women in tech

Leadership Language

~ Susan Kelley ~ Leave a comment

Choose Your Words Wisely

Image courtesy of Brooke Lark on Unsplash

Two employees are asked to evaluate their work at their annual review. One describes their accomplishments as “outstanding,” noting that they have exceeded plan. The other gives a full report listing data points and gives the team credit for achieving success throughout the year.

Which employee was male and which was female?

Study after study shows us that as women, we tend to describe our abilities less favorably than our equally proficient male counterparts. We describe ourselves less often as as “proficient” or “skilled” on resumes and we display less confidence even on our resumes when we have similar degrees and certifications.

Scholars Exley and Kessler studied long and hard to reckon that women come in at nearly 13 points lower than men on willingness to brag about themselves. They do this even when they know they are exactly equal. How do we know? Well, Exley and Kessler offered up a straightforward math and science test with the same questions, and then asked men and women who got the same score how they thought they did. They asked them to rate themselves on a Likert scale. (On a scale of 1 to 100, how well do you think you did?) Women who got the same score ranked themselves on average 13 points lower. They continued to do this even when they knew the score they got.

Fascinating.

We just don’t seem to be all that comfortable saying, “Hey, I’m pretty good at stuff, and I have the score to prove it.”

A new study by Van Epps, Hart, and Schweitzer provides us with some great insight into how to overcome this tendency, and how to level the field a bit. We would be wise to learn it, and use it. It’s called “Dual Promotion.” And I’m here for it 100%.

Dual promotion is all about not just talking about our own capabilities, but elevating each other while we are at it. It turns out that women aren’t altogether good at bragging – we know that, we get that. (And yes, I know this is not universal. Some women show off, some are great in the limelight. Others are wallflowers and won’t say a kind word about themselves if paid a million. Right? Nothing is standard. Moving on.)

Dual promotion benefits more than just ourselves. Nice, right? There are three primary ways we can do this. The first is easy, and makes sense. If you have a team that you work with that helps get you to a goal or inspired you to get there, you give them a nod to the contribution they made to your success.

Allow me to demonstrate. My daughter studied classical vocal performance in undergrad. When she gave her senior recital, she gave a lovely thank-you speech at the conclusion and was sure to thank not only the musicians who accompanied her, but her student-friend who meticulously dedicated hours to arranging a Spanish folk song for her in operatic style that became her finale. This guy was not a part of the performance. He had already given his own concert, but she named him specifically and spoke about the fact that it was his talent that made her own talent shine brighter, then she went on to take several more bows. She made it clear that singing that song was her own thing. She made his music come alive. Without her voice, his arrangement was still folk music, but her operatic voice made a street song something it had never been before. And yet… you see how they both were vehicles for each other? She did not yield ground for her own achievement just because she acknowledged another person’s contribution to her arguably great success.

Another mechanism for dual promotion is complimenting a competitor. This happens often in sport. I am a triathlete, for example, and I find it very satisfying when, at the finish line, I can congratulate with total sincerity the person who has just crossed ahead of me whether by a slim or great margin. And I appreciate fully when they do the same. We are both out there trying to make the best of a tough sport, enduring challenges both within and without our control, and we are enjoying the results not just of a day’s work but of months and often years of training. It feels good to acknowledge that whatever came our way that day, we rose to greet the task. Professional athletes quite often give plaudits to their counterparts, admitting that it takes a lot of grit to get where they are, showing respect not only for the game but for the chops it takes to get there. The same should go for competitors in the market and in the workplace. When we have a colleague on a task or a competitor for a promotion or role, we do well to note that there are many factors that weave into who ends up at the finish first, both realistically and metaphorically.

The third and final dual promotion strategy is recognizing the field. By this I mean when we show our respect for the shoulders on which we stand. Think of an award recipient who shows clear respect for the other nominees. All those who admit “It’s an honor just to be nominated,” are likely not joking. It actually IS. Realistically, when our hat gets tossed in the ring for a prestigious award, it is a privilege and it feels good. To know you’ve gained the respect of someone or a group enough to be considered, let alone to win, feels pretty great. So the act of dual promotion in this instance is when we include by saying, “I’m honored to be among this great group of other people because it means that I, too, am pretty great.” “Look at me and how great I am…gee, I must be pretty great.”

Each of these forms of dual promotion puts us in the spotlight, but the best part is that it doesn’t leave others in the dark. It can feel amazing to allow ourselves to shine, especially if we recognize that it is totally, completely fair to do so. Not one of us got here alone, but we can remember that our shine is not dimmed by the success of others, nor should we promote their contributions over ours. We don’t have to break the rung of the ladder we just stood on, we can extend a hand to the person standing there and bring them along with us, if that is the path they both want and have earned. That’s no problem at all!

Don’t fear dual promotion – it’s a fantastic way to be sure you are shining your own light, offering light to others, and being seen. Your warmth, consideration, and desire to grow will be apparent to all as a leadership and strength trait, and your honesty and sincerity will be apparent throughout.

No one lies a braggart, but nearly everyone likes a team leader. So go forth and promote – dual promote.

Source – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37561455/. Because I definitely want to dual promote the team that taught me what dual promotion is all about!

Singing a New Tune in AI – Prompt Tuning

~ Susan Kelley ~ Leave a comment

We are all well aware that AI is the hottest topic everywhere. You couldn’t turn around in 2023 without hearing someone talk about it, even if they didn’t know what the heck it was, or is. People were excited, or afraid, or some healthy combination of both.

From developers and engineers to kids and grandmas, everyone wanted to know a thing or two about AI and what it can or cannot do. In my line of work, people were either certain it would take away all of our jobs or certain that it was the pathway to thousands of new jobs.

Naturally I can’t say for certain what the future holds for us as tech writers, but I can say this – we as human beings are awful at predicting what new technologies can do. We nearly always get it wrong.

When the television first arrived, there were far more who claimed it was a fad than those who thought it would become a staple of our lives. The general consensus was that it was a mere flash in the pan, and it would never last more than a few years. People simply couldn’t believe that a square that brought images into our homes would become a thing that eventually brought those images to us in every room of our homes, twenty four hours a day, offering news and entertainment, delivering everything we needed all day and all night. They couldn’t fathom that televisions would be so crystal clear and so inexpensive that every holiday season the purchase of a bigger, better, flatter, thinner television would be a mere afterthought.

And yet here we are.

So now that we’ve got that out of the way, on to total world domination!

But seriously.

If you aren’t already using AI, or at least Gen AI in the form of something like Chat GPT, where are you, even? At least have a little play around with the thing. Ask it to write a haiku. Let it make an outline for your next presentation. Geez, it’s not the enemy.

In fact, it’s so much not the enemy that it can help you outline your book (like I’ve done), revise a paragraph (like I’ve done), or tweak your speech (like I have done many, many times). The only thing you really need to understand here is that you are, indeed, smarter than the LLM. Well, mostly.

The LLM, or large language model, does have access to a significantly grander corpus of text than you can recall at any given moment. That’s why you are less likely to win on Jeopardy than if you were to compete against it. It’s also why it might be true that an LLM competitor might make some stuff up, or fill in some fuzzy details if you ask it to write a cute story about your uncle Jeffrey for the annual Holiday story-off. (What? Your family does not actually have an annual story-off? Well, get crackin’ because those are truly fun times…fun times…). The LLM knows nothing specific about your uncle Jeffrey, but does know a fair bit about, say, the functioning of a carburetor if you need to draft a paragraph about that.

The very, very human part is that you must have expertise in how to “tune” the prompt you offer to the LLM in the first place. And the second place. And the third place!

Prompt tuning is a technique that allows you to adapt LLMs to new tasks by training a small number of parameters. The prompt text is added to guide the LLM towards the output you want, and has gained quite a lot of attention in the LLM world because it is both efficient and flexible. So let’s talk more specifically about what it is, and what it does.

Prompt tuning offers a more efficient approach when compared to fine tuning entirety of the LLM. This results in faster adaptation as you move along. Second, it’s flexible in that you can apply tuning to a wide variety of tasks including NLP (natural language processing), image classification, and even generating code. With prompt tuning, you can inspect the parameters of your prompt to better understand how the LLM is guided towards the intended outputs. This helps us to understand how the model is making decisions along the path.

The biggest obstacle when getting started is probably designing an effective prompt at the outset. To design an effective prompt, it is vital to consider the context and structure of the language in the first place. You must imagine a plethora of considerations before just plugging in a prompt willy-nilly, hoping to cover a lot of territory. Writing an overly complex prompt in hopes of winnowing it down later might seem like a good idea, but in reality what you’ll get is a lot of confusion, resulting in more work for yourself and less efficiency for the LLM.

For example, if you work for a dress designer that creates clothing for petite women and you want to gather specific insights about waist size, but don’t want irrelevant details like shoulder width or arm length and competing companies, you might try writing a prompt to gather information. The challenge is to write a broad enough prompt, asking the AI model for information about your focus area (petite dresses), while filtering out information that is unrelated and avoiding details about competitors in the field.

Good Prompt/Bad Prompt

Bad prompt: “Tell me everything about petite women’s dresses, sizes 0 through 6, 4 feet tall to 5 feet 4 inches, 95 lbs to 125 lbs, slender build by American and European designers, and their products XYZ, made in ABC countries from X and Y materials.”

This prompt covers too many facets and is too long and complex for the model to return valuable information or to handle efficiently. IT may not understand the nuances with so many variables.

A better prompt: “Give me insights about petite women’s dresses. Focus on sizes 0 to 6, thin body, without focusing on specific designers or fabrics.”

In the latter example, you are concise and explicit, while requesting information about your area of interest, setting clear boundaries (no focus on designers or fabrics), and making it easier for the model to filter.

Even with the second prompt, there is the risk of something called “overfitting,” which is too large or too specific. This will lead you to refine the prompt to add or remove detail. Overfitting can lead to generalization or added detail, depending on which direction you need to modify.

You can begin a prompt tune with something like “Tell me about petite dresses. Provide information about sizes and fit.” It is then possible to add levels of detail that the LLM may add so that you can refine the parameters as the LLM learns the context you seek.

For example, “Tell me about petite dresses and their common characteristics.” This allows you to scale the prompt to understand the training data available, its accuracy, and to efficiently adapt your prompt without risking hallucination.

Overcoming Tuning Challenges

Although it can seem complex to train a model this way, it gets easier and easier. Trust me on this. There are a few simple steps to follow, and you’ll get there in no time.

  1. Identify the primary request. What is the most important piece of information you need from the model?
  2. Break it into small bites. If your initial prompt contains multiple parts or requests, break it into smaller components. Each of those components should address only one specific task.
  3. Prioritize. Identify which pieces of information are most important and which are secondary. Focus on the essential details in the primary prompt.
  4. Clarity is key. Avoid jargon or ambiguity, and definitely avoid overly technical language.
  5. As Strunk and White say, “omit needless words.” Any unnecessary context is just that – unnecessary.
  6. Avoid double negatives. Complex negations confuse the model. Use positive language to say what you want.
  7. Specify constraints. If you have specific constraints, such as avoiding certain references, state those clearly in the prompt.
  8. Human-test. Ask a person to see if what you wrote is clear. We can get pretty myopic about these things!

The TL;DR

Prompt tuning is all about making LLMs behave better on specific tasks. Creating soft prompts to interact with them is the starting point to what will be an evolving process and quickly teaching them to adapt and learn, which is what we want overall. The point of AI is to eliminate redundancies to allow us, the humans, to perform the tasks we enjoy and to be truly creative.

Prompt tuning is not without its challenges and limitations, as with anything. I could get into the really deep stuff here, but this is a blog with a beer pun in it, so I just won’t. Generally speaking (and that is what I do here), prompt tuning is a very powerful tool to improve the performance of LLMs on very specific (not general) tasks. We need to be aware of the challenges associated with it, like the hill we climb with interpretability, and the reality that organizations that need to fine-tune a whole lot should probably look deeply at vector databases and pipelines. That, my friends, I will leave to folks far smarter than I.

Cheers!

Work-Life Balancing That Works

~ Susan Kelley ~ Leave a comment

Image courtesy of Yuki Nakamura on Unsplash.

This week is the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, DC. It’s less than an hour by train from my house, and is arguably the prettiest harbinger of spring in the mid-Atlantic corridor. Saturdays and Sundays in the limited-run showing of the more than 3,000 cherry blossom trees are a chaotic influx of visitors from around the globe. Busy is a deep understatement. Crowded doesn’t begin to describe.

A fair-weather weekday, though? That provides nearly perfect viewing conditions for the gorgeous 1912 gift from Tokyo.

Alas. That would interrupt a work day. If I took the 2pm train to DC and wandered about the tidal basin for a couple of hours, the earliest I could be back home would be, say, seven p.m. assuming I stop for a bite to eat and don’t rush to ride the train home at 5pm with all of the commuters.

And yet – I’ll likely do it. I’ll feel no guilt about stepping away from my desk at 2, because it’s very likely I’ll sign back on at 7 or 7:30, and will have started my work day at 6:30 a.m. as usual anyway. I’ve been known to crank out some pretty great work at 10 p.m., or to manage some very focus-heavy work before 7 a.m. EST. I very frequently get some good writing done on Sunday morning, or a rainy Saturday afternoon.

Sometimes the 9-to-5 model of work doesn’t work.

Even before the pandemic, strict adherence to a 9-to-5 schedule was on its way out of favor. The onset of COVID-19 made it nearly obsolete not because workers were taking more time for themselves, but because working from home allowed them to take less. Throughout the pandemic, I’ve been working for companies whose workforces span international time zones, sitting on multiple continents. Working a traditional office schedule just no longer seemed pertinent.

There are days when I wake up at 5 a.m. and am energized enough to get started. There are other days when I prioritize going to the gym in the morning, meaning I won’t be at my desk until 8:30 or so. I am a fairly morning-centric person and I like the time to work without disruption from team members with questions or tasks. Working a bit on the weekend allows me the same kind of freedom from slack messages and time sensitive emails. Focus is good for this writer.

I’m not here to brag about my weekend work ethic, I assure you.

I’m here to point out that if you are super-efficient at 8 p.m. after you’ve put the kids to bed and are beginning to settle your mind into tasks you can handle, then by all means work at 8 p.m. But if you choose to do that, don’t feel tethered to your desk from 9 a.m. the whole way through, because that is where burnout happens. Burnout doesn’t come from logging time on a Saturday or before the rooster crows. It happens from feeling the need to be present at your desk even at your lowest capacity. If there are times of day that you are not productive, it’s likely those are the times you should go for a walk, make a grocery run, meditate, read a chapter from that book on your nightstand. You get what I’m saying.

Shed the idea that opening your laptop at 10 p.m. is a sign of overwork. If you provide room for “me time” when it is best for you, then you can also provide “work time” when you are at your peak.

I get it, sometimes you simply must be present for the typical work day to answer emails, attend meetings, and all of those necessary elements of our jobs. But there are other times when you can totally work “outside the box,” and not only should you, but you should also then take advantage of offsetting your time.

Take some time to smell the roses.

Or the cherry blossoms.

Integration. It’s Where it’s At.

~ Susan Kelley ~ 2 Comments
Photo Credit: Klim Musalimov

Integration.

Integrated. Technical. Communication.

More exciting than you think. Unless you are already a technical writer, and in that case you were already excited by the idea. Integrated Technical Writing is what folks who decided to call themselves “Content Strategists” have been yearning for all these years.

Yes, I’ve been known to lament that pretty much anyone can slap that label on and prance about calling themselves a content strategist, and it’s true. But if you can find a company whose position is fair and realistic, then integrating content and communication really is that strategy. And it’s fantastic.

I am with a company now, writing proposals for contracts with the government, local, state, and federal, and we GET IT. We totally get it.

I have embraced technical, marketing, and promotional collateral in such a way that I legitimately just put a woman in a sweet yoga pose on the front page of a proposal for the Department of Information Technology for the state where I work. Yes, indeedy. And the tag line is: “She’s flexible, but our standards aren’t.” It’s amazing. And we are going to win a $30 million contract as a result.

We are going to win it because our technical expertise is incredible, yes, but also because we wrote a top-notch proposal that sings marketing through and through.

Integrated Technical Communications has the key language built in:

It integrates the technical componentry with the Communication that needs to be done to sell. And selling is everything. If you cannot learn to operate the machine, the machine is useless.

The US Department of Labor Statistics will tell you how valuable technical writers are. Now go show the labor pool how valuable your creativity is in doing it.

Sharpen your pencil. Your black or yellow or blue or green pencil. Your integrated pencil. Learn the 5 Ws of online help. Learn the tools of the trade and some design principles. But importantly, learn how they all fit together and have fun blending and blending.

Integration is not just for populations and it isn’t a battle, that’s for sure.

It’s logical and it works, and NOW you can be a content strategist.

#Ilooklikeatechwriter

~ Susan Kelley ~ 3 Comments

 

International-Womens-DayI know I just posted yesterday, but I have had a working draft of this piece in the hopper for a while; it just never quite grew its feet, as I like to say. And I can’t put a piece on the blog until it has its own feet. But today, being Women’s Day and all, the piece found its feet.

I recalled Isis Anchalee – remember her? She’s the bright, talented, strong, and yes, beautiful platform engineer from the Tech Startup OneLogin who asked her to participate in their ad campaign, which then sparked the #ilooklikeanengineer hashtag movement. It didn’t take long for the misogynists among us to determine that Isis was simply too pretty to be a “real” platform engineer. There’s just no way a smart brain could be housed in that attractive body.

The movement caught on fast, but it has faded just as quickly. It’s not enough to repeatedly have lists like Forbes top 30 women under 30, although that’s a great list. I say it’s not enough, because when a company like Microsoft reveals its diversity numbers to reflect the staggeringly awful truth: over 75% male and 60% white, with an only 29% female workforce globally, that’s alarming. And then comes the real hit: only 12.5% of Microsoft’s senior leadership in America is female. (Source: Forbes). This is happening even though we know that women are generally better at coding tasks than men.

But we also have to reveal the truth that, according to the US Department of Labor, only 12% of Computer Science graduates today are women.

Why? What about this environment is blocking women? Are we really just not cut out for this field?

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Not really. According to Gayle Laakman McDowell, author of Cracking the Interview, and a coder herself, it’s primarily that girls, when they are girls, are mostly sent the message that, “hey, this stuff is not for you.” Subtly or overtly, young women are, from a very young age, steered toward the humanities while young men are steered toward hard sciences. (We’ve known this for a long time, but I’m providing ethos here. I’m a writer, so to show you I have backup, I provide a subject-matter-expert, okay?)

So we tell girls and young women that they just don’t look like coders. They look like teachers, they look like nurses, they look like bank tellers or whatever, but they do not look like they fit in the cubicle-hive style pressure system that is software development or platform engineering. Is that it?

In other areas of their lives, we are telling them to be “totally natural,” or to be proud of what they look like. We tell them to embrace their body types and to live their lives with gusto. Kate Winslett recently signed a modeling deal with L’Oreal that has a “no Photoshop” clause, and we applaud this honesty and truth to herself.

But we haven’t told young girls that if their true beauty is in writing code, that they are totally entitled to that gorgeousness?

The percentage of women who work in tech companies remains consistent, at around 30%. So there ARE women who do this stuff, but it’s stagnant. It is failing to grow. Even though more women go to college, and an even greater number of women attain graduate degrees, the percentage stays flat. Now, what I find truly remarkable is that the percentage of women in technical or leadership roles – roles where they can actually influence the direction the company takes, is even lower. This difficulty may be the result of well-known sexism in the technology sector, or at least an unwillingness to combat it. The New York Times ran a great piece in April of 2014 called “Technology’s Man Problem,” documenting just this trend, and not much has changed in the last two years, but some things have.

It is not just a matter of moving more girls into a pipeline of studying STEM, because the high rate of attrition in tech moves them right on out the door just as quickly. Teaching women and girls that the tech field is appealing, lucrative, and open to them is not the quick fix we hoped it would be. Instead, fixing the culture that says, “you don’t look like an engineer, coder, tech writer…” THAT is the solution, or at least part of it. In the UK, a campaign called “This Girl Can” strives to connect young women through physical activity and inspiration, while here in the US, Target recently launched an ad campaign called Target Loves Every Body.

I believe we need a culture shift that defines, or redefines, the landscape to show that coders look like lots of things, and writers look like lots of things. Women in many careers have been trying to reshape their images from Hollywood to magazine covers, so why not in Silicon Valley, too?

Women helping women is the key to confidence and the key to success. If tech culture is going to change, everyone needs to change. The emotional and professional cost is simply too high not to. So on this, Women’s Day, the challenge is to reach out to a woman in your field – or a woman not yet in your field – and mentor or inspire, encourage or reassure her. That is how it gets done. Make a pledge to yourself that you will make room in tech for one more young woman, or that you will make additional room for one more established woman. It’s a jungle in here. Even women who have worked in here for years can get lost in the tangle of tasks, so have lunch this week, next, and next month too. There is networking to be done, and we could all use it. Today does not need to be the only Woman’s Day you have this year. Let the women in your life, especially in your tech life, know that they LOOK like accomplishers, achievers, builders, and leaders.

And then, if you are a woman, make sure you accomplish, achieve, build, and lead.

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