women in tech

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.

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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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