When You're the Lone (Female) Voice of Reason презентация

Inc.
STARWEST 2015 – Women Who Test

15% of CS bachelor degrees are awarded to women
Around 20% of US SW developers are women
Senior women are an even smaller minority
Many teams have 0-1 total women
Coincidentally many ship meetings also
have 0-1 women in the room
Being the ‘other’ is hard!

process:
Always have data
Be wrong a lot
Pick a team that lets you be wrong a lot

hour.
Real-Time Simulations Engineer – Boeing Integrated Defense Systems
Software Developer in Test – Microsoft Live Search
Software Developer (combined role) – Microsoft Bing
Senior Backend Engineer - PlayFab

of data
Good teams use them to make product decisions; great teams use them to make ALL decisions:
Hiring
Promotions
Work Assignments
Product Planning
Ship / No-Ship Calls

will be challenged
Use repeatable processes to collect your data
Bookmark your sources
Lead with your information first
Err on the side of more (concise) data as opposed to less

‘These five tests are failing, and ReportX indicates that the feature area they cover is critical to 80% of our users. Thus, shipping would break a majority of users.’

‘Shipping would break a majority of users.’

VS

precise
Let your information speak for itself:
Don’t play the blame game; data is data, regardless of who caused what
Don’t make it personal
Be inclusive: ‘we’ instead of ‘you’ or ‘I’
Don’t blindly defer because someone is ‘more senior’ or ‘the expert’

and every test case failure is being wrong
Every good design comes from fifty bad designs
On a good coding day, I’m wrong at least fifty times
Be comfortable in your wrong-ness
Be comfortable in your teammates’
wrong-ness
Don’t confuse being wrong with
being bad

to hold being wrong against you
You can talk with candidly
Can gut-check your solutions
Respects you and whom you can respect
Reminds you that you are good at your job!

is good at everything
Find the experts and study them (their mistakes)
Write everything down
Don’t get stuck on big mistakes

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me!

respectful team members
Even joking negativity is still toxic
Sociability is of lesser importance
Other women! Especially in senior roles
Supportive management chain (not just your immediate boss)

of peers
Cold-calls and recruiters are my least-favorite

Interviews are KEY:
You are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you
Do they have all the healthy characteristics?
Can you meet your would-be team members as well as your boss?
Do they use inclusive language? You should!

a ‘known thing’ for the mysterious future
Signs it’s time to leave:
Stalled talk about your future
Being passed up for promotions
Being consistently assigned ‘the dregs’
High-level re-org into a known-problem group
‘Gut feeling’