Accidentally in Code

Tag: presenting

Speaking and Nerves
Credit: Max Pixel

I just gave my third talk of the year, so this marks the half way point as I will do 6 events, total. This included my first opening keynote, and the largest audience I have spoken in front of yet (>700). Now I have a break until September. It seems like a good time to talk about pre-talk anxiety.

Spoiler: I still get it, bad.

I rarely sleep well before a talk. If I speak in the afternoon, I can never eat lunch. When I spoke in the morning it felt like I had a fun choice between vomiting and keeling over on stage (actually neither of these things happened…)

How do I deal with it?
- First, I try and embrace it as a positive thing.
- Second, I try to channel it productivly.
- Third, I try and mitigate things that have the potential to derail me.
So… how can anxiety be a positive thing? Well I don’t get anxious about things I don’t care about. I get anxious about giving a talk because I care a lot about giving a good talk. At most events I find someone who frankly I think should be a lot more anxious about what they are doing than they seemed to be. Maybe they didn’t think through their jokes, or changed something in one part of their talk without thinking about the rest of it, or maybe they just didn’t prepare enough.

How can anxiety be productive? When I’m worrying about a talk I’m giving I have two main options. One: I can hide from that anxiety in something else (aka procrastinate). Two: I can spend time preparing it. I always try to choose option two (I’m human, so sometimes I choose option 1, and then I at least try to embrace productive procrastination). One thing that can happen with this though is, preparing too much or too intensely (normally a lot of low value preparation) such that I start to hate my own talk.

How do you mitigate surprises? Through trial and error I’ve discovered some things that throw me off. I don’t take flights that get in late anymore, because when they get delayed a morning talk is a horrible thing. I always check the hotel before I arrive, because it sucks to arrive and discover it’s horrible. I aim to arrive at the venue with plenty of time to check the AV set up just so I know what I’m getting. I keep my slides in the cloud but make sure they are there on my machine too.

I throw money at things that will result in lower stress levels. Things I have done recently for talks I’m giving: upgraded flights because I was flying non-Star Alliance and I wanted a lounge and space to think. Booked an expensive hotel – I discovered the day before I was giving a talk that I was booked into a terrible hotel far from the venue, so I just booked another one instead. This kind of thing makes speaking more expensive, but it also makes it possible. If I let myself get so stressed out and miserable I would probably perform badly and decide I never wanted to speak again. It’s better (for me) and affordable (for me) to manage my stress levels by ensuring my required level of comfort is met (or exceeded). Of course for some events this is a given from the organisers, and occasionally a bunch of hassle for me and I never have to do those events again.

It feels scary to come out and say that public speaking terrifies me (although I have done this before). But I hate hearing from people who think their fear rules them out in some way, rather than makes them human. Speak, or don’t – I believe in choices, not pushing anyone into anything. But fear is not failure, it’s just information – and very, very normal.
June 15, 2017
On Panels
Credit: Max Pixel

I don’t like panels. I don’t like them as an audience member, because I find they are usually unfocused and boring – there always seems to be one guy who talks too much and says too little. I don’t like them as a moderator, because it’s a lot of work. And I don’t like them as a panelist because I don’t love extemporaneous speaking, and I worry I will be next to the guy who talks too much and says too little, and need to interrupt him. Or worse, that I will be him (is it possible to be that guy with you’ve been socialized to be paranoid about taking up too much space?)

At events with lots of panels, I’ll talk with people and we’ll say, meh, most panels are bad. So why do we have them? Because in theory panels can be really good. Having different perspectives, taking on a topic from multiple angles… this is a counterpoint to one-dimensional Think Pieces and their on-stage equivalents.

The other reason for panels is that it fills a slot with less work… which is a reason for a lot of them being bad. A good panel might (I’m not convinced) be less work than preparing a talk, but it’s not no work.

A final reason not to enjoy being a panelist: it’s scary to get on stage with people you don’t know. You don’t know what they will say, how your ideas connect – and where they don’t. You don’t know if they are anxious too – and if they are anxious, how that anxiety will manifest.

I was on a panel the other day, and it wasn’t my favourite, but the worst part of it was how much time I spent angsting about it. This was a thing that I worried about, daily, in the time leading up to it, but in a way where I was just frustrated and didn’t feel like I had the time to do anything about it.

If I wanted to be happier as a panelist, I would need to figure out two things:
- How do you get comfortable giving up control on stage?
- How do you get better at extemporaneous speaking?
Both of these things are related – I believe in preparation as the best antidote to on-stage anxiety.

Sometimes you prepare actively – as with a talk. But sometimes you prepare generally, for surprises. When I’ve done my best extemporaneous remarks, these have been topics that I have thought deeply and written (or ranted on Twitter) about.

I’m interested in other people’s thoughts on panels: what do you like about them? What don’t you like about them? How do you prepare as a panelist? A moderator?
June 8, 2017
MC-ing Try!Swift NYC

I was one of two MCs and a magician at Try!Swift NYC last week, which was super fun. I’d been thinking it would be fun to MC for a while, so I jumped (OK, asked…) for the opportunity to do it. Liz Abinante wrote an amazing post about her experience MC-ing, which inspired me, although I definitely worried I am not high energy enough! Thankfully I had another MC and a magician to help me! The first day we broke it cleanly that I covered the morning, and that my co-MC Hector covered the afternoon. The second day we blurred things a bit, with Hector appearing once in the morning and me appearing a couple of times in the afternoon. All part of an elaborate joke about them disappointing me that culminated in a break-dance-off.

Natasha (whose event it is) and I are close friends, and I’m continually inspired by what she does for the community. It’s super fun to collaborate and support friends on their amazing projects so I’m always excited to have the opportunity to do so! Speaking at Try!Swift Tokyo was a highlight of this year, and MC-ing was an opportunity for me to support her more with the NYC event. It is really stressful to run an event, and so the idea is that the other MC and I are taking care of transitions on stage, whilst Natasha and the amazing Vaish made sure everything ran smoothly backstage.

For me, being an MC had three components. 1. Make transitions smooth. 2. Make the audience feel welcome. 3. Make speakers feel comfortable.

1. Make Transitions Smooth

Transitions are hard. I know as a speaker, I hate it when I’m waiting to go on, hooking up my laptop, feeling like the entire audience is watching and judging me for not being ready already. It’s hard to be the first person on stage after a break, when people are trickling in, checking their phones. Having a magician really helped – he would warm up the audience, provide a distraction when we needed a little more time between speakers. Handling transitions was the main thing that I did – now we’re going to a break, now we’re going to lunch. Get the audience to refocus on stage, so that the next speaker doesn’t have to.

2. Make the Audience Feel Welcome

Natasha did an amazing job of providing diversity scholarships, many of whom were first time attendees of an event like this. There were also three first-time attendees in the audience who are special to me. The first time you go to a big event like this can be super intimidating, and I kept them in mind throughout.

How do I make them feel welcome? There is a bit of a “scene”, and a lot of people know each other. It’s really cool that a lot of us know each other, and are friends, but we want to invite the audience into that warmth, not seem like a clique they are shut out of. At every break I took ten minutes to do a circuit of the coffee area and say hi to my crew, and anyone else I encountered. I wish I’d had more time to mingle.

How do I make them feel safe? Natasha talked about the Code of Conduct when she opened day one, but it was my job to re-iterate it on day two. She emphasised the hope that people would make connections, which was something that I talked about again before lunch on the first day.

When Natasha ended the event and thanked us all, one of the beautiful things she said about me was that I had been “injecting [my] energy into the audience”. I was really excited to be there, and really excited for each speaker, and I really hope that came across to the audience.

3. Make Speakers Feel Comfortable

I am a nervous wreck before every talk I give, and I know how much the conference staff can help that. I spoke to everyone I introduced, tried to make an effort to connect with them, and connect my intro to their talk. I gave pep talks to a few anxious speakers!

My usual strategy (for basically anything) is compulsive over-preparation. But my life has been chaos lately and my schedule ridiculous – so I did not do that, and went into this feeling like I wasn’t ready. I wish I’d spent more time preparing, but one thing this did was force me to connect with people in person rather than relying on email / slack. I hope I get the opportunity to MC again, and I’ll do more work to prepare – but I’ll also make sure that I connect in person, too.

Overall

I had a great time, and co-MC-ing was actually pretty manageable. I would do it again in a heartbeat!

September 6, 2016
Technically Speaking Workshops

Chiu-Ki and I gave a workshop last year called Technically Speaking – From Conference Proposal to Submit, and we meant to do more with it… and then never did. But luckily, Mozilla reached out to us about doing a workshop as part of their Tech Speakers program (such a great initiative – see this blog post from last year). So we took what we learned last year, re-ordered things a bit, switched up the exercises for the homework, and ended up giving it three times in a week.

It was super fun! The first time giving a workshop is always quite stressful – for starters, you can never be sure how your timings are going to work once you add actual people! But we had a pretty good base to build on from last year, so that made it easier. We’d allowed time between events to learn and change stuff, but didn’t feel like we needed to make any major changes, so that was awesome.

And then co-presenting is another kind of stress. It’s super fun but challenging to present with Chiu-Ki. Super fun because we know each other well and always have a blast! Challenging because we have wildly different styles – of presenting, slides, and preparation. We heard that’s part of what makes it good for the attendees though – because we complement each other, and showcase different ways of doing things. It’s a good exercise for us to push each other out of our normal ways of doing things.

Anyway we had a lot of fun! And we’re super excited to see all the amazing people from our workshops giving talks in 2017… and beyond!

August 23, 2016
Speaker Notes: Burning Down The Patriarchy
Edited notes from my talk at UW Oct 15th which was in part a reflection of what had happened at GHC this year. This is the talk I live tweeted.

I gave a talk on mobile last week at GHC, and I was feeling a little weird about the level of visibility I was experiencing so I started with a joke, “don’t worry, I’m not going to talk about burning down the patriarchy.”

And I came off stage and saw these tweets that were like, “damn”, and I always want to take feedback on board. So here’s that talk. You’re welcome to tweet it.

Sexism in Tech: a Problem?

Who went to GHC this year? Do you know why we have it?

We have it because women still make up 20% of software engineers (2012 survey, web dev higher), the experiences we use constantly are built by predominantly men: 17% at Google, 15% at Facebook, 11% at Twitter. These numbers encompass more than software engineers, incidentally, including at minimum UX and PM and often more. We have it because 56% of us leave at the mid-career level. Because 63% of women in STEM report being sexually harassed. Because right now multiple women are being sued because they named the man who assaulted them. Because just last week two women and their families were driven from their homes because of threats to themselves and their families. Because Anita Sarkeesian regularly gets bomb threats when she is scheduled to speak, and today has been silenced due to poor security measures in response to a threat of shooting. Because Julie Ann Horvarth got harassed out of her job at GitHub. Because one of my friends just abandoned Twitter because she couldn’t take the amount of online harassment she puts up with anymore.

We know that the tech industry monoculture makes for poor products. There is a long and proud history of tech companies shipping products that do not work for large portions of the population. Early voice control software did not work for women. Early facial recognition systems did not recognise black people. The Apple Health app just released without period tracking. And the data shows that more diverse teams innovate more, when measured by things like patent filings.

It turns out you can’t just, as they say, “shrink it and pink it”, you have to actually think about it.

It’s actually pretty clear that women have a problem in this industry. But we can say some good things about it.
1. Firstly, the pay gap is lower than other industries, although make no mistake, it still exists, an average of $6,358 a year. Finance is worse, so you can’t escape this by becoming a banker.
2. Secondly this year we have seen an openness about the data, and a recognition that the data is really bad. That so many powerful men took time out of their schedules to speak at GHC is a recognition of the importance.
3. And the third thing is that there is in general a recognition amongst women that in this environment we should support each other.
Pipelining

I’m going to talk a bit about why people were annoyed at this panel, but first I’m going to explain what Angry Internet Feminists, of which I count myself a proud member, mean when we talk about “Pipelining”.

Pipelining means that people in industry look at these numbers and they blame the graduation rate. We don’t hear quite as much about this one, but universities can look at their numbers and blame schools. Anyway this completely ignores the attrition rate. They say, well our numbers reflect the graduation rate, and therefore they are as good as we can do.

Three major problems with this. Firstly, the graduation rates have been declining for the last 20 years and these companies are not made up entirely of new grads. So this comparison is at best ignorant and at worst intellectually dishonest.

Secondly it’s a complete disavowal of any responsibility. It’s throwing your hands up and blaming other people, and note, these people have less economic resources. I don’t understand how companies can have numbers on par with the graduation rate and claim to be leading in diversity. There are so many places they are not competing with!

Thirdly, the common answer to the pipeline being the problem is to send out the female engineers you have and have them evangelise your company and the tech industry. Which just adds thankless emotional labour on to their actual job of being an engineer. There’s this joke that when you’re a female in the tech industry that you get 2 jobs. Being an engineer, and being a female. But you only get paid for about 88% of the first one.

I have heard many stories of managers saying they don’t like to hire women because their wives don’t like it. I have heard stories ranging from the weird things that will make you second guess yourself, through to stories of sexual assault. Every day women in this industry put up with nonsense that men don’t, and then if they dare to discuss it they risk being harassed, sued, and professionally discredited. In this environment the shocking thing is actually that we hear as much as we do.

So pipelining was the free square in the middle of the bingo card. Because it’s just a joke that that is what it always comes back to. I like to play a game, when important people give talks and mention diversity, I ask them a question that is specifically not about the pipeline and see how long it takes them to get back to it. It’s a comfortable thing for them to talk about, because the pipeline is all external and requires no difficult examination of their own culture.

Why People Worried About That Panel

I’m going to cover a couple of things that made people concerned about the panel.
1. The time slot. This was a plenary panel and a keynote. Previous years this is when I’ve seen Sheryl Sandberg, Carol Bartz, Megan Smith, Nora Denzel speak. This year Megan Smith, as CTO of the USA gave a 10-15 minute talk. These timeslots elevate listening to men, and replace listening to women.
2. GoDaddy. Everyone has heard of their ads. And they are now claiming to be rehabilitated but I think we’d like to see more evidence there. They have done a lot of harm. I think Blake (their new CEO) is well intentioned, but intentions aren’t magic and do not eliminate their previous actions. Sexist marketing materials are an incredibly low bar to step over.
3. The companies in general have pretty poor numbers. Facebook 15%, Google 17%, GoDaddy at 18%, I couldn’t even find Intuit’s. Someone sent me them on Monday and they are actually at 27%, which is great. Bank of America won the ABI Top Company for women award this year, none of these companies had. Intel won the year before although they completely shamed themselves over GamerGate right before the panel. If we read much of the material about women in tech to come out of these companies, it’s heavily about the pipeline – I don’t think there’s much evidence that they are innovating there.
What Happened

I outlined some of these concerns in a blog post, which got shared widely. A large part of the response was “men needed to be involved in the conversation” which completely missed the point of most complaints that I saw (and had).

I decided to live tweet it, and ehashd came up with the hashtag “#ghcmanwatch”. As I was collecting people for the shenanigans, I ran into Alan Eustace who seemed pretty chill about it. I told him I would be live tweeting.

Then I picked up one of my badass friends and discovered she had bingo cards.

Then… the live tweeting began. And we made #ghcmanwatch trend. ABI had set another hashtag, I’m not even sure what it was, I think maybe #MaleAllies. Whatever. We took over. We made them come to us.

The intro to the panel actually mentioned my blog post, which was pretty incredible. If the guys on stage had read it they might have made our game of bingo harder.

I’m not going to go too much into what was said, because if you’re interested you can read the storify. It was very pipeline. It was very Lean In. They talked a lot about unconscious bias training, but not about evidence that UB training actually works.

The next day, so random, I get this tweet from Alan Eustace. Who at that point has 40 followers. And he’s organising a reverse “you talk and I listen” panel, and Schrep from Facebook chimes in and says he will be there too. So I amplify it, share it with friends, and show up. I have to rush there because I was giving an interview to ThinkProgress right before it. Blake from GoDaddy is there too. By the time it’s over, the room is full.

Alan opened by saying that he’d got some feedback and realised he had made a mistake, that the format hadn’t been right, and that it had kept him awake at night. It seemed like a lot of people (women!) who knew him had been in touch to let him know where he had gone wrong. And so they had come to listen.

So for the next hour, they said next to nothing. As women after woman commented on their experiences in the tech industry. We covered the effects of going to HR, which is not there to protect the individual but the company, the prevalence of bad managers, intent not being magic, the despair felt by the phrase “just work harder”, the words that get used about women, and only women. This was me, trying to recreate the what for me has been a powerful experience I think every year at GHC – where almost every woman in the room admits to being described as aggressive, or abrasive, or some other gendered word that means she tried to stand up for herself and was discouraged from ever doing that again. Hands stayed up when I asked who had been called a bitch. And who had been called the C word by a guy who should have treated them with professional respect. A friend of mine talked about how hard it is for her to keep doing pipeline work, she feels morally conflicted about it.

And then it was over. After, I had a brief chat with the panelists about online harassment. The economic disparity is a big issue. Men, especially prominent ones, do not get how much they are protected by their status. Women benefit from this, too, I started getting harassed more once I removed “google” from my twitter profile, a month or so before I left.

Schrep, the Facebook guy, said it had been one of the most useful sessions of the conference, which was really gratifying. I find it funny that he gave me credit for organising, I did a lot of thankless emotional labour in my time in the tech industry that went unnoticed by men in power, and Alan really did the organising. I did (some of!) the hell raising.

What Should You Do (University Students)?
1. Take full advantage of the pipelining. It benefits university students and will discontinue once you are in the workforce.
2. Believe and amplify other women. Men on Twitter have more followers, get amplified more. If you look at your own behaviour you will probably find that you are perpetuating this.
3. Focus on your own message. I got told – by women! – that I was too angry last week, and also that I wasn’t angry enough. This is in no way a productive discussion. If you think someone’s message could be improved, go ahead and make that your message and try it. Let me know how you get on.
4. Check your privilege. We talk about how bad women have it in this industry, and we do. But other minorities, trans people, people of color have it much worse. The best thing I did for my thinking on this was read the book Whistling Vivaldi by Claude Steele (Amazon). We have enormous privilege. UW is a very good school. The coop program means you can earn throughout your university degree and graduate with low or no student debt. We live in countries where we can fight for our rights to equal pay, when some women are just fighting for the right to work at all. Other, less noticeable things – how many of you have a parent in STEM? My mom is a doctor, so I grew up with the expectation that I would have a job, that I might earn more than my partner, and that that would be OK. That has tremendous impact.
What Should Men Do?
1. I would actually advise men in general not to speak on panels of only men. Don’t speak at conferences with no women on the lineup. My speaker coach who writes The Eloquent Woman blog has a post about evaluating speaking gigs for bias. There is no reason why men can’t use that too. Don’t attend conferences where there are no women on the lineup. Demand that the organizers do better. You can also take the Code of Conduct pledge.
2. Don’t be a bystander. We hear all the time, I heard this last week, that it’s a small minority of men who do things that actively hurt women. Maybe so, but it’s a large majority that stand by and let it happen. Men need to speak up when they see things happen in front of them, whether it’s shameless objectification of women, offensive words which get used about women and only about women. They need to start speaking up and saying, “yeah great idea bro but I liked it when Susan said it earlier too.” Especially when it’s offensive. There’s this fear of white-knighting, which I think is completely over-stated, but one way to mitigate that is for men to make it about their own feelings. Like, “hey I don’t like it when you use that word to talk about women”. You don’t have to be female to be offended when a man refers to women using gendered expletives.
3. Look for ways to amplify and sponsor women. Anil Dash challenged himself to only retweet women for a year, which I thought was great. This applies to your team projects, I remember when I was at uni, which wasn’t exactly that long ago, we did this group project. One “girl” was doled out to each team. Along with one AI student, and one business student. At the end of the semester, we presented, and everyone had their role on the team. A shocking number of the women had the title “token girl”. You can shape a better environment for the women around you.
4. When hiring or promoting, insist that there are women on the committee. This is how you get female speakers at conferences, and how you get women into positions of power.
5. Be mindful about thankless emotional labour. Offer to take notes. Offer to organise the team event. Never, ever assume that a woman will do it, never assume she’s happy to do it, and never assume she is being appreciated by her manager or other people. Again and again I hear that is not the case. And, if you call out something like that follow up and make sure it is addressed.
We all suffer in a world where we are constrained to behaving in gender- and race- “appropriate” ways and punished when we do not. Some of us more than others, admittedly. But, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said, and Beyonce sampled, “we should all be feminists”. So let’s burn the patriarchy down. Or at least, tweet our dissent until the men in power listen.
November 5, 2014
Talk Prep: Grids and Concertinas

This year, I prepped one talk. Next year, I feel more confident and plan to prep 3 (working titles: Mobile is a Systems Problem, The Myth of The Intersection of Energy, Creativity, and Time, and a Series of Unfortunate Statistics).

This year’s talk – Distractedly Intimate – has been given in timeframes ranging from 20 minutes to 45 minutes. And though I tweak and personalise it each time (especially when it was the final talk of the conference!) it has remained substantially the same.

That is because it is built on a grid.

This means that there are different adjustments that can be made. E.g. including a section – Application is for longer talks only.

Cutting points, so if I wanted to cut to 15 minutes I might remove a point from each section.

Shortening stories. The close contains a video, which is nice because it gives me a short break and I can come back for a strong finish, but the difference between 25 and 20 minutes is removing the video, and cutting some details of the stories in sections 1, 2 and 3.

The above is the maximum time example – in this case, 40 minutes.

25 minutes is as follows:

20 minutes:

15 minutes:

One thing to keep in mind is having the right amount of content for the time. I hate those talks where I feel like someone talked for 40 minutes and only made 2 real points, and I never want to give one. But I also hate it when the presenter tries to pack too much in and loses the audience because they’ve missed out key things, or the content is too complicated for the timeframe.

I don’t think this talk is really suited for the 15 minute version, so I probably wouldn’t give it in that time. I think the base content is right for 20 minutes, and so every longer session I should increase the information content. My favourite version is the 25 minute version, because I love the video and the time frame is less tight. 40 minutes is a long time to listen to anyone, which is why I mix it up a bit and take a different approach to add that extra ~10 minutes of content and focus on application, rather than ideas (this section gets the least laughs, but I hope people find it useful!)

This approach might seem overly structured, but the purpose of each point is to have a takeaway, and weave a story around it. So, the grid is the concept which in one transformation becomes the (heavily visual) slide deck, and in another transformation it’s the structure I weave my narrative around. I don’t need a slide for each point, but I do need slides (because video!) and I think showing my twitter handle on each slide encourages the audience to tweet about it so I create one for each item in the grid, and it works for me.

There are few things more impressive to me than an excellent presentation, without slides, but often I find speakers without slides become a little unstructured and lose their way. For me the change of slide says “here is a new point” which audience member, or speaker, I appreciate, and I’ll keep them for longer talks – for now.

Preparing one talk, really well, and delivering it multiple times (being careful about not to the same people!) has been great for building my confidence, and has made the investment of time in creating the talk much more worthwhile. Now each conference is 1-2 hours of prep time, rather than 20+. This makes the 5 I will speak at between September and November much more manageable.

September 29, 2014
Returning To The Stage…. Part 2: Speaking to Dudes About Love

Credit: Flickr / Antoinette van de Rieth

There was an amazing response to my previous post, it was really gratifying to have people find it worthwhile.

I wrote it, finally, for two reasons. The first was to take ownership of the experience, to not sweep it under the carpet like it was me that had done something wrong. When you allow someone to silence you, you let them define the story. I was done with that jerk defining that one.

The second reason was because I kept hearing people talk about women needing to speak up, but either glossing over the harassment, or just ignoring the effects of harassment. There are some women who have been horribly harassed, far far worse than I was, and yet they come back, sometimes they even give talks about it as with Caroline Criado-Perez or Anita Sarkeesian.

I found it hard to relate to these stories. These women are usually by some definition public figures – journalists, media commentators, politicians. I could deem their experience too far away, too un-relatable. Well they needed to get on stage and speak again, it was their job, a bigger part of their life. As a software engineer I could get away with staying hidden, keeping quiet. An intellectually dishonest justification of a decision born of fear.

There was a lovely response to that post, people told me that I was brave, thanked me for sharing. And I thought, it’s not really that brave, after over two years. It’s not really that brave, to give a talk at a women’s conference.

That was the warm up.

For my next trick, I talked to a bunch of dudes about love.

I exaggerate slightly – the first in front of 90 people at iOSCon, of whom about 10% were women. The second in front of hundreds of people, a pretty mixed audience, at ModevUX.

My talk was Distractedly Intimate. You can find my notes here, but the short story is, it’s about how people’s feelings about mobile effect what we should build, about how we love our devices but rarely give them our full attention. I reclaimed the feminine rhetoric, and told stories around these themes of – we are in love, we have changed, we are not really here. I talk about adorable hedgehogs, goats, imaginary girlfriends, and the time that I live tweeted a date with a misogynist.

I was terrified. This flowery descriptive explanation, became distilled in my head to “speak to a bunch of dudes about love”. In the days running up to the first event, some mansplaining – a common occurrence as a women working in a male dominated field – had me retreating and panicking. The audience was surely going to think I had nothing to offer, and critique me accordingly. Sitting in a room full of men, not relating to the content, I felt sure this was a precursor of what was to come. Surrounded by people, but feeling other, and alone.

I was blocked on my script. I know, substantially, what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t fit it into my narrative. Denise coached me through it. Then I just couldn’t seem to sit down and write it. Rushing around at work, heading to the gym for a couple of hours instead of sitting down and cranking it out. It occurred to me, as in an elaborate fit of panic-based procrastination, when I chose the 90 minute walk home in the drizzle over the 20 minute tube ride, that I could throw money at this problem. Denise worked my content into the format we’d discussed, and I could breathe again. The problem was manageable. It always had been, but I was stressing too much to realise without help.

It occurred to me, that it was reasonable to ask them to cover an Uber across town. This would make me dramatically less stressed, as it would be faster and more private that two tubes and a 20 minute walk. They agreed.

I wanted to avoid the speaker dinner, figuring that it would only make me more terrified. But I went (Denise talked me into it), and had a really good time. The organisers were no longer names on an email thread, but real, warm people, who were positive about my talk.

I booked the day off work, so that I could focus the morning on last minute bits, going over my slide deck, going over my notes. Double checking my timings. I felt OK about things; I even found time to get a haircut.

I found myself, in a room full of men, miking up. Trying to get the thing over my ears, and under my hair was a reminder that I would be the first woman on stage that day. Too late now, keep breathing. They found me a different mike.

I hid behind a pillar as I was introduced, and then came to the front. Looked out at the room, and could only see men. Took a deep breath. It’s too late now, go with it. Started speaking. Got my first laugh. Good sign, keep going. Spotted a woman at the back. A woman closer to the front smiled at me. Keep talking.

And so I did it, I talked to a bunch of dudes about love. And then a couple of days later, I flew to another country and did it again. Bigger, with tighter timing. Getting dressed that day, I put two items of clothing on back to front, and one inside out. It could have been terror, or jet lag. Thankfully, these wardrobe malfunctions were long resolved by the time I stood on stage, blinded by the bright lights, and tried to make sure my 15 minutes was a worthwhile experience for the people there.

I was shaking with fear. Probably the entire time. I was thrown by the handheld mike, and the clicker, and discovered that my iPad was too heavy to hold one handed for an extended period – time to upgrade to the air, I guess.

When I came off stage, a fabulous amazing woman, one of the co-chairs, told me that I had seemed poised.

I was transported back to the workshop in Oxford. We each gave a word which we felt captured the idea of an eloquent woman. Mine, was poised.

You can see the comments and live tweets, captured in Storify, here and here. I feel compelled to tell you at this point, that one guy thought there was a disconnect in my narrative. I have this urge to apologise, to write some kind of in depth explanation of how those two things are related, just for him.

But in the end, his criticism is intellectual, and not personal. And constructive, not an expletive. So I will leave it, and consider it overall, a win.

May 26, 2014
5 Undervalued Skills in Tech… And Why You Should Master Them Anyway

Credit: Flickr / John Tann

Prioritising

There is a tendency amongst engineers to try and scope out the whole problem, and understand it all, and then work on fixing… all of it.

Being able to say this is the most important thing, and then doing that first – even when it is not the most interesting thing, is a super-power. Do this, and when things don’t go to plan, you can drop features instead of pushing deadlines.

When projects slip by the wrong order of magnitude, like something that was estimated in months that slips by quarters, my observation is that it is usually poor prioritisation. Doing things that are interesting rather than important, failing to eliminate known unknowns.

Summarising

Summarising relates to prioritisation. It’s been able to take all the information that you ingest to make a decision and say these are the most important pieces, and not overload everyone else with all your information. It’s being able to pull out of a meeting, or a document, or a workshop, these were the key points.

Being able to draw out the conclusions from a larger thing shows your understanding, and saves everyone else time. Almost everyone will thank you for this.

When people can’t present the key points of their work, it’s vastly more work for anyone else to try and pull them out. They are also more likely to get lost in the details when trying to communicate it (more on that below).

Running a Meeting

I know, we all hate meetings. But sometimes they are inevitable. And actually well run meetings in limited quantities can be really useful.

There are two key things for a good meeting. First: respect people’s time. This means, come on time, and prepared. Secondly: keep it moving, and actionable. Make sure that you kill discussion that is better taken offline, and leave with clear action items, that are communicated back within 24 hours (i.e. an email that says “this is what we are doing next”).

When your meetings are time-efficient, and productive, people might not be enthused about them, but they will appreciate their effectiveness, and thank you for respecting their time.

When meetings are badly run, or lack followup, they are a waste of time, and cause resentment. We all have better things to do than have a pointless discussion that goes nowhere, or worse, results in an unresolved argument.

Presenting

Sometimes it seems almost a point of pride amongst scientists and engineers to present badly. But if you’ve mastered summarisation and prioritisation above, they will be your friend here. Summarise you content rather than trying to fit everything in, and prioritise what is most important. As for meetings, be prepared and respect people’s time.

Presentations are an opportunity to demonstrate your expertise, and influence people’s behaviour. Give a good one, and you’ll stand out as an expert, and a leader.

Bad presentations overload with information, often losing the audience well before any conclusions are offered. The way to demonstrate your knowledge is not to try and cram it all in and expect people to read your slides, even if it convinces of your knowledge it doesn’t convince that you know what to do with it.

Writing

Very similar to presenting and builds upon summarisation and prioritisation as key for what (and what not to!) include.

If you can quickly put together a well-thought through document and circulate it, or formulate a reasoned email response (or request) you’ll have a head start on your peers who are still wondering what to write, or not saying anything at all.

When writing is hard work, a lot of things (design docs, email discussions, review season) become exponentially more stressful and much more work. All of these things are pretty unavoidable, and only get more important as you progress.

Why Bother?

I have to say, that some of the things that I’ve done that have really been the most thankless have fallen under these categories. But! So have many of the things that I’ve done that have been most appreciated, and that have helped me get ahead. A document became a presentation, became… so many other things. Prioritisation and shipping on time translated into a number of benefits. Being able to run a meeting reasonably well, regardless of any other benefits, has at least saved me a lot of time.

I’m not an expert on any of these things, really. I’d say I do them all slightly better than average for an engineer (and for presenting at least the bar is set low). There are plenty of resources out there for getting better at each of them.

What ~~soft~~ non-technical skills do you take advantage of?

April 9, 2014
Presenting Gives Me Nightmares, but I Still Do It: Here’s How
Credit: Flickr / pinksherbet

I get very nervous presenting, although it’s something I do relatively often. This is not out of enthusiasm for getting up on stage, but rather because I find myself in the position of being the least unwilling engineer.

After my last presentation I was told that I didn’t need to be nervous, because I was good at it (and also because I have a “great personality” – awwh) but I don’t think nerves are a bad thing, within moderation, if you harness them to give a better talk.

There are plenty of people I’ve seen present who frankly should be more worried, because they are appalling at getting their points across. Every time I see someone like that present, I think “this is why I worry”.

Anyway, last time I was so nervous that I was actually having nightmares the night before (about someone who used to be underminey and gaslightey, which I don’t think is unrelated to what I was nervous about). I got more and more jittery as my time approached. And then I got up to the podium, completely focused on the points I was going to make, and the stories I was going to tell, and rocked it.

Aside from the complements above, people commented on:
- The delivery of my jokes.
- Their concrete takeaway.
- An adjustment in their thinking in relation to a point I made (x2).
- Something they are going to look into as a result.
And ranking in my top two favourite pieces of feedback after a talk:

“And you’re an engineer!” – we have a bad rep, sometimes deservedly so.

(My other favourite piece, from another talk, was “I thought you were going to end with ‘and then we all die’, but you didn’t. How did you do that?”).

Narrative

The vast majority of my prep time is spent constructing a narrative. An arc that will tie what I’m going to say together, and then I’ll fit the bits and pieces of factoids into it, as they work. If they don’t, I’ll leave them out. It’s easy to get attached to ideas and facts that you want to talk about, but they aren’t always relevant. If they are but don’t make the cut, they can still come out at question time.

Outcome

This is very tied to the narrative. A presentation is an opportunity for you to influence people’s behaviour, what do you want them to do? I wanted people to take a broader view on something, understand better where we are, and use that to influence their priorities and choices going forward. We’ll see how that worked out as time goes on, but when the goal is for people to take a broader view, then I need to draw focus away from details. When the goal is influencing priorities and choices, I have to contextualise that and make it clear that this is more important than they realised.

Rule of Three

I can’t talk about this better than Denise does on The Eloquent Woman, so I won’t. Groupings are your friend here, details can be grouped, linked together, and lifted up into three distinct strands. Optionally illustrated with pictures of adorable kittens.

Start Strong.

You have maximum attention at the start, why waste it telling people who you are? Better to capture that attention so they listen, and impress them so much they want to find out more – and make it easy for them to do so by, say, taking up a small corner on your slide template for your twitter handle.

Be Provocative

One of the things I’ve been working on is removing wishy washy caveats from my writing and my speaking. This is my blog, of course it’s what I think, and find relevant. Same with talks.

Statistics are so useful for me here, especially talking to engineers. I collect surprising and shocking statistics and pepper my talks with them. So statements like “The tech industry is hard on women” or, “studies show that women leave the industry at greater rates” become “63% of women in STEM report experiencing sexual harassment” [source]. “Mobile is increasing in importance and longer term people expect to be able to do everything on their phones” becomes “13,000 people a year buy cars on the EBay mobile app. There is nothing people won’t do on their phones.” [source].

Keep it Short

I never start with time. Never. I’ve now given enough talks of varying lengths that I have a good idea what is enough content for a given length, and then can adjust accordingly, if time is tight. But in general I aim to use 60-70% of any time allotted to me, and then either finish early, or leave time for questions.

Basically I make a judgement on what points I can make in that kind of time frame, and aim to present them as succinctly as possible, within the narrative. It’s better to come in early than waffle. Especially in a work context – no-one has ever complained about a meeting or talk ending early. It just leaves more time for questions, or for getting back to work!

In Extreme Blue we had to distill our summer’s work down to a four minute presentation. At first I thought it would be impossible. It wasn’t.

Prepare. Prepare. Prepare.

Here’s the thing about a talk made up of stories – you can break it up into pieces. I think my manager had heard the key stories from my talk in the couple of days before I gave it publicly. At no point did I ask him to sit down and practise with me, though! Same for friends I’ve been hanging out with, and err, men on dates (such a mystery why I’m single, really). I’ve practised my talk in bits to unsuspecting people, with the added bonus that since they think this is a conversation (no really, it is) they will respond, and comment, and pick apart my thinking if they find it lacking.

In the shower, or whilst swimming laps, or walking are good times for me to go through all the pieces in my head (stretch goal – start talking aloud to myself around the house).

Nothing beats nerves like knowing you’re prepared. Nothing.

Props

On the day, I was tweeting about how I always present in four inch heels, and that’s not what I’m talking about here, although it goes without saying that I carefully consider my outfit (yet more great comments on The Eloquent Woman).

If I’m talking about mobile, or my career (working in mobile), I present from a mobile device. If I have to use the standard laptop, I put my notes on my tablet. I keep my slides to a minimum, but if I don’t need them – why use them? I gave a talk about my career path once using the Google Maps app (connected my iPhone to the projector) and zoomed around talking about the places I’ve lived and the things I did there.

The Aftermath

I normally don’t remember the 15-30 minutes following a talk, as I calm down from all the stress. I definitely don’t take in anything anyone else is talking about. When I presented at Ignite, I came down off the stage and went straight to the bar for vodka. I’ll also really need some alone time soon after. I’ve learned to adjust my expectations accordingly, and just admit that I was so stressed from it that I didn’t know what’s going on for a while, or need to have a social break. People are usually pretty understanding – especially if they liked what I did.

The End

It’s a lot of work for me to give a talk. A lot of time, a lot of stress. This 10-15 minute presentation was probably about 10 hours of work, not including surreptitious practise time! Recall the nightmares the night before.

But, even 35 people, and 15 minutes, is a lot of other people’s time to waste by giving it badly. About 9 hours of their time, which makes my prep time seem reasonable. Setting objectives for what I want my talk to achieve also makes the prep time seem worthwhile.

For more on presenting, I highly recommend The Eloquent Woman blog.
January 31, 2014