 Live from Houston, Texas. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper celebration of women in computing. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Houston, Texas for the Grace Hopper celebration of women in computing. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE. This is our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles with my co-host this week, Jeff Frick, the general manager of theCUBE. And our next guest is Isis Anjali, Anjali platform developer, platform engineer I should say. Welcome to theCUBE. And started the I Look Like an Engineer movement. Congratulations and great to have you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me. So I got to ask you the first thing is that you seem a little bit humble right now about all the publicity. You look great. You look like an engineer. I think that's great. How was that played out? And how is that transferring over to this show at Grace Hopper? Which has been amazing. It's been a great inspiring show. Talk about that transition. So I've actually never been in a position before to have any type of large public attention. So it's kind of a mind trip, but in one sense, it's a really unique blessing because as one engineer, I contribute work as one engineer. But if you give me an audience and a large platform, that's just an exponential amount of impact and it's really personally fulfilling. Talk about some of the emails you've gotten from people. I mean, obviously you put stuff out there and it becomes a meme. It becomes a movement because it resonates with people because what this event is showing is a new era. We talk about cloud computing all the time. We talk about how businesses are changing. Some are going out of business and a new generation is upon us. And I think this is a historic moment and you hit a nerve. What are some of the things that you've heard for people's share? Some color around the craziest, the nicest, the weirdest, obviously the weirdest, but whatever you think you can share, it'd be great to get some insight on that. So I've had hundreds to even thousands of emails in my inbox ranging from people creating their own communities around, I look like an engineer and parents reaching out, thanking me for inspiring their daughter to want to be an engineer with a picture of their child holding a Lego car. That's amazing. That's awesome. And the change is happening. So I got to ask you, computer sciences was my degree back in the 80s and the old days. No punch cards. So it's pre-punch card. Punch cards was earlier. I was actually coding languages, but it was fun. But it was very male dominated. There's only a few girls in my class, but now it's the spectrum's changed. The platforms are bigger. You got cloud. What are you working on right now? What are you getting your hands dirty with from a coding standpoint? What technologies are you involved in from a CS standpoint? And what do you see out there that your friends are doing? Other women in your peer group? So I'm a full stack engineer at one login. I work mostly with Ruby on Rails on the back end, really JavaScript heavy on the front end. The last really big project that I worked on that we just shipped was a load balancer for Active Directory connector instances instead of having one single point of connection for able to distribute the load which significantly increased the speed of large enterprise companies trying to stick to Active Directory, which could take hours. So I talk about virality of what happened because a lot of marketers are desperately trying to figure out how to make things go viral. And I'm kind of reminded about the ice bucket challenge which was something that just really, it just had the right combination of factors that touched people, was a great cause. And it really just went bananas, right? Everyone got involved from the lowest person of the top level CEOs of all the big companies. What does the nerve you think that your campaign, I don't know, it wasn't your campaign, right? You've now been, it's part of you now that really touched people. Well, I mean, these are challenges that so many people have to face. And it's not even just about women. When I first created, I looked like an engineer. It was about anybody, any gender, any race, breaking stereotypes, because I genuinely believe that as long as you're not being offensive or hurting anyone, that you shouldn't have to sacrifice pieces of your identity to feel accepted at your workplace. That's a common thread we're hearing from a lot of the younger generation coming up is that they kind of almost wave their hands at this whole politically correct thing. It's like, hey, you old guys are just idiots. Stop worrying about, we just want to be ourselves. Is that a sentiment? What is the sentiment? Because I kind of, being 50, it's like, okay, it was a different generation, younger generation is like, guys, chill out. What's the vibe? I mean, share with us the sentiment of like, are people overreacting? People just want to be themselves, not somebody else, right? That's what we're hearing. Well, there's actually a lot of statistical evidence that supports that if somebody feels accepted for their identity and their workplace, that they're more likely to do better work. I mean, it makes a lot of sense. When you're happier and you feel more included in your workplace, isn't toxic or oppressive, you're going to contribute better quality of work. You're going to wake up enthusiastic about being there. And when you do better work, your companies have better products. When your companies have better products, they make more money. Startup founders have higher returns and even VCs win. Yeah, versus, versus what? The alternative, like, this is the way you need to act. Go to diversity training, act like this. We've seen cases where people have tried to force function behavior. Dare I say it? It's possible to have fun and enjoy your work while also being incredibly successful and productive. That's the formula. And the beauty of it is it's not only the right thing to do, but it actually has great business benefits. You get better products. You get, you know, you grow the business. There's really no downside. There are a lot of numbers that really support the financial benefits of diversity. But like ultimately, I think what really affects people is culture. And like the numbers are enough to incentivize companies to want to care. But it's like the hundreds of thousands of people that are working in these companies every single day. We're surrounding, we're spending most of our lives at work. Yeah, it's a cultural issue. And it's ultimately the employees define the culture. If you look at a company, whatever they say, oh, we strive to do X. That's just a mission statement. But if you look at how the employees act, ultimately that is an indicator of culture. If people are cool, then most likely it's a cool culture. Yeah, however, I am a firm believer that a lot of the values need to be instilled top down. So this from the C level and the investors, because ultimately they're the ones that they're doing all of the initial hiring and they have so much control over the development of the culture overall. What is the biggest thing that you've learned that's been magnified for you over the past year? And here at Grace Hopper, what is the magnification of a learning that you could share with our audience? I think that your potential is really only limited by your own mind. I never thought that I would start a global sensation that was incredibly positive, that energized people and inspired masses. That was never a thought that crossed my mind, but obviously it's possible. I mean, I dropped out of school and I taught myself how to code. And instead of being $100,000 in school debt, I have zero school debt and I get paid a shitload of money to learn what I want to learn every single day. So I mean, your reality is what you make. You can make it happen. And we shouldn't unnecessarily self limit ourselves. You know, that's a good point. It's all about not the structure of what you should be doing. If you follow your passion, it's about what you want to do. Exactly. And going for it. Yeah. And then it's not work, right? And then you're following your passion, then you can put in the hours. You can put in the time. You can put in the effort. Well, I mean, sometimes it's still work, but. But those late nice debugging can be pretty brutal, right? I mean, you guys are crying it out. What's the coolest thing you've seen here at the show? Well, I honestly, I have never seen this many female engineers all in one room. I hardly see any. I go to meetups. I work in an industry where, I mean, even my company's numbers are underwhelmingly average. We've got 12,000 of us here. It's so incredibly empowering. It's like the inverse of the gender ratio of the outside world. I know. We do 70 events last year. We'll do over 80 this year. Jeff and I, we're looking at each other like, I mean, I've never seen this many women in one place either. And we're guides. We're like, oh my God, look at all these women. I mean, not even in college. I was a Northeastern. It's like six guys to every girl. But here, there's so many women. It's really mind-boggling. But it makes me feel like, now I know how women feel at the tech events where the men are. Yeah. I guess, I mean, one level. I think that the community that's being created here is so incredibly powerful. The networks that are being created, people are meeting people that they normally would never get to meet. But it's really, really supportive because you're seeing all of these people that you can resonate with. And normally when you're doing your job, working in the industry, and maybe you're the only person of your race or gender or sexual orientation on your team, it can feel really alienating. But like, here we're in a community where it's like, oh my gosh. It's a virtual space out there that you hit the nerve on with, I look like an engineer. And that is that now the world is connected. So you now have a support system, a fabric that just needs to be tied together. I think Grace Hopper is doing that right now. And I think people come here, it's celebration face to face. But when they go back to their jobs, they always know that they're one ping away on Twitter or can start a movement if they feel like they need to have a voice or shout from a mountaintop. Whether they're shouting or collaborating or handshaking, it's out there. There's a support system. So I actually had never really used Twitter before I started the movement. It was like my second tweet that blew everything up. But I look like an engineer has built a community in the same way that Grace Hopper is building community. And ultimately, I think that building community is one of the things that we can do to help improve retention. Because there are a lot of numbers that I only know one for women right now and it's that 41% of women leave the tech industry after seven years according to Harvard Business Review. And that number is really significant. Yeah, and you know what? We are in the content business where we have no ads on our site. We're all run by data science. We have the sponsorships for theCUBE. We have our research with Wikibon, I'll tell you. Because we offer free content and we don't really have an ad model, the content is higher quality and it runs on social networks. But if we point out that it's a communal experience, the audience is consuming in a community way. It's not a one directional broadcast. So this means that there's a peer to peer back channel going on and consumption. So this is highlighting a whole another trend that is empowering because now you're an engineer who dropped out of school making a boatload of money. As you said, the shitload of money is like the exact quote, which is great. We'd love that on theCUBE. Because we're not censored. We can say whatever we want. So this is called making a dent in the world. You've done that. Congratulations. Thank you so much. It's great when the other thing we had, we had Risha on from Girls Who Code. We had Ashley on and Ashley made an interesting statement. Like, you know, we need a face. This whole thing needs a face. And you basically created not a face, but many faces to really kind of highlight what is going on. So I think it really filled, obviously it filled a need as evidence by the way that people got behind it in such a big way. Numbers provide statistical evidence, which is great because it can prove that there's a need. But I think that people care about humanizing it and putting stories and it makes it real. Absolutely. So let's shift gears a little bit. You were on the advisory board of Women Who Code. So we talked about Girls Who Code earlier and they're really focused on rising juniors and seniors in high school trying to move down, stream to younger. What is Women Who Code all about? So Women Who Code is a nonprofit and their goal is to help empower women to be the best engineers that they can be. They have meetups and I'm not even sure how many countries all over the world. I'm not even sure the exact span of as many women that have been able to benefit from their programs. They teach algorithms and data structures. So I got to ask you one more thing. Grace Hopper event is biggest bigger than ever. What's next? What's your vision? I know you're kind of sitting here going wow, the world has changed for you, the world spun in a direction. But if you step back and look at the big picture, how do you see the trajectory of this community? Given the things we just talked about, the community, the interaction, the engagement, the virtual space, the physical face-to-face interaction, support systems, where does it go from here in your mind? I mean, things are changing and I think that we're moving in a direction that's really making progress. Companies are starting to acknowledge the importance of diversity and empathy and inclusion in their cultures. And even I recently read an article that computer science is the most popular major for women now at Stanford. So I'm really looking forward to a future where diversity is the norm and that we're comfortable being everything that we are and celebrating our differences because we're still doing really good at our careers. I just thanks so much for spending time. Congratulations on your success. It's amazing. It just proves that one tweet can shock the world, the tweet hurt around the world. And again, the positive change that's happened thanks to you. It's been amazing. So congratulations. And we'll hope for more breakouts like that because stay the course, get out of your comfort zone. That's the lesson here and congratulations. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back here in Texas for the great hopper celebration of women in computing. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick. We'll be right back after this short break.