So, without much to do, I'm going to give you Liz. Hey, everyone. I hope you're enjoying Scale so far. It's good to see you all here. I see a few familiar faces. Thanks for coming out and showing support. How many of you guys have heard of our Meetup Group before? Learn Teach Code. A few of us. Okay, cool. For those of you who haven't, I gave a talk about this at the San Gabriel Valley Linux users group. So, I'm repeating the talk again this year for Scale. This time speaking at Scale or speaking at a real tech conference. So, I'm really excited to be here. Since we're a small enough group, I figure I will try to do it maybe a bit shorter and we'll have more time for a group discussion at the end. That might be more interesting, I think. So, without further ado, I usually start by saying, just being honest for a minute, even if maybe it's a little bit too honest, that I am definitely a little nervous right now and I always am anytime I do public speaking. And I'm always nervous about anything related to meeting new people or doing events, all of that kind of stuff. And I guess you could just wrap that all up and call it social anxiety. I've experienced it my whole life to varying degrees of intense, from very intense to mild, but it's kind of just part of who I am at this point and I'm always working either with it or against it. Anyway, here I am and I just like to point out that I always feel like a bit of an imposter whenever I'm in a group setting. So, it's a little odd that I'm here giving a talk about building a community. I definitely relate more to this guy, Groucho Marx, than most other quotes about community builders and leadership and so on. I feel or like I just don't fit in to most groups that I've been to. But I guess I've finally found an exception with my own. So, that's really what this story is about. It's mostly a personal story, but I'm also going to intersperse it with some stuff that I've learned from some books I read about building communities just to try to build a context for myself. So, this is kind of, this is me as a kid. I still am definitely an introvert. I was always kind of a loner, I guess. And people ask me, like, well, what do you mean by that? Like, how much of a loner? Like, did you have friends? I guess, I mean, I had friends. I'm like fairly functional social human being like most people. But in college, I didn't really make any friends.  And I feel like that's probably the easiest way to sum up the level that it affected my life. I just never went to parties or anything like that. I've just stayed at home. And I'm actually not even a cat person. So, stay at home, visit my family, my dogs, not cats. So, yes, that's me, introverts. Yes, James is the one who sent me this photo. So, thank you, James. This has stayed with me ever since I found it. That kind of sums it up perfectly. So, people ask me, how did you build such a large community? Learn Teach Code is approaching about 5,000 members now which puts us at one of, I don't think we're the largest yet but one of the largest tech meetups in Los Angeles and certainly the largest educational meetup. I'm in the most active. We have several meetups happening every week. A few different study groups and different parts of LA. And now we also have a chapter in Seoul, South Korea that my friend, Beach, started after he left LA. So, he took the meetup with him and started it there as well. They have about 600 members now too as of last September. So, we've grown a lot. And people ask me, how did you do that? Like, what's the secret? And I usually just say luck because honestly, most days I'm not entirely sure if all of the work that I put into it is causing the results or if it's just black luck. And I have no way of knowing, of course, because all I have is anecdotal evidence here. But what I can offer at least is what did I learn by doing the hard work that I have done and how maybe at least part of that work created part of the luck. So, it's never 100% your effort or luck, right? It's just a little bit of both. So, I guess if there's one piece of advice that I want you all to remember from my talk today and just one thing that I feel like needs to be said more often and that I at least always need to remind myself of more often is to just start whatever it is that you're hoping to do, whether it is building a community or stepping up to be more involved with an existing community or any other project that you have, anything that scares you, you have to just start at some point. You're never going to be completely ready. And even after you start, I find myself needing to remember this every single day. It helped me when I gave this talk last year at, with Lance here now, at S-G-V-L-U-G, check out their meetup. They also have a booth at scale, a really awesome group. It helped me when I talked about it that time and I'm hoping it'll help me again this time because this is something that I'm always forgetting to do. Whenever I run up against something I get stuck on or anxiety returns again, as it often does for me, I forget that, well, I have to just start the next thing. Just keep going. And even no matter how much you feel like you have no clue what you're doing or you feel like an imposter, right, like I often do through the groucho marks of communities, at some point you still just have to start and you figure it out as you go. So that's definitely, if I were to sum up what's happened with the meetup group and the community that I've started and my experience in helping other communities like the scale community and others around Los Angeles, that's what I have to share, more than anything else. But I also wanted to talk a bit more about communities in general. Like, pardon me here, I have a weird dual-screen setup so I'm looking back and forth. If there's a cause it's just because I'm trying to find my cursor. So how do communities create value for people? A quick show of Hansen and me. How many of you all work in technology? Everybody, okay, that's what I figured. Cool, yeah, most of the conferences and events I've been going to have been the same thing. They're tech conferences, right? So people at tech conferences talk about creating value for our companies and for our community here. But it's usually through the lens of what can we build together and how can we encourage other people to be a part of that, how can we make things more efficient. Most of the value that we as individuals bring to our communities and to our companies is because of our experience, our expertise. We have expert level knowledge of how to build systems or how to use technologies to their full potential. And that is the value that we bring because of what we know and what we can do. It's kind of backwards, I feel like, when you're looking at a community. The value from a community does not come from some kind of knowledge or expertise that's embodied in it. It comes just from the connections that exist between the people who have the expertise or know where to find the expertise. So you end up with something looking more like this, just this mess of connections, right? That is what the value looks like for a community. It's pretty easy to find, say, a book written by an expert or find an answer, you know, just on Stack Overflow. The information is out there. So that's separate from the community itself. But the community of scale or of Stack Overflow or the developer community globally in general, the community part is when you don't know how to find that next resource or even know what question to ask, you go to the community to help you find that next step and find the person who does know. So that's that value. So as a community builder, your job is to make this sort of thing happen, create connections between people. So it is actually much less important, it turns out, to be an expert in order to be a good community builder. And I think that's the only reason I've had any luck doing it because when I started my meetup, I was talking about technology. I was just starting to learn how to write some JavaScript code and the very first meetups that I did, I had no knowledge to share with anybody. I was the one asking questions. I was the one saying, I don't know anything. Can you help me too? Can we help each other? And just by knowing each other and finding out who else we know and expanding our network, maybe we can get access to knowledge more easily and motivate ourselves to keep looking for it. So me being a complete new, but that was how I created value for my community. Cool. So community, yay.  We have a community. I did want to actually talk a little bit about some of the research behind value in community because obviously anyone can just say that, oh, this is the value in a community. It's connections and people knowing each other and, you know, whatever. There is more to it than that. There is a more tangible value to communities. They give it a name usually in sociology and psychology research. They call it social capital. And I think it's a very dry term for the kumbaya feeling. But when we're studying it, this is the term that you usually come up with. We talk about the value of connections between individuals as social capital.  I highly recommend taking a look through it. It's an old book but still quite relevant and it sums up a lot of interesting sociology research. This definitely stood out to me that the most common finding across all of this research is just the fact that social connections predict happiness more than anything else. More than your health, more than your career, more than, like, pretty much any other individual factor. It's just the level that you're connected to your community and to your family and friends. And more than that, it affects your health as well. So the health impact of having more community and more friendship in your life has been likened to the effect of quitting smoking. Like, it is that powerful. So making another friend or stopping smoking will, like, expand your lifespan in a similar way. And more generally, people who are, and of course this is subjective, like, how do you measure social connectedness or not, but generally speaking over quite a few studies, you can measure a pretty large factor of a difference between people who are more socially connected or more isolated. People who are more isolated are two to five times more likely to die of anything than people who are more socially connected in their lives. I was definitely in the people more likely to die camp because I had, like, no friends for a long time. And so starting my community was a big part of that for me, just to, one, just be happier as an individual person and then to realize just how valuable it is to be involved in my local communities because I really wasn't until then. Oops, let me get my cursor back, sorry. So just a couple quick testimonials from people from my group. There are quite a few more now. These are a couple of the first ones that I got which are the most meaningful to me personally because that was when I had no clue that anything I was doing was benefiting anybody, except maybe myself. But my friend Ronald's got his first internship because of our meetup which led to a job later on and he's gone a long way in the two years that I've known him. Same with a number of other friends, people I've run into at scale, have come up to me and mentioned, oh yeah, like I went to one of your first meetups and really did help push me to keep going with learning to code. That just has made everything, just made all the difference for me personally to keep going with it.  So before I started this meetup, like rewinding to, let's say, 2014 or so and the decade prior to that, this was pretty much my social network. I had a lot of online friends. You may or may not consider internet friends to be real friends. I'll leave that up to you to decide. It was very real to me, but I realized that there's still something missing. If you can't see them in person, it's just not quite the same. And you don't get as much of the health benefits to people you don't get to socialize with in person. So my social network was mostly a couple of coworkers who I was not really friendly with. We just didn't click all the time. We just didn't become really close friends. We got along fine, but I wouldn't consider like a real meaningful friendship for the most part. It was pretty much just my mom, dad and stepmom who were my friends, who were people I could talk to when I had a problem or I would call on the phone or hang out with regularly. And it took me quite a few years to realize that there's a problem with this network here. It wasn't until really 2014 my mom was diagnosed with kidney cancer that turned out to be terminal. That was the year for me when I realized that I needed friends. Because that was the first time I felt actually lonely. I had never really experienced that before. I didn't mind not having friends before that. Maybe I was just blissfully ignorant or just always wrapped up and working on my own projects, which were pretty much all solitary things, usually just me on my computer. I could keep myself busy just making stuff or learning new things. And I didn't need anyone else to do that with. But things changed a lot when I take my primary social network and then I just cut a third out of it. It just felt completely off after that. And made me realize that I had been accepting a very important area of my life for most of my life, or all of my adult life, at least. So how do you go from realizing this is your life as an adult when you are already out of college so you don't have that to make friends? You either already have a job and the job is not giving you a source of friends. So as an adult and you're single and living alone, what do you do then and how do you make friends at that point? Like, where do you go? So for me, I went back to the internet. This is where I go for everything. I might have a problem. Let's just Google it. Hey Google, how do I make friends? Okay, just tell me where should I go? How do I fix this? Oh, an in-person friend. So that's a specify that. And so the internet took me to meetup.com. And definitely I've become a little bit of an evangelist unofficially. I have no affiliation with meetup at all. But I've become a bit of a sand girl for meetup.com because I'm always telling people how much has changed my life just going to meetup because it's the only website that could point me in the direction of friendly people I could see in person and potentially become friends with. This was before I knew about communities like Scale and, you know, the SCVLEG which is on meetup. Actually, that's what I found you guys too. This is a screenshot of some of my calendar events for the month of August. The month right before, since August 2014, right before I started my meetup group, I made a project for myself to try to go to a new meetup every night for a month to get over my social anxiety. I figured I had done some Googling and some terms came up things like systematic desensitization where you have to force yourself to repeatedly expose yourself to the thing that scares you until you become gradually less scared of it and gradually increase the dosages. So I started small with meetups where I wouldn't necessarily have to talk to anyone. I would just sit in the corner and then I progressively moved up from there to try to go to smaller groups where I would be forced to talk. I went to some groups like there's a Spanish language group where I did not remember any Spanish so that actually helped because it took the pressure off. I didn't understand what anyone said so I just kind of sat there and listened. I went to some storytelling events, some hiking groups. I still go to several of these actually so two years later I'm still part of some of these communities. I went to a Bitcoin meetup before I knew what Bitcoin was. That was awkward. They didn't know what I was doing there but it was fun anyway, they were actually really friendly. They were more than happy to tell me all about it and I didn't understand most of it. This was a fun adventure. I didn't actually, you could see there, I didn't actually do every day of the month but I did most of them. It took me further beyond my comfort zone than I had done. I mean this was more socializing in this one month than I had done probably the four years prior combined so it was a big push for me, for myself. I get to this point where, sorry I need to update my slides here so I can see what I have on my screen. Here's a list of some of the names of the meetups that I attended. They were totally random. Just anything that was in driving distance, I just went. If it was happening after work that day, I just went. I didn't even question it. It became a habit. That's one of the most powerful things I think of just starting is once you can just start, if you manage to keep going it becomes a habit and then it's much easier to do it again. So the next time you stop and have to restart it'll just be a little bit easier each time. Even if it's still scary, which it was then and it still is for me now. Anyway, so you'll notice only a couple of these were tech meetups. How did, so to make the bridge between going to a bunch of random meetups to solve my socializing problem to how did I end up starting a tech meetup specifically that really embedded in this tech community in Los Angeles? I was always interested in technology, but I guess this is probably a pretty good description for me of why I never really got into it before. So I went to college for communication. I was at the journalism school here at USC, not all that far away. And I always liked programming. I had dabbled in it a couple of times as a kid and again in high school and again in college. But I always had these long gaps, like years in between where I did not write a single line of code because I would either get frustrated and lose interest or I realized later, I think it's because I just didn't have anyone to talk about it with, anyone to share it with. All of my friends in high school thought it was like nerdy, would make fun of me for that sort of thing. Like why would you want to be at home on your computer on a Friday night instead of going out and partying with the rest of us? That sort of thing. So more than that, I think it was just more of this feeling, this vibe that culturally we're still fighting against. This unspoken bias that math and science associated with male and arts and languages associated with female. However much truth there is to that or not, it's just this unconscious bias that most people have. A lot of studies have confirmed that. There's some really interesting ones if you look up like cognitive biases. And there were some great talks on that scale this year too. Anyway, to sum that up though, I just didn't feel like it was for me for whatever reason. I couldn't put my finger on it. If you were to ask me why I didn't pursue programming, I just felt like it wasn't the right fit. I think I just, I didn't give it enough consideration until more recently. So fast forward to more recently, I was working at the job I was in at the time with all of meetup experiment stuff and trying to get out of my covered zone the years that my mom passed away to this year of a lot of upheaval in my life. Everything felt like it was turned upside down. It also made me reconsider my career choices. And I realized I was not happy in my job. I was bored. I missed a lot of the things that I had gotten to do in college. And then I realized that a lot of those things that I loved so much were when I went out of my covered zone and took an engineering class or a computer science class. And I don't know why it didn't hit me earlier. So I realized maybe I should give that another try. Maybe I should do the whole learned to code thing. And at that time it was becoming very trendy, right? Especially the women in tech movement, lots of groups and conference scholarships and things popping up all over the place to get more women into tech. So it was in the back of my mind and it just reminded me of it. And so it turned out to be quite helpful. So then back to this whole thing, right? I find myself once again stuck and very scared of what the next step might be. So I had to just do this again. I figured if it worked for me with the social thing, if I could like just through practice get better at talking to people and not being so anxious all the time about it, maybe I could apply that same thing and just practice to my assumed lack of math and logic abilities, right? I just thought my brain is just not good at that stuff. But I figured well maybe I can just practice and get better at it, right? That turns out seems to be how most engineers did it as well. They just started practicing many years earlier than I started. But I guess fundamentally it's the same thing. You just have to work hard at it. And at some point you do have to just start. So I started a little late, but I finally got myself to start. So I was at this interesting crossroads where I wanted to do something one with the whole social project of my own. I got better at it, but I didn't know what to do next. And I figured well maybe the way to level up from here is start my own group. They're just going to other people's groups, right? Plus one leadership skill right there. I figured that would be a great way to scare myself. So I guess I should just do it. And then same thing for well what should the meetup be about? I had a few ideas or things more related to like my background in communication. Maybe a writer's group or maybe a social anxiety group. Which quick shout out to my friend James here for starting his own meetup group as well in Portland for people with social anxiety. I think that is so awesome. I ended up deciding to do my meetup about learning to code. Which was my other goal.  Get my foot in the door as a junior developer somewhere. Sometime down the line. So I just put those two goals together. It worked out quite nicely. And on January 31st, 2015 I started this group. At the time it was called Learn to Code LA. Now it's called Learn to Teach Code LA. Mostly the other part of the reason for doing it was because there was a 50% discount on meetups. So I'm like oh well I'm going to start saving money. I might as well do it now.  Like every tiny thing. Even if it's just calling up one friend on the phone and mentioning it to them and passing. And they say oh my god that's such a good idea. You should do it. All those little things add up to getting you to actually do the things you think of doing but don't normally do or afraid to start. So that was how it kind of snowballed for me in a very positive way. Alright so this is the beginning of a very interesting journey that I'm still in the middle of. It's been just about two years now since I started the group. But I kind of think of it in three main stages. The first being just making friends. This being the most important part I think of building a community. And for me the most personally fulfilling because I really needed friends anyway. The other two stages are more about where do you go from there. Connecting people with each other.  If you do a lot of hard work and you have some luck. But for this very first stage this is the fun part really. For me it's a scary part too if you have social anxiety. This is also quite difficult. But it can be both. It can be fun too. So this is one of the first meetups that happened in my living room. I just figured I'd invite people over. I would have a little pollock, bring food.  So we projected some code on the wall. We were talking about what everyone was working on. Asking questions. There were only a few of us. The very very first meetup that I did actually I think was just about three. Three of us total. And it was very awkward. It felt like a total disaster. I was definitely second guessing myself at that point. Because nobody knew what to talk about and I had no agenda.  It's just me and two strangers sitting in my living room. But I did it again. And I made myself promise that no matter how awkward it was, or how terrible the meetups were, or how awful I felt, like how scared I felt doing them, I promised myself to do it for at least, I think I said it like eight weeks. So I was doing this weekly. So say like two months. If I'm not getting anywhere by then, then okay, I give myself permission to give it up. But I have to at least try it for that long. And every single morning that I did it, I still had a panic attack. So these were happening on Saturday mornings at that point. So it just became a part of my weekly routine. Oh, it's Saturday. Time to have a panic attack and do a meetup again. And I just got used to the idea about, I'd say five or six weeks into it was when the panic attacks finally stopped. And I was able to, I was still quite nervous, but way less so. It was way easier to get up in the morning and I mean, I think by that point, we had moved it to a coffee shop. But either way, to get up, prepare for the meetup, get my laptop, get a little agenda or some questions or things to share with people, and go start it. So started from here, but it grew quite quickly from there. And people asked me, again, what was the recipe for success here for you? I mentioned luck, but I know that's not a satisfying answer. So aside from luck, and obviously hard work, I will say the main ingredient, at least for me, and I think for all communities, it's a little bit of desperation. You don't have to be in the same position I was literally desperate for friends, just desperately lonely. But if you can at least channel that feeling and the result of that feeling when you meet new people as part of your group, then imagine yourself, I don't know how many of you want to start a community of your own, or if you're just interested in finding out how to get more involved in your existing communities. Either way though, if you want to get more out of it and help grow a community, you need to go at it from this really eager sense of I want to really get to know each of you. I want to become your friend. I want to find out what motivated you to come to this meeting or to get involved in this group and how can we help each other. Just really the same process that you do when you make friends. And maybe at this point in your life, I don't know how many of you have a lot of friends or don't have a lot of friends or whether you want more friends or not. But think back to a time in your life when you really, really wanted to make friends. Maybe it was in high school or middle school or something. Sometime when you only had a couple friends and you met someone cool in the yard at recess or something and you just really, really hoped that they would like you and accept you into their group and you would do anything to convince them.  That kind of feeling is I think what makes building a new community successful is when you're really, really invested in the people who join your community to like you back and to find out what's your common ground and how can you help each other out. Second to that though, the other probably even more important piece is just being consistent with the group. So especially if this is an in person community you need to meet regularly. I guess on a larger scale like for the scale conference itself it still has a regularity to it it's every year. We get regular updates from the planning process to submitting talks of speakers to setting up for tickets and getting the word out to actually being here, getting a little break and then starting the whole process all over again, right? But there's still a regularity to it. It's consistent. It's something you can rely on. You know every year I'm going to see these people at scale most likely. So for any group whether your cycle is yearly or weekly or whatever you do need some consistency to it for people to have a chance to like come back and actually build up a relationship over time. So I continued with my little, little meetup. Tried really hard to make friends with all these people actually two of them in this picture from when my first meetups I'm still good friends with two years later. I'm amazed that they ever came back after how bad the first meetups were but I guess maybe we just had some kind of connection or realized we had some common goal and a reason to stay in touch. So we did. From there the group got a little bit bigger as I got more comfortable hosting events and getting a couple of my friends to host events with me or separately and we had things at bars where we had beer and brought our laptops we had things at offices different companies and hacker spaces. Some nicer offices too I think was that we worked and just week after week the group got not that much bigger like every individual meeting is still quite small to this day. I mean most of our meetings are still only like 10 or so people they're intended to be that way. You can only have a conversation with so many people at a time so we keep them small usually study groups and very casual. But I did try some more ambitious things too like workshops this was the very first workshop that I did we had I think about 40 people attend and we were really lucky to get an office to sponsor us. I of course had no clue what I was talking about so I'm like teaching JavaScript when I like just last night learned how to write a for loop and JavaScript for the first time but the point was not to be an expert and to tell people oh I'm an expert I'm just telling you how to do it right it was here's the thing that I learned and I'm going to share it with you and now let's find how we can all build off of this and learn the next thing together and answer to others questions I mean the best way to learn something is to teach it and one of the best ways to teach something is to teach it right after you learned it or as you're still learning it so you create this really nice positive feedback loop and this turned out to be really key for our community. One of the other important pieces I'd recommend while I find my cursor sorry there we go is to ask for help this is something I was never particularly good at either I guess like I had mentioned being kind of a loner I usually thought I could just figure things out on my own and I was just really stubborn that way I'm like I could just Google it I can just I don't need to ask someone hey can you tell me how this works I did not do that often enough and so when I came to building a community that was one of the biggest lessons for me was that if you ask people for help more often than not they actually do want to help you it's amazing people are actually nice it's amazing like I guess maybe I just didn't have much faith in humanity until I started interacting with humans more in person but it really does seem to work and of course offering to help too as long as you do both that right there is a great way to start building up relationships for a community just to show that you trust each other the next piece definitely important is to meet the other organizers I imagine that's why a lot of us come to events like scale is to meet people who run communities of their own and see how we're all doing it differently how we can learn from each other but aside from just sharing the knowledge the benefit that you get is I don't get access just to you as an individual and your knowledge but I get access to your entire network your entire community and you get access to mine and then we create this bridge between our two communities so that everyone else can potentially meet each other if they haven't already so that is pretty much stage two of building a community is just taking the people you already know like when you start a brand new group it might look something like this where you're at the center and you have a few new friends and they all know you but they don't know each other so the most important thing to do once you have that is to introduce them all to each other and create a more dense network there's a term that I really like that I wanted to bring up called generalized reciprocity it's this idea that very similar to the way that money is useful in a society so we don't have to trade one specific thing for one specific other thing at a specific point in time we can say okay I'll all exchange this for you for some more general construct that will be valuable for me later it's the same idea as that but for just social expectations for building up trust between people so the idea is I will help you out but I'm not expecting you to do anything for me in return not right now and maybe never I don't know but I'm like probably later it will come back around to me like the pay it forward mentality I really like that and so a society that has a lot of this generalized reciprocity is one more efficient also probably happier than a distrustful society just because we can exchange goods and resources more easily because we have this build-up of trust that is like our almost a currency in that sense I mean I know it's not a nice way to look at social relationships but that is a piece of it we do need some level of trust to be able to interact with each other and help each other so trustworthiness I like the way he describes it sort of this like social lubricant this idea of building up trust something that you can consciously seek out to do and something that really helps make a relationship or a community work you need a lot of that funny story the day that I found this book also was the same day at our meetup group we went bowling after our study group so I like had the book with me and like hey guys like look we're not doing this we're not bowling alone we're bowling with each other look how social we are this was a lot of fun actually speaking of social lubrication we usually do social things like this with like literally social lubricant beer and alcohol a little bit of that can help to developing these relationships so we start with a study group where it's just heads down we're looking at our laptops it's very social too but we're focused on doing work and then afterwards we go out and do something fun not all the time but we try to that helps a lot here's a couple more good photos of our meetup groups some workshops and then again more social stuff we had this streak of every time I did a workshop we would go out to dinner afterwards and have a big take over a big table somewhere cool so if you're lucky you've done a bunch of these social things you've had some fun you've made a lot of friends you've put a lot of time and effort into it if you're lucky then you end up with a large community at some point maybe it takes years in my case this was about a year one year into it we were already a large community and it was getting difficult to manage the scale of the whole thing this is definitely the challenge that I'm still struggling with right now with our meetup today is just how to manage it so sometimes our meetup just gets a little too big this is one of our larger ones where we just took over the entire coffee shop and there's a thin line between yay look how successful we are our group is so big and oh my god this is pure chaos I don't even know what's happening and I can't find a place to sit and work on my laptop this meetup is you know a waste of my time so we're trying to make sure we keep a good balance there at the more conceptual level too you know when you have a network like this like at a certain size it's great if everyone's connected to everyone but at some point it breaks right there's a quote that I really like this guy Clay Shurkey look him up he's written a lot of really good books and done some great talks on the topic of technological communities he says intimacy doesn't scale I think that sums it up pretty well one of the great benefits of a community is you get the opportunity to make new friendships and have some sort of intimacy in the conversations that you have but it just can't scale because of our human our human limits our human brains can only handle so many relationships this more general networking idea this is called Metcalf's law when you have just to say two people I mean this photo was with telephone networks but any kind of network two people one connection right five people ten connections right I think this is like ten people sixty-six connections and it just grows exponentially from there which on the one hand if those connections are the value of a community then that's great right more value yeah it's super valuable but on the other hand nobody can maintain that many social connections there is some what was it like we can only have the reason Facebook limited you to a certain number of friends like you can only manage somewhere between like a hundred or two fifty or something like that number of friendships and acquaintances ever at any one point in our lives there is a hard limit to this there's a really interesting paper about how we manage to still know each other like you know the term like oh what a small world like funny meeting you here or funny that we both know this same person how is it possible that that ever happens if the world looks like this there's like billions of humans imagine how dense and complicated that network would be well it turns out that that is impossible so the connections don't look like that this paper which is like very mathematical and over my head still for the most part but I would recommend looking it up Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz wrote it they're both really smart interesting people I'd say read their stuff too but they came up with this term small world network and they describe it as instead of having on the left here some very dense network that nobody can actually do in their heads we have these smaller networks but there's some key member of each side of the network that knows another key member and so we have these like many networks that have some bridge between each one and they call that a small world network and it turns out this naturally happens in most human communities so in my meetup group we try I guess that is another job of the community builder is to try to create something more like this right it's sort of like gardening we're like pruning those connections between people I'm saying okay like hey I know James like you're in Portland to have this other friend in Portland who runs this other meetup you guys should know each other right because you're two key members of two groups and maybe your groups don't know about each other yet that kind of thing so we have groups for like our JavaScript study group that I run myself downtown every Wednesday night right now we have a Python group that meets like every other Sunday and Miracle Mile area that my friend Aaron runs himself and I try to make sure that me and Aaron as the two hosts like keep in touch pretty well and I'm always checking in with all the other people on my leadership team which has grown to be I think 12 of us now so my job is now more and more becoming just checking in with all the other key members of our group and making sure that our networks are still exchanging information even though by necessity we've had to break apart into these separate little groups because we have almost 5,000 members now and Los Angeles is a sprawling city so just because of geography also many of us never get to meet in person so we're trying to manage that as best as we can so what's next for a meetup group I was actually hoping to add on more to these slides thinking okay well this is basically the talk that I gave a year ago and surely I must have learned a lot in an additional year of running this group I think it doubled in size in the second year as well so there's been a lot going on but actually it really hasn't changed that much it turns out that once you get to the point where you have to manage scale and you have a large group it does kind of plateau at a certain point for different communities maybe that plateau phase happens after you've been around for seven years with ours it seems it happened about one to two years and I don't know if it's going to grow much more beyond that because we are reaching our limits and I don't know how much more value we could possibly create from having more and more and more members we're still just doing mostly small study groups so turns out in this past year I really haven't learned that much more new stuff it turns out that the main story here and the reason that I'm just repeating my same talk that I gave a year ago is because most of the learning really did happen in the phase of starting the community and for me learning how to socialize now it's just more about it's fine and it turns out that from other people I've talked to from other organizers I'm going to imagine with large groups like Scale as well a lot of the work is more just maintaining those connections and when it's all volunteer run it's very difficult to have the resources to also grow it the way that a company would the way that start-up companies love to talk about like growth hacking right growth hacking is not something you talk about when you're running jobs already most of us anyway like I don't currently so that's why I've had the fortune of putting a lot of time into the meet-up group but at some point I will need to get a job and focus more on just paying my own bills and I will not have the energy to scale up this group more so it turns out it's a lot of maintenance once you get to that point but still very rewarding because I'm still always learning the whole reason we started and that's what we know to each other and to code stuff together and build projects and we're still doing tons of that and that is why I started it and that's why I keep doing it and I'm getting a ton out of that piece like I could go on and on and on for hours about what I've learned this past year about programming which has been a lot but I haven't actually learned that much more about community building it turns out maybe there's some other fourth stage of building a community that I haven't uncovered yet or I haven't gotten there yet I don't know I'm still learning like we're a baby we're a toddler so what's next for learn teach code and for me for community building I really don't know like your guess is as good as mine still this is exactly how I ended my talk last year and this is how I'm ending it again this year I never know what's gonna happen next it might be more the same last time I remember we had a discussion with a lot of people asked me like well have you had much luck finding more people for your leadership team back then the answer was no it's still just me and maybe one other friend for the most part running it and a couple of people who helped out once in a while now we do have a pretty solid leadership team of like 12 of us so I guess that piece has changed but it really is just more the same it's just more of the all the other the desperation I still need to bring that to the table every time I do a group and still be eager to get to know everybody the consistency still needs to happen with my group and all the other groups that we're doing in LA and in Seoul South Korea too it's just more of it now that's the only thing that's changed really for us and the thing that scares me as a meetup organizer is at any point the group could fizzle out and die it is like an organism an ecosystem a living entity like any other and for a group to be sustained you usually need a few key members who are really invested in it and willing to put in a lot of time like for scale I feel like this is one of those people for sure and for the San Gabriel Valley Linux users group like you need to if you're a part of one of those communities or any community and you know there's a couple people who are just always there or always around be sure to thank them because they're probably putting inordinate amount of their free time into keeping the group alive and if they were to be forced to step out for some reason the group may or may not survive that I've tried really hard to get our group to the point where someone else from our leadership team or several of them could share the workload and keep it going if I had to step out which I don't know I have no plans to but I might have to at some point maybe I get a job and have to move somewhere else and then I won't be able to do meetups in Los Angeles because I'll be wherever I am so if that happens my worry is well maybe the group will not survive maybe the other leadership members are not as invested in it as I have been and it just won't have the momentum to keep going without me that could still happen at any moment no matter how much we've had up until this point no matter how big the group grows say we reach 10,000 members next year whatever it is there's still that worry no matter how long your group has been around so it is like I guess like tending to a garden it's constant maintenance and it really is just a matter of if the group continues to provide enough value for the people running it and the people attending it then it will survive and then at some point I think there is a lifespan for most companies for most relationships between just two people like marriages even and between communities too there is a lifespan there I don't know what ours is so just keeping things realistic there but if you are part of a community that you love dearly that you get something out of make sure you take a moment if you can to put something back into it to keep it alive because you do need to do some work to keep them alive cool so that's that's it for me I want to see some questions and also I'd love to hear any stories you have to share too about your own experiences oh you got a mic perfect even better yeah maybe in the back there are two questions did you all hear that or should I repeat the question did the mic get I'll repeat the question okay it didn't sound like the mic got it maybe so the question was have I experienced in our group peaks and valleys and the growth really and oh and what could I attribute them to or those differences to I never really know for sure like there seems to be some natural you know peaks and valleys around things things like the holidays right like we get less people around the holidays great because it's in person people go away go home to visit their family that kind of thing online also like we have a slack channel and that as well there's an ebb and flow to how many people join or don't join in any given week I have had no luck in predicting it or understanding what factors cause any of it because I think there are just way too many factors and I think that that's a normal problem to have any time you're dealing with something very human right where humans are so complicated there's so many things that influence whether someone decides to join the group or not it in general I'd say the growth has been completely opposite of what I've expected for the most part I did not think anyone would join the group I did not think it would grow as it did if I were to make a guess I would have probably guessed we'd have maybe a thousand members by now instead of five thousand in two years in so I have no clue why I really don't I wish I could give you a better answer and I think Lan had a question my kid okay that's cool we want it so I came to this talk specifically because as a community organizer sometimes I get very discouraged and having you lay it out kind of with research not just purely anecdotal but pointing to actual research it really helps me to form an idea in my head a model in my head of how my group is doing and how I can make it better and how I can keep myself from being like if I step away it dies so I really appreciate that and my question for you is about your leadership team of 12 and you say that you check in with them are you doing it kind of like all 12 people meet up or are you the single person that's connecting all 12 12 members yeah Milan asked if am I the main person connecting our leadership team and how we go about staying in touch with each other and meeting regularly I'm still trying to figure that out too I feel like I have not done the best job of keeping us connected lately because I've been trying to figure out other things in my life and there have been periods of time over the last couple years for sure where maybe three months at a time even where I would be pretty hands off on the group and did not check in with anybody like sometimes I feel guilty about that but life happens so and it's been okay like nothing terrible happened because of that it's even better if you can give the rest of your team heads up like hey I have a lot going on right now I'm going to have to take a step back to the next or even I need to take a complete sabbatical because I'm getting burnt out and you guys need to pick up the slack for me for the next like give me a month of just decompressing and not doing the group and just doing my full-time job and my family and this and this and that's right that's totally a valid thing to do as well I've seen I also help out with other groups like Girl Develop It LA I'm one of the chapter leaders and they actually have a formal not totally formal task for taking a sabbatical like that from organizing for a while and that they encourage that for a lot of their chapters so and then on the a question of team meetings we're still trying to figure that out too because I did one one was I think I want to say like maybe October we tried to do a meeting where I invited everybody who was like ever helped out in any way with the meet up expecting a fraction of them to actually attend and then all of them would like 25 people and like you can't have a meeting that way it turned into a meet up and nobody could get anything done we only had enough time for everyone to say their name and do some themselves and ask one question and then our time was already up we got nothing done so it was a disaster it felt like a complete waste of time yeah we're scheduling another team meeting I think we're going to do it next weekend I'm hoping and I'm trying to keep it smaller and ready to keep it casual join get more involved but haven't met each other face to face yet that's a really big component of just does your team know each other ideally the people on your team friends you get along like do you know anything about each other's lives so you can support each other when things get hard and they need to take a step back but still know that we have each other's backs that sort of thing I feel like that's more important than having a formal agenda and meeting minutes and actually getting things done I'm totally okay with us not getting any of the things like I have a long to-do list for our group like we need a new logo we need to actually get our website working we need to we have a million ideas we have a mentorship program going right now a pilot program I'm trying to do more paid workshops with Girls Developed and now possibly with my group I don't know yet there's a lot of things on our plate but if we have to push all that back a few more months and just spend our meetings just knowing each other better I'm totally okay with that because the other stuff it'll happen when it happens the important thing is that we just that we're in sync with each other that's my two cents on it I don't know if that's right or not right because I'm not an expert I've just had a bit of early luck I've only been doing it a couple of years now if anything I feel like I defer to you and you know more than me you've been doing this for a lot longer and more involved in more communities well like I said luck right I don't know luck maybe I was more desperate I don't know or just more free time that might be all it is like I've had this much more free time into it thanks to being unemployed you know so there's that yeah there's that more questions yeah I kind of had a comment and a question yeah first of all thank you for giving this this talk again I missed it last year and this is my second year of independently learning about computer science so I actually don't work in tech so coming to something like this usually feels very overwhelming so thank you also I'm also involved in organizing in another realm I guess and I have a hard time right now with my group in reaching out and trying to find consistent people to take those leadership roles that we need because right now me and my brother are burnt out and we notice that when that happens because life comes into play and we're humans and we can only do so much and it's hard to ask people to be consistent when they're not running and running too I was wondering if you had any ways to reach out to people I mean I just ask and usually I get one or two people for like two weeks but that's two weeks of work which I appreciate but yeah first thank you yeah absolutely first I want to say hats off to you for coming to scale then I was very much and still I'm in the same boat not really working in tech like I do some freelance web development coming to scale last year for the first time I was also very overwhelmed because a lot of the technical talks especially all the DevOps stuff and the infosex stuff was crammed in my head right but you still get something out of it by being here right so that's in my experience too so about your question how to get other people to step up more to help be more more of a leader in your groups so you get to take a little bit of a break sometimes I wish I had like a magic solution but that's been very hard for me too I mean it's only been in the last let's say six months that I've had any luck getting anyone to join our leadership team really before that it was very informal like someone would help out with our group you know we for the most helping out means maybe hosting the meetup especially if I can't be there so I was asking but too if you're asking for things that are maybe too much try asking them to do a little bit less and see if you have luck with that like for our group mostly my ask would be can you host a two-hour meetup this one time while I'm not there that wasn't too much to ask for most people so I had a lot of yeses for that type of thing but anything beyond that like a recurring commitment could you host this once a month was pushing into asking too much of people and it definitely seems like you need to start small and see which of those people are willing to do the small things and want to stick around and want to get more involved and also find more ways that you can help them too right and like you do need to sell it it is kind of like a marketing pitch like well if you host this meetup like I have a friend who recently started this dotnet study group and it's every other week and it's hosted at this company Zephyr they've been really nice to sponsor us and it took a lot of I think it took like three months maybe I'll say two months two or three months between when we talked about her doing it and when she actually did it three months for her to just think about the idea and let it sink in and get used to it and get over her own fears that she wouldn't be a good host or she wouldn't know what to do she was really nervous about the idea even though she it was her idea even so it took three months for her to do it so I'd say be patient with people and with her I had to like constantly not constantly but we had several conversations where it was a reminder for her and for me both about why we're doing this even though it's difficult and a lot of work and scary sometimes that it will help it looks good on your resume it will help you with networking for just knowing more people in the community is always a plus to help you get a lead the next job that you might want to be searching for or all of those sorts of social benefits and practice building up your leadership skills all of that so you find out what their personal goals are and find a way to bridge those goals with your community's goals and how that will help them like if they have some next step in their career they're trying to get to better leadership skills are always going to help with any career goals like that's a pretty easy selling point I would focus on those and then starting small and then seeing once you have someone volunteering somewhat regularly helping with little things you start to ask for slightly bigger things and see how they react and if they react badly you're like no worries no pressure at all I just thought I'd ask only if you want to and then eventually if you do that enough enough time people start to warm up today and want to get more involved and want to help if you're lucky with that whatsoever so I guess that's all I have to offer on that one yeah I have a question about I started late as a programmer and you mentioned about because at first I started as civil engineer in China when I went to Canada I started computer science and I did Java about the last 12 years so now I feel like because in computer science things have changed so fast I mean as I know in China probably nobody coding after like 35 so I was wondering because in US it's very common I mean so how do you think about the future because I feel like as developer it's just so hard to keep up with especially when you're working how can you keep up with so many new technology when you the company only wants you to do what you best at they don't give you opportunity to learn other things like how do you self-led kind of so yeah I mean that's something that we all feel whether we're a beginner or not so the question was how as a developer and you mentioned that you had started computer science later in life as well so I relate to that for sure it sounds like you're further ahead than I am if you're already working as a developer so the question is how do you keep up with all the new developments because things change so fast in tech so how do you keep up with people who in any way sounds like they can keep up no one I guess if you meet someone who says that they're keeping up they're probably lying I would not put any trust in them most people I know at least a little bit humble about what they know and don't know and admit yes I know a lot of things I am definitely an expert at this but I can't keep up with all that I think you're maybe the only thing you can hope to do is get better at learning things more quickly just that general skill and I feel like that is something that you get to practice a lot in technology because it becomes part of your job and you can't you can't learn all the things but you can learn a subset of them and just by going to conferences like this at least they're on your radar so you know that they exist I mean that's better than not knowing that they're even out you know how to use them or not maybe it's not as important but that you build up the confidence in yourself and the ability to learn things when you need them so like maybe in your job one day they need this one new technology and you can say yes I am good at learning new technologies I've done it so many times before give me a couple weeks and I can at least learn the basics of it when I need to I think that's all you can do and last question have you experienced any kind of conflict come up in your community building and if so how have you dealt with that have we experienced any conflicts yet very little I'm really really lucky to be able to say that I think there's been a bit of you know people butt heads right all the time like we have lots of little debate like they've been friendly debates for the most time there's only been a couple times where we had to talk to this person at a group tonight was not okay and you need to show you know we need to be respectful of each other that kind of thing I had to do that kind of talk I think once it's not fun I don't like doing it I thought it was going to have a heart attack I was so nervous when I had to do it you know I've never had to do that before it reminded me that I guess when you're running events you are also kind of like the customer you're the you're the expert person you're the host you're the the marketer you're also the customer service person where if anything goes wrong any of the guest will turn to you to fix it or blame you for it even if it wasn't your fault and you have to at some point accept that and yeah I've been lucky I don't have too much advice to offer on that unfortunately because it just hasn't come up too much but I guess in general like that is larger than have a code of conduct I think that's super important I don't know if the most smaller meetups have a code of conduct but I guess it wouldn't hurt I have it's on my to-do list for our website is to write our code of conduct and put it there so that at least you have something to refer to like these are guidelines for how we treat each other and these are the things that are just not okay beyond that though because it's an informal trust like just basic human decency there's not too much more you can do beyond that I feel like we all showed up in this room today we didn't have to sign any waivers to say like I will not offend the other people in the room by saying this this this this this this like this very little we can do to prevent it I feel like I don't know if I'm any good at that though so I don't have any particular advice on mediation to offer if anyone else does though like definitely like let's talk after we all we're all going to even get lunch and stuff so talk to the people you're sitting next to if you have advice on any of the questions other people just ask today I guess it's lunchtime right yeah so thank you all so much for joining the presentation I was like I'm going to start now uh... yeah it's on is it on right now what I call for a volunteer okay we're going to get started surely so the the topic um today is called top ten ways to a life for women in technology and our speaker is Heather of Vancouver the talk is about mentoring so the background is women's made up 52% of the population and yet 20 years holds less than 20% of all technology positions in workforce so in order to create the technology that serves the society as a whole being more women in technology in this session you will learn 10 ways to for women's in technology learn simple ways to support women in the workforce and community and in office at conference and online we'll ask for volunteers to act out the top 10 ways to be more confident in speaking to support women ok so without much to do I'm going to give you Heather thank you thank you for the introduction so why am I wearing pink you might wonder that is it because I'm a woman do all women like pink and does a developer look like this or do I look as a developer like this does my appearance affect my skills does it change who I am I think by this point in the conversation about diversity we all can acknowledge at least in our heads that that's not true that appearance doesn't necessarily reflect your skills although as we can see by looking at the stats you so kindly shared for me in my introduction when we look at the population today we have over half of the population around the world being women but when we look at the tech workforce we're seeing 17% women making up the tech workforce force and as our society becomes so digital and it touches everything that we do literally from our phones to our computers to ordering everything we want online with from Amazon or wherever service you order your movies with Netflix or your ride from Uber you're using technology everywhere it's literally touching everything and the technology does reflect people who make it so if the technology is being designed by half of the population it's really not serving all of the population so today what I'd like to do is talk to you about this topic it's nice that we talk about it and we've been having this conversation for several years now as you're probably all aware being techie people but what I believe is that we actually need to do something in order to affect these statistics that we see that we shared a number of tech workers we have the amount that women are paid in the workforce okay well most of my slides are pictures but should we turn the lights down can everybody hear me okay okay so we're gonna try to adjust the lighting a little bit so you can see my fabulous pictures pulled a few stats here that you can see on the slide I can actually walk through them for you so we talked about 52% of the population there is a 200 million gap in internet access men versus women we have 16% of the top 1% of our world who are women who are billionaires and 4% of our fortune 500 CEOs are women and most of you have probably seen the statistics about the amount that women are paid which is about 78 cents for every dollar a man earns research that's come out over the last couple of years shows categorically that teams that include both men and women not just women or men are actually more profitable more creative more innovative their collective IQ actually rises and this could have an impact according to McKinsey of up to 12 trillion dollars on our gross domestic products so there's I said the conversation has started but what I would like to do in this talk is talk about some simple ways that we can actually start to affect change in our everyday lives working in the technology field start by saying one of my favorite quotes is by Seneca she who is brave is free and I will tell you if you are a man that the research does show that taking on this topic of diversity will not harm you you won't have to make mistakes even if you make mistakes that's what the research shows and you probably will make mistakes because this is a topic that touches on some things that are a little bit uncomfortable that make some people feel like they're not really sure what to say at the right time it does adversely affect women so that's why I say you have to be brave so women and minorities actually can affect them adversely talking about diversity it can impact the perception of their work even if they're not making mistakes so just the fact that you bring up this topic but I feel it's a really important topic to address I feel like it has societal, cultural and economic impact and at this point in my career I feel I have the experience that can be imparted to some of the attendees here to affect the change in our society at large so I'll tell you a little bit about myself in the Silicon Valley for about 18 years I am originally from Southern California that's my affinity for Southern California and coming to speak to you here I love Southern California and I love working in tech I've had a wonderful career I started working out at Skow Unix and I moved on to the Java community so I've been working with the Java community now for almost 17 years and the Java community is really very generous and I've enjoyed my time with them very much and they are really the impetus for me putting this talk together as I travel around the world in my job working with the Java developer community I often get the question from men since I am usually one of the only woman attendees and speakers what they can do to bring more women into Java conferences so they really were the impetus for my talk and this is not a topic that I embraced wholeheartedly it's more to think I had something to share because I started thinking when I worked in tech that I wanted to do this because it didn't matter if I was a man or a woman that it was a meritocracy and as long as I kept my head down and worked really hard it really didn't matter about anything else but what I came to find out is that working hard will absolutely get you nowhere in technology and I think that applies for a man or a woman you definitely have to be absolutely phenomenal at your job you have to bring your aid game every day but if you really want to thrive and succeed particularly as a woman you really need to be managing perceptions you need to be thinking about increasing your influence and expanding your visibility so those are three things that are important but also take allies you need to have allies in order to do that you can't do that on your own and being that the tech workforce is made up of primarily men it really is going to be men that are going to take these actions that are going to affect change so that's why I put this talk together to talk to men and often times when I thought about this fact I didn't necessarily think it was a problem that affected women it was why aren't there more girls getting involved in technology and I really put a lot of effort into doing some coding workshops and getting girls into the pipeline and I think that's really important and we do have to do but for this specific talk what I want to talk about is women so how can we ally for women and focus just on that for today you can hear you fine okay very good so as I said I was a little bit oblivious to this fact that I was the only woman at first and as I started to realize that I really was it really didn't bother me it didn't affect me at all I'm actually really comfortable working around men and I love my job and I don't have necessarily any horror stories to share but as I've grown in my career I have started to mentor other women and I've heard from them some of the things that they've experienced and from those experiences well as just my own perceptions as someone who works with the community I'm inherently an observer so I observe a lot of things so many of the things that I'll share with you are not necessarily things that I've experienced in my own career or things that I'm complaining about there are more things that I've observed happening throughout the culture that I work in so I will start with my top 10 tips like we said in the beginning I'll share my top 10 tips I did have a volunteer who was going to act out with me each of the 10 he had a family emergency so I'm going to ask for volunteers as we finish our 10 I'll ask for volunteers and we can practice some of the things at the end so I'll go through and start and I'll share maybe a couple of anecdotes as we go along so I think the first thing which is really important and came to me through actually through a scale workshop that I did a couple of years ago I don't know if any of you went to an all day workshop talking about some of the things that you can do to help women in the workplace and they talked about this in the beginning I didn't get the whole workshop but I definitely stuck with me which is an ally as a verb so not something that you are so don't walk around thinking that I'm an ally for women in tech I want to get more out women in tech but think of it as something that you do sometimes something that you do sometimes so it's an action that you take an action that can make a change so as you go about your day rather than think of yourself as something think of it as something that you're actually going to do so be on the lookout or at a conference like this or if you're online in a forum just be just be aware of these things thinking of it thinking of it as an action and I think a really important first step and I know for me personally I will share that I have never had you know people allies, mentors, or sponsors who are women they've always been men so I really want to encourage the men here to think about how you can do this for women that you experience in your workplace at the beginning this is a really uncomfortable topic and it's intersectional so it touches on things like race as well as gender and abilities it touches on so many different things and it's really important that we be open and listen more than we talk and when you think about some things that you do try to be as straight forward as possible and realize that you're not necessarily going to get it right every time but remember the fact that all is actually going to make a difference and if you make mistakes you're really not going to be penalized for it just the fact that you're continuing to make an effort and trying to be simple in your language and not get complicated or being nasty about kind of sarcasm or humor that doesn't necessarily work very well in these kind of situations so just try to be open, simple, kind and actually listen more than you talk and realize that we will make mistakes that it's just part of the conversation and it's going to happen so now we'll get into really the meat of things here so assignment distribution this is something that I found a lot in my job and I think it happens in any field whether it's technology or otherwise there's assignment distribution so you have people assigned tasks and sometimes you can think of tasks of housework versus real work and sometimes people think of this more as just like creative tasks versus office work but it's actually a little bit more specific than that so in technology it's managing the projects versus owning and writing the code so the housework is kind of managing the projects and setting up the meetings and doing the action items and then the real work or the work that really is going to get recognized and have people promoted and give them those opportunities to advance oftentimes what you'll see with women is they feel like they're not getting those opportunities and those high-price profile opportunities with owning and writing the code and so just be aware that within our workforce we do have those different types of work responsibilities and if you look at it back from a historical perspective in society actually the first programmers were women and I think that's become more prominent these days especially as we have the movie hidden figures that came out that you see a lot of the early programmers were women and back in the days of World War II really women were at the forefront of computer programming it wasn't until after the war that men came in and started to become more prominent in that field and then at that time it became a higher pain field and then we started to see the women kind of dropping off both at that time as well as in the 1980s so just be aware that society places less value on those same thing if a woman does a job often times in our society it is perceived as less valuable so be aware when you're assigning tasks or within your team when you're looking at people who might want to have an assignment to make sure that you're distributing it equally between the men and the women and ensuring that you're giving those opportunities to both men and women creating a friendly environment so this is a really important thing when I talked about in the beginning the pipeline so the pipeline of girls coming into tech as well as the leaky pipeline or the women who are leaving tech if you look at the statistics over 40% of women in the tech workforce the few that are there actually leave within 10 years so over 40% of them leave within 10 years and you have to be willing to look at the environment as a factor that's causing that when I looked at a study that came out with this comment so it's really important that we have an environment and we work to create an environment that makes everyone comfortable and I think this can really be done by again listening more than you talk and asking questions so oftentimes when I go to a conference not so much anymore because I've been around for a while but early on people can approach a woman at a conference and think oh she either must be in marketing or she's here at a potential date so when you do see women and you should just make the assumption that they're there for the same reason that you are so they're there to be technical and ask some questions about their work look for things that you have in common with them and look for ways that you can flock together I have the birds here because we all are human and we can easily find things that we have make someone around you feel comfortable I think that can go a long way towards creating that friendly environment because if you look at the reasons that women do leave tech there are things that are easily addressable in terms of the comments that are received and again I haven't necessarily had these things happen but from the women that I have talked to I've heard that this happens often and again not from something that people don't necessarily think about so actually creating that friendly environment for other people speaking up so I think that this happens in a lot of places both in meetings as well as at conferences so oftentimes a woman will make a suggestion and there isn't a reaction or a response and then someone else will make that same suggestion later and the man will take credit into this a little bit because I am kind of this behaviorist who likes to observe people and I have read some studies that say it can be related to the pitch of a woman's voice some men actually wouldn't hear that suggestion so again it's not mean spirited but I think as someone who's looking at ways that they can ally or actions that they can take you can be on the lookout to hear from some of these people listening for their suggestions and then amplifying it when you do hear it so for example since you're going to be on the lookout for a woman to actually say something and participate in these conversations and if no one is responding to them you can actually amplify that so build on what that person just said and say oh like so and so just said you could build on that by saying extra attention to that contribution that was made and kind of stepping in the I guess the path of maybe perhaps someone else speaking up and saying the same thing in addition if someone were to interrupt you can actually say excuse me I don't think that person was finished yet so actually I have seen this often you see in addition to not hearing a suggestion interrupting so at least two times as often women will get interrupted when they are trying to say something so try to be on the lookout for interruptions and we should hear interruptions as a man or a woman you can do this you can say I think we should let that person finish and let them finish their suggestions so those are a couple things that I have for meetings I think interrupting and just not being heard are two things but there's also the third thing which is if you're seeing in a meeting you can say something you can have gentle ways to suggest that maybe they have something to share if you even have some experience with that person and you think they have something important to share you can even prompt them a little bit so I think it's really important that's one of the statistics that I pulled in in the beginning was teams with men and women are more successful and more innovative and more profitable but often times you have to have everyone participating to have if you can facilitate some of that that's one of the ally steps that you can take so in meetings speak up either when there's someone being interrupted when someone isn't participating if someone's suggestion isn't being heard those are all opportunities for you to step in and make make a correction in that behavior through one of these three behaviors and this is actually a really good thing that we can demonstrate later this is one I think that has a lot of applicability and probably everyone in this room has seen some example of one of these things either at a meeting in an online forum discussion or at a conference and then of course we also have these more difficult situations that are a little bit more blatant and often times these will happen more at conferences I've seen situations happen where it's a little bit more of inappropriate conversations that you can clearly see are making some people uncomfortable again this is a perfect opportunity in an allied way so be an ally and offer a redirection when you see these inappropriate conversations if you're paying attention and looking out for ways you can naturally see when someone becomes uncomfortable by their body language so this is a great opportunity to redirect things maybe in a way that's a little bit more back to the reason why you're at the conference the technology or discussion that you could direct things towards so I'm not saying that you should ever engage in personal conversations I'm just saying be on the lookout for conversations that you can tell are making someone a little bit uncomfortable and be willing to redirect that conversation to a more successful result and scale I will say that you know you have a great policy here in terms of appropriate or inappropriate behavior so I'm not saying that happens here but it has been known to happen at conferences okay so he was wondering if I can give a great thing to act out but often you'll see someone who you know it closed body language so they'll start to cross their arms or turn away from you a little bit divert their gaze look down you know start to be a little bit more antsy so yeah you can just kind of like almost wanting to disappear from the conversation right so those I think are some cues to look out for in that regard and you know particularly at the end of a conference when people have had a couple beers or something like that you know it's easy for things to kind of go in those conversations where maybe they shouldn't and so it's easy it's easy for someone to act as an ally and just offer that out either divert the conversation or you know have a side conversation and go off so I think you know again from what I've seen with people in the community I haven't had experience with people who are having these kind of inappropriate conversations and making people feel uncomfortable I don't think it's something that people do on purpose but I think oftentimes you can see people will be silent in those situations and not feel empowered to go ahead and take action so that's really the idea behind this and in some ways it's common sense but also knowing that just being willing to take that action actually can make a big difference on whether that person is going to say I'm not ever going to go to a conference like this again where I can feel like I have people who are supporting me and I can feel comfortable that even if I get into a situation like this there's an avenue to exit it so I think this one is really important and we could probably model this a little bit if I have a volunteer to do that with me okay number seven out of ten character traits so this is one of my favorite ones because I have a lot of experience with this one this is actually this is one of my idealistic things when I came into tech thinking that it didn't matter if I was a man or a woman I could act just the same as everyone and I would be perceived the same way and this was a little bit of my reality check so there are certain character traits in the workplace that are attributed negatively to women you may or may not have heard of these but things like aggressive abrasive or bossy or cold these are character traits that are primarily attributed to women in the workplace and I personally have had experience with this coming into the tech workforce where I'm working around men and I feel I'm mimicking their behavior and again I feel like this is natural human biology we mirror what we see we do this in body language we do this in our behavior and I I was marrying what I saw around me in meetings and the feedback was really aggressive and I was really perplexed about this because I felt like I was behaving the same way everyone around me was behaving but the thing that I realized is that perception is reality so I was being perceived this way when I behaved exactly the same way when I was seeing men behaving this way they were seen as bold and confident leaders but I was being perceived as cold and abrasive and being aware of this I don't think necessarily that we can intrinsically change this right off the bat but just to be aware of the fact that when people have discussions about certain people and these traits come up just to kind of acknowledge that these are behavior characteristics that are primarily attributed to women and being aware of that can make a really big difference in terms of your filter and how you're on this character criticism done by Joan Williams and she did this research in performance reviews so I think this this is a really common place for it to come up as in performance reviews I personally don't participate in performance reviews or feedback that I got was more just one off from actually people who were kind of informally mentoring me which I appreciate the honest feedback that's the way I'm being perceived so it's good to know that the word abrasive in this research you know came up 17 times to describe 13 different women but in this research it never came up once to describe a man and when I heard about that I really thought about it myself and I can say that I've never heard a man described as abrasive but I personally know that I have been described as abrasive and I personally wouldn't describe myself as abrasive but I do acknowledge that I have learned in my career to walk a little bit of a tightrope so I'm walking this tightrope between being too feminine because if I'm too feminine then I won't be affected but if I'm too masculine I won't be likable so I'm kind of balancing all along and looking at how I'm being perceived and then adjusting my behavior as I go and that takes a lot of effort but unfortunately that's what I've learned to do but I think as allies you can just be aware of that fact when you're hearing a performance you're an informal conversation that this does happen and it is human behavior and it has been scientifically proven now the other thing that I have written here is prove it and prove it again and I think this comes this actually kind of introduces me to my number eight which is encouraging norms so that we have a level playing field and what's been found in terms of norms is that oftentimes women feel uncomfortable promoting themselves or negotiating and this is some one of the things that makes for this kind of unevenness in the tech workforce and there is this tendency when I work with women to mentor them which I do quite a bit of these days I didn't use to but it's something that I've gotten into over the last couple of years which is women that I mentor don't want to apply for a job because they feel like they have to prove that they have everything on the list of job requirements before they can actually apply for the job so they feel like they need to prove a job and then prove it again on the job where men will come in and see a list of attributes that are required for a job and think I have two of those things but I can do the rest of them so I'm going to apply based on my potential not proof so it's prove it versus potential and I've found this over and over again when I see open recognitions and I see a woman that I think should apply for something it's oh I have eight of those ten things but I don't have to work on these two other things before I apply for the job where if you suggested to a man that you think oh I saw this job and this would be a good fit for you oh I might have half of the things and think yeah great I can prove I can do the rest of it so they're hired on that potential that they have they've shown potential that they can do it so they don't necessarily have to have everything on the list and I think that comes into a norm so when I say so making it clear that when you have a job description you don't have to have every single thing I think it's pretty I mean to me as someone who's worked in this field for a long time I can say without a doubt that you're never gonna find a perfect person that has every single thing on your list that list that you put up with an open job wreck is the perfect person but you know you're not gonna have the perfect person you will take people that have eight out of ten of those things there are certain things that you can train for to fill the rest of them so I think to encourage those norms in terms of this is a list when you write a job description that would be nice to have but you can still apply if you don't have every single thing on this list so I think that will actually help in getting some women to apply into those positions because often when I talk to people as they say yes we would love to have more women on the team but they just don't apply to get these women to apply and some of these things include working on these norms so things like having in the job prescription that it's not all a requirement in advance having that you need to self promote so if you're already at the company again it's going back to that perception of I just put my head down and do my job and I'm gonna be recognized that's not the way it works you need to apply for the job but you're not gonna get it you need to put in for the work you need to be looking for people who can highlight your work and showcase it to the managers so these types of behaviors are really essential to normalize in the workplace and to explicitly say that in order to be successful in this career you are gonna need to be promoting yourself and showcasing your work and you are gonna need to negotiate your salary that's I mean once you fall behind in your salary from the very beginning you're always gonna be hired based on your previous salary and it's really hard to catch up so I think from the very beginning establishing that as a norm that you need to negotiate your salary you need to promote yourself you need to put yourself forward it's not something that's gonna happen automatically those are norms that I think can really level the playing field and without having women change if we just change that through ally work and again when you focusing on these particular things when you do see women that you think could fill a role it's important to highlight those as an ally that's an action that you can take number nine unconscious bias educate yourself about unconscious bias now again I would have said a few years ago that I had I had no unconscious bias that I I'm going to take anyone in and I have I have no preconceived notions about what anyone would want to do but again it's all human nature that we have bias there's so much stimulus coming into to our brains as humans that we pattern match it's part of how we are designed to be as a human being it's biology so we really can't fight that so part of part of the battle with this is just recognizing that we all do have bias it's part of being human but there are certain things that we can do to overcome that and one of the things that I recommend and why I'm in this mentor track today is mentoring someone different from you can really help you phenomenally in terms of overcoming your bias and when you mentor someone think about not necessarily how you can change their behavior but think about how you can sponsor them and advocate for them as they advance in their career and necessarily changing them everyone can grow and expand their skill set and it's important to encourage that but one of the most effective things you can do as a mentor is provide that career guidance and helping and guiding them in their past but also in championing them in the industry or if you work in the same company within your company management chain providing that positive feedback about that person that you have this experience working with the person and highlighting their skills so mentoring someone is a great way to overcome your unconscious bias and another thing that I've found is really helpful in overcoming unconscious bias is when a situation happens and maybe you have some thoughts about why this person isn't necessarily the right fit for this particular task or this job whatever it is or presenting at this conference take a step back from it and focus on what actually happened and you can do this by sharing with someone share with someone else not you not the person that you're having this confrontation about or this difficulty or dilemma about but take a step back find someone to share with and share what actually happened or what was actually said not what you feel about it or how you perceived it to happen but think about what actually happened and what actually was said by you and the other person and share that with someone else I think oftentimes what I've found is you'll kind of surface some of these biases when you're doing it so you might some of it will start to come into play so for example you know maybe it's maybe it's a woman relating to travel so the woman just had a child and maybe you're holding back on things advances or opportunities or travel maybe because you have certain perceptions about a woman that would maybe not want to travel after having a child or something like that so that's something that I've personally found in my experience that maybe I've allowed to come into my biases and sharing it with someone else I've realized that no that wasn't actually shared with me that was something I'm inserting based on my perception of how it would be not necessarily what that person has shared with me or what that person has done so that's a really important thing to recognize that whoever you are you do have unconscious bias and be on the lookout for ways that you can overcome it and those are two of the things that I recommend mentorship as well as sharing dilemmas that you run into with someone else that you have perceptions or your feelings about it but just what actually happened okay number ten top tip and this is a really important one is to suggest other women support and encourage women speakers and also in addition to speakers you know people being at a meeting so here's me at a meeting this is the meeting I attend most often in my work so I chair the Java community process executive committee and I'm often we have about 28 or 30 of us and I'm very frequently if not always the only woman so again with all of these guys you know they're all great guys I love working with them I have no problems with any of them but when I've talked about this with some of them when they talk about why is it that no women come in here well do you have women that you work with that you could offer as an alternate or a backup that's something that you need to be on the lookout for so follow women on Twitter encourage women to speak if you speak at a conference and are invited frequently which often happens once you start speaking at conferences you're invited to another one and then another one and then another one and before you know it you're wanted everywhere well is there a woman that you work with that could come in step in and fill in for you in one of those spots or often times you could do it as a co-speaker so often times when I've invited women to speak with me they feel like again it's that prove it thing well they don't have enough communications experience they want more practice they want to be trained on it okay well why don't you do a co-speaking with me so that's one way that you can encourage women to come on board is to do co-presentation you can suggest them suggest them for panels suggest them for job tasks at work suggest them for conferences often times I work with men and job developer conferences they say but they don't apply um and you know there's that reluctance to actually specifically go out and invite a specific person because they want to be fair again it goes back to that perception that tech is a complete meritocracy but if we really want to invoke change we need to be willing to take that extra step so go out and actually talk to that woman that you think would be a great speaker and one on one tell her she needs to come and present here and that you really want her to be there it might just be the thing that takes it over the edge versus all are welcome and willing to apply please apply because what I've found often times is that just isn't enough so be willing to take that extra step and go out there and actively encourage a woman to present because what I've found from the women that I've talked to that I've attended my talks is they're always really super excited to see a woman speaking on the topic it makes them feel like they belong at a conference but they belong at that meeting or they belong in that workplace so it's really important to provide those role models and examples alright so and I just want to remember that we can do this we can make the change and you are here and you care about this topic and I truly do think that makes you awesome but I also want to remind you that you might make mistakes and someone might be unhappy with something that you do you're part of making a change and you can make a mistake and it's not going to be the end of the world that still makes you awesome and if you don't get the credit you think you deserve you're still being part of that change and I believe it's one little step after another that is going to make the change that we want to see in the world I feel like all the discussion that we're having in the tech community right now is really healthy and important and I'm really excited to see that but we really each of us need to take specific actions and even if they're small actions I feel like the things I put forward for you today are very simple actions they might take a little bit of courage but I think they're all doable I think every one of you could take at least one of these things and go implement it in the next week and you'll be part of the change that we wish to see in having more tech equity in the tech workforce and in society at large as a result so at this point I will tell you if you want to find out more about me you can follow me on Twitter and we have several minutes left for questions as well as some time to act out any of your favorite tips so if you want to get a little bit of practice role playing on any of those things that I suggested raise your hand and I'm willing to do that with you here and again you know this is a safe environment for that to happen so no pressure if you want to talk to me afterwards for not to do it in front of the whole group no problem with that either I'm willing to do that so should we start with any questions unless we have someone right off the bat that wants to dive into one of these question in the back and then I'll get yours here in the front so being that we're in the mentorship track you hear a lot from people in leadership how important getting mentorship was for them and how important giving mentorship is to them can you talk about what can help men be effective mentors when we're mentoring across gender lines or receiving mentorship across gender lines as I mentioned earlier all of my mentors have been men I've never had a woman mentor so I always tell that to women who say they need to find a woman mentor that you actually don't need a woman to mentor a woman it actually can be just as effective and I think that it often is hard to get matched up I often like I prefer it if people can kind of be matchmaking I like to see that I mean actually I started doing that in my workplace as having mentor circles which is something that is a little bit of a new idea that I've done over the last year so you have maybe six more junior people and then you have someone a little bit more senior come in and kind of discuss in a round table forum to come up that people have and then you have a chance to kind of develop that a little bit more informal relationship in a little bit more of a structured way because it can be a little bit of a challenge if you don't have that formalized way to matchmake to be like oh will you officially mentor me and we need to meet every week and you know it can be a little bit awkward especially across gender lines I realize that I mean I personally haven't had any that with me so I think if you can get into those situations where it's like a mentor circle that's really helpful so if you can affect that in your organization or at a conference it's really helpful to do it that way even some conferences now do like a buddy system so where people who are newbie conference goers can sign up for a buddy program and then people who have gone to conferences many times can sign up to say that I'd be a buddy with someone okay so you don't have that awkwardness of asking I think a lot of times it can be effective too to just do that informal thing where you don't even formally establish oh I'm going to mentor you and you're going to be my mentor I mean it can be something that organically happens that's mostly how it's happened for me other than through the mentor circles and when I worked at Sun Microsystems I had a couple of times they had a formal mentor program that I applied for and I got but I think that you can do it anyway so if you're on the lookout or you just have someone that you see maybe could use a little bit of encouragement just offering yourself in that way not necessarily say I want to be your mentor but I see a lot of potential in you and you know I have a couple suggestions for you that could help highlight some of your strengths do you want to sit down and talk about that did you have something more specific not super specific but the last comments that you were just making that is a conversation that can really easily turn the wrong direction if you approach it incorrectly any additional thoughts there would be great and too you can just make yourself available to say a lot of times if you're on your LinkedIn profile or something if you use LinkedIn open to mentoring people put that out there you don't have to necessarily say if you want to talk let me know but you could just say I really think you have these strengths it would be great to see you grow I've seen there's these positions open have you thought about applying for them so you can be that support and encouragement as well that will naturally lead to that person coming back to you and asking for feedback so that you can learn by working in the field for some time that you know I've seen you do these things I see you have these skills you should consider going forward for this position or I see there's this conference coming up I see that they could use talks on this subject I see that they want to have a diverse speaker representation have you thought about presenting and submitting a session and then just kind of starting that conversation and being that reference point that it would naturally happen you had a question in the front okay is that you assume everyone that watches this talk is of able-bodied mind of work an example of unconscious bias is it in my opinion everyone is possible of unconscious bias yes I believe everyone is is what I asked is it a good example of unconscious bias of thinking everyone in this room is able to find and body to work and therefore has a job here no I don't think that everyone here would have a job I mean I think that that's in most of the conferences I go to there are students there are people who are interested in getting the field there are some people that have certain abilities and others have different abilities so I think that there's room for everyone in the field no matter what your abilities are I think that there's a wide range of opportunities that are in the room yeah there's definitely a whole spectrum of people Hi so my question was how do you strike a balance between wanting to be empathetic and providing a supportive atmosphere for example that you just said about you know somebody just had a baby or going to have a baby versus putting them forward for a challenging position maybe that person's ready for maybe they're not but it's happened to me where I assumed that it wasn't and I later questioned myself why the heck did I do that and I find myself struggling with that any thoughts on that well I think it's important to have those conversations right and so that it's important to be having the conversation about what people want and what they think they're able to do at that point the trouble is that we make assumptions based on what we think versus what the other person have actually said and shared with us so I think it's important to explore that with the other person and actually have the conversation and not make assumptions about it but actually talk through it so if you don't have that relationship with your manager or direct supervisor that would be assigning the tasks I think it's important to have that conversation with someone so seek out someone that can be important for you to realize what it is that you want but I think personally for myself as a manager I want to hear it you know one to one so I want to have those conversations I know sometimes it can take a large amount of time some people like to share quite a bit and sometimes you can't feel a little bit like a therapist but I think it's important that you get the person needs to go and explore it somewhere else before they can give a decision fine but you should definitely ask the question and not make an assumption that someone isn't ready for it just because what you perceive about their situation but you should actually hear it directly from the person that's really my main point with that is that they should be telling you directly you shouldn't be taking away opportunities for them based on a friend he had a question of a friend then one in the back here in the very friend he had a question you got him fine okay sorry so as a hiring manager do you have any recommendations for how to handle expressing increased or getting increased diversity in your group when without lowering the bar without just deciding I'm going to hire more women or more people with diversity but when you're like like for me I get lots of white men applying for the job and I would really really like it if my team could be more balanced it's very hard because I'm either like I don't know how to handle that do you have any suggestions yeah I think you have to reach out and get those participants get those applicants and I always say you know you can't just have one applicant either because again human behavior if you have one applicant who's different you're just going to automatically discount that person and two is the same thing you have to have so at least three in a different group of diversity whichever diversity group you're targeting there are so many like I said it's intersectional but you you need to have at least three and it's not going to happen just by saying oh I want diversity it's not going to happen just by saying oh I want people to apply and then not doing anything about going out and actively getting those people so making a priority within your team and networking and all your social networks in the forums in places that you know applicants you're targeting frequent that this you really want this you need to see these people applying and then not make a hiring decision until you see at least three of those types of candidates I mean that's one suggestion so I know you know getting one really I don't think it's going to affect the change because you're just naturally going to discount that person they're putting that quarter there the X whatever category it is so yeah that would be you know promote the posting to get those candidates and work within your team to get them to be promoting as well to get the candidates and it will take time but I think there definitely are candidates out there okay in the back in the middle first and then we're going to get to you in the back I want to follow up to your question one thing I saw work really well is just go to meetups I see a lot more women going to meetups and just sharing and their what they're trying to achieve what they're trying to learn maybe the career they're trying to break into I find a lot of women actually go to those and we've got really great communities and meetups here in the Southern California and there's also universities where there's tons of women instead of going to USC UCLA go to Harvey Mudd in engineering there are almost 50% women there so you could recruit at universities where they have a diverse population yeah that's a great suggestion yeah and meetups there's women who code groups there's some meetups specifically for women but often times I'll see a few women I usually speak at Java user groups so I speak at some women who code groups as well and you definitely see some women there and it has become a really popular place to talk about job openings and people go to find out about new job openings then I had a question too okay then we get to your question my question was I've noticed and I'm wondering how effective it is but I've noticed instead of for some for some public speakers instead of using male pronouns they use female pronouns so like like a Jane developer like Joe developer or she learned this API how effective is that and should we all do that at work or I'm just curious I actually haven't done any research on that in Sweden so when I went to Sweden I do travel to conferences internationally for my job in Sweden they have actually created a pronoun which is gender agnostic so they have an actual pronoun that isn't he or she and they use that so that's great I haven't actually heard people you know doing that using she versus he or Jane versus Joe you know from my work with middle school girls which I said I do some work for young girls I definitely see that it makes a big difference for them if they see a woman if they hear people speaking about women if they see pictures of women it's it's they've already decided at that point that a programmer doesn't look like them you know by the time they're in middle school so I think you know from that experience I would have to say that it would have an effect on people but I haven't read any specific research on it to comment okay question in the back finally I have a comment and a question okay from as you've mentioned you've generally had a positive experience in your 20 plus years in IT and I have had a positive experience in my four plus years of IT but I'm also thank you so far so good however I'm also a part-time Ph.D. student so I get an experience about how it's like to be in academia as well especially we have talks like these and most men understand they hear people like you and they understand but unfortunately in academia where there's a lot of younger men they lack the experience and exposure so I just wish whoever here knows somebody in college please talk to them and I hope that academia has speakers more speakers like you to spread awareness about how it is for purely selfish reasons have you ever wondered since you've had a positive experience so completely isolating yourself from industry profit what research shows if women and men work together it's better or whether there's no wage gap assuming there's no gender gap in IT jobs have you ever just for your own selfish reasons wondered what it would be like to work with mostly women or even a lot of women would you think that your career would have taken a different shape would it have been easier any thoughts on that um well I often do I wonder what it would be like to work with women because I have recently spoken at a few conferences where it's all women and it's very different experience to present to mostly women versus present to mostly men it feels very different so I assume that it would feel different to work on a team that's mostly women versus mostly men I have had in my experience it really is best and ideal and I feel the most comfortable when it's a mix so you have some men and some women so I think teams are going to be more successful if you do have that mix I think women have some great things to bring to the table and men do as well so when we have those two things working together we come up with better solutions so in an ideal world I really do think that the parity is important so I enjoy working with women and I think working together we can really create the best results Any other questions? Do you have questions here? Anybody want to do any role playing? Question in the middle Nice nice talk I just want to mention another comment about the job description for everybody so when I look up a job not only what is required but the environment is the first thing I look at and if it explains a programmer environment I immediately get rid of it if it says ping pong drinking in the office blah blah blah you're a super ninja all that all that language I immediately you know pass it by because I would rather see something like we like diversity we like whatever that type of environment I go immediately towards it so my company now is very diverse with ethnically and gender and it's very very comfortable and that's way more important than you know all the benefits they say I've ignored you know probably 50% of the silicon rather what is it the the Santa Monica jobs with lots of startup culture and it's very I think it's written for men young men and I think if anyone's in here writing descriptions make sure you relook at it and see who are you actually writing this for who's in your brain when you're writing it and I've hired people as well different ages different genders you know and it's not kind of excluding people when they think it's a a bonus Yes it's really important I didn't mention the programmer culture but I do have that in my notes and that can be very off-putting for certain types of people and I know that is the kind of hip environment to describe so that's a really good point so if that is written into any job descriptions you should consider great things about the IT environment and the culture is that it can be a great place for men and women because you do have that opportunity for creativity and innovation and freedom and flexibility and of course the pay is great but it's really that kind of off-putting programmer culture that drives out a lot of people that could be potentially a great career you know a career where you do have a little bit more freedom than in certain careers like you're a teacher where you're tied to a certain place you have so much more freedom in an IT career and so looking at it through that lens of who's going to be reading this and who's it going to appeal to is a really important point thanks for sharing that and we have one minute left last question before we have to end because my time keeper is 22 is watch I'm curious on the other side on the other side of this so you've already posted the job requisition you've already gotten people to apply for the job do you have any tips for interviews that might actually help either encourage or help increase diversity in terms of hiring well I have read a lot about the white board versus blind interviews and I know for diversity reasons it's really preferred to do the blind interviews versus a white board interview so I don't know if you're doing white board interviews at all I'm not going to go away from those I would try I know in my experience there really isn't anything uniform for interviews so I would try to set some standards and norms for that just in terms of what questions that you ask and try to be consistent with those and share them so often times you'll have like seven people on the team interviewing candidates right and they'll just ask them whatever they deem to be an appropriate interview question I just really kind of looking to match them for similarities to themselves so depending on the diversity of your team that may or may not be successful so if you were to set that up in advance as kind of normalized questions that you might ask and then get the feedback based on the same questions universally you might have a better chance with the outcome with those types of interviews if that's the kind of interview environment or situation you're asking about yeah something more specific yeah we don't do whiteboard interviews we do project based interviews but I was interested in you know what might help others as well as also what type of questions you know like what types of things might have helped us or helped us going forward but I can talk to you I'll find that okay yeah well I think I think normalizing the questions is really good towards the future like how would they solve problems so creative problem solving critical thinking I mean those are all things you're going to find you know universally you can find people with good technical skills but trying to kind of get into the more like communication collaboration teamwork critical thinking how they're going to solve problems be part of a team that's really going to is going to is going to create the solutions better technical skills but that's not necessarily going to create a better result for your team so those are always the kind of questions that I try to ask and focus on so when you're when you're not seen basically who is who's who who like if you don't see it's a woman that's doing this task and you're just rating based on you don't know what your candidate is doing it or even like when the when the like person's ethnicity sometimes by a name gender you can tell certain things about a person based on their name so taking that away is blind I don't know if that's the technically correct but that's yeah I'm saying don't do a white board so so do it online but abstract away you know who it is that's doing it so he has something to add for the white boarding but not white boarding it's there's true ability for doing coding tests or sysadmin tests so it's did they complete this task in the two hours that they were assigned to do this over and they had a week to do this homework and so that do people have the time for that is the other question but here's this person did they pass all these check marks it's the computer doing the evaluation right okay thank you alright I think we're out of time right sorry about that a little bit but I really appreciate all the participation your a great audience thank you and I'll be around I'll sit they outside if you want to talk some more okay thank you thank you test test test test alright we're at thank you for coming today scale 10 ds introducing Alex Juarez I just want to get to the jokes techniques for teaching and learning new topics give them a round of applause Thank you. Not negated at all. Thank you. All right, so the slides are already online. If you want to go to slides.onesupported.io slash getting the jokes, you can all follow along with the slides. So they're there. There's links to some of the resources and content as you go to the presentation. Kind of the cool thing also is that if you are following along, I get to control it. See?  I saw and controlled it, so that's why I'm using this, not some reading off notes. So the title of this talk is, I just want to get the jokes. So techniques for teaching and learning new topics, right? So it's kind of a very, very wide array of topics. And we're kind of catching it down for you all a little bit here today. First off, I want to start with, hi. Hello. Every time I get to speak publicly at a conference for anything, really, I'm constantly humbled and honored by the time that you all chose to spend your time with me here today. There's quite a presentation going on. You could have been any of them. So hello and thank you. First off, this is up here because I read a study last night about how if you're having a bad day, baby animals, pictures of baby animals could help focus you. And so why not throw it up there? Make me happy. Hopefully it makes you happy to smile as well. I have a chance to smile at that, right? But I'll let this show. So why this talk? Why spend the next 45 minutes or so talking about learning, talking about how to learn, how to learn, right? And a couple of things.  I think most of you at this conference will consider themselves to be a lifelong learner. Second point is that I think these ideas are shareable. A lot of them aren't my own. A lot of them I kind of melded into my own opinion about it, but a lot of them aren't my own, right?  And I think there's a lot more than just me keeping these here, right? I remember the first time that I heard some of these ideas and so I think that's the thing that's worth sharing and worth talking about, okay? And then the last part is, you know, getting the jokes. So the topics or the title of this talk came from me a few months ago. It's just my late last year. And it was a meeting with a bunch of managers of technical people, technical systems administrators. And we were talking in this meeting about how much time it would take to teach a particular topic. You know, how much effort we put into it, how deep do we go, is it a week-long course, is it a two-day-long course? And one of the managers kind of just threw his hands up and he said, make sigh. He's like, look, I just want to get the jokes. I want to know enough that when my people are frustrated or mad or happy or laughing, I don't know why. I don't want to just have to get the jokes. And that kind of stuck with me. I really thought that to me that really gave me a good expectation of how far to teach a topic, how far to really take something. And so with that in mind, I began to put a kind of rework on my framework to get to that point, right? And I used to say that I want to teach you enough to ask better questions. I want to teach you enough to have better conversations with the people who do know the information. And so I think that's still true. I just like kind of the way this sounds a little better. They may just maybe laugh, so. Speaking of jokes, we're going to attempt this one. I was going to tell you a UDP joke. Most of you all probably heard this. But then I realized I don't care if you get it. And after laughing, that's exactly the point, right? That's exactly the point there, is that I want you to know enough of that. That tells me a lot about what you know already. It's just by getting that joke. And so that's kind of the whole idea of where to grow up going with this. I'm actually glad that worked out. I wasn't sure. Usually my jokes bomb horribly, but they also reference Beyonce and Justin Timberlake, so not great. Okay, so a quick story about another reason why this topic. I got to do a kind of a speed dating panel with a bunch of new up-and-coming network administrators who were going through a Cisco program at the local college. These are people that just got high school, people that are on their second career, people of all age groups. I sat down on my first table, I'm going to introduce myself, and then I opened up for questions because I was there for them. And the first question I got was from a lady who just looked at me kind of with a little bit of stress in her eyes. She's like, do you ever get tired of learning? I said, wow, you might be the wrong career field, right? I can say that of course, right? I keep it positive. But I really thought, man, that's kind of crazy to think about that because like I said in the beginning, I can say myself I'm a long learner. I consider part of the joy of everything I do is learning some of it, right? And I realized that for some people, you know, a career in technology is part of a means to advance, not because they really want to pursue that career. They might be doing boys and girls but it's a job for them, right? We used to have an issue with hiring that whether we hired them or not, the tech team would hire, we'll be doing this at home, whether we pay them or not. They just loved doing this, right? And as so many crews opened up in this field, what we've noticed is that we don't have that so much anymore. It's rare that we find somebody who would be doing this whether they pay them or not. A lot of times now their experience, in my case with Linux, is maybe nine months to a year through a vocational school or through a technical program. And so they haven't had this many years of kind of learning and banging their heads against things that a lot of us may have had, right? I remember my learning method for a long time, she banged my head against it to collect so many cents, right? For me that worked. I had the time to do it. So people don't have that time to do it, right? So that's kind of where it comes through. I wanted to put structure around how to learn, right? How to take your time more, use your time more effectively. So my hopes for this presentation are three-fold. Number one, that I validate some of the ideas you already have about learning or learning how to learn, right? I hope that not everything here is groundbreaking or a shattery. So that may be, that'd be awesome. But I don't think that in the community we talk about this enough, at least from my experience, about sharing the ideas of how we're learning and the frustrations about what we do when we can't get to that particular topic that we want to talk about. So hopefully validate some kind of ideas, some current sort of looking for methodologies that people have processes. Secondly, I hope to instill some new ones. Hopefully something is here and new. I want you all to leave with more than what you came in with, right? Would it be a little bit of knowledge, a new laugh, picture of baby animals, a new joke, something, right? It's some way to enrich your experience here, because of what's why I'd be here, right? And then lastly, I can say my role up here is to try and entertain you long enough to learn something that comes down to you. Right now I teach any class. One of my goals is to entertain you long enough, keep your attention long enough that you remember something and learn something, right? And I think through laughter, we remember how those talks of those presentations, of those lessons. Bloom's text on learning. I was debating whether to put this in the beginning or the end. I had to put it up here in the front because I can share another story of how I came across this. A long time at work, they used to describe, I work a lot with our learning systems administrators, they used to describe their progression up through level one to level four. I used to say that the level one administrator could go ahead and get the job done, essentially. They could take instructions, read directions, research, try to find a solution, and then try to implement a solution to the best that they can, right? To solve problems. That became our level ones. And then the jump from level one to level two could tell me what they were doing. They could tell me not only they had me have a tap-and-peek crutch on the keyboard to get the job done. They could have a conversation with somebody over the phone in a ticket on the street with anybody and tell them what they were doing. That's a big jump. We found that I love them or surround people with similar ideas. They never started to talk about what they actually meant or what they were doing. That's how I understood the common process and the common understanding. And then jumping from level two to level thr