 So, for those of you who are familiar with the movie Pulp Fiction, you may recognize this as part of one of the most quoted scenes in the movie where Samuel L. Jackson's character is quoting a verse from the Bible before he's about to do his job and execute someone for his boss, Marcelos Wallace. Some of my former co-workers and maybe even my current ones would say that reflects my management style. I hope by the end of this talk you will disagree with them and not think I'm purely an angry black man. However, there are a couple of parts of this quote that do reflect my management philosophy. So, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness to me simply means leading your team through difficult times. And striking down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger, those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers simply means protecting your team, in my opinion. I'm Kevin Stewart. I'm director of product engineering at NodeSource, our company builds products using JavaScript and Node.js for the enterprise. I've only been there two months, but I've been leading software teams for approximately 18 years. In fact, prior to NodeSource, I worked at Adobe, right in this very building and I've been in this room many, many, many times. But I started from the bottom as a first level engineering manager and over the years worked on multiple projects getting promoted up to director of engineering. So I titled this talk, Managing While Black, Totally Tongue in Chief. Any time that I would text my wife saying, hey, I'm going out for a happy hour with some of my coworkers or I'm going to a meetup, she said, okay, that's fine, but don't go crazy, don't drink too much. Remember, you're a black man and a beamer. They will pull you over for driving while black. And I get a little chuckled out and say, sure, I won't drink too much. But of course, I think that's your car. A black woman driving a Benz. They're going to pull you over just as quickly as they'll pull me. But this whole situation, the interactions that we have with the police and some of these scenarios of traffic stops, they've been discussed quite a bit. And I don't want to talk about all the extreme cases. I want to talk about the normal cases where a police officer just doing their job, pulling you over, and what some of the differences are in the interactions between Caucasians and people of color. So this image, the officer's pulling you over. And the most common thing is, do you know why I pulled you over? Now, it's a reasonable question. It's a rational question. I've, officer observed something that caused them to pull you over. Where are you going? Maybe another question, you know, where are you headed? Because obviously something has tipped them off that it's unusual for you to be here. Is this your vehicle? Does this belong to you? Again, all of these are straightforward questions. In context, nothing seems wrong about them, except if you're a person of color, you may have had experiences where these questions have another meaning for you. Because you may be thinking, why is this officer pulling me over? I haven't done anything wrong. I know it's happened to me several times. So officer comes up to my window and I have my hands at 10 and 2, because that's what I've been taught to do since I was 13. And when I hear the question, do you know why I pulled you over? If I hadn't done anything wrong, my first thought might be, no officer, I have no idea why you pulled me over. I wasn't speeding, my tail line is not broken, I didn't cross the median. Why are you here? This is the way to my house, I live here. Is this your vehicle? Yes, it's my vehicle. If you're going to find that out when you check out the license and registration, didn't realize I had to carry the receipt to my purchase in my car all the time. Context is everything. And last week we had the verdict in the Brillo case where I just had this moment where I tweeted out, where in the world can I go where I don't have to fear being killed by the police? Luckily, I live on the internet and people were happy to tell me exactly the answer to my question. Without fail, I got a ton of responses about, well, you can live anywhere. Because if you're not doing anything wrong, the police aren't going to stop you. Sure. I had a block quite a few people. So how does this translate to situations you may be in as a manager or a leader in a tech company? Some of this will apply no matter the industry, but we're going to focus on tech here. So I'm a manager, I'm having a conversation with someone, and they point out, you are so articulate. Okay, that sounds great. That's a compliment, right? Except, I just said I was a manager, and I'm sure all of you have read a job description. Some of you may have written a job description. And inevitably, there is that one line that says, must have great spoken and written communication skills. In fact, as a manager, the bulk of your job is communicating with people. So the question in my head is, why are you pointing out that I'm articulate? You hired me. That was one of the job reforms. Let's say it's not even someone you work with, let's say it's a partner or a customer and you're having a meeting with them and they point out, you are so articulate. Again, I'm a representative of the company. Did you, were you going to do business with someone where they don't have articulate people? Is that the type of company you want to do business with? Probably not. Now, I'm not going to even pretend that people of color don't get promoted. They do. They get promoted all the time. However, there's always that sort of level where you seem to hit the glass ceiling, where you can't seem to break through. You could be punching above your weight. You could be landing all your projects on time. You could be just doing amazing work and just not get to the level that you're trying to get to. And you have this conversation with your manager about this next level of promotion and they say, I don't see you in that role. It's totally within the right to not see you doing a particular thing, but more often than not, you never get the next part of that conversation. You don't get the reasons why they don't see you in that role, or at least not actionable ones. They may be subjective. They may be ambiguous. But what can you do with that? All that leads to is frustration and usually anger of why am I being held down or why am I not being given this opportunity. It's my personal favorite. It's being told that I need to work on my personal brand. Well, usually what this means is you have a perception problem. You are not meeting people's expectations around what they want from a co-worker, colleague, manager. And generally it has more to do with some aspect of your personality. It could be an affectation. It could be the fact that you're more direct. You speak loudly. It could be any of those things. Now, there are behaviors, there are things that you may do that may prevent you from moving forward. Like, it's probably not a good idea to drop the F bond in meetings. I can attest to this. You probably shouldn't display anger to your team. Those are things that are actionable. Those are things you can change. But if you don't appreciate or like the fact that I'm a direct person or that I'm going to be outgoing or outspoken, you're basically asking me to change who I am. And that's not going to happen. The problem with these questions or these statements are that people of color tend to receive them more than Caucasians. And that's the issue is it's not that by themselves there are any problems. It's just who they're directed at. And the situations they're made in. A few years ago, I believe it was in 2012, Paul Judge, who was a serial entrepreneur and investor, wrote a post on TechCrunch entitled, Greed Trump's Race, How to Be a Successful African American in Silicon Valley. And this post actually changed my life. One, because he was responding to a CNN series called Black in America where they looked at entrepreneurs who were trying to boost draft their companies and get funding in Silicon Valley. And I recommend that you all check it out. It was a great series. The problem was that, of course, when they were having troubles or they weren't succeeding, it was pinned on racism in the valley. And I had problems with that. I wrote a blog post about it myself. But Paul had a different take. He said a lot of times when we identify things as racism, that's not really what it is. A lot of times it's underrepresentation and the side effects of underrepresentation. And that stuck with me for a while. But he also made another point, which is related to the title of his post, Greed Trump's Race. And at the end of the day, no matter what company you work for, no matter what they say their mission is, they want to change the world. They want to build innovative products for people. Unless they're a nonprofit or a foundation of some sort, their goal is to make money, full stop. They're there to make money. And if you can find a way to showcase the fact that your ideas, your approaches, are going to bring money in for the company and improve their bottom line, they don't care what color your skin is. Doesn't matter. The only color that matters is green. Now, we're all familiar with the diversity numbers. There's lots of talks about the diversity in tech companies. And around 5% would be what it was for African Americans and Hispanics. When I asked about the same numbers in Adobe, when I was here, it was 1% African American. And I take full responsibility for this number. That's actually my fault because I told a lot of leaders around Adobe that I wanted to be a member of the 1%. Unfortunately, I don't think they understood what I meant. I'm always going to be a member of that 1%. I wanted to be a member of the other 1%. So, listening to what Paul Judge had to say in his post, I realized that part of my responsibility as a manager and leader in the company is to figure out how to address some of these problems about diversity. So, the first, the obvious one is the pipeline problem. We've all heard about the pipeline problem. And the pipeline problem is there aren't enough qualified candidates that are people of color that we can attract to our companies. Normally, this is where I'd use one of those words I'm not supposed to use. So, let's just say there is no such thing as the pipeline problem. In fact, the bigger problem is that our systems are tied to going and looking at the places that I call the usual suspects. If you're recruiting from universities like Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, UC Berkeley, all of the usual suspects. Well, here's a tip. One, those universities are not diverse in the first place. Tip number two, all your competitors and even your partners, they're all recruiting from those places as well. So, that's not going to solve your problem. The point is that you don't have a pipeline problem, you have a networking problem. You don't have enough nodes in the network for your company where there are people of color. You don't know people of color. Everyone tells you when you're recruiting, hey, recommend a friend. You got to know somebody that you've worked with before, bring them in. You even get compensated if you have a referral. Well, if you had more people of color, they have networks too. They have a cousin, they have a friend, they knew somebody from the hood that is great at JavaScript and tell me who they are because I'll hire them. But that's the problem we need to fix. How do we take advantage of the people of color that are in our organizations now and tap into their networks and broaden the overall organizations networks? Related to this is our process for hiring people. Hiring is fundamentally broken and we all know it. How do we fix it? I think the solution actually exists in, strangely enough, reality music competitions. Bear with me on this one. So let's take American Idol as the status quo. They have a job to fill and it's the next American Idol. They do not have a pipeline problem. I see tons of people lining up to audition for American Idol. They have an interview loop. They run through people and they're judged until they finally find who's going to be the next American Idol. Now, I've only watched the early seasons of this, so I'm just going to go with judges I know. Simon Cole will see someone walk in the door for an audition and look at them and say, you don't look like a pop star. Person hasn't auditioned yet. They haven't shown they can sing. You don't look like a pop star. And he's immediately written them off, okay? That might be a problem. Now, let's look at how the voice does it. Again, they're trying to fill a position who's going to be the voice. They don't have a pipeline problem. They have candidates coming in all the time. But the difference is in their interview loop, the judges are turned around. They don't see the candidate. All they do is hear because the biggest part of the job is can they sing? And almost without fail, when someone decides, I want to hit my buzzer and turn around because this person sounds great. You will see a look of surprise on their face because their mental picture of where this wonderful sound was emanating from does not match who's sitting in front of them. Doesn't matter. They've just made a commitment that they're taking this person on their team. And you'll notice as the season progresses, they learn so much more about this person as they have to coach them and work with them and figure out the things that they can extract from these people that helps them achieve their goal of winning that season of the voice. What can we learn from that? What can we do to change our existing hiring processes to get some of those benefits? Those are things we should be thinking about. Final thing, a lot of the talk about diversity in tech is great. However, it seems to be focused more on the we need more diversity in tech because it's the right thing to do. The optics are bad when you have a company that doesn't have a diverse workforce. And that's absolutely 100% true. However, going back to that point that Paul Judge made about the bottom line, one of the reasons we're maybe not being as successful in making that happen is we're not tying it back to that fundamental principle. How does diversity in tech help the bottom line? How do we make those arguments? So, again, I love Twitter. And it wasn't until years later that I even heard of this idea of Black Twitter that there's this ghetto called Black Twitter where the Black people tweet. So I assume we all agree that's completely offensive. But there is something to be learned there. In product development, people who are building a new product have a vision for what they want that product to be and how they're going to make money on it. And inevitably, people will use their product in ways they didn't intend. And there are things that can be learned there. How can we apply diversity in tech to that product development process so that we can expand our customer base to a larger number of people and subsequently make more money? That's the argument that we should be making. That it's not about just doing the right thing and having more Blacks and Hispanics and Asians. It's more about if we had more people of color as product managers and designers and engineers, they would be bringing their experiences, their knowledge, and their differences to the product development process. And whether it's taking one product and making it more broadly applicable or coming up with new products that are targeted to those various segments, that expands your customer base. Expand your customer base, you have more opportunities to make money. Make that argument. So I started off this talk with an image of Samuel L. Jackson as one character, but I actually have an affinity for him in another role, which is Colonel Nick Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D. in all the Marvel movies. And I have lots of reasons for liking this character. I mean, first one, he's a complete badass. So, you know, but he's also, to me, the perfect example of a guy who's doing a great job managing while Black. He has a global organization of super-spots. He has one of the hardest jobs, which is saving the world, seemingly on a daily basis. But he's also proven that he knows what his company's business is, saving the world. And he knew he needed a diverse team to do it. So he built the most diverse team in the world, The Avengers. I can't find a more diverse team than this, all right? You got a super soldier from World War II that was frozen in ice that you reanimated. You have a female Russian super spy who kicks serious ass. You have an Asgardian thunder god. You've got a billionaire playboy philanthropist inventor in a suit of armor. You've got an archer. And you've got a gamma-radiated monster. Damn. And they successfully saved the world multiple times over. So Nick Fury to me is the person I aspire to be as a leader. And in some ways, if you're a manager now or you're aspiring to be one, I suggest you look at Nick Fury as a role model, someone you should aspire to be. Because he gets results. And with that, thank you.