DevPulseCon, with Rupa Dachere from VMware

This episode's guest is Rupa Dachere, an engineer at VMware and the

executive director and founder of CodeChix, a 501(c)3 charity dedicated to

education, advocacy and mentoring of women engineers in industry and

academia. Rupa founded CodeChix because she found that, regardless of

where she worked in the computer industry, she was the only woman on the

team, which led to difficulties in advancing and keeping up with

technologies that continue to pop up. The organization started out with

small group meetings at Rupa's house, grew slowly through meetups and

regular meetings, and now boasts over 400 women engineers as members.

The topic of this episode is primarily DevPulseCon, a two-day

technical and educational micro-conference focused on women engineers,

developers, users, administrators and geeks working in industry and

academia. The conference began in 2015 as Coder[xx] with about 100

attendees, grew to about 120 in 2016, and this year's edition has already

sold over 200 tickets. DevPulseCon takes place April 20 and 21, at the

Computer History Museum in

Mountain View. It is sold out, except for a number of tickets reserved

for students, who may use discount code STUDENT-FREE to register

for free tickets.

DevPulseCon has three components: technical talks, panel discussions, and

hands-on workshops. The full agenda for

DevPulseCon is already posted. For those unable to attend in person, the

technical talks and possibly some of the panels will be recorded and made

available through the DevPulseCon and CodeChix YouTube channels,

alongside the videos that are already available from 2015 and 2016.

This year DevPulseCon features three panel discussions, which are

popular, interactive parts of the conference that tend to run over their

time budgets because the audience doesn't want to stop talking. Rupa is

moderating a panel on toxic environments, which tend to affect women more

strongly than men, for reasons that are not well established. To

encourage participation, the panels are “safe space panels,” meaning

that social media use is banned during the panels and attendees are

encouraged to forget who says what.

Rupa gives some advice on interviewing women for engineering roles. Some

of it I had heard before in unconscious bias training, but some of it was

new to me and easy to act on:

With women, you do a little extra background, reading up on what their

interests are, what drives them, and then phrase your question along

those lines, maybe have a few outlier questions if you think they'll be

able to answer it impromptu, and go that way. Most women like to have a

scripted set of questions, to make them feel comfortable when they're

going into an interview, so they know what to prep for essentially.

Rupa says that CodeChix's primary goal is not recruiting of women to

engineering roles but retention in engineering roles:

Recruiting becomes a secondary [goal]... but retention is and always

has been the focus for CodeChix and that is mainly because of the way I

feel about it. I've been in the industry, I've been on the technical

ladder and actually I've fought to stay on the technical ladder. Most

places they will try to push you into program management, project

management, some sort of management track, and you really have to fight

to stay on the technical ladder...

Now that I have CodeChix, I know that I'm not the only one. That has

always been and still is the number one goal of CodeChix, to retain the

women engineers who are on the technical ladder, keep them on the

technical ladder. In fact, this year I am going to go ahead and say

that I have invited program managers and product managers to the

conference—and these are all people with CS degrees and EE degrees,

that are very qualified—I want to bring them back into the technical

ladder, out of their program management and product management tracks,

and see if I can do that...

I personally feel that it is really a horrible thing if you try to push

somebody who is a good engineer out of the technical track into

something else that, maybe they might be good at it, maybe they're not

good at it, I don't know... I don't want to waste them because it's so

difficult to find good engineers... Also, I'm tired of being the only

female on the team again.

Ben tells a funny anecdote from the beginning of Nicira, but you'll have

to listen to hear it.

DevPulseCon and CodeChix are available through their websites and all

your favorite social media channels. You may also get in touch with them

through email at [email protected] or [email protected].

OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The

intro music in this episode is Drive,

featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumper

music is Yeah Ant

featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro

music is Space

Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All

content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.