Things That Matter Most

Things That Matter Most

I Won’t be at ZendCon

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Next week kicks off the latest version of ZendCon in Las Vegas. Though I had, for a time, expected to be there … I won’t be. You should know why.

Speaking Habits

I really enjoy speaking in public. It’s been a regular part of my career for the past decade, and it gives me ample opportunity to connect with and learn from the communities I care so deeply about.

I tend to submit multiple talks to multiple events per year. On average, I think I’ve spoken at 4-5 conferences per year for the past 6 years – in one “season” I presented in some form at 14 events during the period of the year. This gives me a lot of time on stage, but even more time connection with members of the community.

It’s opened my eyes to quite a few things; one in particular is the lack of diversity (or at least the representation thereof) at many events. We have a wildly diverse community, but a fairly homogenous lineup of “experts” presenting on stage.

Representation matters. I got involved in tech because people I related to were standing on stage telling me that I could. I want everyone to have that opportunity. To have that experience. More often than not, this means I need to step aside and encourage someone else to stand in the limelight. That’s humbling, but perfectly OK with me.

And it’s why I won’t be in Vegas next week …

Acceptance

My original acceptance email was lost to the aether, but eventually the organizing team was able to make contact and confirmed that yes, I was invited to speak. They’d selected both a workshop on security and a shorter talk about promise-driven architecture in PHP.

ZendCon Twitter announcement of my attendance and presentations.
Original Twitter announcement that I’d be speaking.

I was ecstatic!

ZendCon is one of the larger PHP events every year. Better yet, it’s a super short flight from Portland – there aren’t very many high-profile events I can attend to spend time with my community in my neck of the woods. I immediately accepted the invitation and flagged my calendar so I could schedule my time away from the office.

But then … my conscience got to me.

Withdrawal

Don’t get me wrong, the speakers’ lineup for this event looks to bring in solid experts who will be presenting great content. However, it’s also the speakers’ lineup that led me to withdraw from the event.

At the time I was asked to speak, there were 37 other speakers listed on the website. This group of individuals consisted of:

  • 4 women
  • 2 (apparent) people of color

For those who don’t want to do the math, this meant the speakers group was 89% male and 95% white. Adding my name to that list did nothing to make those numbers better.

My presence as a speaker at ZendCon would have actively diminished the value of the event. I refuse to be another white, male face among a speaker list comprised overwhelmingly of white men. This is not reflective of our community, and my ignoring that feeling and speaking anyway would be a betrayal of that community.

I hold no animosity towards the organizers of or speakers at ZendCon. However, I will not participate in your event until you address this discouraging lack of representation.

Moving Forward

I’ve taken fairly strong stances towards many things. I will not participate in events that lack a code of conduct. I will not abide racists, sexists, ageists, ableists, or similar.

I will not participate in events that fail to address serious issues regarding diversity, representation, or inclusion in our community. It’s one thing to say “well, people didn’t apply …” It’s another thing entirely to actively encourage members of the community to engage.

Said another way – if members of particular subcommunities are not organically responding to your CfP in volumes that would make a diverse speakers’ panel easy, you have far deeper problems with your event than you realize and it’s likely something I will not engage with in the first place.

As I’ve said on many topics recently: we can do better. We must do better. Those to whom we leave our projects, businesses, industry, profession behind deserve that we do better. Everything we do today is paving the way for generations to come – I am committed to doing everything in my power to ensure that the future of our community recognizes, respects, and values diversity.

Right now, that means calling out an inclusivity issue and refusing to be a part of the event that’s done little to solve it. In my white, male, cisgendered privilege, one of the strongest statements I can make is to not participate. If that makes room for one more person who doesn’t reflect “me” to the world, it’s a net positive.

Missing: Diversity in Tech

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I attend a lot of tech conferences. I once attended at least 14 events over the course of twelve months. Large events at professional conference centers. Small events at local churches. Events that required driving. Events that required passing through customs.

Every event is unique. Every organizing team is unique. Every attendee is unique.

Still, there is very much a lack of diversity at these events.

php[tek]

The php[architect] team is, in my opinion, one of the best event groups on the planet. They put together several excellent events each year and I'm proud to have been a part of several. This is in no way a critique of that team; just an observation of something I witnessed at an event.

The first day of php[tek] 2015 featured a summit on open source. It was a promising event, bringing the leaders of several different open source projects together on stage to answer questions about their tools, their passion, and the future of open source as a whole. In short, this was a fantastic way to help highlight the "giving back" we know and love in the PHP community.

The only problem with the summit … was filling the stage with nine white men and suggesting it was a fair representation of "the open source community."

Two Reasons Diversity Matters

Diversity matters for more reasons than I can enumerate. There are, however, at least three key reasons the tech community needs to focus on it:

Representation is Empowering

There's a certain amount of pride you experience when you see yourself succeed. That same pride extends to when you see someone like you succeed. Seeing someone you can identify with take the stage, lead a project, or showcase a magazine is profoundly empowering.

Growing up as a white man, it was easy for me to find examples and role models to whom I could look up. They were everywhere. Politicians. Athletes. Entrepreneurs. Astronauts. As a kid, I heard frequently that I could be anything I wanted to be as an adult and I saw a huge amount of evidence to that statement.

Your Perspective is Limited

I once wrote an essay about the importance of diversity in a college setting: Diversity is in the Discourse. I had intended it to be a fun play on the phrase "the devil is in the details," but that wasn't really the point.

My point was that diversity becomes the most valuable when it's personally experienced. You and I each have our limited perceptions of the world around us; we can only see the world through one set of eyes. It's when we share our perspective with others – more importantly, when we listen to and appreciate others' perspectives – that we truly grow and build a fuller sense of the world.

I went to a predominantly white high school. I was in marching band. My favorite event was the annual Festival of Bands we'd travel to around Halloween. It was a great event, and we even had t-shirts printed to commemorate the event. Plain white t-shirts emblazoned with a giant "FOB."

Much later, when my circle of friends began to grow that I wore my shirt to an unrelated event. One of my newer friends immediately yelled at me for "being such a blatant, unabashed racist." I discovered then that "fob" was also short for things like "fresh off the boat" and was a slur that had been used repeatedly after his family moved into the area.

WordPress

I love WordPress. The product is fantastic and the community around it even more so.

I love WordCamps. It's refreshing to meet up with other WordPress users and talk about the different ways we're all using our favorite platform. Some use it as a blog. Some as a corporate landing site. At least one used it as a fantasy football coordination tool. The skies are the limits.

In my career, I've established enough credibility that people will reach out to me as an expert on various topics. The latest request, though, caught me off guard. I was asked to participate as a featured expert on the future of WordPress and how it relates to diversity.

…

I am a huge proponent of encouraging diversity in our community. I will gladly talk to anyone one-on-one about the different things we can do to encourage the participation of people belonging to under-represented demographics. But I am perhaps the last person you want to highlight as a "featured expert" on the topic.

Don't Ask Me

This isn't the first time I've been asked to participate in such an event. It won't be the last, either. But the fact remains, hearing a white man talk about diversity is a zero-sum game. As much as I care about the topic, it makes more sense to have someone more directly affected by the promotion of diversity in technology speak.

Asking a white man to talk about racial diversity or female empowerment or equality in the workforce is fundamentally misguided. We need to have a more diverse community in IT, but the way to get there is to empower those with diverse life experiences and raise them up as role models.

It's empowering to see yourself on stage speaking at an event. Make an effort to cultivate a wide representation of races, religions, orientations, and genders among your speakers.

It's powerful to hear from a broad spectrum of perspectives when making a decision, building a product, or nurturing an idea. If everyone involved in a conversation looks the same, thinks the same, and votes unanimously for an idea without debate you probably need to look outside your circle for a few more voices.

I see enough of myself on TV. I see enough of myself in politics. I see enough of myself in tech. I long for the day when I can look around in the tech community and see a reflection not of myself, but of the diversity of the world around me.

Today’s Youth and Tomorrow’s Technology

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He’s 22 years old. Twenty-two! And he knows a lot more than I do. Seriously, if I knew at 22 what he knows now, I would’ve taken over the world by now.

My first family computer was the dual disk kind. It meant you had two floppy disk drives – you inserted a DOS disk into one, and a disk for whatever program you wanted to run into the other. There was a tiny amount of hard-disk space, but that was meant for more dynamic programs – it wasn’t a hard-disk big enough for DOS, and we never wasted it on static programs for which we already had a disk.

Instead, my dad had a book with programs in it. Literally. The source code was printed on every page. He’d open up a text editor and painstakingly type every line of code so he could run simple programs.

I used it to make art programs. And password-generation programs. And once a naive attempt at artificial intelligence. 1

The way I learned about computers was hard.

I actually tried to teach myself C++ in middle school. I found an old C manual in the library, but couldn’t figure out the difference between C and the “++” variety. I found better manuals at the local bookstore, but they still wouldn’t help me learn development. The only “free” C++ compiler was command-line only; the available GUI compilers were expensive and I didn’t have enough of an allowance to buy one.

I didn’t really learn programming until grad school. In my free time. By searching Google and Wikipedia and reading various blogs on the subject.

Then I go to a WordCamp that features specific breakout sessions for kids. I meet a 10 year old in Brazil who’s attended and been a key participant in international hackathons. I meet a 16 year old at a high school career day who, even before graduation, has amassed more software development experience than I have in my professional career.

Then I look at speaker lineups and see only established professionals on the agenda. I attend meetups that migrate to bars with strict adult-only requirements. 2

It’s fairly evident to me that we have a serious lack of diversity in the technology community when it comes to age – not necessarily for anyone above 21, but for those below that threshold. I’ve meet teenagers and pre-teens who have just as much (if not more than) experience as some of the 30, 40, and 50-yr old developers I know. It’s a shame that they’re not more involved in our community.

After all, they’ll be the ones inheriting and maintaining the infrastructures we build today. They’re already bright enough to understand them (and optimize them), but we don’t always give them the chance.

The 22-yr old in the quote above wasn’t avoiding a world takeover because of a lack of skill or desire to succeed. He was stuck working a day-job for an established firm because no one really took him seriously due to his youth.

How many more times will he (and others like him) be told “you can’t do that” before they internalize it, begin to believe it, and doom us to a future of technological mediocrity?

Notes:

  1. A dumb program that returned scripted responses to text inputs – my first try at an automated chat bot that didn’t really work. ↩
  2. The keynote speaker at one conference I attended was only 19. He was a genius, and couldn’t participate in any of our networking events because of strict carding policies due to alcohol. ↩