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“The Art of the Interview: How to Evaluate and Handle Candidates in Your Pipeline”: Aline Lerner with Interviewing.io (Video + Transcript)

Speakers:
Aline Lerner / CEO & Founder / interviewing.io
Gretchen DeKnikker / COO / Girl Geek X

Transcript:

Gretchen DeKnikker: Hey, everybody, welcome to our next session. Couple housekeeping notes. Make sure that you ask your Q&A at the bottom and then vote them up so that we know which ones to ask when we get to the Q&A section. The videos will be available online just after the sessions wrap up. Without further ado, I’m so excited. I’ve just met Aline and I’ve become a super fan in one phone call. It was a little crazy and so now, I stalk her.

Aline Lerner is the co-founder and CEO of Interviewing.io, which she’ll tell you a little bit about, but I think the product is pretty interesting especially for the audience here. She’s going to be talking about the art of the interview and really looking at it from the angle of not just you being the interviewer, but what are the other elements and what kind of feedback do you get? So, without further ado, welcome, Aline.

Aline Lerner: Hi, everybody. I’m also a huge fan of Gretchen’s and have been stalking her since I met her, so it’s definitely been mutual. Really excited to talk to all of you today about technical interviewing, probably through a lens that you haven’t seen before, because we have some cool data that normally you don’t get. Rather than talking about what makes someone a good interviewee, today I’m going to talk a little bit about what makes somebody a good interviewer.

I’m the CEO and co-founder of a company called Interviewing.io. We are a practice platform for technical interviewing, but we’re also a jobs platform, so if you do well in practice, you get to talk to top companies. The cool thing is everything is anonymous. We collected a ton of data and I’m going to share some of the things we’ve learned today. I’m just going to jump right in. All right. Great.

How it works — once you’re a user of our platform … this is a little bit of setup so you know where our data is coming from. Once you’re a user of our platform, you can see some time slots, grab one, and then, at go time you log in, and you get a mock interview with an engineer from a top company who is good at interviewing and good at giving feedback. After each interview, there is feedback, which you’ll see in a moment. Top performers actually get to interview with companies right on our site and those interviews are anonymous as well. After each interview, whether it’s real or whether it’s practice, there’s some metric feedback. This is the feedback form for interviewees. Hopefully, you can see some of those questions. We ask things like, how was the interviewee’s technical ability, communication ability, and problem-solving? Then, the interviewer will ask stuff like … we’ll ask the interviewer to rank the candidate on stuff like technical ability, problem-solving, and communication, and then, we’ll actually ask the candidate to rate their interviewer and this is what this talk is about.

Normally, as most of you know, an interview is one way. You don’t really get to rate your interviewer and if you do it’s a survey afterwards and it’s not right then. We ask everything from whether you want to work at this company and with this person to how excited you’d be. Then, we also ask how you think you did and that will come up at the end. Great.

We have a ton of data. We’ve done about 20,000 interviews on the platform and I’m just going to get down to brass tacks and show you feedback snippets. We try to distill a lot of signal from these and come up with a few broad categories for what the traits of good interviewers look like. This is going to be more data-driven and hopefully less about platitudes. I’m really excited to answer your questions at the end.

Before I get into the details, one thing, a lot of people think that if you work at a company with a top brand, it’s a really good crutch. If you work at a Google or a Facebook, you don’t have to be as good of an interviewer. That’s not strictly true from the data that we’ve seen. In fact, we saw no statistically significant relationship between brand strength and whether people wanted to work with employers on our site. Brand will get candidates in the door, but once they’re in the door, they’re essentially yours to lose, so keep that in mind.

The first kind of huge thing that we noticed among candidate feedback was that when you’re interviewing people, it’s important to be a human being. So, for each of these broad categories, I’m going to show you exactly what the candidates said. For instance:

  • “I like the interview format, particularly how it’s primarily a discussion about cool tech as well as an honest description of the company. The discussion section is valuable and may better gauge fit. It’s nice to have a company that places value on that.”
  • “Extremely kind and generous at explaining everything they do.”

When I’ve listened to some of these interviews, and I haven’t listened to all 20,000, but I’ve listened to a lot, the best interviewers are people who take the time to get to know the candidate even though interviews are anonymous. So, what are you working on? What do you want? Then, they’ll create a narrative where their company is the next logical step in that candidate’s journey. So, everything you’ve ever worked for is going to culminate in you working here.

Here’s the bad:

  • “A little bit of friendly banter, even if it’s just, ‘How are you doing?’ at the beginning of the interview would probably help the candidate relax.”
  • “I thought the interview was really impersonal. I could not get a good read on the goal or the mission of the company.”

Choosing the question. This is a very erudite topic of discussion, and I know everybody has opinions on what makes for a good interview question. We just have the data, so I’ll just tell you what the data said. So, here’s feedback from people that thought the question was good:

  • “This is my favorite question I’ve encountered on this site. It was one of the only ones that seemed like it had actual real-life applicability and was drawn from real or potentially real business challenges.”
  • “I like the question. It had a relatively simple algorithm problem and then built on top of that.”

One of the recurring themes here is that candidates are used to these generic algorithmic problems and what really gets them engaged is taking it to the next level and tying it into something that your company actually does. This is especially true if people may not have heard of what you do, or you are in a space that by default doesn’t get people excited. Anything you can do to get in the candidate’s head and ask them something interesting and then have it stick after the interview is over is going to be good. Then, candidates also feel like you put in effort.

One of the things that we’ve noticed is that whenever there’s this notion of value asymmetry in an interview, so the candidate is expected to put in work, but the interviewer is not putting in work, that’s not good. You want it to look like you’ve put in work yourself.

Here, let me show you some of the examples of bad questions:

  • “This is not a good interview question. A good interview question should have more than one solution with simplified constraints.”
  • “Question wasn’t straightforward and required a lot of thinking, understanding of setup.”

You don’t have a lot of time with a candidate. You want to make sure that the time that you do use is used on being able to build a connection with them and then actually seeing if they can think rather than jumping them through hoops.

“Is there any way to sharpen the image? Text is blurry.” We’ll send out these slides afterwards. Sorry about that, guys.

That’s really one of the most important things too is making sure that you are getting signal from these people in a way that’s not arbitrary. Setting up the problem to gauge whether somebody’s a thinker and a problem solver rather than catching them on arbitrary a-ha moments.

Writing a really good interview question is hard. It takes time, especially if you’re going to tie it something you do at work, it’s even harder.

One of the best tricks that I’ve seen for doing this is coming up with a shared Google Doc for your entire team or really any collaborative software. Doesn’t matter. Any time you do something at work that made you think, and it doesn’t have to be cool. The bar for whether it’s cool can be really low so you don’t have to worry about it, but any time you do something that you think was non-trivial, just throw a quick line in that doc.

Then, you can come back later and look at all the cool things your team has done and use that as a jumping off point to craft questions that are unique to you. Then, candidates will be like “You did put in the work,” and you do stick in their heads a little bit.

Asking the question itself — One of the best interviewers I ever met was a chief architect at a large software company. He used this expression that I really liked. He said that the purpose of an interview is — “can we be smart together?” That just really stuck with me, and I think that the way you ask the question can really determine whether you can be smart with somebody else or not.

Here are traits of good interviewers when it comes to asking a question:

  • “He never corrected me. Instead, asked questions and for me to elaborate on areas where I was incorrect. I very much appreciate this.”
  • “The questions seem very overwhelming at first, but the interviewer was good at breaking it down. I like the fact that you laid out the structure.”
  • “I’m impressed by how quickly he identified the typos in my hash computation.”

Engagement is, of course, important when you’re asking the questions so you actually have the opportunity to see what it’s like to collaborate with somebody.

Another really important part of this is, and you can see this in the feedback, is layering complexity. This idea of taking a question that can start off very simply at first and then building on it. Building on it in a number of different ways and you can set up benchmarks and say, “A candidate that’s good enough is going to get through the first three portions of the question. Somebody who’s really good is going to get through four and someone who’s exceptional is going to get through five. Then, somebody who gets past that is probably going to challenge the interviewer. The sooner you can turn something into a discussion between equals and an opportunity to collaborate and problem-solve together, rather than a one-way exercise where you’re trying to see if somebody’s stupid or not, which is the worst way to interview, the better it’s going to be.

Here are some examples of poor interview feedback:

  • “It was a little nerve-racking hearing you yawn while I was coding.”
  • “What I found more difficult about this interview was the lack of back and forth.”

Anything you can do to engage with candidates and build on a question is going to be the best and if you can couple that with the previous point, come up with questions that are original to your company and layer complexity in ways that other people couldn’t, then you’re going to be in a very good position.

What happens after the interview? This is one of my favorite takeaways from our data, and it’s completely counter-intuitive. As you recall, we ask people how they think they did on the interview as candidates and then we also ask interviewers how the candidate actually did. We actually graphed this. The x-axis here is the actual score on a scale of one to four for somebody’s technical ability and then the y-axis is their perceived score.

As you can see, there’s quite a bit of imposter syndrome. In fact, we found that imposter syndrome plagues a disproportionate number of our users. So, what is imposter syndrome? It means that you think you did poorly when you did well. Now, here is the crazy part. If a candidate did well and they think they did poorly and you don’t give them immediate actionable feedback and let’s say you let them sit on it for days, they’re going to get into this whole self-flagellation gauntlet.

They’re going to leave that interview and then they’re going to start thinking one of two things: either they’re going to think, “Man, that company didn’t interview me well. I’m good at what I do, and I don’t think that company knew how to get it out of me, so they suck.” Even worse, what’s going to happen is you’re going to think, “Oh, I’m a piece of shit. Now, they know I’m a piece of shit, and I totally didn’t want to work there anyway.”

What ends up happening is unless you tell people they did well, immediately after they did well, you end up losing a lot of good candidates because, by the time you get back to them, they’ve completely talked themselves out of working for you.

So, don’t let this happen. Don’t let them gaze into the abyss, and give people actionable feedback as soon as possible.

Actually, I saw one of the comments. I want to leave a few moments for questions, but one of the comments on the side was “imposter syndrome is a women’s curse.” We ran some data on our platform to see if imposter syndrome is more prevalent in women or whether it’s distributed across both genders. As it turns out, both men and women are equally plagued by imposter syndrome.

The other interesting thing that we learned, and we haven’t written about this yet but we will, is that the better you are at interviewing, the more prone to imposter syndrome you are, and the worse you are, there’s the opposite called the Dunning–Kruger effect where you think you did well when you, in fact, did poorly.

Thank you, guys. I’m really excited to answer some questions. My email and Twitter are also on the slide, and I’m happy to answer them offline as well. Sorry, I saw some of you said some slides were blurry. We’ll send them out afterwards, not sure why that happened.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Great. Thank you so much. We have a few questions here and you guys still have time to submit and vote some up. So, the first question is, what do you think of take-home projects instead of whiteboard style coding interviews for those who grew to dislike them?

Aline Lerner: Yeah. I wish I had it with me. I drew this picture a while ago called the value asymmetry graph and I mentioned it in the talk as well. Value symmetry is this notion that we have two sides, both of them are putting in equal amounts of work. I think that if you’re a company with a top brand, you can get people to slog through a lot more shit than if no one’s ever heard of you. When you’re deciding as a company whether you want to use take-home challenges, that has to be one of the things you consider is, how badly do people want to work for you? If you’re Google or Facebook, at least before you get into the interview, at which point the playing field doubles a little more, people are probably going to be much more motivated to work for you than some company that just started and has no funding. You can’t always look to those companies and say, “If they use a challenge, we can too.”

If you do use a challenge, just like with interview questions, the best ones tend to be ones where it’s thoughtful and where it’s representative of the actual work because then the candidate is getting some value out of it… doing this work is going to be like the stuff I’m going to do every day, so here’s a preview.

On Interviewing.io, what we’ve seen is the customers of ours that have people do coding challenges after their technical interviews — and if those challenges take longer than an hour, the best people tend to drop out because in this market, engineers are flooded with opportunity. If you make them do work, they’re probably not going to do it unless it’s really, really interesting work or some companies pay people. If you have something that’s going take five or six hours, consider giving them a consulting fee and see if that changes anything. But, you should probably just have a really good challenge that people want to do or not have a challenge at all. That’s different for data science and engineering also. Sometimes that makes more sense. For software, you probably don’t want to do it.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I have one I want to put in because we’ve heard this a few times. We’ve been recommending it and everyone’s like, “It’s in private beta. How do we get access?”

Aline Lerner: Yeah, we’re opening it up really, really soon. So, we have a really long waiting list and we’re so excited to get through it. For now, we’ve been favoring people that are still in the U.S. because it means that we can place them a little more easily. We don’t always look at it, but in tie situations, we’ll potentially look at someone’s years of experience because we have more job openings for senior folks than junior ones. Regardless, we are working on a way to open it up and I expect it will be opened up by next quarter. So, everyone that’s on the wait list, I’m really sorry and if you have job interviews coming up soon, send me an email and we’ll see what we can do.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. It’s a great problem to have though, right?

Aline Lerner: Well, we really want to move on from that and just open it up, but yes..

Gretchen DeKnikker: Next question is, I’m unfamiliar with it but very interested. How anonymous is anonymous, first names, voices? Does that anonymity help level the playing field for women and people of color?

Aline Lerner: Yep. When we say anonymous, we mean truly anonymous. Everybody gets a handle. So, my handle on the platform is nihilistic defenestration. If you ever run into … I think I’m the only one that has that. IF you run into that, it’s me. It’s why I quote Nietzsche and wear black, but, in some cases …

For practice interviews, you can hear people’s voices. From voice, you could potentially glean gender and we don’t mask accents. However, we did just two days ago, we just got a patent on real-time voice masking. In real-time, we can make women sound like men or men sound like women or make everyone sound androgynous. If a company wants to use that for their interviews, then they have to turn it on across the board. If you let candidates decide, then there’s this other bias notion, who turns it on and who doesn’t. This way it’s turned on for everyone and we leave that at our customer’s discretion.

We did try making everybody change genders in practice to see what effect that would have and we found that surprisingly, at least to me, it didn’t really change how people did. So, women didn’t do better when they sounded like men and men didn’t do better when they sounded like women. We did notice that women were doing a little worse across the entire platform and I was confused by that ’cause I don’t think women are worse at computers.

What ended up being the case was that women were disproportionately quitting the platform after one bad performance in practice. Once you corrected for people that were quitting after one bad performance, well, the gender-based disparity went away entirely. So, we’re actually rerunning that data now that we have a lot more interviews and we’ll report back. Back then, we had a lot fewer, so all of that … As if the case with science, or in our case, pseudo-science, the stuff can be overturned.

Gretchen DeKnikker: All right. I’m going to do one more. We have 1,000 questions. I think we could mostly stay on this topic all day. You do have a blog, right?

Aline Lerner: Yeah.

Gretchen DeKnikker: So, if you want more from Aline, check out the blog on Interviewing.io because she’s-

Aline Lerner: I’ll put it in the chat.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Perfect. Yeah. There’s a ton of information. So, I’m going to do one more. You touched on this a little bit, did any data, anecdotal or otherwise, bubble up around bias? For example, knowledge of algorithms, which can indicate recency of learning, younger candidates or those who got computer science degrees versus coming from alternative backgrounds?

Aline Lerner: Oh, God, yes. There’s so much bias. The most compelling bias or, I guess, the strongest signal of bias that we’ve seen has been against people with non-traditional educational and work backgrounds. If you didn’t go to a top school and you didn’t work at a top company, it’s going to be really, really hard for you to get in the door. What we’ve seen repeatedly, and this is the thing that blows my mind, is with some of the bigger customers that we have where they get a lot of inbound applications, people have applied, they’ve gotten rejected at the resume screen, so before anybody ever interviewed them, and then they came in … Then, they used our platform, practiced and got good enough to … or, in many cases, they were already good enough, but they got access to our employer portal, interviewed with those companies, and actually got hired.

Of course, once they unmasked after their interview, the recruiting team can see, “Oh, shit. This person is in our ETS but we rejected them six months ago before anyone talked to them. Oh, shit. There’s something wrong here.” In fact, 40% of the hires we’ve made in the last two years have been people that would have been [inaudible 00:21:03]. Companies admitted, they’re like, “Well, I never would have … What the Hell?” That’s why we insist interviews be anonymous, or they actually had been turned away by that employer.

Gretchen DeKnikker: All right. Well, I would love to stay doing this. Thank you so much for coming in and giving this talk. I think it was hugely valuable. Everybody, we’re going to take a short break. We will be back in 15 minutes, so go grab a snack and some coffee and we’ll see you at 1:20. Bye.

Aline Lerner: Bye, everybody. Thank you for having me.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Thank you.

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“CTO’s Lessons Learned on the Journey from Software Developer to IPO”: Cathy Polinsky with Stitch Fix (Video + Transcript)

Speakers:
Cathy Polinsky / CTO / Stitch Fix
Angie Chang / CEO & Founder / Girl Geek X
Sukrutha Bhadouria / CTO & Co-Founder Girl Geek X
Gretchen DeKnikker / COO Girl Geek X

Transcript:

Angie Chang: Hi! Welcome to Girl Geek X Elevate, our first virtual event for the Girl Geek Dinner community. My name is Angie Chang, CEO and founder of Girl Geek X, and this is Sukrutha Bhadouria. We wanted to say “thank you” for joining us this Wednesday morning for our Girl Geek X Elevate. We have been hosting Girl Geek dinners here in the Bay Area for over 10 years — we’ve hosted over 170 dinners at 100 companies, over 100 companies — and we are excited to be able to expand and have world domination. When we thought about 10 years of Girl Geek Dinners, we wanted to rebrand and say…

X is for the community, our community of 15,000 women. It is not just dinners — it’s events and podcasts and webinars and different formats that can help us reach more women globally. Our community of women has grown over the last 10 years, and we’ve heard lots of feedback from women that want to tune in to last night’s dinner by podcast, on their drive to work, or whether they want to tune in from where they are, which is not necessarily where we are in San Francisco. We’ve also taken this chance — and this opportunity to partner with mission-aligned companies, and today we’re grateful to have the support of fantastic mission-aligned sponsored like Mozilla, The U.S. Digital Service, PayPal, SalesForce, Intel AI, Clever, Quantcast, and interviewing.io.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Is that me now, Ms. Angie?

Angie Chang: Yes.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Okay, hi everybody. I’m Gretchen DeKnikker, COO here. To build on what Angie was saying about how we are looking to change things going forward, and expand. We’re very excited, that we’ve worked very, very hard to have our speakers from a wide range of backgrounds today. 70% are women of color, and 40% are black and Latina. And we had a very special focus on that. We wanted to make sure that we’re bringing underrepresented voices to the table. The whole thing was to create opportunity for women to gain visibility and recognition and to share with the community. I think at this particular time in history, it’s really important as we get a seat at the table as women that we pull up another chair and that we be very mindful of the limitations that are greater than just being a woman, and the challenges. So just being more supportive there.

We do want to have more voices at our table. We’d like to invite in ideas on bringing more women of color into the fold, your guys’s ideas on how do we partner and bring more male allies in. These are all things we’re gonna be focusing on now that we’re on the other side of this event. Part of wanting to do this particular event was, like Angie said, to reach more people. But also to … Another thing that we’ve heard is mid- to senior-level career women aren’t necessarily represented strongly at the events, which is understandable. People have other things to do in the evenings.

We wanted to create this opportunity because as you grow in your career, the theme today is growing from a manager to a leader. So what happens when you become a manager of managers. In every stage of your career, the job is different. We have some great sessions today to help everybody on that journey.

We’ve got one on self-awareness and ego with Minji Wong. We have one on the art of the interview, especially around the candidates interviewing you with Aline Lerner from interviewing.io. We’ll talk about delegation and empowerment and advocacy with Arquay coming up just after Cathy. And planning and goals and finding those metrics that matter. How do you lead by metrics when you’re not doing the work yourself, and you’re not in there every single day. And I think we’ll get into that a little bit at the engineering panel at the end of the day. So, Sukrutha.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah, hi. I’m actually so excited because I’m seeing people dial in from everywhere all over the world, how cool. I saw people dialed in from San Francisco, Florida, and I also saw someone comment on our shared earbuds. For me, why we’ve been wanting to do this, especially have technical women give talks, not just about leadership, but about … because there’s more important things to talk about. Then we have talks about security, team learning, and just keeping yourself up to date in terms of your technical skills.

Why is this important is because you and I got into women on stage talking about what it’s like to be in technology beyond just what it’s like to be a women in tech.

So we have speakers from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from Salesforce who are going to be providing their insights, their experiences. And hopefully you all have, not just lessons learned, but you also leave with inspiration today to keep at it, going forward with it. So with that, I’m super excited to introduce Cathy, whose our first speaker, so who’s going to be speaking next.

Cathy Polinsky: Good morning, everyone.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: So really quickly I wanted to introduce Cathy. Cathy is the CTO of Stitch Fix, which is awesome. Cathy and I first met when Cathy was working at Salesforce as an SVP. She’s going to talk about her journey. What I really definitely want to call out is right now she leads the engineering team at Stitch Fix, and supports the company’s efforts to deliver services that meet the clients’ needs. Cathy has been working in great companies like Yahoo!, and Amazon, and of course Salesforce where we met. So Cathy, go ahead. I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Cathy Polinsky: Fantastic, thanks. And thanks for this opportunity. I just really appreciate having an opportunity to network and talk with other women. I just got back from a board effect meeting two weeks ago where we were talking about needing more women representation on boards, and more women representation in the industry. As many of you all know, we’ve come really far, we’re seeing a lot more women in the industry. But as the numbers come back, they can be kind of depressing that even though the number of women in software, in technology organizations has grown, the percentages haven’t changed that dramatically over the last decade.

I hope we can work together to build a more inclusive community and support system. I wanted to share my story of how I got to be from a kid who grew up in Pittsburgh, work my way through to be a software developer, and now to a CTO at Stitch Fix.

It’s hard not to be able to see everyone here. I’m not sure how many of you know of Stitch Fix. I’m hoping that there’s a lot of clients out there, but I’m sure there’s many of you who have maybe heard of Stitch Fix, but don’t quite know what we do. So let me just start a little bit with that so you can get a sense of what I do on a day to day basis.

Stitch Fix is really disrupting how people can find clothes and items they love, and look and feel their best every single day. So as many of you probably have shifted your buying behaviors to online, I’m the same way. I hate going shopping. Before I even learned about Stitch Fix, almost all of my purchasing was done online. I never really go to the store, and yet when I’ve tried to buy clothes online, it’s a really broken experience. There’s so much that goes in your head when you walk into a store. What items you think that look good for you and match your style preferences. And there’s so many things that go in your head when you walk into a dressing room to figure out whether something looks good on you, your complexion, your body type. There’s a lot that goes into thinking about your wallet and your price preferences for whether you’ll take that item and spend that money to go to check out.

When you go online and try to buy something, you get a flat image, you may get a review, but you won’t really know if that person is like you, if they have the same style preferences that you may have, or the same body type. So Stitch Fix really disrupting that business. You fill out a detailed style profile. It’s kind of like a dating profile. Everything that goes in your mind for what you do when you’re walking into a store, and what things generally work for you, and what things don’t. And then you get paired up with a personal stylist who takes that information, paired with tons and tons of algorithms and data science with detailed recommendations that are tailored exactly for you to pick items that will work for you. You get a box delivered to your door, you don’t know what’s gonna show up in that box. You open it, try it on at home. Hopefully find things that you love. But easily return things back that you don’t. You only pay for what you keep.

This was just so disruptive when I really got behind the scenes to learn about this business model and what it was doing and how we’re impacting clients lives that I was really excited to join this group, and now I’m the CTO. My role expands across engineering, IT, product management, and security. So it’s a pretty expansive role, and every day I get to do something different, and I’m learning new things as well.

I just feel very fortunate to have this job and to work with such amazing women here at the company. But I wanted to talk to you about my path to get here. It hasn’t always been easy, but I’ve had a lot of support along the way. I wanted to talk to you about things that I’ve learned along that path, and support systems that I have really benefited from that we can also help others along the way, as well. So I mentioned I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I was in elementary school in the early 80s, and no one had computers at home. Personal computers were just spinning up and the Apple 2s were starting to make an entrance into elementary schools. What’s amazing is that Apple really wanted to nurture that community. They were giving grants out to schools, and donating computers to elementary schools. I heard they even had a surplus of Apple 2s when they launched the Macintosh and say they were really thinking about how they could use that for good. And I was one of the beneficiaries of that. My school took advantage of those programs and created a computer lab, and my teachers loved it. Every week we had a computer lab time where we got to go to the lab and learn computer programming.

My first language was Logo, which was a little tiny triangle on a screen, kind of like the predated Scratch, and you can draw little pictures. You can draw boxes and houses and make simple commands. But it was a real programming language. You could do loops and you can do procedures. It really started that spark for me of what technology could be. I carried that forward for quite some time, even though, after elementary school there were no real programs for me. Our middle school and our high school really didn’t have many computer classes. In high school, I was told about a program at Carnegie Mellon, which was near where I lived in Pittsburgh for a summer program for computer science. And I applied and got accepted into the program, and it was amazing. The morning was taught by a computer science professor at CMU. It was about algorithms and data structures. And the afternoon was special projects where I go to see an arm and try to program an arm robot to make knots and do some object orient programming to make and solve mazes.

After that summer, I really thought that this was something I was interested in and I’d want to pursue. And I had a lot of encouragement in a way through the professor that I got to meet at CMU who talked to me about colleges and talked to me about studying computer science going forward. That spark that I had through both teachers and professors really carried me a long way to thinking about this field because frankly a lot of people of my generation, a lot of women in my generation are only here because of having that spark from someone else, generally a family member. There’s generally someone, a dad, an uncle, even a mom who was a scientist, or someone in that field, but I didn’t have that. But the teachers and the professors that I did engage with really were my spark to enter in the field.

Fast forward, I went to a small liberal arts school in Philadelphia, Swarthmore College and studied computer science. Had a lot of support there for programs around women in technology. And then when I graduated in ’99, it was the peak of the dot com boom, and off I went to Seattle to work at Amazon.com. It was quite an amazing ride, and just every month we were launching new stores. The growth was pretty crazy. The company growth was amazing as well.

It was not easy as I was one of the few women, certainly on my first team, I was the only woman. But I did find my little support group. I had friends that I got to meet, people who helped me through that way as I was trying to figure out a team that worked for me, and I’m forever grateful for that.

I was also there during the rocky bubble burst of the dot com industry, and I had thought that I had missed the interesting times at Amazon, and I wanted to leave and go see what it was like to work at an early stage start up. So I left Amazon, came down to the Bay Area, worked for a small start up, saw it go up and down, and realized it’s not fun to work on software that doesn’t get used. And I swung to much bigger companies since. I went to Oracle right after, which was probably a little bit of an overcompensation. But it was there that I really was starting to do team leading and thinking about being an engineering manager.

A piece of … I have a fun story about that, of I just happened to be meeting with an old friend, and was telling him that I was interested in being an engineering manager, and that I was thinking that I might transition to doing that within the next couple of quarters, it wasn’t gonna happen immediately, but I didn’t think anything of it. And then three weeks alter he calls me up and says, “Hey, there’s a position open for an engineering manager at Yahoo! that I think you’d be a great fit for, you should apply.”

And that just really surprised me. I never thought that another company would consider me for an engineering manager since I had never been an engineer manager. And it never would’ve happened if I hadn’t shared that story and spark with the friend of mine.

Advice that I give a lot of people is to be really free in sharing what your passions and interests are. You never know what opportunities are out there, and people will see you in a different light when you share those aspirations. So figure out things you want to try. Figure out things that you might want to do, and then tell people. It might be a different technology that you want to try, or a new project that hasn’t even been spun up for your company, but your manager or your colleagues may look at you in a different light when those opportunities come out and think of you as a perfect person for that fit.

Fast forward, I went to Yahoo!. It was the most trafficked site on the internet when I was there, ahead of Google. It was a pretty vibrant time when I first arrived. It kind of got rocky. I had my first baby there, and it was … I was working on a really tough project as we were revamping our ad network and really trying to figure out what was coming next for the business. I’d say one of my lowest points of my career happened there where I came back full force after maternity leave, I was excited to be back, I was excited to work on new projects. I even raised my hand to work on this brand new project that was revamping this architecture. Several months after that, I was realizing things just weren’t working. I was really unhappy. I was not feeling like I was being a good employee, not feeling like I was being a good mom. I’ve always felt like I was just chasing to get home in time to relieve the baby sitter, and my baby had stopped eating… I was breast feeding and pumping at work. Even though I had a good enough supply, she was gradually drinking less and less milk every single day. So I felt like this just isn’t working, I need to figure something else out because I don’t feel like I’m doing either job well, from being a great engineering leader, or a great mom. And so I quit — I went in, I went to my boss and I said I was gonna be quitting, and I made up some story about doing some other project.

To my surprise, they all tried to convince me not to leave.

So my boss really asked me a lot of questions. I hadn’t really felt like I was doing that good of a job, so it was really surprising to me at first that they would make all of these overtures to keep me to stay. Other peers and leaders also came to talk to me. And then finally the VP of the business came to talk to me. It was someone I hadn’t engaged with that often. He asked a lot of insightful questions, and I was really trying not to go into details or trying to make it into a way that they would convince me to stay. But he got to a point, and he said, “Cathy, I don’t feel like you’re asking for what you want, or what you need” and that really struck me.

And then he paused and he said, “I don’t know if I can give you what you want or you need, but you’re not even giving me the chance. So if you can think about what it would take to for you to be happy and successful, let us know and give us a chance to make that right.” And that was just such a powerful moment for me. And I was like, “Wow.”

It was the same advice someone had given me before about sharing things that I need and want for transitioning into being an engineering manager. But it was that same advice in a very different context for me when I was going through a difficult time in my job. So I really took a step back and said, “I’m trying to do too many things. I’m trying to be this amazing engineering leader and get the next promotion. I’m also trying to figure things out with my baby. I’m trying to travel to the different sites for these leaders. And I just need to figure out sequencing and not try to do too much at once.”

So I pared things back, I said I’m not gonna do these travel trips for the next 3 months. I also flew my mom out and she helped me with my baby while I looked for a new childcare provider. I got through those next three months, and I decided to stay. What happened after that is I got into this groove, things were doing much better for my baby, things were much easier for my job. I figured out how to do both of them a different way than I was doing it in the past. It really helped, potentially even saved me to stay in the industry at a time that was pretty difficult. It was really thanks to that VP Sandeep who had that conversation with me and made me look at things a different way.

Fast forward, I then went … Yahoo! had a lot of difficult times. I was looking for what’s next, and I had my eyes set on Salesforce. I came into Salesforce and I got to work on a lot of different really great initiatives, but I also got to see a different company that was really focused on giving back. It made me think about that time at Apple, how they influenced specific education and schools and students studying computers where Marc Benioff, the CEO over at Salesforce really wanted to think about how he could give back by not just being a company that makes a lot of money, but also is really successful in helping the community at large. So he created a 1–1–1 model, 1% of time, 1% of equity, 1% of the products were given to non-profits.

I think this is something we can all think about how we can use the power of the institutions that we work for to make a different in our broader community, helping to support other girls, helping women in technology, persons of color, helping with diversity and equality is something I feel like I been it for and I would like to roll forward to others.

I learned a lot working there, and I also feel like I had a lot of advantages working for a company who really cared about equality. So Marc had a program when I was there. He had a quarterly leadership meeting, it was called ECOM at the time. He would bring in his leaders and go business by business and go through the financials of the company. At one point he looked around the room and said, “Where are all the women?” And there may have been a chuckle or two. But after that he said, “No, we need to fix this. I want 30% of the room for all of my meetings to have women in them.”

It didn’t mean that the people who normally would’ve been invited didn’t get to come, it meant that another seat was pulled up to the table. I really liked what Gretchen was saying about just pulling up another chair is really what gives people different opportunities and advantages. I got that opportunity at Salesforce. I was invited to some meetings with really high level leaders at the company, and I got to listen in and engage and learn how the company was operating at that level, and that really helped prepare me for this role as a CTO. And I think that’s something that we can all think about is how can we pull up another seat to the table to give people an opportunity to see what’s going on in your meetings, to see what’s going on in your company, and to have broader access in this industry.

So fastfoward, I’m now at Stitch Fix. It is an amazing job, it’s great to be in this role. It’s something that I’ve always aspired to do and to be. But what I never aspired, and had hoped to work for as a company, that has such high gender diversity. Stitch Fix is 84% women, which is just amazing. Every day I walk into rooms that I’m completely surrounded by such amazing women. That’s something that was so difficult than any other company that I had ever worked. I had been used to being one of the only women in the room where I’ve gone and done the count and said, “Wow, what percentage of women are here today,” and I’ve stopped doing that. After being in a room with 60% women and 70% and 45% women, you don’t really need to do the count anymore. And what I found what’s amazing when you have that level of gender diversity is you really can be your authentic self. I remember early on in my career just wanting to fit in and be one of the guys. I wore T-shirts and jeans and wanted to kind of be appreciated for my technology, and not stand out as different than anyone else.

And now I get to wear dresses every day, I get to be myself, I don’t have to think about how I’m phrasing things or to couch my thought process or argument in a different way to fit in with the culture of the company. I feel like when you have a broader diversity group, everybody can just be themselves and focus on the business, focus on the clients, focus on how to make a difference. And that’s what’s exciting to me.

I love working at big scale companies, I love working at growing teams, growing technology, growing architecture, shipping software, and that’s what I get to do every day here. We’re in this amazing growth phase at Stitch Fix where we’re launching new business lines, where we’re growing our business. And it’s the technology that you see on the website, but it’s also everything that goes underneath it to power it from tools to run our warehouse to tools for our styling organization. Tools also for merchandise, of how we pick and buy and plan and allocate the right inventory for our business. I love wearing T-shirts and jeans sometimes too, and I love wearing dresses, and I love that I can choose. My aspiration going forth in this industry is that we can all be our authentic selves at work, that we can be recognized for what we do.

I hope that I’m seen as a great CTO, as a great technology leader, and not just a female CTO. And that my aspiration is that there are many more of you who rise to these levels as well, and that we can form a great community and support network. I think that that’s essentially my story that I wanted to share today. I think Sukrutha, we may have wanted to open things up for some questions? If anyone has any questions, and you want to type them in, feel free. Oh, there you are, hello.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi, I was looking at everybody’s comments. A lot of people were talking about how they’re loving your story and the honesty with which you’re sharing it. I see a question asking about who your current inspiration is.

Cathy Polinsky: I have to say my biggest inspiration right now is my CEO Katrina Lake. Katrina was a young CEO founder who came up with this idea while she was in business school. She was fascinated by eCommerce disruptions and the sense that the apparel industry was one of the few industries that had not reached double digit online sales, even six or seven years ago. And the sense of the reason is because the model was broken and she had an idea for a different way and a different model. It has not been easy for her. As a young female CEO going to Sand Hill to raise money was not a cake walk. So she really focused on how she could get to profitability as fast as possible so she wasn’t dependent on that industry. And the thing about her is she is just such an authentic leader — she is so smart and savvy, but does not put on airs and is really someone that I’ve watched her, as she’s had her first baby, and navigated the world of pumping and nursing and things that I hid behind. I remember one of my stories of pumping while I’m eating, and having a one on one and someone saying, “What’s that noise in the background?” I’m like, “What noise? I don’t hear any noise,” and not really being that authentic about what was going on and what I needed, really just trying to hide what was going on. And that’s something I don’t think she even thought twice about hiding anything about. She’s not trying to be a role model as much as just authentically is navigating that aspect of being a mom and being an amazing CEO.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: That’s awesome. Someone also pointed out about the fact that there was a podcast where Katrina shared her story. But I do see a lot of questions speaking to your story about Marc Benioff noticing not enough gender diversity and then trying to make a difference. How does one who is not in that level of influence… How would somebody else who would get impacted by a change like that… How would they bring about the influence when they’re not in the seat of power? What advice would you have for people like that?

Cathy Polinsky: I think we could all try to help at whatever level that we’re in — really raising this as an issue to your boss, or thinking about ideas about how you could help, whether it’s the community, or a local university that’s near you. Maybe it’s letting people shadow you in your job and bringing a seat to the table. And then it’s also the opposite of asking — asking, “Can I come to this meeting?” I think that people … It may not always work out for you, but it will never work out if you don’t ask. So really being able to assert yourself and to see if another seat could be brought to that table.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: That’s awesome. And next question, and I am seeing a lot of people asking similar questions, so I’m just summarizing the next question. It seems like a lot of people want to know how do you identify when is the right time to jump at an opportunity, or navigate towards a specific opportunity to grow in your career?

Cathy Polinsky: I’d say the thing I’ve always done is try to look at what are the big opportunities out there that no one is going after, and being open to them. I was going to talk a little bit about managing up. The aspect that has worked for me both as a manager, but also as a strong number two to other of my leaders is to really open myself up to understanding what are the big challenges that my boss is having at any given time, and see how I can make a difference —

What are the big chargers, what are the big opportunities that we’re going after. What are the gaps that we see and how can I lean in to make myself available when there’s challenges. I feel like that’s always helped me, whether it’s a brand new initiative that got spun up, or someone’s leaving the company, someone’s moving to a new role and there’s a gap in the organization. Really saying, “Hey, how can I help? Is there something that I could be doing here? I’d love to take a shot at helping on these projects.”

The way that I’ve always been able to do that is to build a great team. I love to delegate and hire the best people that I can and load them up as much as possible in the same way. And that gives me the space and the capacity to take on more when I am in a growing opportunity that needs more help.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: One quick comment I do want to add is that people are asking for all of your questions to be posted in the ask a question list. So just in case you’ve been posting them in the chat but not in the ask a question list, if you put it there people can vote. Next is actually one of my favorite questions. There are nine and counting votes for people who want to hear more about the differences in responsibilities and duties of being a software developer, an individual contributor, versus a CTO. How did you transition between those roles, what is the main differentiator do you think? Or the biggest challenges.

Cathy Polinsky: Let’s just talk about software developer versus manager because it is this really interesting thing that the things that help you be most successful as an engineer are not necessarily the things that you need to do once you’re an engineering manager. And that’s something that we’re not sure … We talk about that a lot at my staff meeting of if that’s true for a lot of other fields. I get the impression that that dynamic is not always as clear as it is in software development. When you’re focusing a lot on how you’re working on coding and projects and building up your technology skills, those things are great and important to lean on so you understand the projects are going on track, but there’s a whole other aspect of how you’re managing people and projects and initiatives that you don’t necessarily always get to do as an individual contributor.

It was a very challenging and different experience for me, but one that I really loved. I feel like as a software developer, you get these CS highs — You solve some problem, you are excited about getting to a solution that works, and that you can push out and deploy, and that’s just exciting that you get to see that solution, you get to see people using it, and you get to see the difference that you’re making.

When you’re a manager, and you’re not actually writing the hands-on code and influencing through people, things take longer. You can’t always see the, “Hey, I’m trying to give people advice and coaching them in this way. Am I getting through to them? Is this working? Am I shifting the team to be better or not?” It’s not that you can see that on a day to day basis, but that your impact is much broader, and if you can stick through it and realize it’s not the same as that every day, every hour, continuous feedback loop that you find other ways to see your impact, and that you can be really proud of the people and lives that you can influence.

That’s what I really love about the job is that I can have a broader influence and every day is different, as I mentioned. I’m working on a lot of different types of projects, a lot of different types of focus. And I think that’s the thing that also changes as you take on more and more teams, as you go from being a manager to a manager of managers, or a CTO. I was saying as I was making that shift, things when you’re a software developer can go quite fast. You can have a great day, and then you can have a bad day. Depending on the big challenge or bug or issue that you’re dealing with, things are a little slower as an engineering manager. You see the challenges and you’re working towards fixing them, or you’re seeing things working really well, and they stay pretty well for quite some time.

But when you have a larger scope of influence with teams that suddenly don’t have much commonality between them, you can go from one meeting and think, “Wow, things are finally coming together for this group and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and things are going great.” And then you go into a whole different meeting and you go, “Oh, now I have this other problem that I have been neglecting that I really need to help nurture.” It’s just a different pacing, and just being open to those shifts are really important — and to finding different people to get advice from because this job changed quite dramatically.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah, totally. I can’t totally relate because I’m going through that as well myself. Thank you so much Cathy, I wanted to thank you from the bottom of our heart to get started with what’s our first ever virtual conference. Your talk was so inspiring, we see it through the comments, and we feel it too. All of the questions that came in, thank you for asking those questions.

Cathy Polinsky: Thank you for organizing this and thank you for inviting me. It’s great to be here.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you. Over to Gretchen [for our next session] …

Cathy Polinsky is the CTO of Stitch Fix. Prior to Stitch Fix, she was SVP Engineering at Salesforce.
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“From Cat Herder to Air Traffic Controller: Engineering Leadership” — Girl Geek X Elevate (Video + Transcript)

Panelists:
Laura Thomson / Director of Engineering / Mozilla
Miriam Aguirre / VP of Engineering / Skillz
Rija Javed / Senior Director of Engineering / Wealthfront
Vidya Setlur / NLP Manager / Tableau

Transcript

Laura Thomson: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the panel on engineering leadership from cat herder to air traffic controller. My name is Laura Thomson, and I’ll be your moderator. I’m going to begin by introducing the panel, and if each person could wave or tell us who they are as we go around, that would be great. First up we have Miriam Aguirre, who is the VP of Engineering at Skillz. We also have Rija Javed, Senior Director of Engineering at Wealthfront. Vidya Setlur, a NLP Manager at Tableau. And my name is Laura Thomson, as I said, and I’m the Senior Director of Engineering Operations at Mozilla. Welcome to the panel, everyone. We’re going to try to do this in a conversational way. I think a good icebreaker question is for us each to talk about what our career path was. How did we get here? How did we end up in these roles? So who would like to kick us off? Miriam, maybe?

Miriam Aguirre: Sure, absolutely. I actually graduated from college in 1999, and immediately moved to Silicon Valley. I went to MIT and graduated with a computer science degree, and it seemed to be natural for me to move to Silicon Valley. I spent most of my career here in the Bay Area, big companies, small companies, from HPs to two or three people companies. As a software engineer primarily, made my way into architecture and then joined a startup where I felt like I finally had to break into management just because I wanted to drive more of the decisions on what products to work on and what teams to build and how to build those teams. I just felt kind of like there’s only so much I could contribute as an engineer, but there were a lot of decisions where I felt like I could make better decisions at the management level. So I carved my way into leadership at Skillz, now as an VP of Engineering here.

Laura Thomson: That’s great. What about you, Rija?

Rija Javed: I’m originally from Canada. I went to the University of Toronto, did undergrad and grad school there. And then similar to Miriam and, I think, a bunch of people that moved to the Bay Area, that being the hub of tech and software. I was at Zynga, which was a very interesting experience, given that it is a gaming industry, very famine and feast, I was there for about a year, and then this interesting opportunity from a company called Wealthfront came about. The engineering culture really spoke to me, and I joined the company when they were about 20 or so people, and then I recently left when we were about 200+ people. So I was able to contribute across various different areas, and just grew within that role from being an individual contributor to leading and managing that core business area for Wealthfront. And, yeah, met a lot of great people and learned a lot professionally.

Laura Thomson: That’s awesome. What about you, Vidya?

Vidya Setlur: Well, I am originally from India, and so I did my undergrad in India and came here for grad school. My background is in research, so I’ve been doing research and NLP and it’s natural language processing and graphics for more than 10 years. And most recently, an opportunity came up at Tableau where I could manage an engineering team in this space, so it’s just been a great opportunity to practice some of the technical expertise in this area as well as people management hand in hand.

Laura Thomson: That’s terrific. All right, I’ll tell you about myself. I’m originally from Australia, which you probably never would have guessed. When I started college in computer science, the web didn’t exist. And then I decided that that was what I wanted to do for a living, so that worked out well. In Australia I ran a consulting company, went to grad school, and about 11 years ago, I moved to the US and started working for a company that did consulting for startups, really like a lot of scalability stuff. I’ve done a lot open source work and written books and so on, and that’s how I ended up working there. And finally, about 10 and a half years ago I came to work for Mozilla, and I started as a senior engineer and worked my way up to where I am now, which has been a great ride. I wonder, often, how much longer I can go on, but it’s been fantastic.

Rija Javed: Nice.

Laura Thomson: Okay, so next question I have is what’s your management philosophy? How do you approach managing up, dealing with your people that you report to, and down, which is sort of an expression I hate, actually, but, you know, the people you manage. Who would like to tackle it?

Vidya Setlur: I can. I’ll start off. My general philosophy and just watching people that I admire is leading by example. I find it highly uncomfortable asking my team what to do, but intrinsically motivating the team and inspiring the team to really feel the passion and being part of this journey and working on items. I can take the horse to the water and force it to drink, but there’s something lovely about someone who is just excited and passionate about working on certain projects. But, you know, by me getting in and working and leading by example, that’s for me, one way of getting people excited and passionate. The second aspect is just being a really good listener, listening to what people are saying, listening to their signals. There’s a lot of implicit listening that I like to do, their body language, their gestures … Are they uncomfortable? Does their voice need to be heard? So really acutely signaled into some of that as part of the way that I approach leadership.

Laura Thomson: That’s a wonderful answer. I really like that part of it, being a good listener. That’s really important.

Rija Javed: I guess my experience, the way I envision it, for in terms of people managing to me, I very much believe that a job of a manager is to make the people successful, and that’s not while they’re within this particular team or within this particular company. And the way I always look at opportunities, especially within the company scope, is what are the company’s priorities? What are the person’s skills, and what are their interests? And you always want it to be a step up for them, while keeping all of those things intact. And in terms of people higher up than me, I very much believe that an individual’s job is there to make the company successful, all the while, especially when you have people reporting to you, making them successful as well, too. But I feel like I myself have grown a lot within the companies that I’ve been at, and I think good things will just happen to you. You’re then able to make that impact, and other people will see the value that you bring to the table, and it will all work out professionally for you. But, yeah, for me it’s very much making sure that that individual is successful throughout their career and maintaining those relationships and having a good communication system.

Miriam Aguirre: Yeah, really understanding where people want to go and helping them get there and doing the right amount of pushing versus not. Listening, but also listening for things that they’re not saying, and digging in and asking those questions, and trying to steer them towards where they think that they want to go, and giving them those opportunities to see what that’s like. A lot of times you know, or you feel like, something will not be a good idea, or it may not necessarily turn out the way that they think, but you want to be supportive, and you want to give them that space to grow and find out for themselves what they want to accomplish. You taking on that support role is super important for me, in terms of management, just making sure that you’re being supportive but also pushing. I keep pushing them forward.

Laura Thomson: Right, I hear a lot of common things and things that I try to do as well, but maybe not as eloquently stated. A couple of things I really like to do … I like to meet people where they are and not try to force everybody to work the same way or follow the way that I think they should work. As long as they are doing good work, then it doesn’t really matter how they do it. I try to give people the freedom to be themselves. Also, really want to push responsibility to the edges. Wherever possible, the person who knows the most about the thing should be making the decision about the thing, and a lot of the time that’s not me. Those two things are really important.

The other thing is I try to encourage them. I take a philosophy of communication that is kind, direct, and prompt. Because I think, particularly in the open source world, you have a place where people can be kind of jerks, right? They’ll say, “Oh, my god, this code is terrible.” And sometimes you need to communicate that, but you don’t need to communicate it in that way. Also, you can go too far and be nice and not say anything, and that’s not helpful. What you have to do is be kind by telling them, by sharing that with them. Be direct. Say what you mean. And be prompt. Don’t think something and not get around to telling someone until it’s too late for them to do anything about it. That’s my philosophy.

Vidya Setlur: I think, adding to that point, is a fantastic book. I don’t know if you’ve read it. It’s called Radical Candor.

Laura Thomson: Oh, I’ve heard this is really good. I’ve not read it.

Vidya Setlur: It’s a very good book. It’s all about honesty and how you can care about people through honesty…

Rija Javed: I think … Sorry, one other point. One of the things that I recently read in a book … It was by Ray Dalio, and the quote there was that the job of manager and especially any person in a senior leadership role is to figure out the individual’s motivations and ensure that those align with the company strategy and goals. If you’re able to do that, then you’ll really be able to help the people grow, which are the most important part of any organization, and that will help the company grow itself.

Laura Thomson: That’s really great. What do we have next? Oh, this is a great one. So what are your thoughts about mentorship or sponsorship? I’ll just qualify what I think the difference between those are. Mentorship, it tends to be helping someone grow or receiving advice. Sponsorship is more the act of helping someone in their career, like offering them stretch opportunities, helping them be seen, and so on. So how have mentors helped you, and how have you been a mentor to others now that you’re a leader?

Miriam Aguirre: I’d like to hit on that one. I definitely feel like, as someone who has now spent a better part of two decades in tech, being really mindful of where I spend my energy. And especially when I think about giving back to the community, whom I choose to mentor and whom I choose to sponsor. I can only sponsor people who work at my company effectively, but who I choose to mentor, it could be outside of my organization, and that’s where I feel like I could make a big difference if I help girls in junior high or people of color before they leave STEM. And so I try to focus my energies around that.

In terms of my own mentorship and allyship, I try to be pretty focused about what I need from certain people. I have a senior executive that I consult with at Lyft, and I ask him for information that would not be readily available to me. For example, what would a white male ask for in terms of salary for this kind of position at this stage company? And him having that experience is able to give me that information pretty easily, and I don’t have to feel like without this information I can’t negotiate effectively. So being really specific and intentional about the info that you want or the kind of sponsorship or mentorship that you need really helps guide me and focus my energy.

Rija Javed: I like to echo that point, especially in terms of mentorship for outside communities. When I was in high school, in terms of my maths and sciences classes, it was actually most of the girls or women there that were actually achieving the highest grades. But careers, in terms of the STEM category, is just things that they would not think of, so they would try to go into more of a business side of things, whereas it would be more of the male population that would think about going into it. And to be honest, I actually first was doing undergrad in terms of business and economics, and then I just loved math way too much. So since high school up till now, for the past 10 years, I’ve tried to focus a lot more in terms of those diverse groups that wouldn’t necessarily automatically be thinking about the STEM careers, just to open up their mind to learn more about it.

Rija Javed: And then in terms of mentorship within the industry and within the company that you’re working with, I think it takes on lots of different forms. There are, of course, more specific relationships like onboarding mentor relationships, but there’s also a lot of stuff that you learn more implicitly from people. And I feel like I’ve really benefited in terms of that. While people may not necessarily be doing it, but you find them to be inspirational people, and that’s how I carve out my career journey. I think about it. It’s like those are the traits or those are the experiences that I would like to have.

Rija Javed: I think in terms of sponsorship, I read a great article, which I think is probably one to two years old now on Medium. But that was talking about how mentorship is not the answer for why women leave tech. The answer is actually advocacy at the higher exec levels. And that’s actually one of the things that I’ve been more mindful of, given the leverage that I’ve had at the company and thinking more about that diverse group and how I’m able to speak up for them. Because I also know that I’ve been able to grow in my career because there’s been that one person for me that’s been speaking up for me at that high level E-staff and board level.

Laura Thomson: I really like what you said about the implicit mentorship. I always think you should watch what people do, and if there’s something they do that’s great, ask them how they do it and steal it. Make it your own so you can … It doesn’t have to be a Yoda-style relationship where they guide every action, and you’re running through the jungle and learning all these things in this really hard way.

Rija Javed: Yeah, exactly.

Vidya Setlur: And I think that also dovetails into the previous point I made about being a good listener, but also being a really good observer. Because what I’ve realized is the best advice I have given as a mentor or have been given from a mentor is stuff that just happens implicitly without any sort of descriptive advice. I’m not saying that there is no place for that, but sometimes watching situational awareness and how people react in various situations is a really great way of observing and learning and recalibrating ourselves as individuals. I think for all of us here on this panel, we have the responsibility of mentoring the upcoming generation and our peers as well as continuously observing and learning from other people that we look up to.

Vidya Setlur: And the sponsorship thing is really good. Both Rija and Miriam raise some interesting points on, yes, you always want to have someone who can advocate for you or advocate for certain values in place in addition to someone intrinsically motivated and mentoring and helping you grow as a career. And you need both, and there’re places for both in a company and situation.

Laura Thomson: I think that’s really true. Sponsorship is sometimes an easier model, too. And I saw that as a question that I’m not going to answer it particularly or directly about finding people to mentor you at the mid and senior levels, and sometimes sponsorship is a better model there. It’s okay to approach somebody and say would you sponsor me, but I think you need to figure out what you want to get out of it first and make sure that you identify somebody that has the skills or is in the position to help you. And be prepared for them to say no. But I think one thing you can also in those situations is if somebody says no, say, “Well, can you suggest somebody else that might be able to help?” So don’t be frightened to ask. The worst you can get is no.

Laura Thomson: Okay, I did want to mention there are a bunch of questions coming up. We’re going to do a few more questions that we prepared earlier, and then we’ll switch to doing questions from the group. So if you haven’t had a chance, if you’re in the audience, look at the Ask a Question section, vote up questions that are interesting, write your own while we’re talking, and we’ll look at them in a few minutes.

Laura Thomson: Next one I have… let’s talk about challenges, challenges or failures that you have faced throughout your career. They could be things you overcame or things that you don’t think you handled particularly well. Let’s talk about those. Who would like to go first?

Rija Javed: I can start off. When I joined my prior company, the company size was 20, and I was the only female, let alone female within engineering, and certainly people who had five to 10 years more professional experience than me. So I really had to show my value in terms of the work that I was delivering. But one of the disconnects that was there for some time was you might be acting within a role and delivering that impact, but not necessarily getting the title that’s associated with it. And certainly situations where there were people with me that were not necessarily as diverse — they were white / male — and the treatment that they got versus the lack of audience that I got in that situation and the answer that I was literally told were like, “Well, yes, for this very powerful person, you don’t look like the people that he’s used to dealing with, and you just look very different to that.” And I think that prior article that I mentioned of why women leave tech, that Medium blog post …One of the things that it did mention was if … sometimes there are stereotypes associated with women.

So, if you are this very strong leader, then sometimes in conflicts that can be viewed negatively, whereas potentially a white male, who people are more used to, can get more claps on the back of, hey, you’re a strong leader, and you stood up for those ideals. Those are certainly some of the challenges that I’ve had to work through. There’s certainly technical challenges as well, and that’s a conversation that I was having with one of my peers, as well, is I think especially as you go higher and higher, it’s more so about cultural challenges that you have to deal with, and I certainly believe like no situation, no company is perfect, there’s going to be politics everywhere but it’s like what level of politics are you okay with and at what level does it really start to get super toxic?

Laura Thomson: Yep.

Miriam Aguirre: I think for me personally, when I think about my growth in tech, when I think about failures and challenges, what really stands out to me is how much time I feel like I’ve wasted fearing to fail as opposed to overcoming the actual failures. They’re not that remarkable now that I think about all of those failures and some of them I can’t even remember but there’s been plenty of failure throughout my career. What I feel most bad about isn’t those failures themselves, it’s actually how much time it took for me to make those decisions and not be okay with taking that risk and that’s really what I would like to change, not the failure itself. I think failure is just part of our roles, part of our jobs. We have to be able to manage through that. It’s really the lack of decision making that I feel bad about personally. When I think about how I approach my work now, it’s not out of a place of fear, and definitely like I know how to get through failure, I’ve done it plenty of times now. It’s more like let’s be decisive, let’s make good decisions, and let’s do it quickly without wasting time around being afraid.

Laura Thomson: That’s a good one.

Vidya Setlur: Yeah, I think for me, I think the general thread of thinking whether you classified failure as challenges, that’s to be discussed, but I think this is just sort of reminiscent of women in tech who tend to overcompensate for the role that we have and you just talked about that too. I found that starting from grad school because I chose to have a kid in grad school and as it is being a woman in a computer science department pursuing a PhD has its own bias feed and that on top having a child leads to all sorts of assumptions and opinions that people, especially men tend to have, “Are you really cut out for grad school? Is this what you want to do?” Comments like, “I guess I’m not going to see you once you have your kid.” I think for me, the way to address those challenges has been to just overcompensate. Working really hard as a grad student, not playing video games like my male peers, right? Because you feel like you’re constantly judged based on what you’re doing and I think it’s a common thread for me as I have grown professionally. I mean Tableau has been a great company but just because I have been trained and sensitized to overcompensating, I realized that we all wear so many hats that are beyond our pay grade or job requirements and we just do it. I have seen guys saying, “You know what? You’re asking me to do this, you need to give me a salary hike,” but we dare not ask such a question, right? We just do it and we sort of underplay or downplay that overcompensation that we’re doing because we feel that we need to prove ourselves beyond this stereotype that is often there. To me, part of the undercurrent of challenges that I face and I feel that a lot of people can kind of relate to that as well.

Laura Thomson: That’s a good one. I know for myself, one of the biggest challenges I’ve had through my whole career is I have really bad imposter syndrome and I’m sure I’m going to learn that probably like 99% of the people on the call have this to some extent but it’s really frustrating. Like you sort of feel like you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I have this thing that I want to work on, if I talk about it people will think I’m an idiot, is it really a good idea? If we do it, what if I fail and I’ll look stupid and all this kind of stuff. Like it was a very strong problem for me.

One of the things that’s helped me a little bit with that is realizing that it applies in every aspect of my life. I’m also a parent and when I became a parent, I said, “I have no idea what I’m doing, but all of these other moms know what they’re doing.” I was like, “This is imposter syndrome again, I just can’t get rid of it.” It’s kind of good to know that’s just how my brain is. That actually helped me a lot with the career stuff, was it was like, “Okay, this is how it works, I just have to ignore it.” It’s super helpful.

Vidya Setlur: Yes.

Laura Thomson: What do we have next on the list? Okay, so what do you do, each of you, to develop and hone your leadership skills?

Miriam Aguirre: Sure, I’ve got a couple of networking groups. I participate in an engineering Slack group as well. I like to, on my very long commute, I listen to podcasts or catch up on blogs and kind of follow different leaders in engineering and just kind of catch up on articles and keep in touch with the community. I find that kind of research really helps me keep abreast on what other people are doing, what other companies are doing and if they’ve solved some problem that either we are facing or we’re about to face and I don’t even know it yet. I can stay ahead of that stuff and kind of really reach out and kind of get more information around like how they approach the problem and how they came to those solutions because even having the framework for solving those kinds of problems is really valuable even if the problem isn’t directly applicable. I like to read up on the industry and also leaders that I feel are really good leaders at really good companies and try and model after them.

Rija Javed: Yeah.

Vidya Setlur: Yeah, for me, I definitely lean towards honing my technical aspect of leadership. I found that in a meeting, if I’m having a conversation tying it back to something that’s technically grounded often helps me in my role because of the nature of the team that I’m leading. Since I came from research, I continue to be very active in the academic community. I publish at conferences. I do peer reviews with papers. I also, the Bay Area has a lot of opportunities to mingle because there’s so many meet ups on various technical issues, also kind of women in tech issues, so just socializing and being out there and listening and learning and just being actively learning and growing is something that I continue doing.

Laura Thomson: Yeah.

Rija Javed: I mean, I don’t necessarily do as much reading. I try to keep up with some of the stuff but for me, the value that I really place on is on the individual themselves, so I have this collection of people, not necessarily engineers themselves, but within the tech community and some a little bit outside that I very much respect. When it comes to some like high-level decision-making process that I’m going through, I tend to look at a lot of the metrics, like try to be data-driven, but then I also place a high value on the opinion and advice of those folks, and also try to — which I think kind of echos what Vidya and Miriam mentioned as well too — try to learn from the people around me and that doesn’t necessarily need to be like the people that are laterally above you, but people that are around you or below you because everybody has a different way of doing things, and you might be able to learn something from that.

Laura Thomson: Yeah. Yeah, and I think that’s not just learning what to do but sometimes you can learn things that you don’t want to do, right? We just started saying about work too, I mean reading blogs and whatever but I hope it will all work out but one of my awesome colleagues, Selena Deckelman has just started Management Book Club and when I was talking about this when we were preparing, someone said, “Did you actually read the book?” I think it was Miriam and it’s really well-structured for managers because it’s like a chapter at a time so you know, we’ll meet to discuss chapter four. That’s okay, I think everybody can commit to reading like a chapter. I’m hoping that works out really well, but I think the conversation is about it with the other leaders is probably even more important than reading the book.

Vidya Setlur: Laura, what’s the name of the book again?

Laura Thomson: We’re going to do different books, I can put a link to the one we’re doing first. Ask me again in six months if we kept it up. That would be a good question, but I really like the idea. Okay.

Tell me about a bright spot in your career. What was something that you think of as a highlight or a high point, something that went really well.

Miriam Aguirre: I’ve been pretty pleased the way we’ve approached hiring at Skillz and kind of some of the resulting stats from that. Deep down, everyone believes that diverse teams help a company perform better. I wanted to actually apply that and have some results come of it. When we were named the fastest growing company revenue-wise for Inc. 500, I was like, “This is exactly like the proof that people want to see, right?” Sometimes people do things the right way because it’s the right thing to do. Sometimes they want to see that the numbers look good and this is kind of a sweet spot where I feel pretty happy that we’ve got both those things and really want to share that success with other leaders and kind of help them achieve that same level of success because I do feel like at the end of the day, the diverse team really does help the company build a better product and if you’re in a business that wants to make money, that’s very important and you can’t overlook that. It costs money to overlook that.

Laura Thomson: Yep, that’s a great story.

Rija Javed: I think for me, the highlight of my career and the best project that I worked on, which has also been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do was, I was managing that core business area for Wealthfront so we were trying to scale the existing platform but we also wanted to remove some of the middlemen that are associated with the brokerage and financial industry so re-architecting that whole platform and taking all that responsibility in-house, which was a massive undertaking but we didn’t also shut shop so we’re still delivering the new client facing features on top. We also went through like a massive hiring endeavor too as well with somewhere around like 40 or so people just within like a three to four-month span.

That six month period in terms of onboarding, that was like a net negative and a very painful experience for me, but I truly also believe that people are the most important part of any aspect so once they were fully onboarded, and this endeavor — I call it a project but it was a two and half-year endeavor — and it just kind of like really opened up the gates for my company in terms of the products and the areas in which we wanted to expand and also just the control we should take in-house. Then we decided to build while this was going on, a new client facing feature on top, which we knew nothing about and the timeline was compressed on us because our board financing the decision but because I had a great team. There were a lot of tough challenges both technical and to be honest, cultural as well too because we were working with 30 different vendors and hiring people from traditional industry who were just not used to tech at all, so for me to be able to kind of like onboard them and work with the different mental models, certainly the hardest thing that I’ve had to do but also probably the proudest thing because I was just humbled to have worked on it, let alone be able to lead and manage that whole thing of 80+ people, certainly something I’m proud of and a highlight.

Laura Thomson: That’s amazing.

Rija Javed: Thank you.

Vidya Setlur: When I joined Tableau almost six years ago, it was nothing about natural language. Tableau had been an analytics platform supporting visual analytics and I joined a research team but people would look at me oddly and say, “Oh, you have an NLP background, but I guess you also have a graphics background so it makes sense that you’re in Tableau.” I think what I’m particularly proud about is working on the research team on a bunch of prototypes, which focus on the research team, primarily women, I must say, and there was a precipitation point where it’s almost like you have to be at the right time at the right place, the stars need to align for a company to really buy into a research idea. It’s a multi-factor optimization. It goes with competitive landscape has to be just right, the idea has to be well thought through. It needs to excite the decision-makers in the company. It needs to make sense to the company’s business because there’s so much beyond just a good idea and we presented a particular prototype to the executive board where they got so excited that they started a seed engineering team with a female engineer, actually, and then Tableau acquired a start up and now NLP is a first class citizen at Tableau. Everybody talks about NLP. So it’s just exciting to see that technical shift and kind of the respect and the whole ecosystem that comes with that. You have sales people passionate about it talking to Tableau customers. There’s a whole body of work in the research community that’s looking at NLP with visual analytics. It’s just been remarkable and I would just say it’s been lucky I’ve just had a lot of good people working with me and just some good luck as well.

Laura Thomson: Yep. That’s amazing. For me, I think the thing I’m proudest of over the last couple years is actually more of a cultural change than anything. There’s a lot of technical change but mostly a cultural change and the program we have that I came up with, which is called, rather unglamorously, Go Faster.

I come from a web development background and when I moved to actually start working on Firefox, I said, “Why do we only ship every six weeks? Why don’t we just deploy this continuously?” I think I upset a lot of people by saying that. The nice thing about that is, I’ve always kind of thought with continuous deployment, the things that you do to promote that [inaudible 00:35:11] for your culture anyway. It means lots of tests, lots of sort of good data and experimentation and trying small incremental things and seeing if users like them and iterating quickly. We’ve historically been a risk averse culture, which might surprise you, and also a culture that is like allergic to collecting any kind of data because it’s sort of the clash point between Mozilla’s mission. We’ll respect user sovereignty but also try and deliver a good product. It’s like we’ve had to come up with sort of set of lean data practices so we can collect data about the product without invading anybody’s privacy to iterate quickly and make a good product. We can do that now. We can ship multiple times a day if we want to. We mostly don’t but we do a lot more experimental work. We do a lot more testing and experimental features and feature flagging and a lot of things that I am used to doing as a web dev. I feel really proud about that. I think it was sort of one of the key things that allowed us to ship Firefox Quantum last year, so it feels really good to have pulled that off and it kind of surprises me still.

Rija Javed: Nice.

Laura Thomson: It was fun.

Rija Javed: Yeah.

Laura Thomson: Okay, so I have one more question from our prepared ones then I’ll go to the audience questions. This last one I think is a really good one for this audience, which is what do you do to promote inclusive leadership and make people from diverse backgrounds feel welcome in your team? That includes intentionally including people that have a various sort of intersectional differences.

Rija Javed: I think, sorry, I can get started unless-

Laura Thomson: Yeah, go on.

Rija Javed: I think one of the things that I really try to focus on is like the different level of diversities. Like it’s not just, and a lot of companies tend to focus like oh race, gender, and now like maybe thinking about like say sexual orientation or socioeconomic background, but there’s also different personalities in that mix and one of the things that I have been very much cognizant of, especially in the last six to eight months, is some people are more outwardly and happy to speak up for themselves and also opportunities that they would want, which kind of works well within the startup’s culture, as well too, where you almost don’t have like a whole lot of hierarchies associated. Other people are just as impressive, they’re just more behind the scenes and not necessarily super comfortable about even expressing their wants about which project they want to work on and what opportunities they’re next looking for.

One of the things I’ve been cognizant of like trying to really assess the team that I have in terms of, like it’s that whole ecosystem as opposed to the individuals associated with it, and how they’re kind of contributing and working together. First off, as soon as I start mentoring or managing somebody, it’s trying to figure out what their motivations are to like really grow, like why are they even an engineer? Not just working within in this team or within this company but what they want to achieve? Then within that set of how they compliment each other’s skills and the opportunities that are available, try to kind of give them those prodding or those opportunities even if maybe it’s like, “Oh, Julia, you had this great idea, or Bob did this thing over the weekend that actually was great results, or as somebody else mentioned this article.” Yeah, it’s not necessarily super concrete because I think it just depends on the team that you’re working with.

Laura Thomson: Yep. Great.

Vidya Setlur: I would just say just responding to that, I love the word ecosystem and for me, it feeds into kind of a broader philosophy that I have for my team that everybody needs to be in this [inaudible 00:38:44] mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset. In order to achieve that active learning mindset and growing from other people on the team, you need people from different backgrounds, the typical ones that we often see but also more nuanced as we just said. Introverts, extroverts, different skills.

If I have a team that is all highly-functional with superstars and all senior engineers and no junior engineers, people can get cocky. They’re like, “No, we all know what we’re doing,” and there are no opportunities for mentoring and helping junior engineers or even interns [inaudible 00:39:30] and at the same time, interns or junior folks have an opportunity to be mentored and learn and ask the right questions of more senior people. You can slice and dice these across different types of diversities, right, but at the end of the day, you have a puzzle, they’re not all going to fit perfectly. I mean there are going to be bumps, that’s how we are as humans. It’s not perfect, but in that process, you learn, right? Everybody learns and constantly recalibrates and figures out, what can we do to make this situation better?

Laura Thomson: That’s great.

Miriam Aguirre: I feel like this is one of those things that if you start out with a non diverse team it gets harder, and harder to fix that problem. But if you start with a very diverse team it lends itself very well to continuing to promote diversity; from the hiring decisions, the recruiting, how it’s done, how we present ourselves. But very hard to fix later on. You can start by doing the right thing, and things will be kind of steady state and not that hard to fix later on, or you can be in a situation where you’re like a Google or a company like that, where you just have a ton of work to do there. I think for us, because we’re in this situation where what we’re trying to do is to continue to promote that. We’re more open to different backgrounds, we’ve got objective testing that can help us suss out whether or not you’ve got the technical skills to succeed here and we don’t really look at that CS degree as a bar that that’s the first barrier to entry.

We feel good about processes downstream being able to inform us whether or not we think the person is going to be successful on the team. Then once they do join the team we make it part of multiple peoples goals to have that person succeed here at the company; so it isn’t just that individual out there floating by themselves. Multiple people are responsible for the success of that person; and they know it and everyone is aware of, okay you’re this person’s tech lead, you’re this person’s mentor, you’re this person’s … All of those pieces of the onboarding that we try to ensure that once they’ve joined the organization they’re going to have the support framework to succeed here. That really helps us, all of us, be invested in the success of any one individual; just at the end of the day just fixing hiring isn’t going to fix the other problems.

Laura Thomson: I want to pick up on one thing you said that I absolutely agree with you that it’s so much easier to have an inclusive environment if you do that from day one, right? To use a terrible engineering analogy you don’t build the product and then try to tack on security with duct tape, because you’re doomed to failure. It’s so much easier to start from a diverse, inclusive place and just build on that. I suppose it can be done, but it’s always going to be an uphill battle. For us, I really want people to be able to bring their whole selves to work. A couple of things I try to do to help with that are to talk about like, this is a really really basic example, you know if I am sick, or I’m taking time off because I need to do a parenting thing or whatever, I tell people about that. I know some people might feel like they have to hide that they have to take time off work because they have children or whatever. They can feel embarrassed, like oh I’m a mom and therefore I’m unreliable, blah, blah, blah. I always say, I’ve got to take off early today because of this child-related thing, because I want other people to be able to be free to do that. I talk about it because it’s a way of sort of making it clear that that’s okay. Using the privileged position that I have to establish that that’s a good baseline.

There’s just more basic things, like making sure quieter people get heard in meetings and not having every team building be about drinking beer and riding ATVs, and all sorts of … There’s lots of really basic everyday things. I’ve learned a heck of a lot from our head of D&I Larissa Shapiro was on this call and she’s awesome — so can’t say enough good things about her, how lucky we are to have her working with us. I am going to jump to the audience questions. Top of the list is, how do you find mid to senior career mentors? I feel like every time I look at a mentoring group they only want me to be a mentor, which I’m happy to do, but I want both.

Rija Javed: The approach that I’ve taken is just kind of really seek out, and to be honest, kind of like grab the opportunities and just go and ask the people myself. I try to … I like my prior opportunity just because I think it truly attracted top talent from various … Not just within engineering, but seeing the people that I respect, who have delivered and are able to inspire people. Not just given the past work, and what it says on their CV, and on LinkedIn, but the value that they’re delivering right now and you’re able to see. Then just kind of literally go and seek out those relationships. Be like, hey would you mind going on a coffee, or whatever. What I’ve actually found is people are more than happy to provide that mentorship and that advice to you. I’ve had the reverse happen to me as well too, but I’ve seen that people have been shy about it, so I’ve literally kind of taken them out and then once you’re there, then a whole bunch of both hypothetical and actual, real practical life questions come out that they just want your advice and feedback on.

Laura Thomson: That’s great. Anyone else on that?

Vidya Setlur: I would add that at least a couple ways one could possibly find these mentors is, what I found helpful is finding a mentor that would sustain a long term relationship. When I started as fresh out of grad school I had a mentor and both of us have sort of grown professionally over time. There’s still an interesting relationship in terms of the types of experiences that person can relate back to me, as well as growing in my professional career and exchanging notes. That relationship has changed over time, but it’s sustained because the underlying theme is trust and context. I don’t have to give my whole dump of where I am every single time, because it’s sustained. I would say those type of mentors can be rare, because we move, and switch companies, or people get busy, so things happen that way.

Another piece that I have found useful is, especially for people like us in senior levels, we probably have changed companies a few times, or changed management lines a few times. I have found, personally, that some of the best mentors that I’ve come across have been people who were my managers in the past, maybe at a different company, or in a different line, who I have respected, trusted, but because they are not my manager anymore there is a different type of relationship where they can be more mentors. Mentoring as opposed to managing. There’s a lovely reflection there that happens. Kind of seeking out into your network and finding those [inaudible 00:47:28] examples of people that you’ve worked closely with, or that managed you, whether that be directly or indirectly, and seeing if they can help mentor you in your next path, or next endeavor.

Miriam Aguirre: I would reach out to executives, especially if you want to meet someone at that executive level. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a person in your company’s executive team, but they will probably know other executives and can maybe recommend someone. If you’re specific enough about what you’re looking for, what problems you’re looking to solve, or what kind of mentorship you need, I feel like reaching out to your execs, or having them reach out to their board is not out of line for this kind of mentorship. A lot of people are very interested in sharing that women in tech stay in tech. I think that expanding your search and having other people who are already in those positions help you with that search can also be beneficial.

Laura Thomson: That’s great. Okay. I don’t I have much to add, so we’ll go to the next question. If know you’ve undervalued yourself in terms of salary how do you approach your manager to correct it so you’re paid fairly on par with your peers?

Rija Javed: I think the way to look at it is more objectively. I think companies, especially startups, kind of go through various different phases of that, but hopefully there’s some sort of engineering, or within whichever function, some levels associated it. Which is like, hey this is the roles and responsibilities that come with it, and that there’s advance associated with that level in terms of the compensation and various different rewards that go with it. I think having a very open and honest conversation in terms of the value that you are delivering; both objectively in terms of what you’ve delivered in the past, and making sure that you are prescribing and delivering on that particular metric, and hopefully by going through that feedback assessment, or whatever feedback loop that you have, your peers both within engineering and depending on the level that you’re in you’re probably working cross-functionally with folks as well too that can kind of really attest to that in a way.

The worst way you could potentially go about it is the compare and contrast approach, which as human beings, however much you try both preach and try to do, it’s just really hard to get out of. It’s like, oh hey I’m doing this, but this other person is doing that, and I think that’s how much their level, or title, or what they’re actually being paid is. I’ve seen both, me myself potentially being in that situation, or somebody having that conversation with me. Compare and contrast is usually, I think, the bad way to go about it. You want to look at it more objectively in the value that you yourself are bringing.

Laura Thomson: That’s great. One thing I would recommend is go with data. If you can collect any data points, and also it’s really good to rehearse any kind of those awkward conversations where you’re asking for more money, or you’re asking for a promotion. Rehearse it, practice it on a friend, a coworker, a spouse, whatever, so that when you actually go to have the awkward conversation with your boss … Because none of us like to talk about these things, it’s uncomfortable, but it’s like giving a talk; if you’ve done it before it will be easier.

Miriam Aguirre: Yeah, actually I feel like if your friend is up for it, they would really do you a favor by saying no and then that way you get that shock out of your system and you don’t freeze, because that is a potential outcome of this conversation. If you can practice that no with a friend, have your points, and your follow ups ready to go I think that will go much smoother when negotiating in person. I definitely agree with that practice the negotiation in advance.

Vidya Setlur: Yeah, just adding to that. Getting a friend who can play devil’s advocate is good.

Laura Thomson: Yeah, and never work for somebody like that. But yeah, absolutely. I think it’s really important. One of the things that I have done, more on the asking for a promotion than asking for a salary, is to say, what’s the gap? If you’ve said no, what do I have to change? What are the things that you need to see from me in order for me to get this and will you help me work on those things? Make them invested in your success, because it’s their success too.

Rija Javed: Yeah.

Laura Thomson: The next two-

Vidya Setlur: We complete goals, right? What is the delta? This is what you’re expecting of a promotion and just articulating the action of the item. That’s also useful as being a manager of individuals on a team. When you give them feedback and helping them identify learning opportunities, coming up with concrete actions that [inaudible 00:52:09]. Obviously to have data, have points of view that are more concrete.

Laura Thomson: That’s great. Okay, the next two questions are related. I’m going to read them both and then people can tackle whichever part of them they want. The next one is I’d love to get more details on the managing up questions from the panel. The second one is, leadership has two roles, managing those in the organization, but also managing and leading up. As leaders in tech, what advice can you offer for influencing company values to be more inclusive towards diversity, and other values that are meaningful to employees who aren’t white men, especially when there might be resistance to that.

Rija Javed: In terms of just managing up, one of the philosophies that has been one of my go to things and that I actually tell people within my team to do as well too, is over communicate versus less. If you think this information might be useful, even if you don’t think it is. I have literally kind of like — we used to use HipChat as opposed to Slack — but like literally spent selling spam messages almost, I like to call them, just because you don’t know what their filter might be and you always want the information to be going up as opposed to, like I had this one odd case. I was on vacation and got a text later on at night because of it, where the information because of the cross functional group went all the way up, down, and then… It was just this weird thing where you always want it to be going up. And to one of Vidya’s points much earlier, which was in terms of what your leadership skills are, I think both over communicating versus less, because people as you start to go higher up, they tend to lose context.

Maybe this is a bad example given the current tech world that we are in, but people love information, right? That is power. As leaders, you also want to be leading from the front. Having that social capital, and that social equity of the people that you are actually leading, because you are actually able to deliver, or have delivered in the past as well, and you know what you’re talking about. Then that’s also going to speak volumes at the higher up levels, because you have that social capital to back you, as opposed to just this potential — as organizations sometimes scale there’s this different perception; the upwards and the downward perception, and you want to keep that consistent. If you’re able to deliver, then the team itself is going to be kind of speaking for you, and the higher ups are going to believe more of what you say versus like no this is more of a middle manager, and maybe the team is feeling differently.

Vidya Setlur: I think for me there is a certain craft in terms of … kind of going back the point that communication is really important. I think there is a certain craft that comes with communication depending on whom you’re talking to, whether it’s managing up or down. For instance, there needs to be a way for me to articulate what our team is doing, or what it’s focusing on, and the customer value in a way that folks above me can either understand, or be active, but given communication that comes from upstream, downstream, or the way I need to communicate it with my team, you have to be more nuanced, or filtered, or updated based on how people are going to perceive that communication. I think getting more skills in terms of how one crafts communication, and the nuances of that based on who the target audience is, is definitely something that helps someone grow as a leader.

Laura Thomson: We are getting low on time. I think we can try to do these next two questions, because they’re both, I think, really quick to answer, then we’ll wrap up.

The next question is how many of you are still coding on a regular basis while being managers. I’m going to go first, which is I don’t code at work. I don’t code for work because it’s not my main job and I would just be blocking somebody else from getting something done. When I code these days it is like on a side project — on a plane is a great time to be writing code, I spend a lot of time on planes, that’s awesome — but yeah, I don’t want to be on the critical part for anything, because that’s a huge mistake in my mind. Anyone else?

Miriam Aguirre: Same for me. I don’t actually code anymore. I do on occasion peek into pull requests, and drop in some comments, but no, they don’t let me check into the repos anymore.

Rija Javed: Yeah, I’m on a similar path as well, too.

Vidya Setlur: I actually actively code.

Laura Thomson: Yeah, that’s fine.

Vidya Setlur: I review code, I write code, I look at the engineers. Yeah, I figure out which projects I work on… For me, being technically hands on is important.

Laura Thomson: Yeah, for me I think the crossover point is somewhere between being a line manager, and a manager of managers. About when you become a manager of managers it stops being a good idea. Anyway. One other question, I noticed all of you went to grad school, do you feel it made it easier for you to become a director or VP, or that it’s necessary to become one. I’ll start by pointing out I dropped out of grad school as is quite traditional in this industry. You don’t need it.

Miriam Aguirre: I didn’t go. Yeah, I didn’t go to grad school.

Rija Javed: I didn’t find it useful.

Vidya Setlur: I found it useful, especially with something as specialized as NLP. I’m kind of the black sheep.

Laura Thomson: Yeah. I think there are exceptions to that. If you want to be in research, if you want to be in data science, it doesn’t hurt. I’m sure there’s other things where it’s obvious, but it’s never going to stop you from getting a job, I think, at the end of the day, not at this point in our industry anyway. Okay, any last words? Anyone have anything else that they want to add that I should’ve asked? We have one minute.

Vidya Setlur: I should just say the questions that were coming in, I’ve been watching them, I’ve been really awesome.

Laura Thomson: They were great questions, yeah.

Vidya Setlur: Thanks very much and I hope the audience found this useful.

Laura Thomson: Thank you all for coming today. I had a lot of fun. I hope you did too. Thanks.

Miriam Aguirre: Thank you.

Rija Javed: Yeah. Bye.

Posted on

“The Hardest Job I’ve Ever Loved“: Julie Meloni on Building Solutions with the US Digital Service (Video + Transcript)

Speakers:
Julie Meloni / Engineer / United States Digital Service
Gretchen DeKnikker / COO / Girl Geek X

Transcript:

Gretchen DeKnikker: I’m super excited to introduce Julie Meloni. She works with US Digital Service, yes, the government. She is going to tell you about the hardest job she has ever loved, working with USDS. Welcome, Julie.

Julie Meloni: Thank you so much. I hope you can all hear me. I am really excited to be here. I love talking about USDS. Every time I do, I am confused because I never thought I’d work in the government, who would love working in the government, certainly not me. But it’s the hardest job I’ve ever loved, and it’s hard for a lot of reasons that don’t have anything to do with technology. It has everything to do with people.

The technology is the easy part. Complex systems are hard. I’m going to talk a little bit about the types of work that we do, who we do it for, and how we do it. The funny thing is — spoiler alert — the things that we do and the way that we’re successful isn’t really unique to USDS.

You can all do it in your own organizations. While I would love for you all to come work at USDS and do it, as a takeaway, I’d like you to think about how you too can use all of your knowledge and expertise and your entire whole selves and bring it to your own work because sometimes it’s all we have.

If you’re looking behind me, this is the fancy digs we have here at Jackson Place for the US Digital Service. I am indeed in a basement. I am in the fancy room in the basement. That just gives a little bit the sense of just how we work. Scrappy is how we work at the US Digital Service. What are we? We’re about three and a half years old. That means that we were started in the Obama Administration. We’re still here in the current administration.

We’re a bunch of very passionate nerds, who use designing technology to help the government deliver better services to the public.

Very specifically, we don’t say the American people because we also serve people who want to become American citizens, and we still do that work today. We’ll talk a little bit about that as well.

What are our objectives at the US Digital Service? One is to transform critical public-facing services. That means anytime that a citizen, or a person wanting to become a citizen, interfaces with the government, it’s probably digital or should be digital. Those are two very different things. If it is digital, we try to transform those services into circa 2010 technology would be really awesome. 2017, 2018 technology is an amazing achievement and sometimes we get good partners in agencies who are amenable to that. That is amazing. But really, we’re trying to bring interfaces from the ’80s, ’90s, and sometimes the ’70s into the 2000s, 2010s. That is hard. It’s hard for a lot of reasons, and we’ll talk through that in a little bit.

We also want to help agencies figure out how to buy better services. That means really digging into what people are trying to do because they’re usually trying to do the right thing and helping them weed through bad contracts, bad requirements, bad everything, and trying to get them to a better place where they can buy better services that are maybe modern and don’t lock them in, maybe, sometimes uses open source, and maybe, sometimes uses new things like agile. We help them buy better services and save money, and that’s a big deal. If we can keep someone from spending $500 million on something that should have been $5 million, we’re going to take that win for us and for you any day of the week.

Another thing that we do is making sure that we’re expanding the use of common platform services and tools, and that could be tools that we help build such as login.gov, which is a joint effort between the US Digital Service and our partners in the technology transformation organization, 18F. That is meant to be a government single sign-on solution at a very high level of authentication.

We would love to be able to roll that out across agencies. Wouldn’t it be nice to sign in to do your taxes with the same user information that you used to fill out your FAFSA at the Department of Education?

What path can that bring? Even if it’s not a specific tool that we build, it might be a common platform. It might be the use of the Cloud. It might be the use of, I don’t know, some sort of, any sort of continuous integration and build system. It could be a lot of things.

We try to make sure that what we use can be used in other places as well because, if we don’t, we’re just as bad as the contractors who lock agencies into one thing.

Finally, we want to bring hot technical talent into public service, and that’s all of you and your friends who are probably too busy working to be here today, get them too. If you are super experienced, especially in complex organizations, if you have a very high EQ, and if you want to give back in some way, *especially if you never thought you would work in government*.

Take a look at US Digital Service or 18F and see what might fit for you.Not knowing all 2,000 of you or whatever it is watching this today, I can guarantee that we need all of you. I’d be happy for five. We need the help.

Who are we helping? That’s the fun part, right? We help as many people as we possibly can and this is why it gets hard because we can’t help everyone. We have an agency team at the Department of Homeland Security.

We work to create tools that help asylum officers adjudicate their cases quicker, which means they can help more refugees come into the country, more asylees come into the country.

We are trying desperately to make the immigration form process better. Generally, in all the situations that I explained, what we really do is we try to unfuck the government that is really fucked, from a technology perspective.

We have a team at DHS working hard for immigrants and refugees and working a little bit now with FEMA to try to make the grant system not suck quite as much as it does especially for people who have just lost everything in fires and floods. They shouldn’t have to go through as much paper as they do.

We also help veterans. This is one of our favorite stories because there is so much that we owe to our veterans and so little that we do well for them from a technology perspective. There are 598 distinct websites where veterans go to get information about how to get the services they’ve already earned like healthcare and education — 598 different websites is like 597 too many.

We have been working with the VA to make all these websites at least flow through one kind of interface like a portal, very cutting edge portal technology at vets.gov, and trying to make the paper forms not paper anymore, so incrementally taking bad things and making them better in terms of interfaces. You’ll notice a common theme as we go through here.

Military service members — We work for them. One of our teams at the Pentagon, the Defense Digital Service, they’re working on a better platform that helps active duty service members and their families move. The moving process which hundreds of thousands of families do every year, all at the same time, is a very antiquated computer system that usually goes down and results in people not being able to move and so we’re making a better one because that sort of cognitive load. You don’t want to think about how you’re going to move your family from one end of the country to the other while you’re sitting in Afghanistan getting shot at. That’s the last thing that you should be thinking of, so we try to make sure that you don’t have to think of that.

We also help students — In 2015, USDS and 18F worked together to create the new version of the college scorecard which focused on actually listening to students and their families, really figuring out what it is that they wanted to see, and then making that so.

Medicare/Medicaid recipients — We work with the team at Health and Human Services at the centers for Medicaid and Medicare services and we’re working on opening data basically providing APIs for third parties to access Medicare clean data so that doctors and other third parties can work with that data and present it to patients in a better way, make sure that they’re sort of looking at their trends and how can that help provide better service for seniors and anyone, actually.

Farmers — this is my personal favorite. There is a process that we went and discovered. We do discovery sprints here at USDS. We get a bunch of people together like four, five, and we go out for a couple weeks and we learn everything we can about a topic. We interview people, we ask the question, “You know if you had a magic wand, what would you change?” Then, we come up with a report that says, “Here are some things that we think we should change,” and then, if we’re lucky, we get to work on enacting better legislation or even building a better technology system.

With farmers, we found that farmers have a really hard time getting guest workers to pick the crops. This is a food security issue for all of us. If you can’t pick the crops, the crops die, and then you have to plow them under and we have no food. Farmers often have to single handedly manage hundreds of pounds of paper in order to get their guest workers into the country because there’s nobody domestically that wants to do the work. There are five different government agencies that they have to work through to get the workers. Farmers need to farm and not do paperwork for five different agencies, so trying to help people figure out how maybe not make that what farmers have to do. Also, that’s a lot of paper.

Finally, small business owners — I say finally only because that’s the last icon on the screen, not because that’s the end of the people that we help or that we are working for. We have worked with the Small Business Administration to make the application process for certification smoother, much easier, less burdensome, also for the analysts inside the SBA who are adjudicating cases.

Again, we’re using paper and working through nice, clean, modern technology with a UI that makes sense to just to do their job so that small business owners can do their jobs and their families can survive. That’s a lot of stuff right through there. One of the reasons that I worked really hard there to do that quickly was because if I pause, I cry because this is really hard work. There is literally nobody that we could walk past in the street who isn’t served by some of the work that we’re trying to help our agency partners do. That can be really emotional, and that is hard to do sometimes.

Actually, the number one reason that we choose projects, is this project the one that has got the greatest impact for the greatest number of people? If it doesn’t, then we have to prioritize it a little lower. Is the likelihood of success high? If so, awesome, so far so good. Can we scale it across government?

If it’s some really great project that has a high likelihood of success, in time, and we can take something from it and teach others across the government or implement technology somewhere else, even better. That’s when we will choose that project to do. That was a lot.

How do we do it? This is where the takeaways come in for you guys because the values that guide our work, you can use these in your jobs too because they’re very simple and they’re not prescriptive. Hire and empower great people. It’s as easy as that, right? Super easy. No. It’s very hard. Our talent team works tremendously hard to recruit and find the right type of people. Type doesn’t mean the most super senior person in the world. It doesn’t tend to be senior, but it also means someone with a really, amazing upside and high EQ and a high ability to get shit done in a mission driven and complex environment.

If we hire you, you are automatically empowered to go do whatever needs to get done and we’re going to do our level best to support you in that process. Find the truth and tell the truth, this is my favorite value.

We don’t pull any punches. If something is messed up in the government, we will tell the cabinet secretary in charge of it that your thing is messed up. We’ll probably use fancier words and be a lot more technically detailed than that, but generally, we need to find the truth and tell the truth because we don’t have time not to.

Similarly, optimize for results, not optics. We don’t have shareholders except for everybody that pays taxes. We don’t even make fancy presentations to the Board of Directors or whatever. We just need to show our results. If we’re showing results, that is the biggest optic that could possibly be. Let the results speak for themselves.

The minute we do something because someone on the Hill wants us to, it would look good, whatever the case may be, the President thinks it’s cool, then we’ve lost our reason to be here. We are here for results, whatever that means. Sometimes the results are not good ones, sometimes we fail. We learn from them and move on. Sometimes, we succeed, and sometimes, we learn about a lot more stuff that needs fixing.

Sometimes, we have to go where the work is because sometimes that stuff that needs fixing is in Afghanistan and sometimes it’s in Southern Illinois and sometimes it’s in Lord knows where. Especially when we work with military families, those military families are stationed at bases in remote places. The people that are doing the work supporting our deployed troops are in Afghanistan or other remote areas. We have to go there to work with them to figure out what it is we’re designing because we’re designing it for them and we’re not going to make it up just because it’s scary to go to Afghanistan.

We do everything with passion. “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” so says Ralph Waldo Emerson and so say we all. If we’re not making momentum in our projects, if we’re not helping our agency partners move forward, we’re not doing a good job.

Finally, designing with users and not for them. Users are at the core of everything that we do. We have to work with them and not make things up. The minute we stop designing for our users, just like the minute you stop designing for your users, the minute you’ve lost the reason for making your product. All of that having been said, join us, please. Any questions, I’m happy to take them here offline, online, on the Internets, wherever you want… I’m here for you.

Gretchen: Great, Julie. People are so inspired and a lot of thank you’s for doing this work and an empathy for how hard it is. Most of the questions that we got, we just have a few minutes, so I want to kind of paraphrase.

Julie: Sorry, I went long, my fault.

Gretchen: No. Just listening to you is so awesome. If you click this, thanks to our sponsors, you can learn more about jobs at US Digital Service. On that page, you’ll find a list of the types of roles that they’re looking for.

I did want to ask you, Julie, there was a question around, “What special skills? Are there part time things available?” Maybe if we could do that one.

Julie: Sure. We’ll do part time, first. The answer is “No.” Also, we don’t even do remote because it is very difficult to work on the ground with users who are in DC when you’re not in DC. If you really want to work in a modern digital services type of environment and give back to the government and you cannot move, do look into our friends at 18F. They allow remote work.

In terms of skills, if you’re an Engineer of any flavor, please join us. If you’re a Backend Engineer, a Security Engineer, an SRE, a Front End Engineer, we work a lot with React, join us. If you are a Product Manager with technical chops, you’ve led and deployed technical products with a team, join us. If you are a UX Designer or Researcher of any flavor of UX because UX contains multitudes, join us. That should cover all of you.

Gretchen: [laughs] You probably inspired a lot of people to think about this in a way that they never would have. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Julie: Sure. Also, remember, you can do all those things in your own company. You don’t just have to join USDS, but again, we’d love for that.

Gretchen: They’ll all want to come and work with you [laughs] .

Julie: You could all come work with us. There’s only 175 of us. Like 175 is not enough to do all the work that we have to do.