Women In Tech — Jossie Haines, Director of Engineering at Tile
56% of women leave the tech industry during the second decade of their career.
In 2018, after nearly 20 years in the tech industry, Jossie Haines had become that statistic. She left her job at Apple and started her own small business to help entrepreneurs with the technology needed to get their businesses up and running.
But she saw something that she hadn’t been able to see from inside the tech world — women in the real world using technology built for them but not by them. It wasn’t really useful for them and they had lots of challenges.
Jossie realized the future is pretty much being defined by the tech that is being written today, and if we keep having women drop out of tech, then we’re going to have half the population not defining what our future is going to be like. That seems like a very sad future.
In this episode of Women In Tech by Plato, we talk to Jossie about her return to tech, and what needs to be done to reverse that statistic and keep women in tech.
Why did you decide to return to tech?
My big passion has been to keep women in tech. I decided to come back into the tech industry and I had some big requirements. I wanted to find a role where I could work on something that was technically interesting. I wanted a good boss and sponsor. I wanted to work somewhere with a diverse and inclusive environment. And I also wanted to implement some of the diversity and inclusion initiatives that I’ve been very passionate about.
I found all those things at Tile, where I’m the platform engineering director. At Tile, I actually help figure out our Tile Platform as we’re taking it to the next level. Right now, we have 20 million Tiles out there. In the future, we’re trying to get the Tile software into the 5 billion Bluetooth devices being sold this year. My job is to work with different partners as we’re trying to integrate the Tile technology into both access points as well as other Bluetooth devices.
In a video you had created, you gave an example of Siri always defaulting to men’s sports when you worked at Apple. Can you talk to us more about some of these issues you’re seeing that you’re trying to help solve to keep women in tech?
It was very fascinating when I started my own small business because I was working with a lot of women who wanted to start their own businesses but didn’t really have a technical background.
I’d see them use certain tools like Canva, which was very easy for women to pick up, but then integration technologies like Zapier were much harder for them to pick up. I saw what challenges women were facing from the UIs they used.
And then, as you mentioned, there was the Siri example. But another example is Apple’s Health Kit. When it was first released it didn’t actually have support for menstruation cycles and being able to enter that. There are lots of different places in the world where the lack of women is basically causing these products to be released without accounting for women’s needs.
Not only do we need to get more women in tech, but I also see it as a systemic problem that we have of women leaving the tech industry. If we have 56% of women dropping out when they can have the most impact in their career, because they’re at their most senior level at that point, we don’t end up having a future that’s defined with women.
While you were at Apple, what were your roles, your responsibilities and some of the challenges you faced that led you to leave?
I was the Siri media domains manager. Over my two years at Apple, I managed music, media, and sports.
And, if you looked at my career from the outside, you’d think, “hey, she’s having a successful career at Apple. She’s running women in Siri. Her team got an Emmy for Siri on Apple TV. She got to work on launching HomePod and managed the music team while building it.”
It looked great from the outside but inside like I felt like I had no support. I felt isolated and alone. I was building women at Siri but I was told I can’t start a mentorship program because the leadership team didn’t believe in the benefits of a mentorship program.
I was working hard and I was going through all these struggles and I always thought it was me. I spent two years in limbo and I left wondering, was it me? So, when I left Apple, I actually went on a couple of months of exploration of really figuring out if it was me.
I started learning about meditating and morning routines and just becoming more productive and I read 20 books on everything from leadership to technology and then I realized that I really wanted to figure out where I wanted to go next.
So I went to this business seminar and the lady running it was all about finding what your true passion is and making a business out of that. I realized I needed to start my own small business.
I joined this business mentorship program which was a year-long program on building your own business and I realized while I was going through it that my passion was really still technology.
It wasn’t any of these other things that I thought I was trying to do. My passion is really technology and then seeing how women were being impacted in the real world just made it very concrete to me to get back into tech to make a difference.
What advice do you have for other women who are in a similar situation in other companies where maybe it seems like they’re doing really great and they have some really exciting responsibilities, but internally, they don’t have the support?
While it is hard to find great environments where women can thrive, I feel a lot of women stay stuck in the places where they aren’t thriving, and it’s because they feel like it’s them. Like they need to prove themselves to get to the next level and I want to eliminate that.
If the situation sucks and you’re not in a diverse environment and you’re not getting support from your boss, go find something else where you will get that support. They’re hard to find, but there are companies out there that care about diversity and inclusion and it’s not just lip service. They’re really trying to increase their diversity.
And, there’s good bosses and sponsors who can help promote women to the next level. It’s just finding those right situations. That’s one side and the other side is, I think as women, we all need a little more resilience.
Resilience is one of the things like my mom taught me from a very early age. When looking back to figure out what led me to be successful in my career, I realize resilience was really one of those things. It’s not something we teach women or we teach as a skill.
So, learning some resilience as well as finding those good environments and feeling empowered to find the environment you can thrive in instead of feeling stuck in a job where you might not succeed.
Women in tech is not a women’s problem. It is everybody’s problem.
What are some things that we can do to keep them in tech? To bring them back if they are facing these situations and decided to quit?
Women in tech is not a women’s problem. It is everybody’s problem. So, for the women who are listening, I’m calling out to you to stay in tech. Build that resilience. Find the right environment.
But for the men out there, find women you can support and be a sponsor for. A lot of times people sponsor people who look like them. Find somebody who doesn’t look like you to sponsor. Create those diverse and inclusive environments.
Diversity is pretty much set by middle management. CEOs can say we want diversity and inclusion all they want. But they’re not the ones hiring the engineers. It’s the middle managers hiring the engineers.
You need to get the entire company behind supporting diversity and inclusion. And it really starts at that management level. As a manager, it’s easier to just find another guy to hire as an engineer, and I’m not saying that guy wouldn’t be a great hire. But it would be nice to get some more diversity, so look at a diverse slate of candidates.
It sounds like you’ve found that environment at Tile as well. Can you talk to us about your role and responsibilities over there and how it is different than some of the other roles you have been in?
I actually have a very interesting role at Tile. I’m the platform engineering director and I get to pretty much define a lot of our Tile future, which is really exciting. I get to meet with partners as we’re trying to integrate Tile into different devices.
I pretty much get to interact with every single engineering team that we have as we do different integrations and we have to figure out, okay, well is this like a web integration? Do we need more APIs? Is this a back end integration?
So that’s one of the things I really love about my position, that I get to work on lots of different things. But the other half of my position is I actually run Tile’s diversity and inclusion program.
When I joined Tile, one of the things I was passionate about was diversity and inclusion. So, I told them one of the things I wanted to do is help drive our initiatives.
So we’ve done a couple of things so far, which I’m really excited about. I kicked off the Tile mentoring program and we have 29 pairs of mentors in our first round of mentoring and that’s super exciting. We’re doing a three and a half month mentoring cycle.
But for diversity and inclusion, you can’t just do one thing. You actually have to look at everything holistically, from hiring all the way to years in the future, when your employee is there, do they feel like it’s an inclusive environment.
So we broke everything down from hiring all the way through to culture and took a step back and said, okay, what can we do in hiring? In hiring, we want to make sure we always get diverse candidates, especially if it’s a director role or above. We redefined our core values last year.
So now we have interview questions that are directly tied to the core values. We also changed up the way we do the interview feedback to make sure it’s more consistent to reduce bias because when you ask interview questions consistently across the different interviews you reduce bias that way.
And then with our culture, we’re trying to adopt some of that. We’re trying to make sure there’s lots of diversity and inclusion in our core values. For example, our engagement survey these days now actually has diversity and inclusion questions in it.
So it’s amazing working somewhere that allows me to spend some of my time on diversity and inclusion initiatives as well as getting to work on interesting technology.
You mentioned the mentorship as well. Can you dive a little more into how that works within Tile?
Yeah. So one of the big things I really wanted to do is start a mentoring program. I didn’t get to do it at Apple and I really wanted to do it at Tile and so I took a step back and started doing some research on what are some of the key things I need to do to start a successful mentoring program.
There were a couple of things. First is the matchmaking, so we came up with some surveys that we sent the mentors and the mentees and they filled it out and then myself and a group of other people who’ve run our women’s group did all the matchmaking.
And then the other big thing is training. Training is key for starting a mentoring program in your company, especially to be able to set expectations. It helps the mentors figure out what they’re supposed to do and how to be more successful.
We came up with an hour training for the mentors and the mentees and they each went through it with me. We covered things like what you’ll do in your first meeting and the types of questions you’ll want to ask.
You’re also mentoring on the Plato platform. Can you tell us about that experience?
Being super passionate about mentoring, I decided to join Plato mentoring. It’s been very fun and rewarding. I’ve talked to people on everything from getting more diverse engineers, to challenges at work with managers who aren’t being inclusive, to turning software engineers into game engineers.
I find it fun that every week we get to talk to somebody new and different and help them with their problems.
What advice do you have for young women entering tech, who haven’t been in tech before?
My advice to young women entering tech is to be resilient. There are all these challenges, and companies might not present themselves in the best way.
There was this Stanford study recently about how one of the reasons the number of women joining software companies is not going up is how companies are presenting themselves to women when they’re going out to colleges. They’re only bringing male engineers, things like that.
So, my advice to women is — be resilient. Go look. Find those diverse environments and find a good boss and sponsor. My boss, Steve, I’ve worked for him off and on for the last 15 years. This is actually the fourth time he has been my boss and it’s really nice working for somebody that I know has my back and will help with my career.
Want To Get Mentored By Jossie? Find Her On Plato!
Plato connects engineering managers and PMs with experienced mentors and tech leaders from top companies like Google, Lyft, Netflix, and more. You’ll get to have group mentoring sessions alongside peers, and private conversations with mentors like Jossie.
To get a taste of Plato, sign up for a group mentoring session here — http://community.platohq.com
Looking to mentor, or know someone who’d make a good mentor? Apply here — https://www.platohq.com/become-a-mentor
