Gregory Waldorf, the CEO of eHarmony.com, has a great idea for how to judge a company’s culture during an interview. In order to judge whether they’ll be good people to work he recommends asking:
"What happened to the people that had this job before me?"
If they know, if they can tell you where they are working now, what they are up to, etc, then that means they had a good relationship. If they don’t have a clue, well, it might mean that they won’t have a clue about you when you leave.
I didn’t see Danese Cooper‘s talk "Why Whinging Doesn’t Work" but the title has really been bothering me. I almost titled this post "stop telling me to stop whining!"
I should start by saying I have never complained about my career in technology. (And I’m sure Danese wasn’t thinking about me personally when she wrote her title!) To the contrary, I feel like I’ve lived a charmed life in technology. Not only have I had very few negative experiences but they’ve been outweighed ten times by all the positive ones. And as I tried to point out in my lightening talk, in every negative gender related experience I’ve had, it’s always been guys who’ve jumped in to straighten things out.
I really credit the people in technology for my great experience. It started in college with the guys in the lab (we didn’t have Linux on a laptop), the graduate students I met at happy hour, and the professors who spent hours helping me, asked my opinion and took my feedback seriously. (To be fair, I should note that some of the exact same people gave my college roommate a very different experience. She left computer science, but no worries. She got a PhD in electrical engineering from MIT and now balances a career in technology with not one, but three, toddlers. I’m in awe.)
So I’m not whining about my experience as a women in open source – it’s been great – but I talk about women in technology all the time to try to get more women in open source. Think about the best developers you know, those superstars that you admire, the ones whose code and ideas you use every day … Now imagine there were twice as many of them. That’s what bringing more women into technology could do.
We’re making good progress – there were a lot of amazing women at OSCON – but there’s still a long ways to go – I was the only woman at the GNOME mobile meeting.
Now I do think we are usually talking to the wrong crowd. If I had told the GNOME mobile meeting guys, "hey, there’s no women here" they would have gone "yeah, we know." We need to be out talking to those women, and girls, who might join us but haven’t yet.
So earlier I blogged that I had seven bosses. (It was mostly in reaction to the fact that I felt like I was getting way too much attention!) But I realized this morning that I really feel like I got seven mentors. What a way to start out a new job – with not one mentor but seven!
The GNOME board of directors has been great. They were very clear from the beginning that I should feel free to ask them any questions. When I expressed concerns that I was going to flood their mailboxes, they said, no, no don’t worry. (I think that was Vincent – I hope the rest of you agree. 🙂 They did tell me not to necessarily expect verbose replies and that I might see a lot of "+1"s which means "I agree" or "me too". So I’ve been sending them lots of mails, some important, some FYIs and some just downright trivial (who does x?) and they’ve replied quickly to all of them!
Most career management gurus would say that a mentor is key to success and I just got a whole team of mentors! Now I’d better get back to work.
[And I should point out that I feel like others in the community are also going out of their way to mentor and help. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Dave Neary – he’s been a great help!]
In response to all the questions I've been getting, I've been posting a lot about myself. Please feel free to respond or leave a comment and make it a discussion instead of a monologue about me!
"What's my management style?" My flip answer is you don't really manage people*. My more serious answer is that I strive to trust and empower.
And then circle back around. It's not enough to say "I trust you" and throw a bunch of money at them. They might not know what to do with the money – they might need some help. (Or they might be in the wrong job – one they don't believe in.) And you need to know enough so that you can convince upper management that your team is doing a good job and everyone should let them keep working on their great ideas.
People get hung up on whether managers delegate well or not. Delegating does not equal managing. (Not delegating can equal bad management, but delegating isn't managing.) If someone is having trouble delegating, one of two things is up.
There are often complicated and valid reasons people don't trust others. Sometimes you "know" you can do it better or faster or easier. You can read more about how it's hard to delegate at Why you shouldn't do it all yourself.
So that's my "management" style. What's yours?
* Seriously, if you are a manager, the word "manager" should not show up any where in your resume except in your title. "Managing people" is not something you get paid to do. You get paid to make things happen.
You can make a computer do fascinating
things for you – and coding is the secret language. Rod Cope wrote
the first version of OSSDiscovery on vacation. At the time I laughed
and asked if his wife was still speaking to him. But I understood.
When you have an idea, and the ability to make it real, coding is
addictive. A few months ago, I decided to see what Ruby was all
about. It quickly became clear that I’m not good at part time coding.
My family heard a lot of, “just a minute, I just have to do this
one thing …â€
I first got to use a computer in 3rd
grade. My school got an Apple IIe and I fell in love with it
immediately. I wanted one. I begged and pleaded and I finally got one
– and then we left it behind when we moved to Spain. So I bought a
book on how to program basic and taught myself to program with pencil
and paper. Soon after that we bought an IBM clone and my mom and I got to
battle over who got to use the computer more. (I also learned you can
do lots of cool things to existing programs. The year we had a computer class in school I got in "trouble" a lot by disrupting the class making my computer play music, flash different text-based pictures, etc. I say "trouble" because I don’t think the teacher really minded as I was having fun with computers.) I quickly switched my
life goal from being a teacher for the blind and deaf or doing
something with math to computers. Computers not only let us do things
faster and easier, but they let us do things that aren’t even
possible without them.
At Rice University, I confirmed I’d made the
right choice. I loved my very first computer science class. Taught in
Scheme, it taught me a whole new way of thinking. I ended
up working in the computer science department, doing research during
the summer for my professor Matthias and being a lab assistant. I made lots of
friends in the lab, discovered the internet and eventually web
browsers (which I declared a waste of time – hey, I knew what I was
talking about!) I also discovered email and those rudimentary social
networking tools that we used to use – like fingering someone.
Through a couple of summer internships I decided that I did not want
to be a sys admin nor get a PhD – I wanted to code. I ended up
taking a job with Hewlett-Packard in Colorado in the Unix lab.
(Another one of my favorite classes was operating systems.) One of the main reasons I took the job was the people – they were all excited
about what they did, working at HP, and living in Colorado. My first
job was on the user interface team. From there I moved through
various different jobs until I ended up managing the desktop team. (I
like to joke that all good engineers get promoted … to mangement.)
And from there it’s history: I discovered open source.
I’m very excited – I am now officially joining the GNOME Foundation as Executive Director!
Some background. The GNOME project is:
The GNOME Foundation is the nonprofit organization that helps organize and run the GNOME project. The GNOME Foundation members are all contributors to GNOME – hundreds of volunteer developers. They elect a board of directors (from their membership) every 18 months and have a large number of corporate sponsors who participate through an advisory board. My job will be to work with the board of directors, the sponsors and the community to help them further their goals of a creating a free and open source desktop and development platform that is used world-wide by drawing in more developers, sponsors and users.
As some of you probably know, my first experience with open source software was with the GNOME community. Way back in 2000, I was managing the HPUX desktop and we decided that having a free and open source desktop would be advantageous for HPUX users. I ended up working with Ximian (then Helix Code) and attended my first GUADEC in 2001 in Copenhagen. While I was checking into my hotel in Copenhagen, I met some guys in the hotel lobby (Havoc Pennington and some of the Eazel guys) and ended up spending the afternoon exploring Copenhagen with them. The next day at the conference was the day of the famous "You’re a girl!" quote. (She was very excited there was another woman at the conference.) I found the GNOME community extremely welcoming and passionate about their project. They got me hooked on open source and I’ve been spreading the word ever since.
So I’m very excited now to be joining the GNOME Foundation to help accelerate the adoption of GNOME – a free and open source desktop – by strengthening the Foundation and
attracting new industry members and community contributors. For more information you can read the press release or leave me a comment.
P.S. And if you are here at GUADEC, be sure to say hi to me and tell me what you are working on.
John Mark had a great post 10 Survival Tips for the Modern Wageslave. I thought I’d follow up with another piece of career advice that I never got: every aspect of a job offer is negotiable. I actually got advice from my university career office to NOT negotiate a job offer. Luckily I got other advice too and since then I’ve learned it’s all negotiable. This isn’t a post about how to get the biggest salary. It isn’t even a post about how to negotiate. My point here is to say that it’s all negotiable. If you’ve always wanted a title of "technical evangelist", you can ask for it. If you’ve always wanted a love sack with your name embroidered on it, well, they might think you’re weird, but you can still ask for it.
I remember well my first official full-time company job offer. It was Friday afternoon and I had just gotten back to my dorm room and opened a beer when the phone rang and I got a job offer. A real job offer. I said "Cool!" and he said, "when do you want to start?" I then had to explain, cool that I had a job offer, but I wasn’t accepting – I need some time to think. He gave me a week (which I didn’t negotiate) and then I hung up the phone and went into stress mode. I had an on-site interview at Microsoft for the week after that and now I had to decide on the HP job before I knew anything about the Microsoft position. I called the university recruiting office and they said I had an excellent offer from HP, not to jeopardize it in any way, and to accept it or not as is. Finally a good family friend spoke up. She got that look that I’ve come to recognize as meaning I’m not sure about this, it’s your decision, but I’ve thought long and hard and I have an opinion. She told me that she was sure HP would be reasonable and it couldn’t hurt to ask. So I picked up the phone and called and asked the HP manager for an extension. He asked why and in typical Stormy fashion I told him the whole story straight up. He responded with, well, I guess we’d better fly you up here. So I got two cool trips and the opportunity to check out the companies in person. (And HP went out of their way to show me what a cool place it was to live and work. By the way, if I had known the HP manager then like I do now, I wouldn’t have hesitated to ask for an extension but that’s a thought for another post.)
So what can you "negotiate" in a job offer?
What else have you negotiated or wish you had negotiated?
One of the things I'm passionate about is encouraging women in technology. With that in mind, I'm going to talk about something that's never discussed in mixed company: crying at work. Or rather, trying desperately not to cry at work. I'll tell you how I try not to cry at work and I'll tell you how you can help someone who's trying not to cry: create space. Tell a joke, change the subject for a minute.
I cry easily. I cry when I'm frustrated, mad or hurt. I used to not worry about it until one day a roommate told me – after an argument – that when I cried he assumed I was sorry. I was so mad – I cried!
Trying not to cry has always been really hard for me. The tears come, you discretely try to wipe them off, you stare at the ceiling, you think about something else, … it wasn't until I got pregnant that I figured out how to get rid of them. Most of the time anyway.
I did once have the chance to ask a psychologist about trying not to cry. He said he could teach me through lots of role playing and different skills to just not cry. But he wouldn't want to – crying was healthy.
Crying changed when I got pregnant a couple of years ago. When I first got pregnant, if I started to cry, I couldn't stop. There's nothing worse than being in a sales meeting, arguing about whether book covers should be blue or green, and all of a sudden you're crying. And you can't stop. And everyone is looking at you. And they don't know you're pregnant, they just see you bawling about some stupid book covers. I went for a lot of walks there for a while. I think the janitor was really worried about me. Thankfully the next stage of pregnancy set in quickly. During that stage I felt like I was set apart from discussions – maybe it was the eight inches of stomach between me and them – but I just didn't really care. I mostly felt detached humor.
Feeling detached works well for not crying and I can still recreate that feeling (without getting pregnant) but it doesn't work well when you're passionate. And I'm passionate about a lot of the things I work on. I don't want to feel detached. Humor's ok, but not detachment.
So I've worked out two things that help me not cry. (Now consider that I think that the best thing would probably be just to cry and let people deal with it. I'm me. But if the other person is going to think I'm sorry, well, I guess for now I'll work on not crying. Next we'll work on teaching the world there's more reasons to cry than I'm sorry.)
The two things that help me not cry when I don't want to be crying are:
In an ideal world, I think I would just cry when I felt like it. In today's world, if I start crying, I'm spending so much energy worrying what the other person is thinking and trying not to cry, that I'm no longer effectively listening or discussing. So in the interest of being able to work effectively in today's environment, I work hard not to cry.
I figured my story might help others or might encourage others to share their tips and tricks or experiences.
Related posts:
Photo by nyki_m.
There are two things I always keep in mind when trying to understand the other person’s point of view.
The first is something my sister said about 10 years ago. We had just passed a very overweight woman in spandex and I must have said something not nice, because my sister said,
Hey, she might have just lost 40 pounds. She might be feeling really good about her body and proud of herself.
I have never again criticized anyone exercising or in work out clothes. But the real point is, I didn’t know her story. I couldn’t "see" her story by looking at her or through a casual conversation. Maybe I would have been proud of her too, and encouraging, if I’d known her story.
The second quote I keep in mind when trying to understand the other point of view is (and I don’t remember where it came from):
If I were you, I’d do everything you are doing.
If I were you, and I had the same genes, the same experiences, the same friends, I’d be making the same decisions you are. So to change your mind or to influence you, I have to show you or teach you something different. I have to figure out what I know makes me make a different decision than you. And it might not be something I know. It might be the fact that I have two kids and you don’t. Or you have a bunch of credit card debt and I don’t. But the point is we all basically make decisions the same way – we just have different criteria we are using to make those decisions.
There are numerous books and courses that will teach you the best way to approach those difficult conversations whether it’s:
First off, if you are avoiding a conversation, consider how important it is. If Bob picking his teeth at lunch bothers you but you only have lunch once a month, then maybe you better work on your tolerance instead. If Shelly leaves her co-worker’s office crying every month, then maybe it’s worth getting up the nerve to talk to your co-worker. (And Shelly.)
The single best thing for getting better at those conversations is to have those conversations. The first few might not go so well. Don’t worry. Be sorry, apologize, take notes, learn. The next time you are avoiding a conversation, think about the past experiences, rehearse it in your head, practice with a friend, and then JUST DO IT. Avoiding a difficult conversation will not make the problem go away and the more practice get with them, the better you’ll get at them. (They never get easy. When they get easy, you’ve stopped caring. It’s time to get some help yourself.)
Oh, and have these conversation in person. If you are feeling chicken, and depending on the nature of the problem, you might resort to the phone (I’ve done that – especially when people owe me money) but never resort to email. Only use email as a follow-up to remind the person what’s been agreed to and to create a "paper trail" that you can refer to. Difficult conversations go much better in person where you can read body language. It’s not such a bad thing if the other person can see how hard it is for you too.
And always remember, it’s not easy for the other person either.
Now, if you have any advice on how to engage people that are avoiding you, I’ll take that.