role and team, but usually don't get into the deeper details. Occasionally, a recruiter screen will make it clear an opportunity isn't a good fit, but most of the time, I move on to a screening with a hiring manager before making any decisions.

Manager screen

It's relatively common to have a screening video call with the hiring manager or someone in a leadership position, depending on the size and shape of the organization. For roles that were sourced through closer professional networking, this is sometimes my first call. Otherwise, it is often the second call if I pass the recruiter screen.

These tend to be a bit longer and a little more stressful than the recruiter screen, but not significantly so. At this point, I'm still early in the process and usually have other leads, so it feels more like a "getting to know each other and see if this is a fit" conversation than a very stressful interview I need to pass. It's rare for these to feel adversarial (unlike some technical screenings). Hiring is time consuming for managers, and they generally want you to succeed if you are a good fit.

These interviews are usually conversational. The manager will tell me about the role, ask questions about me, and may ask some behavioral interviewing questions. They will usually give me time to ask my own questions, which I prepare ahead of time using my interview template.

Similar to the recruiter screen, hiring managers will sometimes ask a few technical questions. This can be slightly better with an engineering manager because they may have a bit more technical context, but that's not a guarantee, and it still feels like a bad place for technical screening.

I usually get a decent signal from the manager about the company, the team, the role, and my potential new boss. If I come away feeling positively about those things and the manager likes me, I move forward with the process. If I am excited about the company, but not the particular role or team, I will see if they have other opportunities that might be a better fit. If I feel negatively about the company or overall, I will politely decline to move forward.

Take-home technical screen

Some companies will give you homework to prove that you can code. These can range from "fun little exercises I did in an hour" to "time consuming wastes of time that made me dislike your company." I had examples of both last time I looked for a job.

On the positive side, one of the companies gave me a simple exercise that was timeboxed to an hour. You got the instructions ahead of time, so you could prepare accordingly. The exercise felt reasonable to complete in the time allotted. The results of the exercise were used for a technical discussion in a future interview.

On the negative side, another company gave me a complex exercise that was relatively open-ended. Completing the requirements took me an entire weekend. I know other engineers who spent similar time on the exercise. The results were not discussed or used in any way after submitting them.

At least both of these examples touched on work I was comfortable doing based on my job. I have hit exercises in the past that required me to learn and work with a new-to-me technology, which made them even more time consuming.

In my opinion, take-home interviews should:

1. Take no longer than 2 hours, including any learning time to work with the tools and technology.
2. Be as close as possible to the kind of work you are being hired for.

It can be helpful to follow-up on the results in future interviews. For example, you can evaluate technical communication by discussing how the candidate approached the problem and what tradeoffs they made. You can have them extend the solution in a technical interview, so they can pick up with code they are comfortable with instead of trying to build something from scratch under pressure.

I prefer these over live technical screens when they fit my recommended parameters.

Live technical screen

Some companies will give you a live technical screen where you code with one or more engineers for 1-2 hours. The shape of these interviews varies wildly. My favorite format is a pair programming interview where I can set up my preferred environment ahead of time, and I collaborate with my interviewer(s) on a relatively simple problem in my wheelhouse. My least favorite is leetcode style questions in a third party tool I'm unfamiliar with while the interviewer quietly stares at me.

I prefer the take-home technical screen over these, especially if I'm going to be required to do live coding in future interviews.

Third-party technical screens

Some companies use third-party services for take-home and/or live technical screens. I have not experienced this personally, but I suspect I would not appreciate it. You already get so little time to interact with the people you'll be working with before before making a decision. Outsourcing interviewing makes that time even smaller and says something about organizational priorities.

Contracting technical screen

A small number of companies understand that it's not reasonable to ask people to do work for free in a technical screen and will instead pay them to do a small amount of contract work. This sounds nice, in theory, but it doesn't work well for many people in practice.

This is likely a great approach for people who are currently working as contractors because they are already set up to do this kind of work. It seems like a mess for everyone else. A lot of full time jobs have "no moonlighting" clauses in their contracts. Even without that risk, a lot of people with full time jobs do not have the capacity or interest in spending their personal time doing even more work.

Even as someone who is currently unemployed, I'm not interested in this approach. I am talking to multiple companies to find the right fit for me. It doesn't make sense to invest a disproportionate amount of time in one company. Also, as someone who doesn't do contract work, I imagine figuring out the taxes would be a headache.

Personality tests, puzzles, riddles, and other nonsense

These are a red flag for me, and I will generally choose not to participate in them and focus on other companies with better hiring processes. I thought they had gone out of fashion and haven't personally experienced them in a long time, but I've heard tell of them in the wild from people in my network.

I found a bizarre example of this while searching for interview questions the other day. Supposedly, at one point in time, a well known company would ask people, "if you were a gerbil, which gerbil would you be?" If you are asking software engineers questions like this to determine if they are a good fit for your company, you have completely lost the plot.

Why it works for me

I find recruiter and manager screens to be lower stress than may be the case for others because of my situation. There are not a ton of engineers at my level of experience, so there's usually less competition for roles, which can tip the balance of power more towards me than those doing the hiring. The size of my search means that if a particular call goes badly because I had an off day, I still have plenty of other opportunities available. I find these types of calls most stressful (leading to me performing worse at them) when they feel "all or nothing," so I try to avoid that feeling. It's part of the reason I do my job search the way I do.

I get to be picky about the types of screens I will participate in for the same reasons. I can say "sorry, no personality tests" because I have plenty of other companies to talk to that use hiring practices more aligned with the work I am being hired for.

My preferences for technical screens may be the opposite of what someone else likes. I've heard arguments for and against both live and take-home interviews. In an ideal world, maybe you'd let candidates pick the one they prefer. Actually, in an ideal world, you'd believe that people could code based on their resume and skip the technical screens entirely, but I think that's unlikely to happen any time soon. I don't have any easy answers besides "keep technical screens as short and as relevant to the work as possible."

Takeaways for job searchers

A lot of stress in early screening conversations can come from putting all your eggs in one basket. If you get invested in a single job as the one true job that you absolutely must get, it's really easy to psych yourself out. There are so many variables that impact getting a specific job. Even if you perform your very best, you might not get it, and you're not likely to perform your very best if you put too much stock in a single job.

Doing something with this information is easier said than done. I approach it by interviewing with several companies at the same time, which, as I have repeated ad nauseam, is not an option for most people. If you don't have the time and energy to look at multiple opportunities in parallel, you may have more success with working through a list of opportunities in serial, so that if a particular interview goes badly, you have more options to tee up next.

It's not just you. Nobody really likes technical screenings. It can be helpful to understand which common approaches you handle best. This can help you focus on interviewing at companies that use the techniques you are mostly likely to succeed at.

Takeaways for employers

General takeaways

Do not make recruiters ask technical trivia questions in interviews. It's a bad experience for candidates, and I doubt it's a pleasant experience for recruiters. Let them focus on what they are awesome at: identifying if the candidate might be a good fit for the role and getting them excited about it.

People do not enjoy technical screenings. Ask yourself if you really need them at this stage of the process for the role you are trying to fill. If you do need them, keep them short and focused on the work you are hiring for. The more time you expect from someone, the more you are selecting against criteria that have nothing to do with the role (e.g. people who are still employed, people who have busy lives outside of work).

Takeaways for people who want to hire me

I really enjoy chatting with hiring managers! Having a good relationship with my boss is important for both success and happiness at my job, so it's great to talk with them early in the process to assess a fit there. This also helps me suss out information about the team's goals, responsibilities, and ways of working to see if it might be right for me.

Please be respectful of my time when it comes to technical screenings. It's very clear from my resume that I know how to code, so I always find these frustrating. I do get why companies feel the need to give them, so I will be patient with them...to a point. I have a strong preference for technical screens to be short and focused on the skills you are hiring me for.

If you ask me what kind of gerbil I want to be, I am ending the interview.

After reflecting and preparing, it’s time to kick off the actual searching part of the job search.

Table of contents

• My process

  • Reverse job posting
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Ex-company slacks and discords
  • Community slacks
  • Past interviews
  • Active searching
  • Cold recruiting emails from employees
  • Third-parties

• Why it works for me

• Takeaways for job searchers

• Takeaways for employers

  • General takeaways
  • Takeaways for people who want to hire me

My process

I source potential jobs from many different locations. I do a mix of active searching where I look for jobs and passive searching where people come to me.

Reverse job posting

I publish the reverse job post I created in the reflecting step to my personal site, so that it can be shared publicly. The blog post includes instructions for how to contact me with potential job opportunities. In the past, I exclusively used email. This time around, I used an Airtable form to help keep things a little more organized and provided an email with a subaddress (+jobs) as a secondary option, so I could easily filter my inbox.

My personal site does not get nearly enough traffic for the post to do much on its own. I direct traffic to it and use it as a reference when sourcing with other tools.

Twitter

I promote my reverse job post on twitter to get attention and traffic. I discourage people from having detailed conversations about jobs in replies because they are hard to keep track of. I sometimes start conversations with a small number of people I follow in DMs. I do not open my DMs for this process because it sucks to be a woman on the internet.

I have about two thousand followers, so not a massive audience, but enough that I usually get some attention, especially if someone I know with a much larger following helps promote my post (thank you!). I tend to source at least a handful of interesting opportunities this way.

LinkedIn

As noted previously, I kind of hate LinkedIn, but it's where a lot of recruiting happens, so I use it. I change the settings to indicate I am looking for work and make a post linking to the reverse job posting on my site. I do not like the messaging feature on this platform and will encourage people to use the contact methods mentioned in my post.

I tend to source a lot of opportunities this way because the platform includes a lot of features for recruiting. Unfortunately, the signal-to-noise ratio from LinkedIn is awful, so it requires a bit more work to filter the results down to the small number I actually care about. I will only look here when I'm done triaging results from my preferred contact methods.

Ex-company slacks and discords

I sit in a few slack workspaces and discord servers for people who used to work at my previous employers. I post that I am available for work in the job search channels and include a link to my reverse job posting. People also use these channels to post roles they are hiring for, and I sometimes find opportunities there.

These often prove fruitful because these channels include people who have personal experience working with me in the past.

Community slacks

I am a member of a handful of community-based slack workspaces with job posting channels. I will look through recent posts to see if any roles might be a good fit. I may also add myself to a "looking for work" spreadsheet or post that I'm looking depending on the norms of that particular channel.

These are pretty hit or miss for sourcing opportunities, but it's very little effort, so worth trying.

Past interviews

Companies I interviewed with in the past are often worth revisiting when I look for work again. If I do not end up taking a job with a company that I spent significant time interviewing with, it is more often a "not right now" than a "never." Sometimes I got a better offer from somewhere else or the timing just wasn't right. Thankfully, past Julie documented everything, so I can easily look at my notes from last time and see what companies are worth looking at again.

Active searching

The previous sources I listed are mostly passive. I put my information out there and people come to me. I also source a handful of roles more actively through a combination of:

• Job search sites (e.g. LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Google)
• Job postings in tech newsletters (e.g. JavaScript Weekly, Frontend Focus)
• Directly looking at job listings from companies:
  • I have heard good things about.
  • With products, missions, or other work I am interested in.
  • On lists of companies relevant to my job search (e.g. remote friendly, 4 day work week).

When possible, I try to find people in my professional network to learn more about these companies and hopefully refer me for a job. A positive referral often helps shorten the initial application process because you are a known entity. The referrer often gets a bonus if you take the job. Everybody wins!

When I am interested in a role and cannot find a referral, I will sometimes fill out an application cold. My willingness to do so is dependent on my level of interest and the effort needed. I am generally willing to fill out quick and easy applications that require a resume and a few short bits of information. If I'm excited about the role, I will do the extra work of writing a personalized cover letter and answering a few more questions. I am unlikely to fill out long applications that require hours of work. Tech interviews are already incredibly time-consuming, and I could better spend that time talking to other companies.

Cold recruiting emails from employees

Occasionally, someone from a company will send me a cold recruiting email that fits what I am looking for early in my job search process. One of these ended up in the final list of companies I was picking an offer from last time around, so they can be useful. However, the signal-to-noise ratio on these is really bad. There is a reason people complain so much about recruiting spam.

Note that this only covers contact from people directly employed by the company (e.g. hiring managers, engineers, in house recruiters). I have never taken a job based on a cold email from a third-party recruiter.

Third-parties

It is rare for me to work with third-party recruiters in my job search process unless I have a preexisting relationship with them. They can be really helpful for some people, but they are more of an unnecessary middleman in my situation.

There are a small number of really awesome third-party recruiters that have put a lot of work into building solid reputations and relationships with engineers. For example, Jill Wohlner was early in starting up Underpin last time I looked for work, and her list of jobs and support were really helpful.

Another third-party resource I occasionally will chat with are representatives from venture capital (VC) firms. They sometimes assist companies they fund with recruiting. Since I am not that interested in early stage companies, this usually does not provide me with a lot of leads.

Why it works for me

As noted previously (but repeated because these posts may be read in isolation), the very public part of my job search works because I have significant experience, a large professional network, and the ability to be unemployed while I look for a new job. This allows me to put my information out there and have a bunch of opportunities come to me.

I rarely have to cold apply for jobs because I have a significant professional network. That network does not get me the job, but it often allows me to skip the slush pile of resumes and jump right to a first call with a recruiter or hiring manager. After that, I still have to make it through the full onslaught of the interview process.

I can afford to be picky and ignore most third-party recruiters and cold recruiting emails because I know I will source plenty of good opportunities elsewhere. I also do recognize that there is privilege in receiving so many of these that I can complain about them (as I often do).

Takeaways for job searchers

Note that my professional network comes up in several of my sources for job opportunities. Building good relationships with people you like to work with will pay dividends well beyond your current job. It's relatively common for software engineers to change jobs every few years, so you may end up working together again in the future.

I want to acknowledge that the middle of a pandemic is a really challenging time to build your professional network beyond your immediate coworkers. Attending large, in person events like conferences comes with significant risk (to yourself and others). Thankfully, some events still include remote options with digital hallway tracks. There are also a good number of tech communities online using tools like slack or discord to help you network remotely.

Even with my experience and network, I still search for jobs the old fashioned way too. If you rely entirely on your professional network to source new jobs, you may miss out on interesting opportunities.

Takeaways for employers

General takeaways

People talk. They share the good, the bad, and the ugly about their experiences with people in their professional network. If you treat employees poorly, it will negatively impact your ability to hire in the future. On the flip side, if you treat people well, word of mouth from your employees can be one of your best recruiting tools.

People refer to cold recruiting emails, especially poorly targeted ones, as "recruiting spam" for a reason. It is the job search equivalent of a cold call from a telemarketer, especially if you are not looking for work. If this is your primary method of recruiting, you may be struggling with hiring and need to invest in improving your process.

If you are requiring candidates to write a dissertation before they even talk to a human being about the role, stop it. Interviewing for software engineering jobs is already incredibly time consuming, and you are making it worse.

Takeaways for people who want to hire me

Please contact me using the methods I request in my reverse job posting. Trying to track opportunities across email, Airtable, LinkedIn, Twitter, Slack, and Discord is a Sisyphean task. I would hate to miss out on a great opportunity because it fell through the digital cracks.

If you are interested in hiring me, you should contact me during the period when I am sourcing opportunities (right now!). Once I have a sizable list of options that seem like a potential fit, I will close my inbox for business because I can only talk to so many people at once.

Opportunities from third-party recruiters I do not have a relationship with go to the very bottom of my list when triaging potential opportunities. The signal-to-noise ratio is usually really bad, and I strongly prefer to talk directly with hiring managers or in house recruiters instead of going through an intermediary.

After reflecting on what I am looking for, I do a bunch of preparation to set myself up for success with the many, many activities involved in the active job search.

Table of contents

• My process

  • Update resume
  • Set up data store
  • Create interview questions and template
  • Collect resources
  • Set up appointment scheduling tool

• Why it works for me

• Takeaways for job searchers

• Takeaways for employers

  • General takeaways
  • Takeaways for people who want to hire me

My process

Update resume

It is a good practice to regularly update your resume, but I continually fail to do so. I hate updating my resume. I only do it when I really have to. Thankfully, I can put a lot less effort into it at this point in my career because it is unlikely to make or break my ability to get a job.

I usually start by updating LinkedIn because it formats the information, a lot of recruiting happens there, and you can often use it instead of a resume. I do not really like LinkedIn, but it has a corner on the market, so I use it. I will spend most of my time there attempting to wordsmith descriptions of my work and its impact. This is the part of resumes that I hate. Trying to describe the impact of complex work in a few short bullet points while using language that will please a resume parsing algorithm, recruiters, and hiring managers is an exercise in futility. I do so much better speaking to my work in interviews where I can interact with another human being.

When I am sufficiently frustrated with updating my experience on LinkedIn (I timebox this part because I am never really happy with it), I then translate the content to an updated version of my resume. It has lived in a variety of places over the years, but these days I maintain a relatively plain HTML-based version on my personal site. I do not spend time crafting a beautifully designed, 1-2 page PDF, but I do maintain a little bit of CSS to output something sensible when printed to PDF or paper using print media queries.

When updating my resume, I asked around on Twitter to find out if resume length was still important. I got a variety of answers ranging from "one page only" to "two pages" to "it doesn't matter." I made sure the "print" version of my resume was about two pages, which seemed like a good middle ground for my level of experience.

Set up data store

The job search process includes a lot of information. People, companies, job postings, interviews, and more! I cannot keep it all in my head and would fail catastrophically if I tried. Thankfully there are many different tools available to store and keep track of data. I have tried a variety of tools in the past ranging from spreadsheets to project tracking tools.

This time around, I am using Notion ¹, which gives me a hybrid of spreadsheet, database, and document all in one tool. It was new to me, so I spent a few days understanding the features, finding the sharp edges, and coercing my mental model into something that played nicely with it. After making it over the learning curve, I'm happy with what I put together. I'll report back at the end of my job search on how well it worked overall.

The entities in my system this time around include:

• Tasks: General tasks I want to track. For example: updating my resume, promoting my job posting, and writing these blog posts.
• Roles: Potential jobs and information about them (e.g. company, job title, link to job posting). Roles have status that I use to track progress through the job search. I often visualize this using a kanban board.
• Organizations: Companies, non-profits, or other places I may want to work and general information about them (e.g. what they do, size, location, age, industry). I track these separate from roles because I can end up looking at multiple roles at the same organization.
• Activities: Tasks and meetings associated with roles that I want to track. For example: cover letters, take home assignments, and interviews.
• People: People I interact with, their contact information, and how they are related to the job search. This can include recruiters, hiring managers, interviewers, and more.

Create interview questions and template

In addition to the data described above, I want to collect as much information as I can about potential jobs. I did all of that reflecting to identify what I am looking for. Now I need to collect similar information about jobs to see if they align.

The best way for me to do this is to put together a list of questions that I want answered throughout the interview process. I usually turn this into a template that I can easily reuse as I interview. In the past, I used a google doc for these (examples from 2015). When I was doing in person interviews, I formatted the template to be printed and filled out by hand. Now that I interview remotely, I type notes on my second monitor. I am also using Notion for note taking this time around, so I can keep the majority of my job search in one tool.

Preparing for interviews beyond the templates is a large undertaking worthy of its own post. Stay tuned for that in the future.

Collect resources

I collect a list of useful resources, so I can reference it throughout the rest of the process. This is usually a mix of job searches, company information aggregators, and company reviews. Below are some examples from my current search.

• Levels.fyi — Basic company info, compensation
• Glassdoor — Basic company info, employee sentiment
• Crunchbase — Detailed company info, useful for info about funding and startups
• Layoffs.fyi — Info about layoffs
• 4 day week - List of companies that have 4 day work weeks
• Established remote companies (hiring globally)
• Remote-friendly companies
• Awesome Remote Job
• Diversify Tech job board

Set up appointment scheduling tool

A larger, public job search often involves talking to lots of people, especially early on in the process. Doing the time scheduling dance over email with that many people is time consuming and not very effective. Thankfully, appointment scheduling tools exist to simplify this process for both me and the people who want to talk to me.

Last time around, I used Calendly and was really happy with it, so I am using it again this time around. I use one of the lower paid tiers because it provides multiple event types and a few other features that are worth it to me to simplify my process for the month or so where I am interviewing. My calendly events ask the other person to add a link for meeting invites, so my interviewers can use the tool they use day-to-day on the job, and I can avoid paying for yet another service.

Why it works for me

At this point in my career, I optimize for the interview process and spend a lot less time on things like resumes and cover letters. Just like the public job search, I can get away with this because of my experience and professional network. I spent significantly more time on these tools earlier in my career when they were critical for even getting to the interview part of the process.

I put a lot of effort into data stores and templates to keep everything organized. This is necessary because the large scale of my job search exceeds the small scale of my memory. If you are only talking to a couple companies and you have a great memory, this would be a lot of extra work for very little value. Similarly, appointment scheduling tools add unnecessary overhead and cost if you are not scheduling that many conversations.

Takeaways for job searchers

Notice that I keep calling out where I am prioritizing my time and energy. There are only so many hours in the day, and there are a lot of different things you can do to prepare for a job search. Prioritize the work that is going to have the biggest impact for your personal situation and goals. There may be some commonalities with my approach, but unless you are in the exact same situation, your priorities will probably look different from mine.

If you are not sure where to start, think about areas where you struggled in previous job searches. For example, if you rarely hear back after applying for jobs, it may be worth getting feedback on your resume and working to improve it. In my case, I struggle to keep track of everything and to perform under artificial pressure, so I focus on organizational tools and preparation before interviews (more on the latter in a future post).

My level of organization is way more than most people need, but a little bit of organization can go a long way. For example, having a list of questions you want to ask during interviews can be really helpful to get the information you want and make a good impression about your interest in the job.

Takeaways for employers

General takeaways

Interviewing is a two-way street. Make sure that the interview process leaves enough time for candidates to ask questions and get enough information to determine if the organization, team, and role are the right fit for what they are looking for.

I am going to repeat a variation of this in every section. Note how much time and energy a job search requires. I may put more into it than most, but I am not that much of an outlier. Finding a new job is exhausting as a candidate, but it is also incredibly time consuming and expensive for employers. You can set yourself apart from other companies by streamlining your process and making it less painful.

Takeaways for people who want to hire me

The tools and process I use for my job search may look a bit like your process as an employer. Just like you are talking to multiple candidates, I am talking to multiple potential employers. Just like you, I am trying to juggle lots of information and manage my time effectively. I totally understand why your team uses tools like greenhouse to manage the hiring process. Please be similarly understanding when I use tools of my own to keep everything organized.

Expect me to ask a lot of questions. If I take a job at your company, I am going to spend a significant part of my week collaborating with the people there, doing hard work to solve problems, and producing value. I want to know what I am signing up for before I commit to something that has a large impact on my life. Thankfully for you, I wrote down a lot of what I care about, so my questions are hopefully not a surprise.

The job search process is rarely linear, but I start in the same place every time: reflecting on what I want out of my next job and what I bring to the table. This provides a critical framing for everything else. Early on, it helps me decide what companies I am interested in and what roles to apply for. During interviews, it enables me to tell a cohesive story about who I am, what I am looking for, and why people should hire me. If I have multiple job offers, it gives me a framework for making decisions.

Table of contents

• My process

• Why it works for me

• Takeaways for job searchers

• Takeaways for employers

  • General takeaways
  • Takeaways for people who want to hire me

My process

Most people at least implicitly reflect early on in their job search. They think about companies they want to work at and roles they are interested in. I take this a step further and make it explicit by writing it down. Documenting my thoughts forces me to introspect more deeply and produces a durable artifact that I can reference, share, and reuse.

These are the prompts I used for my current job search. The answers have changed over the years, but the topics have been pretty stable since I originally put them together in 2015.

• When: When am I open to start interviewing? When do I want to start a new job?
• Where: Where am I currently located? Where am I willing to work?
• About me: Who am I? Why should you hire me? This is sort of a mix between a resume objective, a personal mission statement, and parts of a cover letter.
• What I'm looking for
  • Main things: A short list of top level priorities for me in my job search and why.
  • Location and work hours: This is an elaboration of the "where" section that goes into details about preferred work hours, travel, and other related topics.
  • Size: What size and scale of companies am I most interested in?
  • Type of work: What type of work do I want to do? What roles will I be interested in?
  • Culture: I use this section to call out a few top level values that matter to me and why.
  • Extras: This is a new one I added this time. They are benefits I am so excited about that they go above and beyond the "pros" section and will put a job at the top of my list.
  • Pros: Things that excite me about potential jobs. They are not requirements, but I am unlikely to take a job that does not have at least a reasonable number of them.
  • Cons: Things that turn me off from potential jobs. They are not dealbreakers, but I will expect them to be offset by higher pay or other benefits.
  • Dealbreakers: Things that are a no-go for me.
• Why did I leave my last job?: This is a question I often get asked, especially after quitting my job without a new one lined up, so I like to prepare for it. It can be tricky to answer if you had a bad experience because unfiltered honesty can come off poorly and hurt your chances of being hired. Thinking through an honest, but professional answer ahead of time helps me field these questions in interviews.

If I am performing a public job search, I will turn my reflection into a reverse job posting on my personal site. I then use this as a tool to promote myself through social media and my professional network during the sourcing stage. I am doing this for my current job search and did so for two out of my three previous job searches ¹. Below are links to the associated blog posts.

• August 2022 - My current job search.
• April 2022 - A preview that I shared at the beginning of my summer vacation.
• June 2020 - My previous job search.
• April 2015 - My first public job search.

Why it works for me

As noted in my introduction, my personal process is not an off-the-shelf tool that will work for everyone. The public aspect of my job search is probably the biggest example of this.

You can only get away with a very public job search if you are unemployed or in a special situation because most employers will not react well to finding out you're looking for a new job. All of my periods of unemployment have been by choice, which many people cannot afford to do, either financially or professionally. The primary reason I quit my job before looking for another one is that the interview process is incredibly stressful and time-consuming. It is a full time job, and I struggle to find the time and energy to be successful at it when I already have one of those. Quitting your job is also the easiest way to get a long vacation because most companies don't allow sabbaticals.

Even if you can afford to be unemployed or are unemployed for reasons outside your control (e.g. folks impacted by the recent layoffs), the public part of the process still may not be a good fit for you. It works for me because I have a significant professional network that will see and boost the post, and I have significant experience and expertise that helps me stand out. I cannot speak to how a post like this would work for someone early in their career or with a smaller professional network.

Takeaways for job searchers

The public part of my reflection process is not a good fit for most people, but the explicit introspection part is good for just about everybody. Thinking about what you are looking for before you start interviewing helps you build a framework you can use throughout your search to focus on jobs that are the right fit for you. Reflecting on who you are and what you have to offer helps you build a narrative about yourself that you can reuse in cover letters and interviews.

The prompts I shared might be a good place to start, but remember that they are based on what matters to me and organized in the way that I think. Identify and answer questions that are important to you in a way that makes sense for your brain. The core questions are: "what do you want out of your next job?" and "why should people hire you?" Start there and explore in whatever ways work best for you. For example, I know people who do mind mapping or make a spreadsheet.

You can do this just for yourself and use the document as a private reference when going through your job search. You can also share it with trusted people like mentors or career buddies for discussion, feedback, and support. There isn't really a right or wrong way to reflect before your job search. The important part is that you do it.

Takeaways for employers

General takeaways

People think a lot about where they are going to work. Work is a huge part of your life from a time and energy perspective and getting it wrong can range from mildly annoying to life-altering. Keep this in mind when interviewing people. Do your best to give them the full picture of what they are signing up for, so they can compare it against their expectations.

Note that I said job searching is so exhausting that I only tend to do it when I am unemployed and can give it my all. While most people cannot afford the unemployed part, many engineers find hiring so exhausting that it holds them back from looking for new jobs. You could see this as a good thing because your employees are less likely to leave, but it also has the down side of missing out on potential hires stuck at other jobs or retaining people who really don't want to be there any more. The software engineer interviewing process is really broken, and you could be competitive by making your hiring process less terrible.

It is also notable that my secondary reason for quitting my job is to get significant time off. I've seen an increasing number of engineers leaving their jobs for similar reasons in the last few years. Companies could keep some of these people by having better policies around sabbaticals. Even unpaid sabbaticals would probably help if people were able to keep their employer-subsidized health insurance. Sabbaticals that require 4+ years of tenure are almost useless in a field where people tend to change jobs every few years and times where people are dealing with increasing amounts of stress from the world around them.

Takeaways for people who want to hire me

I put a lot of thought into what I am looking for in a new job. I want to end up somewhere that is a good fit for me where I can do my best work. I try to communicate this in my reverse job postings, so that potential employers can get a sense of me and if I am a good fit for their team. It is not personalized for your company like a cover letter, but hopefully it provides a lot of useful information.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Target audiences
• Stages of the job search
• Disclaimers

Introduction

I am in the early stages of a new job search (hire me!). This is my third time looking for a job very publicly using a reverse job posting. It worked well for me last time, so I am doing it yet again.

It has been encouraging to see other people adapt and remix my idea to work for their own situations over the years. After getting more questions about my process (in specific) and interviewing (in general), I realized I could share more insights that might be helpful. However, I struggled with how to frame it. A lot of my approach works because of a combination of experience, privilege, and luck (not necessarily in that order). Would it really be helpful for me to share advice that would only work for a small number of other engineers later in their careers?

I ruminated on this. Probably too much. I overthink things. This is part of why I am good at my job. I can tease apart the pieces in a system and think about how they work together. When I dug into my opinions about job searching, I found more than just advice for the very experienced engineer. My first public job search was in 2015 when I was much earlier in my career. I helped people in varying roles and experience look for jobs in the past. Maybe I could be helpful to a wider audience? Also, I wanted to practice writing during my summer break.

As I started working on this, I quickly realized my thoughts on job searching are based on an implicit mental model built over decades. I needed to deconstruct that model and translate it into something explicit that I could write down and share with others. The result is a series of posts that I will be publishing as I go through my current job search.

Target audiences

I identified three audiences for these posts. I will do my best to provide information for all of them, but not necessarily in equal amounts.

1. Future Julie ("my process" & "why it works for me"): All of this hard work overanalyzing my thoughts to make the implicit explicit is not solely a philanthropic endeavor. Documenting something helps me retrospect on what worked in the past and reproduce it in the future. The "my process" section of each post will summarize my approach to that part of the job search. I will use the "why it works for me" section to call out the specifics of my situation and underscore that this is not an off-the-shelf tool for others to use as is.
2. Job searchers ("takeaways for job searchers"): My approach to job searches is not a one-size-fits-all tool. In fact, it could be counterproductive for people in different situations. The "takeaways for job searchers" section in each post will attempt to extract generalized ideas that others could potentially adapt into their own approaches. These takeaways are not only for later career engineers, but they are more focused on people already in the industry. I don't have great insight or advice about breaking into tech with your very first job.
3. Employers ("takeaways for employers"): Employers are the other half of the job search. Hiring software engineers is notoriously time consuming and difficult, especially for more experienced engineers. The "takeaways for potential employers" section in each post will call out information that may be interesting to engineering managers, recruiters, and other people looking to hire me or other engineers.

Stages of the job search

After over-analyzing my process, I broke it into seven stages. These are roughly in order, but I often return to steps and go through them many times throughout a job search. I plan to write about one post for each stage and publish them as I'm going through that stage in my current job search.

• Reflecting - Reflecting on what I want out of my next job.
• Preparing - General preparation for my job search.
• Sourcing - The searching part of my job search.
• Screening - Evaluating jobs for a potential fit.
• Interviewing - The gauntlet of "onsite" interviews.
  • Preparing - Getting ready for interviews.
• Deciding - Evaluating offers and making decisions.
• Retrospecting - Learning from my job search.

Disclaimers

These posts touch on a complex subject that can impact people's livelihoods, so I would like to provide a few disclaimers both for clarification and to avoid liability.

• As mentioned in the post above, my approach to job searching works because of my privilege and experience. It is NOT RECOMMENDED to be used as an off-the-shelf solution for most people.
• My posts will be US-centric because I have lived and worked in the United States for my entire life.
• My advice is focused on people who are already in the industry. I don't have insight or advice about breaking into tech with your very first job.
• The advice that I call out for "job searchers" is an attempt to generalize information that MAY be useful for others. People have a wide variety of experiences and situations, so it would be difficult-to-impossible to provide advice that is helpful for everyone. Your mileage may vary.
• The information in these posts is provided "as is" with no express or implied warranty of any kind. No liability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of the use of the information contained herein. Use the information and instructions contained in this series of posts at your own risk.

As promised earlier this year, I am actively on the market for a new job. After a long, restful summer break, I am recharged and excited for new opportunities!

I will continue to use my reverse job posting approach this time around, since it worked well for me last time (see previous posts for context). It helps me reflect on what I am looking for and communicate it to people who want to work with me. Please take a look and get in touch if you think I would be a good fit for your organization and vice versa.

TLDR: I am a frontend web dev based in Portland, OR with 15+ years of experience looking for an individual contributor role that is remote with no travel. I am open to both product and platform roles and interested in a variety of company sizes. Contact me if you are interested.

• When
• Where
• About me
• What I'm looking for
  • Location & work hours
  • Size
  • Type of work
  • Culture
  • Extras
  • Pros
  • Cons
  • Dealbreakers
• Contact me
• FAQs
  • Why are you only looking for remote jobs?
  • Why did you leave your last job?
  • How is this post different from the one you made in April?
  • I contacted you during your summer break. When will I hear back from you?

When

I am looking now! I anticipate spending a month or so on the job search and want to take a couple weeks off after interviewing. That timeline roughly translates to a potential start date in October, but I am flexible about that, and it may take longer in the current market.

Where

I am currently based in Portland, OR and plan to stay. I am exclusively looking for jobs that will allow me to work remotely with zero expectations of travel, going into an office, or other in person meetings.

I miss spending time in person with my coworkers as much as the next person, but am unwilling to take the health risk of travel or in person work for the foreseeable future.

About me

Check out my LinkedIn or resume for an overview of my work experience, education, and more.

I am a software engineer with over 15 years of experience that specializes in frontend web development. My depth in frontend is complemented by a breadth of experience throughout the stack and non-technical skills that multiply my impact through communication, collaboration, and leveling up the people around me.

Frontend web development excites me because I get to consider a lot of different problems (design, UX, performance, accessibility, tooling, and so much more) while getting to write code and fight for a great experience for users. I am comfortable diving deeper into the stack as part of my job, but frontend is my happy place.

I have experience in a variety of frontend-focused roles. I spent the first decade of my career working as a product-focused engineer that regularly shipped high quality features that delighted customers. I spent two years in an architect role helping teams make good technical choices and driving frontend technical standards. In my most recent role, I worked on a frontend platform team where I architected, built, and maintained tools and platforms that enabled teams to consistently deliver accessible, performant features to customers.

Over the last several years, I spent most of my time working in React using ES6 and TypeScript and some time with Node building CLIs and other developer tooling. My backend experience includes a smattering of Node, Ruby on Rails, and Java. I have many years of experience shipping large, complex, cross-team projects. I am known for my pragmatism, and people that work with me trust me to make good decisions that balance technical quality and business needs.

In addition to my strong technical skills, I bring a wealth of non-technical skills to the table that I developed over my years as an architect, tech lead, mentor, and contributor to the tech community. I am known for my writing and public speaking. I spearheaded mentoring, coaching, and training in my workplaces and tech communities.

What I'm looking for

The main things I am looking for right now are:

• Sustainability — We are all living in unprecedented times that are putting a significant strain on our lives, both personally and professionally. I want to work for an organization that is adapting to those times, so that both the organization and the people within it can endure. Expect me to ask about things like how your organization has handled the pandemic, work/life balance, financial stability in the current market, and risk of layoffs.
• Good people — The people you work with and the culture of the organization are critical. None of the other things matter without them. Expect me to want to meet my manager and some of my teammates before accepting an offer.
• Interesting problems — I enjoy a challenge, so I can continue to learn and grow. These could be customer needs, technical problems, engineering practices, or a combination thereof.
• Compensation & level — I am looking for roles that will provide me with compensation and leveling commensurate with the quality and level of my work. I have over 15 years of experience and performed as a high value principal engineer for the last four years. The compensation matters more to me than the level, but they tend to go together.

Location & work hours

I am primarily looking for organizations within three time zones of my location in Portland, OR (Pacific time) for reasonable work hour overlap. You do not have to be based in the US, but you do have to be set up to support remote employees based there (e.g. health insurance, taxes). As noted in where, I am only looking for 100% remote roles that do not require travel.

I do my best when I can work closer to a 10am-6pm schedule most days of the week, but I can accommodate working closer to a traditional 9am-5pm. Jobs that regularly require me to start my day before 9am are unlikely to be a good fit. I dream of being an early morning person, but it’s not how my brain works.

The changing political landscape in the United States means that I will heavily prioritize roles with companies based in states with a strong commitment to reproductive rights (e.g. Oregon, Washington, California, New York). I do not want to risk loss of critical medical coverage through my employer based health insurance because of where they are located. I am incredibly frustrated that this is something I have to think about while looking for a job.

Size

Type of work

I am looking for a hands-on, frontend-focused, individual contributor engineering role. I am open to working on product or platform teams and have experience working on both.

At my level of experience, I expect my role to include some leadership responsibilities (e.g. tech lead, system design, mentoring, organizing working groups), but I want those responsibilities to be balanced with time for heads down technical work like coding. I am interested in helping mentor, coach, and otherwise level up those around me. However, I am not interested in formal people management responsibilities.

Culture

• Remote work & flexibility — Teams have all the tools they need to collaborate effectively without being in the same room. People are comfortable with asynchronous communication to account for teammates with varying schedules and time zones. Meetings are used thoughtfully and sparingly to ensure people have focus time to complete heads down work like coding. If you have a hybrid workplace, remote employees are included and succeed as much as in office employees.
• Communication & collaboration — People work together to solve problems. They share knowledge and collaborate with people from other roles to build the best solutions for users. Organizational goals and priorities are clearly communicated, so that people have information to make good decisions. People err on the side of writing things down to share information with others.
• Work/life balance — You prefer to work smart at a sustainable pace, so you are successful with a low risk of burnout. People work about ~40 hours a week or less and accomplish a lot because of focus and alignment. Working on nights or weekends only happens rarely in extreme situations. When people leave work at the end of the day or go on vacation, they are able to disconnect.
• Emotional intelligence — People are encouraged to identify, evaluate, control, and express emotions in a healthy way at work and bring empathy to how they interact with others. This is reflected in how people treat one another. Yelling at or belittling others would be out of place and a cause for concern.
• Continuous delivery — Teams deploy code and ship features to users regularly. They prefer to deliver value to users in smaller chunks and then iterate (instead of delivering huge features rarely).

Extras

The following things will put your company to the top of my list. I know these things are still rare, but I would love my next role to have them.

• 4-day work week.
• No on call outside of work hours or, even better, no on call at all.

Pros

The following things will excite me about your organization. They are not requirements, but ideally you have at least a few of them.

• Flexible work schedule.
  • I tend to work 10am-6pm with a couple earlier days for meetings, but appreciate flexibility when I need to adjust.
• 20+ days of paid vacation.
  • This can be an unlimited vacation policy, if you have a minimum expectation for time off, so it does not become a race to the bottom. Expect me to ask how many days of vacation your employees take on average.
• Unlimited sick leave.
• 401k match.
• Transparency about compensation early in the interview process.
  • Some localities are currently (or in the near future) requiring you to provide this information anyway. Why not share it?
• Budget for home office setup and recurring home office costs (e.g. internet).
• Your organization actively helps people or otherwise does good in the world.
• Support for employees using company time for things like professional development, open source contributions, and community outreach.

Cons

The following things will make me less excited about your organization. They're not dealbreakers, but I will expect to be paid more if some of these practices are present at your company.

• Recent changes in senior leadership that impact my role (e.g. CEO, CTO). These sorts of changes often lead to significant shifts in the culture and how work is done, making it difficult for me to know what I am signing up for.
• Combined vacation & sick leave (unless you have a very large amount of leave). This tends to punish employees who get sick, which people rarely have control over.
• Policies that limit what employees can do with their free time (e.g. banning open source contributions or side projects unrelated to the business).
• On call outside work hours. I know this is very common for modern tech jobs, and I am ok with it as a job requirement at reasonable levels. I just expect to be paid more to do it.
  • Expect me to ask how often I will be on call and how frequently your team tends to get paged outside of business hours.
• Support for very old browsers. I can do it and have for many years, but it makes me sad.
• Combined individual contributor and engineering manager roles, especially at larger organizations. These are both full time jobs, and I am skeptical of organizations that try to cram the responsibilities of both into a single role.

Dealbreakers

The following are dealbreakers. Your organization is not going to be a good fit.

• Organizations that primarily focus on the following industries are not of interest to me. Please do not contact me about them:
  • Crypto and related technologies (e.g. NFTs, blockchain)
  • Contracting or providing significant services for the military, police, ICE, CBP, or similar organizations.
• Requirement to work in the office.
• Requirement to travel.
• Leetcode-style hard algorithm interviews.
  • These style of interviews are exhausting, stressful, and bear little-to-no resemblance to the work I will do for you day-to-day. My resume clearly indicates I am capable of passing these interviews (I worked at Google), but I would like to discourage companies from continuing to use a hiring practice that is useless (at best) and harmful (at worst).
• Heavy on call requirements outside work hours. For example:
  • On call more frequently than 1 week per month.
  • Very frequent after hour pages for a significant period of time (i.e. your team likely isn't being allowed to fix underlying issues).
• Your company has zero women employees. I don't want to be a "first" right now.
• Your company has zero people of color employees. Why?!
• Low quality or non-existent health care coverage.
• You don't have HR. Exceptions may be made for early stage startups, but I will expect the founders to be able to demonstrate an ability to handle HR-related issues without them.
• Company is based in a state that has banned critical health procedures or otherwise put reproductive rights at risk. I don't want to take on the risk of how this might impact my employer-provided health insurance.

Contact me

Does all of this sound interesting to you? Awesome! You should contact me if:

• You work for the organization you are contacting me about.
• Your organization is hiring now or in the very near future.
• You are hiring for a role that will be remote and require no travel for the foreseeable future.

The best way to contact me about potential opportunities is to fill out the form embedded below (or linked directly). If you prefer email, you may contact me at julie.pagano+jobs@gmail.com.

I will do my best to respond to people via email within a week, but do not guarantee response times because I cannot predict how many people will contact me.

Please do not contact me about job opportunities using other platforms (e.g. Twitter, LinkedIn). It's difficult to keep track of information across so many different sources, and I would hate to miss out on a great opportunity because it fell through the digital cracks.

FAQs

Why are you only looking for remote jobs?

Remote work enables me to thrive and do my best work. I plan to work remotely for the foreseeable future.

There is also the obvious elephant in the room. I do not want to risk my health to work in an office environment, especially when it is not conducive to doing my best work. The health risk also means that I am not willing to travel for interviewing, team offsites, or other in person events.

Remote work can be awesome if you care about doing it right, and I am excited to work somewhere that is making that investment!

Why did you leave your last job?

I really loved the team that I worked with at Stitch Fix. I was doing impactful work alongside a team of thoughtful, kind, and creative people. Unfortunately, as noted in the cons section, changes in senior leadership can lead to significant shifts in company culture. The company I signed up to work at in 2020 had a very different leadership team and culture than the company I left in 2022. It was no longer a great fit for me, and I was really looking forward to taking some time off after the challenges of the last few years.

In positive news, their loss is your gain! The next place I work will get a Julie fresh from a summer off and excited to work on something new.

How is this post different from the one you made in April?

This post is very similar to the one I wrote at the beginning of my summer break, but there are a few modifications here and there. The differences include:

• Some rewording of the introduction to communicate that I am actively looking.
• Addition of language concerned with the location of employers and how this may impact employer-provided health insurance. I did not anticipate needing this in April and am very frustrated that it's necessary now.
• Moving leetcode-style hard algorithms problems from "cons" to "dealbreakers" after some encouragement from friends. Hopefully, refusing these types of interviews will contribute to their removal because they are harmful.
• Changes to the "contact me" section to reflect that I am actively looking and provide the best ways to share opportunities with me.
• Some minor wording adjustments throughout for clarity and readability.

I contacted you during your summer break. When will I hear back from you?

If you filled out the "Interested in hiring Julie?" form linked in my Available for work in late summer 2022 post, I will do my best to get back to you via email within a week or so of this post going live. If you contacted me using other methods, you should reach out again following the instructions in the contact me section of this post.

I hope I can capture even a tiny bit of the joyful spark of a grade school summer break. This is challenging because I am not a child and have not been one for some time. I have the responsibilities of an adult, but they are manageable when they aren't competing with a full time job. I have the financial burden of adulthood, but also the luck and privilege that allowed me to save enough money to fight the Type A Puritan in my mind that never wants to stop working.

Perhaps the hardest part is that I have the knowledge, anxieties, and traumas of an adult living in these increasingly challenging times. There is not a lot of joy to be found in the world right now. The pandemic made my world very small. The removal of mask mandates as case numbers went down (and then, unsurprisingly, up again) has kept my world small in this third year of the modern plague. There are so many cascading and intersecting horrors on top of covid. Police violence, war, attacks on trans people, the loss of reproductive rights, climate change, and so much more. We're all living through a turducken of catastrophes.

I am so very tired. I guess that makes this a good time for rest.

For the first time in my adult life, I am getting enough sleep on a regular basis. I enjoy cooking when I don't need to cram it in after a long, stressful day of work. I have the energy to try new recipes and am enjoying food a lot more. I can go for a walk when it's nice outside instead of hoping for the rare cooperation of the fickle Portland weather and a work calendar full of doom by Zoom.

I have time to be lazy! I am slowly working through Laziness Does Not Exist to reassure my brain that this is a good thing. I bought a giant, comfy camp chair for my balcony to curl up in and read when Portland stops pretending it's still winter. I am slowly working through Horizon: Forbidden West. I don't think I've put this many hours into a video game since Oblivion.

I am making space to learn about things that have nothing to do with computer programming. One of the great regrets of my college years is that I had so little space to study anything outside of computer engineering. I love film, but have never taken a film class or studied it in any meaningful way. During my break, I am working through The Film Experience (a film studies course from MIT OpenCourseWare), reading A History of Narrative Film (the textbook for the course), and watching a ton of movies. This is bringing me immense joy. I may be taking a break from tech, but I appreciate that it makes it possible for me to enjoy so much film from the safety of my cement block in the sky.

I wish the world was less bleak, but I am glad I have the time and space to exist as a human being and process what's going on around me instead of just doomscrolling at 1am as part of revenge bedtime procrastination. I suspect that after a few months, I will miss the structure of having a job, but, for now, I am really enjoying my summer break.

This post is an early announcement that I will be available for work later this year. I am channeling my school years and taking a long, restful summer break, but at the end of the summer, I will be looking for a new job.

I will continue to use my reverse job posting approach this time around, since it worked well for me last time (see previous posts for context). It really helps me reflect on what I am looking for and communicate that to people who might want to work with me. Please take a look and get in touch if you think I would be a good fit for your organization and vice versa.

• When
• Where
• About me
• What I'm looking for
  • Location & work hours
  • Size
  • Type of work
  • Culture
  • Extras
  • Pros
  • Cons
  • Dealbreakers
• Contact me
• FAQs

When

I plan to take off most of the summer to refresh, so I am my best self when starting a new job. I am aiming to start interviewing in the late summer, which will likely translate to an early fall start date.

Where

I am currently based in Portland, OR and plan to stay. I am exclusively looking for jobs that will allow me to work remotely with zero expectations of travel, going into an office, or other in person meetings.

I miss spending time in person with my coworkers as much as the next person, but am unwilling to take the health risk of travel or in person work for the foreseeable future.

About me

Check out my LinkedIn or resume for a rough overview of my work experience, education, and more. My resume is due for some updating, which I will get to before I start interviewing later this summer.

I am a software engineer with over 15 years of experience that specializes in frontend web development. My depth in frontend is complemented by a breadth of experience throughout the stack and non-technical skills that multiply my impact through communication, collaboration, and leveling up the people around me.

Frontend web development excites me because I get to consider a lot of different problems (design, UX, performance, accessibility, tooling, and so much more) while getting to write code and fight for a great experience for users. I am comfortable diving deeper into the stack as part of my job, but frontend is my happy place.

I have experience in a variety of frontend-focused roles. I spent the first decade of my career working as a product-focused engineer that regularly shipped high quality features that delighted customers. I spent two years in an architect role helping teams make good technical choices and driving frontend technical standards. In my most recent role, I worked on a frontend platform team where I architected, built, and maintained tools and platforms that enabled teams to consistently deliver accessible, performant features to customers.

Over the last several years, I spent most of my time working in React using ES6 and TypeScript and some time with Node building CLIs and other developer tooling. My backend experience includes a smattering of Node, Ruby on Rails, and Java. I have many years of experience shipping large, complex, cross-team projects. I am known for my pragmatism, and people that work with me trust me to make good decisions that balance technical quality and business needs.

In addition to my strong technical skills, I bring a wealth of non-technical skills to the table that I developed over my years as an architect, tech lead, mentor, and contributor to the tech community. I am known for my writing and public speaking. I spearheaded mentoring, coaching, and training in my workplaces and tech communities.

What I'm looking for

The main things I am looking for right now are:

• Sustainability — We are all living in unprecedented times that are putting a significant strain on our lives, both personally and professionally. I want to work for an organization that is adapting to those times, so that both the organization and the people within it can endure. Expect me to ask about things like how your organization has handled the pandemic, work/life balance, and how you manage competing priorities and roadmaps.
• Good people — The people you work with and the culture of the organization are critical. None of the other things matter without them. Expect me to want to meet my manager and some of my teammates before accepting an offer.
• Interesting problems — I enjoy a challenge, so I can continue to learn and grow. These could be interesting customer needs, technical problems, engineering practices, or some combination thereof.
• Level & compensation — I am looking for roles that will provide me with leveling and compensation commensurate with the quality and level of my work. I have over 15 years of experience and have performed as a high value principal engineer for the last four years.

Location & work hours

I am primarily looking for organizations within three time zones of my location in Portland, OR (Pacific time) for reasonable work hour overlap. You do not have to be based in the US, but you do have to be set up to support remote employees based there (e.g. health insurance, taxes). As noted in where, I am only looking for 100% remote roles.

I do my best work when I can work closer to a 10am-6pm schedule most days of the week, but I can accommodate working closer to a traditional 9am-5pm. Jobs that regularly require me to start my day before 9 am are unlikely to be a good fit. I dream of being an early morning person, but it’s not how my brain works.

Size

Type of work

I am looking for a hands-on, frontend-focused, individual contributor engineering role. I am open to working on product or platform teams and have experience working on both.

As a principal engineer, I expect my role to include some leadership responsibilities (e.g. tech lead, system design, mentoring, organizing working groups), but I want those responsibilities to be balanced with time for heads down technical work like coding. I am very interested in helping mentor, coach, and otherwise level up those around me. However, I am not interested in formal people management responsibilities.

Culture

• Remote work & flexibility — Teams have all the tools they need to collaborate effectively without being in the same room. People are comfortable with asynchronous communication to account for teammates with varying schedules and time zones. Meetings are used thoughtfully and sparingly to ensure people have focus time to complete heads down work like coding. If you have a hybrid workplace, remote employees are included and succeed as much as in office employees.
• Communication & collaboration — People work together to solve problems. They share knowledge and collaborate with people from other roles to build the best solutions for users. Organizational goals and priorities are clearly communicated, so that people have information to make good decisions. People err on the side of writing things down to share information with others.
• Work/life balance — You prefer to work smart at a sustainable pace, so you are successful with a low risk of burnout. People work about ~40 hours a week or less and accomplish a lot because of focus and alignment. Working on nights or weekends only happens rarely in extreme situations. When people leave work at the end of the day or go on vacation, they are able to disconnect.
• Emotional intelligence — People are encouraged to identify, evaluate, control, and express emotions in a healthy way at work and bring empathy to how they interact with others. This is reflected in how people treat one another. Yelling at or belittling others would be out of place and a cause for concern.
• Continuous delivery — Teams deploy code and ship features to users regularly. They prefer to deliver value to users in smaller chunks and then iterate (instead of delivering huge features rarely).

Extras

The following things will put your company to the top of my list. I know these things are still rare, but I would love my next role to have them.

• 4-day work week.
• No on call outside of work hours or, even better, no on call at all.

Pros

The following things will excite me about your organization. They are not requirements, but ideally you have at least a few of them.

• Flexible work schedule.
  • I tend to work 10am-6pm with a couple earlier days for meetings, but appreciate flexibility when I need to adjust.
• 20+ days of paid vacation.
  • This can be an unlimited vacation policy, if you have a minimum expectation for time off, so it does not become a race to the bottom. Expect me to ask how many days of vacation your employees take on average.
• Unlimited sick leave.
• 401k match.
• Transparency about compensation early in the interview process.
  • Some localities are currently (or in the near future) requiring this information be made available anyway. Why not share it?
• Budget for home office setup and recurring home office costs (e.g. internet).
• Your organization actively helps people or otherwise does good in the world.
• Support for employees using company time for things like professional development, open source contributions, and community outreach.

Cons

The following things will make me less excited about your organization. They're not dealbreakers, but I will expect to be paid more if some of these practices are present at your company.

• Recent changes in senior leadership that impact my role (e.g. CEO, CTO). These sorts of changes often lead to significant shifts in the culture and how work is done, making it difficult for me to know what I am signing up for.
• Leetcode-style coding interviews.
  • These style of interviews are exhausting, stressful, and bear little-to-no resemblance to the work I will do for you day-to-day. My resume clearly indicates I am capable of passing these interviews (I worked at Google), but I would like to discourage companies from continuing to use a hiring practice that is useless (at best) and harmful (at worst).
• Combined vacation & sick leave (unless you have a very large amount of leave). This tends to punish employees who get sick, which people rarely have control over.
• Policies that limit what employees can do with their free time (e.g. banning open source contributions or side projects unrelated to the business).
• On call outside work hours. I know this is very common for modern tech jobs, and I am ok with it as a job requirement at reasonable levels. I just expect to be paid more to do it.
  • Expect me to ask how often I will be on call and how frequently your team tends to get paged outside of business hours.
• Support for very old browsers. I can do it and have for many years, but it makes me sad.
• Combined individual contributor and engineering manager roles, especially at larger organizations. These are both full time jobs, and I am skeptical of organizations that try to cram the responsibilities of both into a single role.

Dealbreakers

The following are dealbreakers. Your organization is not going to be a good fit.

• Organizations that primarily focus on the following industries are not of interest to me. Please do not contact me about them:

  • Crypto and related technologies (e.g. NFTs, blockchain)
  • Contracting or providing significant services for the military, police, ICE, CBP, or similar organizations.

• Requirement to work in the office.

• Requirement to travel.

• Heavy on call requirements outside work hours. For example:

  • On call more frequently than 1 week per month.
  • Very frequent after hour pages for a significant period of time (i.e. your team likely isn't being allowed to fix underlying issues).

• Your company has zero women employees. I don't want to be a "first" right now.

• Your company has zero people of color employees. Why?!

• Low quality or non-existent health care coverage.

• You don't have HR. Exceptions may be made for early stage startups, but I will expect the founders to be able to demonstrate an ability to handle HR-related issues without them.

Contact me

Does all of this sound interesting to you? Awesome! If you would like to hear from me when I start looking for work in the late summer, please fill out this form, so I can learn more about you and your organization.

I plan to actively start my job search in the late summer, so you will likely hear from me in August or early September if I am interested in your organization.

FAQs

Why are you only looking for remote jobs?

Remote work enables me to thrive and do my best work. I plan to work remotely for the foreseeable future.

There is also the obvious elephant in the room. I do not want to risk my health to work in an office environment, especially when it is not conducive to doing my best work. The health risk means that I am not willing to travel for interviewing, team offsites, or other in person events.

Remote work can be awesome if you care about doing it right, and I am excited to work somewhere that is making that investment!

Why did you leave your last job?

I really loved the team that I worked with at Stitch Fix. I was doing impactful work alongside a team of thoughtful, kind, and creative people. Unfortunately, as noted in the cons section, changes in senior leadership can lead to significant shifts in company culture. The company I signed up to work at in 2020 had a very different leadership team and culture than the company I left in 2022. It was no longer a great fit for me, and I was really looking forward to taking some time off after the challenges of the last few years.

In positive news, their loss is your gain! The next place I work will get a Julie fresh from a summer off and excited to work on something new.

Pig

Sold as Nic Cage doing a John Wick with a Pig. Actually, a beautiful little film that folds both the absurd and heartfelt into one of my top films of 2021. The creator of this film only has a passing relationship with the geography of Portland, but I can forgive this minor transgression.

Last Night in Soho & The Sparks Brothers

Edgar Wright is one of my favorite directors. He put together two films I enjoyed this year.

Last Night in Soho didn't quite live up to my high expectations, but I appreciated a lot of what it was doing. The viewing was a special experience as the only film I've seen in theaters in at least two years. Thanks to the person who made me aware I could book a private viewing online for a lot less money than I expected.

The Sparks Brothers was a fascinating documentary about a band I'd somehow never heard of despite them having significant influence on many of my favorite artists. I'd recommend this one to anyone who enjoys music.

The Witch & The Lighthouse

I'd heard good things about Robert Eggers, but never got around to actually watching anything. This year, I finally corrected that. Both of these films hit a sweet spot with beautifully shot, character-driven horror that really works for me. I'm looking forward to seeing The Northman whenever it will be available to stream.

Raw & Titane

Julia Ducournau is another director I'd heard about, but not engaged with until this year. I normally struggle with body horror, but these films are doing something with it that fascinates me. I'm curious to see what she creates in the future.

Rebuild of Evangelion

In my weeb youth, I loved Neon Genesis Evangelion so much. I remember patiently waiting every couple months to get the next US DVD release of the series from Suncoast at the mall. I remember torrenting a fansub of End of Evangelion on a 56k modem (it took forever). I saw Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone in a local art house theater near the end of my extremely into anime years. Then nothing for over a decade besides occasionally dragging out those old dvds for a rewatch.

The final of the rebuild, Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time, came out in 2021, so I watched all four films over a long weekend. It was fascinating to revisit these characters I loved so much when I was a teenager, but twisted and different. Hideaki Anno has given this one story so many different endings. All of them give me feelings.

Inscryption

My game of the year. I won't say much because it's best to go in with little-to-no context. If you like weird indie games (extremely my jam) or deck builders (shrug), I highly recommend giving it a go.

Death's Door

As a goth, I'm obligated to like this game. You meditate on the concept of death while playing as a little crow reaping souls from dungeons filled with weird but adorable characters.

I was excited about this game after seeing trailers early in the year. I was bummed when it initially only released on Microsoft platforms. I briefly considered buying an Xbox to play it, and then was reminded that it's impossible to buy a next-gen console right now. Thankfully, it was eventually released on Switch, and I got to enjoy it later in the year.

I normally bounce off games with difficult bosses, but I've nearly finished this one. The bosses feel learnable, so you can beat them with practice (unlike games where it's clear I just don't have the twitchy hand-eye coordination to get there). There are enough areas that you can usually wander off and explore elsewhere if you want a break from grinding on a particularly tough boss. The game was delightful enough that I wanted to see more content, and that helped me power through the tough bits. I'm still working on the final boss, but hopefully I'll get it eventually.

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

Xiran Jay Zhao's debut novel was such a fun read. I've been struggling with focusing on reading, but good YA sci-fi/fantasy can always power through the mental block. I especially enjoy ones that leave the boring tropes of hetero love triangles in Western Europe inspired settings. It's time for a badass female protagonist, mecha, and queerness set in China.

A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by Ursula Vernon

Continuing with YA sci-fi/fantasy, I did return to a more Western European setting, but the protagonist is too busy baking her heart out to worry about love triangles. The baking magic premise is adorable and makes for some hilarious scenes. I am compelled to love a book with sentient sourdough starter.

Montero by Lil Nas X

Great debut album from Lil Nas X. It's good music that hops all over the place and often gives me feelings. I love him for responding to criticism of his queerness by being even more intensely queer than before. Bonus points for scaring the straights by being horny for satan.

Screen Violence by Chvrches & If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power by Halsey

New albums from two artists I really enjoy that were on repeat a lot this year while I was writing code.

You Are Good & The Bechdel Cast

Two heartfelt film podcasts that filled the void when I couldn't deal with silence this year. Thanks for keeping me company while I cooked dinner, put away laundry, and had revenge bedtime procrastination.

Runner up: Letterboxd

My runner up for this list is Letterboxd, a social app for film watching. I've technically had an account since 2014, but I only started using it actively in the last year or so. Like reading, I used to love film watching, but struggled with it for some time because of the stresses of living under capitalism. Letterboxd has been one of the tools that helped me get back into it, and I'm so grateful for that.

According to my stats for 2021, I watched 84 films this year.

It’s a bit long, so feel free to take a look at the table of contents and jump around to the bits that interest you.

• Disclaimers
• My background
• What I did
  • Resume
  • Personal site
  • Reverse job posting
  • Applying to jobs
  • Keeping track of everything
  • Filtering the list
  • Technical homework
  • Interviewing
  • Job offers, negotiating, and decisions, oh my!
• Business, business, numbers!
  • Sourcing
  • Time
• Takeaways

Disclaimers

• I am not a career counselor, and my advice should be taken with context and a grain of salt.
• I am not suggesting anyone follow the steps I did. For many people, that would be a terrible idea. If you do follow any steps I did, I am not responsible for the consequences.
• Your mileage may vary. Job searches are hard. There is no one size fits all approach.
• I intentionally did not name the companies involved in my job search. Please do not ask for names unless we are friends and you are looking for recommended places to apply for work.
• I intentionally did not list where I'm going next. I'll share that info when I'm good and ready.

My background

I am a principal software engineer with a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from a state university. I focus on front-end web development and have 13+ years experience as a professional, including time at big names like Google, New Relic, and IBM. Take a look at my linkedin or resume to get more details on my work experience.

I am well networked from years of community work like helping organize conferences, running a Girl Develop IT chapter, public speaking, diversity in tech activism, and much more.

I am a cis, currently able-bodied, queer, white woman. I am relatively financially well-off from a combination of privilege, luck, and working many years in the tech industry.

I mention all of these things to give context for my job search. I have privilege, experience, and networks that made it easier and enabled me to take some risks. Not everything that worked for me will work for you, especially if you are in a different situation.

Based on my experience, my approach is most likely to work for people who fit the criteria below, which is not most people.

• Financially stable enough that you can be unemployed for the duration of your public job search. It's basically impossible to do a search like this while currently employed elsewhere.
• Have significant experience in the field with a strong resume. I doubt this approach would work well for early career folks where there is a lot more competition for roles.
• Have a good network and know how to reach it. Nobody would have seen my job posting without a combination of twitter followers, linkedin connections, and community slack channels.

What I did

Below is a rough summary of the steps I took during this process.

Resume

I didn't spend a lot of time on my resume this time around. I made sure the content was good, but spent very little time on making it look pretty. I did not anticipate most of my opportunities being sourced from someone looking at my resume, so it just needed to be nice enough to serve as a tool for discussion.

Personal site

I was about 85% done migrating my static site to gatsby for over a year and kept putting it off. If I wanted to publish a job search post, I had to either finish it up or figure out how to update a ruby toolchain I hadn't touched in several years. I chose the investment that would serve me moving forward. Yay, gatsby! I'll hopefully write a separate post about the migration in the future.

Reverse job posting

The unique part of my job search was the reverse job posting. This isn't the first time I've done this. I tried it once before in 2015. I started with the same structure as last time, but revisited a lot of the content. Five years is a long time! I had more to offer companies and some of what I was looking for had changed. There were still a lot of commonalities.

I promoted my post through twitter and linkedin. I have a decent network in both that helped spread it around.

See my retrospective from last time for more details on the benefits.

Applying to jobs

I applied to a handful of jobs the old fashioned way. The companies I applied to were a combination of places recommended to me by friends, companies I talked to the last time I did a big job search, and jobs I saw posted in a combination of community slack channels and Jill Wohlner's awesome underpin project.

There were also a small number of jobs that were sourced from my personal network through referrals.

Keeping track of everything

I used a combination of a big spreadsheet, email labels, and folders with notes to keep track of the state of my job search, the companies I was talking to, and where I was at with them.

I am really glad that past Julie was so organized and made such good resources the last time she did this. I was able to reuse a ton of the templates, questions, and other tools I put together in 2015 with a few tweaks to match my current needs.

The one major new tool I used this time around was calendly. It helped immensely with managing my calendar when I was talking to so many different people at once.

Filtering the list

I got a much larger response to my reverse job posting than the last time I did this. I suspect this is a combination of good timing, a larger network, and a much more impressive resume. As a result, I spent a lot of time going through emails, chatting with folks, and collecting information to filter the list down to something manageable.

Apologies if you sent me something, and I did not respond. I'm sure a few fell through the cracks, especially if it came in through twitter or linkedin instead of email.

Technical homework

Thankfully, this time around, only a couple companies required me to do "homework" assignments to make it to the interview stage.

One was a relatively simple exercise based on the kind of work I would do on the job and was timed at a maximum of 2.5 hours. We talked about and extended the project in my follow-up interviews. I thought this was a good example of this sort of exercise for companies that decide to do them.

The other was a much more complex project with no time limit. I spent at least a dozen hours on it, which is way too long for this sort of exercise. I never got feedback on the output or discussed it in other interviews.

Interviewing

One very small benefit of the current pandemic situation is that I did not have to travel for "on site" interviews. It is so much easier to put your best self forward when you get to sleep in your own bed the night before. In many cases, I was also able to spread the interviews across two days, which was much less grueling than the full day of non-stop interviews you normally get. I had a few anxiety-inducing technical difficulties like my home network failing mid-interview, but overall it was a much less stressful experience.

I continue to find technical interviewing a stressful endeavor that is all over the place. My technical interviews included a range of:

• Leetcode style interview questions. I hate these with the fire of a thousand suns.
• Pairing with people on problems similar to what I would do on the job. I love these and think they are great for getting signal on my skills and how we would work together.
• System design questions. These ranged from fun to frustrating depending on the problem and the tools we used, but overall were reasonable. I missed having a real whiteboard for these, but made do with digital tools.

I really enjoy the more chatty sort of interviews where I get to talk through past work, my people-y skills, how I approach problems, and other things like that. These types of interviews were really hard for me earlier in my career, but I've developed a ton of skills and experience since then that make them easier now.

Overall, the interview process went well at all of the companies I talked to, but it was very time consuming. Interviewing was basically my full time job for several weeks straight.

Job offers, negotiating, and decisions, oh my!

I ended up with job offers from five companies, which is four more offers than I've ever had at once before in a job search. It was stressful to juggle calendars and time things, so they would all finish up within the same week or so. I was transparent with all of the companies I was talking to that I was evaluating several opportunities, which helped a lot.

Another first for this job search is that I did a decent amount of successful negotiation. I attempted to negotiate a little bit earlier in my career, but the results ranged from ineffective to really negative. I think about this a lot when people say women get paid less because they don't negotiate. I think I was in a stronger position to negotiate this time around because (1) I am a principal engineer with a really impressive resume (2) I had multiple offers for leverage.

The good thing about having multiple job offers is that I had options and points of comparison. The bad thing about having multiple job offers is that I had to make a decision. It was really hard. I ended up with offers from five very different companies doing very different kinds of work, so it was not as easy as "pick the one with the best offer." I ended up making some really intense pro/con lists and doing a lot of thinking to decide what I was most excited about and what tradeoffs were the right fit for my current situation.

Even though I could not accept all of the offers, I hopefully made some good connections with people at the companies I declined. They were all good places with interesting products and wonderful people. I think of declining with good companies as more of a "not this time" than a forever "no."

Business, business, numbers!

I mentioned that this job search was really big and time consuming. I was curious just how big it was, so I collected a bunch of data. I thought you might find it interested too.

Sourcing

Below are some aggregated numbers to give you a sense of how much of my search came from the reverse job posting and how much came from more traditional job search activities.

Companies I included in my search:

• 45 total. I added a note to the reverse job posting at some point to prevent this number from growing because it was already quite unwieldy.
• 15 where I spoke to someone (usually a recruiter or hiring manager) via phone or video call to learn more.
• 6 where I completed interviews.
• 5 that offered me a job. I declined to move forward with the 6th company because of fit with the role and timing with other offers.
• 1 where I accepted a job.

Overall sourcing of companies came from:

• 26 from reverse job posting.
• 8 from applying to a public job posting.
• 6 from intros from my personal network.
• 5 from recruiters cold contacting me.

Sourcing of the companies I got offers from:

• 2 from reverse job posting.
• 1 from applying to a public job posting.
• 1 from intros from my personal network.
• 1 from recruiters cold contacting me.

My personal network also had an impact on my search regardless of initial sourcing:

• 21 of the companies involved my personal network in some way.
• 3 of the companies I got offers from had some network involvement.

The company I took the offer at was one that I applied to and had referals from previous coworkers and my personal network. The tight competition for second choice was a company that contacted me via the reverse job posting where I had no network.

Time

The timeline for my job search was about a month and a half, with some light work in late June and the majority of July intensely focused on job searching and interviewing.

Rough timeline:

• early June: attempt to start job search and realize it is impossible to focus on a job search while you are working nights and weekends at your job.
• June 19: last day of previous job
• June 30: post For a Limited Time Only: Looking for Work (2020 edition)
• July 30: accept job offer

Of the companies I got offers from, I invested the following time:

• Average of 10 hours overall including things like tech screens, talking to recruiters, interviewing, take home exercises, etc.
• The worst time commitment was close to 20 hours because of an unreasonably large takehome assignment. They were an outlier, and most of the other companies took 6-10 hours of my time.
• About 60 hours overall spread across a few weeks.

Takeaways

These are my personal takeaways. Please refer to the disclaimers at the top of the post before applying these to your personal situation.

• A solid job search is really hard to do while employed full time, especially if said full time job is running you ragged.
• A job search can easily be a full time job. Plan accordingly.
• Understand what you’re looking for and what you have to offer. Speak confidently about these things to others. Practice on your partner or your cat if you need to (I definitely did both).
• Stay organized. There are a lot of moving pieces, and you will drop something without a system.
• Take notes. Human memories are terrible, especially when you are talking to a ton of different people and places.
• Negotiating is much easier if you have multiple job offers.
• Know what you are worth and try to negotiate if you can. It can often lead to a significantly better offer.

For a limited time only, I am on the market for a new job. Last time I was looking for work, I wrote a sort of reverse job posting that helped me reflect on what I was looking for and communicate it to people who might want to work with me. It was pretty successful, so I am trying it again. Please take a look and get in touch if you think I would be a good fit for your organization and vice versa.

P.S. I can't believe it's been five years since the last time I did this. Time is an illusion!

Last updated on 2020-07-05.

When

Soon! I am happy to start conversations and interviews now. I am giving myself a little time off to recharge, so I am aiming for a start date in August or September.

Where

I am currently based in Portland, OR and plan to stay. I am exclusively looking for jobs that will allow me to work remotely with zero travel for the foreseeable future. I will consider going into an office or occasionally traveling for work again when the global health situation is dramatically improved (timeline unknown).

Real talk: why are so many companies still requiring people to relocate right now? Make the best of this bad situation and learn to support remote work!

About me

Check out my LinkedIn or resume for an overview of my work experience, education, and more.

I am a software engineer with over 13 years of experience that specializes in frontend web development. My depth in frontend is complemented by a breadth of experience throughout the stack and non-technical skills that multiply my impact through communication, collaboration, and leveling up the people around me.

Frontend web development excites me because I get to consider a lot of different problems (design, UX, performance, accessibility, and so much more) while getting to write code and fight for a great experience for users. I am comfortable diving deeper into the stack as part of my job, but frontend is my happy place. My next job does not need to be 100% frontend, but I want it to be something I regularly work on.

I spent the last five years focused on React development in ES6, but I am very open to learning and working with other frontend technologies. My backend experience includes a smattering of Node, Ruby on Rails, and Java. I have many years of experience shipping large, complex, cross-team projects. I am known for my pragmatism, and people that work with me trust me to make good decisions that balance technical quality and business needs.

In addition to my strong technical skills, I bring a wealth of non-technical skills to the table that I developed over my years as an architect, tech lead, mentor, and contributor to the tech community. I am known for my writing and public speaking. I spearheaded mentoring, coaching, and training in my workplaces and tech communities.

My most recent role was as a principal engineer and architect. While I enjoyed my time as an architect helping teams make good technical choices and succeed, I am hoping for my next role to take me closer to writing code and delivering features to users again.

What I'm looking for

The main things I am looking for right now are:

• Good people — The people you work with and the culture of the organization are critical. None of the other things matter without them.
• Interesting problems — I enjoy a challenge, so I can continue to learn and grow. These could be interesting customer needs, technical problems, engineering practices, or some combination thereof.
• Work/life balance — We are all living in unprecedented times that are putting an additional strain on our lives. I want to work somewhere that is understanding of this and helping employees find a sustainable balance.

Location

Size

Type of work

As noted in the "about me" section, I am looking for more of a hands-on individual contributor engineering role right now. I am happy for this to include some leadership responsibilities (e.g. tech lead, organizing frontend-focused communities of practice), as long as I am still spending a reasonable amount of time coding. I am very interested in helping mentor, coach, and otherwise level up those around me. However, I am not interested in formal people management responsilities at this time.

Teams that build product for users tend to be the best fit for my experience, skills, and passion. A team that works on internal tools or other internal-facing projects may excite me if they are solving some interesting problems and engage with their internal users to build solid experiences.

Culture

• Communication & collaboration — People work together to solve problems. They share knowledge and collaborate with people from other roles to build the best solutions for users. People err on the side of writing things down to share information with others, which is critical for remote workplaces.
• Emotional intelligence — People are encouraged to identify, evaluate, control, and express emotions in a healthy way at work and bring empathy to how they interact with others. This is reflected in how people treat one another. Yelling at or belittling others would be out of place and a cause for concern.
• Work/life balance — You prefer to work smart at a sustainable pace, so you are successful with a low risk of burnout. People work about ~40 hours a week or less and accomplish a lot because of focus and alignment. Working on weekends only happens in extreme situations. When people leave work at the end of the day or go on vacation, they are able to disconnect.
• Continuous delivery — Teams deploy code and ship features to users regularly. They prefer to deliver value to users in smaller chunks and then iterate (instead of delivering huge features rarely).

Pros

The following things will excite me about your organization. Think of them as bonus points!

• Flexible work schedule. I tend to work 9:30am-5:30pm PT, but appreciate flexibility when I need to adjust.
• 20+ days of paid vacation.
  • If you have unlimited vacation, expect to "show your work." I suggest information about recommended minimums and the average amount of time off employees take in a year.
• Unlimited sick leave.
• 401k match.
• Support for employees using company time for things like professional development, open source contributions, and community outreach.
• No on call outside work hours. I know this is relatively rare these days, but I can dream!
• Budget for home office setup and recurring home office costs (e.g. internet).
• Your organization actively helps people or otherwise does good in the world.

Cons

The following things will make me less excited about your organization. They're not dealbreakers, but I will expect to be paid more if some of these practices are present at your company.

• Combined vacation & sick leave (unless you have a very large amount of leave). This tends to punish employees who get sick, which people rarely have control over.
• Policies that limit what employees can do with their free time (e.g. banning open source contributions or side projects unrelated to the business).
• On call outside work hours. I know this is very common for modern tech jobs, and I am ok with it as a job requirement at reasonable levels. I just expect to be paid more to do it.
  • Expect to let me know how often I will be on call (e.g. 1 week every 6 weeks) and how frequently your team tends to get paged outside of business hours.
• Support for very old browsers. I can do it and have for many years, but it makes me sad.

Dealbreakers

The following are dealbreakers. Your organization is not going to be a good fit.

• Required to work in the office. I'm not going in an office any time soon.
• Required to travel. I'm not going in an airplane any time soon.
• Heavy on call requirements outside work hours. For example:
  • On call more frequently than 1 week per month.
  • Very frequent after hour pages for a significant period of time (i.e. your team likely isn't being allowed to fix underlying issues).
• Your company has zero women employees. I don't want to be a "first" right now.
• Your company has zero people of color employees. Why?!
• Your company sells to ICE and/or CBP.
• Low quality or non-existent health care coverage.
• Heavy drinking culture. None of us are getting together any time soon, but if this was a part of your culture before covid, it still worries me.
• You don't have HR. Exceptions may be made for early stage startups, but I will expect the founders to be able to demonstrate an ability to handle HR-related issues without them.

Contact me

See note at the top of the post. I am no longer considering any additional companies right now.

Does all of this sound interesting to you? Awesome! You should contact me if you meet all of the following criteria.

• You work for the organization you are contacting me about. Ideally you are a hiring manager, software engineer, or someone who works closely with the team (e.g. designer, QA, PM).
• You read the post and think your organization would be a good fit for me and vice versa.
• Your organization is hiring now or in the near future.
• You are hiring for a role that will be remote for the forseeable future.

Please contact me via email at julie.pagano+jobs@gmail.com and include the following:

• The name of the organization you are contacting me about.
• Where the organization is based.
• What kind of organization it is (e.g. private/public company, non-profit, government).
• Information about the organization's remote work policies.
• A brief description of why the organization would be a good fit for me and vice versa.
• Information about the position(s) and/or a link to relevant job postings.
• Any other information you think is useful. For example, I'd love to hear how you are handling working during covid.

FAQs

Why are you only looking for remote jobs?

I WANT TO LIVE! No, seriously, this whole covid thing is a lot. Until there is a clear light at the end of the tunnel (e.g. a vaccine that has been widely implemented), I will be prioritizing my health over a job that requires working in an office or traveling. Remote work can be awesome if you care about doing it right, and I am excited to work somewhere that is making that investment!

Why did you leave your last job?

Working at New Relic for over four years has been incredibly valuable for my growth as a software engineer and as a person. I learned a lot, expanded my skills, tried out architecture as a role, and finally earned the coveted "principal" title. I am grateful for the kind and talented people I worked with during my tenure there. The people and the culture were really what made New Relic such a great place.

Unfortunately, the culture has changed significantly, and it is no longer a good fit for me. They would not pass the rubric in this post. In particular, the work/life balance became incredibly challenging during covid with a regular pressure to work nights and weekends for months on end. I am hoping to find a more stable and sustainable workplace.

In 2018, I'm freeing myself from the following:

• Apologizing for or minimizing my achievements. Especially my professional ones, especially for men. I work my ass off. I'm done shrinking myself, so more privileged people can feel better about themselves. Which brings me to...
• Performing emotional labor. With exceptions for: family, partner, close friends, mentees, and other similar relationships. Get yourself a therapist because I won’t be performing this service any more. P.S. diversity and inclusion work counts as emotional labor.
• Caring if people like me. I left a lot of this one in my late 20s, but there's a bit more work to be done if I truly want to free myself from some other items on this list. This isn't an excuse to be an asshole. I don't want to be hated, but there are plenty of perfectly acceptable feelings that fit between hate and like. Respect is the one I'll be trying to aim for.
• Keeping up with every tiny terrible thing that is happening at all times. Regularly stressing myself to the point of exhaustion and negative health consequences because I've turned my brain into some sort of 24-hour bad news network is not sustainable. Apathy is not an acceptable alternative, but there's a middle ground to be found in there somewhere.
• Focusing on my career to the exclusion of my life. I’ve been doing this most of my adult life. I took a hard look at this when I updated my mid-career survival talk for Write/Speak/Code, and I need to start taking my own advice. I can be good at my profession without cannibalizing the other dimensions of my life. Just because we have to work twice as hard to get half as much doesn't mean we should. Finally having "lead software engineer" as my title will hopefully make this easier to manage.
• Men who try to sexualize professional relationships. Sorry (not actually sorry) "nice" guys. I'm sure it's pleasant to mix your professional and dating pools, but the rest of the men ruined it for you (and let's be honest, you probably fucked it up too). If you try to fuck your professional contacts, you're going on a list. Spoiler alert: the list is actually a dumpster, and we'll be throwing you in it with all the other garbage.
• Ironic/hipster *-isms and saying garbage things to get a rise out of someone. I've never really tolerated this, but this year I'm adopting a zero tolerance policy. Not even once with this garbage behavior.

Originally, I was not planning to share any of this talk content outside the safer space of AlterConf. After giving the talk and having many people who could not be there show regret about missing it, I decided to put together a transcript with some redacted slides. I am taking a risk by sharing this publicly, but I decided the reward of helping others was probably worth it. Please don't make me regret that.

Dear journalists who might get pointed at this if it becomes popular, please read Life and Times of a Tech Feminist Killjoy: Vultures Circle Overhead first and then consider moving on without comment. I have zero interest in my personal difficulties being misrepresented and put on display for wide, public consumption for the financial benefit of others.

Table of Contents

• The Talk
• Attribution
• Additional reading

The Talk

Content notice: High level discussion of _-isms, bias, mental health impact, and other side effects of being from a marginalized or underrepresented group in tech. Brief discussion of medical issues related to pulmonary embolisms.

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.)

Attribution

• Lungs by Sergey Demushkin from the Noun Project (modified, colors added)
• Liz Abinante for her tweet
• Stranger Things style "negative vibes" slides made with makeitstranger.com
• Thanks to this tutorial for helping me make my vector drawings look more hand drawn.

Additional reading

• If you want to know more about why I don't like Lean In, check out the storify from when I livetweeted reading it.
• I should probably put more stuff in here, but this is it for now because I'm tired after transcribing the talk and adding alt tags to 152 slides.

This year, I'm taking it month by month. I'm also channeling teen Julie and providing a digital mix tape to go with it --- a song for each month. It's a mix of old and new music that meant something to me this year.

January

The Knife -- Heartbeats

I set some goals for the year. I failed to keep most of them for reasons that will become apparent in the months to follow.

I gave my only conference talk of the year at CUSEC. I had a lovely time and still think about it fondly. I'm glad I gave my last talk there --- still not sure if I'll return to speaking. My only regret is that Montréal was a bit too cold to explore.

I visited friends in San Francisco and attended my first AlterConf in Oakland. I had a great time seeing my Bay Area friends. AlterConf was intense and draining, but in the good sort of way. I was glad we pre-gamed at the local cat cafe.

A collection of sleepy cats at the cat cafe.

At AlterConf, Porpentine said something I still think about.

Like, in feminism there’s this pressure to be strong and brave and absorb a lot of pain. I don’t want to be strong. I want to be happy.

After the last few years of stress from work, activism, and my personal life, this really hit home. I don't want to be strong. I want to be happy. The status quo of my life was strength, but not happiness. It was taking a toll.

I decided on this trip that I needed a change. I turned my passing interest in the west coast into a goal. In a year, I would move to the west coast. Very likely Portland, a city I fell in love with when I visited for Open Source Bridge the previous year.

February

Metric -- Blindness

In late February, I had a pulmonary embolism. My blood turned against me and filled my lungs with clots that made it hard for me to breathe, hard for my heart to pump blood past the obstructions. I almost died.

I spent a week in the hospital --- about half of it in intensive care. I was put on strong blood thinners and then eventually coumadin, a drug that is also used as rat poison. Eventually I was allowed to switch to a new blood thinner with a massive price tag and a recommendation from Kevin Nealon and Arnold Palmer.

Get well gifts from friends and family.

I would be on blood thinners for most of the year, afraid of cutting myself or falling. My blood clots too much, it kills me. My blood clots too little, it kills me. I sardonically referred to this dangerous balance as "murderblood."

The pulmonary embolism was likely caused by a perfect storm of:

• Estrogen-based birth control.
• A genetic predisposition to clotting I didn't know I had.
• Long flights.

Many people who heard about what happened shared their own stories about blood clots caused by birth control. Estrogen is a hell of a drug. I'm still angry at my doctors for downplaying the risk of being on it for so long.

March

Lilly Wood & The Prick -- Joni Mitchell

In March, I went home from the hospital and spent several weeks on recovery. My body was still really messed up from the pulmonary embolism, so I was tired a lot of the time. I still get tired more often than I like because my body isn't 100% back to where it was before this happened.

The week after I came home, Kelly Ellis went public about the harassment she dealt with when she worked at Google. I remembered her from when she worked there, but hadn't known this was why she left. The responses from the outside world and the world inside Google upset me deeply. A couple women had quit over unfortunate circumstances there while I was in the hospital. Another just a few months prior. The hypocrisy of the company I worked for on the topics of diversity and attrition weighed on me.

Almost dying put some things in perspective. I did not want to die in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania doing work I didn't enjoy for a megacorp that frustrated me. I took several weeks of unpaid leave to regroup mentally and start looking for jobs in Portland.

I also bought Leon a stroller.

April

Passion Pit -- Lifted Up (1985)

I flew out to Portland to interview for jobs. The interviews can best be described as a series of unfortunate events. I gave up and resigned to returning to Google. Job searching was stressful, and I was still in pretty bad health. I would try again next year.

In late April, I returned to work. I was anxious after what happened in my absence. My return coincided with a rare event at our remote office, a visit from an executive and an opportunity to ask questions. My heart racing, I asked about the hypocrisy of second shift work. How Google claims it cares about diversity, but much of the diversity work it promotes falls on the backs of underrepresented employees who will not be rewarded for that work, especially in the promotion process. That it leads to burnout. The response boiled down to "Diversity work should be its own reward. Everyone deals with burnout."

I was unhappy at Google for some time for a laundry list of reasons including boredom with my project, poor support for frontend engineers, bureaucracy, bad work/life balance, and hypocrisy around diversity issues. Someone so high up in the company hitting hard on that last one was the straw that broke this camel's back.

The next day I handed in my resignation and wrote a goodbye letter explaining why I was leaving.

A heavily redacted screenshot of my goodbye letter. I've debated sharing all of it, but I'm concerned about backlash.

I collected my thoughts and started a second round of searching for a job to take me to Portland, this time very publicly. Writing down what I was looking for was valuable. I recommend it even if you're looking quietly and can't publish it.

I turned 30 this month. Unlike others, I did not stress about this birthday. I was happy to age.

May

Melanie Martinez -- Mad Hatter

I accepted a job offer from SEED, a tiny, early stage startup, the last place I would have expected to end up. I was very excited and planned to start in June. They offered to pay for relocation, so I started investigating options to move. I was pretty desperate to get the hell out of Pittsburgh.

Before starting the new job, I drove down to DC to visit my friends. I had a lovely time and got to see an adorable ballet version of Alice in Wonderland, one of my favorite books.

June

Talking Heads -- This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)

I started my new job at SEED working remotely from Pittsburgh. It was exciting to build the web application from the ground up using React. I really liked my coworkers. I made the right choice about where to work.

I continued planning my move. It was a lot of logistics for one person to manage in a short period of time. Nikita and Leon helped.

I grumped at GHC again and wrote about forms and personal information.

My younger sister (and only sibling) died unexpectedly. Going home and dealing with the funeral was hard. Out of respect for my parents, I am not going to write anything else publicly about this.

I was very thankful for the adorable dog during my visit home for the funeral.

Shortly after the funeral, I flew to Portland for Open Source Bridge and AlterConf Portland. Kronda gave a badass keynote about tech companies and diversity. Considering my year, it hit close to home.

photo of Kronda's slides

I vaguely recall having a nice time, but not much else. I was pretty distracted by my family situation. While there, I got the keys to my new apartment.

July

Bat For Lashes -- Travelling Woman

In July, I finally moved to Portland. It was stressful and exhausting, especially because I got tired so easily post-PE. With the help of my mother, I flew two very cranky cats across the country on a very hot day with delayed flights. Everyone survived, but we were very grumpy when we got there. The cats adapted to their new home as soon as they got food, water, and a view of the giant windows.

Nikita and Leon investigating my moving boxes in the new apartment.

August

Screaming Females -- Hopeless

Once I settled in to Portland, I wrote a long post reflecting on my job search as a reference for myself and others.

I went to my first concert in Portland. Screaming Females are awesome live. Highly recommend.

September

Bitch Better Have My Money -- Rihanna

I got back the $700 I lost in my first job search. I donated most of it.

The hematologist let me go off the fancy blood thinners. I have to go back on them temporarily for long flights, so I won't be traveling a lot.

I got to see a bunch of people in town for XOXO. I kinda regretted not getting tickets. Maybe next year.

October

Grimes (feat. Janelle Monáe) -- Venus Fly

I attended Open Source and Feelings, an awesome conference run by some friends. I missed part of it because of a false alarm PE scare. I'm looking forward to next year, where hopefully I can give it my full attention.

November

IAMX -- Happiness

I had a lovely veg Thanksgiving with friends. I'm so thankful for the community of friends I have here in Portland. Moving here was the right decision.

I started helping with the new node.js inclusivity working group.

December

Lana Del Rey –- God Knows I Tried

At the beginning of December, I had a nice mini-vacation in Seattle with friends. Lots of good company and a visit to Glowforge to play with lasers.

OMG bee in a glowforge!

I wrote about Centralia, PA.

I dressed Leon up for Christmas. My tree is a cardboard scratching post because he can't be trusted with anything else.

Popular writing

The top 5 most popular posts on my blog this year are listed below. I didn't write much this year, so it's not surprising that some of my popular posts from 2014 are still going strong.

• JavaScript Debugging for Beginners - written in 2014
• Job Search Retrospective
• For a Limited Time Only: Looking for Work
• So You Want to Be an Ally - written in 2014
• Diversity for Sale - originally posted in Model View Culture in 2014

Conclusion

2015 has been the worst year of my life. I barely survived it. A lot of difficult things happened. The bad things forced me to reevaluate. 2015 is also the year I forced myself to make big changes. I don't want to be strong. I want to be happy. I'm not there yet, but I think I'm moving in the right direction.

I'm going to expand on that last one --- the newest one. It's much less self-explanatory than the others. To understand the metaphor, you need to know about Centralia, a tiny ghost town in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania. Gather around for a weird piece of US history.

Centralia was a small coal mining town in Pennsylvania. The town had a garbage dump on top of an old strip mine. In 1962, they decided to clean it up by setting it on fire. Everybody loves a good trash fire. Unfortunately, this particular trash fire spread to the coal mine under the town.

Fun fact: coal is really good at burning, especially when there's a lot of it. Centralia's underground trash fire quickly got out of hand. Side effects of the runaway trash fire included: hot steam, poisonous gas, spooky smoke, and sinkholes that tried to eat children.

Repeated attempts were made to put out the fire. All failed. They gave up and let it burn. The town was inhospitable. The people left. Centralia became a ghost town.

That trash fire is still burning. It will be burning long after we're all gone.

Bonus fact: Centralia, PA and its spooky, neverending trash fire were an inspiration for the eponymous town in the psychological horror video game Silent Hill.

Why is a decade's old trash fire under a ghost town in Pennsylvania a metaphor for the tech industry? I will leave that as an exercise for the reader. For extra fun, involve the bonus fact and consider which tech "celebrities" make you think of Pyramid Head.

As a parting note, please remember that your trash fires send a message, and you can't always put them out.

My blog post circulated in the Portland tech scene and eventually made its way to company #1's human resources staff. They contacted me asking to chat. I provided additional details about the situation via email and strongly suggested they reimburse me. They agreed. About a week later, I received the full $748.50 they owed me.

Company #1 gets a few points for reimbursing me, but that's it. You don't get a gold star for doing the right thing four months late after being pressured by public criticism. I shouldn't have been on the hook for that money in the first place. Their staff was aware of issues with the recruiter during my interview process, but did not contact me about it until I wrote that blog post.

You may be wondering why I didn't press the issue harder with them four months ago. Four months ago, I still hadn't found a new job, and there were other teams at the company that were hiring. I was concerned that making a fuss about the recruiter lying to me would eliminate other potential opportunities. Even as a more senior engineer with a strong resume, I felt like I had to play nice and eat that $700 if I wanted a job.

Thankfully, I had the privilege of having a Google engineer's salary at the time, so losing $700 was not the end of the world. Imagine how this situation would have played out for someone else. Someone with less privilege than me --- less money in the bank, perhaps less work experience, maybe a different skin color. Someone with a smaller professional network. They probably wouldn't have gotten their money back even if they wrote a blog post. If they did write a blog post, it might have blown up in their faces instead of being rewarded.

I think a lot about how much I get away with because of my privilege. I think a lot about how much I am probably not getting away with. I got a lot of positive feedback about my retrospective and some high fives when I finally got that money back, but I wonder about the other side of it. How many people are getting screwed by companies and not getting their money back? How many companies will never even interview me in the future because I might call out their mistakes publicly? How many people are afraid to even talk about bad experiences because they're desperate for work and are afraid to be seen as difficult? There are a lot of broken things here...

However, I want to leave this on a positive note! I assumed months ago that I would never see that money again. When I got reimbursed, I decided to pay most of it forward and just keep a little for myself. I donated the majority of the money to the awesome organizations below. If you have some extra money, I encourage you to share it with these groups. If you're one of the companies I called out in my post, you should donate money to these organizations as penance.

• Women of Color in Tech Chat - $100
• Hack the Hood - $100
• The Recompiler - $100
• Model View Culture - $100 (pending)
• Trans*H4CK - $50
• CollectQT - $50

It's a bit long, so feel free to take a look at the table of contents and jump around to the bits that interest you.

Update 2016-03-19: I quit my job at Seed today because it was not a good "culture fit." My original gut feeling that tiny, early stage startups were a bad fit for me has been validated.

Table of Contents

• My background and some disclaimers
• What I did: Part 1
  • Resume
  • Identifying potential employers
  • Talking to recruiters
  • Phone screens
  • References
  • In person interviews
  • Job offer & Negotiating
  • Conclusions
• What I did: Part 2
  • Reverse job listing
  • Promotion
  • Organization
  • Reviewing companies
  • Phone screens
  • SEED
  • Conclusions
• Miscellaneous advice, recommendations, and more
• Resources
  • My templates
  • Interview questions
• Contact me

My background and some disclaimers

I want to start with a little bit about me. I am a senior software engineer with a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from a state university. I focus on front-end web development and have about a decade's experience as a professional, including experience at big names like Google and IBM. I am well networked from years doing tech community organizing and activism. I am a cis, currently able-bodied, middle-class, white woman.

I mention all of these things to give context for my job search. I have privilege, experience, and networks that made my job search easier and enabled me to take some risks. Not everything that worked for me will work for you, especially if you are in a different situation.

Disclaimers

• I am not a career counselor, and my advice should be taken with context and a grain of salt.
• I am not suggesting anyone follow the steps I did. In some cases, it'd likely be a terrible idea. If you do follow any steps I did, I am not responsible for the consequences.
• I intentionally did not name the companies and people involved in my job search. In my experience, doing so can end badly. Please don't ask me publicly for names.
• Your mileage may vary. Job searches are hard. There is no one size fits all approach.

What I did: Part 1

People who saw the very public part of my job search (see part 2) may not realize a more private search happened first. This section is about that more traditional piece of looking for a new job.

Resume

Before I started the job search, I needed to update my resume. In theory, you should keep your resume regularly up-to-date, but in practice I never do because I hate it. Writing a good resume is hard, and I never seem to find the time.

The last iteration of my resume was created using a crappy google docs template over two years ago when I applied to google. I spent a half hour trying to modify it before I swore off fighting with word processing software and started from scratch on the web. I'm a front-end web developer, so this move made a lot of sense for me. It gave me a chance to showcase some of my skills and play around with design.

You can see my resume here.

Some general notes about my resume:

• I probably spent 15-20 hours putting this together. A lot of that time went into wordsmithing the content and trying out different designs until I found something I really liked.
• I had several people review it for style, readability, content, and typos/grammar before I started using it. Thanks to my friends who helped with this!
• It has a print css template, so that I can print to PDF for HR/recruiting staff who need a file they can send around.
• It's responsive, so people can easily look at it on mobile.
• The skill ratings are incredibly subjective. I spent a lot of time tweaking them.
• I took an intentional risk listing my activist work and writing. I decided it was a good way to filter out some companies that would be a bad fit for me.
• My resume is a little long. I made sure to put the more important things first. I also knew that I could get away with this because of my experience level.

Identifying potential employers

The first major step of the job search involved identifying companies I wanted to talk to. This search was private because I did not want my employer to know I was leaving, so I leaned a lot on my personal network.

I started by chatting with tech friends in Portland about what I was looking for:

• Located in Portland and would help me relocate.
• Role as a senior front-end web developer.
• Small-to-medium size.
• Company culture that won't make me want to set the building on fire.
• Develops a product I'm not ethically opposed to.

I identified three companies in Portland to talk to based on recommendations from friends. I knew at least one person at each company. I like talking to a friend who will give me honest answers and insights to compare against the shiny happy sales pitch I usually get from recruiters and hiring managers.

Talking to recruiters

My contacts at the three companies helped me start conversations with recruiters. An internal referral tends to work much better than cold applying via a jobs page.

My first interviews were informal discussions with the recruiters to discuss what I was looking for, my background, and my timeline for starting a new job. My new resume helped me walk them through my background. They talked to me about some positions that might be a good fit and answered some questions about their companies.

These all went well. Some of the recruiters immediately put me in contact with hiring managers to start interviewing. Others asked me to officially get into their system by applying online first.

Phone screens

Next up was phone screens. These varied pretty wildly from company to company. Some of them had me chat informally with the hiring manager and/or members of the team. Others had me answer some thoughtful technical questions. At least one asked me some technical trivia questions. Some just talked on the phone. Others used a variety of videoconference tools. I preferred videoconferencing (when it worked) because it's easier for me to talk face-to-face.

Some of the companies I interviewed with had me do a coding challenge. One of them was pair programming via videoconference. Another was a take home coding challenge that I pushed up to a github repo and discussed with them via email.

I went through this process with two teams at one of the companies because the first team was "not a good fit" (recruiter speak for "we're not going to tell you what happened"). There seemed to be minimal communication between the two teams, so there was a lot of repetition for me.

References

Around when I started phone interviews, I compiled a list of references. Many potential employers ask for them, so I wanted a list of three ready to go.

My list including the following:

• Co-worker from my previous employer who had been a reliable reference in the past.
• Friend I worked with at a previous employer who had been a reliable reference in the past.
• Co-worker from my employer at the time who I could trust to speak well of me and not tell people I was looking for a new job.

I asked people I could trust to provide a solid reference and to keep quiet about my job search. I checked with all three to make sure they were ok with being a reference and what contact information they would prefer I share.

Thankfully, I didn't need to use my references. If I had, I would have given them a heads up whenever a specific company would be contacting them.

In person interviews

Eventually, all of the companies wanted to do on site interviews. The first company that showed interest pushed me to come on a specific timeline, so I planned to come to Portland that week and urged the other companies to fit me into their schedule. I scheduled three interviews in three days. It was too much. I do not recommend this.

Preparation

The recruiter from company #1 said they would cover my travel and one night of hotel (more on this later). I asked the other companies to cover one night of hotel each. I covered a few nights of hotel, so I could stay a few extra days to see friends and check out apartments. I sorted out all the logistics for travel and put them in TripIt.

I asked each of the recruiters about expectations for interview dress. Tech companies vary, so I prefer to ask. Two of them said casual. One said business casual. I checked on the weather and packed clothes that would work for all three and one extra just in case.

I prepared an interview packet for each company and printed them out (see my templates for an example). Packets included:

• Company name
• Company location
• Company contacts
• Interview schedule
• A page for each interviewer. This is a mostly a blank page with their name and title. I use the blank space to take notes.
• A list of questions I want to have answered by the end of the day with space to write answers (see interview questions).
• Some notes for a compensation discussion, if they decide to have one.

I brought the interview packet, a pencil, my laptop, my wallet, my phone (sound and vibrations turned off), a snack bar (just in case my blood sugar gets wonky), and a water bottle to each interview. I gave myself enough time to arrive at each of the interviews at least 10-15 minutes early, just in case.

Day One

The first day at company #1 was an intense full day of interviews 9am-5pm.

Interviews included:

• A couple chatty interviews that seemed focused on checking me for culture fit.
• Several pair programming interviews in languages I was comfortable in (JavaScript, Ruby). Some on my computer. Some on the interviewer's computer.
• An interview or two where the other person directed me to write code, but it wasn't really pairing. At least one of these was remote via a videoconference.
• One interview involved analyzing code on a piece of paper in languages I am not familiar with for things that required familiarity with the language. This felt very close to a puzzle question to see if I would crack under pressure.
• Lunch interview with my friend. This was basically a chance to decompress.
• Interview with the hiring manager to ask how the day went and answer some questions.
• Final interview with the recruiter. This was a very awkward interview. The recruiter demanded to know my salary and got frustrated with me after I gave a number. This interview included what sounded like rehearsed speeches about how great a recruiter they were, that it's important to compromise to work for a good company, and I should tell them things I didn't want to tell other interviewers (this last one was extra weird). The recruiter was unable to answer the majority of my questions about company benefits and never followed up with answers when they said they would.

Pros:

• Most interviewers were kind and seemed interested in and prepared for the interview process.
• The pair programming technical interviews were interesting and collaborative.
• The culture fit interviews focused on values I care about.
• I liked the team and was excited about potentially working with them.

Cons:

• They pushed me aggressively to fly out on short notice despite me indicating I had important doctor appointments I could not reschedule.
• I got warned on fairly short notice (while I was on the plane to Portland) that they wanted me to bring my laptop to code on. I had to ask follow-up questions to figure out what they wanted me to have set up ahead of time.
• This was a really long day of interviews. I was completely exhausted.
• The puzzle interview seemed like a waste of my time and the interviewer's.
• The recruiter. They were the only person at the company who made me feel uncomfortable.
• There was no position to hire me into despite the hiring manager really liking me. The recruiter had led me to believe the company would make one for me if I came out to interview and they liked me.
• The recruiter lied to me about how much of my travel the company would cover. As a result, I was out $700 and did not find out until it was too late to ask the other two companies for help with flight costs. Lesson learned: always get things in writing.

Day Two

My second day of interviews at company #2 was a more leisurely half-day of interviews.

Interviews included:

• Chatty interviews with people from a variety of roles at the company.
• Informal lunch with the team I would be joining.
• Final interview with the hiring manager.

Pros:

• Respectful of my time.
• Everyone I chatted with was kind and interesting to talk to.
• I really liked the hiring manager and thought we would have worked well together.

Cons:

• People had mediocre answers to many of my questions about engineering, policies, and company culture. It sounded like the company was in a pretty bad state of startup growing pains and not handling them particularly well.
• The hiring manager resigned the week I interviewed. It was "no longer a good fit" when the team ceased to have a manager.

Day Three

My third day of interviews at company #3 was a packed half-day of interviews.

Interviews included:

• Chatty interviews with people from a variety of roles at the company. One of these was over a videoconference.
• Architecture discussions where I excitedly drew all over a whiteboard.
• A coding exercise where I coded on an interviewer's computer while the two interviewers watched over my shoulder.
• Some coding trivia questions that involved looking at weird JavaScript on a piece of paper and trying to explain how JavaScript handles weird cases that people intentionally avoid when writing actual code.
• Lunch interview with the hiring manager.
• Final interview with the hiring manager and recruiter. When the hiring manager left, the recruiter explained their benefits and asked me a few questions about my timeline.

Pros:

• Respectful of my time.
• Really interesting interviews with people from other roles (e.g. documentation, UX).
• Thoughtful architecture discussion was fun for me -- I love chatting through this stuff on a whiteboard.

Cons:

• Some technical difficulties with a videoconferencing interview messed up the schedule.
• It seemed like they tried to cram too much into a short time. Things might have went better if they made the day longer or had less interviewers.
• The paper coding interview was not a good test of my coding skills. I hate trivia questions about edge cases of languages.

Job offer & Negotiating

Companies #1 and #2 didn't work out because #1 interviewed me for a job that didn't exist and #2 lost their manager. Company #3 was potentially interested in hiring me.

I had several back and forths with the recruiter about what I was looking for in a job offer (mostly about salary). This ended with a call with the recruiter and the hiring manager where they discussed the terms of a potential offer. The title, salary, and relocation were all less than the lower end of what I wanted.

I asked the hiring manager why I was not getting a senior software engineer title, which is in line with my skills and level of experience. They felt I lacked leadership experience and technical skills. In the past, this claim might have kicked my insecurity into overdrive and convinced me I wasn't good enough. Not this time.

I spent the last several years upping my leadership game. All of the following are on my resume:

• Technical lead on a complex, high-value project at google over the last year.
• Manager for a year at a previous job.
• Organized the Girl Develop It chapter in Pittsburgh for almost two years.
• Helped organize Steel City Ruby (a Ruby language conference) for two years in a row.

My strong technical skills got me through google's intense hiring process and earned me a recent promotion, which is heavily based on technical achievements. On top of all this, the two companies I interviewed with earlier that week had explicitly called out these skills as being exciting to them. Either this company's interview process had failed to discover skills the other two companies found, or they were trying to convince me to devalue myself for a pay cut. Neither speaks well of them.

The hiring manager suggested that I was on the "cusp" of being senior and would probably be promoted in a year. I've seen this happen before. I've had it happen to me before. It's a bullshit line. The job offer you wanted today becomes a promise for a year from now. That year often turns into a year and a half or two years or NEVER.

I politely declined the job offer. I was unwilling to take a financial and professional step backwards to work for a company that was trying to start out our relationship by devaluing my skills. This is where my privilege comes in. I still had another job, and I was in a position where I could decline this one. If I was unemployed or deeply unhappy at that job, I probably would have begrudgingly accepted.

Conclusions

I went into this part of the job search fairly confident that I would end it with a new job. My ideal scenario was getting job offers from all three companies, having my pick, and being able to leverage the other offers for one really good one at the company I liked best. I figured I would get at least one or two decent job offers and be good to go. I'm generally a very cynical person, so this was a rare moment of optimism.

The job search ended up being a series of unfortunate events that even my cynicism couldn't have predicted. I ended up with no new job, out $700, and pissed off. I decided to go back to my job at google, focus on recovering from a recent health scare, and try again in a year.

What I did: Part 2

My plans to return to google didn't last long. The accumulated bullshit of working there came to a head, and I just didn't have it in me any more (a story for another day). I quit. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

I let myself enjoy a couple weeks of funemployment, and then I started my second attempt at searching for a new job.

Reverse job listing

Once people heard I quit my job, they started sending me job postings and asking what I was looking for. I wanted to give them some direction, but the prospect of repeating myself over and over was daunting. I decided to write up my thoughts into a blog post, so that I could share it and direct my job search.

What I thought would be a simple post grew into a lengthy, but thoughtful explanation of my background, what I have to offer, and what I was looking for. It ended up reading like a reverse job listing.

For a Limited Time Only: Looking for Work

Some general notes about my post:

• Writing this post helped me be much more introspective about the job search.
• The post is pretty long, so I improved readability with lots of well-labeled sections and some cute imagery.
• I explicitly mention who I do and do not want to hear from in the post to minimize wasting time.
• I mention the information I expect in a first contact email. This helped me answer some questions about a company early on. It also gave me an idea of how good people are at following directions.
• I added +jobs to my contact email, so that I could easily filter emails into a folder for review.
• I had several friends review the post for content and typos before I officially published it. Thanks for the help!
• I added the FAQ to head off some likely questions and give them a nice answer. Also, it was an excuse to include a picture of Leon in his stroller.
• I added some notes to the post indicating it is inactive, so that I don't continue to get requests.

Promotion

Once my post was published, I needed to get people looking at it. I sent it to the people who had already started reaching out to me. I brought back my previously deleted public twitter account to promote it. This is one of those times where having a large network helps a lot. My friends and acquaintances helped pass my post through a variety of channels and made sure it got attention.

Organization

Once my post got out, I got emails from a wide variety of companies that were interested in talking to me. I made a job search folder in google drive to keep track of the overall process and a status spreadsheet to keep track of all the companies. This folder also included templates for company questions and interview packets. When I got interested enough in a company to start talking to people, I created a folder with the company name and copies of those templates to fill out.

This may sound a little over-organized, but it was immensely helpful. I have a terrible memory, especially when there are a lot of moving parts. This process helped me keep track of everything. It also ensured that I was following a similar process with each company, so that I could evaluate them side-by-side, if needed.

Reviewing companies

I got a lot of emails, so I had to review and prioritize companies that I wanted to focus on talking to. I ended up getting emails from about 20 companies. About 15 of them ended up in the spreadsheet (the ones that didn't make it were way off the radar). From there, I did a little investigation on each to gauge my level of interest.

I started discussions with six companies I was interested in (if the process had gone longer, I might have talked to more). Some of them were a spot-on fit for what I said I was looking for. Some were close. One company was farther afield than I expected to be interested in, but seemed worth talking to. That was SEED, the company I ended up working with.

Phone screens

Once I had a little back and forth via email, I scheduled an initial chat with my contact from each of the companies via videoconference. As requested in my post, the people I was talking with were actual tech folks who worked for the companies. These early conversations dug into answering questions from my questions template and talking about what I was looking for.

After these initial discussions, I was fairly excited about two companies that were a nice fit with my post, willing to continue chatting with some folks that mostly fit and seemed like good backups, and surprisingly excited about the company that initially seemed like a bad fit.

I had one follow-up technical screen that involved some coding in JavaScript over a video chat. Some of the other companies planned to follow up with me to discuss technical screens and in person interviews.

I politely ended my discussions with other companies when I accepted an offer from SEED. I explained that I had an exciting opportunity with a startup that I didn't want to pass up, but would keep them in mind for the future.

SEED

Update 2016-03-19: I quit my job at Seed today because it was not a good "culture fit." My original gut feeling that tiny, early stage startups were a bad fit for me has been validated.

I want to talk the most about SEED because that's where I ended up, and I didn't expect to. SEED is a tiny, early stage startup that is working on developing banking for small businesses.

Tiny, early stage startups are also unlikely to be a good fit.

The above line is from my job post, so you can see why I didn't expect to end up there. The initial email was from an acquaintance who heard I was in the market from a friend I trust. I responded politely saying that I wasn't sure if a startup would be a good fit, but I'd be happy to learn more. They piqued my interest with some reasons why SEED wasn't like your average startup, and I agreed to chat.

We spent over an hour on google hangouts chatting about the company, the people, the values, and the potential there. I was really impressed by the answers. The CTO sitting next to them piped up "it's a marathon, not a sprint" when I asked about work/life balance. Next, I talked to the CEO (also over a hangout). We chatted for over an hour and had a detailed discussion about the one item on my "dealbreakers" list they hit --- no HR. I really appreciated how willing they were to engage with me on a tough topic. I later chatted with everyone else from the team one-on-one (most of them over hangouts, one in person).

After interviewing with everyone on the team, SEED seemed almost too good to be true. It was the one magical unicorn startup that I'd want to work at. I don't dislike startups because they're small and early stage. I dislike them because of the baggage that often comes with them: frat culture, drinking, long work hours, low pay, no diversity, etc. This company didn't want to have those things and was trying to avoid them. Everyone I talked to was respectful of my skills and opinions and seemed genuinely interested in working with me. The product sounded like an opportunity to help a wide variety of people (not just a bunch of 20-something brogrammers in SF). I would have an opportunity to help build the user experience and user interface of the product and the culture of the company. They already were working with a diversity consultant I trusted.

I was super excited, but also wary. Things that seem too good to be true usually are. I consulted the whisper network to get some background. Were there any skeletons in closets I should be aware of? The whisper network said no. This was actually a decent group of people. The whisper network said go for it.

Continuing to support the hypothesis that they're a decent company, I got a job offer I was happy with and assistance for moving to Portland. I didn't negotiate. I probably should have because you're always supposed to, but I hate negotiating, and I was happy with the offer. This may bite me in the ass later. I guess time will tell.

Conclusions

A public job search is a lot easier than a private one because you can talk freely and openly about what you're looking for. Searching for a job is harder than it seems. It can be a full-time job all by itself, so it's more manageable when you're unemployed. This is where the privilege comes in again. I had the ability to quit my job and be unemployed while I searched. Many people have no such luxury.

I am proud of my reverse job listing. It helped me collect my thoughts, it got the right kinds of companies interested in talking to me, and it seemed to inspire some other people looking for work.

Asking companies lots of questions is helpful. It's important to know what you're signing up for, and you learn that by asking questions. Most companies saw this in a positive light and appreciated that I cared. A few noted that it felt like I was interviewing them too (in a positive way).

Sometimes the best place for you is not what you're expecting, so it's important to keep an open mind. It's easier to do this when things come from a network you trust.

I've been at SEED for two and a half months now. I'm happy there. I enjoy the team I work with --- we have some great shared values and respect for one another. I'm excited about the work I'm doing in a way I haven't been in years. I'm learning a ton and looking forward to more. I'm debating a keg of stumptown coldbrew for the office because who needs beer when you can have coffee.

This second search was a success. I'm less mad about the first search going sour because it meant I ended up in a better place. I still want that $700 back though.

Miscellaneous advice, recommendations, and more

• Apply to a bunch of companies. Job searches fail for all sorts of reasons. You want backups.
• Understand what you're looking for and what you have to offer. If you don't understand these things yourself, you'll have a hard time convincing others.
• Know what your situation is. Do you desperately need a job now? What are you willing to compromise on? When should you walk away?
• Be organized.
• Take notes. Keep track of things you want to ask people. Take note of the answers you get when you ask them things.
• Get things in writing, especially things involving money.
• Investigate the job market for the role, location(s), and types of companies you're looking for. This will help inform expectations about things like salary.
• Research companies before you talk to them.
• Get intel from the whisper network, if possible. People rarely talk about negative experiences with companies publicly for fear of backlash. The whisper network can warn you if you're walking into a bad situation.

Resources

Here is a collection of resources that might be helpful to you.

My templates

• Interview preparation template
• Organization information template

Interview questions

Here is the list of questions I used during my interview process. I didn't always ask all of them. A lot of them got answered during discussion rather than directly asking questions one after the other. These were the right questions for me, but may not be for you.

Special thanks to the following people who shared their own list of job search questions, some of which are included in my list

• Liz Abinante - Getting hired without getting burned: Sniffing for culture smells
• Julia Evans - Questions I'm asking in interviews

Intro

• What does your team work on?
• Who are your target end users?
• What size is the team?

Technical

• What does your stack look like? What languages/tools/etc. do you use?
• What version control system do you use?
• Do you test your code? What does the process look like? What does your QA process look like? Who does QA?
• Do you do code review? What does the process look like? Does all code get reviewed?
• Describe your deployment process – how do you find bugs in your team’s code? What recourse do you have when you find a serious bug in production code?
• Who is responsible for doing deployment? How often do you deploy?
• How do you test new features and development (e.g. user testing, user studies, a/b testing)?
• How do you think about code correctness?
• What does your dev env look like? (mac, linux, etc.)?

Code Maintenance

• How do you make sure that all code is understood by more than one person?
• Do you have an issue tracker? How do you manage triaging bugs?
• How do you balance support work and feature development?
• What’s your approach to technical debt?

Front-end Bits

• Supported browsers?
• Mobile/tablet/etc.?
• Accessibility?

Planning

• How are decisions made? Is architecture dictated top down? Are ideas from anyone welcomed? If so, in what scope/context?
• Is there a written roadmap all developers can see? How far into the future does it extend? How closely is it followed?

Collaboration

• What does your team communication look like (e.g. irc, in person, email)?
• Do you work with other engineering teams? What does that look like?
• Do you have designers you work with internally? What does that interaction look like? Is it a collaborative process?
• Do you interact with customers? If so, what do those interactions/relationships look like? If not, does someone else interact with them? Do you have communication with them?
• How/when do developers talk to non-developers? Is it easy to talk to the people who will be using your product?

Remote (if relevant)

• How much of your team is remote?
• How long have you been doing remote?
• How do they work together and ensure good communication and collaboration?
• What tools do you use?
• Can you tell me a little about the pros/cons of being a remote employee?
• Is there support for a home office and/or room at a coworking space?

Team Interactions

• How does engineering work get assigned?
• How are technical decisions made and communicated?
• How are disagreements solved - both technical disagreements and other kinds? What happens when personalities clash?
• When something goes wrong, how do you handle it? Do devs get shamed for breaking the build?
• How often do you have meetings? Are there any scheduled/standing meetings?

Employee Development

• Tell me a little bit about your team onboarding process.
• How is employee performance evaluated? What sort of growth is available for senior engineers?
• Can you give me an example of someone who’s been in a technical role at your company for a long time, and how their responsibilities and role have changed?
• How does your company support the growth of junior engineers?
• Work/Life Balance
• Would I need to be on call? How often? What is the SLA? How often do people tend to be paged? How often is it a real emergency?
• Does this position require travel? How often?
• How many hours do people work in an average week? In your busiest weeks?
• Is variability tolerated or is everyone expected to be on the same schedule?
• How often are there emergencies or times when people have to work extra hours?
• Do people work on the weekend?
• How much vacation do people get? Sick leave? Are they combined or separate?
• Do people check in when they’re on vacation? How often?
• (if not remote) Is it possible to work from home, say, 1 or 2 days a week? Does anyone do this?

Employee Support

• employee education/training/development/etc.?
• support for conference attendance?
• tech community involvement? locally? conferences?
• What are the policies around employee activities outside of work? Open source contribution?

Diversity

• Could you tell me a little current diversity at your company? Any steps they are working on to improve?
• Are there any internal employee resource groups?
• Is my diversity in tech advocacy work ok? E.g. writing for model view culture.
• Interview Process
• Can you tell me about what I can expect from the interview process?

Contact me

If you would like to contact me about any of the items listed below, please email me at julie.pagano+job-retro@gmail.com. I make no promises about responding.

• Copyediting feedback (e.g. typos, grammar mistakes, weird wording).
• Questions about something in the post.
• Feedback about something in the post.
• Paying me that $700.

Please do not contact me about any of the following.

• Press wanting to talk to me about the post.
• Companies wanting free advice about hiring/interviewing/etc.
• Asking me to name the companies that are intentionally unnamed in this post.
• Strangers asking me for advice about their job search. I wish I could help you, but I am not qualified to be a career counselor nor do I have the time right now. If you are a friend, you are not included here, and you know how to find me on other channels.
• Sending me patronizing feedback about my job search. I see you, dudes, waiting. DON'T DO IT. Especially nasty emails will be published. You've been warned.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert on any of this. I strongly recommend consulting people from impacted groups for feedback.

• Requesting personal information
• Gender
• Why are you picking on Grace Hopper Celebration?
• Conclusion

Requesting personal information

Are you an organization that requests personal information from people? Maybe you run a conference and want attendee information. Maybe you develop software and want to learn about your users. Whatever your use case, asking for personal information should be done thoughtfully.

Being thoughtful should include asking a lot of questions:

• What information do you want?
• Why do you want this information?
• What information is required? Why?
• How will you format requests for information?
• How will you communicate requests for information?
• How will requests impact the people you are asking?
• How will this information be stored? Who will have access to it? Is it secure?

Let's break each of these down and talk about why they are important.

What information do you want?

Start by making a list of personal information that you want to request from people. You need this for the other questions.

Why do you want this information?

Evaluate why you want each piece of personal information. If you cannot come up with a good reason, you should not be asking for it.

What information is required? Why?

For each piece of personal information, evaluate if it should be required or optional. If you cannot come up with a compelling reason for it to be required, it should be optional.

How will you format requests for information?

For each piece of personal information, consider how you will format a request for that information. Will you give the person a text box or a list of options to choose from? If the latter, how will you populate that list?

Many organizations prefer to use a list of options because it allows for information to be formatted in a uniform way. However, lists are a common source of problems. This post was prompted by an organization failing when requesting gender information by using a list.

An open text box requires more work to aggregate information, but it often provides a better user experience. If you do not have the time to aggregate the information, really think about if you should be requesting it in the first place.

Carina C. Zona's excellent talk, "Schemas for the Real World," discusses this and provides some great examples. I recommend giving the talk and slides a look if you want to learn more.

How will you communicate requests for information?

How will you communicate to people why you are requesting this information and what it will be used for? Personal information is important to many people, and they want to understand why you want it and how it will be used. Thoughtful communication not only informs people, but can assuage worries about privacy or even make them feel good about your organization.

How will requests impact the people you are asking?

Think about how your requests will impact people. Consult with people from impacted groups to test things out and get feedback. You should care about this. It is a part of the user experience for your event, product, etc.

Some requests can lead to a negative response. Will requiring private personal information make them less likely to use your product? Will a poorly constructed list make someone feel unwelcome at your event?

Some requests can lead to a positive response. Will asking people about their dietary needs make them feel welcome at your event? Will providing an open text box for personal information make people excited about your product because they can express themselves accurately?

How will this information be stored? Who will have access to it? Is it secure?

For each piece of of personal information, evaluate if it is personally identifiable information (PII). PII has security (and sometimes legal) implications. I am not an information security expert or a lawyer, so I am not qualified to expand on these implications. If you are asking people for PII, you should consult with experts about these issues.

Gender

Gender is the piece of personal information I most frequently see organizations get wrong. One such failure prompted this post, so I want to expand on this.

Many organizations request gender information when it is not needed. Sometimes out of laziness. Sometimes out of habit. Really think about why you are requesting gender information. If you don't have a compelling reason, don't ask for it.

Assuming you have a legitimate reason to request gender information, you need to be thoughtful about how you do so.

Let's start at the beginning. Gender is not binary. If you give two options: male and female, you are doing it wrong. Let me repeat. GENDER IS NOT BINARY.

Some organizations want to indicate they are inclusive of transgender people and try to do so in their gender form. This often goes terribly wrong. For example, look at Grace Hopper Celebration 2015's registration form below.

Original gender input for Grace Hopper Celebration's registration.

They get a point for understanding that gender is not binary, but fail pretty badly by including "MTF" (male to female) and "FTM" (female to male) in a narrow set of options. While some transgender people prefer to identify this way, many would find this a frustrating and upsetting choice to make. For example, a transgender woman is a woman and would likely want to select the female option in the dropdown.

After receiving criticism about this, they modified the form as seen below.

Modified gender input for Grace Hopper Celebration's registration.

This version of the form is about as bad as the previous one. While some transgender people may be ok with this, many are not and find it problematic. This form makes them choose between their gender (e.g. female for a transgender woman) and sharing the information that they are transgender. Most people use transgender as an adjective or modifier, not as their gender. I am a cisgender woman. Some of my friends are transgender women. We are all women working in tech, and we find this gender dropdown unacceptable.

Both iterations of the form can make people feel obligated to disclose that they are transgender. For many, this is information that they do not want to disclose for a wide variety of reasons including privacy and safety. This requirement may upset people and make them feel unwelcome or unsafe at an event. The organization's interest in obtaining this demographic information should not trump the comfort and safety of potential attendees.

How do you handle the complexities of gender and make sure you do the right thing? Use a text box! Below is an example of the gender input on the registration form for Open Source Bridge 2015. They also make it optional, so that people are not obligated to share this private information.

Gender input for Open Source Bridge's registration.

Why are you picking on Grace Hopper Celebration?

Here I am, yet again, writing a blog post about how Grace Hopper Celebration has failed. I'm not happy about it, but they leave me little choice. I expect more from an event that bills itself as "the World's Largest Gathering of Women Technologists." An event run by the Anita Borg Institute, a prominent organization with a budget of several million dollars. I am not picking on them. I am trying to hold them accountable. As a member of the demographic they supposedly serve, I expect more.

As a note, they published an explanation and apology about what happened, but I find it lacking. I expect more.

We recognize that a write-in box for gender identity that allows participants to simply mark their own gender identity is the optimal solution, but are currently unable to provide this service given our current resources.

Conclusion

Please be thoughtful when your organization requests personal information from people. Ask a lot of questions. Only require information that is critical. Be thoughtful about how you ask for information. Communicate why you want the information. Empathize with the people you are asking. Get feedback before you move forward on a path that may end badly. Make sure you have the resources available to address problems and make changes in the case that you make a mistake.

• What I'm Up To
• Recommended Reading & Current Events
• Mass Media Musings
• My Writing
• Miscellany

What I'm Up To

• I quit my job and am currently funemployed! Check out my post about looking for work if you want to recommend a job or help me find one.
• I am keeping some structure during my funemployment. I will use some of my time off to get caught up on technologies I missed in Google's not-invented-here bubble. Let me know if you have an open source project that needs some front-end help. I am especially interested in projects that use shiny new front-end technologies and/or are working to help people.

Recommended Reading & Current Events

Disclaimer: For a variety of personal reasons I am not nearly as up-to-date with current events as I used to be. If I don't include something here, it's not because I don't care, but because I am not qualified to talk on the subject.

Recommended Reading

• Houston, We Have A Problem. by Stephanie Morillo. If you are doing diversity in tech work, read this. It's important.

I’m now at the point where “diversity in tech” has become synonymous with white women. And I’m here to raise the red flag.

In the News

• Lauren Voswinkel is calling for us to talk about pay using the #talkpay hashtag on May 1st (International Workers' Day). That is today. I'll be joining in. I hope to see you there.
• Nonviolence as Compliance in Baltimore and Living With Everyday Violence in Black Baltimore by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con.

• Check out #BaltimoreUprising for updates on what is going on in Baltimore from Netta and DeRay.

Mass Media Musings

Games

Neko Atsume

Do you like cats? Do you have an iPhone or Android phone? Then I have the game for you. Neko Atsume! Just look at how cute these kitties are. How can you resist the cuteness?

The gist of the game is you buy food and toys for your garden to attract cats. It sounds silly, but it has kept my attention for a suprising amount of time. It's the sort of thing I pick up a few times a day, smile at the kitties, spend some of my fish (the currency in the game), rearrange the garden, and then put it back down.

It's a Japanese game, but is easy to play without knowing Japanese (I know about five words). Check out this guide for playing Neko Atsume to get started.

Film

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

I want to give this film a second viewing and write a proper review for it, but it is on Netflix instant, so I want to bring it to your attention now.

This "Iranian vampire western" is a visually stunning and intriguing take on the vampire story. I went in not knowing much, but excited to watch yet another vampire film. I got that and then some. It was more art house than expected, but not unpleasantly so. If any of those things sound interesting to you, I highly recommend giving it a viewing while it's up on Netflix. I will hopefully write a proper review some time soon.

Television

I finished up the new Daredevil (the Netflix series, not the horrible movie with Affleck). One of my favorites, Orphan Black, is back for a third season. Stay tuned for writeups in upcoming dispatches.

My Writing

I wrote a bunch of things in my time away from the dispatches. Here are some highlights if you are interesting.

• Stop Centering the Majority in Minority Spaces
• Conference Recap: CUSEC 2015
• Diversity for Sale

Miscellany

• Quitting my job means no more free food, so Julie’s Cooking Corner will make a return soon.
• One of the places I sell swag has leggings now. Should I make firebee leggings? Would that be TOO MUCH? Do I care?
• Dispatch title from "Nothing to Prove" by The Doubleclicks [youtube]. Warning: the video may hit you right in the feels. My room was inexplicably filled with onions when I watched it.

Disclaimer: I am not interested in hearing from independent recruiters, recruiting firms, etc. This post is not for you. Everyone else, continue on! This post will self-destruct when I find a new job.

For a limited time only, I am on the market for a new job. A bunch of friends asked what I was looking for, so I decided to put it all in writing rather than repeat myself many times. Please take a look and get in touch if you think I would be a good fit for your organization and vice versa.

Where

I am currently based in Pittsburgh, PA. I want to move to Portland, OR in the relatively near future. I am looking for companies that fit either of the following:

• Based in Portland.
• Based in the US and support remote employees.

FAQs

Last updated 2015-04-23 at 6:30pm

Why do you want to move to Portland?

I've been in Pittsburgh a long time (~12 years), and it's no longer a good fit for me. It's time for a change. I spent a bunch of time in Portland last summer for AdaCamp and OSBridge and fell in love with the city. My awesome friends in Portland are lobbying hard for me to move. The tech community there sounds welcoming. And a hundred other little reasons.

Bonus: I am told it will be socially acceptable to push my cat around in a stroller there.

Why are you leaving Google?

Working at Google for the last 2+ years has been really valuable for my growth as a software engineer. I learned a lot and expanded my skills. I am grateful for the kind and talented people I worked with during my tenure there. However, just like Pittsburgh, Google isn't the right fit for me any more. Below are some reasons why.

• Google does not allow remote work and there aren't opportunities for me in Portland.
• Working for a huge megacorporation is not a good fit for me. It was a beneficial learning experience, but I am hoping to move somewhere smaller. Up side: most tech companies are smaller than Google.
• Google has a very bad case of not invented here syndrome (often for legitimate reasons). This makes it difficult for me to keep up with the latest and greatest in front-end web development, and I do not want to fall behind in my field.
• It was difficult for me to maintain good work/life balance at Google. I want something more sustainable.

When it comes to diversity in tech, things are changing. As with almost every other subject, people are ready to “disrupt”… and turn a profit.

Reduced to Clickbait

The press is one of the groups most obviously profiting off the increasing focus on diversity. Many have turned it into glorified clickbait, while others write puff pieces that help companies polish their image. It seems like almost every prominent publication has written a superficial piece about diversity or women in tech. Some journalists dig into diversity issues, ask important questions, and add value to the discussion, but they seem to be the exception.

When Julie Ann Horvath discussed why she left GitHub, her mentions on Twitter filled with journalists pleading for their piece of the story. Much digital ink was spilled, but there was little digging into systemic issues at GitHub or the industry. Much of it read like a gossip column about an isolated incident. Something similar happened with Whitney Wolfe and Tinder. Look at enough of these stories and a pattern emerges. Meanwhile, it’s difficult to find even half as many positive stories promoting underrepresented people and their projects.

The worst of the tech press look more like tabloids and paparazzi every day. They consume the pain and hardship of marginalized people harmed by the tech industry and transform it into a profit with little consideration for the consequences. You can literally see them circling when something goes wrong. At least celebrities have trained staff to help them navigate these shark-infested waters. Most tech workers have no such luxury when journalists come to collect their pound of flesh, and somehow they can’t draw the same attention when something positive happens.

Check the Diversity Box

A positive thing about diversity in tech being so actively talked about is that organizations ignore the issue at their peril. It’s become an expectation that companies, particularly large ones, will throw some time, resources, and money at the problem. If nothing else, they’ll speak about diversity to make sure they’re paying sufficient lip service to the topic. But so much of this is just window dressing.

The money spent on “diversity in tech” efforts is often a drop in the bucket — well worth the free press (and sometimes a tax write-off). Participation in diversity activities often falls on volunteers from their own employee base — free labor in the form of a second shift. Focus is often given to the “pipeline problem,” allowing tech companies to address diversity without making changes within their own organization.

Many tech companies take parallel steps towards addressing diversity by targeting low hanging fruit. Few are acknowledging, let alone trying to address, the complex, systemic issues at the heart of the problem. If none of them stand out, they can all get away with a degree of mediocrity and still check that “diversity” box. With a consistently low bar, even a little effort gets a gold star.

The Numbers…Sort Of

Every now and again, a company will stand out and move the bar ever so slightly. This year, Google released numbers about the diversity of their employees, data people have been requesting for years. Once one large company gave in, others followed suit to keep up (see Open Diversity Data for a list of companies and the state of their diversity numbers). Previously, many companies refused to publicize this data, arguing that it was competitive information. These numbers were not the first to be released, they’re just the ones that got a lot of attention. Last year, Tracy Chou created a self-reporting system for the gender breakdown of tech employees at companies. The results include numbers from startups and small to midsize companies.

An attempt at comparing data on race from Bureau of Labor Statistics, Taulbee Survey, NSF, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Twitter. While it is interesting, the varying survey methodologies and years make this a less-than-scientific comparison. Raw data here.

A similarly flawed attempt at comparing data on gender. Raw data here.

These diversity numbers are often limited and inconsistent, making deeper analysis (e.g. comparison with other companies, the Taulbee survey, or data from the NSF) flawed or impossible. For example, some data includes leadership numbers, but none of the ones I reviewed included information about leadership in technical roles. Amazon and Microsoft didn’t break out data about technical staff at all. Groups including Native Americans don’t even get their own section — they are collapsed into a tiny percentage marked “other.” Unsurprisingly, none of these companies shared numbers about their attrition rates.

I am curious to see what happens with these numbers. Are there goals for improvement? Will they share updates every year, so we can track progress? Will we get better data that allows us to evaluate the intersections of things like race and gender? Will we learn what diversity looks like in technical leadership? Or will we give these companies a pat on the back for releasing limited data every now and again?

The Pipeline Problem

A huge amount of diversity effort and money is focused on “the pipeline problem.” Not enough young people get interested in technology, so they never enter the pipeline, so they never get CS degrees, so they never are available to hire as programmers, so these tech companies never get their “fair share” of diversity. It is simultaneously the excuse many use for issues with diversity and their best hope to improve it in the future.

The monomaniacal focus on this narrative does a disservice to underrepresented people in tech in the present and future. A pipeline has many entry points and continues on for a distance. Focusing solely on a single entry point leaves the rest to disrepair. The metaphor is so broken that many have added their own sardonic twists: The pipeline is leaky and full of acid. The pipeline leads to a sewage treatment plant. The pipeline ends in a meat grinder.

In popular conceptions of the “pipeline”, the single entry point is the traditional computer science degree. Companies ignore other methods of entry like apprenticeship programs, hiring self-taught programmers, or transitioning staff from related roles like QA and support. Many small and midsize companies aren’t even willing to invest in junior engineers who do have a traditional CS degree. Companies simultaneously claim they care about diversity and hiring the best engineers, yet their “meritocratic” methods for identifying the latter often are in conflict with the former.

But for all of the moaning the industry does regarding the perceived lack of qualified Blacks and Latin@s for highly skilled positions, Black and Latin@ CS students are graduating from top universities at twice the rate of their representation at tech companies.
– from How Blacks and Latin@s Are Left Out of Tech Hiring by Stephanie Morillo

Many companies ignore large portions of the pipeline once you leave the beginning. They’re not sharing their attrition numbers. You’re unlikely to hear about how they’re addressing toxic environments. The most you will probably hear about is addressing issues related to babies (e.g. maternity leave, freezing eggs). I’ve heard more than a few stories about leaders largely blaming motherhood for the lack of diversity in tech despite studies to the contrary. Ultimately, it’s easier for people to point at the “pipeline problem,” allowing them to wash their hands of investing in change within their own organizations in the here and now.

The Cost of Learning to Code

Another form of school has been popping up to profit off an alternate route to becoming a programmer, often targeting people who got the “wrong” college degree or never were able to attend college. Code schools are unaccredited and widely varying in cost, duration, quality, and outcome. They’re selling the idea of becoming a programmer (an occupation that, in theory, is lucrative and has job security) for quicker and cheaper than a college degree. The relatively expensive tuition and living expenses cannot be paid with traditional student loans, and scholarship programs are often small or very limited in quantity.

Examples of varying durations and costs for some well-known code schools for immersive programs intended to prepare someone to work as a programmer (data as of 2014-11-29).

Unlike accredited colleges, it’s difficult to get data on the quality of these programs or the success rates of their students. Finding a job after finishing one these programs often depends on the code school’s network of companies (some of which are obligated to pay a fee to the school). You’re unlikely to hear honest criticism from students because they are beholden to the school to find jobs to pay off the personal loan they probably took out to attend the program. Additionally, for-profit educational endeavors with such little transparency have a high potential for predatory behavior.

The (not so optional) Second Shift

One of the ways that companies “profit” off diversity is leveraging free labor to support the diversity efforts that promote their company. Diversity is important, but not valuable enough to compensate many of the people needed to make it happen.

This work often falls on “diverse” employees. They are frequently asked to volunteer for outreach with students to help the pipeline, recruiting for hiring, and general diversity events to show how much the company cares. This work becomes a second shift, something they have to do on top of their regular job. Issues like stereotype threat and unconscious bias often mean that people from marginalized groups already work harder to see the same (or less) progress in their careers. It all adds up to a lot of extra work for people to manage. They don’t have to volunteer, but they “probably should” if they care about diversity.

Organizations don’t just ask their own employees. I have heard of numerous cases of people being asked to help with diversity consulting for free or some menial compensation like free lunch. One of the top tech companies once asked me to come give a talk for their women in tech group and let them record it to help future employees for the low low price of free lunch and a tour. Many code schools rely on free labor from mentors to keep their programs running.

Some of the second shift work is less blatant. If you are a member of an underrepresented group, you are often expected to be the very model of a modern minority techworker. People will ask you about diversity at the company you work at, and you will feel obligated to speak positively about it. You become walking, talking marketing material. Criticism of their diversity efforts and stories about negative experiences run a risk, so most don’t speak up… there’s a reason this piece is written anonymously.

The (Male) Allies

Now that diversity in tech is a commodity, everyone wants in. They can profit off it, use it for exposure, or even turn it into a redemption story. The most privileged people in tech are now leveraging the stories of marginalized people for their own benefit. Sometimes this comes at the expense of the very people they claim they are helping.

Screenshot from the Innovating Women Indiegogo page

For example, Vivek Wadhwa has recently been receiving press for putting together a publication titled Innovating Women that focuses on the stories of “women in technology and other fields of innovation.” He raised over $40k in an Indiegogo campaign to fund the development of the book. For contrast, Farai Chideya, the woman working with him to develop the book, received very little press. The proceeds for the book go to a fund for women at Singularity University, an unaccredited, for-profit organization that Wadhwa is involved in. Meanwhile, many women, people of color, and others struggle to raise a tiny fraction of that money to tell their own stories, support their own projects, and create spaces that are focused on supporting others like them.

A prime example of this phenomena is the male allies plenary panel at Grace Hopper Celebration, the world’s largest gathering of women technologists run by the Anita Borg Institute. A conference with 8,000 attendees, 94% of them women, were asked to attend a plenary panel (the only event in that time slot with the expectation all will attend) filled with high-level white male executives talking about their role as male allies. One of these executives was the relatively new CEO of GoDaddy, a company known for years of sexist advertising, clearly aiming for a nice redemption story.

Unsurprisingly, the Anita Borg Institute receive a lot of pushback prior to the event. Why was an audience of 7,500 women technologists being asked to listen to men talk about being allies? Why is the CEO of a tech company reviled by many of those women on the panel? At a conference for women in tech, wouldn’t it be better to give women the stage for a plenary session? Are male allies so desperate for recognition that they need the biggest women in tech conference and 7,500 women to collectively give them a cookie?

Photo of Ally Bingo cards handed out by the Union of Concerned Feminists during the panel.

The show went on. Before the panel started, a group of people calling themselves the “Union of Concerned Feminists” handed out a bingo card covering topics they suspected would come up during the panel. They weren’t wrong. The panel was nothing new. Filled with platitudes, cliches, and a lot of patting on the back. About halfway through, a woman yelled “BINGO!”

Some of the discussions were ignorant at best and harmful at worst (they definitely failed the bad ally quiz). Many tasked women with solving diversity themselves with advice to “push through boundaries,” “be great,” and see this as “just another class of problem” to solve as engineers. “Lean in” is an even more bitter pill to swallow when it comes from some of the most privileged people in the tech industry, especially when they are labeled “allies.”

There was no Q&A after the panel. Some of the panelists met the next day for a reverse panel where they listened to women, but the larger damage was already done. Unfortunately, I cannot provide you with a link to the video to evaluate for yourself.

Unlike other livestreams from GHC, the Male Allies panel is no longer available to view. A copy of the stream posted to YouTube was removed via a copyright request from the Anita Borg Institute. A transcript is available here, via Julie Pagano.

Diversity is for White Women

In August of this year, Mikki Kendall launched the #solidarityisforwhitewomen hashtag, highlighting exclusion, abuse and racism in the feminist movement. Unfortunately, we’ve seen similar themes across the diversity and feminism in tech movements.

Many of the examples I cite throughout this piece are about women despite the many other underrepresented groups in the tech industry. Much of the “diversity” being commoditized is nearly as homogenous as the industry itself. So many of these efforts focus on women, and while it is not explicitly stated, mostly middle-to-upper class, straight, white, cis, able-bodied women.

It’s easy to focus on that group. They’re the low hanging fruit. They have access to technology. They go to the “good” universities. They’ve been primed by Lean In, and they’ll work twice as hard for less pay. Companies can blame motherhood when they leave, and then start all over again by pushing more of them into the pipeline.

These women suffer from being commoditized, but many also profit off it. The poster child for this is Sheryl Sandberg, the author of Lean In. She has created an entire empire around her self-help book that purports to provide advice for all women, but is mostly applicable to well-off, heterosexual, white women who aspire to motherhood and leadership roles.

It is unpleasant to be tokenized and profited off of, but at least it opens some doors. You may be a minority, but there are likely enough of you to form groups in your workplace or community. There are dozens of organizations targeting your needs and advocating for you. If you want to start your own women in tech group, you won’t have trouble finding support and press. Many other people are not so lucky.

Black and Hispanic programmers find it difficult to find jobs and are often paid less if they do find them. Often, there is nobody else like them in their workplaces, maybe even not in their professional communities. There are very few organizations to support them. Some people will have their identities erased entirely by being thrown into an “other” category, or by efforts which completely ignore the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and other sites of oppression. When people from these groups ask for more attention or criticize the homogenous nature of many “diversity in tech” initiatives, they will often be dismissed as difficult or divisive.

When diversity is seen as something to profit off of, the people and organizations who see it that way benefit the most. The “easy” underrepresented groups get a mix of help and exploitation. Meanwhile, the most marginalized people, who would benefit the most from support, tend to be left out in the cold to fend for themselves.

Background

I mentioned in my goals for 2015 that CUSEC was an exception to my "no more tech community" rule. I could have cancelled, but I was unwilling to screw over the student conference organizers because the tech community had done me harm.

The conference was three months after I decided to quit the tech community. I began to dread going back after a season's break, but I keep my promises. I practiced my talk. I got ready to go. I can do this. It's only three days.

I am not telling you this because I want to depress you. I am telling you this for context. People who follow my writing already knew about it, and now you're caught up too.

The conference

I had a wonderful time at CUSEC. I couldn't have asked for a better last conference. I got to leave on a positive note with a little hope for the future. That means more to me than I can put into words. Thank you.

I got to open the conference with a version of my impostor syndrome talk. I love giving this talk as an opening keynote because it gives me the opportunity to set an encouraging, positive tone for the rest of the event. I was especially excited to give this talk to an audience of students. It was a chance to send that message early, so that hopefully people get help before impostor syndrome hurts their careers. I was a little worried about doing Q&A on stage (I usually avoid this), but every question I got was valuable.

I had so many wonderful conversations with people afterwards about impostor syndrome and related topics. It was clear that they cared. I think my talk had a positive impact, and that really warms my heart.

Through a lovely bit of serendipity, some of the other keynote speakers were people who had encouraged me to start public speaking in one way or another. My talk includes a short anecdote about Aaron Patterson being vulnerable on stage about his fear of public speaking. Years ago, Sandi Metz chatted with me on a Google Hangout and urged me to give public speaking a try. I am not one for hero worship, but sharing a stage with people who I look up to made this special for me.

Ultimately, the people are what made this conference really stand out for me. I met so many wonderful people, I couldn't possibly name them all. I got to connect more with people who I knew in passing from the internet or other events. I met loads of new people. I talked to so many students who are excited about programming. I had thoughtful, engaging discussions with people about a wide range of topics.

The only negative thing I can say about CUSEC is that Montréal was way too cold. However, I don't hold the conference responsible for that. I want to come back and visit when it's warm out, so I can properly enjoy and explore the city.

A note on women speakers

I didn't think about this until another speaker pointed it out, but the conference had a large number of awesome women speakers. This is notable because it is rare. Not only is it rare, but many conference organizers claim it is too hard to do.

If my experience as a speaker is any indicator, the gender diversity in the speaker lineup was not an accident. The CUSEC organizers clearly cared about this and put hard work into it. They reached out early in the year to make sure the conference was on my schedule before I was booked up. They showed excitement about a topic I speak about that would fit their audience. When I asked about a code of conduct, they took it seriously and clearly cared about it.

This conference run by student volunteers succeeded at something that many conferences organized by working professionals have claimed is too hard. I never bought that argument before, but I really don't now.

Note to the organizers

Dear CUSEC Organizers,

You did an amazing job this year. I tried to tell as many of you as I could in person, but just in case I missed anyone, I'm also telling you here. I know organizing a conference is often thankless volunteer work. You clearly worked diligently this year to put together a great conference, and you deserve praise for that.

As a speaker, it was fantastic to have everything taken care of, so I could really focus on giving a good talk. Even after I was done speaking, I felt taken care of, so I could focus on engaging with students. This was one of my best experiences as a speaker, and I would definitely recommend your conference to others in the future.

I also had a great time as a conference attendee. You did so many things, big and small, to build a pleasant community for those three days. The talks were great. The events were fun. You kept the coffee flowing all day.

I was seriously impressed. You all did a great job. Thank you so much!

Best,
-- Julie

I did a double take the first time I read it. Why would a straight man be centered in a space focused on queer women? I read the email again. There wasn't an answer to my question.

I turned to Google to try to find an answer. After a little searching, I found that he supports gay and lesbian causes through donations and speaking out. The company he works for has donated specifically to this organization in the past, so his philanthropy directly benefits them. My educated guess is that a straight man is being centered in a space focused on queer women because he is a "good ally."

This sounds familiar...

All this has happened before

Only a few months back, we saw something similar at Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC). GHC had a male keynote speaker and a plenary panel featuring four men. Two major slots at the world's largest gathering of women technologists were given to men instead of women. Both of these slots had a prominent woman technologist interviewing these men. The organizations these men work for are known for donating to women in tech causes, including the Anita Borg Institute, the organization that runs GHC. The men on the panel were specifically selected for being "good allies."

The men featured at GHC did not even do a good job providing valuable content for the audience at the event. Both the keynote and the panel included patronizing and even hurtful advice for women working in the tech industry. Satya Nadella ended up having to apologize for some of the content of his keynote. See my annotation of the male allies panel transcript for more details about what happened there.

A pattern emerges

If you compare these situations, you start to see some similarities:

• An event is focused on creating a space for an underrepresented group.
• A company donates to the organization that runs the event.
• Someone who works for that company and is not a member of the underrepresented group is given a prominent position at the event.
• A member of the underrepresented group is often present to introduce or interview them.

This is a pattern of appropriation, and I consider it an ally smell. When I wrote about this last year, I even explicitly called out speaking at events.

Privileged people who are known for being allied to an oppressed group will often be offered a platform to speak about the group’s experiences and issues that impact them. Platforms like an interview on a tv show or podcast. Platforms like writing for a blog or publication. Platforms like presenting at conferences or other events.

Why is this happening?

Without being privy to the conversations that lead to these situations, I can't be sure why this keeps happening. I do, however, have some theories...

The kindest of these theories is that organizations see these people as great allies and want to spotlight them at their events. Maybe for the sake of "inclusivity." Maybe as a sort of reward for their good work as allies.

The most cynical of these theories is that companies demand prominent positions at these events in return for significant donations. The organization isn't thrilled about the situation, but desperately needs the money, so they agree to it.

I suspect that the reality is in the middle somewhere. Organizations depend on donations to run events. They want to maintain good relationships with large companies that can provide significant donations. This can be done by showcasing a company at an event, giving them a captive audience and a chance for positive press. The organization also has to keep their target demographic happy, so they invite a speaker who they can spin as a "good ally" that belongs at the event. This unspoken quid pro quo keeps the money flowing.

This is all speculation. Outsiders can't be sure of the cause, but we can see the outcome...

What's the harm?

This pattern is harmful. The harm mostly falls on the very underrepresented groups these events supposedly serve.

Underrepresented groups get so few spaces where they are the focus. Spaces where they get to see people like themselves on stage and learn from them. Spaces where people like them are prioritized. Seeing someone from the majority in a position of prominence in that space is demoralizing. It means that yet again the majority is given priority, even in a space that isn't supposed to be about them. It's especially a punch to the gut when someone you actually want to hear from is on the stage as a glorified prop --- an interviewer to ask questions.

The appropriation of the stage isn't the only harm. Members of marginalized groups often go to events focused on their demographic to escape the regular micro and macro aggressions they experience at other events. When the stage is given to members of the majority, that safer space can be destroyed. For example, GHC basically gave five men the opportunity to say upsetting and discouraging things to a captive audience of over 7,000 women. Nearly all of them took that opportunity, making the event a less celebratory space for women.

When an organization follows this pattern, they often lose trust and support from the very demographic they are trying to serve. Many women technologists think less of the Anita Borg Institute after last year. I think less of the organization that emailed me that keynote announcement, and I doubt I'm the only one.

It can also be harmful to hold up "good allies" in these spaces. It sends the message that they're such good allies they deserve to be applauded by audiences of the people they're allied to. I think this can easily to go to one's head and encourage all sorts of bad ally behaviors.

Make it stop

I am concerned about this pattern. It seems to be spreading. Happening more and more instead of less. I want to see it stop.

If my theory about financial concerns is right, focusing on the organizations that run these events isn't going to make this stop. I think it is reasonable to be critical, but I do not want to focus the majority of my pressure on them. I especially feel this way about small organizations --- there's a reason I name the huge, powerful Anita Borg Institute, but not the smaller organization that prompted me to write this post.

I would like to focus criticism and pressure on the people agreeing to these speaking engagements. Nearly all of them are very powerful men of significant financial means. They have the power to say no. They have the power to push back and stop this. They can refuse to be part of this pattern, and even help dismantle it. That is what a good ally would do.

Recommendations for allies

Now, these allies may not be sure how to go about this. They don't want to screw up and make the situation even worse. I have some suggestions to help them out.

When you are asked to speak at an event:

• Politely decline and explain why.

I would feel uncomfortable speaking at the event because it is for <demographic> and I don't want to detract from that.

• Consider recommending someone awesome you know that would be a better fit for the event. If you still want your company to be promoted, recommend someone you work with.

I think <awesome person from underrepresented group> would be a great fit to speak at your event instead of me. Please let me know if you would like an introduction.

• Consider attending the event as a regular attendee. Listen to the speakers and learn from their experiences and expertise.

If you have the power to do so:

• Inform other people in your company and community about the issues with this pattern and encourage them to avoid propagating it.
• Help support and promote underrepresented people in your workplace and community as leaders who should be invited to speak at events.
• Call out other powerful people who continue this pattern of appropriation.

Accountability

Since I am calling for accountability, here is a list of some powerful people who have recently spoken or agreed to speak in prominent positions at tech events focused on an underrepresented group they are not a member of. I call on them to stop doing this and consider my recommendations above.

REDACTED

The first draft of this post included a list of powerful men from large tech companies who should be held accountable for taking spaces of prominence at events focused on marginalized demographics. VPs, CTOs, and CEOs. People who will not be harmed by a callout from some woman on the internet.

However, calling them out can harm me. I have bills to pay and am not in a position to make myself more unhireable than I already am for my writing and activism. I wish I was brave enough to not care, but I'm not in a position to do that right now. I hate that my silence is a form of passive support. These golden handcuffs are becoming heavier every day.

resolution -- A firm decision to do or not to do something.

Resolutions tend to be absolute, so one gives up on them the first time they fail. It's all or nothing. Black and white.

I prefer to live in shades of grey. I like to set goals.

goal -- The object of a person’s ambition or effort; an aim or desired result.

A goal is a thing I can work towards. If...when I fail, I can pick myself up and continue pushing towards what I want. Goals are things I can change when life requires it.

Goals feel more like working on improving as a person and less like checking off an abitrary list of things I thought were a good idea at the turn of the year. So here I am setting some goals for 2015.

Fuck the tech community (mostly)

In October 2014, I left the tech community. The plan was to leave in 2015, but I just couldn't wait.

Maybe you understand a little bit better now why I am leaving. Maybe it doesn’t matter. I don’t need your permission. I am gone.

I am not leaving tech entirely. I like my job and being able to pay my bills. I am, however, leaving the community.

What does leaving the tech community mean? No conferences (with one exception I agreed to months ago). No speaking. No organization. No local user groups. No helping people make their events more friendly to women. No more trying to explain basic human decency to people. No more free labor. No more. No more.

I meant it. I am still gone. The only thing I regret is waiting so long to leave.

I am committed to staying out of the tech community for the duration of 2015. At the end of the year, I will re-evaluate. If I am happier, it is unlikely I will return.

There are several notable exceptions:

• CUSEC 2015 -- I agreed to keynote this conference before I quit, so I am following through on my commitment.
• social justice and feminism focused tech spaces (e.g. AlterConf, AdaCamp, Geek Feminism, DoubleUnion) -- While these are tech-related, they focus on topics that matter to me, include people I care about, and build the kind of communities I thrive in. I will not remove myself entirely from people I care about, my social network, and my support system to spite the larger broken tech community.
• work obligations -- I will be keeping this to a minimum, but it may occasionally be necessary.

Self-care

One of the reasons I left the tech community is that it became all-consuming. It was bad for my sanity. It was bad for my health. I stopped having the energy or excitement to enjoy things I once loved. Things that made me a happy, healthy, well-rounded human being.

One of my major goals this year is to work at getting some of those things back. I spent years destroying them, so it will take time to get them back. It seems worth the effort.

• Enjoy films I have never seen (old or new). Revisit films I enjoy. Write short film reviews when I'm in the mood.
• Continue to develop my writing by publishing something at least once a month. Work more with a copyeditor to improve my skills and the quality of my work.
• Draw more and improve my skills with the wacom tablet. Occasionally share my work when I feel comfortable doing so.
• Continue to cook for pleasure by making cute food and learning new recipes.
• Go for a walk in the afternoon, especially on workdays. The activity and sun are important with a desk job.
• Do yoga twice a week. It helps with stress.
• Read more books. I used to love books so much. I want to try to tap back into that. Also, it helps me sleep if I do it before bed.
• Manage a good work-life balance. This was nearly impossible to do when I was doing tech work during my free time and it all kind of bled together.
• Go on vacation. I haven't had a real (i.e. not related to work, a conference, or a family obligation) vacation in years.
• Make an effort to socialize with people I enjoy spending time with. Being a hermit isn't good for me.

Things to Avoid

Ceasing to do things can be as much of a goal as doing things. I have already been working on some of these, but I want to continue with that work this year.

• Avoid performing emotional labor for people who are not close friends or family, especially men. I'd be so happy if I was never expected to give free emotional labor to a man ever again.
• Avoid people with poor boundaries and those who regularly disrespect the boundaries of others.
• Avoid spending time with people who I am not excited about or who aren't excited about me. I like a lot about this Fuck Yes or No post a friend shared recently.
• Avoid making comments that conflate gender with genitals. I know better, but fucked up on this too many times last year. Changing language patterns is hard, but important. Please feel free to call me on this if you see me do it, and thanks to those who have done so before.

Miscellaneous

• Work on being a better ally (a forever goal because that work never stops). I stepped down my activism, so I will have ample time to listen to and amplifying others.
• Declutter my house. I have so much junk that I need to get rid of.
• Volunteer more often at the animal rescue. I want to hug ALL THE CATS.

Table of Contents

• Community (or not)
• Self-care
• Writing, comics, and other creative work
• Speaking
• Work
• The World
• Conclusion

Community (or not)

I did community work, organizing, and activism in the tech community, both in person and online, for roughly the last three years. It took a toll. This was my last year.

• Several bad things that happened in 2013 still stick with me. I cannot forget, and I have been given no reason to forgive.
• Attempts to hold people in positions of power accountable for bad behavior ended poorly precisely because of said power.
• Arguments about code of conducts repeated themselves over and over because every white dude seems to think he deserves an explanation from first principles.
• The gittip crisis happened. Gittip and others impacted by the ego and ideology of its quasi-benevolent dictator still haven't recovered. I doubt they will. E.g. they're getting a lot of flak this week for being disinterested in moderating their community.
• The harassment of myself and people I care about escalated and became more real for me this year. In April, I wrote Abuse as DDoS. It's a pretty accurate picture of what the year looked like for some people.
• As my follower count rose, twitter stopped being a fun place both because of active harassers and supposedly well-intentioned people with very shitty boundaries. My attempts to set boundaries were ignored because people suck.
• I quit public twitter and deleted my account.
• I stepped down as the chapter leader of Girl Develop It Pittsburgh.
• I quit the tech community. It didn't deserve my effort any more. It wasn't worth killing myself for such a broken, toxic place. The "meritocracy" deserves itself.

Self-care

Leaving the tech community has been really healthy for me. I have time now for other things that make me happy and fill my time. I have time for self-care. I will be focusing on that more next year.

• I volunteer with the cats at a local animal rescue. They are adorable, and people should give them forever homes.
• I tried yoga and liked it (except hot yoga. hot yoga is HELL ON EARTH).
• I snuggled a bunch with my two cats and watched stupid tv.
• I started getting back into film, which I had lost interest in for a while.

Writing, comics, and other creative work

• I created a home for the firebees where I occasionally put up comics and other art.
• I am proud of coining the phrase "Fuck a culture that sacrifices women on the altar of men's hurt feelings."
• I wrote a lot about allies including: a quiz to help identify bad allies, some "ally smells" to be avoided, and a resource for people who want to be allies.
• I transcribed and annotated the terrible male allies panel from this year's Grace Hopper Celebration.
• My post about JavaScript debugging for beginners was surprisingly popular. I should write more beginner-friendly technical content.
• I contributed several times to Model View Culture (some writing, some comics, some attributed, some anonymous). I am so happy to contribute to such an important and valuable publication. Shanley is a fantastic editor that brings out the best in my writing.
• I started writing (mostly) weekly dispatches. I'm taking a little holiday break, but I'll begin again in a few weeks.
• Overall, I wrote 40 posts, sent 15 dispatches, and created 8 pieces of art for the firebees.

Popular writing

The top 5 most popular posts on my blog from this year are:

• JavaScript Debugging for Beginners -- 2014-05-18
• Life and Times of a Tech Feminist Killjoy: You Can’t Go Back & There’s No End in Sight -- 2014-10-10
• So You Want to Be an Ally -- 2014-05-10
• Bad Ally Quiz -- 2014-02-26
• Blast from the Past: Interviewing Women Candidates -- 2014-01-30

Speaking

• I gave my first ever keynote at Open Source Bridge.
• I gave my impostor syndrome talk at PyCon. The video has over 7,000 hits, and I am so happy that it is helping people.
• I think it's about time to retire the impostor syndrome talk.
• I worked on supporting new speakers through a talk and a workshop. The materials are free to share non-commercially with attribution. At least one person has already reworked them to use in another workshop. I encourage others to do the same.

Work

• I still work at Google.
• I got a promotion.
• I still enjoy the team I work with both for being good programmers and pleasant people to work with.
• I desperately wish I got more time off. Sadly, 15 days is pretty good for the US, but it's not as much as I would like for self-care.

The World

Holy fuck, everything is terrible and broken. This year was like bad news after wave of bad news in a tidal wave of doom. I am not going to list it all out here. I have nothing productive to add.

Conclusion

This was mostly a really bad year for me, but things getting that bad pushed me to make some important decisions. I am proud of myself for stepping away from toxic situations and setting myself up for things to be better next year.

• What I'm Up To
• Recommended Reading & Current Events
• My Writing
• Miscellany
• Cuteness

What I'm Up To

• The kitty is feeling better this week! He's gained back some weight and is back to his silly, energetic self. I am so thankful for that.
• The world is still shitty.
• I am still behind on EVERYTHING, but especially my email. I swear some day I'll catch up.

Recommended Reading & Current Events

Black Lives Matter

I am reserving this section for news and writing about the situation in a country where black lives are not equally valued. As I said last week, I am not even remotely the best resource on this topic, but I will share some writing or links to people to follow to make sure the topic is covered in my dispatches because it is important.

Note: Postings in this section may contain triggering content.

• For Tamir, Who Was Stolen by Stacia L. Brown.

You need to remain real for me, Tamir, because you were real and you were twelve and you had every right to reach adulthood, tangible and talking and marveling that you made it.

• Whose Lives Matter?: Trans Women of Color and Police Violence by Princess Harmony Rodriguez at Black Girl Dangerous.

• On Not Breathing Due to Failures of Democracy by Latoya Peterson at Racialicious.

• Being a cop showed me just how racist and violent the police are. There’s only one fix. by Redditt Hudson at the Washington Post.

The problem is that cops aren’t held accountable for their actions, and they know it. These officers violate rights with impunity. They know there’s a different criminal justice system for civilians and police.

• Dear White Protestors by Young, Gifted, and Black on tumblr.

Recommended Reading

• Feminist Complaint by Sara Ahmed.

So emotional; so moved by being heard as emotional. You are used to this. Eyes rolling. You are used to this. Feminists are heard as being emotional whatever they say, which is to say, again, independently of what they say. Being called “emotional” is a form of dismissal. How emotional. Just look at you.

And we learn: anti-feminism is an extension of sexism. Women are already heard in this way, as complaining, moaning, whinging. If women do not accept the place they have been assigned, they are heard as complaining, moaning, and whinging. These are willful assignments; given to those who are not willing to accept how they are assigned.

• From Open (Unlimited) to Minimum Vacation Policy by Mathias Meyer. I do not like unlimited vacation policies, and this post gets at a lot of the reasons why. Their new policy sounds great. I wish I got 25 vacation days a year, but I have the sadly small 15 days that is more common in the US for programmers (many other professions get by on much less or none at all here).

• Something Terrible Happened to Jackie by Sarah Jeong. Trigger warning: rape.

Model View Culture 2014 in Review

Model View Culture's last issue of the year is out, and it is full of awesome stuff. You should read it all. Below are some of my selected favorites.

• This Tweet Called My Back by Collected Authors (@tgirlinterruptd, @chiefelk, @bad_dominicana, @aurabogado, @so_treu, @blackamazon, @thetrudz). See #ThisTweetCalledMyBack for additional writing on the topic.

• Ouroboros Outtakes: The Circle Was Never Unbroken by Sydette Harry. This great piece breaks down a lot of the changes in social media this year.

2014 has been a year of examining, extending and reevaluating our connections and our communities. As the social aspect of “social media” bleeds into all of our tech, and all our relationships, what it means to be a member of a community is the question we are asking again and again, even if we don’t know it.

• Diversity for Sale by Anonymous Author.

When diversity is seen as something to profit off of, the people and organizations who see it that way benefit the most. The “easy” underrepresented groups get a mix of help and exploitation. Meanwhile, the most marginalized people, who would benefit the most from support, tend to be left out in the cold to fend for themselves.

• Support for Black Humanity in Tech by Anonymous Author.

I condemn the tech culture that creates this environment where black people feel that speaking out about these injustices could derail their career. I condemn the culture that creates an environment that has no problem acknowledging and using my labor, but would not support my fight for my humanity.

• How to Uphold White Supremacy by Focusing on Diversity and Inclusion by Kẏra.

Companies can tokenize women and people of color throughout their advertising. They can get way more credit than they deserve for being not 100% white men. They can profit from the increases in efficiency and productivity associated with more diversity. All of the above ignore the fact that companies needed to have diversity initiatives to make them less overwhelmingly white in the first place; that white people are the ones in the position of being able to grant access in the first place. When we work for justice and liberation, we can’t accept progress that is conditional on being economically beneficial.

• Codes of Conduct: When Being Excellent is Not Enough by Coraline Ada Ehmke.

Codes of conduct are, in part, intended to communicate that organizers put a priority on the safety and comfort of marginalized members of the community. How could attendees from these groups be confident that this was in fact a priority, if the organizers were so reticent to recognize a problem and the need to act on it? If putting a comprehensive and enforceable policy in place was so difficult, how could we trust them to handle an actual crisis? Is the code of conduct indeed just “words on paper” in the minds of the organizers, or is it a legitimate and sincere commitment to those who are attending the event?

In the News

• Wealth inequality has widened along racial, ethnic lines since end of Great Recession from the Pew Research Center.
• Insurers in New York Must Cover Gender Reassignment Surgery, Cuomo Says by Anemona Hartocollis at New York Times. The article still isn't great on handling this (par for the course for the mainstream press), but this is good news. I wish this would be applied in all states.
• How Greenpeace Wrecked One of the Most Sacred Places in the Americas at Gizmodo. Fuck Greenpeace for doing this.

My Writing

Last week I transcribed the male allies panel from Grace Hopper Celebration. This week, I've added some annotations. Even better, I hacked up disqus, so you can add your own thoughts. Help me annotate the male allies panel.

Note: comments will be moderated to make sure the annotations don't turn into a cesspool like most comment sections.

Miscellany

• Parable of the Polygons. A post about segregation, bias, and the shape of society with some cute interactive games and simulations to play with.
• Dirtbag Paul Atreides from the Toast had me laughing my ass off. It may not be as funny if you're not familiar with Dune.
• This shirt that reads "The fucks I give are like horcruxes --- very few and hard to find" is my nerdy Harry Potter everything.
• Dispatch title from "Cloudbusting" by Kate Bush [youtube].

Cuteness

The cat is feeling much better this week, so here are some pictures of him being adorable.

Today, I am sharing a version of the transcript annotated with my own thoughts. I think this is useful on a couple fronts. The Anita Borg Institute, NCWIT, and other big "women in tech" non-profits seem to be on a real male allies kick this year. I want to cover some of the ways ABI got it wrong in this panel in the hopes they'll avoid it in the future. I also want to provide some advice for men who are actually interested in being allies because there are a lot of antipatterns (that I refer to as "ally smells") in this panel.

If you wish to view an unedited, unannotated version of the transcript, you can find it here.

Disclaimer: I am speaking as an individual, not a representative of my employer.

Annotation Formatting

I may bold, italicize, or otherwise highlight text in the transcript to call attention to it.

Transcript

Announcer:

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the vice president of programs at the Anita Borg Institute, Barb Gee.

[intro music]

Barb Gee:

Good evening. I hope you had a great day. [applause from audience] So I read a very interesting blog yesterday by Cate Huston. Cate with a "C." I encourage you all to read it. What I really liked is she very much articulated the different kinds of diversity work. The easy stuff that you can do. When I'm cynical, I consider it the phony, shallow stuff. Window dressing. And all the way to the very hard stuff, which is really getting to the root of toxic cultures. I hope that this panel is just our first step in starting to attack that really hard stuff cause frankly I'm not really interested in wasting our time on window dressing. We need serious culture change, [applause from audience] and I'm very excited...I'm very excited to present the next panel. I'd like to share how this panel came to be and at some point I will address some of the legitimate concerns that people have had with this.

But I just want to tell this story. So about a year and half ago, Telle Whitney and I were at the NCWIT summit. We had just finished listening to a very respected Perl programmer in the open source community talk about how he personally had been trying to challenge his male peers about the sexism that was rampant in that culture -- this is quite well known [editor's note: the speaker being referenced is Michael Schwern]. And the resistance he got and the way he was treated. He had gotten to a point where he was beleaguered, defeated, ostracized from a community that was important to him. So Telle and I walked to lunch, and she just turned to me and she said, you know, we don't have a place for the guys to go to. So that started me thinking about what kinds of resources and programs we could offer for our male allies.

Some months later, I'm sitting in a meeting with the ABI trustees. I listened, this is a very private meeting, and I listened as the men in the room shared their stories about how they talk to other men about gender issues. I listened to Mike Schroepfer, CTO of Facebook, talk candidly about how he converses with other men. And like a good engineer, after taking us through his very well orchestrated logic tree, he ended with "so, essentially, I position unconscious bias a false negative." I thought, wow, what a great way to present the gender issue to an engineer. And, um, I thought, you know, there's state of the art dialogue that's needed in order to make this culture change happen. Mike credits Alan Eustace of Google with this framing. And that's really what this male ally work is about. Men helping men talk to men. Cause they don't need to talk to us. We know what's going on. They need to talk to other men about why this issue's important and point out where unconscious bias is, how they manifest.

Later, I was on the phone with a woman. I don't even really remember who she was, and she was telling me about the stress she was under because she was the only woman on her team, and she was encountering a lot of resistance. So I asked her, do you have any allies in your company. Where's your boss on this? She said, my boss is a great guy. He is supporting me. He sticks up for me, and guess what. Not surprisingly, they're starting to push him aside. And that's when I realized that men take risks when they advocate for us. They face the same toxic culture that we do. This added more motivation for me to figure out what we could do to help. And this panel's just the first step to starting to develop ABI programs for our male allies.

Before I introduce the panel and address some concerns, I'd like to share a teaser for a documentary that's coming out next year called "CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap." Robin Hauser Reynolds, the director/producer, and Stacey Hartman, producer, are present in the audience. Robin and Stacy will you raise your hand. Right here [points]. [audience applause]. I'm sure they'd love to talk to you after this. So let's check out their great work.

[trailer for documentary plays]

To me this is a clarion call for culture. It's time to build a serious movement. [applause] Some of you might know there's been serious concern about this panel. Some women believe it's totally inappropriate to have GoDaddy's CEO Blake Irving on a male allies panel. [applause] Some women take offense that we're giving plenary attention to men. I would be the last person to defend the misogynistic advertising that GoDaddy employed prior to Blake joining the company. I've been intrigued with the challenges he faces. Doing an external and internal cultural turnaround. Ironically Blake's turned over his executive staff. 30% of his executive staff is female, which we would die to have our partner companies do. [applause]. And Elissa Murphy, his CTO, is a woman. I seriously don't think he lowered the bar to hire her. [applause] The women at GoDaddy have weighed in and testified positively about the company's internal culture. So I think this is an interesting situation and would like to learn from those challenges. I get that this is hard to reconcile. Those ads were horrendous, but I've looked at every ad that has come out since Blake took over, and they're quite good.

But I thought if I shared some stories from my life, and some of the lessons my mom taught me. During the tumultuous time in the 60s and 70s when social movement building was everybody's hobby, um, that I might give you some perspective about how to think about this, and how to think about including men in our movement and why I think it's so important.

These stories really hit at the heart of why I believe the inclusion of men into our movement is a good thing. Because if we say we're about diversity inclusion, we've gotta walk the talk. Hard as it is, we gotta do it. So I was raised in San Francisco during the 60s when there was great social upheaval and social movement building in our country. I like to joke that for our Sunday Sunday drive my dad would pile us into his old Ford, and we'd go down to the Haight-Ashbury and look at the hippies! Didn't everybody do that when they were kids? The Chinese-American community that I was part of could be quite racist, especially towards the African-American community. They had very different ways of expressing themselves. Ways that seemed kind of rough to us Asians. My mom could have reinforced those racist attitudes in me, but instead she said, "we owe a lot to the Black community." We might not protest the way they do, but they had not stood up and broken down some doors, we would not have had doors to walk through. That was my first lesson in diversity. [applause and shouting] The importance of valuing people who are different than you and seeing them for their strengths as partners. Not writing them off because they're different.

During the 60s and into the 70s, I went through an intense personal racial identity crisis. While at the same time our country continued to experience major cultural disruption, social movements continued to grow. As Martin Luther King said in his essay about how he came to non-violence, "I came dangerous close to hating all white people." That hit a chord for me. I could relate. Enter mom. She said to me, I have to hand it to those white college kids. They're the ones who are truly prepared to give up their power and privilege, so we can build a just world. And for those of you who might not remember back then, many white college kids from wealthy families challenged their parents. Challenged our culture of materialism and were prepared to give up their material comfort, their own personal material comfort, for a bigger cause. This was happening all over the country. This was my second lesson in diversity. A culture change. I could've gone through life pissed off at every white person who slighted me or insulted me. It still happens. Mom instilled in me the ability to respect the positive actions of those who I might too readily write off. She taught me that in order to change the situation of those who hold weaker social positions in society, we need an accompanying change on the part of those with power and privilege. Giving up power or using it on behalf of change is a vital ingredient. We need to partner with the majority, not because they're superiors or that they need to lead us. I mean, we don't need that. But as equal partners in this incredibly rewarding and hard work of changing our culture. It's in thanks to mom and in her spirit that I offer this panel.

This is just the start of our formal work with male allies. I welcome your input. For all of the men who are here. All 483 of you. I imagine you might be a bit shell-shocked right now, but I'm here to tell you it gets better. I would like to invite you to join me for an informal listening session tomorrow at 5:15. I want to hear your stories from the frontlines and brainstorm how we can help. I recently spoke with Alan Eustace and Telle Whitney, who knew Anita Borg well. I asked "what would Anita say?" They both told me that Anita welcomed male allies into the work from day one. So, I think she would approve. [applause]

With that, let me introduce, Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain and former trustee of the Anita Borg Institute, who will introduce and moderate our male allies panel. Thank you.

[applause][music plays as panel walks on stage]

Penny Herscher: Thank you Barb. Let me start by introducing my esteemed panelists here. We have Alan Eustace, who is the SVP of knowledge from Google. We have Mike Schroepfer, who is the CTO of Facebook. We have Blake Irving who is the CEO of GoDaddy. And we have [yelling from audience]tayloe stansbury who clearly has a fan club here. [more yelling]. And we have Tayloe Stansbury who is the CTO of Intuit. [applause]

And as Barb said in her introduction, this subject is actually a contentious, emotional subject for many people, but it's also very personal. I'm sure for many of you in the audience, it's very personal. There comes a moment in your life, when you decide what you're going to fight for, and gender equality in the workforce is something that my panel has decided to fight for.

And we're going to start with why is it personal to them. Because there's been so much discussion on social media about GoDaddy, we're going to start with Blake. Go for it.

Blake Irving: Thanks Penny. Um, when I, when it was announced that I had taken this job, I had, um, a lot of friends that I worked with in the technology industry, over 20 years or so go, GoDaddy? What are you kidding? Because that is so off brand for you, you know, and what I personally stood for. Of course, you know, the things that people know about the company, at that point, people go "I know your ads. I don't like them." You know, and the guys would tell me, they're misogynistic. They objectify women, and you know, I know that's what you're about, but, dude, that's what you're walking into. I said, well, there's no better way to fix something head on from a cultural perspective. Then oddly when I got to the company, I started talking with folks inside it. I found this very large dichotomy between the people that were there and how we were represented outside. So the commercials didn't represent the spirit of the people, the diversity of the company.

And for me and my own person story, um, thirteen, a little over thirteen years ago, my sister who, Laurie Irving, who was a professor at Washington State University in Vancouver died through complications in her pregnancy, and she was two weeks away from having her first child. Um, and Laurie was one of the foremost researchers in the effect of media on women's self-esteem and body image. Um, and I was extremely close to her. She was my closest and youngest sister, and after her passing, I vowed to do as much as I possibly could to forward women in my chosen field as she had done with hers. She was fighting anorexia and bulimia and had as a child. And I'd do everything I could to fight the same cause she was fighting in my industry. Can you imagine a better company to join than GoDaddy to achieve that goal. Absolutely not. [applause] And so I took the jump and decided to do that, and as off brand and as off-putting as it was for a lot of folks, it was absolutely the right choice. Since joining, the advertising has taken on a completely different flavor. It's not about sexist, it's about women's empowerment. They make up 58 percent of small businesses in the United States, and by golly, we're gonna show how hard they work, and how darn hard it is for them to...to do the same that others that are male do. [shrugs] So that's my story.

Penny Herscher:

So, who wants to follow that. [laughter]

[Alan Eustace points at Tayloe]

And it's Tayloe.

Tayloe Stansbury:

So my mom actually worked as a programmer for the federal reserve in the late 50s and early 60s, and she taught me to program when I was eight. And then she moved on to become a teacher of computer science and math. My wife is...was a computer scientist. My two older daughters are studying computer science. One at UC Santa Barbara and one at Harvey Mudd College. My wife's mother was a CS professor. Her mother was a physics professor. [laughter from audience] So I guess I've been surrounded by women in technology, and in particular, women in computer science, for pretty much all my life, and uh, something that I try to continue to work on.

[applause]

[Penny looks at Alan]

Alan Eustace:

She's nodding at me. [laughs] So, uh, I guess the, you know, the start for me was really Anita Borg and I were really really close personal friends, as were many people in the audience. She and I started at a digital equipment corporation on the same day, and she corrected my first uh -- I was from Florida, by the way, not a pillar of enlightenment, uh, at least when I growing up. And, uh, the very first, you know, the first few days, I said, "why don't we go to the girl's volleyball game at Stanford." She just turned at me and she goes, "do you go to the boys basketball game at Stanford." And I said, "no, I go to the men's basketball game at Stanford." [laughter] And she, you know, in her own way she smiled at me, and that was probably one of 4,000 lessons that she taught me. Not by, you know like, beating me down, but by helping me through the journey. She was also the smartest person, I think that I knew, uh, which was great. She was working on the hardest problem. I was working on a floating point processor, and she was building the virtual memory subsystem of the operating system, so I had a lot of awe for that. You know, kind of the hardest piece of the whole puzzle. So I knew her for, you know, a very long time, and uh, you know if you spend any time at all with Anita, and many of you have, uh, you'll know that she imparts on you not just a change in the way you think about things, but also a kind of a lifelong commitment to the causes that she stood for. Many of us in this room honestly are, uh, are fulfilling what we think is a legacy, and so, I want to thank everybody that came because she would love this. She would love 8,000 people here because the best thing that you can do is have incredibly smart talented women entering the workforce and changing the world, and that would've made her really happy.

Penny Herscher:

Go for it, Mike.

Mike Schroepfer:

Uh, I think there's a theme in all of these, which is a personal connection. Mine comes from my wife, Erin. Um, she's an engineer since I've known her. She's actually a CTO too. We joke, we're probably one of the few dual CTO households in the country. I'll point out, she got there first. So, uh, [applause], by a good bit, so she's the better engineer, by far. The, you know, and kind of we started our careers together, so I watched her often be the only female engineer in the company, um, and you know, she's thrived in that, which is a testament to her, but not without its obstacles along the way. And it's one thing to hear someone else's story or read about something in a magazine. It's another to hear the story coming home how you're constantly mistaken for someone in marketing or the receptionist or whatever it may be because people wouldn't actually believe you're an engineer. Um, and, you know, those things do actually have an impact. So I think that's where it really started for me. And then when I was lucky enough to join Facebook, 6 years ago now, just realizing that we're a platform used by, you know, 1.3 billion people, and um, it's crazy just on basic logic that we didn't have, or wouldn't have an engineering team that's a good reflection of that planet of people, and isn't concentrated with one set of people in it. And so kinda diversity of gender and of all kinds has become really important to us to make sure we have people building the product that are like the people who use it.

Penny Herscher:

That's great. Thank you all for sharing your personal stories.

[applause]

So I that, uh, as you advocate for women in your workforces, do you come across resistance? And, um, men and women will resist you, and I, as we prepped for this, you told me a number of stories. I want to start with Tayloe. You had some stories about the resistance you experienced, and how you overcome it.

Tayloe Stansbury:

I'm not sure so much resistance, as reminder. I think in general, our culture is one that is open and accepting, but one does have to ask questions about how we're doing on hiring women, hiring minorities. Um, one does have to ask questions about how we're doing at promoting them, particularly in areas where they're underrepresented. We find that women tend to, uh, promote easily into, or relatively easily into positions of people leadership, but not so much into individual contributor or very senior roles. Distinguished engineers, fellows, chief architects, and sometimes those need some curation and thought pinpointing people who are likely candidates and then asking questions about what do they need for development. What would make them ready to be promoted into those positions. So those are things we work on.

Penny Herscher:

So Mike, you explain the false negative argument to the audience. [laughs]

Mike Schroepfer:

Um, yeah, and I'll point out, you know, resistance, just to answer your other question, is interesting. Cause, let's be frank, we're all here in positions of power, so I don't actually think we get a lot of resistance in day to day. First of all, shame on us if we don't use that power to make some change. And, you know, I've had a lot of reticence to coming to this panel because it's, it's not like we're winning yet. So, we're all trying really hard, and I think we all care, but the results aren't there yet. So I don't wanna stand, at least myself up, for sure, up as any kind of pinnacle of someone to admire or follow on this, as far as the result that are there.

But as far as the false negative. Basically, I have to start from a principle believing people aren't malevolent. They just are who they are. So I have to have a rational model for why people are believing the way they are. And, you know, the false negative argument comes from basically, this constant concern people have, at least in our organization, of hiring quality. Are we hiring the absolute best people in the world we can find for everything? And whenever you talk about anything that isn't some thing directly related to performance of an individual, it always raises the question of, "well does this mean we're lowing the hiring bar." And Alan and I were just having this conversation, and we've had this conversation quite publicly inside the company. I've gotten so irritated by this conversation, that I've tried to like remove the word "hiring bar" from our lexicon because it's stupid. It's not like there's a standardized test that everyone takes. That's there's a score, and we draw a line and everyone above the line comes in, and everyone below the line doesn't. Like that is not how a hiring process works. You're trying to make a judgment on will this person be exceptional and succeed and do well here, and that's all anyone wants. You know, there's no reason for us to hire someone we don't think will be that way. So you kinda have to walk people through the whole process and explain that it is what it is, and you're trying to find the best person you can, um, for that role no matter what. And I think that the one place where, you know, I think you can get people to agree that like, ok at the end of day, we have the same hiring process. We're going to evaluate all the candidates in the same way. We have a hiring committee which does this, and they don't take gender into account. We just try to decide who are the best. It's fine. So you can kinda get people through that, and say ok, great, we're not lowering the bar.

But then there's this other question. It's like, well, we're spending all this time on diversity. Right? And we have these recruiters who are spending their time on diversity. And if you look at the data, you say that those recruiting pipelines are less efficient than other ones. Meaning, number of people hired per hour spent recruiting is lower, and that is accurate. It is true that if I take a recruiter and put them on hiring just any random college grad versus hiring from a smaller pool of people, diversity, they will be less productive on the second than the first. And so there's a question of like is that a fair thing to do. Should we be using company resources on that. Um, and I think we've just decided that this is a stated policy of the company that we're gonna do this. We think it's important for all the reasons that we've talked about. That diversity is key for the company, so we're going to invest the time and energy here. And by the way, we make this decision in other ways too. It's a lot harder to hire a 20 year experienced system programmer than it is someone with a more general skillset, so it's again, a less efficient process. So it's kinda walking everyone through the process of, look, it's the same hiring calibers. The only question is, "will this person be exceptional in the company or not, no matter where they came from or what their background is." And secondly, it's like are we willing to like spend some of the company money trying really hard to make sure we're encouraging everyone who we can who might be exceptional here to come here and join us. And that's where we are.

Penny Herscher:

Alan, I know you had some stories of resistance, and how you've overcome it in your career. Can you share some stories with the audience?

Alan Eustace:

You know, I don't think it's so much resistance. I think it's, uh, it's people not really understanding. You know, I've, I mentioned this to other people, you know, many times, but uh, I don't think people really understand what women really go through in a technology field. They just don't understand it. It's just beyond their mental model of what it's like to be in a minority because they've never been in a minority. I've asked thousands of women now, uh, the question, "has there ever been a time in your career where some man has said something that made you do a double-take because of some gender-based stereotype that was behind it." And, you know, it always come out as like "did you just say that?" And nobody says anything about it. Nobody actually corrects them because it happens so often, that you know, you just, you know if you corrected everybody, that's all you'd be doing. And I ask people, I said, if you're one of those people that has never had this happen to you, please come up and tell me. And so far I've had one person. Thousands and people. Is there anybody here that that's something never happened to you? Ok, so now we know, it happens all the time.

And so, my fear right now is, you know, is that because the people are, you know, mean. Are they stupid? Are they not informed? Or is it just because we haven't done as good a job as we can of building an environment that is -- that reacts negatively. When the antibodies come out against that kind of behavior. And I think we can. I lived through the civil rights movement and other things. I saw what happened, and people, you know, I saw what happened with jokes and other things over the years, over many many years. I feel we can make a change there, but it's going to require a lot of men and women, but certainly it's harder for women to make the case for those things, and somebody else has to do it, as well. Because these kind of changes and environment happen because the majority does something different, not because the minority does something different.

Penny Herscher:

There is an element of personal risk. I know, Blake, you're taking on quite a bit of personal risk at the moment as you try and change the world. Talk about how you experience that when you're interacting with other men.

Blake Irving:

You know. I...strangely enough, I have been, um,...I've encountered mostly acceptance when I've introduced some of the things that I've done from other men. I've also, you know, have had not pushback. I've had pushback on some of the changes in advertising from men, right, which, you know said, "I think your advertising was fine."

Penny Herscher:

They enjoyed it, probably.

Blake Irving:

And I'm like, you know, that's, you're missing the mark. And, it's not about the company on the outside. It's about how do you actually create an environment on the inside of the company, that is as accepting as possible for women. And some of that is trying to make sure that the leadership you bring to the company is equally distributed as you possibly can make it. Uh, so, hiring Elissa Murphy as our CTO was very deliberate, and, you know, she's the, she's unbelievably talented, and I've had the pleasure of working with her for over a decade, and was delighted when she said, "you know, I believe in what you're doing here, and I think I think, uh, I'm willing to take that lead, and I know that I'm going to be answering a lot of tough questions from my friends too." And the first, uh, board director, independent board director, I appointed was Betsy Rafael, who was the chief accounting officer at Apple, as well. And I say, I didn't encounter a lot of pushback. I will say, um, a CTO who is a women, that when I introduced Elissa to the board, and she met all of the board members, the initial thought was, "a woman as a CTO, that's interesting." And I'm like, "she's awesome." Every conversation Elissa left with the board, they were flabbergasted. You know, just, oh my god. Super thoughtful. Super powerful. Soft-spoken. Very effective. And creating and environment where she can thrive and where others like her can thrive. I think is incredibly important to push back against that resistance.

And another thing that I've found, and I know I have a friend who is the head of the computer science department at Cal Poly has found, is when you build small teams, whether they're scrum teams or agile teams, if instead of saying, look, I'm going to try to equally distribute -- I'm going to put a woman on every team. He's actually found if you try to put the same number of women and men on a team, on a small team, that you'll end up having a much more balanced team, that is much more effective, and I've found that also creates less of a, less of a pushback.

Penny Herscher:

Having been the only woman in the room for the first twenty years of my career, I can tell you it's much more fun when it's balanced between men and women in the room. Definitely.

So, we talked as we were prepping you about this. Hundreds of years of conditioning, and we're all conditioned by our experience. We're conditioned by the media. We're conditioned by our families. And, so, one of the things that the Anita Borg Institute does is the top women -- top company for women award. And when AMEX won this award, I was struck by how they talked about the need to really educate the men at the top of the company to bring the women up as much as to educate the women. But they also, I know many of your companies run very specific programs targeted at helping the women and the men overcome the hundreds of years of conditioning. So, for our audience, if you could talk about some specifics. What do you do specifically to try to overcome that conditioning that we all have.

Tayloe Stansbury:

Sure, if I may. So Intuit has about 3,000 people in technology, of whom 170 are here to learn and to recruit. Um, so expect to learn here. And we have about 27% of our technical staff are female, but if you want to go, if you want to really be effective you have to think earlier. So one of the programs we support is Girls Who Code, and I was lucky enough that my daughter went through that this summer. My youngest daughter, and she's now decided that she wants to major in computer science. So I think getting girls early on to get confident and get excited with it is really really important. We have a really large recruiting program for interns and early career. We expect to hire, at this conference, 100 women. So it's something that we're working on throughout what we do, and then as you move forward in their careers, how do you make sure that they stay around at the company. So we have about 8% attrition amongst women in technology. That gets a little worse as they get later career, and moving into places where either there are other opportunities at other companies or life events happen that make it harder to hold down the same kind of job without flexibility. And so we try really hard to be creative about moving people into new roles for which there, they don't have obvious credential, and I think we've done an unusually good job with that, and also to be flexible about hours, videoconferencing from home to allow for flexibility in women's lives in mid-career.

Penny Herscher:

How does the women's attrition rate compare to the men's at Intuit.

Tayloe Stansbury:

Uh, about the same.

Penny Herscher:

About the same.

How about you, Alan? I know you're doing a lot at Google, very specifically.

Alan Eustace:

Uh, you know the biggest in reference to your question is unconscious bias, and uh, we've been running an unconscious bias program. That I think the goal was to have everybody at Google go through unconscious bias training, which is an enormous investment to do, but even before that what we did was we put together our own training based on the best research that's out there. Cause look, you know, especially engineers, you know, you can't just kinda give touchy feely things. You have to prove things to them. And, uh, and it's actually really easy to prove this. There's lots of studies about unconscious bias, and what's very clear if you go through, and there's exercises. There's lots of research that's been done. You can actually run your own test on some many web sites, and find out how biased you are. And you'd be shocked to know how biased anybody is about anything. I mean, just and it's, and the bias is the same for men and women, actually. I mean, it's amazing, we have an impression of what a particular person looks like. You know, we have of what a programmer looks like, or what a nurse looks like, or, you know, what a fireman looks like. It's just ingrained. And I think one of the really nice things about the program. It's like an hour long. Is it teaches people that they are biased, and that you have to step back and think about what kind of biases you have in every situation, and you have to understand that. And then you have to physically compensate for what your entire life has taught you to do that.

I mean, for example, one of our senior fellows, a guy named Jeff Dean, whose daughter might be in the audience. I saw her earlier today. And we thought about, you know, our hiring process at one point was how many standard deviations away from Jeff Dean is this person. And, you know, well, this person's three standard deviations away. And we just thought about how wrong that message is. That's not a program, that's not what a programmer looks like. They come in all sizes, shapes, you know, genders, you know, races, ethnicities, backgrounds, things like that. And so, you know, for me, that training was really important, and it was powerful, and I think we've got a much more sensitized workforce because of it. And I hope it's gonna turn out better for lots of outcomes in the company.

Penny Herscher:

In fact, everyone in the audience can go through the training right? It's online, isn't it? I watched the video. There's a one hour video, and it's really eye opening. It's really good.

Mike Schroepfer:

Yeah, I think this is just this is, double down on this...We're running a similar program, and it's really important to get people sensitized to the fact that they have these biases. The way I often talk about this to engineers is, you know your brain is this amazing pattern matcher. And so, because we have this problem of diversity in the workplace, it's like reinforced the patterns in your brain, which is you're used to going into a room where it's usually white men, and those are the programmers. You know, other functions or other people are represented by other things. So that's the pattern you represent in your brain. It's fairly, it happens, it doesn't necessarily mean you're a bad person, but if you don't acknowledge that it exists, as Alan said, you don't correct it. If you assume, no no no, I'm great with this, I don't have to worry about it, then you're probably screwing it up because you really have to be worrying about it all the time and correcting for it. Man or woman, background, care about it or not to make sure that you're doing the right thing in the workplace all the time. And that's a really hard message for people to hear, but I think it's important people hear it in a non-judgmental way. It's, again, not a bad person, just this is the state of the world and the state of your mind and brain, and what you've been trained to see. And here's where we want to move it to, and we need to all work on this together. And I think that's a really important step for the workplace.

Penny Herscher:

You doing anything really active to bring women up, Blake?

Blake Irving:

Um, yeah, so we...

Penny Herscher:

Programmatically?

Blake Irving:

Well, programmatically, we have something that we started about, eight, nine months ago, which is called the GoDaddy women in technology group. And we encourage men to participate in the GoDaddy women in technology group, and we bring in speakers, uh, on on a monthly basis. We've had the president of the Geena Davis foundation, Telle's been out, Maria Klawe's been out, Lisa Stone from BlogHer's been out. And they spend the whole day with us, and they spend the day with the exec staff, talking, helping influence. We listen a LOT on things that they think we should be doing. They listen to what we are doing. Uh, and making sure that the awareness across the company is greater that, gosh, there's a lot a women that are in technology in this company, and they need a voice. They need a common voice -- a way to be heard. Uh, and we need to be educated by them. Um, I think some of the ideas you've introduced about unconscious bias are absolutely true, and I'm anxious to view the video.

Penny Herscher:

It really is fantastic.

Blake Irving:

Sounds awesome. Uh but, those are the things we've been doing programmatically. And there's, on a, I'll be flat open honest, there's a lot more that we have to do. You know, we're just getting started on some of this stuff, so um. I think Alan and Mike have been, frankly, you know, way ahead of it, and I'm, uh, delighted to be able to chat with them about it.

Penny Herscher:

So let's go off script for a second.

Alan Eustace:

That's always a bad idea.

Penny Herscher:

So this is all very nice.

[laughter from audience]

This is all very nice and positive, right. Why is this so hard? I have thirty years in this business as a technical woman, and we aren't done yet. Right ladies? We aren't done yet. [yelling from audience] So why is this so hard? You, you must see it from you're in this perspective of power. I know you all care. What's so, what's making it so difficult? Why can't we move faster?

Alan Eustace:

You know personally, I think it's culture. Culture's the hardest thing to change. I feel like computer science is a wonderful layer we're actually trying to solve huge problems. It's really, it's interesting. I love this discipline in every way. I feel like it's so important, but at the same time, we've created a, um, over time this culture of kind of exclusivity, elitism, ah, you know, it it's, we make things that are really simple, actually hard. You know, we have, [laughs], you know like pipelining, you know. It's a washer and a dryer, that's all pipelining is. You know, but we have all these acronyms and make everything seem really super hard and difficult and, you know, have uh, you know, we've just, we've created this club, you know, this fraternity that is programmers, and it's just bad. It's just wrong. And, and I feel like it's holding us back as a company. It's holding our individuals back. It's holding our companies back. It's holding the field back.

woman in audience:

BINGO!!!

Alan Eustace:

[confused look] What? Uh oh. Uh oh, I might've...

[audience laughter]

Penny Herscher:

I think that was enthusiasm in the audience. Keep going.

Alan Eustace:

Anyways, so uh, so it's just holding us back, and I feel like somehow we have to break through the culture, uh, to really make progress. You know, the sad thing is, is I don't think the culture is active. I don't think people are, you know, actively protecting it and trying to hold off the hordes of women and diversity candidates and keep them from the power structure that is technology. It's just not happening like that. [laughs] Maybe it is. But my hope is that it's not that, and that and it's, you can teach people, uh, and you can change that culture, and that we don't have to wait for all those people to die because that's the alternative. [audience laughter] Now many of you want to kill a few of them, and I'm ok, I am not encouraging that behavior, but, but uh, I think we have to change that.

Penny Herscher:

Do you think it's generational? I mean, Mike, you have a very young employee base at Facebook. Do you think some of the issues are generational? Do you see it better in the younger generation than the older generation.

Mike Schroepfer:

I mean the data says the reverse. Is that it was actually better twenty years ago than it is today, so I, you know, [audience yells something...maybe another bingo?] if it's generational, it's going...

Blake Irving:

...it's going wrong..

Mike Schroepfer:

Going in the wrong direction, so uh, I don't think it's generational. Um, I think it's a lot of what Alan said. We need to fix the culture.

Blake Irving:

And more people have to care. I mean, one of the biggest problems is most of the guys that are in the club, in the fraternity that Alan was describing. Honestly, they don't care enough, and they have to change behavior, and changing behavior is hard and you have to really want to do it. And you have to be conscious about it. And if you're introducing new things that somebody has to do, and the benefit for them, especially among engineers, isn't tangible, the, they're, why the hell would I make that investment? Because they don't see the tangible. Now, I believe they will. I've seen it on small teams. It matters a whole hell of a lot.

Penny Herscher:

Yes.

Alan Eustace:

Let me add one thing on a previous thing. I had mentioned the whole thing about, uh, about how many women have encountered in their career, some form of stereotype, and it's caused them to uh, you know, have either do a double-take or things like that. But the other part of that story, that I think is the most interesting part is the reverse. Of all the men I've asked "have you ever in any situation or workforce ever said something or done something that has made a woman uncomfortable based on some stereotype." And I've yet to find a single male that will admit ever doing that. [laugher from panel]

Penny Herscher:

I'll give you names.

[laughter from audience]

Alan Eustace:

No no. Actually someone came to me after I'd done that, and said, "Alan, I remember a time when you made me uncomfortable." [laughter from panel and audience] So, it's happening out there. She took me aside and corrected me. We're fine now. [laughter]

Tayloe Stansbury:

Penny, if I could add. You know, I think all of us are hiring well above the average of graduates in computer science, and I'm guessing everybody in the conference is doing the same thing. I think the problem starts way earlier. A bunch of you out here are students in computer science. You've already decided to make that choice, to go into computer science. I think the problem is in high school, when girls decide not to. And if you think about the problem we have in this country of not enough graduates in computer science. How you can fix the problem if you don't get the other half of the population to get excited about computing and feel capable of doing it, so I think programs that reach all the way back into high school and middle school that get girls excited about computing and feeling like it's cool and that they can do it. And it's not out there and weird and geeky, are incredibly important to feed the pipeline, so that when it comes downstream to us for trying to hire people, they're there, and they're great. And one of the things that, you know, we require in schools is that everybody take languages. You have to take so many years of a foreign language when you're in high school. Why is not computing a language you have to take? Why is it not a requirement? [applause]

When women actually do have to take computer science as a requirement, almost half of them actually find out that they actually love it and want to continue studying it. I think Harvey Mudd is an example of that.

Blake Irving:

There's a, uh, an organization called code.org. I don't know if you're familiar with them. Hadi Partovi, big voice in that, uh, that group. Great guy. And they have something they do called the hour of code. Um, and, don't know, our company just sent out a mail encouraging everybody to do this, this. Everybody across the company, to spend an hour, just coding, and see what you think. And his, his take is exactly what you said. Look, we should have this as a science because we still do, we do biology, we do chemistry, and we don't do computer science, nor do we treat it as it was a language, and it was just part of the linguistics program. And either can be true, and few folks, few kids in high school, or even going into high school, or matriculating into college view coding as a creative art form, when it is, in fact, incredibly flexible and incredibly creative. In a place where, yes, you can apply linear thinking, and do all kinds of things that would apply to somebody who was gonna be a double E or an ME, but it's also more creative than that because you can express yourself in different ways and get to the same result. And few folks actually know that when they're in their high school years, and nobody's teaching them. And we've got to.

Penny Herscher:

So, Mike, you told us about a program about a program, um, to bring kids in who were not from computer science and teach them over the summer. That was a fascinating program. Can you tell the audience about that program.

Mike Schroepfer:

Sure. We call it FBU. This is the second summer we did it, and it was actually, I got tired, we got tired of talking about this, and wanted to try to do something to get people who might be interested from might "I might be interested" to "hell yeah, I'm interested in computer science." And, um, so we started in 2013. It was a small group. We made it 60% bigger this year. This year's class was 96% diverse, so 96% women and minorities. We actually got some anecdotal feedback that they wanted some other men in the program. [laughter] But, um, much more important, they did amazing. So they goal here was to get people who were freshman, so rising sophomores in college, who were interested in computer science, but probably hadn't taken enough of the prerequisites to qualify to be a full-time intern, um, so weren't, either weren't a computer science student or weren't far enough along, and try to hook them into it. So, you've got iOS training, so we actually did the same iOS training we'll use to take a web developer and turn them into a mobile developer, offered it to them, and they did team projects in groups of four. Um, and then presented them at the end of the summer. And what's amazing is that a good portion of them came back the next year as full time summer interns, and they're, they performed amazingly well. As good or better than any other cohort I could find at the company. So it's a small group, but we're hoping to expand it over years.

Penny Herscher:

What were their majors? Or, what were the breadth of majors?

Mike Schroepfer:

I mean, most of them were undeclared because they were freshmen. So, you know, some were math, some were in the humanities, and some were maybe interested in computer science, but weren't sure. And, um, you know, the most fulfilling is just meeting people who said, "yeah, I wasn't sure whether I was interested", but after the summer it's like "heck, yeah, I can do this and it's amazing." Hopefully, we can do more things like this across the industry.

Penny Herscher:

So you've got a big pipeline out of there of students who I'm sure you'd love to recruit, but they're all, uh, living with the culture that Alan described. We're all living with it. And so what would you tell them to do as they come into your companies, or they come into a different company. They're all fiercely brave, right ladies? [applause] What would you tell them to do to change the culture? How can they, every one of them make a difference? They're not the men in power, but they're brave.

Alan Eustace:

I think the best thing that you can do is excel, and to push through whatever boundaries that you, you know, see in front of you, and, uh, just continue to push, and be great. I mean, just be super amazing great because there's one thing that, um, I don't care who you are, I don't care what culture and stuff like that, greatness is amazing, and people recognize greatness, and, uh, you know, it requires a lot of hard work. And you'll see a lot of adversity along the way. I mean, you'll have lots of people that are doubters. And you'll have people who say the wrong things and do the wrong things, but if you build great thing, uh, people will recognize you, and uh, and know that it's gonna be twice as hard for you. I mean, you're gonna have to work so much harder, uh, I think, than a lot of other people potentially because you're gonna have to overcome a lot of these unconscious biases. But you can make a big difference in your company.

We had one project at Google early on. Debbie Wollack and Fei Chang [editor's note: I'm unsure how to spell these names. Apologies if they are misspelled.], you know, close friends of mine. They actually worked on this tiny little project in the company on, uh, trying to build a bigger index, which is kinda the heart of search, and uh, using less machines, and it was a side project. It was, uh, called blimpie at the time, and uh, and it turned out that there was a time in the history of the company where it was super important for us to raise the index size, and those two women built the core of what allowed us to create an enormous index without using a lot of machines. That was like a huge competitive advantage for the company. And they did it. That one team: two women. An amazing story, and uh, and so that, that was the best thing that I think you can do. Just excel, and work hard to excel.

Tayloe Stansbury:

If I could build on that, Alan. You can't be in computing without being problem solvers, and this is just another class of problem. So apply your problem solving to the social dynamics and the people problems that arise just as much as you do to the technology problems, and excel, as Alan suggests, and you will solve it.

Blake Irving:

Yeah, I guess the only thing that I'd add, I think you guys both make great points. Speak up. One of the things that I've found is women won't speak up, and honestly, sometimes guys don't wanna hear them. It's true, and speak up, be confident. Uh, you have allies, you don't know where they are. They might be hidden. They might be some other part of the company. They care. And they're there. Speak up and be heard.

[applause]

Penny Herscher:

And don't ever let anybody tell you you can't do something...ever. [laughs]

So let's, let's talk about the commercials because in the end um [yells from audience] no the commercial not the commercials, the commercial nature of this, in the end [Blake Irving wipes brow][audience laughs] unless we make money, we're all running for profit ventures, unlike Telle, we're running for profit ventures. So how do you explain to your CFO, let's get to the sort of the hard facts? How do you explain to your CFO why this is a good idea? Ah, the reason I'm asking this question is I think helping the audience understand that this is also about making money, and it's not just feeling good. That I think it helps everybody just get grounded in the idea we're running businesses.

Alan Eustace:

Well, my CFO rides a booster board. He has an electric bike. He's like the most crazy guy that I've ever seen. He is as enlightened as any CFO in the entire world. I've never seen him wear a suit ever. Ah, um, and so uh I think he's well primed to solve this problem, but I think in companies though this isn't a -- this is going to make better products. That's the whole key, right. You have to build better products. And you know if you think that, and you know uh, a bunch of guys hiding over in a corner in a locker room thing. If you think that's the path to an enlightened product, you know, for the world, then go for it. Um, but I don't think any of us believe that. I don't think any engineering department believes that. I don't any executive believes that that's the right way, and I feel like if you're going to build the great products, you have to have a diverse workforce, and it's gotta reflect the customers that you have. But more importantly, I feel like it's a much better place to work. Uh, you know, I don't wanna work in a locker room. You know, I want to work in a place where there's a lot of people with a lot of great ideas that are free to express them. And uh, you know, I think we're going to have better companies. We're gonna have more profitable companies. We're gonna have funner companies. And we're going to, uh, you know, we can solve big and hard problems for the world. And uh, that's what we have to do. Together.

Blake Irving:

Yeah, so, uh...

Penny Herscher:

I'm biding my time here.

Blake Irving:

My, look, I don't necessarily agree that every exec is an enlightened as your CFO. My CFO is a thirteen year KKR guy, so he's from private equity. Now, I will say that Scott Wagner, great guy, brilliant guy, also my chief operating officer. Um, he's believes, and I believe this in the bottom of my heart, that if you build products for a diverse customer base, you should try as hard as you can to get your workforce, you engineering teams, to replicate that customer base as closely as you possibly can. At this conference, we've funded 112 students to come from both Cal Poly and Harvey Mudd to come here, and that was...pretty expensive. Uh, and Scott, who understands the value, understands the value of the recruiting pipeline, says that's good spend. And, and that's from a guy who doesn't ride electric, I don't think he has an electric vehicle. But uh, so, I mean, there are, again, there are advocates out there. There are people that support it. But it is, frankly, you said it earlier, it was either Mike or Alan said, it's more expensive to hire women because the, frankly, the population is smaller, and that's one of the problems Tayloe was talking about, as well, so we're spending and we think it's worth it.

Penny Herscher:

And we still see predominantly male, many, many predominantly male startups, so we haven't got the venture community to understand the economics of this. How do you think we get them to understand that?

...

Nobody taking that one.

Alan Eustace:

Well, it's funny you mention it because my daughter's 14 and she loves computer science. My younger daughter's 9 and she also likes computer science, but she and I, we often go ride our bikes out to Sand Hill Road out to Medera, which is a restaurant that's right near. It's as close as you could possibly get to the venture community. And one day, it was during the summer, we went up during noon on like a Thursday or something like that. And uh, and the room was filled with men, and they were all wearing suits and stuff. And my 14 year old looks at me and says, "Who are all these people?" And I said, well this is the venture capital community. They're all, you know, doing deals at all these different tables. And she looks at me and she goes, "why are there no women?" And I said, you know, that's a really good point. I think you should go randomly ask them. [laughter from audience and panel] And she goes, "dad, I just can't do it." I need to work on her assertiveness, but I uh, but I think that's a really important question. Why isn't it a requirement. I don't get it.

Tayloe Stansbury:

It is a great question because you pointed out earlier, most of your customers are women. It's true for our company, as well. Most of the small businesses we serve with quickbooks and personal finance products, tax products. Most of those are driven by women, so why is it our workforce as best as possible match our customers, so that we can understand our customers better. I can't imagine that the same thing isn't true for all the venture startups -- that a lot of the people that they're serving are not matched well.

Penny Herscher:

Snapchat, tinder.

[something shouted from audience]

Penny Herscher:

The audience is women.

Tayloe Stansbury:

And furthermore, we talked about the increased innovation that you get when you have a diverse team. Uh, diverse teams just think more innovative thoughts, and that's one of the reasons we work on it pretty hard. I don't know why venture companies wouldn't do precisely the same thing.

Blake Irving:

Back to the speak up thing. If a guy has an idea, and he gets really pumped up about it, he's likely to be more vocal about it, and go to try to get funding for it, etc. And back to that notion of like speak up, be heard, uh, if you have an idea, bring it forward. If you have an idea that you think is worth funding, try to do the same thing that a lot of guys do. They go to FFF, family, friends, fools, etc., and go down that path of actually telling your story. Telling what your ideas are, and executing against it. Cause in the end it's all about the execution.

Mike Schroepfer:

I think we think this group to start more companies. It's pretty simple. The VCs will follow the good ideas. So get out there and do some stuff.

unknown woman in audience:

Who's gonna fund it?

[nervous laughter]

Mike Schroepfer:

Come to me.

Penny Herscher:

There you go, ladies. There you go.

Alright, so with that, I'm gonna thank my esteemed panel. I think you guy are actually very brave to take on this subject in front of a room full of women. [applause] Thank you. It's, uh, it's not an easy subject, and as uh, as everyone has spoken about tonight, we have a long way to go, but as somebody who's been in this business for thirty years. I'm CEO of a company where half my board and half my management team are women. We can do it. And you are the generation that will do it. So, as Mike said, start companies and just tell everybody else to get out of the way.

Thank you so much, gentlemen.

[applause]

We're gonna put up some resources. Do go to the NCWIT's website. There are a lot of resources there for working with your male allies, and, uh, please enjoy the rest of the evening.

ncwit.org/ghcmaleallies

[music plays]

• What I'm Up To
• Recommended Reading & Current Events
• Mass Media Musings
• Julie's Cooking Corner
• My Writing
• Miscellany
• Cuteness

What I'm Up To

• One of my cats has been sick for a little over a week now, so that's been eating a lot of my time and stressing me out. Little guy just got back from the hospital tonight, and I'll be keeping a close eye on him this week and making sure he eats enough.
• It's been a bad last few weeks both personally and in the world. :(
• I am really behind on a lot of things because of the sick cat and the world being terrible. I'm trying to do my best to catch up.

Recommended Reading & Current Events

Black Lives Matter

The news is filled with police getting away with murdering black people. Over and over again. It is horrifying. Black lives matter. I am not even remotely the best person to talk about this, so here are some people, publications, etc. that might be better. My apologies for these being limited --- I am still trying to play catch-up myself.

• Colorlines -- a great general news resource.
• Shaun King has been providing some good coverage over at DailyKos.
• on Ferguson, riots and human limits video by Jay Smooth.
• Intimate Partner Violence, State Violence and Marissa Alexander by Trudy at Gradient Lair.
• A lot of good discussion and information is on on twitter. Below are a few people who I read that you might benefit from following.
  • Black Girl Dangerous
  • Jamelle Bouie
  • Mikki Kendall
  • Ta-Nehisi Coates

Recommended Reading

• Metafoundry 17: Twenty-Five Years Later by Deb Chachra.

The École Polytechnique shootings are as much a part of the history of women in technology as Ada Lovelace or Grace Hopper.

• Reporters are not your friends by Malcolm Harris at Al Jazeera.

Mass Media Musings

Film

Guardians of the Galaxy

This film is adorable and cheered me up a good deal (minus the sad opening) when I missed the kitten while he was at the hospital. I will likely revisit it and write a more proper review in the future.

Games

I played a ton of Don't Starve over Thanksgiving because it was on sale on Steam. It's a quirky survival game with a spooky aesthetic I enjoy. It kept my short attention span entertained a lot longer than I expected. My favorite character was (unsurprisingly) the woman who liked to set things on fire.

Julie's Cooking Corner

No recipe this time, but thought I'd share my cute Thanksgiving dinner. It's ground turkey tacos with chips, refried black beans, and pan fried sweet potatoes. Not pictured is a mini no-bake pumpkin cheesecake. I love the little yam bunny.

My Writing

• I shared some rambling thoughts about my feelings on the 25th anniversary of École Polytechnique (trigger warning).
• I transcribed the male allies panel from this year's Grace Hopper Celebration. I recommend giving it a read to understand why people were upset about it. I may write up an annotated version with my thoughts in the future.

Miscellany

• Dispatch title from "Fuck Tha Police" by N.W.A. [youtube].
• This tl;dr wikipedia for Peter Pan made me laugh.
• I was cleaning a little bit this weekend and found my collection of tech conference badges. I snapped a picture and then threw them all away. It felt good. After leaving the tech community, they aren't happy memories. Badges? I don't need no stinkin' badges!

Gittip Update

I haven't provided an update on this in ages, so I thought it was about time for a follow-up. Below are charts with data from week 107 to week 131. The continued decline is not surprising. Many people were not able to immediately leave, so they are doing so slowly as they find alternatives.

Active users have largely stabilized with a decrease of -2.60% since week 107.

Weekly gifts continue to decline with a decrease of -29.74% since week 107.

Cuteness

Here are some foster kittens I got to play with when I hung out with my friends after Thanksgiving.

Today is the 25th anniversary of the mass shooting in Montreal often referred to as the École Polytechnique Massacre. I have been thinking about it a lot today, so I want to share some thoughts, rambling as they may be.

Today I wonder how many people outside Canada think about this incident. Do those who are younger and American even know about it? It happened on December 6th, 1989. I was four, living in Pennsylvania, and far too young to have learned about it. The first time I visited Montréal was this year for PyCon. Despite no attachment to the place and being very young when it happened, I think about this incident often. Honestly, more often than I like.

The notable thing about this incident for me is who was killed and the reasons the killer cited. He targeted women engineering students claiming that he was fighting feminism. He killed fourteen women. The day is commemorated in Canada as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women.

This event is notable to me and often thought about because it is a reminder that people do exist who not only intend harm against women, but will actually carry it out. This isn't an isolated incident --- another mass killing targeting women happened this year in California. Many smaller incidents happen all the time. I think about it often. I can't not.

École Polytechnique, in particular, sticks with me because I am a woman, an engineer, and a feminist. So are many of my friends. Many of us have received harassment, stalking, and threats of violence. Sometimes thinly veiled. Sometimes straightforward. Always unsettling.

People tell us to ignore the trolls. They're not serious. They're just trying to get a rise out of you. The trouble is, some small percentage of the time they do mean real physical harm. We have no way to know when someone is "just a troll" and when someone will do something terrible like what happened in Montréal. One man even invoked Montréal when threatening a feminist video game critic this year.

I think of these incidents every time myself or one of my friends receives harassment or threats. I can't not. What so many people don't get is the long-term psychological damage of having to run the numbers in your head of how likely it is that a threat is serious. Of how likely it is that someone is going to harm you or someone you care about. Trying to figure out all the ways to make yourself less easy a target.

Don't publish your travel information. Use a PO Box. Remove your information from "people search" sites. Always pay for whois privacy protection on your domains. Warn your friends and family to avoid social engineering. Secure all of your electronic accounts with two factor authentication and strong passwords. Know that none of this is enough if someone really wants to harm you.

When we mention these incidents, people tell us to go to the police, as if we didn't think of that already. Believe me, we've tried to contact the police. They don't care. I once asked a retired law enforcement officer who cares about me about this, hoping there was a trick to get police to pay attention and care. He did not sugarcoat his response. He said that, sadly, "they tend not to care until there's a body. It's wortwhile to file a report, so that if someone does hurt you, there's a paper trail, but that's about it." The experiences of myself and my friends certainly support that. I dearly hope that none of us ever get to the part where someone has been harmed.

I keep talking about harm like it only involves a gun or a knife or a dead body. There are many forms of harm, and that is certainly the most extreme, but there is another form of harm. The psychological harm of worrying about the risk of the physical harm is significant, especially over long periods of time. I think people forget that. They don't think about École Polytechnique more often than they want to. They don't receive threats, harassment, or stalking. They don't regularly run numbers in their head about risk assessment. They have the luxury of seeing events like Montréal and Isla Vista and so many others as isolated incidents caused by madmen. They don't understand what this feels like.

Maybe you should think more about what happened at École Polytechnique more often. About the women that died because a man hated feminists. Think about it before you say something to women talking about their fear and frustration with harassments and threats. Think about it before you tell them what to do or how to feel. Think about it.

Fuck a culture that sacrifices women on the altar of men's hurt feelings.

Plaque at École Polytechnique commemorating victims of the massacre

One of my cats has been sick the last few days, and I needed something to focus on while watching him to prevent a full on catmom freakout. Transcription seemed like a good fit. I decided to transcribe the male allies panel from Grace Hopper Celebration 2014. This high profile plenary panel at the biggest women in tech conference was livestreamed without transcripts. I am sure at least a few deaf women or male allies would appreciate being able to review the content, so I put this together. I hope it's helpful.

Transcript

Announcer:

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the vice president of programs at the Anita Borg Institute, Barb Gee.

[intro music]

Barb Gee:

Good evening. I hope you had a great day. [applause from audience] So I read a very interesting blog yesterday by Cate Huston. Cate with a "C." I encourage you all to read it. What I really liked is she very much articulated the different kinds of diversity work. The easy stuff that you can do. When I'm cynical, I consider it the phony, shallow stuff. Window dressing. And all the way to the very hard stuff, which is really getting to the root of toxic cultures. I hope that this panel is just our first step in starting to attack that really hard stuff cause frankly I'm not really interested in wasting our time on window dressing. We need serious culture change, [applause from audience] and I'm very excited...I'm very excited to present the next panel. I'd like to share how this panel came to be and at some point I will address some of the legitimate concerns that people have had with this.

But I just want to tell this story. So about a year and half ago, Telle Whitney and I were at the NCWIT summit. We had just finished listening to a very respected Perl programmer in the open source community talk about how he personally had been trying to challenge his male peers about the sexism that was rampant in that culture -- this is quite well known [editor's note: the speaker being referenced is Michael Schwern]. And the resistance he got and the way he was treated. He had gotten to a point where he was beleaguered, defeated, ostracized from a community that was important to him. So Telle and I walked to lunch, and she just turned to me and she said, you know, we don't have a place for the guys to go to. So that started me thinking about what kinds of resources and programs we could offer for our male allies.

Some months later, I'm sitting in a meeting with the ABI trustees. I listened, this is a very private meeting, and I listened as the men in the room shared their stories about how they talk to other men about gender issues. I listened to Mike Schroepfer, CTO of Facebook, talk candidly about how he converses with other men. And like a good engineer, after taking us through his very well orchestrated logic tree, he ended with "so, essentially, I position unconscious bias a false negative." I thought, wow, what a great way to present the gender issue to an engineer. And, um, I thought, you know, there's state of the art dialogue that's needed in order to make this culture change happen. Mike credits Alan Eustace of Google with this framing. And that's really what this male ally work is about. Men helping men talk to men. Cause they don't need to talk to us. We know what's going on. They need to talk to other men about why this issue's important and point out where unconscious bias is, how they manifest.

Later, I was on the phone with a woman. I don't even really remember who she was, and she was telling me about the stress she was under because she was the only woman on her team, and she was encountering a lot of resistance. So I asked her, do you have any allies in your company. Where's your boss on this? She said, my boss is a great guy. He is supporting me. He sticks up for me, and guess what. Not surprisingly, they're starting to push him aside. And that's when I realized that men take risks when they advocate for us. They face the same toxic culture that we do. This added more motivation for me to figure out what we could do to help. And this panel's just the first step to starting to develop ABI programs for our male allies.

Before I introduce the panel and address some concerns, I'd like to share a teaser for a documentary that's coming out next year called "CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap." Robin Hauser Reynolds, the director/producer, and Stacey Hartman, producer, are present in the audience. Robin and Stacy will you raise your hand. Right here [points]. [audience applause]. I'm sure they'd love to talk to you after this. So let's check out their great work.

[trailer for documentary plays]

To me this is a clarion call for culture. It's time to build a serious movement. [applause] Some of you might know there's been serious concern about this panel. Some women believe it's totally inappropriate to have GoDaddy's CEO Blake Irving on a male allies panel. [applause] Some women take offense that we're giving plenary attention to men. I would be the last person to defend the misogynistic advertising that GoDaddy employed prior to Blake joining the company. I've been intrigued with the challenges he faces. Doing an external and internal cultural turnaround. Ironically Blake's turned over his executive staff. 30% of his executive staff is female, which we would die to have our partner companies do. [applause]. And Elissa Murphy, his CTO, is a woman. I seriously don't think he lowered the bar to hire her. [applause] The women at GoDaddy have weighed in and testified positively about the company's internal culture. So I think this is an interesting situation and would like to learn from those challenges. I get that this is hard to reconcile. Those ads were horrendous, but I've looked at every ad that has come out since Blake took over, and they're quite good.

But I thought if I shared some stories from my life, and some of the lessons my mom taught me. During the tumultuous time in the 60s and 70s when social movement building was everybody's hobby, um, that I might give you some perspective about how to think about this, and how to think about including men in our movement and why I think it's so important.

These stories really hit at the heart of why I believe the inclusion of men into our movement is a good thing. Because if we say we're about diversity inclusion, we've gotta walk the talk. Hard as it is, we gotta do it. So I was raised in San Francisco during the 60s when there was great social upheaval and social movement building in our country. I like to joke that for our Sunday Sunday drive my dad would pile us into his old Ford, and we'd go down to the Haight-Ashbury and look at the hippies! Didn't everybody do that when they were kids?` The Chinese-American community that I was part of could be quite racist, especially towards the African-American community. They had very different ways of expressing themselves. Ways that seemed kind of rough to us Asians. My mom could have reinforced those racist attitudes in me, but instead she said, "we owe a lot to the Black community." We might not protest the way they do, but they had not stood up and broken down some doors, we would not have had doors to walk through. That was my first lesson in diversity. [applause and shouting] The importance of valuing people who are different than you and seeing them for their strengths as partners. Not writing them off because they're different.

During the 60s and into the 70s, I went through an intense personal racial identity crisis. While at the same time our country continued to experience major cultural disruption, social movements continued to grow. As Martin Luther King said in his essay about how he came to non-violence, "I came dangerous close to hating all white people." That hit a chord for me. I could relate. Enter mom. She said to me, I have to hand it to those white college kids. They're the ones who are truly prepared to give up their power and privilege, so we can build a just world. And for those of you who might not remember back then, many white college kids from wealthy families challenged their parents. Challenged our culture of materialism and were prepared to give up their material comfort, their own personal material comfort, for a bigger cause. This was happening all over the country. This was my second lesson in diversity. A culture change. I could've gone through life pissed off at every white person who slighted me or insulted me. It still happens. Mom instilled in me the ability to respect the positive actions of those who I might too readily write off. She taught me that in order to change the situation of those who hold weaker social positions in society, we need an accompanying change on the part of those with power and privilege. Giving up power or using it on behalf of change is a vital ingredient. We need to partner with the majority, not because they're superiors or that they need to lead us. I mean, we don't need that. But as equal partners in this incredibly rewarding and hard work of changing our culture. It's in thanks to mom and in her spirit that I offer this panel.

This is just the start of our formal work with male allies. I welcome your input. For all of the men who are here. All 483 of you. I imagine you might be a bit shell-shocked right now, but I'm here to tell you it gets better. I would like to invite you to join me for an informal listening session tomorrow at 5:15. I want to hear your stories from the frontlines and brainstorm how we can help. I recently spoke with Alan Eustace and Telle Whitney, who knew Anita Borg well. I asked "what would Anita say?" They both told me that Anita welcomed male allies into the work from day one. So, I think she would approve. [applause]

With that, let me introduce, Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain and former trustee of the Anita Borg Institute, who will introduce and moderate our male allies panel. Thank you.

[applause][music plays as panel walks on stage]

Penny Herscher: Thank you Barb. Let me start by introducing my esteemed panelists here. We have Alan Eustace, who is the SVP of knowledge from Google. We have Mike Schroepfer, who is the CTO of Facebook. We have Blake Irving who is the CEO of GoDaddy. And we have [yelling from audience]tayloe stansbury who clearly has a fan club here. [more yelling]. And we have Tayloe Stansbury who is the CTO of Intuit. [applause]

And as Barb said in her introduction, this subject is actually a contentious, emotional subject for many people, but it's also very personal. I'm sure for many of you in the audience, it's very personal. There comes a moment in your life, when you decide what you're going to fight for, and gender equality in the workforce is something that my panel has decided to fight for.

And we're going to start with why is it personal to them. Because there's been so much discussion on social media about GoDaddy, we're going to start with Blake. Go for it.

Blake Irving: Thanks Penny. Um, when I, when it was announce that I had taken this job, I had, um, a lot of friends that I worked with in the technology industry, over 20 years or so go, GoDaddy? What are you kidding? Because that is so off brand for you, you know, and what I personally stood for. Of course, you know, the things that people know about the company, at that point, people go "I know your ads. I don't like them." You know, and the guys would tell me, they're misogynistic. They objectify women, and you know, I know that's what you're about, but, dude, that's what you're walking into. I said, well, there's no better way to fix something head on from a cultural perspective. Then oddly when I got to the company, I started talking with folks inside it. I found this very large dichotomy between the people that were there and how we were represented outside. So the commercials didn't represent the spirit of the people, the diversity of the company.

And for me and my own person story, um, thirteen, a little over thirteen years ago, my sister who, Laurie Irving, who was a professor at Washington State University in Vancouver died through complications in her pregnancy, and she was two weeks away from having her first child. Um, and Laurie was one of the foremost researchers in the effect of media on women's self-esteem and body image. Um, and I was extremely close to her. She was my closest and youngest sister, and after her passing, I vowed to do as much as I possibly could to forward women in my chosen field as she had done with hers. She was fighting anorexia and bulimia and had as a child. And I'd do everything I could to fight the same cause she was fighting in my industry. Can you imagine a better company to join than GoDaddy to achieve that goal. Absolutely not. [applause] And so I took the jump and decided to do that, and as off brand and as off-putting as it was for a lot of folks, it was absolutely the right choice. Since joining, the advertising has taken on a completely different flavor. It's not about sexist, it's about women's empowerment. They make up 58 percent of small businesses in the United States, and by golly, we're gonna show how hard they work, and how darn hard it is for them to...to do the same that others that are male do. [shrugs] So that's my story.

Penny Herscher:

So, who wants to follow that. [laughter]

[Alan Eustace points at Tayloe]

And it's Tayloe.

Tayloe Stansbury:

So my mom actually worked as a programmer for the federal reserve in the late 50s and early 60s, and she taught me to program when I was eight. And then she moved on to become a teacher of computer science and math. My wife is...was a computer scientist. My two older daughters are studying computer science. One at UC Santa Barbara and one at Harvey Mudd College. My wife's mother was a CS professor. Her mother was a physics professor. [laughter from audience] So I guess I've been surrounded by women I'dn technology, and in particular, women in computer science, for pretty much all my life, and uh, something that I try to continue to work on.

[applause]

[Penny looks at Alan]

Alan Eustace:

She's nodding at me. [laughs] So, uh, I guess the, you know, the start for me was really Anita Borg and I were really really close personal friends, as were many people in the audience. She and I started at a digital equipment corporation on the same day, and she corrected my first uh -- I was from Florida, by the way, not a pillar of enlightenment, uh, at least when I growing up. And, uh, the very first, you know, the first few days, I said, "why don't we go to the girl's volleyball game at Stanford." She just turned at me and she goes, "do you go to the boys basketball game at Stanford." And I said, "no, I go to the men's basketball game at Stanford." [laughter] And she, you know, in her own way she smiled at me, and that was probably one of 4,000 lessons that she taught me. Not by, you know like, beating me down, but by helping me through the journey. She was also the smartest person, I think that I knew, uh, which was great. She was working on the hardest problem. I was working on a floating point processor, and she was building the virtual memory subsystem of the operating system, so I had a lot of awe for that. You know, kind of the hardest piece of the whole puzzle. So I knew her for, you know, a very long time, and uh, you know if you spend any time at all with Anita, and many of you have, uh, you'll know that she imparts on you not just a change in the way you think about things, but also a kind of a lifelong commitment to the causes that she stood for. Many of us in this room honestly are, uh, are fulfilling what we think is a legacy, and so, I want to thank everybody that came because she would love this. She would love 8,000 people here because the best thing that you can do is have incredibly smart talented women entering the workforce and changing the world, and that would've made her really happy.

Penny Herscher:

Go for it, Mike.

Mike Schroepfer:

Uh, I think there's a theme in all of these, which is a personal connection. Mine comes from my wife, Erin. Um, she's an engineer since I've known her. She's actually a CTO too. We joke, we're probably one of the few dual CTO households in the country. I'll point out, she got there first. So, uh, [applause], by a good bit, so she's the better engineer, by far. The, you know, and kind of we started our careers together, so I watched her often be the only female engineer in the company, um, and you know, she's thrived in that, which is a testament to her, but not without its obstacles along the way. And it's one thing to hear someone else's story or read about something in a magazine. It's another to hear the story coming home how you're constantly mistaken for someone in marketing or the receptionist or whatever it may be because people wouldn't actually believe you're an engineer. Um, and, you know, those things do actually have an impact. So I think that's where it really started for me. And then when I was lucky enough to join Facebook, 6 years ago now, just realizing that we're a platform used by, you know, 1.3 billion people, and um, it's crazy just on basic logic that we didn't have, or wouldn't have an engineering team that's a good reflection of that planet of people, and isn't concentrated with one set of people in it. And so kinda diversity of gender and of all kinds has become really important to us to make sure we have people building the product that are like the people who use it.

Penny Herscher:

That's great. Thank you all for sharing your personal stories.

[applause]

So I that, uh, as you advocate for women in your workforces, do you come across resistance? And, um, men and women will resist you, and I, as we prepped for this, you told me a number of stories. I want to start with Tayloe. You had some stories about the resistance you experienced, and how you overcome it.

Tayloe Stansbury:

I'm not sure so much resistance, as reminder. I think in general, our culture is one that is open and accepting, but one does have to ask questions about how we're doing on hiring women, hiring minorities. Um, one does have to ask questions about how we're doing at promoting them, particularly in areas where they're underrepresented. We find that women tend to, uh, promote easily into, or relatively easily into positions of people leadership, but not so much into individual contributor or very senior roles. Distinguished engineers, fellows, chief architects, and sometimes those need some curation and thought pinpointing people who are likely candidates and then asking questions about what do they need for development. What would make them ready to be promoted into those positions. So those are things we work on.

Penny Herscher:

So Mike, you explain the false negative argument to the audience. [laughs]

Mike Schroepfer:

Um, yeah, and I'll point out, you know, resistance, just to answer your other question, is interesting. Cause, let's be frank, we're all here in positions of power, so I don't actually think we get a lot of resistance in day to day. First of all, shame on us if we don't use that power to make some change. And, you know, I've had a lot of reticence to coming to this panel because it's, it's not like we're winning yet. So, we're all trying really hard, and I think we all care, but the results aren't there yet. So I don't wanna stand, at least myself up, for sure, up as any kind of pinnacle of someone to admire or follow on this, as far as the result that are there.

But as far as the false negative. Basically, I have to start from a principle believing people aren't malevolent. They just are who they are. So I have to have a rational model for why people are believing the way they are. And, you know, the false negative argument comes from basically, this constant concern people have, at least in our organization, of hiring quality. Are we hiring the absolute best people in the world we can find for everything? And whenever you talk about anything that isn't some thing directly related to performance of an individual, it always raises the question of, "well does this mean we're lowing the hiring bar." And Alan and I were just having this conversation, and we've had this conversation quite publicly inside the company. I've gotten so irritated by this conversation, that I've tried to like remove the word "hiring bar" from our lexicon because it's stupid. It's not like there's a standardized test that everyone takes. That's there's a score, and we draw a line and everyone above the line comes in, and everyone below the line doesn't. Like that is not how a hiring process works. You're trying to make a judgment on will this person be exceptional and succeed and do well here, and that's all anyone wants. You know, there's no reason for us to hire someone we don't think will be that way. So you kinda have to walk people through the whole process and explain that it is what it is, and you're trying to find the best person you can, um, for that role no matter what. And I think that the one place where, you know, I think you can get people to agree that like, ok at the end of day, we have the same hiring process. We're going to evaluate all the candidates in the same way. We have a hiring committee which does this, and they don't take gender into account. We just try to decide who are the best. It's fine. So you can kinda get people through that, and say ok, great, we're not lowering the bar.

But then there's this other question. It's like, well, we're spending all this time on diversity. Right? And we have these recruiters who are spending their time on diversity. And if you look at the data, you say that those recruiting pipelines are less efficient than other ones. Meaning, number of people hired per hour spent recruiting is lower, and that is accurate. It is true that if I take a recruiter and put them on hiring just any random college grad versus hiring from a smaller pool of people, diversity, they will be less productive on the second than the first. And so there's a question of like is that a fair thing to do. Should we be using company resources on that. Um, and I think we've just decided that this is a stated policy of the company that we're gonna do this. We think it's important for all the reasons that we've talked about. That diversity is key for the company, so we're going to invest the time and energy here. And by the way, we make this decision in other ways too. It's a lot harder to hire a 20 year experienced system programmer than it is someone with a more general skillset, so it's again, a less efficient process. So it's kinda walking everyone through the process of, look, it's the same hiring calibers. The only question is, "will this person be exceptional in the company or not, no matter where they came from or what their background is." And secondly, it's like are we willing to like spend some of the company money trying really hard to make sure we're encouraging everyone who we can who might be exceptional here to come here and join us. And that's where we are.

Penny Herscher:

Alan, I know you had some stories of resistance, and how you've overcome it in your career. Can you share some stories with the audience?

Alan Eustace:

You know, I don't think it's so much resistance. I think it's, uh, it's people not really understanding. You know, I've, I mentioned this to other people, you know, many times, but uh, I don't think people really understand what women really go through in a technology field. They just don't understand it. It's just beyond their mental model of what it's like to be in a minority because they've never been in a minority. I've asked thousands of women now, uh, the question, "has there ever been a time in your career where some man has said something that made you do a double-take because of some gender-based stereotype that was behind it." And, you know, it always come out as like "did you just say that?" And nobody says anything about it. Nobody actually corrects them because it happens so often, that you know, you just, you know if you corrected everybody, that's all you'd be doing. And I ask people, I said, if you're one of those people that has never had this happen to you, please come up and tell me. And so far I've had one person. Thousands and people. Is there anybody here that that's something never happened to you? Ok, so now we know, it happens all the time.

And so, my fear right now is, you know, is that because the people are, you know, mean. Are they stupid? Are they not informed? Or is it just because we haven't done as good a job as we can of building an environment that is -- that reacts negatively. When the antibodies come out against that kind of behavior. And I think we can. I lived through the civil rights movement and other things. I saw what happened, and people, you know, I saw what happened with jokes and other things over the years, over many many years. I feel we can make a change there, but it's going to require a lot of men and women, but certainly it's harder for women to make the case for those things, and somebody else has to do it, as well. Because these kind of changes and environment happen because the majority does something different, not because the minority does something different.

Penny Herscher:

There is an element of personal risk. I know, Blake, you're taking on quite a bit of personal risk at the moment as you try and change the world. Talk about how you experience that when you're interacting with other men.

Blake Irving:

You know. I...strangely enough, I have been, um,...I've encountered mostly acceptance when I've introduced some of the things that I've done from other men. I've also, you know, have had not pushback. I've had pushback on some of the changes in advertising from men, right, which, you know said, "I think your advertising was fine."

Penny Herscher:

They enjoyed it, probably.

Blake Irving:

And I'm like, you know, that's, you're missing the mark. And, it's not about the company on the outside. It's about how do you actually create an environment on the inside of the company, that is as accepting as possible for women. And some of that is trying to make sure that the leadership you bring to the company is equally distributed as you possibly can make it. Uh, so, hiring Elissa Murphy as our CTO was very deliberate, and, you know, she's the, she's unbelievably talented, and I've had the pleasure of working with her for over a decade, and was delighted when she said, "you know, I believe in what you're doing here, and I think I think, uh, I'm willing to take that lead, and I know that I'm going to be answering a lot of tough questions from my friends too." And the first, uh, board director, independent board director, I appointed was Betsy Rafael, who was the chief accounting officer at Apple, as well. And I say, I didn't encounter a lot of pushback. I will say, um, a CTO who is a women, that when I introduced Elissa to the board, and she met all of the board members, the initial thought was, "a woman as a CTO, that's interesting." And I'm like, "she's awesome." Every conversation Elissa left with the board, they were flabbergasted. You know, just, oh my god. Super thoughtful. Super powerful. Soft-spoken. Very effective. And creating and environment where she can thrive and where others like her can thrive. I think is incredibly important to push back against that resistance.

And another thing that I've found, and I know I have a friend who is the head of the computer science department at Cal Poly has found, is when you build small teams, whether they're scrum teams or agile teams, if instead of saying, look, I'm going to try to equally distribute -- I'm going to put a woman on every team. He's actually found if you try to put the same number of women and men on a team, on a small team, that you'll end up having a much more balanced team, that is much more effective, and I've found that also creates less of a, less of a pushback.

Penny Herscher:

Having been the only woman in the room for the first twenty years of my career, I can tell you it's much more fun when it's balanced between men and women in the room. Definitely.

So, we talked as we were prepping you about this. Hundreds of years of conditioning, and we're all conditioned by our experience. We're conditioned by the media. We're conditioned by our families. And, so, one of the things that the Anita Borg Institute does is the top women -- top company for women award. And when AMEX won this award, I was struck by how they talked about the need to really educate the men at the top of the company to bring the women up as much as to educate the women. But they also, I know many of your companies run very specific programs targeted at helping the women and the men overcome the hundreds of years of conditioning. So, for our audience, if you could talk about some specifics. What do you do specifically to try to overcome that conditioning that we all have.

Tayloe Stansbury:

Sure, if I may. So Intuit has about 3,000 people in technology, of whom 170 are here to learn and to recruit. Um, so expect to learn here. And we have about 27% of our technical staff are female, but if you want to go, if you want to really be effective you have to think earlier. So one of the programs we support is Girls Who Code, and I was lucky enough that my daughter went through that this summer. My youngest daughter, and she's now decided that she wants to major in computer science. So I think getting girls early on to get confident and get excited with it is really really important. We have a really large recruiting program for interns and early career. We expect to hire, at this conference, 100 women. So it's something that we're working on throughout what we do, and then as you move forward in their careers, how do you make sure that they stay around at the company. So we have about 8% attrition amongst women in technology. That gets a little worse as they get later career, and moving into places where either there are other opportunities at other companies or life events happen that make it harder to hold down the same kind of job without flexibility. And so we try really hard to be creative about moving people into new roles for which there, they don't have obvious credential, and I think we've done an unusually good job with that, and also to be flexible about hours, videoconferencing from home to allow for flexibility in women's lives in mid-career.

Penny Herscher:

How does the women's attrition rate compare to the men's at Intuit.

Tayloe Stansbury:

Uh, about the same.

Penny Herscher:

About the same.

How about you, Alan? I know you're doing a lot at Google, very specifically.

Alan Eustace:

Uh, you know the biggest in reference to your question is unconscious bias, and uh, we've been running an unconscious bias program. That I think the goal was to have everybody at Google go through unconscious bias training, which is an enormous investment to do, but even before that what we did was we put together our own training based on the best research that's out there. Cause look, you know, especially engineers, you know, you can't just kinda give touchy feely things. You have to prove things to them. And, uh, and it's actually really easy to prove this. There's lots of studies about unconscious bias, and what's very clear if you go through, and there's exercises. There's lots of research that's been done. You can actually run your own test on some many web sites, and find out how biased you are. And you'd be shocked to know how biased anybody is about anything. I mean, just and it's, and the bias is the same for men and women, actually. I mean, it's amazing, we have an impression of what a particular person looks like. You know, we have of what a programmer looks like, or what a nurse looks like, or, you know, what a fireman looks like. It's just ingrained. And I think one of the really nice things about the program. It's like an hour long. Is it teaches people that they are biased, and that you have to step back and think about what kind of biases you have in every situation, and you have to understand that. And then you have to physically compensate for what your entire life has taught you to do that.

I mean, for example, one of our senior fellows, a guy named Jeff Dean, whose daughter might be in the audience. I saw her earlier today. And we thought about, you know, our hiring process at one point was how many standard deviations away from Jeff Dean is this person. And, you know, well, this person's three standard deviations away. And we just thought about how wrong that message is. That's not a program, that's not what a programmer looks like. They come in all sizes, shapes, you know, genders, you know, races, ethnicities, backgrounds, things like that. And so, you know, for me, that training was really important, and it was powerful, and I think we've got a much more sensitized workforce because of it. And I hope it's gonna turn out better for lots of outcomes in the company.

Penny Herscher:

In fact, everyone in the audience can go through the training right? It's online, isn't it? I watched the video. There's a one hour video, and it's really eye opening. It's really good.

Mike Schroepfer:

Yeah, I think this is just this is, double down on this...We're running a similar program, and it's really important to get people sensitized to the fact that they have these biases. The way I often talk about this to engineers is, you know your brain is this amazing pattern matcher. And so, because we have this problem of diversity in the workplace, it's like reinforced the patterns in your brain, which is you're used to going into a room where it's usually white men, and those are the programmers. You know, other functions or other people are represented by other things. So that's the pattern you represent in your brain. It's fairly, it happens, it doesn't necessarily mean you're a bad person, but if you don't acknowledge that it exists, as Alan said, you don't correct it. If you assume, no no no, I'm great with this, I don't have to worry about it, then you're probably screwing it up because you really have to be worrying about it all the time and correcting for it. Man or woman, background, care about it or not to make sure that you're doing the right thing in the workplace all the time. And that's a really hard message for people to hear, but I think it's important people hear it in a non-judgmental way. It's, again, not a bad person, just this is the state of the world and the state of your mind and brain, and what you've been trained to see. And here's where we want to move it to, and we need to all work on this together. And I think that's a really important step for the workplace.

Penny Herscher:

You doing anything really active to bring women up, Blake?

Blake Irving:

Um, yeah, so we...

Penny Herscher:

Programmatically?

Blake Irving:

Well, programmatically, we have something that we started about, eight, nine months ago, which is called the GoDaddy women in technology group. And we encourage men to participate in the GoDaddy women in technology group, and we bring in speakers, uh, on on a monthly basis. We've had the president of the Geena Davis foundation, Telle's been out, Maria Klawe's been out, Lisa Stone from BlogHer's been out. And they spend the whole day with us, and they spend the day with the exec staff, talking, helping influence. We listen a LOT on things that they think we should be doing. They listen to what we are doing. Uh, and making sure that the awareness across the company is greater that, gosh, there's a lot a women that are in technology in this company, and they need a voice. They need a common voice -- a way to be heard. Uh, and we need to be educated by them. Um, I think some of the ideas you've introduced about unconscious bias are absolutely true, and I'm anxious to view the video.

Penny Herscher:

It really is fantastic.

Blake Irving:

Sounds awesome. Uh but, those are the things we've been doing programmatically. And there's, on a, I'll be flat open honest, there's a lot more that we have to do. You know, we're just getting started on some of this stuff, so um. I think Alan and Mike have been, frankly, you know, way ahead of it, and I'm, uh, delighted to be able to chat with them about it.

Penny Herscher:

So let's go off script for a second.

Alan Eustace:

That's always a bad idea.

Penny Herscher:

So this is all very nice.

[laughter from audience]

This is all very nice and positive, right. Why is this so hard? I have thirty years in this business as a technical woman, and we aren't done yet. Right ladies? We aren't done yet. [yelling from audience] So why is this so hard? You, you must see it from you're in this perspective of power. I know you all care. What's so, what's making it so difficult? Why can't we move faster?

Alan Eustace:

You know personally, I think it's culture. Culture's the hardest thing to change. I feel like computer science is a wonderful layer we're actually trying to solve huge problems. It's really, it's interesting. I love this discipline in every way. I feel like it's so important, but at the same time, we've created a, um, over time this culture of kind of exclusivity, elitism, ah, you know, it it's, we make things that are really simple, actually hard. You know, we have, [laughs], you know like pipelining, you know. It's a washer and a dryer, that's all pipelining is. You know, but we have all these acronyms and make everything seem really super hard and difficult and, you know, have uh, you know, we've just, we've created this club, you know, this fraternity that is programmers, and it's just bad. It's just wrong. And, and I feel like it's holding us back as a company. It's holding our individuals back. It's holding our companies back. It's holding the field back.

woman in audience:

BINGO!!!

Alan Eustace:

[confused look] What? Uh oh. Uh oh, I might've...

[audience laughter]

Penny Herscher:

I think that was enthusiasm in the audience. Keep going.

Alan Eustace:

Anyways, so uh, so it's just holding us back, and I feel like somehow we have to break through the culture, uh, to really make progress. You know, the sad thing is, is I don't think the culture is active. I don't think people are, you know, actively protecting it and trying to hold off the hordes of women and diversity candidates and keep them from the power structure that is technology. It's just not happening like that. [laughs] Maybe it is. But my hope is that it's not that, and that nad it's, you can teach people, uh, and you can change that culture, and that we don't have to wait for all those people to die because that's the alternative. [audience laughter] Now many of you want to kill a few of them, and I'm ok, I am not encouraging that behavior, but, but uh, I think we have to change that.

Penny Herscher:

Do you think it's generational? I mean, Mike, you have a very young employee base at Facebook. Do you think some of the issues are generational? Do you see it better in the younger generation than the older generation.

Mike Schroepfer:

I mean the data says the reverse. Is that it was actually better twenty years ago than it is today, so I, you know, [audience yells something...maybe another bingo?] if it's generational, it's going...

Blake Irving:

...it's going wrong..

Mike Schroepfer:

Going in the wrong direction, so uh, I don't think it's generational. Um, I think it's a lot of what Alan said. We need to fix the culture.

Blake Irving:

And more people have to care. I mean, one of the biggest problems is most of the guys that are in the club, in the fraternity that Alan was describing. Honestly, they don't care enough, and they have to change behavior, and changing behavior is hard and you have to really want to do it. And you have to be conscious about it. And if you're introducing new things that somebody has to do, and the benefit for them, especially among engineers, isn't tangible, the, they're, why the hell would I make that investment? Because they don't see the tangible. Now, I believe they will. I've seen it on small teams. It matters a whole hell of a lot.

Penny Herscher:

Yes.

Alan Eustace:

Let me add one thing on a previous thing. I had mentioned the whole thing about, uh, about how many women have encountered in their career, some form of stereotype, and it's caused them to uh, you know, have either do a double-take or things like that. But the other part of that story, that I think is the most interesting part is the reverse. Of all the men I've asked "have you ever in any situation or workforce ever said something or done something that has made a woman uncomfortable based on some stereotype." And I've yet to find a single male that will admit ever doing that. [laugher from panel]

Penny Herscher:

I'll give you names.

[laughter from audience]

Alan Eustace:

No no. Actually someone came to me after I'd done that, and said, "Alan, I remember a time when you made me uncomfortable." [laughter from panel and audience] So, it's happening out there. She took me aside and corrected me. We're fine now. [laughter]

Tayloe Stansbury:

Penny, if I could add. You know, I think all of us are hiring well above the average of graduates in computer science, and I'm guessing everybody in the conference is doing the same thing. I think the problem starts way earlier. A bunch of you out here are students in computer science. You've already decided to make that choice, to go into computer science. I think the problem is in high school, when girls decide not to. And if you think about the problem we have in this country of not enough graduates in computer science. How you can fix the problem if you don't get the other half of the population to get excited about computing and feel capable of doing it, so I think programs that reach all the way back into high school and middle school that get girls excited about computing and feeling like it's cool and that they can do it. And it's not out there and weird and geeky, are incredibly important to feed the pipeline, so that when it comes downstream to us for trying to hire people, they're there, and they're great. And one of the things that, you know, we require in schools is that everybody take languages. You have to take so many years of a foreign language when you're in high school. Why is not computing a language you have to take? Why is it not a requirement? [applause]

When women actually do have to take computer science as a requirement, almost half of them actually find out that they actually love it and want to continue studying it. I think Harvey Mudd is an example of that.

Blake Irving:

There's a, uh, an organization called code.org. I don't know if you're familiar with them. Hadi Partovi, big voice in that, uh, that group. Great guy. And they have something they do called the hour of code. Um, and, don't know, our company just sent out a mail encouraging everybody to do this, this. Everybody across the company, to spend an hour, just coding, and see what you think. And his, his take is exactly what you said. Look, we should have this as a science because we still do, we do biology, we do chemistry, and we don't do computer science, nor do we treat it as it was a language, and it was just part of the linguistics program. And either can be true, and few folks, few kids in high school, or even going into high school, or matriculating into college view coding as a creative art form, when it is, in fact, incredibly flexible and incredibly creative. In a place where, yes, you can apply linear thinking, and do all kinds of things that would apply to somebody who was gonna be a double E or an ME, but it's also more creative than that because you can express yourself in different ways and get to the same result. And few folks actually know that when they're in their high school years, and nobody's teaching them. And we've got to.

Penny Herscher:

So, Mike, you told us about a program about a program, um, to bring kids in who were not from computer science and teach them over the summer. That was a fascinating program. Can you tell the audience about that program.

Mike Schroepfer:

Sure. We call it FBU. This is the second summer we did it, and it was actually, I got tired, we got tired of talking about this, and wanted to try to do something to get people who might be interested from might "I might be interested" to "hell yeah, I'm interested in computer science." And, um, so we started in 2013. It was a small group. We made it 60% bigger this year. This year's class was 96% diverse, so 96% women and minorities. We actually got some anecdotal feedback that they wanted some other men in the program. [laughter] But, um, much more important, they did amazing. So they goal here was to get people who were freshman, so rising sophomores in college, who were interested in computer science, but probably hadn't taken enough of the prerequisites to qualify to be a full-time intern, um, so weren't, either weren't a computer science student or weren't far enough along, and try to hook them into it. So, you've got iOS training, so we actually did the same iOS training we'll use to take a web developer and turn them into a mobile developer, offered it to them, and they did team projects in groups of four. Um, and then presented them at the end of the summer. And what's amazing is that a good portion of them came back the next year as full time summer interns, and they're, they performed amazingly well. As good or better than any other cohort I could find at the company. So it's a small group, but we're hoping to expand it over years.

Penny Herscher:

What were their majors? Or, what were the breadth of majors?

Mike Schroepfer:

I mean, most of them were undeclared because they were freshmen. So, you know, some were math, some were in the humanities, and some were maybe interested in computer science, but weren't sure. And, um, you know, the most fulfilling is just meeting people who said, "yeah, I wasn't sure whether I was interested", but after the summer it's like "heck, yeah, I can do this and it's amazing." Hopefully, we can do more things like this across the industry.

Penny Herscher:

So you've got a big pipeline out of there of students who I'm sure you'd love to recruit, but they're all, uh, living with the culture that Alan described. We're all living with it. And so what would you tell them to do as they come into your companies, or they come into a different company. They're all fiercely brave, right ladies? [applause] What would you tell them to do to change the culture? How can they, every one of them make a difference? They're not the men in power, but they're brave.

Alan Eustace:

I think the best thing that you can do is excel, and to push through whatever boundaries that you, you know, see in front of you, and, uh, just continue to push, and be great. I mean, just be super amazing great because there's one thing that, um, I don't care who you are, I don't care what culture and stuff like that, greatness is amazing, and people recognize greatness, and, uh, you know, it requires a lot of hard work. And you'll see a lot of adversity along the way. I mean, you'll have lots of people that are doubters. And you'll have people who say the wrong things and do the wrong things, but if you build great thing, uh, people will recognize you, and uh, and know that it's gonna be twice as hard for you. I mean, you're gonna have to work so much harder, uh, I think, than a lot of other people potentially because you're gonna have to overcome a lot of these unconscious biases. But you can make a big difference in your company.

We had one project at Google early on. Debbie Wollack and Fei Chang [editor's note: I'm unsure how to spell these names. Apologies if they are misspelled.], you know, close friends of mine. They actually worked on this tiny little project in the company on, uh, trying to build a bigger index, which is kinda the heart of search, and uh, using less machines, and it was a side project. It was, uh, called blimpie at the time, and uh, and it turned out that there was a time in the history of the company where it was super important for us to raise the index size, and those two women built the core of what allowed us to create an enormous index without using a lot of machines. That was like a huge competitive advantage for the company. And they did it. That one team: two women. An amazing story, and uh, and so that, that was the best thing that I think you can do. Just excel, and work hard to excel.

Tayloe Stansbury:

If I could build on that, Alan. You can't be in computing without being problem solvers, and this is just another class of problem. So apply your problem solving to the social dynamics and the people problems that arise just as much as you do to the technology problems, and excel, as Alan suggests, and you will solve it.

Blake Irving:

Yeah, I guess the only thing that I'd add, I think you guys both make great points. Speak up. One of the things that I've found is women won't speak up, and honestly, sometimes guys don't wanna hear them. It's true, and speak up, be confident. Uh, you have allies, you don't know where they are. They might be hidden. They might be some other part of the company. They care. And they're there. Speak up and be heard.

[applause]

Penny Herscher:

And don't ever let anybody tell you you can't do something...ever. [laughs]

So let’s, let’s talk about the commercials because in the end um [yells from audience] no the commercial not the commercials, the commercial nature of this, in the end [Blake Irving wipes brow][audience laughs] unless we make money, we’re all running for profit ventures, unlike Telle, we’re running for profit ventures. So how do you explain to your CFO, let’s get to the sort of the hard facts? How do you explain to your CFO why this is a good idea? Ah, the reason I’m asking this question is I think helping the audience understand that this is also about making money, and it’s not just feeling good. That I think it helps everybody just get grounded in the idea we’re running businesses.

Alan Eustace:

Well, my CFO rides a booster board. He has an electric bike. He’s like the most crazy guy that I’ve ever seen. He is as enlightened as any CFO in the entire world. I’ve never seen him wear a suit ever. Ah, um, and so uh I think he’s well primed to solve this problem, but I think in companies though this isn’t a -- this is going to make better products. That’s the whole key, right. You have to build better products. And you know if you think that, and you know uh, a bunch of guys hiding over in a corner in a locker room thing. If you think that’s the path to an enlightened product, you know, for the world, then go for it. Um, but I don’t think any of us believe that. I don’t think any engineering department believes that. I don’t any executive believes that that’s the right way, and I feel like if you’re going to build the great products, you have to have a diverse workforce, and it’s gotta reflect the customers that you have. But more importantly, I feel like it’s a much better place to work. Uh, you know, I don’t wanna work in a locker room. You know, I want to work in a place where there’s a lot of people with a lot of great ideas that are free to express them. And uh, you know, I think we’re going to have better companies. We’re gonna have more profitable companies. We’re gonna have funner companies. And we’re going to, uh, you know, we can solve big and hard problems for the world. And uh, that’s what we have to do. Together.

Blake Irving:

Yeah, so, uh...

Penny Herscher:

I'm biding my time here.

Blake Irving:

My, look, I don't necessarily agree that every exec is an enlightened as your CFO. My CFO is a thirteen year KKR guy, so he's from private equity. Now, I will say that Scott Wagner, great guy, brilliant guy, also my chief operating officer. Um, he's believes, and I believe this in the bottom of my heart, that if you build products for a diverse customer base, you should try as hard as you can to get your workforce, you engineering teams, to replicate that customer base as closely as you possibly can. At this conference, we've funded 112 students to come from both Cal Poly and Harvey Mudd to come here, and that was...pretty expensive. Uh, and Scott, who understands the value, understands the value of the recruiting pipeline, says that's good spend. And, and that's from a guy who doesn't ride electric, I don't think he has an electric vehicle. But uh, so, I mean, there are, again, there are advocates out there. There are people that support it. But it is, frankly, you said it earlier, it was either Mike or Alan said, it's more expensive to hire women because the, frankly, the population is smaller, and that's one of the problems Tayloe was talking about, as well, so we're spending and we think it's worth it.

Penny Herscher:

And we still see predominantly male, many, many predominantly male startups, so we haven't got the venture community to understand the economics of this. How do you think we get them to understand that?

...

Nobody taking that one.

Alan Eustace:

Well, it's funny you mention it because my daughter's 14 and she loves computer science. My younger daughter's 9 and she also likes computer science, but she and I, we often go ride our bikes out to Sand Hill Road out to Medera, which is a restaurant that's right near. It's as close as you could possibly get to the venture community. And one day, it was during the summer, we went up during noon on like a Thursday or something like that. And uh, and the room was filled with men, and they were all wearing suits and stuff. And my 14 year old looks at me and says, "Who are all these people?" And I said, well this is the venture capital community. They're all, you know, doing deals at all these different tables. And she looks at me and she goes, "why are there no women?" And I said, you know, that's a really good point. I think you should go randomly ask them. [laughter from audience and panel] And she goes, "dad, I just can't do it." I need to work on her assertiveness, but I uh, but I think that's a really important question. Why isn't it a requirement. I don't get it.

Tayloe Stansbury:

It is a great question because you pointed out earlier, most of your customers are women. It's true for our company, as well. Most of the small businesses we serve with quickbooks and personal finance products, tax products. Most of those are driven by women, so why is it our workforce as best as possible match our customers, so that we can understand our customers better. I can't imagine that the same thing isn't true for all the venture startups -- that a lot of the people that they're serving are not matched well.

Penny Herscher:

Snapchat, tinder.

[something shouted from audience]

Penny Herscher:

The audience is women.

Tayloe Stansbury:

And furthermore, we talked about the increased innovation that you get when you have a diverse team. Uh, diverse teams just think more innovative thoughts, and that's one of the reasons we work on it pretty hard. I don't know why venture companies wouldn't do precisely the same thing.

Blake Irving:

Back to the speak up thing. If a guy has an idea, and he gets really pumped up about it, he's likely to be more vocal about it, and go to try to get funding for it, etc. And back to that notion of like speak up, be heard, uh, if you have an idea, bring it forward. If you have an idea that you think is worth funding, try to do the same thing that a lot of guys do. They go to FFF, family, friends, fools, etc., and go down that path of actually telling your story. Telling what your ideas are, and executing against it. Cause in the end it's all about the execution.

Mike Schroepfer:

I think we think this group to start more companies. It's pretty simple. The VCs will follow the good ideas. So get out there and do some stuff.

unknown woman in audience:

Who's gonna fund it?

[nervous laughter]

Mike Schroepfer:

Come to me.

Penny Herscher:

There you go, ladies. There you go.

Alright, so with that, I'm gonna thank my esteemed panel. I think you guy are actually very brave to take on this subject in front of a room full of women. [applause] Thank you. It's, uh, it's not an easy subject, and as uh, as everyone has spoken about tonight, we have a long way to go, but as somebody who's been in this business for thirty years. I'm CEO of a company where half my board and half my management team are women. We can do it. And you are the generation that will do it. So, as Mike said, start companies and just tell everybody else to get out of the way.

Thank you so much, gentlemen.

[applause]

We're gonna put up some resources. Do go to the NCWIT's website. There are a lot of resources there for working with your male allies, and, uh, please enjoy the rest of the evening.

ncwit.org/ghcmaleallies

[music plays]

• What I'm Up To
• Recommended Reading & Current Events
• Mass Media Musings
• My Writing
• Julie's Cooking Corner
• Miscellany
• Cuteness
• Promotion

What I'm Up To

• Finished up the super-busy period at work.
• Doing more yoga. I have been faithfully going twice a week, and it is really helping me relax.
• Watching more film. Once upon a time, I was a huge film nerd. The tech community kinda killed that as it killed the rest of my soul. After leaving the tech community, it's slowly coming back. Hurray!
• Dreaming of one day opening a cat cafe.

Recommended Reading & Current Events

• The Other Side of Diversity by Erica Joy. This is a really important piece about Erica's experiences working as one of very few black women (and black people, in general) throughout her career. She calls out something important that many overlook. The cumulative stress of being different in a homogeneous environement does very real physical and emotional damage.
• Rethinking Allyship by Mattie Brice.

[Being] part of a particularly marginalized group is really frustrating, especially when you’re tasked for educating an entire artform and industry. People who say they are allies, with completely good intentions surely, form exploitative relationships instead of ones of care and mutual interest. These alliances tend to be particularly transactional, usually exposure for the marginalized so the powerful can cash in on their cultural capital, and is always more of a deal for the latter.

• "Just Being Who We Are Is Extremely Risky": An Honest Discussion On Race In Silicon Valley at FastCompany.

The meritocratic glow of Silicon Valley is so frustrating. It creates a pass for people who use things like the “culture” filter. What’s the culture filter? An easy excuse to be prejudiced.

Why is “Did you do this for somebody just because they’re black” an insult? “Did you do this for somebody just because they’re white?” isn’t an insult, and that happens all the time.

I want black people to be massively, undeniably successful, so that nobody can say anything.

In the News

In this week's news, mainstream news outlets are awful.

• MSNBC gave screen time to a fucking KKK leader (Arturo Garcia at Raw Story) who threatened violence against the protestors in Ferguson. I hate 24 hour news networks so much.
• Time magazine suggested banning the word "feminist" (alongside a bunch of other words, many of which are slang more frequently used by people of color). No, I am not linking to that garbage.

Mass Media Musings

Film

Want to see me review a film? Submit a recommendation.

Snowpiercer

As promised last week, I wrote a review (spoiler warning).

eXistenZ

I have been slowly working my way through David Cronenberg's films. I try to space them out to minimize damage to my psyche. This is definitely a Cronenberg film. It oozes (both literally and figuratively) Cronenberg. I don't love the film, but it was worth seeing once for my brain's film catalog.

• I found myself wanting to yell "ACTUALLY, IT'S ABOUT ETHICS IN GAMES JOURNALISM" at the screen repeatedly throughout the film.
• Everything is gross and icky because Cronenberg.
• Interesting commentary on the blurred lines between reality and the fantasy world of gaming.

Television

Gilmore Girls

I am a little bit into season 4, and it is pretty meh, so far. Hopefully I'll have something more entertaining to report back on next time.

My Writing

I wrote a review for the film Snowpiercer. It includes some silly notes similar to my old film livetweeting. Warning: review contains some spoilers.

Want me to review a film? Submit a recommendation.

Julie's Cooking Corner

The corner of the dispatch where I show you my attempts at cooking to help readers who are also inexperienced cooks.

Chicken & Chana Masala

This is a quick and easy dish to make. It reheats well, so I tend to make a ton of it and have the leftovers when I don't have time to cook. I mix together chicken and chickpeas, but you can make this with just chickpeas (good for vegetarians) or just chicken (good for people who hate chickpeas---I am judging you).

Ingredients

• Can of chickpeas (also labeled as garbanzo beans)
• Skinless boneless chicken thighs (would likely work well with chicken breast too, but I haven't tried it)
• Peppers of your choosing (I usually use two green bell peppers)
• Onions (I usually use one large onion or two small ones)
• Masala simmer sauce (I usually use Trader Joe's or Patak's. You can find the latter at most grocery stores.)
• Minced garlic (I usually buy the pre-minced stuff, but you can mince it yourself).
• Naan (I usually buy the frozen garlic naan from Trader Joe's).
• Garam masala
• Cumin

Tools

• Pan suitable for simmering (I use a deep pan with a top, so I can make a bunch of food).
• Knife for cutting up veggies and chicken (I use this one).

Directions

• Turn on your oven to preheat for warming up the naan (refer to packaging for exact temperature).
• Dice peppers and onions. Mince garlic. Cut up chicken into small pieces.
• Heat up the pan and start cooking onions.
• Add garlic and peppers.
• Add chicken and cook it until it is lightly browned.
• Add simmer sauce and chickpeas. Stir and cover.
• Simmer for ~15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add spices (garam masala, cumin) to taste.
• Put in naan a few minutes before the simmering is done.
• Eat some of the delicious food. Save the rest for leftovers.

Miscellany

• So You’ve Finally Started Wearing The Right Bra Size from the Toast.
• temporarilyembarrassedmillionaires.org
• Dispatch title from "Travelling Woman" by Bat For Lashes [youtube]

Cuteness

This is Leon modeling my new mochi bunny friend.

Check out pictures of the shelter cats from my volunteer work this week.

Promotion

Donations Needed

• Your local food bank. Winter is coming, and that is a rough time of the year for a lot of people. Help make sure they can get something to eat.
• Quirell via Indiegogo. Quirell is a social network currently in the planning stages being developed by queer/trans collective CollectQT. Quirell differs from traditional social networks in that it aims to be a place for marginalized community members and others to escape the noise and over-saturation of traditional social networks.

Newsletters

• Technically Speaking a new newsletter from Chiu-Ki Chan and Cate Huston with CFPs and information on public speaking, with a focus on technical topics.

Prepare yourself for some silly film reviews! If you've seen my film livetweeting, it will probably be a bit like that, but with slightly more cohesion. My first review is for the film Snowpiercer.

Intro

Do you like dystopian futures, violent action movies, and trains? Then this is the film for you!

• IMDb. Check the parents guide for warnings about content.
• 95% on rotten tomatoes.
• Currently available to watch on netflix instant.
• Warning: review contains spoilers.

Review

Snowpiercer is at its heart a dystopia. The story starts in 2014 to remind us just how close we are to a doomed future. Scientists release a chemical into the atmosphere to counteract global warming by cooling things down. Things don't go as planned, and the earth is cooled into an unlivable ice age. Thankfully, some guy named Wilford was thoughtful enough to build a self-sustaining train impervious to the ice age and able to pierce through ice. A moving ark to save humanity. SNOWPIERCER!

Fast forward 18 years, and we're in the steerage section of the train with the protagonist of our story. We've got our dystopian future, and our hero is preparing for a revolution. No more eating black jello in the back of the train. It's time to work our way to the front of the train and maybe stab some bougies on our way there!

The film takes us on a dark adventure through the train with each car a new surprise. We get to find out how the sausage (er---protein blocks) is made, battle some scary train military, see how the richer half lives, and much more. Throughout the film, I found myself guessing what the next section of the train would hold. When it was over, I wondered about the places it skipped. I love the world building that happens in such a tiny space. I am curious if the graphic novel it is based on goes into more detail.

The world of the film is not only interesting, but visually appealing. This is my first Joon-ho Bong film, so I have nothing to compare to, but it makes me want to explore his other works. Chris Evans does a fine job as the protagonist, but my excitement lies with a lot of the smaller roles. Tilda Swinton does a great job as a bit of comic relief (let's be honest, I would watch her read the phone book---I adore her). Alison Pill steals the screen for the few scenes she's in. John Hurt excellently serves as the grizzled old mentor for our dystopia. Last, but not least, Kang-ho Song intrigues me as the cynical security specialist who has his own ideas about revolution. I look forward to seeing him more when I visit the director's previous films.

Snowpiercer is darkly funny in just the right ways to offset the violence and gore (and is, admittedly, sometimes part of the violence and gore). The absurdity in this dystopia reminds me a little bit of Brazil, a film I have been meaning to revisit for some time. Like Brazil, this film is working on multiple levels. There's some action, violence, and bloodspray, but there's also metaphor, symbolism, and political commentary. If you are into those things, I recommend giving it a try.

Notes

Highlights from the notes I took during the film. This is about as close as you'll get to my old livetweeting.

• Grizzly Captain America will save us!
• “This is size 10 chaos.” –Tilda Swinton talking about a shoe
• Train parkouuuur attaaaack!!!
• Even in the dystopian future, computers don't work.
• So the protein bars are made of bugs? People eat bugs now. They acted so horrified, I expected it to be people (::cough:: SOYLENT ::cough::).
• LOOK AT US GUTTING THIS FIIIIIIISH. WE’RE SO SCARY.
• He just slipped on that fish like it was a banana peel. Is this supposed to be the comic relief?
• Let's stop for sushi in the middle of our revolution. Om nom nom.
• These creepy children are freaking me out.
• Teacher's goooot a guuuun (sung to the tune of Janie's Got a Gun).
• THIS IS MADNESS! NO, THIS IS A TRAAAAAAAAIN!
• Yeah, you punch that door. It’ll open it faster.
• Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, WILFOOORDPHOOOONE!
• Wait, wait. Let me get this straight. You know what people taste like and think babies are delicious, but you were upset that the protein bars are made of bugs?
• Oh noes, a club kid. WTF? ATTACK OF THE CLUB KIDS!
• Come to the dark side, we have steak (and maybe cookies).
• Welp, you got your arm chopped off, like you always wanted. WAS IT ALL YOU HOPED AND DREAMED OF?
• How did those fur coats not get singed to shit in the explosion?
• Polar bear! Is that supposed to be hopeful? It’s probably gonna maul their faces.

• What I'm Up To
• Recommended Reading & Current Events
• Mass Media Musings
• Firebees
• Julie's Cooking Corner
• Miscellany
• Cuteness

What I'm Up To

• Work is still pretty busy, but that should end after this week. FREEEEDOOOOOM!
• I made more homemade applesauce. I may have an addiction to applesauce. I LIVE FOR THE SAUCE. CAN'T STOP THE SAUCE.
• I have been continuing with yoga 1. I find it really helpful for giving my brain a break.

Recommended Reading & Current Events

• White men by Sara Ahmed at Feminist Killjoys. Yes, yes, everything about this post. Sara Ahmed's writing is so good. Seriously, read the whole thing.

You come against a system when you point out a system. When there is a system those who benefit from the system do not want to recognise that system. You might be heard as dismissive as if you are explaining away their personal achievements. They might not recognise the walls, because to recognise the walls would also expose how an upward trajectory is not simply a matter of volition but is dependent on being supported and enabled; dependent on the uneven distribution of support.

White men = a support system.

And I call upon white men not to keep reproducing white men; not to accept history as a good enough reason for your own reproduction.

It takes conscious willed and willful effort not to reproduce an inheritance.

• Pregnant, and No Civil Rights by Lynn M. Paltrow and Jeanne Flavin at the New York Times. This is so terrifying to me as a person capable of becoming pregnant.

Anti-abortion measures pose a risk to all pregnant women, including those who want to be pregnant.

Such laws are increasingly being used as the basis for arresting women who have no intention of ending a pregnancy and for preventing women from making their own decisions about how they will give birth.

• San Francisco's gay culture is dying by Samantha Allen at The Daily Dot. This is really depressing, but not surprising. This is part of why I will not move to SF. I don't want to contribute to this any more than I already am by working for a large tech company.

San Francisco as we know it is dying and the closing of the Lex is nothing but the most recent warning sign that the city is being consumed by wealthy white heterosexual culture.

San Francisco’s LGBT homelessness problem is driven by two distinct but interrelated phenomenon: First, queer people drawn to San Francisco because of its progressive reputation find themselves unable to afford shelter when they arrive and second, queer people who already live in the city are being evicted as rent and home prices soar.

As subcultures, countercultures, and just plain culture are drained from the City, San Francisco is becoming a high-tech dystopian playground for rich white people.

• The Dads of Tech by Astra Taylor, Joanne McNeil at The Baffler. #NoDads

While early techno-utopians envisioned “cyberspace” as a place where Internet users could invent new selves, liberated from oppressive real-world constraints, Internet discourse routinely, and forcefully, transports women back into their offline bodies.

In the end, an Internet built by Dads, for Dads, sells most of us short. The stereotypical Dad, insulated from divergent perspectives, lacks the necessary understanding of how social problems and power inequities persist—and how these problems get amplified in a networked society.

In the News

• 9 Not-Terrible Things That Happened in Last Night’s Election from Autostraddle.
• Conflict Kitchen closes after death threat from Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Conflict Kitchen is a restaurant in Pittsburgh that only serves food from countries the US is in conflict with. Previous countries have included places like North Korea, Cuba, and Iran. Their current offering of Palestinian food has led to a lot of (in my opinion, unreasonable) backlash. They are currently closed because of death threats.
• #pointergate may be the most racist news story of 2014 by Shaun King at Daily Kos.
• If Twitter Won’t Handle Its Massive Harassment Problem, These Women Will by Samantha Allen at The Daily Beast.

Mass Media Musings

Film

I used to be a huge film nerd, but the soul-sucking tech community destroyed that for a few years. Thankfully, my excitement about movies is starting to come back. I am hoping to try my hand at writing more about film in the future. Stay tuned!

Snowpiercer

I watched this over the weekend. I am planning to do a standalone review, so keep an eye out for that some time soon.

Television

Gilmore Girls

I just finished season 3. As usual, silly bullet points and there may be spoilers.

• “PACK YOUR CHASTITY BELT, GILMORE! YOU’RE GOING TO HARVARD!” – Paris
• Fiiiiiiight! Watching Jess and Dean beat the crap out of each other was enjoyable. I can't stand either of them. No more shitty boyfriends. DEATH TO SHITTY BOYFRIENDS!
• Poor Dave trying to read the entire bible. Lane's mom is bananas.
• “I’m so glad I had all that sex.” – words to live by from Miss Patti
• We've reached the part of the show where they try to start a spinoff on the CA beach with Jess and his deadbeat dad. This is stupid.
• Apparently Paris' middle name is Eustace.
• Rory graduated. Next stop, Yale!

Shondaland

I continue to be bored with Scandal this season. I hate Fitz more than ever before (and there was a lot of hate previously). He's so fucking gross. Can they just kill him and somehow make Mellie president? That's a show I want to watch.

How to Get Away with Murder continues to intrigue me and keep my attention. Viola Davis continues to be amazing. How to Get Away with Dynamic Black Women Leads by Corinne Gaston at Bitch Flicks has an interesting writeup about Viola Davis' character on the show.

Firebees

New comic: Actually.

Julie's Cooking Corner

Welcome to the section of the dispatch where I tell you about what I've been cooking. I am not an experienced cook, and I just started really cooking again after a long dry spell. I suspect some of my readers are equally inexperienced, so hopefully this will help you.

I need to get a better lit location to take pictures of the food. Sorry these look a little drab.

Ramen with smoked salmon

I was in the mood for ramen and needed to use up some smoked salmon, so I decided to combine the two. It was a little different, but tasted good to me.

One of my friends mentioned it looks a little bit like sushi ramen. I may try to add some nori strips next time to better fit that name.

Ingredients

• Ramen noodles (I usually use one of the cheap brands. Flavor packet doesn't matter---you're not going to use it).
• Miso paste (I use a brand called Minute Miso I got at Whole Foods).
• Green onions.
• Diced garlic.
• Veggies of your choosing (I used broccoli this time).
• Sesame seeds (I used garlic flavored ones).
• Smoked salmon.
• 1-2 cups of water (depends how much broth you want).

Directions

• Put the water in a pot and bring it to boiling. Chop the green onions and veggies while you're waiting for the water to boil.
• Add the noodles for about 2 minutes, stirring occasionally.
• Add your veggies at the appropriate time based on how long they need to cook (or steam them ahead of time and dump them in at the end).
• Add miso paste to taste. If you don't have miso paste, soy sauce also works well. If I'm in the mood for spicy, I also add some sriracha.
• Add garlic, green onions, and some pepper. Stir.
• Put the soup in a bowl.
• Top with smoked salmon.
• Sprinkle sesame seeds over everything.
• Enjoy!

Waffles with homemade applesauce

I don't really have a recipe here. I just wanted to share how delicious this is. Syrup is a little too sugary and sticky for me sometimes, so I made waffles and topped them with warmed homemade applesauce. It is delicious, and I highly recommend it.

See dispatch #9 for my homemade applesauce recipe. I used waffle mix, so nothing special there.

Miscellany

• Dispatch title from "Dead Air" by CHVRCHES from the upcoming Mockingjay soundtrack [youtube].

Cuteness

I present you with pictures of my cats in both upright and curled positions.

Table of Contents

• What I'm Up To
• Recommended Reading & Current Events
• Rant of the Week
• Mass Media Musings
• Miscellany

What I'm Up To

• I was a cat from the future for Halloween because I wanted a chance to wear my necomimi cat ears. Meow!
• I am the Goldilocks of yoga. Gentle yoga was a little too boring. Hot yoga was hell on earth. This week, I tried yoga 1, and it was just right.
• I got a promotion at my job!
• Work is still super-busy, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. SOON.
• I am ridiculously behind on email. To those I owe emails, I'm sorry. I'll likely get back to you in a couple weeks when work busy time ends.

Recommended Reading & Current Events

Model View Culture's issue on events is out. You should read it, especially if you organize events. So much good stuff.

• Beyond Codes of Conduct: What Tech Events Need to Do Better by Shanley Kane does a great job introducing the topic and the posts from the issue.

• A Code of Conduct Is Not Enough by Maggie Zhou, Alex Clemmer, Lindsey Kuper (organizers of !!con). Having been a conference organizer who was in charge of the anti-harassment policy, I cannot agree enough with everything they are saying here. I am glad to see a group of organizers discussing and agreeing on these things. Being the sole person pushing for a better process is exhausting.

Having a token CoC that is never explicitly discussed is almost worse than no code of conduct at all. It tells conference-goers that you threw a CoC up on your website because doing so is expected, rather than as part of an intentional effort to define the culture of your event.

We all know that inclusivity is one of our goals, and we all trust each other to prioritize it. But our attendees don’t necessarily know what our priorities are — after all, we are in many cases complete strangers to them.

CoC violations sometimes will happen in spite of our best efforts. If we judge the success of our CoC (and of our event) by whether there are CoC violations, it will ultimately discourage reporting of violations, because nobody wants to be the one to have “ruined” the event by reporting. And that’s the opposite of what we want.

• Unlocking the Invisible Elevator: Accessibility at Tech Conferences by Liz Henry.

Instead of complaining to me that disabled people just don’t come to your conference, do something that would make them want to come to it!

Do a walk through and at least imagine a roll through. Iterate. Make your venue unlock the elevators. Make good signs. Remind everyone to use microphones so they can be heard by more of the listeners. Hire someone for CART captioning of talks. And tell us right up front on your conference site that you’ve done these things.

So… you want “diversity” at your conference? You could put your money where your mouth is, and hire an accessibility consultant.

• Alcohol and Inclusivity: Planning Tech Events with Non-Alcoholic Options by Kara Sowles. If you organize events with alcohol, please be sure to focus on the points about making your event inclusive to non-drinkers.

When alcohol is currency, non-alcoholic drinks are considered valueless, and the interests and needs of people who don’t drink alcohol are easily forgotten. In a community so focused on alcohol, those who don’t partake are excluded.

The reasons don’t matter: What’s important is an understanding that there is a large range of rationales and circumstances around the non-consumption of alcohol, and the question of “Why aren’t you drinking?” is better left unasked.

• Beerops wrote a followup post after reading Kara's that I enjoyed -- On alcohol and tech culture.

Somewhere along the way, the difference between “someone I can get along with in a professional context” and “someone I like in a personal context” got a bit confused and twisted around under the nebulous guise of “culture fit”.

In the News

Note: I'm still really behind on the news because of work, so this is a pretty random list of things that caught my eye.

• For-profit programs face 'gainful employment' rule from the AP. This piece reminds me that I have been holding in a rant about for-profit code schools for some time now. I really should write that.
• Amazon released some diversity numbers. It's notable that they have not broken out their tech roles like most other large tech companies did.
• Content notice: sexual assault. MIT, one of the top computer science schools in the US, recently released Survey Results: 2014 Community Attitudes on Sexual Assault. Many of the results are worrisome, but not particularly surprising. Ugh.

Rant of the Week

I had a mini-tweetstorm on my private twitter account after reading Kara's piece about alcohol in the tech industry. I'm reproducing it here, so I don't have to write a new rant.

Drinking culture in tech is problematic, exclusionary, and dangerous. It really upsets me.

I know people who essentially developed drinking problems because they did the conference circuit and wanted to socialize.

#tw That terrible horrible fucked up shit that happened last year? Dude blamed alcohol. People supported that bullshit excuse.

I know several men active in the conf scene who I can tolerate when they’re sober, but who I know to avoid like the plague when they drink.

The alcohol doesn’t cause this behavior, it just enables it and excuses it. I shouldn’t have to worry about that shit.

Almost every conference I’ve attended, I lose out on the networking and socializing at parties because binge drinking upsets me.

It doesn’t upset me in a “waaah, I’m a teetotaler” sort of way. It upsets me because it makes the space less safe.

I do drink, but in small groups with people I trust who drink in moderation. I.e. a situation where it is safer and people have judgement.

Funny thing, even when my friends have had a little too much to drink, they still behave reasonably and respect boundaries pretty well.

I hate people who blame the alcohol for their bad behavior. Bullshit. You can be drunk and not harm people. If you can’t, don’t drink.

Mass Media Musings

Film

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

I took myself on a nice solo date to see this film over the weekend. I feel like I need another viewing to decide entirely how I feel about it. Time for bullet point thoughts!

• My immediate mental response upon leaving the theater: WAT.
• Lots of long takes. These must have been a pain to shoot, but they're awesome to watch. The visuals are definitely one of the stars of the film.
• The film had a great cast, and they all were fabulous in their roles.
• It has a lot of layers. It reminded me that I really want to revisit Synecdoche, New York, a very dense and layered film that I've only seen once.
• I don't think I loved the film quite as much as it loved itself, but I still enjoyed it.

Television

Gilmore Girls

Continuing on with Gilmore Girls. I am about halfway through season 3.

• Yessss, I finally got to the Paris vs. Rory fencing scene.
• Rory and Jess dating is boring. I'm so glad you two are good at sucking face, but I miss when you used to have interesting discussions about literature, music, and film.

Shondaland

• Still enjoying the crap out of How to Get Away With Murder.
• Scandal is starting to get in that "this show has been running too long and doesn't know what to do with itself" state, but I keep watching anyways. I hope it takes a while longer to go completely off the rails.

Miscellany

• Actually... from Manfeels Park.
• A Wrinkle In Time: Dirtbag Mrs. Whatsit from the Toast.

Everyone here who used to be an actual fucking star in the sky raise your hand.

• Dispatch title from "Wise Up" by Aimee Mann [youtube clip from the song in the film Magnolia]. I desperately want to re-watch Magnolia now. Going to try to put that on the todo list next weekend.

• What I'm Up To
• Recommended Reading & Current Events
• Mass Media Musings
• My Writing
• Miscellany
• Cuteness

What I'm Up To

• Work is still super-busy. ::dies::
• I tried hot yoga. I did not like it. I think that was the closest approximation to hell that I have ever experienced in my life. From now on, I will be sticking with forms of yoga that do not run a high risk of heat stroke.

Recommended Reading & Current Events

• It’s Ada Lovelace Day: Get Angry by Garann Means. I'm not sure I fully agree with everything she says, but I do agree with a lot of it. It was also a reassuring message to hear after my recent departure from the community.

Things like that happened a few more times before a clear picture emerged: white men run the internet, white men run technology, and whatever place you imagine your work has earned you in either, white men can snap their fingers and take it away.

The women who inspire me are those who’ve taken the frightening step of lessening their culpability by decreasing their participation. While it’s courageous to remain in tech/on the internet and try to make it a better place, you can’t get around the compromise in doing so.

• School Shootings: What’s Different About Europe? from Sociological Images.

No, the important difference seems to be the guns. But guns have become the elephant in the room that nobody talks about. Even asking about access to guns seems unAmerican these days.

• Episode 576: When Women Stopped Coding podcast from NPR's Planet Money.
• Tech’s Meritocracy Problem by Jocelyn Goldfein on Medium.

We must not just recruit women and minorities into our industry, they must be treated fairly once they are here.

Meritocracy is a myth. And our belief in it is holding back the tech industry from getting better.

The intent to be meritocratic is not a myth, but we know what road is paved with good intentions.

• Minimum Wage Hikes Work from Sociological Images.

In short, raising the minimum wage did boost the earnings of those at the bottom of the income distribution. Moreover, workers in states that raised the minimum wage also enjoyed greater employment growth and a greater decline in unemployment than did workers in states that did not.

Gamergate

• Why We’re Not Talking About GamerGate from Annalee at Geek Feminism.

So before you lament how terrible it is to ‘let them win’ by being silent, please stop and think of a better way to phrase “I want to live in a world where the victims of abuse campaigns have a winning move.” Don’t ask women to sacrifice their names, careers, and safety to the fantasy that life is fair.

Telling women to be brave and speak up is telling them to face a violent horde unarmed.

• actuallyethics.tumblr.com. This tumblr has a hilarious collection of images telling you that "actually, it's about ethics in games journalism."

This Week in Racism and Sexism

I have seen several images of white people putting together Ray Rice Halloween costumes, often including blackface and dragging a doll as a standin for his wife.

WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU FUCKING PEOPLE? BLACK FACE IS NOT FUNNY. DOMESTIC VIOLENCE IS NOT FUNNY. NOTHING ABOUT THIS FUCKING THING YOU ARE DOING IS FUNNY OR CLEVER OR APPROPRIATE. WHAT YOU ARE DOING IS RACIST AND SEXIST AND HORRIBLE.

If you do this, you are a bad person and you should feel bad.

This Week in Sexism in Tech

Tech companies haven’t gotten past sexism 1.0 by Kristen V. Brown at SFGate.

A few weeks ago, a startup founder showed up in the lobby of The Chronicle after hours. He told me I hadn’t responded to his e-mails. And he wanted to get my attention.

He delivered his pitch, along with a wicker basket filled with sexually suggestive gifts: the sex toy, a tube of K-Y Jelly, raw oysters and Tequila.

You read that right. A startup founder showed up at a female tech journalist's workplace with a basket filled with sexually suggestive items. What. The. Fuck. How do people with this level of terrible judgement keep getting money to run startups?

P.S. I tried to google more info about his startup, but they named the thing "Need" making it pretty difficult to google. Good job, dude.

Misogyny is a tech industry institution that has yet to be disrupted.

Mass Media Musings

Film

Dear White People

I have been looking forward to seeing this film for a while. I really enjoyed it and highly recommend others go see it.

Quick description for those who aren't familiar --- it's a thoughtful and witty take on racism on college campuses in a supposedly "post-racial" world.

I am not the best person to write a review, so I'll just share a few bullet points.

• It's a very character focused and dialogue heavy film, so basically it lives right in my happy place.
• Tessa Thompson totally steals the show as Sam White.
• I suspect some white people will watch this film and think characters like the college president, his son, and his son's friends are caricatures. They aren't. People like this do exist, and they are not rare.
• Just in case the audience thought the film was being hyperbolic, the credits include newspaper clips and imagery from real life incidents that are just as bad as those shown in the film.
• If you didn't know this already, DO NOT DRESS UP AS BLACK PEOPLE (or any other race/culture/etc.) FOR HALLOWEEN. DON'T DO IT. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, OTHER WHITE PEOPLE. STOP IT!

Television

Gilmore Girls

I continue to work on Gilmore Girls. I am a little bit into season 3 now. The random comments continue. They include some spoilers.

• The baby shower was scary. I went to my first baby shower recently and was terrified it would look like this because it was my only exposure to what they look like. Thankfully, feminist baby showers do not look like this.
• Devilled egging Jess's car was pretty amaaaaazing.
• RORY FINALLY BROKE UP WITH DEAN! Well, actually he broke up with her, but close enough. I have been looking forward to this for many episodes. I can't stand Dean.
• Let's all fight about which incredibly overpriced ivy league school Rory should attend. HARVARD! NO YALE! NO HARVARD! NO YALE! Good thing your grandparents have so much money.

My Writing

I am working on a few more entries for the Life and Times of a Tech Feminist Killjoy series. Stay tuned.

I am considering doing a series about some of my favorite childhood books. I would revisit each one and then do a writeup about how it holds up as an adult and what I remember from my childhood. Would this interest you? My current shortlist is below. I still own my childhood copies of most of these.

• The Lorax by Dr. Seuss
• Bunnicula by James Howe
• Matilda by Roald Dahl
• Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
• Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien
• A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
• Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine
• The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
• His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman

Miscellany

• I tried to look for a bee costume at the Halloween store. This is all I could find. The child in me that loved Halloween more than any other holiday despairs.

• Dispatch title from "A World Alone" by Lorde [youtube]

Cuteness

I help out with socializing the cats at one of the local animal rescues. This week I took some really cute pictures.

Cuteness Therapy: Animal Rescue Edition

• What I'm Up To
• Recommended Reading & Current Events
• Mass Media Musings
• Julie's Cooking Corner
• My Writing
• Miscellany
• Cuteness
• Promotion

What I'm Up To

• I deleted my public twitter account and quit the tech community. Read my post for more details.
• I finally moved the rest of my sites off github pages, and moved the majority of my code off github. Better late than never.
• I did yoga for the first time ever and did not hurt myself. I try to set the bar for success nice and low.
• I started cooking again, and it makes me super happy. Note the new "Julie's Cooking Corner" section of the dispatch.

Recommended Reading & Current Events

• Why nerd culture must die by Pete Warden.

Whatever the future becomes, the bottom line is we need to value being a decent human being a hell of a lot more than we do now. Our toleration of asshole behavior must end, and it’s such an integral part of nerd culture that nuking the entire thing from orbit is the only way to be sure.

• If you want a summary of what happened at the allies panel at Grace Hopper Celebration, I recommend this storify that A.V. Flox put together and these recent posts from Cate Huston.

Gamergate

Content notice: threats of violence and sexual assault, harassment).

I repeat again:
FUCK A CULTURE THAT SACRIFICES WOMEN ON THE ALTAR OF MEN'S HURT FEELINGS.

I have a lot of thoughts about this, but don't have the energy to write them down right now. I recommend reading my piece about Abuse as DDoS. It's incredibly relevant.

Below are some pieces from others that cover gamergate from a few different angles.

• IT HAPPENED TO ME: I've Been Forced Out Of My Home And Am Living In Constant Fear Because Of Relentless Death Threats From Gamergate by Brianna Wu at xojane. Brianna Wu is one of the recent game developers to be targeted by gamergate. She is badass for standing up to them, but it sucks we live in a world where she has to.

I am the Godzilla of bitches. I have a backbone of pure adamantium, and I’m sick of seeing them abuse my friends.

• ‘Gamergate’: Feminist video game critic Anita Sarkeesian cancels Utah lecture after threat by Soraya Nadia McDonald at the Washington Post.
• The Future Of The Culture Wars Is Here, And It's Gamergate by Kyle Wagner at Deadspin. I strongly recommend this piece. It's long, but well worth the read to get a full picture of what's been going on with the whole gamergate situation. Below are some good pull quotes, but seriously go read the whole thing when you have a minute. It is a thoughtful and terrifying look at what's going on. It makes me glad I left, and I wasn't even a game developer.

Co-opting the language and posture of grievance is how members of a privileged class express their belief that the way they live shouldn't have to change, that their opponents are hypocrites and perhaps even the real oppressors.

If the goal of Gamergate is to wipe out corruption in games journalism—if the movement isn't merely a bunch of loosely shaped sublimated qualms about feminism and minorities—it's doing a shit job of identifying the actual, honest-to-god problems in games writing.

All culture wars strike these same chords, because all culture wars are at bottom about the same thing: the desperate efforts of the privileged, in an ever-pluralizing America, to cling by their nails to the perquisites of what they'd thought was once their exclusive domain.

What we have in Gamergate is a glimpse of how these skirmishes will unfold in the future—all the rhetorical weaponry and siegecraft of an internet comment section brought to bear on our culture, not just at the fringes but at the center.

• #GamerGate and the Golden Mean Fallacy by Caelyn Sandel. A good post explaining the golden mean fallacy in relation to gamergate.

By using it, someone with a vested interest in a harmful status quo can appear ‘moderate’ by positioning harassers and and people fighting harassment on the opposite sides of an imaginary spectrum, suggesting that somehow the ideal lies in the middle.

• Lazy coverage of Gamergate is only feeding this abusive campaign by Alex Hern at the Guardian.

Like the Tea party, like climate deniers, the group will continue to thrive as long as it’s treated as a valid interlocutor in an important discussion.

In the News

• Weekend Reads: Ferguson, Young Black Men And Resistance from Colorlines.
• Tech jobs: Minorities have degrees, but don't get hired from USAToday.

Top universities turn out black and Hispanic computer science and computer engineering graduates at twice the rate that leading technology companies hire them, a USA TODAY analysis shows.

• High-tech pay gap: Minorities earn less in skilled jobs from Jessica Guynn at USAToday.

That's the finding of new research that shows Hispanics earn $16,353 a year less on average than their colleagues who are not Hispanic. [...] In the same high-skilled positions such as computer programmers and software developers, Asians make $8,146 less than whites and blacks $3,656 less than whites, according to the report from the American Institute for Economic Research.

Mass Media Musings

Film

In a World...

I have been meaning to see this indie film that is written by, directed, and starring Lake Bell for a while. It finally ended up on Netflix instant, so I gave it a go this weekend. It is far from a perfect film, but it has just the right mix of feminism, adorable awkwardness, and cute dialogue to please me.

As usual, here are some random bullet points. I don't want to include too much because it would give away too many bits of the film.

• Lake Bell is adorable, and I love her wardrobe that looks like it came from the 90s.
• OMG Nick Offerman. Oh noes, he keeps wearing a trilby. Send help for Nick Offerman.
• That dude from Party Down is so icky and groooooss.
• Everyone in this film is so awkward, but I love it. It's not annoying US Office style awkward. It's more cute and endearing awkward.
• One of my favorite exchanges in the film:
  • "I thought you don’t eat meat."
  • "I don’t, but on game day you wanna taste some blood."
• Dear movie, you are adorable, and I like you.

Television

How to Get Away with Murder

This is a new show from Shondaland productions that I am enjoying so far. I recommend you give it a try if you like Scandal or similar shows. It suffers from some iffy writing and direction sometimes, but Viola Davis totally makes up for it. She is amazing, and I am so glad to see her getting so much screen time.

Gilmore Girls

I continue to work my way through the very nostalgic Gilmore Girls. I'm about halfway through season 2 now. The random comments continue. They include some spoilers.

• Dean is seriously the worst. I know some people say he was ok early in the series, but I call bullshit. He's awful from the very beginning. Being stalkery is gross. Breaking up with someone because they aren't ready to say "I love you" when you are is gross. Being controlling is gross. Trying to get in fights with every dude who even looks sideways at your girlfriend who can clearly take care of herself is gross. Seriously, I cannot stand his character and can't wait to get to the part where Rory leaves him.
• Jess is kinda a douche, but I still ship him and Rory over Dean and Rory.
• The best relationship pairing is Rory and Paris. I recommend The Toast's take on this.
• I kinda hate how much this show presents the image of skinny women who eat massive amounts of junk food and don't eat vegetables or exercise.
• The first Twin Peaks actress has arrived. Hi Shelly!

Julie's Cooking Corner

It's apple season, and that means it is time to make some homemade applesauce. I made some, and it was delicious. You should make some too!

Ingredients

• A crapload of apples (I used ginger gold, but this should work with most apples)
• A slow cooker (also known as a crock pot)
• Water
• Cinnamon sticks
• Spices you enjoy with apples (e.g. cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, the blood of your enemies)

Directions

• Peel, core, and dice crapload of apples.
• Throw crapload of diced apples and ~1 cup of water into a slow cooker.
• Add a few cinnamon sticks and any other spices you like. I added a little ground cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves.
• Turn the slow cooker on high for ~3 hours.
• Remove cinnamon sticks.
• Stir.
• Eat the delicious applesauce.
• Save some for later. I really like these jars (pictured above).

My Writing

There are two new posts in the Life and Times of a Tech Feminist Killjoy series.

• The Cuts Leave Scars
• You Can’t Go Back & There’s No End in Sight

As a reminder, I have written a bunch about allies, a relevant topic with the recent discussions about Grace Hopper Celebration. Consider reading and sharing my posts.

Without access to twitter, I no longer have a straightforward medium to share my writing. If you enjoy my stuff, I appreciate you helping get it out there by pointing people to it.

Miscellany

• The Womansplainer. I love this idea of charging people for chatting about feminism. I think this is the only way you could get me to go back to twitter.
• Y/N?: Binary for Humans with Haleigh Sheehan at Madison+ Ruby. This is an awesome talk I enjoyed at Madison+ Ruby this year about consent, boundaries, and tech. I highly recommend it.
• Dispatch title from "The Beginning Is the End Is the Beginning" by The Smashing Pumpkins [youtube]

Cuteness

Kitties!

Promotion

Things to Buy

Jessica Dillon's amazing misandry slayer tees are back up on teespring.

I recommend starting at the beginning of this series for context.

Yesterday, I declared on twitter that I was leaving the tech community. That my involvement in tech will just be my job for a good long while. I meant it. Before the day ended, I deleted my public twitter account. This has been a long time coming. Those who know me well are not surprised.

I was trying to hold it in until I finished the series. I had this grand plan of announcing it near the end of the year. Something like "2015 will be my year of self care, and the tech community is a toxic place." I just couldn't wait. Kathy Sierra leaving twitter again because of harassment was the last of so many straws. I couldn't wait.

So how did I get here? That's what I keep asking myself. It's why I am writing this series. I want to reflect on how things got this bad. On why I was planning to withdraw from the community. On why I'm not the only one who feels this way. I want to share, so maybe history doesn't repeat itself.

So how did I get here? I didn't start here. I wasn't even a feminist when I started tech. I thought women's groups were stupid. I was frustrated with the few women classmates I had in the engineering department, not because of their low numbers, but because of my perception of their incompetence. I was what some refer to as a "Fuck You Got Mine" (FYGM). Something so common we have a name for it. Most of the tech feminist killjoys I know have a similar origin story. We were not born this way. We didn't enter tech this way.

How does a FYGM end up a tech feminist killjoy? Put them in the tech industry for a few years and wait. The tech feminist killjoy is often forged in the crucible of the "culture" the tech industry is so fond of. It becomes hard to ignore sexism, homophobia, racism, bias, mistreatment, and, above all, worship of all that is young, white, and male. Once you see it, it cannot be unseen.

I talked about some of my personal experiences in My Experiences in Tech. I started learning in late college at an internship. It continued at my first full time programming job. The series ended with my Death by 1000 Paper Cuts post, written several months after taking a new job.

I mentioned the new job was better, but it's not just the job. I have been doing this for years now, and the cuts leave scars. I am covered in them, and I have never gotten a chance to heal. So I am leaving the community, but not the job.

So how did I get here? I keep digressing, but not fully answering that question. What changed since I wrote about paper cuts? Did it really get that much worse? Where do I even start?

The Stories You Don't Hear

Over the last year or so, I have opened up a lot. That first series was the start. I shared even more in my writing, on twitter, and in person. I talked in front of audiences about my experiences with impostor syndrome. I shared my vulnerability and told my stories.

People see these things and see me as someone they can talk to. Someone they can ask for advice. I hope that most of the time I live up to that expectation.

People tell me their stories, so many stories. Some of them sound like mine, and some of them are different. Some are better, and some are worse, but to take a measure to them is pointless. The point here is that they have been hurt. So many people have been harmed by the tech industry.

When it comes to the tech feminist killjoys, most of us know each other. It’s a survival mechanism. Those of us who gave up being acceptable, realizing it wasn’t going to save us. We live on the whisper networks and the backchannels --- the safest places for us to share information and support one another. This is my support system, but it is also a source of many more heartbreaking stories.

Many of you may think the bad things that happen in tech are isolated incidents. I could not harbor that delusion even if I wanted to. Not after hearing all of the stories. It is nice to know I am not alone. It is horrifying to realize this is an epidemic.

The Stories You Do Hear

Even for people who do not hear personal stories, it is willful ignorance to believe that incidents are isolated. Just look at the timeline of incidents. We haven't had a break from this in years.

Nearly every week there is something new to be upset about. Some might think that I would get used to it --- a new normal. I suppose in a way I have. I haven't been surprised by it in a very long time. However, lack of surprise is not lack of feeling. I used to say that "apathy was too high a price to pay," but feeling a mix of anger, sadness, and frustration on a nearly constant basis isn't healthy.

Some people seem to have the ability to turn it off. To stop caring for a little while. To up the apathy for the sake of sanity. It is not a skill I have ever been very good at. I can’t not be upset at this stuff because it hurts people. The accumulated burden makes it harder every year.

There's No End in Sight

I have known for some time now that I was pushing myself too far. That this was catching up with me. I have finally learned that I cannot disengage without removing myself from the community. Even when I have tried to take a break, it found me.

I have some stories about times I tried to take a break and how it turned out. Interestingly, they almost all involve proximity to a conference. Conferences are supposed to be a fun chance to share time with friends. Sadly, most of them have been ruined in some way.

September 2013

I attend a new conference I am incredibly excited for. It's my first serious conference speaking gig. My friends are going to be there. I cannot wait.

The night before the conference is somewhat marred by a long argument online with the opening keynote speaker about the lack of diversity in the speaker lineup at RubyConf. This includes that person accusing myself and others of just "whining on twitter." He uses his spot as a keynote speaker to claim he will fix speaker diversity with a new program.

I am so upset about the events at the conference, I write a post titled I think I’m in an emotionally abusive relationship…with the tech community. What happened did not violate a code of conduct, but that doesn't mean it wasn't harmful. A good friend is so upset about what happened, she has not attended a tech conference since, even though this is potentially harmful to her career.

The person who did this continued to violate boundaries with the people involved months later. When I called him on this, he emailed a private ruby organizer list and a number of my friends. As far as I can tell, he still does not understand what he did wrong.

The promises made on a stage were likely never fully followed through on. The twitter account hasn't tweeted since last year. The site is still a launchrock page. I have seen no accountability for this. However, at least one of the women speakers on this year's RubyConf schedule credits my speaker support group with encouraging her to submit.

October 2013

Despite what happened in September, I am so excited for my first time attending Grace Hopper Celebration. It's a conference full of women. Surely nothing bad will happen while I am there. Even despite the Lean In heavy program, the conference was fine. I meet some awesome people and mostly have fun. However, I was not able to fully focus on the conference.

Three things happened around the time of this conference: I was mugged, and two women who work in tech went public with stories about being assaulted by men who were prominent in various tech communities. I recovered from the mugging pretty quickly. I wasn't hurt, and all I lost was an easily replaced phone. I still haven't recovered from the other things, and what I lost cannot be replaced.

I don't want to get into a lot of details here. They aren't my stories to tell, but I want to comment on a few things.

I threw myself into it more than I should have. I played tank in a way that probably wasn't good for my mental health. I do not regret it, but my friend who keeps telling me about secondary trauma is probably right.

A woman who runs a number of popular tech conferences said I was more dangerous than the predator involved in one of these situations. That is fucked up. I will never trust an event she organizes to create safer spaces or uphold a code of conduct.

I lost a huge amount of respect for a large number of people over what happened. That's what I lost that I cannot get back. You acted terribly. Those of you in power took little to no steps to prevent this from happening again. Most of you moved on and pretended it never happened and get angry with us when we remind you. I'm sorry, but this isn't something I can move on and forgive. For forgiveness, you would have to be sorry, accountable, and show change.

The tweets above are from a man who I worked with at my first job. He wrote these around the time of these events as a means to discredit me. As a note, incidents involving this man are mentioned repeatedly in My experiences in tech: Adventures outside the workplace. He is known in some circles for frequently trolling women about "women in tech." He is one of the reasons I began to really realize things were broken. He frequents the local tech community, and I don't even want to be in the same room with him at this point. Meanwhile, people tell me what a "nice guy" he is.

As far as I can tell from all of these exchanges, members of the tech community (including some people in power and leadership positions) think I am harming the community for suggesting we don't include rapists. That is a community I want nothing to do with.

January 2014

One of the women from the incidents mentioned in October 2013 is being sued for a large sum of money for warning people about a man being arrested for assaulting her. The lawsuit is ongoing. A reminder of exactly why most women don't speak publicly about these sorts of things.

June 2014

Despite months and months of bad things, I am again excited for a conference. I am going to Portland for the first time for AdaCamp and Open Source Bridge. I will be giving my first keynote at OSBridge and am incredibly excited.

The night before I fly out to Portland, what is now referred to as the Gittip crisis happened. As a friend or acquaintance of almost everyone involved and a gittip contributor, user, and advocate, this was not an easy situation to ignore. I shared some pertinent information, shared some thoughts while traveling, and then shut off twitter to enjoy AdaCamp.

Unfortunately, shutting off twitter was not enough. Despite requests to no longer discuss the situation, I received an email from the leader of Gittip including a sample blog post he wanted to publish that included a lot of war metaphors. Considering most of the people on the other side of the issue were already receiving harassment and threats on a regular basis, war metaphors being spread was upsetting. I lost part of AdaCamp to dealing with the situation. I was stressed about it for most of the trip.

I wrote a brief post about leaving Gittip. A lot of people who depended on money from gittip were harmed by the entire situation and still have not been able to make up for the loss. Gittip rebranded to Gratipay, partly because of the scandal around all this.

July 2014

I am pretty overstressed at this point, but I am super excited about Madison Ruby. This will be my third year attending. Even though I've left the Ruby community, I adore this conference. It becomes the vacation that is the light at the end of the tunnel...until it isn't.

Myself and a number of my friends become targets for harassment and threats from a man that lives in Madison. I go anyway. Eventually, I settle in and enjoy myself, but the city doesn't feel safe the way it did the year before.

The harassment from this person continues to this day. It seems unlikely to stop.

October 2014

Grace Hopper Celebration has a male allies panel with the CEO of GoDaddy on it. The corporate women in tech movement has officially jumped the shark.

Kathy Sierra leaves again.

I leave. Even as I am leaving, people suggest they hope it's a signal I am going to kill myself.

Does this help answer how I got here? These are just some stories. There are many more from me and from others. There's the timeline of incidents. The stories from others that don't ever make their way public. It adds up to a lot. I can't remember a week where I had a break in years. The damage compounds, and I am never left time to recover.

Goodbye

Maybe you understand a little bit better now why I am leaving. Maybe it doesn't matter. I don't need your permission. I am gone.

I am not leaving tech entirely. I like my job and being able to pay my bills. I am, however, leaving the community.

What does leaving the tech community mean? No conferences (with one exception I agreed to months ago). No speaking. No organization. No local user groups. No helping people make their events more friendly to women. No more trying to explain basic human decency to people. No more free labor. No more. No more.

I may still write, but focus less on tech and more on other things. This series still has a few posts in it that I may write. I will very likely still generate firebees content because it makes me happy. I still exist on the backchannel. If you are someone I want to see, you know how to find me.

Bye.

Even the tiniest little things add up to something big --- sometimes it’s really death by 1000 paper cuts. [...] That no matter how tough I get, how thick my skin, the paper cuts still hurt.
-- from My experiences in tech: Death by 1000 paper cuts

The paper cuts metaphor is less apt when it comes to healing. Paper cuts, while painful, are usually thin and shallow. They are unlikely to leave scars. The same cannot be said for the injuries that accumulate while working in the tech industry.

Over time, the accumulated trauma does real and often long-lasting damage. The thousands of cuts make you more sensitive than you want to be. Even when healed, they leave you covered in scar tissue. The thicker skin you were obligated to grow becomes a painful callus. You become the working wounded, staggering through your career.

You hope you can push yourself hard enough to still keep up. You try to forget that you already had to work harder to get the same respect. You eventually realize this isn't sustainable. Working harder gives you less time to rest. Less time to rest slows recovery. Slower recovery means continuing to push yourself to keep up. It becomes a Sisyphean task.

Earlier this year, I wrote a piece that provides a different, perhaps better, metaphor --- the distributed denial of service attack (DDoS).

DDoS attacks are abuse of computer systems until they slow down, stop working, and often eventually fail. Abuse of human beings has a similar impact. People dealing with abuse stop being their best, stop working, and eventually fail.
-- from Abuse as DDoS

This helps explain why healing is so difficult. You don't have time to recover from the first cut before the second follows...and then the third and the fourth and so on. It starts with microaggressions (the paper cuts), but it often doesn't end there. Eventually, you stop needing metaphors because it becomes clear that the situation is physically and psychologically harmful.

The damage doesn't even have to be a direct hit to do harm. It could be directed at people you care about or respect. Sometimes it's enough for it to happen to people who are similar to you. Next time it could be you.

These abuses don’t just harm their immediate targets. It’s terrifying to see people like you being targeted. That maybe you could be next. That you can’t predict how bad it will get. The possibility [...] becomes a sword of Damocles hanging over our heads. Someone could cut the thread at any moment.
-- from Abuse as DDoS

The scars are a daily reminder of places, people, and situations that may no longer be safe. As a result, many of us withdraw because of anxiety about safety and the potential for harm. We have to weigh the risks and emotional cost of things that are easy for others. Things they take for granted. Our worlds become smaller and smaller.

After years of pushing yourself and being stretched too thin, you lose the flexibility you once had to bounce back. You snap more easily. The paper cuts are harder to brush off. You are likely to be punished for this. You will be seen simultaneously as too sensitive and too harsh. You are "too easily offended" while also being "too abrasive." You become the tech feminist killjoy even when you don't want to be. Even when all you are trying to do is take care of yourself and make it through the day.

I wish I could say I am the only one who feels this way. That I am being melodramatic with all of the metaphors and references to Greek mythology. Sadly, I am not. This story is common, but not commonly talked about. Tech isn't a place where vulnerability is rewarded, and to talk about this is to make yourself a target. There are no great efforts to fix the culture that causes this. They're too busy pushing the next round of young people into the pipeline. It makes me wonder if they've already written us off as a lost cause.

I’m not the only one covered in bandaids trying to stanch the bleeding and focus on programming because it’s a thing that I love. I’m terrified of the day that it becomes terminal, the day myself or one of my friends becomes another statistic in the book of "they leave and they don’t come back."
-- from My experiences in tech: Death by 1000 paper cuts

Table of Contents

• What I'm Up To
• Rant of the Week
• Rants of the Month
• Recommended Reading & Current Events
• Mass Media Musings
• My Writing
• Miscellany
• Promotion

What I'm Up To

• The closer I get to the holiday shopping season, the busier work gets. I may spontaneously combust a few weeks before Black Friday.

Rant of the Week

Let's continue last week's rant about men inappropriately being involved in and centered in discussions about women in tech.

This year, Grace Hopper Celebration, is having a Male Allies Plenary Panel. It includes the CEO of GoDaddy. For those not famliar with the event, it is a huge conference focused on women in tech. The vast overwhelming majority of attendees are women.

In this panel, we will hear from men who have been advocates for women technologists, who have been on the front-lines of culture change in technology-based companies. They will share what they have learned as they have leaned in to the challenge of creating workplaces that are fair and equitable.

I am going to leave you with my bad ally quiz and your own thoughts to figure out why this is problematic. If you want a more detailed analysis, Cate Huston has a post on the topic.

Rants of the Month

October is here and with it some regular rants. I'll keep it short this week, but may expand in the other dispatches this month.

Halloween

Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays. That being said...DO NOT USE HALLOWEEN TO DRESS UP AS ANOTHER CULTURE OR RACE. DO NOT DO IT. IT IS APPROPRIATION AT BEST, AND RACIST AS FUCK AT WORST. JUST DON'T.

Breast Cancer Awareness Month

October is Breast Cancer Awareness month. I don't get the awareness push at this point because most people are well aware of breast cancer (or at least they are in the US where the awareness campaigns are in full swing). That being said, awareness can improve donations to help with things like research, detection, treatment, and support for people with cancer and their families, so it can do a lot of good. However, please keep in mind that a lot of that pink stuff sends pennies on the dollar (and sometimes literally nothing) to these causes. There is a special place in hell for people and companies that profit off of cancer.

I encourage donations to places like Planned Parenthood. They help people (particularly poor people) get the health care and screenings necessary for early detection and treatment of health issues like breast cancer and cervical cancer.

Recommended Reading & Current Events

• Why We Should Abandon the Word ‘Subtle’ When Discussing Racism by Travis Alabanza at Black Girl Dangerous.

I believe comparison of cultures, countries and continents is important in gaining understanding of how this systematic-bullsquishy works; what I don’t believe in is quantifying someone’s pain or being comparative in someone’s hurt. The word “subtle” absolutely and aggressively does this, thus keeping the oppressor oppressing.

• Why I’m Not Really Here For Emma Watson’s Feminism Speech At the U.N. by Mia McKenzie at Black Girl Dangerous.

Telling men that they should care about gender inequality because of how much it hurts them, centralizes men and their well-being in a movement built by women for our survival in a world that degrades and dehumanizes us daily. [...][the] people with the most privilege are constantly being centralized this way in conversations about oppression and it needs to stop.

The truth is that women are whole, complete people, regardless of our status in the lives of men. This is what men should hear, over and over again. This is what everyone should hear, every day.

• California’s Affirmative Consent Law: Beyond The Bullshit from Yes Means Yes. A breakdown of the new statute in CA beyond the misleading information in the headlines.

In the News

• Alabama’s Abortion Law Puts Minors On Trial And Gives Their Fetuses A Lawyer from ThinkProgress. WHAT. THE. FUCK. THE FETUS GETS A LAWYER?! I have no words.

Under a new law that went into effect this summer, minors who are seeking to bypass their parents’ consent to get an abortion are essentially put on trial. The state is allowed to appoint a lawyer for their fetus and call witnesses to testify about the teenager’s character.

• I am generally behind on the news this week, and didn't have time to catch up before I sent out the dispatch. :(

Mass Media Musings

Television

Scandal

Season 4 of Scandal just started. Despite last season going off the rails a bit and having some really shitty triggering content, I continue to watch. There may be some vague spoilers below.

• Jake and Mellie are both just as over the Fitz and Olivia thing as I am. Thumbs up to them for not believing it for a second when their respective partners claim they won't repeat history for the billionth time.
• I kind of love a Mellie that finally does not give a single fuck about the White House and Fitz, but it's also heartbreaking how she had to get there.
• "A broken heart is a broken heart. To take a measure is cruelty." -- quote of the week

Gilmore Girls

Gilmore Girls is finally on Netflix instant watch, so I am rewatching it to soothe myself with nostalgia. So far, I'm about halfway through season 1. Below are some random comments.

• Dean is a lot creepier than I remember. I'll be over here waiting for Jess to show up.
• The cheeky dialogue still holds up really well.
• Emily Gilmore is THE WORST.
• I totally had a classmate like Paris when I was in school. She literally threw a temper tantrum when I was higher ranked than her for a semester. She tried to harass the gym teacher into giving her a higher grade, so she'd be bumped above me. I am not kidding.
• Melissa McCarthy is underutilized thus far --- mostly there for physical gags. If I recall correctly, she gets better screen time as the show progresses. I do appreciate that she is adorable, and her weight is not commented on at all (or at least not that I can recall).
• Luke is kind of an adorable gruff dude who seems to manage to be mostly a good guy, but I worry that behind that baseball cap and flannel he's thinking about Lorelai friendzoning him.

My Writing

In case you missed it last week, I shared materials from my "Speaking at Tech Events for Beginners" workshop. You can find materials from the workshop, including slides and a worksheet, on my speaking page.

Miscellany

• I adore The Toast. It is a glorious mix of humor and feminism. This post from Fast Company about bootstrapping the business is interesting. Here are some recent highlights from the site:
  • Ayn Rand’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer
  • Dirtbag Aslan
  • Femslash Friday: The Craft
• Dispatch title from "Duvet" by Boa from the Serial Experiments Lain soundtrack [youtube]

Promotion

Donations Needed

• Growstuff via indiegogo. Help build an open database for food growers everywhere. Check out dispatch #5 for more details about why Growstuff is awesome.
• Ada Initiative. The Ada Initiative has made record progress for women in open tech/culture in 2014. They are asking for donations before October 8th to support programs for the next year.

• What I'm Up To
• Rant of the Week
• Recommended Reading & Current Events
• Mass Media Musings
• Firebees
• Miscellany
• Promotion

What I'm Up To

• I gave my "Speaking at Tech Events for Beginners" workshop for the first time through Code & Supply. I think it mostly went well, but I definitely need to select a longer time slot next time. You can find materials from the workshop, including slides and a worksheet, on my speaking page.
• Work continues to be very busy.

Rant of the Week

Reminder: appropriation is an ally smell.

Considering that, why the hell is a man writing a book about being a woman in tech? That article barely even mentions the woman, Farai Chideya, who is the co-author on the book. There are so many things wrong with this. I am so fucking sick of men and corporations exploiting our stories for profit, press, and attention, while many women in tech can barely get support for their projects and businesses. FUCK THAT.

Recommended Reading & Current Events

• Why can't you track periods in Apple's Health app? by ntlk. "The only valid reason I can think of is that it didn’t occur to anyone to include it." I would be curious to know if the developers on the team were entirely cis men. It certainly would explain a lot.
• You Asked: Why aren't more companies putting their weight behind diversity initiatives? by Ashe Dryden.
• Tech’s Wakeup Call From Your Trans Coworker by Jessica Lachenal.

This lack of knowledge about how to properly handle trans issues exists industry-wide. On top of it all, there is an immense pressure to believe that these problems don’t matter, shouldn’t be discussed, or that they don’t exist at all. If we don’t fit in to “the culture,” in tech, we get iced out silently and forcefully.

In the News

• A Mother in Jail for Helping Her Daughter Have an Abortion at NYTimes. A primary example of why the anti-choice laws in this country are harmful and dangerous.

This Week in Sexism

• Last week I was in Chicago speaking at jQuery Conf. from Jenn Schiffer.
• Texas court upholds right to take 'upskirt' pictures from the guardian. Excuse me, I'll be over here throwing up and adding this to a very long list of reasons why I will never visit Texas (beyond layovers in the airport, which are even a bit more than I want).

Mass Media Musings

Movies

X-Men: Days of Future Past

Despite never reading the comics (boo, hiss, I'm a fake geek girl, COME AT ME BROS), I really like X-men because I enjoyed the crap out of the cheesy cartoon when I was a kid. I deserved some silly movie fun after this long week. Below are some random notes I took during the movie. There may be some spoilering below depending on your exposure to info about the film.

• Are these things the sentinels? They look a little too terminator-y for me.
• WOLVERINE BUTT.
• Badass Mystique is best Mystique.
• Drunk baby Professor X amuses me.
• Enjoying the shit out of Quicksilver in this film so far.
• MAGNETO IS WEARING A FEDORA. I SEE YOU MAGNETO! I JUDGE YOU!
• I guess at least he’s classy enough for a real fedora (not a trilby).
• “We can change that.” YES PLEASE, RETCON THE FUCK OUT OF THE LAST STAND. DO IT NOW.
• Oh cool, these xmen have clearly played portal before.
• Magneto is such a douche. You know, as premonitioned by the fedora.
• YESSSSSS, LET THE RETCON WASH OVER YOU. YESSSSSS.

Overall, I am pleased because they retconned the crap out of X-Men: The Last Stand, which is a terrible film.

Firebees

I made a fuck your culture in cross stitch print and hung it on my wall. I regret nothing about this decision. If you want one too, you can get them at society6.

Miscellany

• Managing Privilege comic from Robot Hugs.
• The Bézier Game -- A game to help you master the pen tool. Maybe if I play this enough, I will finally get it.

Promotion

To Buy and Read

• Your Startup is Broken: Inside The Toxic Heart of Tech Culture. by Shanley Kane.
• Newsfail: Climate Change, Feminism, Gun Control, and Other Fun Stuff We Talk About Because Nobody Else Will by Jamie Kilstein and Allison Kilkenny the people behind the Citizen Radio podcast.

Donations Needed

In honor of dudes who are profiting off of women in tech, donate to some actual women in tech working to support themselves and others like them. Seriously, these are good causes, and it would mean a lot to me if you donated.

• Growstuff via indiegogo. Help build an open database for food growers everywhere. Check out dispatch #5 for more details about why Growstuff is awesome.
• Ada Initiative. The Ada Initiative has made record progress for women in open tech/culture in 2014. They are asking for donations before October 8th to support programs for the next year.

• What I'm Up To
• Recommended Reading & Current Events
• My Writing
• Firebees
• Miscellany
• Promotion

What I'm Up To

• Work continues to be super-busy. ::dies::
• Next week, I'm teaching a workshop for beginners about speaking at tech events.

Recommended Reading & Current Events

• The Myth of Magical Futures by Kate Losse. She does a great job of dissecting the many problems with a recent comment by Peter Thiel that the solution to misogyny in tech is "more women founders."

[The] idea of women founders as a solution to tech misogyny also makes existing male founders and investors unaccountable for misogyny as it exists today.

THIS BIT RIGHT HERE IS EVERYTHING (emphasis mine).

This is why many powerful people in tech can only conceive moves to “change” the industry in terms of magical futures like “more women founders” or “getting young girls to code”. The women working in the industry right now are being written off in favor of these magical futures, and as long as this is the case, the now of tech (whether the now is today or twenty years from today) will be unchanged.

• My Feminism Starts 300 Years Ago at Colorlines. An interview with Tressie McMillan Cottom at Feminism for What? Equality in the Workplace after Lean In, a conference run by Baffler.

A lot of corporate capitalist feminism begins with the idea that feminism is always starting on the day the person discovered feminism. [But] my feminism can’t start when you discover it, I need mine to start 300 years ago.

• 5 Things I Learned as the Internet's Most Hated Person by Zoe Quinn at Cracked.
• Conferences, Code of Conducts, and Being #ThatWoman by Cate Huston.

In the News

• This year's MacArthur Fellows were announced. It is really awesome to see such a diverse, interesting list of recipients, including Alison Bechdel (creator of the Bechdel test).
• LAUSD School Police Will Give up Grenade Launchers from Colorlines. My brain exploded when I read this headline. WHY DOES A FUCKING SCHOOL DISTRICT HAVE GRENADE LAUNCHERS?1
• Police killed a black man dressed up like an anime character from the Daily Dot. ACAB.
• Daniele Watts: Django Unchained actress detained by Los Angeles police after being mistaken for a prostitute from The Independent. A black actress was mistaken for a prostitute and accosted by police because she was being affectionate with her white husband in public. ACAB.

This Week in Sexism

• The Shermer Allegations: Some Considerations for Those to Whom This Is a Nasty Shock by Dana Hunter at Freethought Blogs (content notice for discussions of abuse and sexual assault). The skeptic/atheist communities have just as many, if not more, problems than the tech industry. There's a reason I distanced myself years ago. I remember being warned about Shermer when I was in the community, especially when I was planning to go to TAM 8. This is not new. People have been whispering about it for years.

My Writing

I started a new series named Life and Times of a Tech Feminist Killjoy.

I think about the death by a thousand paper cuts more often than I like. I want to reflect on what I wrote and what has happened in the time since then.

So far, I have written two entries in the series. I plan to write at least a few more in the coming weeks.

• Vultures Circle Overhead

Our stories are not our own. Not while there is a headline to be had. Not while we can be used as click bait. We stop being people and become a commodity to take advantage of. A spectacle to gawk at.

• It's Not Just Your Job

The thing about working in tech is that it’s rarely just your current job. I had jobs before this one, and I will likely have jobs after. This pleasant job seems like an outlier, and working in tech has never just been about the job. You are expected to go above and beyond to be truly successful.

Firebees

The firebees are still on hiatus during my busy time at work. In the mean time, check out the store for swag. There is a new "firebee trio" design as of today.

Miscellany

• Rejected Princesses -- A series of illustrations of women whose stories wouldn’t make the cut for animated kids’ movies, illustrated in a contemporary animation style.
• 25 Famous Women on Childlessness from NyMag. As a childfree woman, I found this kind of interesting, but certainly don't agree with all of them. I think this is my favorite.

I'm not that big a fan of marriage as an institution, and I don't know why women need to have children to be seen as complete human beings.
-- Marisa Tomei

• Dispatch title from "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" by The Smiths [youtube]

Promotion

In this section, I promote events, fundraisers, organizations, and other things that I think are worthwhile.

Donations Needed

If you have some disposable income, please consider donating to causes listed in this section. I have donated to all items listed here because I want to put my money where my mouth is when suggesting others do so.

• Growstuff via indiegogo. Help build an open database for food growers everywhere. Check out last week's dispatch for more details about why Growstuff is awesome. To encourage donations, I will release adorable pictures of Leon in a silly costume at each $5k milestone.
• Ada Initiative. The Ada Initiative has made record progress for women in open tech/culture in 2014. They are asking for donations before October 8th to support programs for the next year. The Ada Initiative does awesome things like running Ada Camp, providing training on topics like impostor syndrome and how to be a good ally, and promoting codes of conduct.

Problems are easiest to resolve by finding a new job --- this is what I do (thankfully the new job is much better).
-- from My experiences in tech: Death by 1000 paper cuts in March 2013

The new job is still better, albeit less shiny and new. I work on a good team with people who are both kind and smart --- a combination often difficult to find. Nobody pats my head or patronizes me about my work. I am rarely asked to take notes in meetings (and when I am, it makes sense). My title is software engineer, and I get to focus on front-end web development. My specialization is considered valuable, and my knowledge is respected. I am paid a competitive salary. It’s not perfect, but these experiences are a pleasantly stark contrast to previous ones described in that post.

You might theorize that over a year in a much-improved workplace would also greatly improve my feelings about working in tech. That it might give the paper cuts a chance to heal. You would be wrong.

The thing about working in tech is that it’s rarely just your current job. I had jobs before this one, and I will likely have jobs after. This pleasant job seems like an outlier, and working in tech has never just been about the job. You are expected to go above and beyond to be truly successful.

Read blog posts. Learn new languages. Attend user groups. Have side projects. Participate in communities. Contribute to open source. Build your personal brand. Attend conferences. Write blog posts. Mentor. Speak at events. DO ALL THE THINGS.

If you aren't doing this, you are seen as less. Less passionate. Less skilled. Less valuable. So I do these things. Sometimes because I want to. Sometimes because I feel like I have to. Sometimes it becomes hard to tell the difference.

When I was a server, I got to leave work at the end of my shift. That job was stressful, demanding, and often demeaning. I wouldn't want to go back to it, but it did have one benefit --- it was a distinct and timeboxed part of my life. At the end of the workday, I took off my apron and the job went with it. Programming has never been like that. I don’t get to take the job off at the end of the day. The job comes home with me, and the extracurricular activities are waiting for me when I get there.

Many of these activities require you to interact with a wide variety of other people --- locally and globally, in person and online. Places where the paper cuts have continued. Places where sometimes it is much more than a superficial cut (a story for another post). Changing my job wasn’t going to change the problem. It only removed one source while many others remained.

These negative interactions with people and communities remind me how few options I have to participate in the community or find future jobs. This isn't an idle concern --- software engineers tend to change jobs every few years, and I have already mentioned the importance of community involvement. The ever-growing list of people and places that seem questionable, hostile, or even dangerous makes the landscape look bleak. It can feel like the walls are closing in, leaving you with fewer and fewer places to go.

Sara Ahmed recently wrote a post titled A Killjoy in Crisis. So much of what she talks about echoes my experiences.

You also know that you can’t always choose your battles; battles can choose you. Sometimes the things you come to know seem to feel like another wall, another way of signalling that you have few places to go.

The painful parts about being a tech feminist killjoy are not just about my job. It is about realizing that I have to choose between enduring unpleasant and painful situations or seeing doors close for me. It is about having fewer and fewer places to go. It is about burning too many bridges because the alternative was to burn my values. I'm almost 30, and it already feels like my options are limited. Being a tech feminist killjoy makes it difficult to imagine a long-term future for yourself in this industry.

"My experiences in tech: Death by 1000 paper cuts" was my first piece of writing to get much attention. Without asking first or even the small courtesy of notifying me, several prominent publications wrote articles about the post. One day, I woke up to find my words dangerously misrepresented in national publications with millions of readers and my employer's name in giant letters in the headline. I started that morning filled with anxiety about consequences at my relatively new job. Would I be fired? Would I sour these new relationships before I had time to get to know people? Thankfully, my employer has plenty of experience dealing with the press, and it wasn't a problem. I wonder how bad it would have been if I worked somewhere else.

I intentionally disabled comments on that post when I published it. Comment sections are the cesspool of the internet. I had no desire to host a bathroom wall for people to write nasty things on. Unfortunately, every publication that wrote about my post had no such policy. They all had open, unmoderated comment sections that justified just how much the original post was necessary (see: Lewis’s law).

These are just some samples of the comments. There are many more where they came from.

I wish I could believe this was an isolated incident, but it’s not. A small handful of journalists do a good job covering issues related to underrepresented people in the tech industry. The rest are more like tabloid journalists and gossip columnists, aiming for attention-grabbing headlines instead of thoughtful, researched content. They circle like vultures whenever an incident happens, hoping to get their pound of flesh.

Photo of vultures from docentjoyce at Wikimedia Commons via CC2.

Our stories are not our own. Not while there is a headline to be had. Not while we can be used as click bait. We stop being people and become a commodity to take advantage of. A spectacle to gawk at.

COME SEE THE WOMEN IN TECH! HEAR THEIR STORIES OF WOE (hyperbolized and misrepresented for your entertainment)! THROW TOMATOES AT THEM (in the comments)! psst...don’t forget to click the ads, so we make money.

Every time I publish something, there is a non-zero chance that one or more journalists will have a slow day and decide to twist and turn and steal my words. That even if I write in giant bold text, it may not be enough. DEAR PRESS, YOU DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO USE MY WORDS OR MY STORY. I DO NOT TRUST YOU. NO. STOP. That my consent is not required. That accurately representing what I wrote is not required. That even notifying me they will be writing about me is not required. But writing about someone who is in no way a powerful or public figure is apparently required. THE PUBLIC NEEDS TO KNOW. Journalism ethics are a funny thing these days.

I’ve learned that the press (particularly the tech press) is not to be trusted and will likely do more harm than good. Even well respected national publications have taken women’s words out of context to make them look bad in what were supposedly supportive pieces about "women in tech." Many more have exploited heartbreaking stories about harassment and abuse without any deep analysis of why it happens. Others have pushed or dragged people under a magnifying glass with about as much care as a small child burning ants.

As far as I can tell, most journalists are much more interested in exploiting our stories than they are in investigating the systemic problems that lead to them. They have become one more thing to worry about in an already stressful situation. As if the potential for terrible things happening wasn't bad enough. Now, many of us also worry about the press eagerly waiting to make those situations worse.

• What I'm Up To
• Recommended Reading & Current Events
• Mass Media Musings
• Firebees
• Miscellany
• Promotion

What I'm Up To

I am deep in the super busy time of the year at my job. OH GOD, OH GOD, EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE.

Recommended Reading & Current Events

• This is why you never end up hiring good developers by Laurie Voss at Quartz. So much good stuff in here. If you are involved in hiring programmers, you should give this a read.
• A follow-up to some of the discussions of the bullshit in the gaming community last week. Zoe Quinn lurked in 4chan's raid irc channel and recorded most of it for weeks while they were targeting her. She is a badass.
• Silicon Valley's Cult of Male Ego by Bardot Smith at Model View Culture.

A culture that automatically mobilizes to search for a reason to dismiss the claims of those raising dissenting opinions and experiences is toxic. [...] If they don’t want the game disturbed -- it’s because the rules are in their favor.

• Reddit is a failed state from The Verge. A discussion on reddit's shitty handling of the posting of the stolen nude photos of celebrities.

Reddit wants to be a techno-libertarian’s wet dream, but in practice it’s a weak feudal system that’s actually run by a small group of angry warlords who use “free speech” as a weapon. [...] Reddit believes in free speech unless your speech involves speaking truth about the unsavory men who keep exploitative content flowing.

• Some companies are willing to lean in the other direction when balancing free speech and protecting oppressed people. Etsy recently decided to ban the sale of items with the racist name or logo of the American football team based in Washington DC.
• Con$ent Is $exy: The Imagined Racket of Social Justice from Consent Culture.

If we can cast the responsibility of “saving the world” onto some yet-unsurfaced Pollyanna, clean of conscience and free of finanicial commitments, then nothing ever changes. There’s no quid for the quo. We remain rusted wheels.

An activist is not a bad thing to be. It’s bad for your health–and sanity–but I defy you to make me feel guilty for taking a vested interest in toppling a system actively holding us down.

In the News

• The Senate Tried to Overturn ‘Citizens United’ Today. Guess What Stopped Them? from The Nation. The Republicans made sure that corporations will continue to be people. Hurray, America.
• The Kyriarchy Is Killing Us: Survey Says LGBT Women Poorer, Less Healthy Than Everyone Else from Autostraddle.
• America's wealth gap 'unsustainable,' may worsen: Harvard study from Reuters. Good thing we have Harvard Business School to run a study telling us the obvious. The study seems to be arguing for better support of workers because YAY CAPITALISM. Ugh.

This Week in Sexism

• Megachurch leader calls women 'penis homes' on religious forum. I could not make up a headline like this if I tried.
• There have been some important discussions related to domestic violence this week, but I am not sufficiently up-to-date on them. I will try to provide some updates in next week's dispatch.

Mass Media Musings

Games

I started playing Civ 5 again to relax during my off time. I cannot stop. Please send help...

Music

I am incredibly bad at describing and reviewing music, so this will mostly be "here's some things I enjoy listening to. YMMV." I listen to music a lot at work or while doing other things, so I don't always tune in well to lyrics and am not a reliable resource for notices about problematic content.

"The Voyager" by Jenny Lewis

• Thanks to Liz Abinate for recommending this one.
• I think "Late Bloomer" is my favorite track from the album (and contributes the title of this week's dispatch).

"Women in Technology" by White Town

• Blast from the past! I remember loving the single "Your Woman" when it was on the radio in the 90s.
• This somehow ended up in a recommended list or something in spotify. I cannot remember how I got here.
• I had not previously listened to the whole album. I'm enjoying it.

Firebees

You can now buy some firebees swag! The swag currently includes shirts and bags with the fuck your culture in cross stitch design. Below are some examples, and more styles are available in the store.

Miscellany

• OMG CAT HEADPHONES. I really hope this becomes a real thing I can buy.
• Speaking of headphones, I finally ordered a good pair of noise canceling headphones. They have managed to diminish my seething hatred for open workspace noise.
• Dispatch title from "Late Bloomer" by Jenny Lewis [youtube].
• Interview with Chris Martens, Programming Languages Ph.D Candidate from Lambda Ladies about her work on logic programming, games, and forging new connections in computational creativity.

Promotion