Why I'm Woke

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This is almost certainly the first in a series of Not A Tech Bro posts that could share the same title. Today, I want to talk about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, and why I worked so hard to establish them at Cloudera. MAGA hates DEI, and stole the term "woke" to insult folks who embrace it. I'm stealing it back to explain why they're wrong.

I am, proudly, pretty damn woke.

If you're the CEO of a tech company doing innovative work, you are in a constant struggle with every other tech company CEO to recruit and retain top-tier talent. Especially in its early days, the major threat to a start-up isn't competition. It's mediocrity.

Received wisdom among the MAGA crowd is that DEI programs drive mediocrity. Of course if you elevated skin tone or gender above everything else in hiring, that'd be true. But of course that's a dumb mistake and easy to avoid. It for sure isn't how I used DEI at my company.

There are three things that concentrating on DEI can do for you.

First, there's an extensive body of scientific research that demonstrates conclusively that diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams. The intuition on this is pretty simple: A group of people with the same education and background is going to think in pretty much the same way. If you're looking for outside-the-box thinking, the simplest way to get it is to go outside the box. A team with lots of different backgrounds and experiences will bring different approaches and ideas to problems. You get the benefit of lots more creative thinking. And the intuition is backed up by hard data: Done properly, diversity wins.

So, if you want a top-performing team, you want to avoid hiring people who learned all the same things in all the same ways, who have had all the same experiences. They're too likely to agree with one another when you need them to cogitate, disagree and discuss. You need your team to make better decisions.

Of course, hiring a diverse team means you need to see a diverse field of candidates. You can't hire who you can't see.

That brings up the second advantage of DEI programs: They expand your candidate pool.

Remember that my goal is to build an excellent team of high-performing people that are good individually and think creatively as a group. Informed by a good scientific education of my own, buttressed by a habit of reading widely, I am convinced that top-flight brains are distributed equally across the entire population. You might carry around two X chromosomes, or an X and a Y. Your skin pigmentation could be anywhere on the spectrum at all, really. None of that correlates in any way with innate intelligence.

If you disagree with that point – if you think white guys or Asian guys or whatever have a hard-wired advantage at writing computer programs – by all means, declare that publicly. Tell your partner, tell your friends, tell your parents. Your racism or sexism are an important part of who you are. And it'll also help me avoid hiring someone like you, who's dumb enough to embrace those unscientific tropes.

And if you're afraid that you can't compete in that broader pool – that some of those non-cis-male, non-white folks might be smarter or more talented than you – well, then, quit whining and skill up. I'm not going to hire you because of your skin color or your gender. This is a meritocracy.

Women are wildly underrepresented in the tech workforce. Likewise, people of color work in tech way below their presence in the population as a whole. These gaps are, to some extent, a pipeline problem. If your school didn't offer good STEM classes, if your teachers didn't encourage you to take the tough math class because girls didn't do that, then it'll be much harder for you to get those tech jobs when you grow up.

But representation is also a sourcing problem. If I want to hire the best, I need to cast as wide a net as possible. I want to look at all the candidates, consider their abilities and the needs of the team, and make the best choice.

The DEI program we established at Cloudera expressly aimed at improving our sourcing in hiring. We asked our people to refer their friends, and we generally paid them a bonus if we hired someone that they referred. Lots of people associate mostly with folks much like themselves. We saw that in our referrals. A diverse team with diverse social networks improved our sourcing all on its own.

We also addressed under-representation at Cloudera by advertising our jobs thoughtfully in places where they might not otherwise be seen. We took advantage of programs run by historically-Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to reach their students and alumni. We posted jobs to forums frequented by LGBTQIA+ folks. We thought hard about where groups hung out based on affinity or identity. If we didn't think they knew about our open positions, we figured out how to talk to them.

The result was that I got to look at more people than my competitors. More brains, but also more experience, more creativity, more drive and determination. We didn't relax our hiring standards. We didn't need to. We were able to apply them more rigorously, because we had more and better choices than our non-DEI-embracing peers.

I said above that my job was to recruit and retain top talent. So far, I've talked about DEI for recruitment. It's hugely important in retention, too. That's the third area where we established DEI programs at Cloudera.

In 1978, I worked as a high school intern at a tech company in Kansas City. I remember vividly a day when one the men in the office commented on the sexual attractiveness of a woman in the office, to her face, in front of the whole office. I knew at the time that it was cringey and wrong, but I laughed along with all the other guys.

In the early 2010s, I was at a professional event in the San Francisco Bay Area. A male engineer made nearly the identical sexual comment to a woman. It was just the three of us in the conversation. This time I intervened, explained why the comment was wrong, let the woman know she had some cover. My personal progress over three decades is admittedly tiny, but it's something.

Nobody's going to willingly work at a place where they feel devalued or ridiculed. No one will endure for long the implicit violence of sexual harassment in words or physical contact. We spent enormous amounts of time and money recruiting and hiring top talent. I couldn't allow behavior like that to drive my best people out of the company.

We created programs at Cloudera to teach folks who hadn't yet made my tiny thirty-year quantum of progress how and why to watch their language and their actions. Best would be that everyone acted with respect and kindness! We created channels for our people to report misdeeds, and policies for dealing with them. Where bad things happened, our people needed to know that management cared and would intervene.

We also created programs that let folks find others on our staff who shared their backgrounds. It's nice to know that you have colleagues who know where you're coming from. It's nice to have someone who understands you, to listen to your worries and to offer mentorship and advice.

If you think that company-supported groups like that are unfair because straight white guys don't get to form clubs: we didn't forbid straight white guys from forming a club, but none ever did, to my knowledge. I think that's because straight white guys have plenty of chance to associate exclusively in the world already. They didn't need my meeting rooms or pizza allowance to make that happen.

You can sum up the preceding 1,400 words this way: I instituted DEI programs at Cloudera because I'm a rapacious capitalist who saw it as a competitive advantage to do so. I'd do it again! And now I think it'd be an even bigger competitive advantage, because so many organizations are fleeing the strategy.

But I also did it because I believe it's right. Mårten Mickos' guest post yesterday made the point that society is truly free only when freedom applies equally to all of us. The huge economic opportunity of working in tech is unevenly distributed, right now. I want the whole of society to have the chance to build the wealth to raise the families to produce the workers and the thinkers that will drive us forward in the coming centuries. DEI programs are a small but effective way for me to remedy that under-representation and to smooth out that distribution.

That's why I'm woke.