January 9, 2017 • 25 mins
It's something that just about every technology company says it wants to address -- diversifying its workforce. So why is the industry so full of men, most of whom are white or Asian? Bloomberg Technology's Ellen Huet and Aki Ito follow Mitchell Lee, co-founder of a startup called Penny, as he tries to hire someone who doesn't look like your typical Silicon Valley programmer. The process raises some surprising challenges and poses plenty of uncomfortable questions.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Don't let your legacy I T systems cost you money, innovation,
and a place at the digital table of the future.
You can change your systems and the economics of it
with software from red Hat See how at red hat
dot com. Today's episode is about a guy called Mitch
al Lee. He runs a startup called Penny in San Francisco.
(00:23):
We'll tell you later about what Penny does. For now,
what you need to know is Penny is almost two
years old and it's really small. It's Mitch, his co founder, Alex,
and two employees. They're all software engineers, and big surprise,
they're all guys. A few months ago, Mitch started looking
for a fifth employee, and he wanted that fifth person
(00:44):
to be different from him and the rest of the team.
And since this is a podcast and we can't just
show you a picture of Mitch, we asked Mitch's sister
Christina to describe what he looks like. He's always got
some like really soft hoodie or T shirt on and
jeans or corduroys. If he was walking down the street,
(01:04):
you probably wouldn't necessarily notice. He blends in pretty well. Basically,
Mitch looks just like a lot of other people in
Silicon Valley. He's young, he's white, he's straight, and he
went to a top college. Yeah, he even has this
neatly trimmed beard, and perhaps because he's a cyclist like
the rest of San Francisco, he has a nice tan too.
(01:27):
In Silicon Valley, most programmers are white and Asian men
who have computer science degrees from elite universities. But for
Mitch's next higher he's committed to looking outside that pool
of people. That's pretty unusual for a company of penny size.
Some people would call it affirmative action hiring, because Mitch
is going to be actively considering the candidates background when
(01:49):
he's deciding who to hire. And it's a very touchy topic.
As we'll find out, not everyone agrees that it's the
right thing to do him Ako and I'm Ellen Hewitt,
and this week Undecrypted, we're going to be talking about
(02:10):
something that every technology company says they want to do
something about, which is diversity in the workforce. Well, they
want to talk about it in these lofty slogans, but
when you actually drill into the specifics, things start to
get uncomfortable. We found one of the few guys in
the industry, willing to speak completely openly, willing to get
(02:31):
really uncomfortable with us. Someone who's trying to do something
to fix the lack of diversity and tech from within
his own tiny startup. Oh cool, I look at this
giant chess board. The guy's penny work in a small
(02:58):
coworking space in downtown San Francisco. They're on a shoestring budget.
It's really not a glamorous place. They don't have free snacks,
there isn't very good natural light, and their office is
about the size of the bedroom room, A spacious, lovely
I was telling her, I'm excited for her to see
how like the other half of startups live, this is
(03:22):
the don't spend a lot of money half of stars.
Inside this tiny office, there are four guys sitting side
by side. My name's Mitch. I grew up in San Jose.
I'm a mid twenties white guy. I'm alex and Stanford
is American. My name's Andrew Donnas. I'm half black, half white.
(03:43):
Um I'm married, and I'm my dad. I am Jonathan,
and I was born in Taiwan and I grew up
in Maryland. All four of them believe it's the right
move for their company to be prioritizing diversity now. Not
just because it's the right thing to do, they also
believe it will help their product. Yeah, Penny is this
(04:06):
app that links to your bank accounts and can give
you financial advice based on your spending patterns. Here's Mitch.
As we were working on that core product, we were realizing,
we're both two software engineers that grew up in the
Bay Area. How are we going to get a product
that does well in Montana and Kansas and Maine. And
(04:28):
our answer to that was, we should be solving this
by building out a diverse team that can empathize with
people from different parts of the country, from different genders
or different ethnicities. And you use the app by messaging
this chap bot, this computer program that texts back and
forth with you. The chat bot is called Penny, and
(04:48):
Penny has a female face. But at the beginning, everything
Penny said was written by two guys, Alex and Mitch.
Here's Mitch's fiance, Lizzie Wagner, explaining one way that went awry.
So they started to use a little bit of like
a snarky tone, you know when you use like a
winky emoji, it can also be considered flirty. So I
(05:09):
told him I just read this conversation and I think
Penny was flirting with me. And he was like, no way,
it's a computer. It can't flirt, and I was like, no,
it's a flirty conversation. He's like, this is exactly why
we need more diverse perspectives, because Alex and I never
even thought about that comment being taken that way. And
(05:30):
building a relatable chatbot is super important when you're guiding
customers through something as personal and sensitive and daunting as
your finances. When a user writes in and says, I
overdraft a lot, how do you respond? And some people
will respond with, well, they should stop spending that much money.
(05:51):
Other people will put themselves in their shoes and say
that really sucks. That level of empathy doesn't come if
everyone thinks and acts the same in a room. They're
all just gonna confirm each other's opinions of like, well,
that person shouldn't be spending money they don't have. And
Penny stands out from the rest of startups and Silk
on Valley because it's focusing on hiring for diversity so
(06:14):
early in the company's history. I think the default for
early stage companies is not necessarily in aversion to diversity.
It's not an active process of saying we are only
going to hire people that look and sound just like us.
It's the idea that we want to move fast, and
(06:35):
the fastest way to hire people is to pull from
our network. They get this big paycheck from a venture
capital firm and they say, great, we're going to spend
it immediately. They expand their team from two or four
people to eight or twelve. If you punt the issue
of diversity down the line, it becomes much harder because
when you have eleven men on your team on a
(06:57):
twelve person team, it becomes a hostile work environment for
women trying to enter into that team. When you have
a group of all white or all Asian people sitting
in the same room together, it makes it hostile for
other minority groups to join that environment. These kinds of
(07:21):
companies really do exist. We talked to Jennifer Barbattini, as
software engineer who interviewed with Penny in September, though she
didn't get the job. I remember there was one company
that I interviewed with. It was a smallish company like
fifteen to twenty. They had ten engineers, all ten were male,
(07:42):
and all ten were from Stanford, And I was like,
I don't know if I'm a good fit here, like,
and the hiring person was telling me we're we're trying
to be diverse, and I'm like, well, okay, but still
like this is a little intimidating. I don't have a
Stanford eventual, Um, I'm I'm definitely not. I can't brow talk.
(08:05):
If it's a problem at a startup with twenty people,
imagine what it's like at a Google or Facebook or Twitter.
They have thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of employees, only
about thirty are women, and only about six percent are
black or Latino. These companies can hire only people from
those groups for the next year and their numbers would
(08:27):
barely move. So it makes sense to start early. But
the problem for startups is a pressure they're under in
the very early days. You have maybe a year of
funding in the bank, you have a bunch of competitors,
and if you can't hire quickly to build quickly your toast.
The consensus opinion is start worrying about it. When your
(08:48):
product is successful enough that you know that you're going
to be building out a team for the long run.
Even someone like Mitch who's really determined to focus on this,
he's run into a lot of obstacle. Remember, Mitch isn't
this diversity or HR expert. He's just a programmer trying
to figure it out as he goes along. From a
(09:09):
macro perspective of actively pursuing diversity, I'm almost but implementation wise,
I'm i am just throwing darts on board and and
hoping that we'll learn enough from those to get better.
Every Monday, Mitch logs onto recruiting sites like angel Lists, Hired,
and triple Bite. He's looking for candidates or approach, and
(09:32):
he'll spend one or two hours on each platform. He
said it takes him maybe six hours on Monday to
do that outreach, and then the follow up throughout the
week brings his time to about fifteen hours every week
just to fill one role. We spent one such Monday
with Mitch. As you look through a fresh batch of candidates,
these ones he found and hired this week, there were
(09:54):
forty two that match to search criteria. The very first
candidate has real experience, which is great, comes from a university,
I've never heard of also great and then has experience
in different areas, and you see the person's photos, and
you see the person's photo and their name, UM, and
(10:15):
actually what salary they're interested in, which is pretty interesting.
So I will start looking through this. Fortunately, when you
have forty two people every week on this platform, plus
the hundreds across, a lot of startups look at these
sites when they're trying to hire. But after a while
Mitch realized that these job sites, they're only good for
(10:36):
finding a certain kind of candidate. Angel List is great, UM,
but not a good place to look for diversity. Same
with many of the hiring platforms that we tried. I've
asked them about that in the past, and the typical
answer is, sorry, this is just what's available. This is
(10:57):
the pool of candidates. It's predominantly male, it's predominantly white origin.
So Mitch started to look for ways to find people
with more varied profiles, things like newsletters and meet ups
for women and engineering. He also looked for new graduates
from coding boot camps, which teach you how to code
in a short period of time. These people tend to
(11:18):
come from unusual backgrounds, but boot camps didn't turn out
to be particularly helpful for Mitch. He found that a
lot of these graduates didn't have enough experience to start
contributing right away, and Penny, as a young startup, doesn't
have the resources to train them. To apply to Penny,
(11:39):
you have to complete a coding questionnaire, kind of like
a take home test, and Mitch found that some people
who started it weren't finishing, and a lot of the
people who were dropping out were people who didn't have
computer science degrees, or were women, or were programmers of color.
And it was often these candidates that Mitch was most
interested in. Mid suspected it might have something to do
(12:02):
with a lack of confidence, like these people with non
traditional backgrounds are taking themselves out of the running before
they even tried. Maybe the job description will say you
have to have at least three years of experience, and
let's say often the men with two years of experience
will apply anyway, but the women wouldn't. Submitch, he tried
(12:25):
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(13:11):
Mitch had a realization that the very candidates he was
interested in were taking themselves out of the running, maybe
because they didn't think they would get the job. Anyway,
Here's what he decided to do about it. When we
get the sense that somebody has either a confidence issue,
(13:31):
like just doesn't think they're a good fit for the
position or doesn't think they have the skill set required,
we will have a lot more contact with that person
to assuage their fears. That may mean a phone screen
much earlier in the process. It may mean more checking emails.
That helped him shepherd more people through the whole process,
(13:52):
not just the ultra confident ones. And that was a
small success, but it all came at a real cost
in the form of mid just time, the fifteen hours
a week that Mitch was spending on recruiting. That's fifteen
hours he's not coding or troubleshooting or mentoring his team.
Mitch said it was worth it, but you can see
(14:12):
why a lot of other founders in his position wouldn't
really have the time to do this. And that brings
us to the most controversial part. When you get to
that final stage. Would you pick one person or another
because they're a minority candidate? What would you do? I
(14:36):
talked to Jay Schweney Vassan. He's the CEO of Spoke,
which is a nine person enterprise startup in San Francisco.
Like Mitch, Ja says he wants a diverse team, but
he said he's not comfortable with making someone's ethnicity or
gender one of the reasons why he's hiring them. He
explicitly did not factor that into the final decision because
(14:58):
I think that's unfair to us as well as the
person being hired. Um at the end of the day,
we want to have the best people possible for each
role in our company, and this makes sense right. Picking
someone in part because of what they look like can
even be seen as employment discrimination, or it can feel
(15:20):
patronizing to the person who was hired. These are the
kind of counter arguments you hear a lot in Silicon
Valley and elsewhere. But we asked, Mitch, here are two
hypothetical candidates equally strong encoding and other important values at Penny,
but one's a white guy and the other has a
less typical background. Who would you hire? You just said
(15:42):
that they're equally qualified. What we're saying is that the
the people that were interested in hiring were weighing them
across all these factors, and so somebody with a diverse
background and a totally different perspective, in our opinion, is
more qualified for the position that we're trying to fill.
Giving us a perspective that we've never considered helps the
(16:05):
product more than somebody that has our same perspective but
as good at engineering. Did you have put back from
people who felt like, what's unfair? I should I be
punished for going to Stanford's exactly that should I be
punished for going to Stanford? It's it's something that I
don't have a good answer to, other than the entire
(16:28):
playing field is leaning in your direction. I know that
it can feel like in that specific instance, you're being
discriminated against or you're somehow unfairly disadvantaged, but you are
unfairly advantaged everywhere else in your life. So it's just, uh,
(16:48):
it's just a slight tilt of the playing field, a
little less in your favor, um, which I'm okay with.
I can. I can sleep easy at night knowing that,
knowing that if you graduated from Stanford you're going to
be fine. I'm not worried about you. And we just
heard Mitch laughing there. But you can tell just how
(17:09):
carefully and deliberately Mitch has been choosing his words through
this whole interview. His face was flushed. You could really
tell that he was nervous. And I don't blame him.
Here we are shoving a mic in his face, asking
him to talk about gender and race and all these
other things that are so touchy. The things going on
in my mind are I need to be careful about this.
(17:31):
I know that people are going to look at me
and say, you're just some white dude rattling off about diversity,
but you have no idea what you're talking about. That
may be true. I may not know what I'm talking about,
but I want to get that conversation going so that
I can learn, so that the rest of our team
can learn, and so that um, we do better moving forward.
(17:53):
We'd basically just saying, you know, Allen, I really can't
remember the last time I was this nervous trying to
come up with the most delicate way to pose these
questions to me too. And Aki, you and I are
both women of color, you're also gay. It really makes
you think back to every time you've ever been offered
a new job. Yeah, and I guess until now this
(18:15):
has all been theoretical. But when we went in to
interview the Penny team, they were in the final stages
with one candidate. They were talking to a woman and
she's of Indian descent. While we were in the Penny office,
we got the team altogether in a room and asked
them what they thought of her. Yeah, they all thought
she would work well with the team, but she lacks
(18:35):
some technical experience. Specifically, she wasn't fluent in the main
programming language that Penny is written in. On top of that,
the company was about to enter a really busy period.
Great culture fit. It's somebody that we would all gladly
having the room working with us, because she's articulate and
(18:55):
well thought out and it's very responsive to feedback. How
do you weigh that with the fact that shifts no
experience shipping production Ruby code, which is the language that
we write in UM, but seems to have the aptitude
to pick that up quickly. Well, the answer is we
don't know, so ak. When we visited Mention his team,
(19:18):
everything that they were saying seemed pretty reasonable to us. Yeah,
I thought he was a really thoughtful guy. I was
just genuinely impressed. But we're not experts on this either,
So we outlined Mitch's philosophy and tactics with my Von Hutchinson,
a former labor lawyer who is now a consultant helping
smaller startups on diversity and inclusion. You get an A
(19:41):
for enthusiasm Mitch for this letter grade, I would give
him a beat. Um. I think that he's doing some
of the right things. Um, he's taking a couple of risks,
but he could take bigger risks. I think that he
could definitely educate itself a little bit more, just comb
through the resources and see what's out there. My Van
said that in the long term, Penny should build relationships
(20:04):
with organizations that are trying to bring more underrepresented groups
into tech host dinners and meetups and that kind of thing.
But she also gave Mitch some practical advice for right now,
like put your pledge to diversity on your company's landing page,
not just on your job spage. Consider bringing in an
(20:24):
expert to help guide you instead of trying to figure
it out for yourself. And when you hire minority candidates,
don't expect them to do the work of recruiting diverse
candidates for you. I'm really happy there are guys out
here like Mitch. I think, um, sometimes we see guys
like Mitch. Don't stay like Mitch for very long. I
(20:45):
think it's going to be in the next few years
is going to be really hard to hold those values
and not to succumb to the temptations that are going
to be abound in the industry when it comes to
making the final call on who to hire. My Van said,
Mitch is taking the right approach by focusing on the
different perspectives that a candidate would bring to Penny. I
(21:08):
don't think that you should hire someone just because they're
black or just because they're a woman. That will fill
a short term goal. But that's not going to pay
off in the long run. And I feel like so
often we we equate identity with experience and it's not
the same thing, although sometimes they're tied, right, So I
think if you can figure out a way to really
capture that, to capture the experience part of the identity
(21:30):
as opposed to just the identity in a vacuum, like,
that's when you're kind of like more set up for
a success, Which brings us to our climax. Did Mitch, Alexandrew,
and Jonathan hire the female programmer? We followed up with
them in late November, and even though they were approaching
a busy time, they decided to give her an offer.
(21:51):
Her name's Vertica Shrivastav, and we met her just a
few days after she accepted Penny's offer. She told us
that as she's met with all these different companies, she
knew she was likely going to be an outlier. I
made it a point to ask Um how many female
engineers they had, And after I started asking, I realized
(22:15):
it made people uncomfortable. I didn't mean I didn't mean
it as like a point of like superiority. I just
wanted to know how many female engineers because it would
affect me as someone joining their team, and it made
people uncomfortable. UM. They kind of be like, you know, well,
we had this engineer she left. UM, but she didn't
(22:35):
sense that same discomfort at Penny. I had asked them
a question, UM, saying that companies always asked me why
am I interested in them? I think it's only fair
for me to ask why are you interested in me?
And I liked that they didn't like tiptoe around the
fact that I'm a female engineer. They're like, diversity is
something that's really important to us, and you're clearly different
(22:56):
because you're female, and then also listed like other things
that were a little differ and about me then I
guess the average software engineer. So like that they're honest
about that and they're not trying to just because I'm
a girl come out of the team like they saw
something more in me other than just that I'm a female.
(23:16):
Vertica starts this week, but Mitch's work isn't over. Wi Bond,
the diversity consultant, told us that it's not going to
be enough to just hire candidates with minority backgrounds. The
hardest part is making sure that the new hire feels
like a real and necessary part of a team with
challenging work, but also the right amount of support. It's
(23:37):
a difficult balance, Mitch just success in the long term
ultimately depends on whether Vertica stays and thrives at Penny
and down the road, whether the different people Mitch keeps
hiring will make the app more useful and enjoyable to everyone,
not just people in the Silicon Valley bubble. And that's
(24:02):
it for this week's episode of Decrypted. Thanks for listening.
You can subscribe to the show on iTunes or any
of your favorite podcast apps. While you're there, please leave
us a rating and review. I read each and every
one of these reviews. It helps us keep making the
show better, and it also helps us find new listeners
and tell us what do you think of the state
(24:23):
of diversity in the tech industry. I'm on Twitter at
Ellen Hewitt and I'm met aki its O seven. This
episode was produced by Pierre ged Kari Magnus Hendrickson, and
Liz Smith. Emily Buso edited Ellen's print story, which you
can find on Bloomberg dot com Slash Technology. Alec McCabe
is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week.
(24:57):
Don't let your legacy I T systems cost you money, innovation,
and a place at the digital table of the future.
You can change your systems and the economics of it
with software from red Hat. See how at red hat
dot com.
Don't let your legacy I T systems cost you money, innovation,
and a place at the digital table of the future.
You can change your systems and the economics of it
with software from red Hat See how at red hat
dot com. Today's episode is about a guy called Mitch
al Lee. He runs a startup called Penny in San Francisco.
(00:23):
We'll tell you later about what Penny does. For now,
what you need to know is Penny is almost two
years old and it's really small. It's Mitch, his co founder, Alex,
and two employees. They're all software engineers, and big surprise,
they're all guys. A few months ago, Mitch started looking
for a fifth employee, and he wanted that fifth person
(00:44):
to be different from him and the rest of the team.
And since this is a podcast and we can't just
show you a picture of Mitch, we asked Mitch's sister
Christina to describe what he looks like. He's always got
some like really soft hoodie or T shirt on and
jeans or corduroys. If he was walking down the street,
(01:04):
you probably wouldn't necessarily notice. He blends in pretty well. Basically,
Mitch looks just like a lot of other people in
Silicon Valley. He's young, he's white, he's straight, and he
went to a top college. Yeah, he even has this
neatly trimmed beard, and perhaps because he's a cyclist like
the rest of San Francisco, he has a nice tan too.
(01:27):
In Silicon Valley, most programmers are white and Asian men
who have computer science degrees from elite universities. But for
Mitch's next higher he's committed to looking outside that pool
of people. That's pretty unusual for a company of penny size.
Some people would call it affirmative action hiring, because Mitch
is going to be actively considering the candidates background when
(01:49):
he's deciding who to hire. And it's a very touchy topic.
As we'll find out, not everyone agrees that it's the
right thing to do him Ako and I'm Ellen Hewitt,
and this week Undecrypted, we're going to be talking about
(02:10):
something that every technology company says they want to do
something about, which is diversity in the workforce. Well, they
want to talk about it in these lofty slogans, but
when you actually drill into the specifics, things start to
get uncomfortable. We found one of the few guys in
the industry, willing to speak completely openly, willing to get
(02:31):
really uncomfortable with us. Someone who's trying to do something
to fix the lack of diversity and tech from within
his own tiny startup. Oh cool, I look at this
giant chess board. The guy's penny work in a small
(02:58):
coworking space in downtown San Francisco. They're on a shoestring budget.
It's really not a glamorous place. They don't have free snacks,
there isn't very good natural light, and their office is
about the size of the bedroom room, A spacious, lovely
I was telling her, I'm excited for her to see
how like the other half of startups live, this is
(03:22):
the don't spend a lot of money half of stars.
Inside this tiny office, there are four guys sitting side
by side. My name's Mitch. I grew up in San Jose.
I'm a mid twenties white guy. I'm alex and Stanford
is American. My name's Andrew Donnas. I'm half black, half white.
(03:43):
Um I'm married, and I'm my dad. I am Jonathan,
and I was born in Taiwan and I grew up
in Maryland. All four of them believe it's the right
move for their company to be prioritizing diversity now. Not
just because it's the right thing to do, they also
believe it will help their product. Yeah, Penny is this
(04:06):
app that links to your bank accounts and can give
you financial advice based on your spending patterns. Here's Mitch.
As we were working on that core product, we were realizing,
we're both two software engineers that grew up in the
Bay Area. How are we going to get a product
that does well in Montana and Kansas and Maine. And
(04:28):
our answer to that was, we should be solving this
by building out a diverse team that can empathize with
people from different parts of the country, from different genders
or different ethnicities. And you use the app by messaging
this chap bot, this computer program that texts back and
forth with you. The chat bot is called Penny, and
(04:48):
Penny has a female face. But at the beginning, everything
Penny said was written by two guys, Alex and Mitch.
Here's Mitch's fiance, Lizzie Wagner, explaining one way that went awry.
So they started to use a little bit of like
a snarky tone, you know when you use like a
winky emoji, it can also be considered flirty. So I
(05:09):
told him I just read this conversation and I think
Penny was flirting with me. And he was like, no way,
it's a computer. It can't flirt, and I was like, no,
it's a flirty conversation. He's like, this is exactly why
we need more diverse perspectives, because Alex and I never
even thought about that comment being taken that way. And
(05:30):
building a relatable chatbot is super important when you're guiding
customers through something as personal and sensitive and daunting as
your finances. When a user writes in and says, I
overdraft a lot, how do you respond? And some people
will respond with, well, they should stop spending that much money.
(05:51):
Other people will put themselves in their shoes and say
that really sucks. That level of empathy doesn't come if
everyone thinks and acts the same in a room. They're
all just gonna confirm each other's opinions of like, well,
that person shouldn't be spending money they don't have. And
Penny stands out from the rest of startups and Silk
on Valley because it's focusing on hiring for diversity so
(06:14):
early in the company's history. I think the default for
early stage companies is not necessarily in aversion to diversity.
It's not an active process of saying we are only
going to hire people that look and sound just like us.
It's the idea that we want to move fast, and
(06:35):
the fastest way to hire people is to pull from
our network. They get this big paycheck from a venture
capital firm and they say, great, we're going to spend
it immediately. They expand their team from two or four
people to eight or twelve. If you punt the issue
of diversity down the line, it becomes much harder because
when you have eleven men on your team on a
(06:57):
twelve person team, it becomes a hostile work environment for
women trying to enter into that team. When you have
a group of all white or all Asian people sitting
in the same room together, it makes it hostile for
other minority groups to join that environment. These kinds of
(07:21):
companies really do exist. We talked to Jennifer Barbattini, as
software engineer who interviewed with Penny in September, though she
didn't get the job. I remember there was one company
that I interviewed with. It was a smallish company like
fifteen to twenty. They had ten engineers, all ten were male,
(07:42):
and all ten were from Stanford, And I was like,
I don't know if I'm a good fit here, like,
and the hiring person was telling me we're we're trying
to be diverse, and I'm like, well, okay, but still
like this is a little intimidating. I don't have a
Stanford eventual, Um, I'm I'm definitely not. I can't brow talk.
(08:05):
If it's a problem at a startup with twenty people,
imagine what it's like at a Google or Facebook or Twitter.
They have thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of employees, only
about thirty are women, and only about six percent are
black or Latino. These companies can hire only people from
those groups for the next year and their numbers would
(08:27):
barely move. So it makes sense to start early. But
the problem for startups is a pressure they're under in
the very early days. You have maybe a year of
funding in the bank, you have a bunch of competitors,
and if you can't hire quickly to build quickly your toast.
The consensus opinion is start worrying about it. When your
(08:48):
product is successful enough that you know that you're going
to be building out a team for the long run.
Even someone like Mitch who's really determined to focus on this,
he's run into a lot of obstacle. Remember, Mitch isn't
this diversity or HR expert. He's just a programmer trying
to figure it out as he goes along. From a
(09:09):
macro perspective of actively pursuing diversity, I'm almost but implementation wise,
I'm i am just throwing darts on board and and
hoping that we'll learn enough from those to get better.
Every Monday, Mitch logs onto recruiting sites like angel Lists, Hired,
and triple Bite. He's looking for candidates or approach, and
(09:32):
he'll spend one or two hours on each platform. He
said it takes him maybe six hours on Monday to
do that outreach, and then the follow up throughout the
week brings his time to about fifteen hours every week
just to fill one role. We spent one such Monday
with Mitch. As you look through a fresh batch of candidates,
these ones he found and hired this week, there were
(09:54):
forty two that match to search criteria. The very first
candidate has real experience, which is great, comes from a university,
I've never heard of also great and then has experience
in different areas, and you see the person's photos, and
you see the person's photo and their name, UM, and
(10:15):
actually what salary they're interested in, which is pretty interesting.
So I will start looking through this. Fortunately, when you
have forty two people every week on this platform, plus
the hundreds across, a lot of startups look at these
sites when they're trying to hire. But after a while
Mitch realized that these job sites, they're only good for
(10:36):
finding a certain kind of candidate. Angel List is great, UM,
but not a good place to look for diversity. Same
with many of the hiring platforms that we tried. I've
asked them about that in the past, and the typical
answer is, sorry, this is just what's available. This is
(10:57):
the pool of candidates. It's predominantly male, it's predominantly white origin.
So Mitch started to look for ways to find people
with more varied profiles, things like newsletters and meet ups
for women and engineering. He also looked for new graduates
from coding boot camps, which teach you how to code
in a short period of time. These people tend to
(11:18):
come from unusual backgrounds, but boot camps didn't turn out
to be particularly helpful for Mitch. He found that a
lot of these graduates didn't have enough experience to start
contributing right away, and Penny, as a young startup, doesn't
have the resources to train them. To apply to Penny,
(11:39):
you have to complete a coding questionnaire, kind of like
a take home test, and Mitch found that some people
who started it weren't finishing, and a lot of the
people who were dropping out were people who didn't have
computer science degrees, or were women, or were programmers of color.
And it was often these candidates that Mitch was most
interested in. Mid suspected it might have something to do
(12:02):
with a lack of confidence, like these people with non
traditional backgrounds are taking themselves out of the running before
they even tried. Maybe the job description will say you
have to have at least three years of experience, and
let's say often the men with two years of experience
will apply anyway, but the women wouldn't. Submitch, he tried
(12:25):
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(13:11):
Mitch had a realization that the very candidates he was
interested in were taking themselves out of the running, maybe
because they didn't think they would get the job. Anyway,
Here's what he decided to do about it. When we
get the sense that somebody has either a confidence issue,
(13:31):
like just doesn't think they're a good fit for the
position or doesn't think they have the skill set required,
we will have a lot more contact with that person
to assuage their fears. That may mean a phone screen
much earlier in the process. It may mean more checking emails.
That helped him shepherd more people through the whole process,
(13:52):
not just the ultra confident ones. And that was a
small success, but it all came at a real cost
in the form of mid just time, the fifteen hours
a week that Mitch was spending on recruiting. That's fifteen
hours he's not coding or troubleshooting or mentoring his team.
Mitch said it was worth it, but you can see
(14:12):
why a lot of other founders in his position wouldn't
really have the time to do this. And that brings
us to the most controversial part. When you get to
that final stage. Would you pick one person or another
because they're a minority candidate? What would you do? I
(14:36):
talked to Jay Schweney Vassan. He's the CEO of Spoke,
which is a nine person enterprise startup in San Francisco.
Like Mitch, Ja says he wants a diverse team, but
he said he's not comfortable with making someone's ethnicity or
gender one of the reasons why he's hiring them. He
explicitly did not factor that into the final decision because
(14:58):
I think that's unfair to us as well as the
person being hired. Um at the end of the day,
we want to have the best people possible for each
role in our company, and this makes sense right. Picking
someone in part because of what they look like can
even be seen as employment discrimination, or it can feel
(15:20):
patronizing to the person who was hired. These are the
kind of counter arguments you hear a lot in Silicon
Valley and elsewhere. But we asked, Mitch, here are two
hypothetical candidates equally strong encoding and other important values at Penny,
but one's a white guy and the other has a
less typical background. Who would you hire? You just said
(15:42):
that they're equally qualified. What we're saying is that the
the people that were interested in hiring were weighing them
across all these factors, and so somebody with a diverse
background and a totally different perspective, in our opinion, is
more qualified for the position that we're trying to fill.
Giving us a perspective that we've never considered helps the
(16:05):
product more than somebody that has our same perspective but
as good at engineering. Did you have put back from
people who felt like, what's unfair? I should I be
punished for going to Stanford's exactly that should I be
punished for going to Stanford? It's it's something that I
don't have a good answer to, other than the entire
(16:28):
playing field is leaning in your direction. I know that
it can feel like in that specific instance, you're being
discriminated against or you're somehow unfairly disadvantaged, but you are
unfairly advantaged everywhere else in your life. So it's just, uh,
(16:48):
it's just a slight tilt of the playing field, a
little less in your favor, um, which I'm okay with.
I can. I can sleep easy at night knowing that,
knowing that if you graduated from Stanford you're going to
be fine. I'm not worried about you. And we just
heard Mitch laughing there. But you can tell just how
(17:09):
carefully and deliberately Mitch has been choosing his words through
this whole interview. His face was flushed. You could really
tell that he was nervous. And I don't blame him.
Here we are shoving a mic in his face, asking
him to talk about gender and race and all these
other things that are so touchy. The things going on
in my mind are I need to be careful about this.
(17:31):
I know that people are going to look at me
and say, you're just some white dude rattling off about diversity,
but you have no idea what you're talking about. That
may be true. I may not know what I'm talking about,
but I want to get that conversation going so that
I can learn, so that the rest of our team
can learn, and so that um, we do better moving forward.
(17:53):
We'd basically just saying, you know, Allen, I really can't
remember the last time I was this nervous trying to
come up with the most delicate way to pose these
questions to me too. And Aki, you and I are
both women of color, you're also gay. It really makes
you think back to every time you've ever been offered
a new job. Yeah, and I guess until now this
(18:15):
has all been theoretical. But when we went in to
interview the Penny team, they were in the final stages
with one candidate. They were talking to a woman and
she's of Indian descent. While we were in the Penny office,
we got the team altogether in a room and asked
them what they thought of her. Yeah, they all thought
she would work well with the team, but she lacks
(18:35):
some technical experience. Specifically, she wasn't fluent in the main
programming language that Penny is written in. On top of that,
the company was about to enter a really busy period.
Great culture fit. It's somebody that we would all gladly
having the room working with us, because she's articulate and
(18:55):
well thought out and it's very responsive to feedback. How
do you weigh that with the fact that shifts no
experience shipping production Ruby code, which is the language that
we write in UM, but seems to have the aptitude
to pick that up quickly. Well, the answer is we
don't know, so ak. When we visited Mention his team,
(19:18):
everything that they were saying seemed pretty reasonable to us. Yeah,
I thought he was a really thoughtful guy. I was
just genuinely impressed. But we're not experts on this either,
So we outlined Mitch's philosophy and tactics with my Von Hutchinson,
a former labor lawyer who is now a consultant helping
smaller startups on diversity and inclusion. You get an A
(19:41):
for enthusiasm Mitch for this letter grade, I would give
him a beat. Um. I think that he's doing some
of the right things. Um, he's taking a couple of risks,
but he could take bigger risks. I think that he
could definitely educate itself a little bit more, just comb
through the resources and see what's out there. My Van
said that in the long term, Penny should build relationships
(20:04):
with organizations that are trying to bring more underrepresented groups
into tech host dinners and meetups and that kind of thing.
But she also gave Mitch some practical advice for right now,
like put your pledge to diversity on your company's landing page,
not just on your job spage. Consider bringing in an
(20:24):
expert to help guide you instead of trying to figure
it out for yourself. And when you hire minority candidates,
don't expect them to do the work of recruiting diverse
candidates for you. I'm really happy there are guys out
here like Mitch. I think, um, sometimes we see guys
like Mitch. Don't stay like Mitch for very long. I
(20:45):
think it's going to be in the next few years
is going to be really hard to hold those values
and not to succumb to the temptations that are going
to be abound in the industry when it comes to
making the final call on who to hire. My Van said,
Mitch is taking the right approach by focusing on the
different perspectives that a candidate would bring to Penny. I
(21:08):
don't think that you should hire someone just because they're
black or just because they're a woman. That will fill
a short term goal. But that's not going to pay
off in the long run. And I feel like so
often we we equate identity with experience and it's not
the same thing, although sometimes they're tied, right, So I
think if you can figure out a way to really
capture that, to capture the experience part of the identity
(21:30):
as opposed to just the identity in a vacuum, like,
that's when you're kind of like more set up for
a success, Which brings us to our climax. Did Mitch, Alexandrew,
and Jonathan hire the female programmer? We followed up with
them in late November, and even though they were approaching
a busy time, they decided to give her an offer.
(21:51):
Her name's Vertica Shrivastav, and we met her just a
few days after she accepted Penny's offer. She told us
that as she's met with all these different companies, she
knew she was likely going to be an outlier. I
made it a point to ask Um how many female
engineers they had, And after I started asking, I realized
(22:15):
it made people uncomfortable. I didn't mean I didn't mean
it as like a point of like superiority. I just
wanted to know how many female engineers because it would
affect me as someone joining their team, and it made
people uncomfortable. UM. They kind of be like, you know, well,
we had this engineer she left. UM, but she didn't
(22:35):
sense that same discomfort at Penny. I had asked them
a question, UM, saying that companies always asked me why
am I interested in them? I think it's only fair
for me to ask why are you interested in me?
And I liked that they didn't like tiptoe around the
fact that I'm a female engineer. They're like, diversity is
something that's really important to us, and you're clearly different
(22:56):
because you're female, and then also listed like other things
that were a little differ and about me then I
guess the average software engineer. So like that they're honest
about that and they're not trying to just because I'm
a girl come out of the team like they saw
something more in me other than just that I'm a female.
(23:16):
Vertica starts this week, but Mitch's work isn't over. Wi Bond,
the diversity consultant, told us that it's not going to
be enough to just hire candidates with minority backgrounds. The
hardest part is making sure that the new hire feels
like a real and necessary part of a team with
challenging work, but also the right amount of support. It's
(23:37):
a difficult balance, Mitch just success in the long term
ultimately depends on whether Vertica stays and thrives at Penny
and down the road, whether the different people Mitch keeps
hiring will make the app more useful and enjoyable to everyone,
not just people in the Silicon Valley bubble. And that's
(24:02):
it for this week's episode of Decrypted. Thanks for listening.
You can subscribe to the show on iTunes or any
of your favorite podcast apps. While you're there, please leave
us a rating and review. I read each and every
one of these reviews. It helps us keep making the
show better, and it also helps us find new listeners
and tell us what do you think of the state
(24:23):
of diversity in the tech industry. I'm on Twitter at
Ellen Hewitt and I'm met aki its O seven. This
episode was produced by Pierre ged Kari Magnus Hendrickson, and
Liz Smith. Emily Buso edited Ellen's print story, which you
can find on Bloomberg dot com Slash Technology. Alec McCabe
is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week.
(24:57):
Don't let your legacy I T systems cost you money, innovation,
and a place at the digital table of the future.
You can change your systems and the economics of it
with software from red Hat. See how at red hat
dot com.
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