 My name is Liz Abinante. I am a software engineer here in Portland. And last year, I found myself in a really terrible position. My CEO had made a rape joke at an all hands meeting. And I reported it to HR. Lots of conversations with VP of HR. And I was very upset about this. A number of us were upset about this. A few people quit over this. I could not quit over this. It was my first job as a software engineer. No experience outside of this job. And I was like, well, I'm screwed. This is it. Goose cooked. I complained about the CEO. And the company was also 80% Mormon white men. Not a place you would picture me working. That's a different story. So this complaint came up in our public engineering chat room. And someone at work said, well, if you always act like a victim, people are going to treat you like a victim. It's like, whoop. Not going to work at a place like this again. So how do I prevent this from happening? So let's say you're looking for a new job. And you're a little bit worried that you're going to end up working for, say, a racist company or maybe a transphobic boss or with even misogynistic bros. Either way, you're worried about being in a toxic environment, a place where you're not going to thrive, you're not going to be happy. You're just probably going to be miserable and mad all the time. How can we prevent this? How can we find places to work that fulfill our needs technically, culturally, and mentally and give us health benefits that actually cover things? So, oh, that's so tiny. I'm so sorry. I'll read it to you. So I'm going to go over a couple things, mostly just a multi-pronged approach to screening companies, but also interviewing successfully that you can do before, during, and after the interview. And I'm also going to give you some tips for finding places to interview. All of this has been totally scientifically tested to quote somebody yesterday, Stephanie, or Thursday. By me, I tested this. Last time I interviewed for a job. I'm employed, so I think it works. So before you actually go interview, research. Research, research, research. Find people in your network or friends of your friends in your network that know people that work there. If it's like your brother's sister's cousin's friends' neighbor, that's a connection. This is what LinkedIn is for. This is why we use LinkedIn. And submit interview requests before your actual interview. So when you get that, hey, we want you to come into the office and meet everybody. Cool, we're going to interview for eight hours. It's going to be so fun. Reply to that email and be like, great, cool. I've got these requests. Find an interview buddy at the company if you can. And if you're somebody like me who likes to write things down, bring an open book with a bunch of questions and ask all of your questions multiple times to different people in different roles with different managers and different opinions and different identities. Answer their questions as real as you can and try to gauge their responses. If you're not the kind of person who's really great at reading people, that's OK. We can practice this. And if it's an office environment and not a distributed company, try to get a feel for the office environment. If it's a remote company, try to get a feel for how they communicate. Take breaks in the process and self-care. This is what you should be doing, loving yourself throughout this process. Don't stress yourself out. Take time. So how do we find these places so we can actually do these things? Who do you know? Where do they work? Where have they worked before? Where do they never want to work again? Start with that list. Look for places friends of friends have worked. Or maybe if you're not super social or you're new to the industry, do you have a favorite meetup or conference like maybe AlterConf? Who sponsors that? Who goes to that? What kind of employee presence is there? And my most favorite thing to do in the entire world is to activate the Whisper Network. If you are in tech and you have a network of friends, DM, email, tweet, IRC, whatever your method, ask them where they've worked and get the dish. This is hot, hot gossip and trust me, everybody does this. You should do it too. So before the interview, this is before you walk into that door and start asking all those questions. Let's talk about that research that you're supposed to be doing here. Who works there right now? And again, LinkedIn. I'm telling you, this is the only thing I use it for is finding jobs. Who works at this company? But who used to work there? And why don't they work there anymore? Did they leave of their own volition? Or were they fired? And why were they fired? If there's any negative press about this company, can you find it? What does it say? If there's positive press, who wrote it? Is it always the same person? Are they a sleazeball? If it's a VC funded company, who do they report to? Who's on their board? Who are you gonna have to deal with when you have to file a complaint about the CEO? And what does the demographic of this company look like to an outsider? Does it look like your friends? Or does it look like everybody works in the brewery and chamber at Dropbox? So some tactics. Asked to be interviewed by a person from an underrepresented group, even if you do not belong to an underrepresented group. Ideally, it would be someone in the role that you're looking to fill, but if it's a small company, that's not always possible. And then maybe, interview with someone from a different department. I'm an engineer and I always ask to talk to somebody from customer support, because how that person feels about their job is way more reflective than that engineer eating Cheetos. I eat the Cheetos. It's me. I'm the Cheeto reader. So take note of what happens here. Who do they pick for you to talk to? Are they a token or are they actually somebody who's generally interested in talking to you and caring about their job? And these interview requests, like I said earlier, submit them as soon as you can. How do they actually respond? Do they give you sass? Cause they shouldn't give you sass. Like these should be normal things that should be accommodating. And do they actually fill all of your requests? If they can't fill them, why can't they fill them? And I know for me, I really wanted to meet with people who were not dudes, having come from a company where I was the only woman in the engineering team for my first six months there. Don't do that. I really wanted to meet some other women that worked at the company. Cause you know, friendship is magic. And I got to meet someone who was on my team, which was really great. And I interviewed with her, but I interviewed another company that said, well, we don't have any women. We can't find any. And I'm like, all right. I think your values are probably not in line with mine. And my barometer here was if you're about, if you're big enough to where you start having managers, VPs, and these are things that matter to you. And you're all one type of person and that one type of person is not diverse. Our values are not in line. Thank you, but no, thank you. So prepare a list of cultural screening questions based on your requirements. And I've got some sample questions for you. We will talk about here shortly and all of them are online, so don't worry. Do they have HR? Maybe you should talk to them. I always try to speak to somebody from HR. And I ask them the same questions. I ask the engineers. And you don't always get the same response. It's very interesting. Before you go in, always ask about the interview format. You don't wanna go in, whether it be an hour or eight hours or four hours or heaven forbid multiple days and have no idea what's gonna happen. Are you, do you need to bring your own lunch? I always wonder if it's cold in an office because like, you know, you just wanna be a little modest if you're a lady and like, gotta make sure you're comfortable. So ask these questions ahead of time. They're not gonna think you're weird. And during the interview, it's okay if you say a class word, I promise. But prepare notes and make sure you have everything ready ahead of time. I'm a person who likes to write stuff down. Other people prefer to be more extemporaneous and just fly off the cuff, but I would still recommend that you have something to reference because when you're nervous and you wanna perform as good as you can or as well as you can, you wanna make sure you have something to reference from. Like, I have these sweet slides to reference from. And other speakers have had notes to reference from because while we trust our brilliant selves, we would prefer to just be on the safe side. If it's an office, visit the different departments. Are there different floors? Where are the restrooms? How do these things work? And observe the actions happening around you as the environment changes. If you go over to the design department, is everybody super excited and happy to be there? Of course they are, because they're playing with fonts. I live for fonts. I spent four hours picking this font, not a joke. Or is it really sad and depressing over there? The designers just huddled over there like working on their things and just, my life. Or is it a party and engineering and depressing and customer support? What's it like? How do these departments vary? And take your time and provide real answers to their questions. No, I'm not talking about like, re-implement the shuffle method. How would you prove that something is random? I don't give a shit if it's random. What I care about is answering the questions in a way that is as real to me as I can possibly answer. But only do this if you feel like you can. I am a married white lady and I'm married to a man. So I'm very fortunate in that I can walk into a room and be like, well, this is me, what's up? And I can do that, but not everybody can. So if you do not feel safe in emphasizing the things that are important to you or if you feel forced to out yourself, you do not have to. You do not have to do this. You can find somebody internally to ask us questions for you. This is the interview buddy that I spoke about earlier. In an ideal world, we would all know at least one person at the company we were interviewing at. But if you don't, I might. I can help you. I'm sure lots of people here would be happy to do the same thing. Maybe that person feels comfortable asking those questions for you and they can ask them internally and get the real answers, not the PR hiring a new candidate answer. And if you feel safe, meeting with HR confidentially might be an option. It also might not if you don't trust them. I don't blame you. I don't always either. Or you can request interview modifications that allow you to kind of like sniff things out without actually having to ask questions to put yourself in a situation where you feel unsafe. So here's some of those sample questions I talked about earlier. Again, these are all online. So if I go through them a little quickly, they will be available to you. I break them down into three broad categories that are not distinctly different. They are related to each other. Diversity, employee value and retention and HR. So for diversity, I start out with the soft balls, the easy questions, the things I expect people to answer with some nice, beautiful PR sentence. Why do you think it's important and how do you define diversity? What's going on here? And then I ask them, do you have trans-inclusive healthcare and what exactly does it cover? And you'd be surprised when you ask this question and you're not trans, what answer you get? I ask this question everywhere, it's interesting. I also ask about parental leave and lactation rooms. I also ask about what policies happen for working at home or bringing babies to the office. I also ask about bringing dogs to the office, but that's me. And then I write as I'm about to leave, write when I'm about to be done with this meeting, what does diversity success look like to you? And sometimes people say terrible, terrible, terrible things that erase everything good that they said before. So just use caution if you're gonna ask them that question. What kind of diversity focused initiatives do they have at that company? What have they implemented recently and what did the results look like? Did they even measure results? And what work do they think needs to be done still to make it a good and happy environment for underrepresented people? Employee Valuing Retention is really important to me which is why I always ask to talk to people in customer support. It's generally the last department to see career paths and raises and anything other than talking on the phone or applying to email all day. So what kind of job training do they provide and are there budgets for different departments? Do some departments have much cashier budgets than others? And what career paths are available from the position you are applying for versus all positions? And do they track metrics on retention and satisfaction and do they cross-reference those with demographics? Do they even do any of this? HR, our friends, do they have HR? This is like super basic. And the answer is no, I would recommend maybe just not unless you're interviewing for the HR position in which case please. And who do they report to? If they report to maybe like marketing that's probably a bad sign. How do they handle internal complaints? If like my last company they just tell the person that you complained about them, maybe, maybe don't. And then this one is kind of a little pop quiz. How much do you know about labor law and unions? Our employee salary is confidential. How often can you renegotiate? Can you renegotiate publicly? These kinds of things. And what is their charter? What is their primary function? And sometimes they give you an answer that implies their primary function is to protect a company, which is not the case. You should be looking for an answer that's to protect you as an individual. Not all workers, but you. They want to protect you. So while you're asking these questions, while you're doing this interview, put on your scientist goggles. I love minor goggles. We shall have a pair. Put them on and do some observing. Who actually eats lunch together? Does everybody eat lunch at the same time? Do they socialize outside of their department? Or is it just everybody that sits together at work then moves and eats here and then goes back and then works? How does that happen? What's the social dynamic? Do they have gender-neutral bathrooms? Did they get confused when you asked them what they were? What does the employee demographic look like? What's the average age? Are they all sub-30? I'm gonna turn 30 this year. It's gonna be great, guys. Sorry, everyone. Are there people from underrepresented groups in upper management? Not I'm managing a team of product designers or a team of engineers or a team of whoever, but I'm the SVP of the super awesome department. Are those underrepresented groups or are they all still dudes that are white? Real questions. How are those low-level employees treated and do they get the same perks? Do they get to travel to conferences? And are they promoting internally or externally? And are they hiring experienced people or are they hiring people with varying backgrounds? Do you have to have a college degree or is high school diploma sufficient? Or maybe just a GED or not at all? What does it look like? How hard is it to enact change and what changes have they made recently? How long did it take? Pro tip, if a company is public, expect on the many, many years market or level. Sorry, sad, sad fact. And the Model View culture piece that came out a while ago, look for HR anti-patterns, the biggest of which is there's no HR. So after your interview, you've gone in, you have wowed them with your brilliance, you've asked all these questions. What did you know? Got all this information. Usually when you go into interview you don't just talk to one person and I find that I very rarely have follow-up questions for like say the hiring manager, but I really wanna talk to that one person that I had lunch with. I emailed the hiring manager or the recruiter and asked to speak to that person directly. I try not to go through a recruiter or hiring manager to ask questions to other people at the company and ask them their questions over email. I always prefer to get things in writing and gather all those notes and research. And if you're me, they're probably color coded. If you're not me, then they're probably easier to read because you were writing instead of getting pens and examine how everything comes together. What was your perspective? What did you observe and what are the actual policies? Where are the differences? I guarantee you it's not always gonna be what you expect. Their words match their actions, sometimes not always on which issues. Where do they skip a beat? And what stances do they take on the things that matter the most to you as an individual? And say you have a list of 10 things that are the most important to you. And on one of them, your most important thing, they knock it out of the park. Everything exactly what you wanted. And then on the other nine things, they just fail miserably. It's terrible. It's kind of embarrassing. You're like, wow, you can't even write checks to give people their salaries. Maybe that one thing alone is not important enough. You have to balance what's most important to you and how they respond to the things that are most important to you. Put it all together to make a decision and it's not easy and I'm very sorry. Someday we'll have our lovely, lovely tech cooperative that we can all work for and it'll be great. But for now, we just have each other. So good luck and go forth and prosper. Thank you.