Transcript



Ashley:

What's going on y’all! This is Culture and Code, a podcast brought to you by Render Atlanta. If you're not already familiar with what Render Atlanta is, we are an organization dedicated to increasing the presence of black and brown people in all stages of the tech pipeline. We do so with different events and at experiences focused on not just tech, but also culture and how it brings people together. Our main experience, which I am personally super excited about, is our annual Render Atlanta conference held in Atlanta. Our next conference will be June 1st through fourth in 2022. It is super exciting. We have a ton of great speakers lined up some amazing food, and even an after party music festival, it's going to be incredible. And I absolutely cannot wait for y'all to experience it. You have got to get in on it if you haven't already. To learn more about us and keep up with our events, you can visit our website renderatl.com. You can also follow us on Twitter or Instagram @renderATL and join the conversation on our Discord at renderatl.com/discord.



Hi everyone. This is an episode of Culture and Code brought to you by Render Atlanta. My name's Ashley I'm one of the developer advocates for Render Atlanta. Today. I'm here with Rizèl Scarlett, who is a developer advocate at GitHub, and we're going to be chatting a little about empowering junior engineers and creating content for a junior developer audience. I'm super, super pumped to have Rizèl on because I actually met her through Twitter. So this is just my first time chatting with her in general. So I've really been looking forward to it. So hey, Rizèl how's it going?



Rizèl:

Hey, thanks for having me on. And I'm excited to be here too. Everything is going good!



Ashley:

Good. I'm glad to hear it. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here. I wanted to start today with just talking a little bit about your background and how you got into tech and got to where you currently are today.



Rizèl:

Sure. So I've talked about this before in other mediums, so I'll try to make it short, but basically I started going to college for psychology and I was undocumented realized I didn't have enough money to finish college and then especially come as I was undocumented, that meant I wouldn't have like federal financial aid or I couldn't take out loans and stuff like that. So I decided, okay, I have to like stop going to college because I don't have the money. And I decided to take like a year trying to think about like what I should study instead.

And then afterwards I got this thing called DACA, which essentially allows undocumented students to like get like social security numbers and stuff like that so they can go to college drive actually have a life. And I took that time to like reevaluate and be like, this psychology actually makes sense for me, because I would have to go to grad school and I just Googled jobs that make a lot of money and then tech kept coming up. So I was like, I know how to use a computer. I could do that. So I started studying information, computer information systems at Bunker Hill. Through that got a couple internships, got introduced to software engineering, went to a coding bootcamp to learn about software engineering, got a software engineering role. And then I seen people on Twitter, creating content and stuff like that and I was like, that's really cool I want to do that. And I looked into developer advocacy and eventually got a role in that.



Ashley:

That's amazing. I love that. It's rarely ever a straight line I've found with people that get into tech. So it's always super interesting to see how people end up here.



Rizèl:

Yeah, no, it really is. There's a lot of people who have been teachers or marketers and stuff like that. I try to tell people about that because I think it's pretty life changing



Ashley:

For sure, yeah. And just the fact that you study different fields or you were exposed to different fields and you're able to bring that perspective in that's super, super valuable. So that's amazing to hear.



Rizèl:

Yeah. Thank you.



Ashley:

But yeah, so you gave a few talks or maybe just a couple about empowering junior engineers. So I'd love to just get some ideas from you because I feel like the pipeline for junior engineers from starting a job or even just backing up like finding a job, starting a job and then actually getting acclimated to a job those are some really, really impressionable parts for them that can really make or break their career. So in terms of onboarding processes, I'd love to get your thoughts on what are some ways that those onboarding processes can be shaped to be more inclusive of junior engineers.



Rizèl:

Yeah. I've had a lot of experiences at startups as a junior engineer and like I completely understand startups or startups, so they don't always have everything together and they may get very excited to welcome on a junior engineer. But I think for onboarding, the simplest thing you can do is have them come on, show them how your company works, pair them with a mentor that's actually interested. Because I think sometimes junior engineers get paired with a mentor that like maybe they feel a little bit overwhelmed by their work or they're not that passionate or interested in mentoring another junior engineer. So get someone who can advocate for them cares and maybe let them know yeah, I understand that you're going to be mentoring a junior engineer. So if your tickets aren't getting done or something like, give them less story point or something like that.

And then on top of that, having them do, everyone does the whole going through documentation. So having them go through that so they can set up their machine, have them edit the documentation to things that were more obvious to them and then give them a few good first issues. And also I think in, I'm pretty passionate about the mentorship part too in like talking with the mentor the mentor should talk with the mentee and try to get a better understanding of how the mentee best communicates and how you would prefer communicate. Making those things clear is really important because I think I've gotten paired with mentors in the past and I was confused. I'm like, should I hit them up? Do they want me to Slack them? Do they want me to email them? So just being transparent and laying those cards on the table, you're invested in helping them grow and any that they ask is not too dumb and figuring out what pace they want to go at.

Because I think sometimes you might throw them a good first issue and then you're like, all right, now here's a feature. And that can be overwhelming. You're like, whoa, okay. Or maybe they feel they're going too slow. So I think a lot of the onboarding can vary from person to person. And I think it's sitting down and getting an understanding of how that person best works and what they're looking for in their career.



Ashley:

For sure. That's all super amazing advice. I especially love the points you made about setting that expectation. Because I think it is often done maybe on one side, like maybe mentor sets it for the mentee, but not the other way around. So I think that's a great point about the mutual expectations there. You also mentioned documentation, so obviously it's a huge part of everyone's learning experience. How do you feel like we could write better documentation for all skill levels, but especially for juniors?



Rizèl:

Yeah, that's a really great question. I think the simpler or the more you break it down the better, right? I think sometimes we write documentation assuming that maybe this person knows what repository to go into or what folder or I'm like break it down to the smallest thing. Even if you think maybe that person knows it already, make it even more broken down. And I think, I don't know if people review documentation as deeply as they do code reviews. So having the team or maybe the most inexperienced, their newest person on the team also review that and be like, oh maybe you should add this part in or that part I think. Yeah, I think a lot of times we write documentation with a ton of assumptions, breaking it down to the simplest point is important. I'm hoping, I don't have that much advice on this though. And I was hoping to read the docs for developers book because I think that would probably have some great advice on how to write good documentation.



Ashley:

For sure, yeah. It's definitely, I think it's an interesting problem that hasn't been addressed that frequently. I think inherently people are like, yeah we do need better documentation all around, especially for those that are starting. But it's really hard to understand where to start with that. Especially when you already have such a large base of documentation. What's going on y'all if you're loving this episode so far, we'd love to invite you to join the conversation about it by hopping into our discord at renderatl.com/discord. We'd also love to have you at our upcoming conference this year, June 1st through fourth in Atlanta. You can visit renderatl.com for more information, you can also find us on our updates on Instagram and Twitter @renderATL. Everything being distributed now, with that remote work model, are there any good ways that we can open that up a little bit and make that easier for juniors to still feel comfortable asking questions with that lack of accessibility that you might have from being in the office next to someone?



Rizèl:

Yeah, good question. So I teach at this program or I help to run this program called G-code, which teaches women of color and non-binary people of color to code. And I have noticed that like in moving from being in person to remote, like people are more quiet. They're scared to ask questions. We can't tell when they're struggling. So it's something I've struggled with as well. But similarly to some of the other points I made, we have office hours opened. So if they feel like embarrassed or scared to ask those questions in the moment they can hop into office hours, I think just stressing to them like you're here, you're available ask me anything. And I don't think junior engineers are that scared to ask questions as people make it seem. I think it's more like sometimes the reaction from other people, I think sometimes I've asked questions and then felt discouraged because they all say like, oh just Google it or something that feels very dismissive.

And instead of saying just Google it, I think a better thing to say is like try to get them into a pattern of answering all the questions that you need first because of course they already Googled it. So saying like, what's your goal? What have you already tried? And then what was the result? And then after a while, they'll get into that pattern of answering it that way before you even ask them. So I think it's more about showing that you are available to answer questions than doing anything else because I think people are ready to ask questions and also showing that the rest of your team also ask questions. If you see a senior engineer asking for help, you're like, oh, okay, this is the culture. It's okay to ask questions here.



Ashley:

That's always super validating for me too when I go into a space where I see someone more senior than me that is comfortable just like throwing a question out there because then I'm also like, oh yeah, it's okay that I have questions too. And everyone, no matter what level that you're at is always going to run into some sort of snag or have some sort of question. So yeah. That's super, super encouraging.



Rizèl:

Yeah, agreed.



Ashley:

I did also want to talk a little bit about the tech pipeline, especially for juniors. I think that's something that has been a recurring topic on Twitter, especially lately a lot of juniors or new grads or even people that are self-taught or bootcamp grads are just hitting a wall when it comes to applying to jobs. My partner is a bootcamp grad and I kind of want to get your thoughts on the first part of the pipeline. So interviewing practices in general, how can we adjust that to make that more inclusive and junior friendly, especially because technical interview is so intimidating, it's basically like having a job in itself. So how do we fix that?



Rizèl:

Yeah. I'm terrible at technical interviews. I do not like those. I think I've always excelled at the interviews where they ask me to show them a project that I've done before and talk about it in detail. I think I would hope that more companies can move to that kind of model. I know oftentimes too, they want you to, the take home projects are not that bad, but I think they're also a little but not inclusive because now there's people working their full-time job and doing a take home project at the same time. So I say evaluate the project they've done in a bootcamp, evaluate the project they've done on the side or whatever and talk to them about it in detail. And I think that to me, that's good enough to see where their understanding is and what they can do.

I've also seen interviews where they had them read or like help them to debug code. I think that's the little scary, but I think it's a little bit easier than like, oh, watch me code, like having someone and watch you code and you're typing it out. And you're like trying to do a linked list when... I don't understand that either you're a boot camper, why are they asking you to like write a linked list? You haven't learned data structures, this is not fair that you have to like sit down and relearn everything else. But I think people, if they've gone through a coding boot camp and they're great at communication, I think people and they have the bandwidth to support a junior engineer. I think companies need to be more willing and understanding and look at their projects and how they communicate technical concepts more than just like, oh, this person knows how to do something that people learn in college.



Ashley:

For sure. Yeah, I've noticed that we maybe have tried to simplify the interview process a little too much with things like grading and hacker rank and just scoring all of these things, but it's really like, you can't score problem solving skills in such a timed constraint, especially when in a normal context you use Google, you use external resources. So yeah, I think those are really great first step. And I wanted to kind switch it up a little bit and ask you a more Render question especially since we're all thinking about the holidays and seeing family I'd love to know what food reminds you the most of home.



Rizèl:

Ooh, that is a really good question. I'm going to say roti and particularly like Guyanese are Trinidadian roti. My family's Guyanese, pretty Caribbean. So I'm like into Caribbean roti and stuff like that. So yeah, I'll pick that and if people don't know what that is, it's kind of, it looks like a burrito, but it has curry in it. I think a Caribbean person would be mad if I said that, but that's the most, the best example I could get for people.



Ashley:

Thank you, I love that. Yeah. So I think we're coming up on time. It's been amazing chatting with you. It's definitely flown by. To close out, is there anything that you want to plug? It can be personal, it can be a meme. It can be a cause you support. You're welcome to go ahead and plug whatever you'd like.



Rizèl:

Sure, I want to plug two things. I guess first follow me on Twitter @blackgirlbytes and then also follow @GCodeHouse on Twitter. That's basically a program that helps to support women of color and non-binary people of color and teach them to code. And eventually we're hoping to be able to house those who are low income or dealing with housing insecurities. We actually purchased a house. We're just looking to renovate it. So if you want to help come to mentor or donate some money or if you're someone looking to learn to cope, definitely check us out.



Ashley:

That is so incredible. Yeah, that's amazing. I'm probably going to check y'all out after this.



Rizèl:

Thank you.



Ashley:

Yeah. Seriously. Thank you so much, Rizèl for coming on. It's been amazing chatting with you. We talked about this a little bit before we hopped on, but it's always so fun to actually talk to people that you've only ever spoken to on the internet. So this was a great experience all around.



Rizèl:

I agree.



Ashley:

Yeah, thank you. And thank you so much, everyone for tuning into this episode of Culture and Code, we'll see you next time. And of course don't forget to stay looped in on all things Render, especially with our conference coming up in June 2022 in Atlanta. You can find us on Twitter @renderATL and you can hop in on our Discord and join the conversation at renderatl.com/discord. You can also find me on Twitter @ashley_in_tech. Thanks so much for listening y'all. See y'all next time.