WeirdBeerGirl.com

“Hey, you got your peanut butter in my chocolate!”
“You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!”

What does a vintage candy commercial have to do with tech employment? Plenty.

A recent Forbes article described the hot new trend of tech companies hiring newly-minted holders of liberal arts degrees.  In my 20+ years of experience, this is neither new nor hot - I've worked on amazing dev teams full of people with multiple advanced degrees in the humanities who felt like earning an actual salary - but it's worth talking about. While it's absolutely true that there is a vast shortage of people with STEM skills in the US, and plenty of well-paying jobs sitting vacant for them at tech companies large and small, the notion that you 'need' a STEM degree to land one of these jobs is damaging, both to jobseekers and to companies. At the same time, there is an extremely tired idea that studying the arts or humanities is a waste of time, because it doesn't 'prepare you for the workforce' - and that's simply untrue as well. Both sets of skills are necessary in the modern workplace - and getting beyond that initial entry-level engineering job may be easier for those with liberal arts background, as we’ll discuss in a moment.

But the basic premise of the article maintains a strict tech/non-tech divide: a new Slack employee with an arts background was briefly profiled, but it emphasized that she was so useful because she was non-technical:

She’s been at the company for barely a month but she’s already helped a construction company assimilate Slack’s software to keep track of things as varied as plaster shipments and building regulations via employee smartphones. Lee says she’s in awe of her technical colleagues who write Slack’s code. They, in turn, respect her because of her untechnical ability to “connect with end users and figure out what they want.”

And this is the point that is often misunderstood: you can absolutely succeed in a technical role with a humanities or liberal arts background, as long as you've also got the technical chops, and even if you are in a purely non-technical role, remaining 'in awe' of your technical colleagues isn't particularly helpful - you should have at least some understanding of what goes into what they do, and know that it's hard work, not magic. Many new non-engineering graduates gained solid technical skills as they studied Proust or philosophy (which does, to be fair, get a mention in the article), but it’s not always a given.

On the flip side, moving into a management or leadership role with a purely technical background is a different sort of challenge. For those looking to brush up on their technical skills, there is a burgeoning industry of boot camps and self-directed learning. If you're an engineer who needs to learn to write, present and influence decision-makers in a new role, the path forward is rather murkier, even if someone is on a strict principal-engineer path. Good code isn't enough to get you there, and some of the more theoretical aspects of an engineering degree program (which in itself is not exactly 'vocational' education, though that's something that could be much more highly-valued in tech) are fabulous in helping you develop ways to approach a technical problem; being able to lead a team and explain to your leadership why you've chosen a particular path forward isn't as straightforward.

The Forbes article also included this leftover from Stereotype Salad:

People with balanced strengths in social and math skills earn about 10% more than their counterparts who are strong in only one area. In fact, socially inept math whizzes fare no better than go-getters who struggle with numbers.

While I'd be more than happy to introduce you to some equally-introverted historians (they'd totally hate that, of course), there is a useful point buried here: a basic understanding of both technology and the liberal arts gives you adaptability; fluency in both can give you career superpowers. Understanding how to wrangle data is important. Being able to contextualize and tell a story with that data, to multiple audiences, is equally critical. And having the ability to pivot to an entirely new role, vertical or industry is more realistic if you simply have more tools in your toolbox; being able to switch back and forth between technical and non-technical positions as business or life conditions change gives you options you might not have otherwise.

This is not to say that specialization is a bad thing, or that all engineers are lacking writing and management skills - far from it. But developing expertise in one or more areas is what happens on the job, as you gain more experience, and technical degrees become 'stale' far more quickly than those in the humanities: a programming language you spent several months, or even perhaps a few years, learning as an undergraduate is most likely almost useless ten years down the line - if you're still in the field, you've learned new languages and skills through work. But the ability to research, synthesize and present arguments, whether those are about the Corn Laws or stylistic pottery variations at Mohenjo-Daro, are still valuable skills when differently employed. The subject may be far removed, but the skills around critical thinking, thoughtful skepticism and time management are vital.

And arts/humanities graduates have another leg up when it comes to tech job descriptions: 'comfort with ambiguity.' You'll see a similar phrase in nearly every job description from a tech company, in both tech and non-tech roles, and yes, it's an extremely useful quality to have in this (and many other) fields. Fortunately, if you've spent several years gathering data, writing research papers and debating complex issues that don't have a clearly-identified 'solution,' congratulations - you've got the right mental training for this career. I've seen some young engineers struggle with just this aspect of the field - you can't always engineer your way out of the problem (well, often you can build something, but it leaves significant technical debt that you - or someone else - will need to deal with eventually), and there may be multiple paths forward. Having experience of referring to historical precedent goes a long way.

In my own tech career, I've never had to reproduce any of my shaky college algebra (turns out it wasn't even useful early on as a front-end and back-end web engineer), but I write research papers, give presentations and analyze strategies and processes; these are things I was quite well-prepared to do as both and undergraduate and graduate student of archaeology - and that's especially true for the data analysis skills I learned there, though the technologies and techniques are now quite different.

So, where do we go from here? I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time as a self-taught techie; early on in the dot-com era, the skills were the important thing; it didn't matter where you'd acquired them. To a certain extent that's becoming true again - boot camps and coding challenges are offering other paths in to the profession. But there's a fundamental disconnect in the way we approach teaching both technology and the humanities, at least at the high school and college levels (there seems to be a little more room to experiment in the elementary years, though that seems largely driven by the STEM-only crowd). A newly-minted engineer, either at the undergraduate or graduate level, needs coursework and experience writing. New English or Art History grads may have had some exposure to technology through text mining or other digital humanities projects, but ensuring a solid exposure to 'real' coding is just as important for them.  Internships would also ideally include both coding and writing experience - and many more are starting to do just that.

We also need to do a better job as a profession helping people from purely technical backgrounds move into senior roles - a few hours of 'management' or 'business writing' training isn't especially impactful in most cases, and there aren't equivalent writing 'boot camps' to help hone those skills. Having a foundation as a matter of course, even if it wasn't the key focus of a degree program, would go a long way toward setting people up for success - testing out of English 101 isn't the same thing.

While many larger tech companies have figured out that an ever-broader population has tech skills as well as what we might term 'business' advantages, startups and smaller companies aren't always aware that they should cast a wider net in tech recruitment. Librarians have often been forced to become software development managers, just by the nature of modern work in the field. PhD historians often outpace new data science grads - many of those skills are part and parcel of modern academia, they just pay very poorly in that setting.

There is an artificial barrier between these two broad skillsets that needs to disappear; having a foundation in both is critical for success in tech, and in many other businesses.  Putting the two together brings out the best of both, just like the commercials said.

Eat up!

This post also appears  on Medium.com.

I recently had the good fortune to geek out on corporate culture with the wonderful people of Zappos (full disclosure, we are 'cousins' within the Amazon ecosystem, though I include my usual 'Not Speaking for AWS' disclaimer here), and while they had a full spectrum of fascinating, positive things about their culture to latch onto, what I was most struck by was the role that shared experiences played in shaping their unique approach to work, and how the thoughtful, intentional creation of shared workplace experiences is often overlooked as a tool to drive a positive corporate culture.

I am certainly not unique in having worked for a variety of companies, large and small, that miss the mark when it comes to helping you learn how to navigate and thrive in their specific cultures. Back in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom and bust, I experienced both little startups - I was employee 18 (or so) at a dot-com, pre crash/burn – and I subsequently worked for a few huge, global tech companies. While those organizations were very different from each other in almost every way, they did share a total lack of structure around onboarding. That's expected (though not really excusable) at a startup, but even at Big Tech Company No. 2, no one helped me figure out how to get paid until about 3 months in. There was no training, either formally or informally, on in-house tools, norms or expectations. I don't think I saw a company mission statement or had a specific new hire or role-based orientation program until about a decade into my career.

And then I have experienced the other side of that coin - training and process overkill. Another nameless company I worked for was insistent about transmitting everything to do with its goals, values, compliance, and culture via time-consuming, mandatory e-learning. While there is certainly a time and place for asynchronous training, especially when you have a global workforce, I argue that if you are looking to foster long-term business relationships and a strong, healthy company culture, e-learning and classroom training aren’t magic bullets. Live, shared experiences are the key, and that brings me back to Zappos.

Everyone who joins Zappos, regardless of role or level, joins a cohort of new hires who have four weeks of training - they learn the customer service role inside and out, they work the phones and speak directly to customers in the call center; no one gets to opt out to attend a 'more important' meeting. Their training is capped off by a real-life graduation ceremony, and many of the people I met, in a variety of roles, fondly recalled their training; it gave them a firm grounding not just in the company culture and expectations, and also set them up for success at building relationships across departments and roles. I'm sure those relationships are a major factor in why there were so many long-term Zapponians - people whose tenure often exceeded a decade. From a tech perspective (including my own, which, again, is not unique, where I've seldom been in any one company more than 2-3 years), that's astounding.

This is not to suggest that every company should go out and bolt on a four-week immersion experience to their hiring process; it's certainly not cheap and for a globally-dispersed team, small or large, it's simply not always feasible or even desirable. But even fully-remote companies realize that technology alone can't create and develop culture; Automattic's approach of an annual meetup for the full company and smaller team get-togethers creates regular opportunities for their employees to share experiences. Other companies have town halls or all hands meetings that serve similar functions; the cyclical, almost ritual repetition of these kinds of meetings (and, not infrequently, the trip to the libation chamber bar after) lets employees build organic relationships and memories - 'remember the all-hands where X spoke or Y performed?' That's important.

Shared experiences drive shared purpose.  As humans, we seek out cyclical, seemingly ritual, experiences - is an annual trip to Disneyland substantially different from a theoretical 'pilgrimage' to Avebury or Stonehenge undertaken by their builders (and, quite probably, their plus-ones)? We have good evidence that the 'users' of Stonehenge (to put it in vaguely techie terms) liked a good annual party; the motivations behind it may have not been terribly different than that of a modern company picnic or offsite: do something different from your regular workday, with your colleagues (and possibly your family as well), then consume food and beverages. There would have been other commonalities with our era - everyone would recall the colleague who got horribly drunk one summer, or the time someone's dog tried to attack the fire-eater (you may recognize the voice of experience here). While the terms we use to talk about prehistoric gatherings tend toward the mystical or mysterious, that's largely a function of the paucity of evidence and/or our tendency to want to make something we don't immediately understand more meaningful, but annual or seasonally-occurring events in the distant past may have been quite similar to ours - a working meeting with a party afterward.

In the workplace, we create rituals whether we mean to do so or not. A standing happy hour, a semi-organized run at lunch, a yearly offsite or even our more formal business mechanisms like annual reviews or daily standups drive our culture. How we create and evolve those experiences for employees says a lot about that culture - going back to Zappos, they ensure that everyone has the opportunity to attend their all hands meeting; it's such a priority that the call center is shut down for the occasion, as it is - briefly - for some other seasonal events. Creating an environment in which all employees have consistent, shared experiences builds personal connections and deeper engagement - provided those are good experiences. Yes, it’s hard to do globally, at scale, but it’s worth trying.

A few simple guidelines:

• Be intentional. What do you want to create, and why? How will you evolve it?
• Be consistent. Create a regular cadence and stick to it.
• Be inclusive. If your site or event doesn't welcome everyone (and there may well be certain team- or role-specific events), what are you telling current and prospective employees?
• Have fun. You may not see a direct ROI on every event, but if your employees want to be there for the long term, you're doing something right by giving them something to remember that that isn't just their meeting schedule.

Finally, think long term. Everything you do is adding to your company’s history, whether that will eventually be long or short – what kind of story do you want your employees to tell their future grandchildren or robot overlords?

This post also appears on Medium.

It's been difficult to miss stories of tech and startup culture fails of late, whether it's Uber or Thinx, and there have been many excellent suggestions on how to improve diversity and the employee experience, but I'll throw another one into the mix: hire an archaeologist*.

No, it's not a joke, though I fully admit it may be a head-scratcher at first, but hear me out: I've been working in technology for 20+ years, and while I'm emphatically not speaking about my current role at AWS, where I'm the Culture Lead (yes, we're secretive, but you knew that, and no, I’m not claiming we’ve ‘solved’ everything culture-wise), I can assure that my two archaeology degrees have been incredibly useful in this field - though never more so than in my present position. Allow me to explain –

I fell into technology while working on my MA in archaeology at University College London in the 1990s; I began my tech career as a coder and moved (kinda/sorta) swiftly into people and technology management in Silicon Valley, NYC and elsewhere - I'm now happily situated in Seattle, where I get to do all sorts of Secret Things I Can't Tell You About Right Now. Along the way, I've seen some pretty bizarre things from a company culture perspective (terrible brand rallies! awful 'culture fit' excuses in hiring! team and product names that are totally offensive to colleagues in other regions!), but I've also been lucky enough to see the good as well. After a few general culture protips, we'll discuss how having an archaeological viewpoint can be a huge benefit - for real.

First, though, a few notes on What You Should Do; your company culture, like any other aspect of business, can't be left to good intentions - it needs structure and mechanisms to reinforce it and to help it evolve in a positive direction. Whether you are a tiny startup or a huge multinational, you need mechanisms that will scale with your organization's growth, and that can be consistently applied wherever your people are. You may need to modify them to work in some regions or for remote people or teams, but they should still be scalable and repeatable.

Your culture is modeled by your leadership, and that's at every level, from the c-suite to brand-new dev managers. While it seems that every company has 'values' or 'principles' that were drawn up early on, in my experience the uptake on these ranges from absolutely embedded and referenced on a daily basis to openly mocked and derided, with most places falling somewhere in between. When they work, they are a valuable tool and a core driver of your business - they dictate hiring, promotions and offer direction on key decisions. When they don't work, there's usually an obvious reason:

1. They were developed by outside consultants to 'sound good'
2. They are meaningless platitudes that simply take up time during the onboarding process
3. They are actively terrible, and are used as an excuse to avoid diversity

I won't dig too deeply (see what I did there?) into the third point, simply because it needs to be its own discussion (as it is here), but I'll pivot to why they work when they work:

1. They are thoughtfully, and intentionally, developed in-house, taking into account a wide range of viewpoints
2. They are flexible and can be specifically applied to daily work, but aren't 'rules' that must be obeyed
3. They are regularly reviewed and updated as the company grows
4. They are an expected, and hence unremarkable, part of daily worklife

If your company's mechanisms for people management don't reflect whatever your company's stated values are - or if they overindex on a specific one or two points - you'll very quickly get drift away from the good intentions that went into their creation. Having repeatable, measurable processes around your business life cycle and the people who make it happen is the key to a healthy culture, and this is where the archaeologists come in.

The popular view of archaeologists falls into one of two main camps: we're either Indiana Jones or scruffy bearded people with a fondness for drink who wish they looked a bit more like Indiana Jones. I surely don't need to point out that both of those impressions skew almost entirely male (feel free to insert a Tolkien joke about dwarf wives and their beards), but there's a lot more going on than just drinking digging and/or punching Nazis. While I won't get too deeply into describing different approaches to archaeology (for example, did you know that theoretical archaeologists mainly argue about French social theory, and rarely, if ever, go outside, much less dig? Did you know that post-processual archaeology is real? Mostly true facts!), there are some commonalities that give archaeologists an edge in mapping and shaping company culture.

Everyone 'knows' that archaeologists can take an artifact (or, more typically, an assemblage of artifacts) and use clues from that artifact to tell us more about the people who created it, traded it, used it or who perhaps just thought it looked cool. At work, we create 'artifacts' every day without thinking twice about it - documents, wikis, websites, apps, you name it. And when we're speaking about those internally-created artifacts that are used to hire and manage people - interview notes, performance reviews, presentations and so on - it's easy to forget that the mechanisms that generated those artifacts were designed with specific long- or short-term goals in mind. Indeed, there may have been considerable 'cultural drift' between a mechanism's original purpose and its current usage; for example, it may have once been the case that 'big ideas' went through a presentation-heavy gating process to get executive buy-in, but now it seems that absolutely every decision goes through some version of that. That's not to say that processes and mechanisms like that can't work, but that the rationale behind them needs to be understood, and that they need to be regularly reviewed to ensure they are still fit for purpose. Not infrequently, most employees who need to actually follow these processes have little-to-no information about why it was created, or what the unwritten rules are - it's purely tribal knowledge.

And that's another way archaeologists 'get' how to dig (har) into corporate culture: when they don't know why something was created or can't pin down an obvious purpose, there's a default answer - ritual! (In all seriousness, this is a thing. It’s practically reflexive). But so much of what happens day-to-day at work falls into this bucket as well; as mentioned, the people who designed (or inherited) a process have left, or have long since forgotten its origin, and it has become almost entirely ritualistic - we do it 'just because.' Sure, we'd like to fix that broken process or mechanism, but it's like that For A Reason, we assume - and thus are corporate sacred cows born. This is just as true looking at archaeological sites; while some pretty weird things do, indeed, fall under the 'ritual' heading (at least without further evidence), it's also clear that people in the past not infrequently did things just because they were fun or looked cool - they aren't so different from us.

Throwing an archaeologist at your company processes and mechanisms can turn up all sorts of unexpected things about your company's culture; simply having a complete audit of all the 'things' you're doing, how they came about, whom they affect, how and where they are implemented is quite illuminating. Turning an archaeological lens on this adds further value; as mentioned above, people rarely know precisely why they created something or how it evolved, so having a background in making educated guesses in that regard, based on data, is quite useful.

With this information in hand, you can begin to make better data-driven decisions that drive your company culture - did you discover a gap in your onboarding process in a specific region? Perhaps there is no policy to handle difficult employee situations, or you may simply have not had time to develop a codified, shared value system for your organization. Knowing where you have a potential problem and what resources you need to allocate is job one - you can thank an archaeologist when they help you unearth these clues.

Finally, a closing thought for the archaeologists out there: want to come work in tech? You have great skills in data analysis, project management, research and writing (to name just a few), and many of you have excellent coding skills - while we don't get to spend much time studying the past over here, we have the opportunity to help our organizations be thoughtful about how we build the future. Bonuses: excellent pay and benefits (actual excellent pay and benefits, not what most rescue digs or academia can afford), opportunities to work remotely and/or travel, and a work culture that still enjoys a drink or three - though that's not certainly a requirement. Beards are entirely optional.

*Other types of social scientists are also available, but I don’t know if they are as much fun.

This post also appears on Medium.