 So, I feel like companies in HR frequently use diversity as a trendy buzzword and they focus on the facts of who a person is. For example, I'm a queer South Asian Hindu woman, but what they miss is the story that's told by the background of their engineers individually and collectively. I'm going to frame this talk on the story of my background and how that influenced the teams that I've worked on. What I want you to get out of this talk are actionable ways to support your diverse team members. So the talk is going to be based on, we'll talk a little bit about who I am. I'm going to define diversity, what it looks like, why you want it, and also how it plays out in reality. I'm going to talk about advocacy and I'm going to dispel the notion that you need to be a diversity champion to actually make an impact on your co-worker's lives. And I'm also going to talk about inclusion and how it is really important to be inclusive in order to have a positive feedback loop and a culture of collaboration. So this talk came about because I've been asked many times about how I've gotten to where I am today and my path is a little bit unique and non-traditional. If you'd asked me a decade ago if I was going to give a talk on diversity, I would have emphatically said no because I'm a technologist at a tech conference, so why am I not giving a tech talk? Well, a decade later, having frequently been the only person like me in my teams, only woman, only brown person, only gay person, only Hindu, it matters a lot more to me what my teams look like and the choices that we make when we communicate with each other and the impact that has on everyone on our teams. So as we've discussed, I'm a queer South Asian Hindu, I was born and raised in Texas, I have a wife who's right there, two cats, a dog and I'm an amateur woodworker. Now the director of site reliability at Active Campaign, I'm also a former high school teacher, business analyst, DBA and database developer. So how did I get here? It was a lot funnier when I worked at a company called here. So I started my career, clearly I haven't updated my slides. So I started my career with an interest on the tech side, but because I have really great communication skills, I was told that I should stick to the functional track because I'd be more successful. Now being socialized as a South Asian woman in the 80s in Texas, I was socialized to believe that I should respect my elders and follow the paths that they lay out for me. So despite the fact that my interest was actually more technical, I followed the functional path. But I noticed that I always leaned towards the reporting and analytics and data side of the world, and so I kept moving in that direction. And eventually I was working with a DBA and what she did is she mentored me and she opened up my world so that at some point I was the actual DBA on a legacy system that we had because I was the one with the most functional knowledge of the system. And I had been working with it technically. This led me to be able to transition to being a full-time DBA at a trading firm and at that trading firm, this mentorship gave me the confidence to express an interest in the NoSQL databases and my boss at the time was thrilled and was like, great, here's MongoDB and Elastic Search, please spin up all of our clusters and handle it. Also, we don't have any monitoring or learning or any way to spin these up automatically, so figured that out too, which is sort of how I was introduced into DevOps and configuration management and that has led me to my career in infrastructure today which I love instead of one that I just tolerate. So what do I care about diversity? Well, somewhat obviously I care, but also this non-traditional path following the functional route all the way over to the technical side, it means that I have a lot of skills that are helpful and that I use every day to help my team coming from the functional world. However, it also means that my experience may not follow the full path of what people expect someone on a site reliability team to have. And so having co-workers who are empathic and are collaborative means that we all fill in the holes together and we have a better and more positive team and that's why I care about diversity. So diversity is not just about race or gender, it's also about the skill set that the people around you possess. In my case, the fact that I was a young woman with a liberal arts background made it so that my true vocational interests were overridden by the facts of me and I'm certain I'm not unique in this. In that example at the trading firm where my boss let me be the DBA that worked on the NoSQL databases and he ended up letting me be one of the experts in SaltStack, which was our config management tool of choice. Nothing pointed to me to be the person that he should pick on his team to do that. What he did was he was listening when I was speaking to him and I'm sure that everyone's heard that if you don't ask for things, you're not going to get what you want. However, I have something like 20 years of socialization running counter to that advice. So I frequently employ something else called a soft ask where I gauged the interest of the person I'm speaking to and so when I was talking to him, I was like, hey, so I've heard about MongoDB and it's really cool and I'm really interested and he did one better than just saying, oh, that's nice. He was like, do you want to manage it? Yes, great, here. It's all yours and so this was good for me but it was also good for him because at the time our SaltStack deployment was using MongoDB as its returner and I was interested in automating our MongoDB installs and monitoring, which I eventually did using SaltStack, but also because our deployment was the returner was slightly broken because it wasn't using MongoDB correctly, I ended up fixing that for my team. So what he ensured by letting me learn new things and allowing me to broaden my interests was that he strengthened his team by diversifying their skill sets. He also strengthened his tool set because I fixed a broken deployment and then he also bought some of my loyalty by giving me new cool things to learn. So that's one example of why a diverse team is a good team and a stronger team, but why is a checklist not enough? There are a lot of studies that show diverse teams are more successful but I'm sure everyone here has read all of those articles about diverse candidates fleeing from toxic cultures. So why is a checklist not enough? If you hear me, I'm gonna use a woodworking example. So I made this beautiful cutting board for my wife last year or something like that for Christmas. And I was so excited about how pretty it looked and the design and the appearance of the design and what it went and making sure everything lined up perfectly. And then three months later, it looks like this, what happened? I was so focused on the appearance of my design and not the components or function of them that I forgot that when you're actually putting wood together, it moves. And so because of wood movement, the toasted ash on the sides blew off the cutting board. So what we need to do is to focus on the actual function instead of on the appearance. Now what does this look like in real life? Well, we have the benefit of being people and not wood. So we get to make our own communication choices. So early in my career, when I was a business analyst, I was getting my first performance review and everything was going great. My boss was like, everyone loves you, you're awesome, you're doing great. The client thinks you walk on water, blah, blah, blah. And then right at the end of the review, he's like, well, there's this one dude whose name I've forgotten because it's been a decade, who you're really short with and I'm just so disappointed in you. And growing up in Texas as a woman in the 80s, I knew better than to talk about sexual harassment because you want to know what happens, A, people don't believe you. B, you have to relive your experience and you see, even if they do believe you, nothing really happens. But this was my review, so I felt the need to say something. So I was like, hey boss, I don't know how to tell you this, but this guy makes me really uncomfortable at work. He stares at me by stare. I really mean leer and doesn't meet my eyes and is looking in use your imagination and he stands way too close and it's just generally not cool. And my boss sadly responded in the way that I expected and said, well Rhea, I was hoping he's really young and just over from India and he doesn't know how to talk to women. I was hoping because your communication skills are so great that you could teach him how to talk to women, for real. So now, what this told me is that this cutting board was not a place that I would stay on much longer. It said to me that the comfort of my male coworker and boss were more important than my safety and security. Now, how do you help diversity thrive? First, I want to dispel the notion that the person I was talking about in the last slide is a bad guy. He was actually a fantastic manager. He fought for me in a lot of really good ways and he made a really egregious mistake. Also, it's been a decade and our sensibilities have changed a lot in that decade. And I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but people are complex and we are more than the sum of our parts and we should remember that. Having empathy for people on your team is not a bad thing. Having empathy for that guy wasn't a bad thing. What he was missing there was that maybe I had a point. Maybe I shouldn't have to feel uncomfortable every day when I go to work. Now, I wasn't looking to go to legal or HR. All I wanted to do was set some boundaries and have him talk to this guy and be like, hey, here are some boundaries. Don't stare, don't be professional at work. The end, and so what I was looking for and what I generally think would be really helpful is to actively listen. Because this is a pretty simple instance. We're actively listening to what I was saying. And talking about coming to a point where we can remediate it and work together is what's important. You don't have to go to either extreme to show the person that you're talking to, that you're listening to them. You respect them and you take them seriously. Take, for example, my boss at the trading firm. He was listening to what I was asking for without always having to ask directly for it. And I'm not advocating for a soft ask. I'm saying that if you were actively listening, it gives you the tools to fill in that information and to ask more relevant questions so that you can get a better understanding with your employees. And with your teammates. So also the DBA that I was working with. When I was working with her, she allowed me to ask her questions and broaden my skillsets. And that's a type of advocacy. Because it broadens the skillsets of those people around you. And they could be anywhere. They could be in any department. And letting them learn new skills opens up doors that you may never have thought were available. So there are two types of advocacy I want to talk about. There's advocating for others and there's also self-advocacy. The examples with my manager and the DBA I was working with are examples of advocating for others. And there are also other ways that you can advocate for others. And one really useful way is amplification. So studies show that women are not heard as well as men. And it's pretty detailed in the language I've linked it. So if you look at my slides you can actually click on the link and learn more. In the instance where we're talking about women's voices not being heard as well, one of the most frustrating times this happened to me, I was a MongoDB DBA. And we had a dev team that was complaining about performance. And at the time the infrastructure had been set up before I even knew what MongoDB was. And so it was these huge boxes. And everybody knows that MongoDB scales horizontally and not vertically, right? So clearly we were set up for failure. And so what I did is I actually started our database cluster. And it increased our query performance by 20% making no changes to any of the dev work. Now this was a pretty big change and to actually implement that change on the cluster would require a significant amount of work that was never scheduled. So a few months later we're in a meeting and they're still complaining about query performance. And I say, yeah, you could start the cluster. And my male DBA sitting next to me saying, hey, the only way this is gonna work is if you shard the cluster. More than a year later, it's still credited to the male DBA despite the fact that I did an entire proof of concept on it with data. So it really matters who the speaker is and how you hear it. Now I worked at another company called Here. And I had this really amazing co-worker named Russ who did this really awesome thing. If anyone helped him with any piece of a project or just anything generally at work that made his life better, he would credit that person by name like multiple times a day. And at first I thought it was a little weird. Not gonna lie, probably says a lot more about my background than his. And what I noticed by him doing this is it created this culture of positivity. Just naming people, like he would be like, oh yeah, so I was creating this CloudWatch dashboard but Rih let me set it up and blah, blah, blah, blah. So now my work is done. By giving people credit where credit is due, you're amplifying their voice. You're amplifying who hears about it. And not only are you doing that, one of the things that happened on that team is that everybody started doing it with each other. So our entire team started talking about the work that everyone else was doing that helped them do their own work. And that created this positive feedback loop. And it culturally made it so that it was easier to self advocate because knowledge sharing was embedded in the culture. We all know that no matter where you are you do have to advocate for yourself but if you have a positive culture and a team that actually lifts up the idea that knowledge sharing is just inherent in the culture that makes it much easier to advocate for yourself because mentoring and pairing is a really easy way to find growth and opportunities already within your environment. And this brings me to inclusion, to better support our diverse teams including everyone in the conversation is a crucial step. When I feel included in a conversation and I know that people hear the ideas that I'm saying and give me credit for those ideas I'm much more willing to fully participate and give an unfiltered version of my ideas which generally leads to more creative and better solutions. Now, not being inclusive is not always a deliberate decision to exclude people. There was a company I worked at where there was a private chat channel and it was like the dudes talking about sports which is totally fine but what I found having been invited several months later and I noticed that the intern dudes were invited almost immediately after they joined was that there were a lot of questions that were actually technical questions being asked. Now, being someone who is not in that chat channel initially the culture of that team was like night and day because when you're not in that channel you don't know that these questions are acceptable that they're being asked and that they're being answered and there's no judgment. So when you're outside of that channel you think you have to be perfect all the time and that can be a much harder culture to want to be a part of than a culture that celebrates knowledge sharing and collaboration. So one of the things that I loved about my time at here was that my coworkers Russ and Lee were pretty amazing about including people in conversations and I'm gonna use an example from that time. So we were having a conversation about immutable infrastructure and Lee was talking about how immutable infrastructure was great and you know kind of like Jeff I was like I don't know I like config management what's wrong with config management and so things were getting kind of heated and what was really great about this is in the middle of the conversation Lee says I wanna pause because I don't wanna invalidate all of the work that you've been doing to make our config management better. I'm saying and I'm not saying that this works in our reality right now but I'm saying philosophically immutable infrastructure means less points of failure and therefore it would be the ideal. Now it's less about what he's actually talking about technically. What my point is is that Lee stopped in the middle of a really heated technical debate to draw me into the conversation to say that he valued the work that I was doing he valued my opinion and he wanted to come to an understanding where we could have the best technical where we were making the best technical decisions possible. That's a really supportive environment that encourages knowledge sharing and different viewpoints and one of the things that inclusion allows you to do and in this case what it allowed me to do is to bring my whole self to work and I know a lot of people say you know I'm the same person everywhere well that's not an experience I share. As a member of the queer community for a very long time the self that I presented was very very different everywhere including at work including at interviews. Up until last year I did not dress like this if I was interviewing. I wore heels, makeup, grew out my hair holding yards, completely different person. With my family I do not dress like this I am lucky that they accept my wife with open arms but being gender non-conforming is not as easy to accept. So when I was hiding a part of myself there's this low level of stress that happened because you don't know how people are gonna react if they find something out about you. You don't know if it's gonna be positive or negative or how that will go. But when your coworkers demonstrate that they are listening and hearing and they care about you as a person they respect you as a person you don't have to agree about everything but respecting that person as a human being allows them to bring their whole selves to work. I feel lucky that I'm able to choose to work in environments where I bring my whole self. Inclusion is not just something that should be a nice to have. It should be something that always exists because that's how diversity thrives. Being inclusive helps find and support people from diverse backgrounds and advocating for their success empowers team members to contribute to their fullest. Remember to listen, hear and ask your team members what they want and raise your own awareness whenever possible. If there's nothing else you get out of this talk the one thing you can do that can make a really meaningful impact in people's lives is to remember to call out good ideas by name. Remember to credit the person by name and that can change your entire team dynamic. And because this is Dev Update, here's Kat, yes. I'm gonna ask a question then. So is there anything that you feel like your teammates can do every day to be more inclusive of diversity? And also have you ever found yourself also not being inclusive? Because I know as a woman in tech I'm in a minority, right? But every now and again I just make assumptions about people based on their gender or the looks or whatever. I know that I am also biased against certain things, so. Oh yeah, totally. I mean one of the things that I do which is not a very traditionally female trait is I talk over people. I catch myself doing it all the time. I have to try really hard not to do it. Like it's not just like a dude thing. Like I can do it too. And it's still not good. Like you should not do it, I try not to. And to be more inclusive, like one of the things that I try to do is I try to pause whenever we're having a technical discussion to think about the merits of what someone's saying and what I'm saying so that it's not personal, right? Like you want to come to the best technical decision to move the company forward or to move the project forward. It's not about my ego. And so that's what I try to embody that it's not that when we're trying to work together you're trying to work together to make whatever it is you're working on better. You're not, it's not about you personally and having that culture of collaboration and the team effort, it helps to lift it up as a whole team so it's not all on any one person's shoulders. Yeah, I was curious if you had any suggestions on how you can try to identify some of the champions for diversity through like the hiring process. So not specifically trying to hire diverse people but try to identify people that will help embody that spirit of diversity. So I try to look for people who when I'm doing hiring I try to look for people who tend to like to collaborate. So like I do some collaboration projects as part of the interview process and it helps to gauge like how receptive people are to actually collaborate just in general. Because it's really hard because the interview process just kind of sucks all around for everyone. Like it's not pleasant. So I try to make it as like least pressure intensive but also like to have like a collaboration project. So you can see if they're gonna talk to you if they're gonna engage with you or if they're gonna try and railroad you or if they're just gonna like go in a corner and work by themselves. Not to say that any of those things are bad but that's just you know what I'm looking at. Thank you Rhea. Thanks.