Presentation: Engineering Inclusion

I'm the VP of Engineering at Heptio. We're focused on bringing cloud native technologies like Kubernetes to enterprises. And since we're a startup I'm primarily focused on establishing the engineering organization and culture and delivering product.

I think a lot of the you know tech giants like the Googles and Facebooks who have announced diversity initiatives haven't really seen any meaningful change. And my assumption is that a lot of this is largely due to the fact that they haven't focused on inclusion and just making sure that people feel welcome and accepted once they do join your company. So you end up getting an influx of people in, but because there is some systemic problems that haven't been addressed they tend to leave rather quickly. So the real focus should be on inclusion which will then lead to having increased diversity in your organization.

Exactly, but I think the larger point is that people should stop looking at diversity inclusion as just sort of us you know good Samaritan thing to do and start looking at it from a business perspective. We're living in a global society, we're living in a very diverse society, and if a very homogeneous group of people are creating products for a target audience you're going to miss … you're going to miss pretty big.

By having product managers designers developers that come from diverse backgrounds like have diverse experiences will only end up improving your product design which then expands its reach. And I think the more that people get that they'll understand that they shouldn't be looking at this from a quota based perspective. They should be looking at it from a how do I improve my product perspective.

Technology problems don't keep me up at night. And probably that's a function of my position. People problems keeping you me at night. That's one thing that has been consistent throughout my career that most of the technology problems basically can be tracked back to people but people end up creating a lot of the technology problems that we have by either reinventing the wheel or applying technology for technology's sake.