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.