Resources

Recruiting, Interviewing and Hiring
Engineering, Programming and Open Source
Company Culture and Workplace
The Pipeline, Bootcamps and Learn to Code Programs
Abuse and Harassment
Tech Culture
Labor Issues
UI/UX and Design
Feminism in Tech
Events and Conferences
Advice, How-Tos, Interviews

Recruiting, Interviewing and Hiring

Cultural Ramifications of Technical Interviews by Heidy Khlaaf. Punishing and irrelevant interview processes seek to produce disciplined high-tech employees, jumping through arbitrary hoops at the whims of employers.
How Blacks and Latin@s Are Left Out of Tech Hiring by Stephanie Morillo. Having more white women attendees at a conference this year than last is hardly diverse, and hardly a reason to celebrate diversity when Blacks and Latin@s still make up only 5% of people in tech.
Gender Bias In Hiring: Interviewing as a Trans Woman in Tech by February Keeney. Being trans brings an entire new layer of bias and discrimination to play in every interview.
25 Tips for Diverse Hiring. Addressing hiring holistically.
We Hire The Best by Cate Huston. The tech industry prides itself on its rationality, and yet is filled with trite slogans that are demonstrably untrue… and further, harmful.
The Top 10 (%) Tech Rules by Leslie Miley. Every step along the way, exclusionary hurdles are introduced to limit the candidate pool.
Manufacturing the Talent Shortage by Dimas Guardado. How our assumptions about the skill and capability of our technical workforce keeps us from building more diverse — and more successful — organizations.
Hiring, Rock Stars, and How Camaraderie Fails Us by Alyssa Kwan. The mythos of the “rock star” is a compelling and seductive one.
Technical Interviews Are Bullshit by Anonymous. I don’t want to be on an engineering team with people who were primarily chosen by their ability to write code on a whiteboard.
Tech Hiring: The Hunt for Highly Technical Superhumans by Anna. The job search in tech equals an unpaid full-time job.

Management

Hacker Mythologies and Mismanagement by Betsy Haibel. Myths about engineering management harm projects. This makes them annoying and expensive. They also harm people. This makes them dangerous.
Your Half-Assed Diversity Initiatives Aren’t Going to Cut It In 2016 by Riley H. Companies have made it crystal clear that they don’t actually care about the diversity they’re supposed to be working on.
Asian American Women in Tech: Lawsuits and Lived Experiences by Michelle Lee. Evidence that Asian American women haven’t been fully included in technology is found not only in recent lawsuits, but in the lack of Asian American women in tech leadership.
Managing Silicon Spoons by Anonymous Author. Management & Chronic Illness.
Managing Up and Barely Holding On by Anonymous Author. When company attitudes around training and growth unwittingly produce ineffective managers.
The Full-Stack Employee and The Glorification of Generalization by Elea Chang. Do we really need to be the chasing the latest random attributes and shifting trends of yet another re-brand on the “perfect tech employee”?
Hiring Isn’t Enough by Catt Small. The true story of a team that tried and failed to retain diverse employees.
On Open Companies, Consent, and Safety (among other things) by Ellen Marie Dash (duckie). We can’t get to the future we want by pretending we’re already there.
Engineering Management and Diversity by Marco Rogers. Command-based vs service-based management.
The Expendables: How Game Development Standards are Inherently Harmful by Eira A. Ekre. In a way, you were the dream: someone who delivered high-quality work – or even perfection – without staying at the company long enough to get paid.

Engineering, Programming and Open Source

C is Manly, Python is for “n00bs”: How False Stereotypes Turn Into Technical “Truths” by Jean Yang & Ari Rabkin. We need to question our “objective” and “technical” opinions about programming languages.
The Hidden Power Dynamics of Open Source by Anonymous Author. Despite our mythologies of open source as a flat, accessible, democratic model for software development, the way we lead our open source groups consistently proves otherwise.
The Life Cycle of Programming Languages by Betsy Haibel. New programming language communities are “graded” on how cutting-edge they are: our pattern-matching capabilities associate white men with the cutting edge, especially if they’re talking about monads.
The Dehumanizing Myth of the Meritocracy by Coraline Ada Ehmke. Is it enough to be measured by the quality of our code alone?
Side Project Culture: Opportunities and Obstacles for Marginalized People in Tech by Terri Burns. While side projects can be a great indicator of personality, ability, and work-ethic, they should not have as much ability to make or break someone’s career.
Programmer Legitimacy: Earned, Bought, or Borrowed? by Nikki Murray. Legitimacy as a programmer universally requires a stamp of approval from institutions with power and privilege over marginalized groups.
The Untitled Life of Alex Rodriguez: Fall & Get Up Through the Lens of a Latino Coder by Alex Rodriguez. My experiences call into question what we can do better to make more Latinos successful in tech.
Leaving Toxic Open Source Communities by Anonymous Author. Exploring the cultural shame of leaving and tips for finding healthy communities.
Non-Coding Contributors in Open Source by Stacy Mullins & Jesse Cooke. The tradition of privileging only technical skills triggers imbalance and inequality.
Software In Person by Sumana Harihareswara. Why do you think you’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars holding hackathons, sprint weeks, and conferences? And how could you be using that time and money better?

Company Culture and Workplace

How Perks Can Divide Us by Melissa Santos & Rafe Colburn. Perks are a poor substitute for a culture built on a stronger, more inclusive foundation.
Interview With Julie Ann Horvath. “It’s easy to feel like the tech culture is just normal and how the industry is or should be. And that’s the moment of maturity – going from ‘oh, this is how it is’ to feeling like no, this is wrong and this isn’t how it should be.”
Mental Illness In The Workplace: Are You Being Served? by Davida Small. Support staff are often expected to respect the states of our more privileged and powerful co-workers, yet our own frailties, states of depression, or anxiety are seen as not deserving of care and accommodation.
Breaking the Tech Language Barrier: How Empathetic Communication Can Bridge the Gaps by Sharon Steed. Tech is an ecosystem, and it’s much healthier when we are working cohesively within that system.
Learning the Rules: Empathy and Enforcement by Amelia Abreu. On project teams and in workplace culture, enforcer roles fall to women regardless of their job titles.
Can Coops Revolutionize the Tech Industry? by Gabrielle Anctil. “If this place is so good for women,” I thought, “then why are there only 4 of us on a team of 12 people?”
Autistics in the Silicon Valley by Erika Lynn Abigail. While attempts to increase the size of the Autistic work force are laudable, it is important to critically think about how these attempts are executed.
How the Glorification of Software Developers Compromises Tech Companies by Kinga Kięczkowska. Instead of prioritizing coding work, we should instead look at our teams and companies as a complex and intricate organism, requiring every part of it to cooperate in order to work.
The Myth of the Non-Technical Startup Employee by Zoelle Egner. The indignities unwittingly foisted upon the early operations employee are many and varied.
Support for Black Humanity in Tech by Anonymous Author. I condemn the culture that has no problem acknowledging and using my labor, but would not support my fight for my humanity.

The Pipeline, Bootcamps and Learn to Code Programs

Institutional Barriers for Women of Color at Code Schools by Anonymous Author. In an industry where black, Latina, and indigenous womyn make up less than 3% of the field, we know that walking through those code school doors, we will be outliers.
Exclusion and Exceptionality in the Pipeline by Julia Nguyen. In computer science classrooms across high schools and universities, minorities are excluded and exit early in the pipeline.
The Code School-Industrial Complex by Shawna Scott. While some code schools are intentionally predatory institutions, many more simply recycle the tired tropes and biased practices rampant in startup culture.
Ableism and the Academy: What College Has Taught Me About My Disabled Body by Daniel Freeman. College campuses can, and should, do a better job of advocating for their students, staff and faculty with disabilities.
Without Scars: Domestic Violence, Abuse and the Tech Pipeline by Anonymous Author. I look around and I see my friends building technologies that make life easier for abusers. I am overwhelmingly sad thinking of all the people whose lives have been made orders of magnitude more hellish carrying ever-connected computers on their bodies.
The Problem With the Zuckerberg Analogy for Youth of Color by Kortney Ziegler. The Zuckerberg analogy avoids the looming issue of systemic discrimination.
Tech in Underserved Communities: Beyond Feel Good Stories by Stephanie Morillo. It’s hard not to miss the sentimental value in the stories of those whose lives were changed by tech’s opportunities. But something is missing.
Intersectional Approaches to Diversifying the Tech Sector by Natasha Vianna. If programs to get youth into tech are adding an extra layer of difficulty for young people, rather than improving their lives, why would they enter and stay?
Coding Bootcamps and Emotional Labor by Tilde Ann Thurium. Bootcamps are a micro example of how the tech industry is built on the emotional labor of the same groups who are marginalized within it.
The Accidental Classism and Unintentional Racism Of iOS Development for Children by Donyae Coles. There is a gulf between children that are able to access the tools that will help them prepare for the future, and those that simply cannot.

Abuse and Harassment

Abuse as DDoS by Julie Pagano. We spend a lot of time trying to counteract attacks on our systems, but often overlook abuses directed at people.
Flickering the Gaslight: Tactics of Organized Online Harassment by Gersande La Flèche. Faced with organized infiltration, appropriation and psychological abuse in our online communities, we have stopped believing in our own interpretations of what we experience.
Anonymity and Toxic Internet Culture by Cameron G. Confronting the darkness that lies with anonymity as a defining factor of online spaces.
Leaking Nudes by Lesli-Ann Lewis. The leaking of celebrity nudes was a part of the larger trend in 2014: reminding women of our place and using technology and the sexism in tech to do so.
When Movements Backfire: Violence Against Women and Online Harassment by Lauren Chief Elk-Young Bear & Shanley Kane. The anti-online harassment movement is already replicating many of the shortcomings, failures, erroneous assumptions and faulty strategies of the larger violence against women movement.
Workplace Harassment, Reporting, and the Whisper Network by Jennifer Wong. Anytime I divulge my story to coworkers, I find that they have their own stories of sexual harassment to share.
An Untold Startup Story by Anonymous Author. A story of sexual assault leading to the downfall of a female founder.
The State of Online Harassment: Decentering Whiteness and Colonization by Izzy I. The most marginalized groups deserve as much access, resources and social capital in aid against harassment as white victims.
Push Me Until I Break: The Effects of Unrealistic Expectations on Marginalized Workers in Tech by CK Oliver. One must consider if this pressure is put on creators specifically to see them fail.
Netflix, Uncovering Cycles of Abuse and Chill: Jessica Jones and Domestic Violence by Shaadi Devereaux. On the heels of Domestic Violence Awareness Month, Jessica Jones confronts many themes of intimate partner violence.

Tech Culture

Technology Colonialism by Anjuan Simmons. Technology companies today are increasingly colonial in their actions. This can be seen in the veneer of sovereignty they seek to cultivate, how they work across borders, their use of dominant culture as a weapon, and the clear belief that “superior” technology is a suitable excuse for lawlessness, exploitation and even violence.
Exposing the Reality of Black Women and Venture Funding: digitalundivided Founder Kathryn Finney on #ProjectDiane. “Black women startup founders have only actually received 0.2% of venture deals funding over the past three years, at an average of just $36,000. In comparison, an average (mostly white male-led) failed startups raises $1.3MM.”
Tech Workers and the Eviction Crisis by Erin McElroy & Kelsey Gilmore-Innis. A look at new technology projects combating Bay Area speculation, plus the role and responsibilities of tech workers within local communities.
The Blackness of Meme Movement by Laur M. Jackson. Not only can the origins of many memes be found in Black creators or online Black communities (Black Twitter, Black Tumblr, Black nerd culture at large), memes appear to model the circulatory movement of Black vernacular itself.
Damaged Karma: Commoditization and Exploitation of Asians in Tech by Brian Kung. Cultural appropriations perpetuate stereotypes, disrespect and exploit Asian culture, and reflect an industry-wide disdain for Asian people and culture.
How to Uphold White Supremacy by Focusing on Diversity and Inclusion by Kẏra. Liberalism’s inherent racism.
Country Clubs on the Web: Exclusivity and the Myth of Early Adoption by nina de jesus. How different the social media landscape would be if sites focused on more than the good ol’ boys network to drive their initial growth.
Assistive Technology By People with Disabilities, Part I and II by Alice Wong. Very often, specialized companies create assistive technology with little input from actual users with disabilities. These products are usually institutional in look and feel, overpriced, and only reimbursable by insurance.
An Open Letter On the State of Women of Color in Technology by the Ola Initiative. As Latina, Native, and Black women professionals in the technology sector, we are especially underrepresented as compared both to our male of color peers, and our White and Asian female colleagues.
How Tech Business Models Come From Marginalized Communities, But Startups Are Still Mostly White by Kara Melton. The word “startup” has begun to signify a particular brand of business success… and a particular type of business person.

Labor Issues

Inside the Movement For Silicon Valley’s “Invisible Workforce” with Maria Noel Fernandez, Julian Posadas and Matt Schaefer. “As folks talk about the booming economy and the wealth and incredible jobs that tech is creating, the folks that are being left behind are the invisible workforce, are people of color.”
Let’s Talk About Pay by Lauren Voswinkel. The lack of knowledge regarding reasonable salaries and predatory behaviors in tech companies can be directly attributed to the social taboo surrounding people talking openly about their salaries.
The Predatory Search And Exploitation of Free Labor by Cameron G. The industries we know and love are being built on our free labor, our hunt for “experience,” and our naivety about our worth.
Crowdsourcing, Open Data and Precarious Labour by Allana Mayer. Crowdsourcing and microtransactions are two halves of the same coin: they both mark new stages in the continuing devaluation of labour.
Give Your Money To Women: The End Game of Capitalism by Lauren Chief Elk-Young Bear & Yeoshin Lourdes & Bardot Smith. #GiveYourMoneyToWomen is more than a hashtag, it’s a theory and practical framework of gender justice.
In a Jam Between Community and Capitalism: A Critical Look at Game Jams by Veve Jaffa. The moment game jams were treated as a solution instead of a tool, they became vulnerable to corporate interest, and lost important value as a potential community resource.
We Don’t Work for Free: Centering Marginalized Community Members in Decision Making by CK Oliver. Having cisgender white males and venture capitalists creating projects about diversity not only doesn’t make sense, it’s insulting.
The Sick Day that Never Ends: Capitalism’s Pricetag for the Disabled and Marginalized by Melissa King. Capitalism is an economic system of convenience… that is, the convenience of management and CEOs.
Why Do We Only Care About Programmers? by Hannah Howard. We Need to Expand the Tech Diversity Conversation.
How Tech Devalues Social Media Workers by Andrea Garcia-Vargas. Social media jobs may not involve coding. They may not involve debugging. They may not involve writing a novel or reporting. But they’re still analytical as fuck, with a measure of art in there.

UI/UX and Design

Money in Politics: A Massive Design Problem by Jon Lewis. Following political expenditures is a lot like hunting a mouse in a labyrinth where the walls are constantly moving.
UX of People with Disabilities: Advancing Accessibility in Social Media by Alice Wong. The power and promise of social media is still out of reach for some people with disabilities who do not have the same ease-of-use and benefits as non-disabled users.
The Argument for Free-Form Input by Emily Horsman. We continue to arbitrarily trust the judgements of white, able-bodied, neurotypical cis dudes to define personhood in the digital world.
Radical Curation: Taking Care of Black Women’s Narratives by Nehal El-Hadi. Radical curation has meant the validation and celebration of our existence.
The Hidden Dangers of AI for Queer and Trans People by Alyx Baldwin. The more we discuss the dangers of training AI on only small sets of data and narrow ideas about identity, the better prepared we will be for the future.
Reckoning with a Decade of Breaking Things by Anna Lauren Hoffmann. The Zuckerberg Files and Facebook’s Enduring Contempt for the World.
Taking The Social Model of Disability Online by El Gibbs. Decades have passed and still accessibility remains on the fringes of technical change.
Building Accessibility Culture by David Peter. Accessibility must be part of every aspect of business, part of the minimally viable product, a core part of how we approach the launch and growth of our platforms.
Making Queer by Neal Ulrich. Making as a gay man is a political statement that I will not be relegated to the periphery of society, seen as inconsequential, or be without the power to shape my own world and the worlds of others.
I Can Text You A Pile of Poo, But I Can’t Write My Name by Aditya Mukerjee. We can’t ignore the composition of the Unicode Consortium’s members, directors, and officers — the people who define the everyday writing systems of all languages across the globe.

Feminism in Tech

An Open Letter on Feminism In Tech by Collected Authors. We are tired of pretending this stuff doesn’t happen.
Quantify Everything: A Dream of a Feminist Data Future by Amelia Abreu. Women’s lives have been subjected to quantification for decades.
How The Rhetoric of Imposter Syndrome Is Used to Gaslight Women in Tech by Alexis Hancock. The overwhelming focus on imposter syndrome doesn’t provide a space to process the power dynamics affecting you; you get gaslighted into thinking it’s *you* causing all the problems.
Feminists in Tech: Please Stop Treating Sex Work as a Contagion by Eva Gantz. We love to talk about diversity and bringing marginalized women into tech. But our biases against sex work are biases against the very marginalized women we wish to include.
Beauty as Safety: Why #FeministsAreUgly is More Than Meets the Eye by Lily Bolourian. Beauty is a litmus test for white supremacy: the closer your ability to pass as white, the better your chance of being deemed beautiful, and the further your chances from being killed.
The Pie is Rotten: Re-Evaluating Tech Feminism in 2016 by Amy Nguyen. If we reach our numerical goals only to look in the mirror and see all the corruption that already existed, we will have failed.
Lean Against: Building an Alternative to Lean In Within Tech by Shanley Kane. The ultimate message of Lean In ideology is transparent in the name itself: Stay in the machine. Work for the machine. Appease the machine.
Social Media and Academic Surveillance: The Ethics of Digital Bodies by Dorothy Kim. Now Twitter is the panoptic medium.
Dear White Women in Tech: Here’s a Thought — Follow Your Own Advice by Riley H. You’re happy to use the means afforded to you for being white while doing nothing meaningful for women of color.
Why We Need Reproductive Justice in Tech by Shelly [Schell] Carpenter. I’m advocating for you to incorporate reproductive justice as a lens through which to view your work in the tech industry.

Events and Conferences

Organizing More Accessible Tech Events by Lacey Williams Henschel. Wide accessibility must become a part of everything we do in the tech industry, and our events are a critical part of that mission.
How to Be Critical of Industry Events Without Throwing Other Women Under the Bus by Lynn Cyrin. When you tell women, specifically sex workers, that they do not belong at your work events, you are perpetuating whorephobia (and by extension, misogyny) against them.
Alcohol and Inclusivity: Planning Tech Events with Non-Alcoholic Options by Kara Sowles. Confronting the assumed use of alcohol forces admission of other issues long swept under the tech industry’s rug.
Ten Lessons Learned from Organizing Diversity-Focused Events by Catt Small. Here are some methods I’ve learned over the past two years to create well-attended, diverse events.
Q&A with Chad Taylor: Making Tech Events Accessible to the Deaf Community. “Not many hearing people realize Deaf people have to fight for access on a daily basis.”
Making Tech Spaces Safe for Diverse Faces by Anjuan Simmons. We must examine the harmful outcomes that technology events foster: discrimination, aggression, and harassment. The only way to change these outcomes is to change behavior.
Unlocking the Invisible Elevator: Accessibility at Tech Conferences by Liz Henry. Instead of complaining that disabled people just don’t come to your conference, do something that would make them want to come to it!
Emancipation of Deaf Voice by William Albright. Deaf people can’t learn to hear, can you learn to provide access?
Where Are You Really From: Microaggressions and Making Tech Meetups Safe by Nasma Ahmed. There are times when I don’t want to be the only women of colour in the room that happens to also wear the hijab proudly. When I would rather not spend my evening being asked ignorant questions or being gawked at.
A Code of Conduct Is Not Enough by Maggie Zhou & Alex Clemmer & Lindsey Kuper. Despite “doing everything right,” we failed to create a safe space for our attendees. How did we screw up?

Advice, How-Tos and Interviews

Advice for Women Entering the Tech Industry by Kat Li. At the end of the day, there’s no way to sugarcoat this: you will encounter difficulty, you will experience discrimination and harassment both in the workplace and in the larger community. Leaning in doesn’t solve everything, and leaving isn’t always the right choice for you.
How We Got Sponsorship for #WOCinTech Photo Shoots by Stephanie Morillo & Christina Morillo. How to find sponsorship and bring your vision to life!
Networking for Capital: Advice for Entrepreneurs Getting Started in Tech by Christine Johnson. If companies founded by underrepresented groups are to grow and scale, they must be vigilant in creating their sphere of influence.
Dear Marginalized People Coming Into Tech by Kronda Adair. Experiences, Thoughts and Advice From Experienced Technologists
Finding Success Outside of Venture Capital by Tiffani Bell. My Startup, Advice for Bootstrapping Your Company, And Why VC Isn’t Always The Right Choice
Interview With Aniyia Williams, Founder of Tinsel. We spoke to Aniyia about the wearable tech market, raising seed funding, building your founding team and where Tinsel is going.
Using Crowdfunding To Support Your Work. How we think about and use crowdfunding at MVC, and what social justice/feminist/community platforms can learn from us.
Getting Started In Tech’s Social Justice Movement by Stephanie Morillo. Social justice activism is one of the most empowering ways to create change in our industry.
An Interview with Anthony Frasier. “There’s always a lot of things when it comes to Black people in America, where it can make a young person feel like, why even try? It can create so many mental barriers for a young person. So if I can do my part in trying to break those down before they even build up, I’m gonna do that.”
How Niche Sites are Building Safe Spaces and Better Communities by Carli Velocci. I spoke to the founders and editors of Femsplain, CirclePlus.co, Black Girl Nerds, Thurst and Autostraddle to find out what it takes to create safe spaces online.

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