Episode 115: Shayna Diamond

Introducing Shayna Diamond

Shayna loves WordPress, CSS art, clean-code, accessible websites & building inclusion in the tech community. She co-founded Shift/Enter to help people, especially those who are underrepresented, succeed in technology-related careers. She also loves rocks.

Show Notes

Website | Shift/Enter

Twitter | @whosyourwebsite

LinkedIn | Shaynald

Hashtag | #shiftentercville

Preferred Pronouns | She/Her

Episode Transcript

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions and our guests share their stories, ideas, and perspectives.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 115.

Tara: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by Shayna Diamond. Shayna loves WordPress, CSS, art, clean code, accessible website and building inclusion in the tech community. She co-founded Shift/Enter to help people, especially those who are underrepresented succeed in technology-related careers. She also loves rocks. Welcome, Shayna.

Shayna: Hi. Thanks.

Tara: Hey, Shayna. It’s great to see you. Thanks for joining us on Hallway Chats. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Shayna: Sure. I came into technology sideways, I would say to the side door after being a jewelry artist and rock hound and nomad for about 10 years. Then I started studying web development and started building sites in WordPress, where most of my career has been working in WordPress building custom sites and customizing themes and all the usual handful that goes with being a developer in the WordPress world.

I became a chapter leader for my local chapter of Girl Develop It to help mostly women get started and launch their careers in technology. I really felt like with the women in tech communities and the WordPress communities I had found my people, my clan sort of for the first time in my adult life. So I wanted to help other people who were intrigued by that workspace break in.

During this time, I became good friends with a woman who works as a software manager, I believe is her title. She was on hiring committees and she had been for longer than I’d been working in tech and had discovered this paradox of knowing people through organizations who were talented people looking for jobs who could never find the jobs they needed. As a hiring manager, looking for talented employees and not being able to find them for jobs she had openings for and felt like there has to be a way to get these two communities to find each other.

So last year, we started an organization called Shift/Enter to run career-centric conferences, teaching interview skills and job search skills negotiation. We’re launching a larger conference this coming year with a track specifically for hiring managers, for them to get us help in writing job requisition and how it to find diverse candidates. My last job, we were hiring an engineer and my boss said, “I’m not against hiring minorities or women but they don’t apply for the opening.” So what does that mean about the way the job description might be written or where you’re posting it? That’s our current goal, and that’s my recent drive.

Tara: So it has a little bit of an element of like a match.com for business. Am I understanding that correctly? Is it an online system?

Shayna: It’s not an online system right now. Right now it is conferences primarily to help teach these skills.