Recap: Grace Hopper Celebration 2017
I’m Lauren and I am a software engineer at Turo. These are my musing about Turo’s engineering trip to the 2017 Grace Hopper Convention and Celebration in Orlando, Florida.
So who is Grace Hopper and why did we attend her celebration you may be asking? Well, Grace Hopper is a famed computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral. She led the team that created the first computer language compiler, which led to the popular COBOL language. The eponymous event was created by a friend of Admiral Hopper, Dr. Anita Borg, with the main goal to bring more women into technology. The Grace Hopper Celebration is now the world’s largest annual gathering of women technologists. This year’s event was attended by over 18,000 people.
Keynote Standouts
Melinda Gates gave one of the most memorable keynotes of the event. Not only was her message on point, but her deck was brilliantly curated and the flow of her story, pitch perfect.
She sagely reminded us that:
“Not every good idea comes wrapped in a hoodie.”
😆…and:
“ the world deserves the chance to see what girls can do.”
More on that in a bit…
The keynotes in general this year were largely impressive and included women technologists across many fields.
We heard from other leading women in the field like Dr. Fei-Fei Li, Professor and Director, Stanford University AI Lab AND Chief Scientist, Google Cloud. She talked about the diversity crisis in tech.
“If AI is going to change our lives, our society and perhaps the entire future of humanity, which I believe it will, then this lack of representation is an absolute crisis.”
Diana Greene, founder and CEO of VMware, current Google Cloud CEO, spoke about “how much is possible in a truly collaborative environment and how much fun it is to build and bring to market something that’s both loved and high impact.”
It was truly inspiring to hear their stories and many others, you can watch the entire keynote lineup here: https://ghc.anitab.org/ghc-17-livestream/
On the showroom floor
With Turo currently having many open engineering roles, the Turo booth at the job fair was going to be a big focus of the team. We held daily shifts and were able to chat with people about what Turo does, what it’s like to work there but also what it’s like working as a software engineer in general. The job fair was huge and attended by many well known companies (Airbnb, Intuit, Google, Microsoft, us 😉, you name it). The swag was flowing and every day was brimming with people and interesting companies. We were able to conduct several screening interviews with potential candidates and met a lot of engineering grads just starting out on their budding careers.
This year’s Turo booth was looking particularly great with the help of our community manager Chris and our engineering director Jonathan. Before I show you that though let’s take a quick trip back in time to our pre-rebrand booth from GHC 2015 …
#TBT Grace Hopper Booth (2015)
This Year’s Booth
Celeb Sightings
At a gathering of this scale you expect to see some familiar faces from tech and beyond … Here’s a few of the people we bumped into at GHC17.
Megan Smith
R2D2
Kim
Insights from Engineering Sessions
Nicole — Turo Software Engineer
Attended: Fighting Machine Learning Bias: Driving Growth by Tackling the Homogeneity Assumption:
“I went to a talk on ML bias that was super awesome. Frances B. Haugen, Product Manager at Pinterest was explaining that because their earliest adopters were mostly midwestern US women, their recommendation algorithms suggested content that was almost exclusively female-targeted. By the time they corrected the algorithm by over-sampling for their male users, they had already created a brand that was completely women-centric, and missed out on a half-population of potential users as a result.
My take away was that there are some compelling business reasons to actively introduce bias into ML(machine learning) algorithms (because the alternative is a passive bias that we may not always be aware of or have control over).“
Thoughts for Turo:
“There are a lot of ways I’d love to see us apply this to our business, including:
1) Managing risk + allowing low-income users to rent
2) Improving gender spread on our platform (we don’t have hard numbers, but there is substantial evidence that both our owners and renters skew heavily male).”
Kelli-Jean — Turo Data Scientist
Attended: Recommendation Systems and Personalization:
“Included an interesting talk by Dorna Bandari, Lead Data Scientist at Pinterest, that discussed clustering sessions (e.g. grouping sessions into different categories based on whether people were going to their site to browse, pin things, check notifications, etc) and recommending different actions based on the type of session the user was in.”
Takeaways for Turo:
“I could see Turo doing something like this. For example, if users are there simply to check on their upcoming trip, we could immediately display their details when they go to Turo or open the app. Or, if they are there to rent a vehicle for the weekend, we could immediately recommend cars available for that weekend.”
Obviously, we took a detour to Disneyland
One of Turo’s own engineers did a short stint as an engineer for Disney corporate in Orland and so, kindly acted as our resident Orlando/Disney expert. We visited Disneyworld ‘contemporary’ as she would have us call it. We went on almost every roller coaster (much to Linda’s dismay, cue her very nervous laughter) and saw a very spooky fireworks show.
Wrap up
GHC17 was an incredible experience in many aspects; in sheer scale, in technical content and most importantly in inspiring vibes. It was also a great reminder of how much more we have to grow women’s representation in tech, but also how far we’ve come.
Now, back to Melinda Gates, who emphasized the most salient point of the entire week:
We need to create new pathways for women to get into tech.
There are women from different life walks and career development stages that could be utilized to solve today’s problems, right now. They just need a pathway into tech, a stepping stone. Traditional education paths, such as college, are only one piece of this puzzle. There is a lot more we could be doing post k-12 and post higher-ed. We need to take advantage of non-traditional channels as well and even build new ones to help more women gain the skills needed for a technologist career.
If we want to see a wave of women in tech, then we have to open the flood gates. Right now, diversity efforts focus on getting more women in to the pipeline, but it’s not working, so what can we do?
What if we created many pathways into tech:
- Reach them early — Let’s give young girls in and out of school early access to computers and tech. More toys like Goldiblocks and Kano.
- Emphasize tech as a tool. “Computer science is as much about computers as chemistry is about beakers”.
- Combine computing: Offer computing courses in addition to regular coursework to expose tech as a complementary tool to their field.
- Post-college: Bridge programs for CS, masters programs that add a CS emphasis.
For anyone and everyone who has talent and interest there should be a way into tech. Not just one pipeline, but many pathways. Turn the trickle of women into tech, into a torrent.
I’ll close with a bit of advice from Diane Greene:
“Define a vision and goals, throw yourself into realizing them as fully as you possibly can, surround yourself with people and situations that you enjoy and be mindful of the world as it is, even though you are changing it for the future.”
Great celebration team! We are the future, let’s transform technology for the best 😉.
