Video: Why we shouldn't target women

If you have a Parleys subscription, you can watch the whole "Why we shouldn't target women" panel from Devoxx 2011 a month or so ago.  Watch me attempt to monopolise the whole panel as if it was my idea or something...

How to make your CV Not Suck

When you're applying for a job at LMAX, your CV (or résumé, for our American readers) usually comes through me and I decide whether to call you for a technical phone screen.

I'm going to let you into a secret.

I'm going to tell you the criteria I use when judging your CV.

Now, you could say this is a foolish thing for me to do, because now when you apply you'll be "cheating" and writing your CV to pass these guidelines.

Good.

LMAX isn't the only company that's going to judge your CV based on these criteria. I firmly believe that an increase in quality of the CVs in our industry can only be A Good Thing.  An increase in the quality of your CV is definitely A Good Thing for you.

Even more importantly, if I get CVs that do not pass these basic criteria, now I know you either don't read the LMAX blogs (shame on you), or you're not able to follow simple instructions (bodes poorly for your ability to learn within the company).

The thing that you have to keep in mind when you're writing your CV is that the reader really does spend less than a minute reading it.  It's not fair, true.  But it's the way humans are. I'm not in HR or recruitment, I have a proper job as a software developer, and I need to get back to that as soon as I can.  When I get CVs in batches of up to 12, as I regularly do, I'm not free to spend more than 10 minutes going through all of them.

The Easy Stuff
You must be able to spell
You really must.  There are things called Spell Checkers and they are amazing.  Some of these new-fangled pieces of software even show you your errors in this cool squiggly red underline in your document.

I'm reading your CV in Open Office, and if I see red squigglies under words that aren't technologies or acronyms I'm going to wonder how good your attention to detail is.

You must use capital letters in the appropriate places
It's traditional to start a sentence with a capital.  It's also traditional to use a capital "I" not "i" when referring to oneself.  We're not 14 years old, we're not writing an SMS to our mates.  We're applying for a proper job paying proper money.

Correct grammar is appreciated
Whether you're a native English-speaker or not, you need to get someone else who is a native English-speaker to check the prose in your CV to see if it scans correctly.  For me, it's not about being prejudiced against you because you're not a natural author, it's a) attention to detail again and b) your ability to make yourself understood.  If your sentence construction, choice of words or simple comma placement is off, I'll have to read that sentence a couple of times to parse it and it's going to trip me up and ruin my flow.  I want to get a good feel for you from reading your CV, so if I stumble a few times I'm not going to feel like I connected with you.

Harder and fluffier
I don't care which versions of Spring you've worked with
I know you need a checklist of technologies on your CV so it gets past the non-technical recruitment agents and get picked up via automated searches.  This is a bigger problem with our industry than one I want to tackle right now.  So I'll let you off having buzzword bingo on your CV.  However, your CV needs to be more than just a list of technologies you have used vaguely, or perhaps once read about.

It's useful to me if a) you put the technology check list in a single place on your CV, b) you give an indication of your level of proficiency in that technology (novice/competent/master) or length of time you've used it in a commercial environment, and c) you organise them in some useful fashion - preferably the ones that are appropriate to the job you're applying for near the top, or at least those you're happiest with at the top.  Alternatively put the checklist of technologies next to the role you used them in.

Often I will completely ignore this section because I'm more interested in your ability to learn and your passion for what you do.

I want to know about your passions
In the old days I used to fast forward to your hobbies and interests, but these days we're encouraged not to put those on the CV in case you're judged against them.  Which seems like political correctness gone crazy, but then when you think about it you can infer a lot about a person from their hobbies and interests, and therefore you could be pre-judging them based on some criteria that is not at all associated with their ability to do the job.  For example, if they have hobbies that take them all over England I might infer they have a car and can drive - OK, it's a dumb example, but you get the idea.

These days, given that I'm trying to find great team members to work with me at LMAX, I'm looking for things like: your blog; any contributions to open source software; your involvement in a Java User Group (or other extra-curricular activity).  I'm not going to discard you if you don't have any of these things, but if you do it's definitely extra brownie points for you.

I want to know if you worship at the altar of technology, or if you're business-value driven
Either of these things is fine - we need people who are very business-focussed and people who are rabid about technology, as well as all those in between, to build a good team.  Another axis of interest is people/process - are you passionate about people, about building a good team, about helping them to deliver?

Getting a feel for where you sit on these axes is not for me to discard you, but if you look like you're strongly in one of these camps and I feel like we need a team member to really push that area, then you stand a much better chance of getting a phone interview.

I'll get an indication of where you are by the way you talk about your roles and your achievements.  This does not help me:

Senior Developer on a web administration application.  Product was implemented using JavaScript, HTML, Spring, Hibernate, JMS, and MySQL.

This is much more useful:

I was part of a team of four developers implementing a web based administration application, commissioned to enable internal users to update the settings of our reporting tool.  This saved the support staff approximately 4 hours every week, as they no longer needed to manually update the database. We used agile techniques such as daily standups and weekly iterations in order to provide quick feedback to the business.

(I made both of those up, by the way, before anyone starts trying to sue me for stealing something off their CV).

Here I can see:

1. The size of the team, and your ability to work in a team
2. You understood the business need you were trying to fulfill
3. You have worked in an agile environment and at least pay lip service to why you were working that way.

I don't really care about the specific technologies you used, the fact that you mentioned web-based and database gives me enough of a feel.

Sometimes prospective employers really do stalk you
Personally I think claims that prospective employers will check every facet of your web presence are somewhat over-exaggerated.  If I barely have 60 seconds to read your CV, I'm not going to check you out on Facebook, my life is too short.

However, if you claim to have written a book I will look it up on Amazon.  If you have a publication or example code, I will glance at those.  If you've worked for a company I've worked for in the past, I'll look you up on LinkedIn to see if we have any common connections (or worse, to see if I should remember you and simply don't).  I'll also use LinkedIn if your CV is not screaming yes or no, to see if there's an extra dimension in your profile which will tip me one way or the other.

So be aware of your web presence, particularly something that is aimed at your professional image like LinkedIn, and make sure it represents you the way you want it to.

In Conclusion

This post might be simply a good way to increase my own workload - every CV I get from now on may be an automatic pass, and then I have to call all of you before I can start weeding you out.

But I don't mind too much about that.  I get concerned sometimes that good people are not getting the interviews they deserve, not just at LMAX but across the industry, because they get almost no good CV advice.  Frequently the people who are the first to read CVs are agencies who are not technologists.  By all means, have words on there that will make your CV appear on their search results.  But you need to put something on there for me, a real developer, because strings of keywords tell me nothing about you.

If I can improve the quality of just one person's CV with this post, I'm happy.  If I have given you that first step towards that job you really want, then that's even better.

Video of our JAX London session

At JAX London Mike and I presented "Understanding the Disruptor - A Beginner's Guide to Hardcore Concurrency".  This is the session we initially previewed to the London Java Community a few weeks earlier.  The content is the same, but the feel of the presentation was quite different to us - the venue for the LJC event was more intimate, and it was easier to interact with the audience.  At JAX, we were up on stage, which was pretty cool actually, but meant that it felt more like a lecture and it was less easy to connect with the audience.

We received some really great feedback on this presentation, and it was brilliant to see a lot of the speakers from JAX there watching us.

Interview by the Oracle Technology Network at Devoxx

Tori Wieldt from the Oracle Technology Network interviewed me at Devoxx.  Because I was there to be on the Why We Shouldn't Target Women panel, the interview is just another platform for me to air my views on this subject again.

Yes, I am actually wearing pink....

London Java Community Open Conference

Saturday was, hopefully, my last conference of the year.  My lucky readers should start to see some posts which are not simply me gushing about another opportunity to hang out with awesome people and learn about interesting "stuff".

Who wants to propose a session?

In many ways the London Java Community Open Conference was my favourite one so far, and not just because it's near home and I helped to organise it.  One of the awesome things about both Java One and Devoxx was the opportunity to travel, to see new places and to meet people you might not meet in London.  The scale, and the opportunities to meet key players in the Java world, were the things I probably appreciated the most from both of those conferences.  And you can tell from my posts I really enjoyed them.

But the LJC conference was probably perfect as my last one for 2011:

"How do you spell 'lightning'?"

• Being on home turf with awesome people who have really helped drag me kicking and screaming into the conference scene really brought home to me what an amazing year this has been.  This time last year, I felt I barely had the credentials to be a behind-the-scenes organiser for the LJC, and I didn't attend last year's conference because I wasn't sure how much I would get out of it.  This year, I'm at the conference giving two sessions, having made my international début already.
• With 120 people you feel like you can talk to everyone at some point if you want to.  I don't think I managed that, but I probably chatted in one way or another with maybe half the attendees.  The great thing about this is you see the wide variety of things people are working on - the technologies, the business problems, the team and company sizes, the methodologies. It's eye-opening and quite exciting.
• It seemed that a small, open conference like this drives content based on relevance.  We had no vendor pitches, although John was contractually obliged to mention Atlassian at least once every half hour (but as they paid for the beer, this was only fair).  People vote with their feet, and attend the sessions that they will get the most out of.  I liked this format a lot.
• I presented alone for the first time, not hiding behind Mike or Martin.  I found this surprisingly liberating.  I love working with those guys, but without them providing a safety net I actually found my confidence increasing as I realised I was perfectly capable of answering things I would probably have let them field.
• My second session was more workshop-like, and I wanted the audience to guide what we covered.  I thought it went really well, I loved letting the audience guide it, and I enjoyed giving it.
• I was honoured (and terrified) to be asked to be part of a Meet the Experts panel with people who actually know what they're talking about.  I was very very pleased to get away with not being asked any questions about being a girl or the length of my skirt.  We had a great discussion around writing high performance code, about different technologies and their applicability, and about the future of Java and JVM-based languages.
• I loved the venue.  The rooms were a nice range of sizes, all with projectors of course, but also whiteboard space and flip charts.  It looked like a 1960s version of the future - all shiny white surfaces and curving lines.  But it felt like a space to create and innovate in.
• Mike's Hacking the Open JDK session in the morning was excellent.  Again, this was another example of a workshop format working really well.  He gave some good background to compilers in general, and a good walk through of some of the code that's there at the moment.  He was happy to share stuff he'd learnt the hard way, and it made me want to get more involved in that side of things.
• The food was awesome.

Clearly people haven't had enough coffee yet.

My sessions were User's Guides to the Disruptor - a beginner's and a more advanced one.  The beginner's was an updated summary of the Disruptor stuff already covered in this blog - the ring buffer, writing to and reading from it, and configuration.  The second session covered  more advanced ideas: you don't need a ring buffer any more; cache lines and false sharing; worker pools; aggregate event handlers. This session was a lot less prepared and more collaborative, and I loved giving it.  Maybe that's my teacher-genetics coming out.

The aim of both sessions was to give people an idea of how to actually use the Disruptor - developers are definitely interested in how and why it works, but we've been evangelising a lot and now there are very sensible questions being asked about how to get it to do various things.  I'd like to run some more of these sessions in future, and to add more material to the blog.

And finally, a proper meal before more beer.

Back to the conference.  Were there any downsides?  Personally I had none.  If I had to suggest an improvement for next year, it's that we would like to see more novice speakers presenting.  The LJC has always been about nurturing this talent, and a small conference like this one with a friendly audience, many of whom you may already know, is a great place to practice.  The lightning talks showed the great variety (and abilities) of our members, it would be nice to expand this to full sessions.  As I found, filling a 30 minute session is not anywhere near as hard as you think!

I'm really looking forward to next year's LJC conference, and I'm totally buzzing from the positive vibe from this year's.

The LJC Associates modelling their lovely new t-shirts.  Mine fits!

Why We Shouldn't Target Women

I'm back from Devoxx, having had lots of food for thought.  In particular, my panel on Why We Shouldn't Target Women generated a lot of discussion and I'm still trying to process it all.

Martijn Verburg; Regina ten Bruggencate; Trisha Gee; Antonio Goncalves; Claude Falguière; Kim Ross 

The panel went really well, we got decent interaction from the audience, and of course my fellow panel members were awesome.  I managed to restrain myself from using the opportunity as my own personal soap box and allowed other people to speak occasionally.  Sadly the only male on the panel stole the show somewhat, so Antonio won't be invited in future... Actually in seriousness, it was great to have a guy on the panel to present his point of view.  It was interesting that he's a father, highlighting that parenting issues are not the same as women's issues, and conflating those two concerns hurts both genders. But Antonio's hair is far too shiny and pretty and he's funnier than I am, so I'm not standing next to him again.

I'd love to make a note of all the issues discussed during the hour, but I'll be honest, I was too busy trying not to fall over in my girly six-inch stiletto boots to remember anything that happened.  The video will hopefully be available on Parleys some time in the future, so I will link to it when it's there if it's not too horribly embarrassing.

Someone let me have the microphone again...

One question that came up more than once throughout the week was: IT/programming is not the only industry with a lack of women, why should we care?  Maybe it's just natural?

I think we need to be very careful before writing off such an imbalance as "natural".  We need to make sure first that we aren't discriminating against groups, consciously or through some unnoticed system bias.    And for me, the thing is that we notice that women aren't well represented in technical roles, but we don't necessarily notice the other groups of people who might be being put off for similar (or maybe totally different) reasons.  We can't so easily tell if gays, jews, parents, shy people, folks from poor backgrounds or any other less distinguishable sets of people are finding it hard to make it as a programmer.

We can see the figures for females.  In the UK in 2008:

• 44.7% of people taking ICT (Information and Communications Technology) at GCSE (age 14-16) are girls.  As in many other subjects these days, the girls get better results than the boys.
• 38.6% of kids taking ICT at A Level (16-18) are girls.  Only 9.6% of Computing students are girls. Again, girls outperform the boys in both subjects.
• 19.4% of those studying Computer Science at university are women.  This is down from 24% in 2003.
• Through a not-very-scientific poll of the members of the London Java Community, it looks like approximately 15% of techies in industry are women.  Interestingly, some companies have a much higher proportion than others, but I think that's something to explore another time.

The thing that worries me about these figures are a) the "pipeline" hints at a drop-off in interest in the subject, not a lack of ability, since the girls are doing well tech subjects but choose not to pursue them and b) the numbers are declining in some areas, specifically university applications.  I've read studies that show the percentage of those in technical jobs who are women has been steadily declining since the 80s, but it's difficult to get specific figures, especially as I'm particularly interested in programming / technical roles rather than just the percentage of women "in IT".

If the numbers are declining, that seems like a smell to me.  Not only do we have some sort of image problem which puts people like those who have two X chromosomes off from entering our industry, we're driving them away when they get here.  And I don't believe that's because women find they're not good at it.

Other industries have been successful at attracting a higher proportion of women - for example, in 1950, only 15% of accountants were women.  By 1985 half of all accounting majors were women, and by 1990 the majority of the workforce was female.  It would be nice to think we could learn something from our friends in the Maths world.  After all, the skills are not dissimilar.  But they have a slight advantage over us - in many countries all children are required to study maths until age 16.  However, there are very few 16-year-olds who have any programming experience at all.  Either we need to accept that we're going to have to hire kids with other degrees and train them to be programmers, or we're going to have to do some serious outreach to interest kids in programming and technology long before they start to make their exam choices.  In the UK, they need to choose their GCSE subjects at 14, which means we probably need to be targeting kids as young as 10 or 11.  That's not inconceivable, when you think about it - how many of us were programming in BASIC aged eight or nine?  Could we not teach kids to write an iPhone app or a Facebook app instead?  I was very pleased to hear someone in our audience was teaching their daughter to program.  At an even younger age, the least you can do is buy your kids Lego - I'm sure that exercises the right parts of the brain.

The point is, that I don't think we can conclude that it's "natural" for girls to not be interested in programming.  The first programmer was a woman, and during the war and even into the '60s many programmers were women.  I think that if we can work with schools to provide some tutoring in computing at a younger age we might be able to attract kids who wouldn't have thought about programming as a career choice before.  Some of these may be women, some will not.  That's fine, diversity is our ultimate goal.

Which leads me onto another point - special treatment of women.  I've said it before I'm sure - I think singling out women to attempt to increase their numbers does more harm than good, for a number of reasons: 

1. It makes women think that there must be something wrong in our industry if women need to be treated differently, or mentored differently, or need additional training to get by. Or it makes us think that we really aren't as good as our male counterparts because we're being given special treatment.
2. It builds up resentment amongst our male colleagues, so they soon begin to wonder if we're doing our job because we're good at it, or if we got there because we got lots more help, or because we're there to tick some sort of box
3. It's not solving the problem of lack of overall diversity - where are the programs for people who went to the wrong schools, for those who didn't think about programming as a career, for a million other special interest groups that exist out there?

Some of the ideas that imply special treatment are things like: all women events (you should know by now how I feel about those); free entry to conferences for women; higher pay for women at certain companies.  Although I would benefit from all of these things, I hate them.  I feel like I'm being compensated for this terrible affliction of being born female.

So, what can we do?

• Reach out to those you want speaking at your conferences.  This might include women, it might include people from other "minorities", or it might just be awesome people that you want there making your conference look good.  
• Use these people for marketing and role models - it is indeed possible that if you have some female faces on your conference site and posters, you might attract more women attendees.  Actually, if you have more women role models you might attract more men, but hey, it's all about diversity.
• Buy your kids Lego and teach them programming.
• Treat women in your company like people the same as anyone else.  We were asked about how to deal with a younger female boss.  Kim's answer was perfect: "Like an older, male boss".
• Get involved in mentoring programmes, not just for women but for people of all ages - kids at school, undergraduates, or people who are already in the industry and want to take that next step, for example to speaking at conferences or writing or leading teams or becoming CTO.

Since the panel I've been pointed, numerous times, to this excellent article which talks about racism, sexism, and meritocracies.  I particularly like the line "Explicit diversity programs have the solution exactly backwards".  Well worth a read.

Devoxx: The story so far

Stephan wearing the Brazilian flag at the opening keynote

• European conferences are different (and cool) because you get to hear even more languages spoken than you usually do in London (apparently the most diverse city in the world for spoken languages).  I think the idea of a Paris Devoxx with 75% of the talks in French is brilliant - I'm always banging on about diversity, we shouldn't expect developers to learn in English only.
• Really great to meet up with some of the people I met at Java One and am starting to feel more a part of the global community.
• Seems to me there are slightly more women here than at the other conferences I've been to, and not just because Regina and I pulled together four women for a panel on women technologists.  And once again, a lot of guys asking why this is, because they want things to change.
• A highlight was seeing my namesake, AutoTrish, up on a cinema-sized screen in front of hundreds of people at Dave Farley's Continuous Delivery presentation.
• Building on from my twitter revelation at JAX London, I've found twitter very useful here for messaging people I want to meet up with, but also for chatting to new people and making new friends.  It's not quite as intimate as JAX London though because there are billions more people here, so the chances of actually bumping into the twitter friends is much lower.
• Have had lots of interesting conversations with people about the Open JDK, which I guess is the logical extension of the interesting conversations I had about the JCP In San Francisco.
• A community event like this is different to an event like Java One, because a single organisation isn't calling the shots.  It's interesting (and great) that Oracle and Google can both be here talking about the cool stuff they're up to.

The Diabolical Developer

Conferences are clearly something that appeal to me - I love meeting people and chatting about interesting and (sometimes) intelligent things; I love learning stuff and indexing it away, possibly for future references; I love hanging out with people like the LJC guys (Ben, Martijn and John); I love kicking around ideas of what more we can do at LMAX with our lot (Mike, Dave, Dali).

Dave's Continuous Delivery

I'm really looking forward to my panel this afternoon, I'm going to be ranting about how we target women for tech jobs.  Should be fun.

Nice 'tash!

Shameless plug: Mike and Dali are raising money for men's health with their rather awesome 'tashes.  It took guts to stand up on stage and present with that handlebar, please give a penny or two: