 Hi, and thank you for joining us today for I Don't Qualify and Other Tales Discussing the Impact of Hiring Processes on Diversity on Open Source. Hi, everyone. My name is Amy Marish. I'm the moderator for this panel. I am a member of the OpenStack board. I serve as the chair of the Diversity Inclusion Working Group for OSF, and I'm core on OpenStack Ansible. Our first panelist I'm going to introduce is Mari Tom. Hi, I'm Mari. I'm based in Estonia and I'm a contractor for a city network. I also contribute to upstream OpenStack Manila, and I've been taking almost about two years. The next panelist I'm going to introduce is Meg Heisler. Hi, I'm Meg Heisler. I am based out of St. Louis, Missouri, work for AT&T, worked there about two years and I've been in the industry about two years, also been involved with OpenStack for about two years and contributing to the OpenStack Home Project. And our final panelist is Vicky Delacruz. Hi, everybody. Thanks, Amy. I am Victoria Martinez Delacruz. I am a senior software engineer at Red Hat and also a career for OpenStack Manila. I want to thank everyone for being here today, and Vicky, the first question I want to ask you is you've been involved in different types of internship programs as both a participant and an organizer. Can you tell us about a few of them? Sure thing. So one interesting thing about the OpenStack community that I usually like to highlight is the effort that everybody has been doing on getting internship programs ongoing and also mentoring within the community. Two of the biggest internship programs we have had in the past is OVG and Google Summer of Code. We had pretty much like 55 interns along the OpenStack history working in different projects, at least 15 of them, and from really different geographical locations. So those programs have shown to be able to get a lot of diversity within the community, which is something that is very impressive. Difference about these programs are in general that they are sponsored by different contributors for the community that are also sponsored for the OpenStack Foundation and that they peer applicants to get with a mentor to start giving their first steps in getting to know the community, working on different technical tasks, and also with the everyday tasks such as code reviewing, bug fixing, bug triaging, and other different tasks. I think that will be the summary for those. Great, thank you so much. Mari, now you're a former Outreachy participant. Can you tell us about your experience in the program? Yeah, definitely. So I was an Outreachy participant in December 2019 around and I joined the OpenStack Manila team, and it was a really, really awesome experience. It had a lot of firsts for me. This was the first time I worked fully remote. The first time I worked with an open source community, the first time working with Python, Django, Garret, and everything. So it was very challenging and very intense, but in the best way I learned a lot, and it did prepare me in many ways for what was next for me, looking for jobs in open source and so on. So I would definitely recommend everyone to try to go for that opportunity. And I would love to help someone get that opportunity, so I do try to spread the word as much as I can. So yeah, it was really awesome. It sounds like you had a really good experience in the program. Now, Mari and Meg, both in your introductions, you spoke about how new you were into OpenStack and into your employment. So starting with Mari, can you tell us a little bit about your experience getting hired and tell us, because personally, when I got hired many, many years ago and first got into the tech world, things were different. So give us a fresh viewpoint on that. Yeah, sure. So I'm not going to like maybe go to this live coding experiences, because well, some people like those. I'm not one of those people. I think I'd like to bring out here that the sad thing I noticed is that the open source contributions are not being looked at because they give so much good information about your applicant. So if you look at your applicants like Patch and Garrett for OpenStack, for example, you can like, obviously, you see all the technical skills. You know that their code is passing tests and their code is passing reviews. They know how to use Garrett and all that. But you can also see how that person communicates with the team. How do they react to code reviews? If you're lucky, maybe you stumble upon like a patch that the person has been really stuck with. So you literally have the history of like seeing how that person solves the problem. How do they ask for help? Do they like abandon the batch or do they ask like specific questions that like get them out of being stuck and so on. So I think that was that was the saddest part that like a lot of people who are looking through applicants, they are they're not looking at that information and that's what you want to know about the person in my opinion. You want to know how do they interact and how do they react to stressful situations, maybe, and all of that. And also that goes like the other way around. If you're looking for a job, let's say if you want to apply for a team that you know works with an OpenStack team, OpenStack community, you can also see into that team how does that team work. And that is like like a good way to look into the team that you want to apply for. Yeah, I think that's that's what I'd like to bring up here. Meg, can you go ahead and talk about your experience as well? Yeah, my experience was very different. I came in through a perhaps more traditional route of got my bachelor's in computer science from a university here in the United States and then was approached in college by an AT&T recruiter. I kind of wound up working. You know, with open source through my job. So my job was to work to create sort of this cloud infrastructure at AT&T and helping with that. And they were using OpenStack. And that's how we got involved in the community and how, you know, I really found more that I like to be involved with the open source side of things. And luckily, my job was able to help get me into that. Our normal interview process now is, you know, that's a thing that we look for, especially at my company is anyone who perhaps in college did, you know, contribute to any sort of open source or take that leap of getting outside of maybe their typical curriculum and really trying to to insert themselves in a community that's unfamiliar, the people that they don't know. And, you know, sort of what Maru said, working off of problems that, you know, you can go back and sort of see what somebody's done. That's certainly something we try to do. And I think, yeah, it's definitely an issue and certainly something that can be looked at through interviews. It's great having that that thing that you can go back to as the person being interviewed and say, this is where I was or this is what I've learned. And it's it's nice working in open source that you can go to that. So, yeah, Mari's point about actually looking at the reviews. I hadn't even thought of that. I mean, a lot of times you send no perspective employers to your GitHub. I never even thought about sending them to Garrett. And that's true. I mean, there's a lot of good conversations within Garrett. And you can learn a lot about a person and a team from that. Meg, you're currently leading the mentoring efforts within OpenStack and you have experience with AT&T's mentorship program. And like AT&T Red Hat also has internal mentoring programs. So a lot of companies have these programs. But how are they different between the company led ones and the open source led one? I think the company led one is can be very different in that a lot of times, you know, with at least certainly with the OpenStack mentoring, it's very remote. You know, you may never meet your mentor face to face unless you go to a conference or something, whereas with, I know, at least internally for us, my mentor works with me. So I would see him every day. And I know it's the same for a lot of people. Our mentoring program is, I like to call it semi-formal. It's we start out with bringing college hires through our actual normal college hire program. But when they start in the organization that I work in, that works with OpenStack. They start out in what we in almost like a little group of new people who all would have mentored or get mentored at the same time. And are led on a journey to sort of learn more about how we're utilizing OpenStack, how we are setting things up and learn more about how internally we utilize this process instead of, you know, if you open or if you mentor with OpenStack directly, you don't know how somebody may be using it or you don't necessarily know what services they're using. So it's a little less tailored. That being said, I think the wealth of knowledge that comes from people that you may never meet who have entirely different experiences from you is something that really should be explored. I really do think we look to expand or start up again with the mentoring through the diversity program and have seen a few people, you know, really try to reach out and say that they want to do that. And so I think there's great opportunity there. Great. We're at about 10 minutes. So we have time for one more question for everyone. Can you tell us about your own search for a position in open source and recommendations you would give to others? Mari, do you want to start? Yeah, sure. So I think I like to focus on the positive and tell you how I found the job that I have now, which is I'm a junior developer in City Network's education team and that opportunity actually I got thanks to Victoria who shared the screenshot from Twitter about the job posting. At that time, I was not using Twitter, so I wouldn't have ever seen it. So many things happened to get me there. And also, compared to other interviews, my first interview with my current team lead, he was looking at my Garrett patches and he actually gave me code review. He made notes what I should be fixing. And after the interview I went back and I fixed those. So that was something I valued myself like I wanted to get feedback and code review and I wanted to work in a team like that. And also, while I was searching, there's not a lot of junior positions available, but they're like really scarce. So I would definitely recommend people checking out City Network's opportunities because I am quite recent junior hire and I know that right now we also have two open junior positions. So if someone's looking, definitely check that out. And I can highly recommend City Network. They're a great group of people. Meg, would you like to talk about your experience? Yeah, definitely. Like I said, I went through sort of very traditional college routes. So all of, I know for most of AT&T, that's how sort of it's worked through, there are different internship programs that work through university, do recruiting through universities, but also all of these options are available online. AT&T has a very extensive internship program that they offer every summer. And it's incredibly, definitely will give you the experience of what it's like being a software engineer and sort of working on a project from the get-go, really integrating with a team. And it's not something where you're just an intern that gets handed a baby project. You are going to be working on the physical software that we produce. That being said, there are always opportunities that are always available online, at least for my company. I know a lot of people who may be looking specifically for an open source position may have, you know, that's not always so obvious, at least with us on what is open source and what isn't, and what will you be working with at the time. I think one of the biggest things people sort of really should think about is that, you know, everything might not be there in the job description or everything that you see there might not be something that you have to have. So I know a lot of times we get a little lofty with the requirements that we want in a person. And if you see something and say, oh, I can fit five out of those three things, it's definitely worth giving it the shot saying, I'm going to hand in my application for this job. And if you find something like that, I highly encourage people to, maybe if they feel like they're shooting a little high, try it anyways. Yeah, that's definitely true. Studies have shown that women make sure they tick all the boxes and not just some of the boxes when they apply, whereas men tend to go, oh, I can do two of those. I'll go ahead and apply. Vicki, do you want to close this out with your experience? Sure thing. Well, it has been a long time ago that I started my career position. I started my career, of course. It's been like seven years already and my case was very different than most of the cases because I started as well as an original intern and I continued to be engaged with the Opposite community doing contributions. So I was finishing my career, my academic career. And at the moment, there were not product engineers for any company contributing to OpenStack in my country. So it was really hard for me to get a position here. After some time and after talking with a lot of people, I managed to start interview process for my current position. It was the first time they were opening a remote position, something that allowed me to actually start working because, as I mentioned, there were no engineers, there were no engineers, and it was very impossible to continue after the internship to contribute to the Opposite community if I didn't have this offering. So I believe that something you can tell about that is that don't surrender. If you don't find an opening right away that fits your skills, that fits your interests because apart from the skills you have, you also want to target your next step, career move to a place that you want to get to. So if you don't find that right away, just keep connecting with people, keep talking with people on the open source communities. The Opposite community is very good at that because they enable different channels for former interns, former contributors to continue to be engaged, go to conferences. Yeah, so keeping connected is key to learn your next position, and don't be afraid of asking, don't be afraid of trying to get to your next step. And yeah, that's what I can say about that. One thing Vicki just mentioned was the fact that she had trouble finding a remote position and things have definitely changed recently. Don't be scared to apply for that position at AT&T or city network even if you're in a different country. And that's one thing that is important to note is that different companies in different locations and also within different open source communities have different positions available and things are changing. So go ahead and apply for that job that you may not take all the boxes for or isn't even in the same country because as long as the company has a presence there, they still may be able to hire you remotely. Now does anyone have any questions for the panel?