The diversification imperative

As has been stated and re-stated many times over the past few months, our industry is still overwhelmingly white and male. There are significant structural and societal hurdles that make it harder for people who are not cisgendered white men to get into, and then succeed at, a career in engineering. If you aren’t convinced of this yet, I’d like to suggest you read more from smart people like Ashe Dryden and Marco Rogers.

I’m convinced. I really believe this hurts our industry, and impedes our collective ability to innovate. As Carvell Wallace said recently at AlterConf:

People are only good at solving the problems they have.

How are we to create products that address the needs of, for example, young black women, if we don’t have any in the industry? If you’re not convinced by the moral or social justice imperative, you can at least be convinced, I’m sure, by the economic one. Besides, homogeneity is boring.

Making a start

There are many fine organisations working to address this imbalance, including Black Girls Code, Women Who Code, Tech Superwomen, and CODE2040, with whom I’m proud to say that Medium is partnering this summer as a host company for three fellows.

But outside of these organisations, what can we do individually to address this issue? Something, at least.

A recent mock interview arranged by CODE2040 between myself and a young candidate convinced me that I can help by preparing students for their first technical interviews.

So, starting next week, I’m going to be blocking out an hour of my time each day at 12pm PST to offer free mock engineering interviews to current Black and Latino/Latina CS students who want to pursue a career in engineering.

The mock interview will take place over Google Hangouts and will last an hour, during which time I’ll walk you through an example format of a technical phone screen. I’ll ask a coding question and try to help you get comfortable with thinking out loud, narrowing in on a solution, and writing code in a shared coding environment. I’ll tell you the kind of things I look for in a candidate, and how you can make it easier for the interviewer to say “yes”. There should also be time to answer any other questions you have.

This will obviously be drawn from my personal experience on both sides of interviewing, but hopefully much of it should be transferrable to the general case.

There will be no charge.

Caveat emptor

Medium wholeheartedly endorses the mission of greater diversity in the workplace, but this mock interview program is a personal endeavour. In line with the distributed authority we enjoy here, I haven’t asked anyone here for permission to do this (though knowing our team, I’m sure they are going to be supportive). Suffice it to say, though calendar invites might come from a Medium email address, and I might call you from a Medium laptop, this is not an official Medium program.

A mock interview with me is not an interview for an internship or full-time position at Medium. Applications for Medium’s Summer 2015 intern program are closed. We are hiring for full-time positions, but to avoid a conflict, you should not take a mock interview from me if you are planning to apply to Medium soon — I do a significant amount of the first round technical phone screens here.

Though I’m pretty well-calibrated on what makes for a good interview, a private endorsement from me that you did well in a mock interview should not be construed as a guarantee that you’ll succeed elsewhere. I hope I can help, but your mileage might vary. If there was an Apache license for this kind of thing, that would probably cover it.

Also, it’ll be lunch time, I might be eating.