Taking our Tech Summit Virtual
Flatiron’s Tech Summit is a time where all our technical employees gather together to share knowledge and celebrate our accomplishments. Last year’s summit had the theme “Know When to Startup and When to Scale”, with speeches about how Flatiron’s data was changing the way cancer drugs were being developed and regulated, discussions of our plans to scale our Engineering org to match the company’s impressive growth, plus playing human bingo and a Happy Hour.
I loved my first Tech Summit at Flatiron so much that I joined the planning committee for the 2020 event. But the world changed, and we had to rewrite the playbook.
In May we sat down to plan the 2020 Tech Summit, set for the end of July, in a very different environment. It was clear we wouldn’t be gathering in the same physical space. It felt wrong to focus on celebrating ourselves when the Black Lives Matter movement was calling on us all to stand up against racism and when the world was in turmoil from the COVID-19 pandemic. We still wanted to provide a way for Flatiron technologists to engage with peers, reflect and share knowledge, and so we set out to create an event focused on ways that we can evolve and grow to meet the challenges of the time. Our theme: Evolution in Times of Change.
I’d like to share a few takeaways I learned from the planning process and this year’s event.
Lean into ✨Zoom✨
While we were planning the Summit, we knew that, despite going virtual, we still had to achieve one of its most important goals: to bring the tech organization together. This goal was made very challenging given that the pandemic had forced us into situations where it was all too easy to fall out of touch. Many attendees had started working at Flatiron post-COVID and had never even met their teams in person. Our summer interns were here, but missing out on the in-person interactions that could let them truly experience Flatiron’s warm and collaborative culture. We wanted to use our virtual platform to give everyone, old and new, an opportunity to connect with others and to create a feeling of being in the same space.
We knew we’d end up with a pale approximation of previous years if all we tried to do was put on the exact same events, but through Zoom. So instead, we accepted the reality that everything would look and feel different, and leaned into the ways that a virtual Summit could even enhance our experience!
We spread the event over two days instead of its usual one, to support employees who work part-time or in other time zones. We scheduled frequent breaks between events and kept lunch offline to avoid Zoom fatigue. In one session, the icebreaker had everyone split off into groups and see which could come up with the most innovative “Zoom pose,” using everyone’s cameras in a grid view (the team that dressed up in all green and made a four-leaf-clover took home the gold). And instead of plopping everyone into a giant Zoom room for happy hour, we used a service called Gather, which allowed us to recreate a mini-map of our office and use virtual avatars to walk around and talk to each other in a space we all miss!
Acknowledge Current Events and Make the Space to Discuss Them
We knew that our summit would look very different and not just because we were going to be virtual. So much had changed in our personal lives — we had all been working remotely for a couple months, some Flatiron employees became full-time caregivers and teachers when schools also went remote, some of us weren’t even in New York anymore. The news was constantly reminding us that COVID-19 was still raging — and would be impacting our lives for the foreseeable future. It was (and still is) a time of moral reckoning, a time to challenge ourselves to be actively anti-racist, to strive to be empathetic and inclusive despite so much harshness in the political and social climate of the country. We wanted to frame our Summit events to not just acknowledge what was going on in the world, but to also embrace and confront it directly.
Our keynote speaker, Neetu Rajpal (the VP of Engineering at Oscar Health), shared advice for ways to thrive when you’re going through periods of significant change. Our Tech Leadership team swapped out our traditional Status of the Union speech and instead gave a keynote centered on Embracing and Learning from Change. We heard their stories about ways they had tackled uncertainty in their lives, and advice about how to not shy away from taking risks in our current jobs.
Summit attendees also embraced our theme in real time. A major component of our Summit is Unconference Sessions — roundtable discussions that can be led by any attendee. These sessions traditionally cover topics like how to navigate career growth at Flatiron, or sharing a new technology, but this year we saw many leaders opt in to lead a session aligned with the change we’re currently experiencing. I saw sessions on how COVID is impacting cancer care, how to increase diversity in our hiring pipelines, how to maintain morale while working from home, and more.
In one of the Summit’s most vulnerable moments, 3 Black engineers held a panel discussing their experiences being a person of color in tech. I remember listening to them share the somewhat non-traditional paths they took to get to Flatiron, which made me take a step back and realize the privilege that I exercised when I joined the company through a traditional campus hiring pipeline. One engineer likened his code switching at work to “wearing a mask just to fit in” — hiding his culture by changing the way he spoke or looked just to survive at work. The panel gave us a lot to reckon with, and brought into the limelight how much more room for growth we have when it comes to making Flatiron more inclusive for our Black colleagues.
I haven’t seen my team in person since March 2020, but the Tech Summit connected me to my co-workers in a lot of ways I didn’t think could be possible over a series of video calls. I met new people, gained wisdom from our speakers and from my peers, and attempted to share some things I’ve learned in the last year. By embracing some of the change we’re all going through, we continue to evolve and grow even because of it.
