Coraline Ada Ehmke on Artis and Engineering Leadership | RailsConf 2014
Hi it's Mike with UGtastic. I'm here at RailsConf 2014 and I'm standing here with Coraline Emke who gave a talk called "Partisans and Apprentices. Hi it's Mike with UGtastic. I'm here at RailsConf 2014 and I'm standing here with Coraline Emke who gave a talk called "Partisans and Apprentices. Meet Coraline Ada Ehmke, a Staff Engineer and Content Strategist, who shares insights on onboarding new developers, preserving community values, and inclusive practices in the tech industry. [Listen to the full interview] https://just3ws.github.io/interviews/coraline-ada-ehmke-artis-railsconf-2014
The Interviewer
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
The Guest
Coraline Ada Ehmke
Artis and engineering leadership
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Hi it's Mike with UGtastic. I'm here at RailsConf 2014 and I'm standing here with Coraline Emke who gave a talk called "Partisans and Apprentices. " Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me. Of course. So can you tell me a little bit about your presentation? Sure.
Coraline Ada Ehmke
Artis and engineering leadership
▶ Speaking
I've been involved with onboarding new developers, with bringing new people into our field for a number of years now, through mentorships, through training, through education, by being a teacher's assistant. And I really think that it's one of the most important problems that we have to solve right now as technologists, is how to bring new people into our community while preserving our community values and making sure that they have the appropriate resources to become effective and happy with their careers. Okay yeah because I worked with the talent that I have a group on and so I'm familiar with some of what you're talking about. Some of those things that you're dealing with when you're onboarding an employee can be a huge indicator of whether they're going to stick around. Right and I think actually even before they come into their first job, the work that we do as a community to prepare them for entering the workforce, whether they go through a bootcamp program, whether they go through a CS program or if they're self-taught, the way that we present ourselves to them, we establish a baseline for what our expectations for them are. I think that's something we have to be very deliberate about.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
So when you say expectations, are you talking about strictly technical or maybe cultural or both?
Coraline Ada Ehmke
Artis and engineering leadership
▶ Speaking
Absolutely both. Our culture will erode. The things that bring us to a particular open source community, whether it be Ruby or Python or what have you, is the image that the community portrays and the way that it lives, the values that it professes to hold dear. If we're not very deliberate about passing these values on, that culture will erode and the things that we love about a community won't surely go away. So things like RailsConf having the no harassment policy, those are important things or maybe I'm drifting a little bit from or I should say are they imparting lessons to people who are apprentices or artisans coming to RailsConf and saying wow RailsConf has this thing that's obviously, even if it's subconscious, it's imparting that this is important. Actually, I never made that connection before but I'm really glad you bring it up because I do work a lot with conferences and with people who work with conferences to establish good codes of conduct. What these are, in my talk I talk about the fact that a boot camp situation where your pay, you don't work for 12 weeks and you pay them $12,000, that draws from a very privileged class of people who can afford to not have a wage for that time, who can afford 12 grand, who don't have families to support and so on. I think that self-select people who are of a privileged class and in order to attract people who are different from the majority of software developers, people who are maybe from outside of your community, outside of your network, it's important to signal to them that they're welcome. And I think codes of conduct is one of their one mechanism by which you can signal to women and minorities and people of color and people on the LGBT spectrum that it's a safe place and that they're welcome and that there are consequences for people who violate the community norms. So you're here and you're presenting at Rails Conference, so it sounds like you do feel comfortable here and you feel like it's giving a positive vibe. Is this something you've seen other conferences adopting or is this something that maybe some conferences are kind of, "I'm not going to do this because maybe I'll upset our core audience. " I absolutely have seen that play out, that discussion play out. And I took the code of conduct pledge that Ash Dryden put together late last year. I will not speak at or attend a conference that does not have a comprehensive code of conduct. And a lot of people took that pledge. The people who disagree with it or who don't think it's a big deal are not the people that the code of conduct is there for.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah.
Coraline Ada Ehmke
Artis and engineering leadership
▶ Speaking
So if I'm somebody who's working in a community and I have a user group or a conference, what are some of the things that I can do to be more aware or ensure that I'm not even unaware of them, excluding people. I mean, if I look out at my user group and it's all a bunch of middle-aged white guys, is it just that's the area I'm in? Or am I maybe doing something that, how can I become more aware of what I'm doing and evaluate whether or not the audience is just that's the demographic I'm in?
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Or is there something I'm maybe doing to put up a barrier?
Coraline Ada Ehmke
Artis and engineering leadership
▶ Speaking
I think that is absolutely the first step, is looking out at the people that you're associating with. And if they all look like you, there's a good chance that you're suffering from network effect. You have established relationships with people that you've worked with, people that you socialize with. It's not that you've done something wrong, it's that you haven't done all of the things that you could do to make your group inclusive and welcoming. And one of the ways you can do that is by promoting the fact that you are open and welcoming. You can reach out specifically to people that you know in the community who are, you know, people of color, who are women, who are people on the LGBT spectrum, who are, you know, not able-bodied like you are. Reaching out to them and making sure that they understand that you are open to their participation and you welcome their participation is an important first step. But there are people who are much more well-informed about these topics than I am. I recommend going to Geek Feminism Wiki, and there are lots of resources there for answering some of those questions.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Geek Feminism Wiki?
Coraline Ada Ehmke
Artis and engineering leadership
▶ Speaking
Yeah, you can just google Geek Feminism Wiki, and they have lots of resources. And does that include information for people who are all they're abled and- Yes.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Okay.
Coraline Ada Ehmke
Artis and engineering leadership
▶ Speaking
Yes, it's intersectional. Okay, yeah. And, you know, going even beyond the current world conference, in a company where they're dealing with trying to recruit the most competent people, how can they- Do you have any advice on how they can work within these frameworks or these- One of the techniques that has been shown to be effective is removing names and all identifying information from resumes as they come in. There have been studies that have shown that men and women are more likely to pick resumes that belong to people with male-sounding names, or people who don't have a name that sounds Latina or European, Polish, or what have you. We tend to favor and pick people who remind us of us. So a blind selection process is very good. It's also a great way for taking speakers at conferences.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Just topic, and does it sound like it would be a good talk?
Coraline Ada Ehmke
Artis and engineering leadership
▶ Speaking
Right, exactly.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah. And then you can further down the process, you can say, Oh, what has this person done before? And what other talks have they given?
Coraline Ada Ehmke
Artis and engineering leadership
▶ Speaking
And second, it's the right flavor for our conference. And you do the same sort of thing with your company. Like, everything that you do as an employer, the way that you post your job ad, where you post your job ad, the sorts of events that you sponsor, the marketing materials you have, the message around that, these are all expressions of your values. Your culture is not a ping pong table. It's not a foosball table or beer after work. Your culture is what you believe in as a group of people and how you express it.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah.
Coraline Ada Ehmke
Artis and engineering leadership
▶ Speaking
And it's also going, you know, I might fit into the cultural class of the typical white male, but even when I see a ping pong table at a company, I have three kids.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Right.
Coraline Ada Ehmke
Artis and engineering leadership
▶ Speaking
That's not appealing to me. That's, that's, that's immediately a barrier. And I feel that between me and, and I think there's also an empathy thing that, you know, sure, you know, I'm not, maybe not somebody who's experienced severe, um, uh, challenges culturally, but I can extrapolate from them. It's like, Oh, I feel complicated there. Well, maybe that other person who is not able to, you know, go up the stairs like I can, might feel like, Oh, they're not comfortable coming to a company that is up on that floor. I think you get on something important to you. Empathy is very, very important. Um, if we're thoughtful and empathetic, um, then we, and we try to put ourselves on another's position, um, and not express our opinions about what that must be like, but listen to what it's like, um, and figure out a way to, to advocate and be a good ally. It really comes into listening and empathizing.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah.
Coraline Ada Ehmke
Artis and engineering leadership
▶ Speaking
And you know, we did go a little bit off from your original talk. I, I kind of went off in a different direction. I apologize about that. But, uh, so just to go back to artisans and apprentices, what was, what was the, the message, the story that you were telling the talk?
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Sure.
Coraline Ada Ehmke
Artis and engineering leadership
▶ Speaking
Um, the period of time that we live in where we have, um, market economies that are taking off, where we have periods in which people are moving from rural areas to cities, population explosion, um, an age of specialization as opposed to generalists. All of that happened before, um, in medieval Europe, um, and it's between the, you know, 11th, 12th, 13th centuries. Um, so we are not in a unique position and the way that people then reacted to changing cultural and market, uh, market and governmental forces can, um, teach us a lot about how we can react in a more effective way. There are things that we did, that they did better than we did.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah.
Coraline Ada Ehmke
Artis and engineering leadership
▶ Speaking
Um, if you were an apprentice in a guild, you had health insurance essentially. Your master was required by law, um, required by the legal agreement that you signed, um, to provide you with healthcare, with food, um, and room and board. Um, and we don't do that for people who are entering our profession now. If you've got to work for a startup, you're lucky if there's insurance.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Right.
Coraline Ada Ehmke
Artis and engineering leadership
▶ Speaking
And again, that self-selects people who can afford insurance or don't need insurance.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Right.
Coraline Ada Ehmke
Artis and engineering leadership
▶ Speaking
So, so, uh, yeah, that's interesting to think about how, you know, we, we like to think of as everybody for themselves or kind of thrown into the wolves back in those days, but it really wasn't. I remember even hearing about like in Egypt, um, that there's, there's controversy about whether the people that built the pyramids were slaves.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Right.
Coraline Ada Ehmke
Artis and engineering leadership
▶ Speaking
And that they were tradesmen and they were actually like, kind of like the middle class, you know, like lower middle class and they went and they built it. They worked for a period of time and then they went back and then they had, they were paid, you know. So, you know, we, we think that we're so civilized now, but, and that everybody back then was so uncivilized and, you know, it's, Civilization is not a living or progression.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Right.
Coraline Ada Ehmke
Artis and engineering leadership
▶ Speaking
It's a cycle.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah. So, thank you for taking the time to speak. I appreciate it. I really appreciate the opportunity. Yeah. [Music]