A diversity challenge: tech start-ups have a great opportunity
Xin chào thế giới! (“Hello World!” in Vietnamese)
Happy New Year! I hope you all got a chance to decompress, take stock, and think ahead about what you want to accomplish and improve on this year. I did my personal strategy offsite to do a second half of 2024 retrospective and some professional planning for the first half of 2025.
As we enter this new year, I’m simultaneously excited about the wealth of new AI tooling we can take advantage of (GitHub making co-pilot free is a game changer) and the speed at which this space is maturing while also being concerned about the next generation of developers potentially being scared away from the industry by stories of AI replacing them and the lack of entry-level jobs in the industry right now.
I’m also concerned about how the perception of our industry and technology is changing in the current political climate thanks to the public political actions of prominent CEOs and VCs. While the people in technology have always had a broad spectrum of political beliefs (like any group), the industry has been seen as largely apolitical (no matter what accusations certain politicians made). The fact that this is changing so starkly could have a lot of implications for the future.
At my company, I’m excited about some of the projects we’ll be working on and about building on the team’s improvements last year, which have unlocked new capabilities. That is the benefit of continuous improvement—it never ends!
I plan to write more new stuff for you all, and I’m eager to hear what subjects you’d like me to cover. I received some good suggestions from the survey. If you haven’t had a chance to take the survey, please do, or you can e-mail (info for both is below).
If you are new to the newsletter, please check out the archives on Substack. Of course, you can always buy the book.
New Blog Post
Creating the newsletter or podcast every week and promoting the book have seriously impacted my blogging frequency, but I published a new blog post a few weeks ago: “The CTO’s Guide to Crafting a Technology Leadership Resume.” I wrote it after reviewing multiple resumes of senior engineering leaders I mentor who are considering switching roles in the next year and finding that I was giving the same advice to all of them.
About this newsletter
What makes this newsletter unique is that every two weeks, I share a chapter from my book It Depends: Writing on Technology Leadership 2012-2022, which Unit Circle Press released in March of last year. These chapters are not sequential; each is a standalone piece. In addition, a podcast serializes the audiobook in order, released alternate weeks from this newsletter.
The Latest Podcast
The latest episode of the podcast is “Using Self-selection to Create Journey Teams at Avvo.” It describes how we used a self-selection exercise as part of a re-organization to let people self-select into new teams. It also discusses some lessons learned and mistakes made. I shared this chapter in this newsletter in November. In the podcast episode, I went into much more depth about what Journey Teams were and how we arrived at them as a novel organizational structure at the company. Even if you’ve already read the chapter in the newsletter or the book, you will find that the podcast adds a lot of valuable context.
You can get the episode at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, directly via the RSS Feed, or wherever you get your podcasts (see pod.link for a more extensive list).
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About this week’s chapter
As I mentioned in the introduction, I’ve been concerned about some of the overtly political changes some companies in our industry have made in the last year. One of the most disappointing things has been how many companies are publicly ending their DEI initiatives. Now, I never believed that many of those companies were serious about those programs. Still, even if some of them were Diversity-Washing all along, it did mean increased opportunities for under-represented groups in technology at those companies for a while. Hopefully, that will have some long-term impact.
I wrote this chapter while I was the CTO at Avvo, my first CTO role and my first role after Spotify. While I was at Spotify, they made a significant effort to increase the number of folks from under-represented groups on the technology team. Still, even as the number of employees from those groups increased, the percentages of those groups relative to the whole team stayed relatively low. The entire team was just too large for reasonable increases in the under-represented percentage to affect the organization’s diversity as a whole significantly.
I made it my mission that we would make meaningful strides in building a genuinely diverse engineering team at Avvo. That effort started before I joined the company in discussions with my new boss and head of technology recruiting. I’m very proud of our success at Avvo, the diverse team we built, and what that team accomplished. For more details about our changes, see Changing Hiring Practices to Build a More Diverse Technology Organization in the February 25th, 2024 newsletter, which is Chapter 31 in the book.
The law of small numbers made it possible to achieve such success in such a short time. I joined Avvo to help the company scale. The existing team was relatively small, so each new person we added from an underrepresented group could profoundly impact the percentages and visibility of that group. Once I had that realization, I decided that it was up to us, the start-up CTOs, to make meaningful progress in improving representation in the industry. I wrote a short post encouraging my peers to prioritize diversity because I knew the larger companies weren’t serious about it.
This is chapter 30 of It Depends.
A diversity challenge: tech start-ups have a great opportunity
Originally published on May 16, 2017
For decades, we’ve been complaining about the lack of diversity in the technology industry. We’ve worked on the pipeline problem. We’ve worked on reducing bias in hiring. We’ve worked on the sourcing problem. We’ve worked on the retention problem. The net result thus far is that we’ve barely moved the needle.
Most of the companies that are investing in diversity programs are large companies. For them, their continuing lack of diversity is a public embarrassment.
At scale, though, it is a far more difficult challenge for a company like Google, Microsoft, or Facebook to reach any percentage of the tech workforce that mirrors their customer base. The numbers are too large to move the needle. It’s far easier for startups.
A critical part of building an inclusive culture that supports diversity is reducing “otherness.” Inclusiveness is also much harder to do in a large company. If Google hired 1000 developers of color across all their offices, those individuals might never encounter another person like themselves on a daily or weekly basis. They may still be the only person of color their peers see at work. They will be spread too thinly across the population.
Large technology companies should still work consistently to improve their diversity, but startups are much better suited to solve the diversity problem for the industry as a whole.
A startup with a development team of ten, four women, has a ratio of 40% female developers. Any woman who interviews with the company will see that they are welcome. Any man interviewing will understand that they will be joining a company that takes diversity seriously and will be expected to conduct themselves appropriately. This would be the same for any other underrepresented group. If the company is serious about building a diverse workforce, they will find it easier to continue to be diverse as they grow.
Bringing in a diverse workforce at the early stages of a company will also mean leadership opportunities for those employees as the company grows. It will help address the lack of diversity in industry leadership, which further helps build minority representation. It will also eventually mean more startups started by underrepresented industry groups, which will continue to fuel diversity in the industry. Some of these startups may be acquired, putting their leadership into the leadership of other companies, increasing diversity in them.
Most surveys show that startup founders’ most significant challenge is hiring development talent. Meanwhile, there are ever-larger numbers of coding schools and boot camps graduating eager junior developers, willing to work hard, and coming from largely underrepresented populations in the industry. Many experienced minority developers at larger companies would be interested in an environment that allows them to be themselves.
Unfortunately, most startups neglect the critical cultural aspects of building their company as they chase product/market fit, funding, or customers. Many haven’t considered that building a diverse company will help them find the right product for mainstream audiences, that sources of capital increasingly value diversity in their funding decisions, and that diverse teams build better products that attract more customers.
So, I call on my fellow startup CTOs and CEOs to take on this challenge. If we succeed, we will not only build a better industry but also create better companies for our shareholders, employees, and ourselves.
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