Breaking Down Gates with Tim Banks

Matty talks with Tim Banks, recorded on Friday the 13th in November 2020, about gates and barriers in tech. The conversation opens with a chili argument from DevOps Twitter and turns into hiring, inclusion and how companies treat people during the pandemic. The cold open is Tim: "If you don't have black women that are rising through your ranks, you're fucking up."

Chili as a Metaphor

Tim has strong views on chili, which for Texas has two ingredients, meat and heat, with no beans and no tomatoes, and uses it as a metaphor. Chili, like DevOps, means different things in different places: is DevOps a job title, a methodology, a culture or a group? The same title comes with different responsibilities at different companies. Matty notes the metaphor breaks down because chili has a definition and DevOps doesn't, and adds that at a bank everyone has the title vice president, which means you're not in leadership.

Standardizing Levels and Interviews

Tim would like tech to have something like the journeyman levels in the trades, so people know where they stand, and Matty adds that electricians have unions and certification boards. Tim says that if we call ourselves engineers, there should be standards, whether a union or a certification. Standardization would help with treatment, pay and inclusion, and lower barriers by making hiring less arbitrary, such as trivia interviews where someone is asked for an inverted binary tree they will never write in the role. Tim also worries about startups expecting junior people to work 60 to 80 hours for no equity.

Matty mentions Kat Cosgrove's All Day DevOps talk on gatekeeping, which showed a junior job posting that described an entire team. Matty says job descriptions get garbled between a hiring manager's nice-to-haves and an engineer who doesn't know how to write job requirements, and recalls keyword-stuffing a résumé for recruiter software, like listing every ProLiant model. Tim still gets Solaris contract offers because the résumé mentions it.

Two Kinds of Gatekeeping

Tim describes two gates: getting in, from résumé screen through interviews to the offer letter, and staying in, with promotions, raises, reviews and projects. Many companies measure inclusion with lagging indicators like hiring numbers, and Tim says to look at retention and promotion. Tim says it's not a pipeline problem: people leave, even if you get them in. A good gauge is an anonymous survey asking whether someone who was LGBTQ would feel comfortable coming out to co-workers and leadership, and the answer has to be an emphatic yes. Matty likens it to an NPS question because it has skin in the game.

Matty compares counting hires to monitoring and sentiment to observability. Tim agrees: observability is insight into what's going on inside, where hiring and retention numbers are "when you get paged at three o'clock in the morning that something is down because it's already broken." Matty adds that you can't put a Nagios agent on your people, and that becoming a people manager is a career change, not a promotion.

Being the First

Matty worries about the difficulty of being the first person from an underrepresented group on a team. Tim says you can't hire a junior person to be the only one and need someone with more experience who can navigate it, and that you have to fix the culture and listen without defending. Tim says "when you have a more inclusive culture, you will have more inclusive hiring practices. Full stop." Matty says a failed first attempt is not a reason to stop, because you have to keep trying.

Tim says the first hire is being asked to do their job plus fixing the culture and being a pioneer, which is three jobs, and so should be paid more, and the worst outcome is finding out you're a token. Tim recalls a company that announced a diversity push and then celebrated progress hiring more white women, and notes "the things that you measure are the behaviors you're going to incur." Matty describes a frozen middle: people who support diversity in principle and then stall when it gets hard.

People in a Pandemic

Tim says tech has often told people the job is typing on a keyboard, when people need to feel they matter as whole people. Tim says that in the pandemic tech is losing women, especially mothers dealing with kids at home, and it's "unforgivable." Matty adds that much of the loss is invisible. Tim says if a hiring manager loses a woman who has to take care of family, "you fucked up," not the person who left.

Matty and Tim say companies have the money. Companies are saving on rent, commuting benefits and parking, so they could offer stipends or a one-off payment, like $1,000 each to 100 people, which is a rounding error for most VCs. Matty argues investors don't have a fiduciary responsibility to make shareholders insanely rich, and suggests that if growth is 300 percent instead of 1,000 percent, that's fine, and to invest in people. Matty ties this to resilience: organizations rebound from unmodeled disruptions like a pandemic through depth of capacity, which comes from people, "because it's banked." Tim says you must put into the granary in good times and take care of people all the time, since they'll leave "the second they can." Matty says the bar is so low that being slightly less bad than everyone else will make a company look like the best in the world.

Tim ends by saying that without insight into what your people are going through, the only signal is a lagging indicator when something goes down. Matty adds that you'll see it a year or year and a half later, wondering where everyone went: "Here's your chance to get it right." Tim is @elchefe on Twitter.

• Texas Chili Parlor in Austin
• Chili John's - the chili place Matt's friend brought him to in California
• Gatekeeping and the DevOps Revolution: We Haven't Always Known Everything - Kat Cosgrove at All Day DevOps 2020
• Lending Privilege - Anjuan Simmons
• levels.fyi/

Shout-out to Matt's friend Marcelo for the link for Chili John's (and for taking Matt there so many years ago)