Jaclyn Damiano

Jaclyn Damiano: Today, I want to talk to you about diversity in tech. The first thing I want to say is that I am not with HR, and I know people have their triple PhDs in this topic. I am not one of them.

But I do recognize how hard it is to build diverse teams. The problem for me is that I got tired of sitting back and admiring the problem. I felt like I really needed to put together a plan that we could action in order to increase diversity in tech.

With that, we implemented a pilot at Verizon to create a new pipeline for diverse talent. Today I am going to share some of those details with you, in hopes that you might be able to take some of the pieces and potentially implement them at your own enterprise.

Before we dive into those details, I thought it would be helpful if I gave you a little bit about how I form my perspective. I am a proud graduate of Bucknell University. I have worked in a few different industries at some really great companies. Throughout my career, I have worked between the business and the IT organization, trying to build great products for our clients.

In November of 2016, my life changed. There was a small election in the United States. You probably heard of it. We elected a president, and the results were not what I expected. All at once, I realized that I had a societal obligation to make sure that women and other groups were being treated equally and fairly, both at work and in society.

So you can imagine my surprise when an event that part of my team runs had an interesting outcome. We put on an event called Verizon Tech Days. These Tech Days look very similar to our public DevOps days. We released a CFP to 1,000 engineers. Guess how many women responded to that CFP? Zero. One thousand engineers and zero women responded.

Now, if this could happen under my watch, what does it look like for people who are not so concentrated on creating diverse environments?

I did a lot of research about why this might have happened, and I came across some things that, frankly, I did not know before. There is this thing called the confidence gap. In studies, men overestimate their abilities and performance, while women underestimate both. Studies show our abilities and performance are equal.

The founder and CEO of Girls Who Code talks about how we are raising our boys to be brave and we are raising our girls to be perfect. What does that look like from a DevOps perspective? We are teaching our boys that they can experiment, they have bravery to do that, and they can fail, learn from that failure, and move on. We are teaching our girls that they have to be perfect. I let that sit in and ruminated on it as a parent.

I learned a lot through this research, and I came up with some other nuggets that I think are important to share. You all probably already know this, but it is proven that diverse teams build better products. Diversity is not about being nice or noble. Diversity makes good business sense. If you are building better products, you are generating more revenue. In this competitive landscape, you cannot afford to not have diverse teams.

With all of this information that I got, I decided that it was time to talk about it. Last year, I did an Ignite at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in Las Vegas. I talked about the research and things that I had found. I tried to make visible the things that I did not know about.

The response was crazy to me. People came up to me after the talk. They had stories to share. They wanted to talk about themselves or their wives or their daughters. It was very apparent to me that this resonated, and I was super happy. I know that a lot of you probably have LinkedIns that look much cooler than this, but to me, this was heavy traffic. It was something that I was really proud of and excited about.

I was flying high, literally and metaphorically, on the plane back. We got into New Jersey, and about five minutes after we got off the plane, my boss turned to me and said, "You know, you did a really good job with that presentation. Everybody seemed to like your talk. But what are you going to do about it?"

I thought to myself, "Oh, gosh. I think I just created a lot more work for myself." Because if all I did was talk about it and not do something about it, I am only perpetuating the circumstance.

So I thought back to a talk that I heard at Grace Hopper. How many of you are familiar with the Grace Hopper Celebration? Every year, tens of thousands of women, 18,000 last year to be exact, come together. They descend upon an unsuspecting location in the United States, and they talk about all sorts of topics in tech. One of them is culture. There are things that are very technical, things like moving from project to product. One of the talks that I heard was about building diverse pipelines.

Have any of you heard of Mariana Costa Checa or Laboratoria? She is a new hero of mine. You are going to hear from her in just a second.

Video Clip (Mariana Costa Checa, Laboratoria)

Mariana Costa Checa: In Latin America, we have societies that are still highly unequal in terms of income and in terms of opportunities. So you get brilliant young women. They are doing low-skilled work in the informal economy, and there is really no path to get to the other side.

My husband was a software developer. The two of us and a friend of ours started our own software development company. That is when we realized it was really hard to find developers at the time in Lima. It took us over a year to find our first female developers. That is when we started thinking, "You know what? If we cannot find any, why do we not go out there and build a program to make sure we can get more women into this space?"

We started a pilot program. There were only 15 students. We were basically knocking on doors. It took us a while, but I think as soon as we had our pilot program, as soon as we were able to tell that story, then things changed.

Our mission is to find talent where usually nobody else is, and then prepare these women to transform their lives through a career in the tech sector, and also start transforming the entire tech sector into a much more inclusive, diverse one.

Now we have five training centers: Lima, Santiago, Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Sao Paulo. We have gone from maybe 50 or 60 applicants per cohort to over 6,000. Now we really have thousands of applicants across Latin America.

In 2016, I received a call that I was invited to share a Global Entrepreneurship Summit panel with President Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. Getting the recognition of leaders of the world like that, that type of exposure and recognition has been amazing, I think not only for us, but for every social entrepreneur out there working to build a better future.

It is amazing to see that in such a short period of time, we have been able to spark this movement of women that now dream of building a career in the tech sector. That has a transformational impact in the lives of our students, but it is not only on them. It is on their families, their communities, and it is also changing the companies that they join, building more inclusive teams that definitely lead to better products.

A mentor of mine once told me, "If women knew that through technology you could change the world, there would be so many more women technologists out there."

Jaclyn Damiano

Jaclyn Damiano: All right. What Mariana did is she really sought to solve a supply and demand problem that we have in tech. Tens of thousands of positions go unhired every year in technology. There are a lot of people in communities that we do not traditionally tap into that are looking for work. By marrying the two, she was able to drive incredible business results.

You see these statistics. Over three years, she has educated and graduated 1,000 women. She has placed them at over 400 companies, including places like Thoughtworks and Accenture. She has a job placement rate of over 80%. The women that she places are making three times what they would have made if they never went into tech. These results are fantastic no matter what lens you look at them through.

Mariana's talk resonated with me for some very personal reasons. I came from a small town in Pennsylvania where our economy was based on the coal mining industry. A few decades ago, that industry went away, and it was replaced in Scranton with the service sector. Our median income is pretty low when you compare it to New York City or any average American median income. My parents both worked, and we are from some pretty meager backgrounds. When Mariana talked about going into these communities, I had been a part of some of these communities that she referenced. When I heard her story, it really spoke to me in a lot of different ways.

Even though we had a simple sort of background and financial situation in my family, there were a lot of other things that I did not experience. I was actually fairly privileged. I was never discriminated against because of the color of my skin. I was never marginalized because of who I loved. There are so many communities, so many members of those communities, that feel disenfranchised today. If we could start to bring them into the conversation about how we build products and technology, my bet is that we would build better products.

I promised you an actionable strategy. Meet Project Athena.

What we are doing at Verizon is creating a brand-new talent pipeline from underserved communities. It consists of three different phases. The first is identification of apprentices. We are actually working with a group of 40 people right now. The second phase is upskilling the apprentices. The third phase is evaluating the opportunities that they might be able to take advantage of inside of Verizon.

These apprentices will be with us for a time period of six months, and we are going to be paying them to learn, paying them a living wage. It is going to give them opportunities that they may not have had, and then, selfishly, we get the diversity that we need in order to build better products.

To identify the apprentices, we worked with community partners in two of our locations in the United States, in Texas and in New Jersey. We partnered with organizations like unemployment offices and also the Salvation Army. They then helped us identify people to apply to the program.

Four hundred people were at the top of the funnel. Four hundred people applied to the program. We had 40 spots. It was a really great outcome and outpouring of support from the community and interest from the community.

We then went through a process where we took them through an online training tutorial where they had to evidence some skill or ability in technology. We wanted to find people who were not just passionate about tech. We wanted to find people who had underlying capabilities that would make them great technologists.

After they went through that online trial track, they then had to fill out a scholarship form to help us understand why they wanted to get into tech. We reviewed all of those applications and selected the 40.

Right now, they have been co-located. They are in two of our Verizon locations. We have 20 people sitting in New Jersey. We have 20 people sitting in our Texas facility.

The majority of the day right now is doing self-paced online training. They are actually learning full-stack JavaScript, which is something that we had to define before we brought them in. That online training is being augmented with in-person coaches that we have.

Those coaches are able to figure out if they are having an issue within a particular lesson. They are able to stop, do things like have lunch and learns, do one-on-ones with the individual people, to make sure that they are coming up to speed in the expected timeframe.

Right now, we are on day 17 of learning how to code. All 40 of our apprentices are still with us, which honestly, to me, is a big win. We were worried about attrition. Every day, they are making that effort to get in and really think about coding and what it means to them.

At the end of six months, we are going to be placing them within Verizon. They are going to have the ability to apply to positions on our technical teams. It is super important, as we are going through the training process and then the placement process, that we find technologists from the different business units who are willing to come in and sit with the apprentices and show them some things about Verizon.

For the first three months of the program, the apprentices will be going through that online training. The second three months is all about getting them immersed in the Verizon context. Part of that is having those lines of business come in and really share with the apprentices what they need to know, so that when we go to do the placements, they will be able to hit the ground running as a beginning developer.

The benefits of Athena, I think, are pretty high. If you look around our technology teams, a lot of times we are in this homogeneous environment, and we do not have a lot of different perspectives represented. If we are able to bring people in who do not think like us, who do not look like us, we start to see things from a different vantage point.

It is also really important that we invest in our local community, and Verizon has made a real effort to get out there and pay back the community in different ways as we go forward.

A lot of people have asked me how Athena came to life and how I got it approved, and it has been kind of an interesting process. We came back from the DevOps Enterprise Summit in early November, and it was about a week off the plane before I had this idea, and it all came together. I showed it to my boss, and I was like, "This is kind of expensive, right?" And he said, "No, this is a typing error. This is something that you should definitely pursue."

Then we had this huge company change, and my idea sort of went to the back of my mind for a little while. It took a couple of weeks, but it came back up, and I started to think about what it would take in order to make this a reality at Verizon.

The first thing I did was I named the project Athena. I named it Athena because there were a lot of NDA'd projects that had male gods, so I figured it was about time for a female goddess. Athena is the goddess of wisdom and math, and the name really took off. It stuck.

After I named it, I talked to anybody who would listen. As soon as I heard a senior leader talk at a conference or lament on Twitter about how there were not enough women at a meeting, I emailed them, and I asked for 30 minutes. "Can I come and talk to you? Can I get your advice? Can you just help me think through this?"

In 90% of the cases, that senior leader got back to me pretty immediately, which is honestly amazing to me. Verizon is a super big place. We have 130,000 employees. To be able to email one of our EVPs and to be able to email someone who is on the board of directors to say, "Hey, I am having this thought. Can you help me with it?" and for them to answer back and be so generous with their time was really incredible.

Advice that I give to people now is: do not be afraid to ask for help. Do not be afraid to skip five or six levels up the hierarchy in order to get your project to the place that it needs to be for it to be visible.

I had to do a lot of partnering with allies. Through these past eight months, I have learned more about employment law than I think I ever wanted to know. I have avoided getting fired or sued, thanks to our HR partners.

I have had senior leaders who wrote one-word emails that made Athena a reality. That one word was "approved." It is amazing how one senior leader can really change the trajectory of your career.

At the end here, persisting. This morning, we heard about the abyss. There were a lot of days when I thought that this idea was dead, and that there was no way I was ever going to get the funding to do what I wanted to do. But it ended up that whenever I was stuck in that abyss, the next day I would go in, something would happen, and the idea was alive again. I kept that idea alive over four months until I finally had our CIOs come together and agree to give me the money to do it.

While we are on the money part, we talk a lot about how diversity is important, but in order to be successful at anything in technology and business, you need three things. You need people, you need passion, and you need money. Your diversity issues are not going to go away because you talk about them. Your diversity issues are going to start to be addressed once you start acting.

My leadership believed in this idea enough to fund it and to get it going. I will tell you that the funding part is really just a rounding error at a company the size of Verizon. So I think Project Athena is a realistic and actionable strategy to increase diversity at large enterprises.

Going back to what Gene talked about this morning: how you can help. The next time that you hear someone lamenting that diversity is just so hard, or that they do not have a slate that reflects the kind of diversity they are looking for, talk to them about Laboratoria. Talk to them about creating new pipelines. Try this out on your own. Maybe 40 is too big for your first go-around, but maybe you try it smaller.

I think that you really can make a meaningful dent in this problem if you have those three things that we talked about before: people, passion, and budget.

For me, we spent about two months out working with partners and identifying apprentices. We were looking at their names on spreadsheets for what seemed like an eternity. It became really real for me when we launched the last week in May and all of the apprentices came in to get their laptops and to be oriented.

All of a sudden, I saw this beautiful picture painted of gender, of race, of ethnicity, of age, and it became even clearer that I have found a purpose in my life. I have had that opportunity because I have been mentored by some really fantastic people who have reminded me to persist when I did not think it was going to be possible.

Without further ado, this is our New Jersey cohort. This is our Texas cohort.

What is amazing about all of this is that the education level of our apprentices spans from high school degree to college degree. Their background consists of people who have majored in electrical engineering, people who have done boot camps before, and people who have had no formal education or training in technology.

When you get all of these people together and they start to look at a code base, some really amazing things happen. You start to see them helping each other. You start to see them get comfortable with asking questions. You start to see the leaders of the group, the people that are really the cream of the crop. You start to see people who are in the middle and probably going to make very good developers. And then you see the people who this is not the thing for them. But to be able to give them this opportunity in order for us to meet a business need, it has been pretty incredible.

With that, I am available later for questions in Speakers' Corner. Thank you.