The sad state of diversity in Systems Engineering teams. And some mitigations…
Probably the most invaluable learning I’ve acquired in my 5+ year ride at Spotify is most problems technology teams face are not a technical problem. Nothing you will solve for good with more/new code or metal.
Diversity, or more specifically, the lack of it, is one of the big ones. Luckily, many organizations are putting a spotlight on this. It is obvious, however, the industry has not come a long way.
One of the great things about the initiatives to foster diversity at Spotify is getting people to talk more openly, freely and frequently about those issues. And, honestly, it’s been quite eye-opening and saddening at times. It has given me and others the ability to reflect on how our attitudes at work and in life play and have played an important role on making the world and our job fair or unfair, inclusive or exclusive.
“I realize I was behaving like one of them”
Some months ago, I was having a chat with a woman who works in one of our engineering teams, when she said something staggering about her previous job: “I realize now I was behaving like one of them [men making sexist comments about women in technology] and I feel embarrassed about it”. Being able to talk openly is a great first step towards improving the situation.
The “Sysadmin”
Systems Engineering, which is one of the disciplines closer to my heart, is even in a worse shape. An image search for “Systems Administrator” or “Systems Engineer” is quite revealing: all the stereotypical traits of a sysadmin surfaced in two sets of images.
How did we get here?
For many, the job of a sysadmin is connected with unhealthy habits such as pulling out frequent all-nighters, being called at any point in time, working in unhealthy environments (try spending 12 hours in a datacenter) or saving the world by carrying out heroic efforts.
All those things, make people think this is a job only some want and can do. And the stereotypes are reinforced (by ourselves many times). Hell, even during the recent System Administrator Appreciation Day, many of the gratitude tweets and messages were clogged with images that contribute to strengthening them further.
Been there, done that
I used to be “proud” of saving the world. I used to count as trophies the amount of nights I had seen the beautiful dawns of Barcelona.
And with that and a high tolerance for behaviors (mine, too) which should have been suffocated (language, jokes, etc) I contributed in making this job one that is perceived as a white-male-20s-beerdrinker-basement-unhealthy one.
It does not need to be like that
Starting at Spotify. Growing older. Moving to Sweden. Having my first daughter. Spending time with people from different places, with different backgrounds. Having slight burnout after being overworked for weeks. All of those things make me realize how negative the current status is.
It is not necessary to remind everyone about the benefits of having diverse teams. There is plenty of literature around it. There is not a single angle you can look at it from where you are not going to find benefits: productivity, fairness, equity, quality of products, work life balance, etc…
Mitigations
Even if you ace your duties as a sysadmin, your job will have some peculiarities and probably a higher degree of unpredictability than other engineering disciplines. Here is a list of things you can do to ensure this can be a job for everyone.
- Hold everyone around you and yourself accountable for taking the necessary rest after stressful situations: Law already enforces this in many countries. Anyways health>law. You might be able to work three nights in a row. Once. Twice. Maybe more. If you don’t get the necessary rest, you will end up paying the price. You should be able to have a family and do your job. You should be able to have a life and do your job.
- Call in for help if you are alone fixing a problem. Even if you know how to fix it and have an understanding of when it is going to be fixed, probably your prediction will be wrong.
- Distribute operational responsibility: one of the cool things we do at Spotify is not having central teams being paged. We take it to an extreme (each team that develops a feature is responsible for its uptime), but I am sure there are middle ground solutions.
- Ensure there is an escalation path in your on-call rotations that allows several people to jump into a problem.
- Avoid luring people to work with you using the stereotypes that accompany our job: beer, etc…
Some other stuff, not sysadmin specific:
- Ensure many different people with different backgrounds are interviewing candidates. Don’t focus only on technology. Try asking people how they deal with stressful situations. See how they collaborate. See how they involve others and who they involve.
- Even if your current organization/team is not very diverse, ensure decision making happens by groups capturing your limited diversity. Inclusion is crucial to avoid self-reinforcing behaviors.
- Try to have your meet-ups at family friendly times. If not possible, maybe you can organize some parallel activities for kids.
- When you interview people, be ready to experience different communication styles. Also, don’t underestimate the amount of resolution you can lose when people are not using a language as a native.
- Ensure your workplace, facilities, decoration, messaging and equipment are appealing to everyone.
