Image shows a TODO list titled “Second Shift”. List items: prep K12 talk, blog on woman at the company, tweet a fun selfie with a hashtag. The last item is “FIX IMPOSTER SYNDROME” (all caps).
Corporate feminists and big companies love to talk about imposter syndrome because then they can shove it into the second shift work that women and minorities are expected to do.
It’s just an expected hazard, ladies, and don’t worry just fix thyself. Once you’ve made sure that we’re making the appropriate effort on the pipeline, of course – we all know that’s the biggest problem. Sometime between the talk you’re giving to those school kids and by the way we thought it would be cool if you wrote something for the company blog talking about how great it is to work here whilst female. PR will help you.
Your male teammate never mentions the blog post, but he does send back that code review you’ve been waiting two days for. He wants you to do it completely differently, and you sigh because you have three other branches on top of that, now. You stay late proving that his way won’t, in fact, work. What a waste of time. Better not include that in the talk.
You feel discouraged, and try to talk to your manager about it. But he’s just been to the company mandated diversity training. He tells you how much the work you’re doing on the pipeline is appreciated, dodges your question about promotion, and later sends you an article on Imposter Syndrome.
Imposter: one that assumes false identity or title for the purpose of deception.
Here’s the thing. Maybe you are, in fact, an imposter. Maybe you are a Hufflepuff trying to survive in Slytherin. You have so many great qualities, but they won’t ever shine when people keep calling you “mudblood” and putting bugs in your bed. Maybe it’s more Mean Girls.
If you have to be like Regina George to succeed, can you? Do you want to? What might attempting do to you?
I’m telling you this, because I was an imposter. I tried to succeed in a system that told me I would never be allowed to. Where I saw ten times as many women burning out and unappreciated close up as I did snippets of women succeeding at a distance.
I tried “working harder” and “being more confident”. It would sometimes work, or maybe I would sometimes get lucky. And then another reorg, another dude who thought that any effort at improving diversity was “lowering the bar” asking me to prove it again and again and again. The voice in my head that questioned whether I belonged, whether I could ever belong, got louder and louder.
Maybe I’m not good enough.
Maybe I can’t work hard enough.
Maybe I don’t want it enough.
I felt like leaving tech was just a matter of time, and how long I survived a measure of my own resilience.
Getting out of that environment, and working to shed the baggage I picked up when I was trying to be a Slytherin – learning how to have opinions again, learning how to be a decent person, and how to expect decency in others… well that was the best thing I ever did for my career.
I recognise the person who wrote the post about leaving. But I’m not her, anymore. I don’t feel that way. I remember it, but it’s not how I feel. I’m not an imposter anymore – I’m where I belong, working at the intersection of multiple things that interest me. I’m appreciated generally, and treated with respect by my team and peers.
The person I was when I wrote the leaving post couldn’t have imagined this. She had no concept that it was possible.
It is.
Maybe imposter syndrome is a sign. It’s telling you to get out – whilst you can.
And managers, consider that if you have capable people on your team with “imposter syndrome” – the causes are largely environmental, so you may well have given it to them.
I put together this talk as part of Design+Exclusion. It’s about the ways in which women get told to be quiet, and some of the thought behind our approach to inclusivity with Technically Speaking.
This was a challenging talk to put together because part of it involved looking up some of the things people have said to me online that have not been so nice and talking about them. But I think it’s important to highlight the ways in which we get silenced – because it’s easy to ignore, and to surface the hard and continuous work that goes into creating space for under-indexed folk to speak up – because it’s easy to overlook.
SPONSORSHIP ISN'T ALWAYS BIG – stop the presses, this is fantastic insight
— duretti (🗣 dret-tea) hirpa ✨ (@duretti) March 20, 2017
I have a friend who has followed her boss from job to job because he sets her up to be successful. This is what we typically think of as sponsorship. But, it’s a high bar to meet and one that we may not feel we have the power to do.
Credit: Pexels / UnsplashSince that article on Uber dropped, I’ve been watching people’s reaction. There was the shock from people who should know better, and the lack of surprise from many women but there was also something that I can only describe as a PTSD reaction from many technical women I know. I saw it on Twitter. I saw it in our Slack team. I felt it myself.
It’s one thing to intellectually know that this stuff is happening, constantly, and another to be read another woman’s story, see the exact details, all the things that match up to your own experience. The threats – overt or more subtle – and senior leadership not giving a shit. To see the PR blitz, because there’s always a PR blitz, and then see the tweet about the smear campaign that goes with the PR blitz and be like. Oh. Of course. That too.
I must have spent a year thinking about that blogpost before I wrote it. I sat on it for months before publishing it. Nearly three years later, that piece is still going. The industry hasn’t changed.
I’ve changed, though.
I chose the management track because I realised that the best way for me to be part of an inclusive team is to run one. I picked smaller companies and leaders who exhibited some degree of awareness. I learned to be more reassured by the phrase “we’ve fired people for harassment” than “nothing has happened here”. I realized that I care more about numbers for women in leadership roles than gamed metrics of overall representation. I chose working remotely because in an office there’s a constant, visual, reminder that I’m in the minority. Also I would have to get dressed and brush my hair every day. But sometimes I feel like I failed because it wasn’t a free choice, I didn’t look at management vs staying an IC and feel like I could do either. I chose the route I felt was survivable.
And I worked hard to identify the ways that being a woman in tech, experiencing the things that we all seem to experience, and watching those things happen to my friends, too, had made me a less good, less nice, person. And then I worked hard on them, on not being damaged by that whole experience. Because it turns out, that becoming a jerk is a normal reaction to being treated badly by jerks. And the only person who was going to fix that, was me.
Don’t get me wrong – I love my job. I love building functional and inclusive teams. But I wish I knew what it was like to be an engineer on a functional team, in a supportive environment. Where I didn’t regularly feel other or put up with overt, or “nice” sexism.
There’s this collective trauma here, and it’s not from one incident. The myriad effects create a map that explains the careers we have – or haven’t had. The choices we made, and the ones we didn’t believe were there. And the systematic inequity of opportunity that it seems will never go away.
We’re all outraged at Uber – again. Because it turns out that the company that tolerates sexual harassment from their drivers, and in the government they work with, also tolerates and enables it… amongst their own employees.
And yeah, this was really bad, but it’s not like this is just Uber. I’ve heard similar stories from most tech companies and every woman in tech I know has a story like that. Often more than one. We all know that HR is there to prevent the company getting sued, not anything else. The only shocker here is how blatant it was – do they know what retaliation means?
One HR rep even explicitly told me that it wouldn’t be retaliation if I received a negative review later because I had been “given an option”.
It’s safe to hate on Uber, because we know they are evil. The challenge is not tweeting something supportive when it happens at a company you hate. It’s how you react when it happens in a company that you’re invested in, to someone sitting right next to you. Many men have sat next to these things, known they were happening, and said nothing. Plenty of white women have done the same to women of color.
Perhaps we should talk about how even when the disregard for the law is flagrant, as it is here, it’s still better to write a tell-all blog post than to seek legal redress. Women know the consequences for that, and they don’t take them. Who can blame them.
And maybe we should also talk about what will happen next. Nothing. Uber chose their “high performing” men over the high performing woman, and now they are on some empty PR blitz (HR is going to investigate! LOL) but it means nothing. Maybe they will have a harder time hiring women now. I don’t think any woman I know was willing to work there anyway, so how much worse can that get, really? Uber was built by the brogrammers, for the brogrammers. This is how it’s always been. This is how it will always be.
Delete the app – great – but it’s still baked into Google maps functionality, so Uber will still be fine. VC bros don’t turn on their own kind because they continue to operate the way they always have.
And let’s also talk about the bar we hold women to in these situations. You shouldn’t have to be a white woman with a best selling book to expect to be respected at your job. You shouldn’t need to have to document every interaction with your manager or HR department.
Finally, can we please talk about why men let other men slide on these things? It’s because they identify with the dude who made a “mistake” more than the woman he harassed. It’s because they fear they too could make that “mistake” – people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. And so they let him make the “mistake” again and again and again. Please, guys, let that one go. You probably wouldn’t make that “mistake” with every woman who joined your team. I believe in your capacity to be better. This is not about you. It’s about him. There is no “high performing” manager who can’t be trusted to manage women – fully 50% of the population – without propositioning them. Understand that “we’re poly but my wife is more successful than me” is the new “my wife doesn’t understand me”. It’s possible to be poly and not be creepy AF, but this dude failed at it. Let him go. Firing people is horrible, but I could fire a manager like that and never lose a minute’s sleep over it. You can do it, too.
As an industry, we need to take a hard look at ourselves right now. We have bragged about changing the world, and we have to accept that we have – and not all for the better. The fear of entitled white men does not just prioritize the fear of their litigation over that of the women they harass, it also drives this misunderstood argument of free speech – people can say what they like, you don’t have to give them a platform*. We’ve created things to allow people of similar interests to find each other, and the Nazis, well they have found each other, and they are stronger than ever. We have erased and hidden and diminished sexual harassment and assault until it has reached the highest office. We have encoded a white supremacist patriarchy in the platforms we have built and watched it thrive in the real world whilst disclaiming responsibility.
It started inside the office – not just of the company you hate – but the ones you like, the one you work or would work for. When these kind of things happened, and nothing was done.
* Let them RTFM and build their own – all the pieces are out there – this is the beauty of OSS.
On the list of “things that come up a lot in Feminist Cabal meetings”, pretty high is a complaint that HR have taken ownership of “inclusion” and are being ineffective.
This is not surprising when you think about it. Regardless of discussion about “employee happiness” etc, the main function of HR is to ensure that the company doesn’t get sued. Whilst in theory inclusion should reduce the risk of lawsuits, in practise it’s unclear as to whether that is the case, and definitely that is a longer-term outcome rather than a short-term one.
Three reasons why HR have tended to be ineffective at Inclusion: Trust, Data, and Accountability.
Trust
A genuine inclusion effort defines new parameters, but HR are often distrusted for failing to enforce the theoretical parameters of the old system. Almost every woman I know has a story about harassment at work, and spoiler, the ending is never “but HR handled it really well and I still work there”. Alternative endings include:
“It was OK in the end because it pushed me to look for something better. That guy still works there though.”
“They finally fired him after he harassed multiple other people, but process was exhausting and cost me a lot of political capital.”
There is no viable strategy for inclusion that doesn’t include the willingness to fire people over it. Inclusion is the potential to include everyone, not the inclusion of everyone. That means that people must be included on the basis of things they can’t change (gender, orientation, race, etc…) but it’s perfectly reasonable, necessary, to exclude people on the basis of things they could change, but have chosen not to (bigotry).
Far too often people hear “well we want to include everyone, which means including that guy who is choosing to harass you” and the outcome of this is that the victim of harassment quits instead, and the harasser keeps working there.
This doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t be given feedback and the opportunity to improve. But it’s up to them to take it, and there need to be consequences if they don’t.
How does this relate to trust? Well, this is the system we have had for a long time, and HR have been the enforcers of it. It is hard for people to have any faith that the same documentation, and the same people, will now have a new ethos.
And if the priority is not getting sued… the strategy has generally been gas-lighting victims into submission, and anecdotally at least, it seems like that has been pretty effective. So when it comes down to it, what will win out? Not getting sued? Or Inclusion?
Data
HR often doesn’t want to release data, and there are good reasons why – personal information, and especially for smaller companies, statistical significance. But everyone knows the Dave : woman/latinx/black ratio, and just because the numbers aren’t out there doesn’t mean that people don’t have a very good idea of what’s going on. It just seems like HR are needlessly hiding something that everybody knows.
The same for data around recruitment and attrition. 1 women leaving when there are 10 might statistically be there same as 10 men leaving when there are 100, but is liable to feel very different to the 9 women who remain.
Accountability
Finally, if HR own inclusion, who are they accountable to? Are they evaluated on whether employees trust them to speak to? Or whether ERG (Employee Resource Group) leaders think that they are effective? What’s the lead time on feedback? Is it filtered through employee surveys… run by HR?
Product and Engineering leadership tend to be separate for a good reason. One asks “what could we do” the other answers “this is what’s feasible”. There’s a natural tension there, that it’s hard for one person to hold together. They risk being not ambitious enough, or too ambitious and defining something that can’t be executed on. The questions “how do we include everyone and address historic structural inequity” is a hard one for someone whose focus has been “how do we not get sued” to answer. It’s hard to hold people accountable for these two things together – since success on one may come at the expense of the other, incentives are unclear.
If Not HR, then Who?
Clearly D&I (Diversity and Inclusion) is HR related and even if not within HR needs to work with HR – and HR needs to work with D&I (seriously: I’ve heard multiple stories of HR people bullying D&I counterparts). Even if D&I strategy is not defined by HR, HR will need to execute on parts of that strategy. The title of this post is provocative, intended to invite you to reconsider the role of D&I and define it in a way that will be effective.
Some questions to consider:
Who owns D&I?
Do they have credibility?
Are they trusted?
How are they evaluated?
How are they held accountable?
And finally, is the risk of lawsuits overstated? For women at least (and I expect other under-indexed people), a lawsuit is seen as likely to end your career. Given the state of things, it’s hard to imagine an under-indexed person suing a company where they are appreciated and happy, that is actively working to address historical inequity, unthinkingly perpetuated. Entitled white men seem to be much more litigious. If fear of lawsuits is king, inclusion will never move forward.
This post comes from multiple requests from friends with whom I have talked about leaving tech, and returning to tech, and the way that I started to think about money relating to that. Money is a loaded topic, and I want to be up front here that this is written from a place of financial privilege. I graduated from my undergrad (and dropped out of grad school) without any debt. My first developer job paid well, including stock grants (not options). I inherited some money. I’m also a citizen of a country with public healthcare. I need to work, but I’ve not had to try and create my own financial stability – because I already had it.
Credit: Skitterphoto
Forty-one percent of women leave technology companies after 10 years of
experience, compared to only 17 percent of men [source]. For comparison, consider that the average career length of a Premiership Football player is 8 years [source]. Premiership Football players make a lot more money, but if you know that part your career is likely to be over within ten years, you (if you are sensible) factor that into your financial planning. Looking at the data, it makes sense for women in tech to do the same.
Some people call it a “fuck you fund”. I call it sensible financial planning. Bankers who treated their bonus like it was part of their salary ended up in hot water when the markets crashed and bonuses shrank or disappeared. Looking at the stats about women leaving, to me it makes sense to treat every year you last in tech after ten years as a bonus.
I would love that to be different, and let’s be clear – I work very hard to make that the case, for me and others. But sometimes we play game that’s on, and sometimes we try and make a new game. Until we have a new game, 10 years is realistic – and honestly, optimistic for some.
Tax and Rent
The first way in which I changed the the way I thought about money was to realise that my major out-goings were tax and rent. My salary seemed so much more than I could possibly make doing anything else. But let’s do some math.
Let’s consider a salary of 75K British pounds, which is I think pretty standard for London. And then consider a salary of 50K British pounds (a number I completely fabricated) outside of London.
Woah! A 25K pay cut! But first – the top 25K of that was taxed at 40%. So the government loses 10K, and you lose 15K.
Then, rent. The difference between rent and council tax on a 1-bed apartment in London vs another major UK city like Manchester or Birmingham could reasonably be 750 GBP / month. So now you’re paying 9K less a year in rent.
So now you’re 6K a year worse off, or 500 GBP a month.
But you move to a place where things are on average 1/3 cheaper (completely reasonable for Birmingham, Manchester or even Edinburgh in comparison to London [source]). So gym membership, food, transportation… depending on your habits, it might just be a wash.
Then if your job no longer stresses you to the point where you are paying for weekly therapy and / or expensive getaways or other forms of retail therapy… you might even be in profit.
Salary and Longevity
The second is to consider longevity. Consider two job offers. Job A pays 20% more. But the company is well known for being staffed by brogrammers. You think you could do two years. Job B seems nicer – they let you work from home 1-2 days a week, invest in your personal development, and there are noticeably more women there. You think you could do three years there, maybe even longer!
So then the maths (ignoring inflation and payrises):
Job A: year 1:X + 20%, year 2: X + 20%, year 3: 0 (burnout) = 2.4X
Job B: year 1: X, year 2: X, year 3: X = 3X
Then Job B starts to look like a better option financially – as well as emotionally. And that’s not even considering tax.
Let’s consider tax (at an average of 30%).
Job A: year 1: 1.2X * 70%, year 2: 1.2X * 70%, year 3: 0 (no tax!) = 2.4X * 70% = 1.68X
Job B: year 1: X * 70%, year 2: X * 70%, year 3: X * 70% = 3X * 70% = 2.1X
This doesn’t consider that with a non-regressive tax system you might actually pay proportionally more of your salary in tax when you make more.
Even though Job A pays 20% more, in this scenario, you’re 25% better off over a three year period if you take Job B.
Tradeoffs
This is not to say I think people should always take the lower paying job, or move to the cheaper city. I’m not a financial advisor, and I don’t like to give advice about any topic, least of all this one.
But I think people should think about costs as well as salary. And salary in real (post-tax) terms. And for women – our best financial investment might actually be in creating longevity in our careers.
Thinking like this has encouraged me to take more risks in my career, and approach it differently. I stopped being afraid to take an on-paper pay-cut, because I looked at it differently and knew I could end up much better off over the longer term from it. I think I did end up better off financially over the longer term. But emotionally there is just no comparison. Leaving (again) is something I accept as statistically likely, but no longer feel every single day.
But, like I said at the beginning, financial privilege. And risks are much more palatable when you already have a baseline.
Tech culture doles out imposter syndrome on one side, hubris on the other.
Originally published in Model View Culture, April 2015.
Credit: Flickr / Guillermo Viciano
There’s something ironic about the fact that as the deadline for this piece approached, I opened the document and stared blankly at it. Frankly, opening it was progress—I’d been intimidated to come back and make the changes I needed to for days. A piece about imposter syndrome was circulating; it had popped up on my Twitter feed several times. I was afraid to read it. I convinced myself that it explained the points I was making here far more eloquently (and with better graphics!), and no one would need to read my version.
The piece is excellent. I finally read it, and you should read it too. Was it the definitive post on imposter syndrome, such that there never needed to be another one? No. Let alone that it would be impossible (it is a large topic), and that it wasn’t trying to be. I had just convinced myself—irrationally—that an article I hadn’t read meant I had nothing to add to this topic. I was experiencing imposter syndrome… about writing about imposter syndrome.
It’s Environmental
This is one manifestation of imposter syndrome—faced with an intimidating task, we fear that we can’t do it. But another, perhaps far more common, manifestation is: faced with a hostile and discriminatory environment, one we are unwelcome in, our perception of our skills, our chances, and our abilities to succeed—change and suffer.
What we call imposter syndrome often reflects the reality of an environment that tells marginalized groups that we shouldn’t be confident, that our skills aren’t enough, that we won’t succeed—and when we do, our accomplishments won’t even be attributed to us. Yet imposter syndrome is treated as a personal problem to be overcome, a distortion in processing rather than a realistic reflection of the hostility, discrimination, and stereotyping that pervades tech culture. The focus on imposter syndrome as a personal problem, as a series of “irrational” beliefs, pathologizes its victims and diverts attention from the problematic environment to the individual: this is classic victim blaming.
The symptoms of what we refer to as “imposter syndrome” were originally defined by Dr. Pauline Rose Clance, in her seminal 1978 paper“The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention”. The research was inspired by her experiences in a highly competitive and selective graduate program, from which many of the 25 students enrolled wouldn’t graduate, and her later experiences as an educator and practitioner hearing these same fears from women [covered in Hot Seat].
Whilst imposter phenomenon is about the way that people—in the paper, women—perceive their achievements, it’s created and exacerbated by the environment and the way women are socialized:
“Given the lower expectancies women have for their own (and other women’s) performances, they have apparently internalized into a self-stereotype the societal sex-role stereotype that they are not considered competent (see Broverman, et al., 1972; Rosenkrantz, et al., 1968). Since success for women is contraindicated by societal expectations and their own internalized self-evaluations, it is not surprising that women in our sample need to find explanation for their accomplishments other than their own intelligence—such as fooling other people.”
Despite clear evidence of environmental factors (and the damaging effects of Stereotype Threat), not personal factors, we continue to hear constant refrains about how to overcome as individuals, and how to self-talk and confidence-boost our way into somehow not having it.
Meanwhile: Another depressing day of being ignored in meetings. The end of another long code review in which your every decision was questioned and had to be justified again and again. Another exhausting quarter “leaning in” only to be overlooked for promotion… again. When the HR process ends with a reminder of the enforced silence, and you walk past your harasser in the cafeteria because yes, he still works there—of course he does. A Latina engineer is mistaken for a cafeteria worker. A Black product manager debates whether they should call out another racist microaggression or just let it go. An Asian test engineer sighs as they have to answer the question “No, where are you really from?” one more time. A female interviewer is forced to explain, again, that no, she is not the recruiter.
And all the while, we ignore data on how minorities are perceived when they do “overcome” imposter’s syndrome, and when they are confident… and then punished for it.
The life of a minority in tech is one of a thousand tiny cuts while we’re lectured on “getting over” imposter syndrome. We politely call the environmental causes “unconscious bias,” pretending that it’s no one’s fault because everyone “means well,” like good intentions are magic. And so we whisper amongst ourselves, develop elaborate coping mechanisms, go to therapy, and avoid the guys that everyone whispers about but who are still there—because of course they are. At the end of the day, or late into the night because we’re “leaning in,” we go home and wonder if we can do it again tomorrow.
Is this evidence of imposter syndrome? Or is it an accurate assessment about how unwelcome we are, and how toxic, discriminatory, and abusive our environment really is?
It’s Not About Never Feeling Inadequate
The other aspect of the imposter syndrome dilemma is that it gets thrown about way more than it should be, used to mean many things beyond what it really does: a catch-all for people—especially women—who have any kind of doubt. But the reality is that technology has an even greater problem than under-confidence: over-confidence. In fact, it seems that the only failure not celebrated in Silicon Valley is the failure of confidence… and so imposter syndrome is treated as something to be avoided at all costs.
What about when, as Lara Hogan put so eloquently, we (or rather other people) call impostor syndrome what is really “having a totally reasonable amount of self-confidence”? Owning what you’re good at—and what you have still to work on? Really, as Christina Xu pointed out, isn’t the problem of over-confidence more prevalent? “Blowhard syndrome” rather than “imposter syndrome”?
If you’ve watched How I Met Your Mother, you’ll be familiar with the Barney Stinson attitude to life.
“You know what Marshall needs to do. He needs to stop being sad. When I get sad, I stop being sad, and be awesome instead. True story.”
On TV, this is comedy. In the tech industry, it’s:
“Sometimes I don’t feel prepared, and so I tell myself that it’s imposter syndrome, and I go do it anyway.”
The existence of imposter syndrome doesn’t mean that no one should ever feel inadequate:
Just became a manager and worry you aren’t good at it? Maybe it’s not imposter syndrome—maybe you need coaching.
Just switched to a new platform and worried you don’t know what you’re doing? Maybe it’s not imposter syndrome—maybe you need to read a book or take a class.
The overconfidence of the industry manifests in widespread dysfunction and failure conditions that affect our employees and our products. The treatment of imposter syndrome as a horrible thing to avoid, a personal flaw, means that sometimes our realistic assessments are misclassified, ignoring their specific context. In fact, the low standards of management in the tech industry suggest that we need more feelings of inadequacy, or at least humility, when it comes to dealing with people. Products that ship without fundamental use cases accounted for (such as Apple Health and its lack of period tracking) suggest that we need more feelings of inadequacy when it comes to “product vision”. Long-delayed projects suggest that we should feel more inadequate about our capabilities when it comes to what we might achieve—or not—in a given time frame. Privacy issues and rampant online harassment suggest that we should feel deeply inadequate about how we’re protecting people’s personal information, and especially that of marginalized people.
There are a number of harmful implications to these patterns: the pathologizing of underrepresented minorities, the displacement of responsibility for professional development, and the perpetuation of toxic environments. In the tech community, imposter syndrome is seen as a personal problem of feeling irrationally inadequate—yet continually telling women they are being irrational when they express concerns isn’t helpful. It ignores the culpability of the environment and the processes used to evaluate people within it.
Even if it were possible to trade imposter phenomenon for megalomania (which it isn’t), it would only move us further away from the humility and empathy the leadership and product failures of the tech industry tell us we desperately need. What room does the vast application of imposter syndrome leave for self-doubt or self-awareness? Assuming that it’s just irrational self-doubt denies potentially useful support or training. Most of all, chalking up myriad factors to such an umbrella term belies the need to explore where these concerns arise from and how they can be addressed or mitigated. Subtle or not-so-subtle undermining behavior by colleagues? Gendered feedback? Lack of support or mentorship?
And so tech culture doles out imposter syndrome on one side, hubris on the other. We pretend imposter syndrome is some kind of personal failing of marginalized groups, rather than an inevitability and a reflection of a broken and discriminatory tech culture. On the other side, we pretend that any feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt are something to be avoided at all cost, and that destructive overconfidence is the norm, even the ideal for tech workers—the white male ones, anyways.
Thanks to Ashley, Julia, Martin and Renee for reviewing and giving feedback.
I gave a talk at Self.Conference the other week called “Some Things I’ve Learned About Color”. There’s no video, and I haven’t shared the transcript – I will eventually share this content, because people have connected with it and because I think it’s important. But I’ve yet to figure out how to do that. It’s a special talk, and I don’t think a blog post or two is the right format. For now, you can see the live tweets in the Storify.
The first half is a lightly refreshed version of the talk I closed the first day of JSConfEU 2015 with. About how there are 5 causes of burnout that are not overwork, how these 5 things seem like things that side projects can actually help with, and how that might influence the way we try and involve people in side projects. Through it I refer a really miserable project that I worked on (and the worst manager I ever had), and the side project (that turned into Show and Hide) that helped me survive.
The second half, I looked at how these five things are likely to be worse for underrepresented minorities in tech, and talked about how I personally left the tech industry, after predicting I would. I talked about rehabilitation – about rediscovering joy in making, about building confidence, the work of learning not to be afraid anymore. And I talked about coming back. The most interesting part of it being the unknown unknowns.
Since giving it, it occurs to me that this topic ties to another one that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about since I went to work for a startup. The difference between job security and career security. That as part of leaving a job that was “secure” I built up something better – the ability to be confident that I can get another job. Career security.
Job security means that you know you will keep getting a paycheck from $company. Career security means that you know you can get another job, and develop yourself and your career in the way that is meaningful to you.
One thing I’m grateful to from my time at the Conglomerate is that my fear of disappearing – again – keeps me pushing to make sure I stay visible. Women are only as good as their last, most recent, achievement, after all. So I get up at 6am so that I have an hour or so to write code on my side project before my first meeting. I spend Saturday morning in a coffee shop writing. I limited myself to six talks this year, but still – six is quite a lot. I choose this even though it sometimes means harassment, because the alternative – disappearing – is mostly, usually, much more terrifying.
A big company can offer job security in a way that a startup can’t. But, I think that it’s much harder to have career security there. Firstly, because external visibility is often explicitly discouraged. Secondly, because big companies are incredibly complex systems where most people who exist in them have very little control. Of the six projects I worked on at the Conglomerate, three were relocated to other offices, two were outright killed. The reasons for this were sometimes political, and sometimes the product of poor execution. I look back on these and I could give you a list of things that went wrong, but I could not tell you how I could have had any influence to change those things.
An extreme example, but on the terrible project that burned me out, we missed a deadline – in my opinion because of poor project management. I said to my manager, the worst manager I ever had, “I’m worried that we missed this deadline”. He replied, “What deadline? There was no deadline.”
There was a deadline. His refusal to acknowledge failure, to hold the person who was supposed to be running the project accountable, made it clear to me that nothing was going to change. I could bang my head against a brick wall trying to get someone to listen whilst being told that I was being “negative” or “not a team player”, or I could leave. I left. Everything I predicted came to pass. The project was cut down and moved a year later, three people who had remained on the team messaged me to tell me that I’d been right.
In a large organisation with limited power and constant re-orgs, it’s hard to have career security. One of the reasons why this situation of seeing a project failing and being unable to do anything about it was so stressful to me, was that I knew it would hit reset on my getting promoted, and that as a woman I would be subject to what I always had been – prove it again. That because of entrenched sexism and power dynamics it was much more dangerous to my career to be on a failing project than it was to the manager who presided over it. He, of course, got a more important project when that one failed. Failing upwards in the way that cis-white men so often do. I wonder what he took from that experience.
At a startup it’s just accepted that you do not have job security. This is the kind of thing that employment laws in Europe in general but particularly in France cause that the startup scene is less vibrant. It’s very hard to legislate job security at the level of uncertainty that startups operate, and this also inhibits the possibilities of 1-person businesses to expand because the risks are so great. I’m a proud European, and very much in favour of robust employment law. But this is one of the consequences of it.
But, if you are not a cis-white-man failing upwards in the valley, how do you create career security? Some ideas.
It’s not enough to be good at what you do, you have to document and prove that you are good at what you do.
Be strategic about visibility. I get plenty of Token Women invitations, and I get myself uninvited from almost all of them. People want to talk about “diversity” but very few want to do the hard work of inclusivity. Being known for being a woman in tech and not for my technical achievements does not take my career in the direction that I want it to go in. (Note: I haven’t done the best job of this, but it’s something I’m very aware of).
Build your network before you need it. Not cynically – genuinely connect with awesome people over the things you have in common.
In the long term, no-one is going to look out for you, but you. Consider what options you are creating for yourself… and what you are shutting down.
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