One of Our Own
Editor’s note #1: Alesia Braga has served as Chief Technology Officer of Quandoo since May 2018. She says she first got interested in AI when it wasn’t over-hyped but quite useless since meaningful computations would take hours and days. A fact about herself that Alesia regards as a fun one is this: she learned German in 6 months from zero till university-level fluency to be able to eventually build an engineering team from 0 to 80 engineers, in 2 years.
What follows is based on Alesia’s talk at Tech Open Air Berlin 2019:
I’m an engineer. But you never work alone in our field, as it is always about The Team! So, becoming a leader, I had to come up with some sort of a formula on how to build great teams!
I’m also an ex-Googler, and one of the major takeaways from Google culture for me was going through the experience of “bias busting” which is arranged as follows:
They give you a set of tests or exams, if you will, each one of them taking ~ 10 minutes, and they aim to get your responses fast, ideally without thinking. The questions are focused around building groups that match. You can check your biases related to gender, political views, race, religion … as well as to about other 10–15 things that I wasn’t even aware people could discriminate against.
The results were quite surprising. You never know how your environment shapes your decision-making process. After all, you know the saying: “Tell me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are.”
It turned out I have a positive bias towards women in science. I see them as a better fit for engineering roles.
This information influenced my hiring approach. Getting rid of your biases altogether is an exercise in futility. The least we can do is be aware of them and act accordingly. And, since I know about my biases I’m cautious about picking the right person for the job, and I constantly question myself if I’m favoring the right candidate.
And, while there’s no such thing as “one size fits all”, I’ve seen how women tend to be overly shy about their accomplishments, while men are less hesitant when they speak of themselves with confidence, and often do not hesitate to over-promise or over-sell. So, for some cases, here’s the formula that I might suggest and that might help build balanced teams:
Discount confidence of male candidates by 25% and mark-up those 25% to females who tend to be shy about their accomplishments.
I’m aware there can be many exceptions to a rule. Cats should be treated on cat-by-cat basis, as another saying goes. But, hey, when you ask an engineer like me to solve a problem: be ready to get numbers and algorithms!
Editor’s note #2: Following her presentation at TOA 2019, an interview with Quandoo’s CTO appeared on page 12 in the printed version of Die Welt Kompakt, a German national newspaper (see online). Alesia Braga also spoke at the 3rd Annual Machine Intelligence Summit 2019, and her talk at Google Cloud Summit in Munich is coming up later this week.
