jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
Parent categories: Becoming A Manager
Other tags: | Hiring: Other |
Hiring (and Retaining) a Diverse Engineering Team - Gergely Orsoz, Sarah Wells, Samuel Adjei, Franziska Hauck, Uma Chingunde, Gabrielle Tang, and Colin Howe Hiring a diverse team, especially in research computing, is not the default. As empirical evidence, I offer… *gestures widely*. Therefore, default processes won’t get you there. With that the case, and because there’s moral and effectiveness imperatives to making sure you’re not excluding good candidates from opportunities on your team, then you need to change how the processes play out, which means...
Continue...Other tags: | Hiring: Other |
Markets, discrimination, and “lowering the bar” - Dan Luu There’s a common, dumb argument that there can’t be sustained discrimination in a competitive hiring market place, because competition would have gotten rid of any such inefficiencies. Needless to say trying to negate actual reality with pure thought doesn’t work well, and Luu’s article here puts this article to rest. This is an older article that is extremely relevant to the hiring process text above; how you aren’t trying to hire some “best” candidate out there...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other |
Managing for Neurodiversity - Anjuan Simmons This is a short and useful discussion from an experienced tech manager about managing team members who are expressing behaviours that might suggest neurodivergence: They simply receive information about the world and process it in different ways. In fact, no two people see and respond to the world in the same way. We all need to make accommodations for these differences whether we’re talking about introversion, extraversion, autism, or dyslexia. The thing I like about this article is it...
Continue...How to Call Out Racial Injustice at Work - James R. Detert and Laura Morgan Roberts, HBR At the beginning of the summer there were a flurry of articles on addressing racial or other systemic injustices in the workplace. Unfortunately those have died down a little bit. This HBR article discusses how to call out racial injustice at work - it could just as easily be used to address issues of gender inequality, or dealing with any systemic issues. The steps Detert and Roberts suggest...
Continue...Does Research Software Engineering have a diversity crisis, and what can we do? - Neil Chue Hong This is a talk that Neil Chue Hong gave at the 2020 International RSE Leaders Workshop. The numbers he gave are UK based - he’s with the Software Sustainability Institute in the UK - but they’re pretty grim. UK research software developers (RSEs) have as low or lower percentages of people who identify as women or are black, asian, or other ethnic minorities in the UK than either...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other |
Do Your Employees Feel Safe Reporting Abuse and Discrimination? - Lily Zheng, HBR If we want to support our employees, especially team members who experience sexism or racism, we need to make sure they have opportunities to report that abuse and discrimination. Although our teams are typically small, we’re often in large institutions which have mechanisms that can help, such as employee assistance plans (EAP), explicit offices for EDI or that handle sexual harassment or racial discrimination complaints, or ombudsman offices. It’s our responsibility to...
Continue...I’m deaf, and this is what happens when I get on a Zoom call - Quinn Keast Another reminder that our sudden working from home doesn’t affect all team members in the same way. Keast, who is profoundly deaf, relies on lip reading for verbal communication in person; but that works much more poorly over videoconference where there’s a lot less information. This article is a good reminder that while many people require various accommodations, and many of those accommodations “work”, they are still a...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other |
Building neuro-diverse team culture Here’s an evolving collection of resources which may be of use to managers to support current or future team members with ADHD, Autism, or Dyslexia.
Continue...Ramadan Mubarak! - Ramadan Tips for Non-Muslim Friends of Muslims - Fahmida Kamali Ramadan is here, and Kamali offers some tips for those of us who are non-Muslims to be supportive to and non-weird around their Muslim colleagues during this period of fasting. As Kamali points out in a twitter thread, working from home does not make it easier to fast (do you find yourself eating less working from home?) and we could all use a little extra support right now. In this slide deck,...
Continue...How Men Can Be More Inclusive Leaders - David G. Smith, W. Brad Johnson, and Lisen Stromberg, HBR If something - anything! - is truly important at work, then you adopt and communicate it as one of your small number of priorities, learn about it, set targets for it, and have transparency and accountability for those targets. Then you try stuff, listen carefully about why current approaches are and aren’t working, and iteratively make changes to what you’re trying and the targets. Smith, Johnson, and...
Continue...Other tags: | Becoming A Manager: Remote |
Microaggressions at the office can make remote work even more appealing - Karla Miller, Washington Post Office spaces aren’t equally welcoming environments to all of us. Here Miller points out that for many potential team members, distributed work can mean less of the constant low-level stream of bullshit they’d normally experience in a predominantly white and male workplace. This point: Working at home has largely spared them from having to deal with such incidents as […] being mistaken for another colleague of the same race...
Continue...Other tags: | Technical Leadership: Open Source Management |
Open Source Communities Need More Safe Spaces and Codes of Conducts. Now. - Jennifer Riggins, The New Stack Codes of conduct in Open Source Software—for warm and fuzzy feelings or equality in community? - Vandana Singh, Brice Bongiovanni, William Brandon, Software Quality Journal Riggins walks us through the need for codes of conduct for open source projects, pointing out the rather shocking statistic that women make up less than 3% of open source communities, and that this has been stagnant for two decades. Between higher...
Continue...The missing millions: Democratizing computation and data to bridge digital divides and increase access to science for underrepresented communities - A. Blatecky et al Research computing and data are increasingly important for STEM fields, so if we want STEM - and R&D careers - to be available to all, we need to make sure there are as few barriers as possible to being fluent with computing and digital research infrastructure[*], and to having it accessible. More selfishly - we readers of this newsletter are all...
Continue...Other tags: | Managing A Team: Other | Technical Leadership: Other | Technical Leadership: Software Development |
The pushback effects of race, ethnicity, gender, and age in code review - Emerson Murphy-Hill, Ciera Jaspan, Carolyn Egelman, Lan Cheng, Comm ACM 2022 When we’re assessing the technical merits of a code contribution, and by extension assessing letters of reference etc about a candidate’s technical merit, we need to be aware of these effects - non-white, non-male, and older colleagues get significantly higher pushback for PRs, controlling for number of lines changed, readability, and other effects.
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