This episode of Greater Than Code was sponsored by Alt::BrightonRuby, a slightly odd, quasi-conference for strange times by Andy Croll. 

 There's no in-person BrightonRuby this year, but Andy is still trying to bring Ruby-ists and other software folks together. 

It will be recorded talks, a physical book, and a podcast. Delivered throughout June and July of 2020. Plus a donation to Shelter's Coronavirus appeal. 

 Tickets are on sale now for 29Euros plus tax (which works out to a very affordable about $36.50+tax in U.S. dollars!)  

 You can find out more information, see all the speakers and get your tickets at https://alt.brightonruby.com.  

 P.S.: A trusted source tells us that the book is a beautifully typeset copy of Why's Poignant Guide.

REIN: Hello and welcome to episode 185 of Greater Than Code. I'm Rein Henrichs, here with my co-host, Jamey Hampton.

JAMEY: Hi. And I'm here with our guest for today, Michelle Glauser. Michelle Glauser is the founder and CEO of Techtonica, a nonprofit that provides free tech training with living and childcare stipends, laptops and job placement at sponsor companies to women and non-binary adults with low incomes. And 92% of participants are people of color.

Michelle is also a software engineer, community developer at Twilio, the lead organizer for PyLadies San Francisco, the world's largest chapter of women who code in Python and also on the leadership team of Diversity Advocates.

In 2015, she spearheaded the #ILookLikeAnEngineer ad campaign. In 2016, LinkedIn chose her as one of the Top 10 Professionals 35 and Under for Software, and Upworthy has also featured her work. Thank you so much, Michelle, for coming on the show.

MICHELLE: Thanks for having me. I should also add that my pronouns are she and her.

JAMEY: Thank you. Very helpful. My pronouns are they and them, by the way.

MICHELLE: Great. Thank you. 

REIN: And mine are he and him.

MICHELLE: Awesome.

REIN: I was going to say that the only reason I wasn't in that LinkedIn list is because I was over 35. But then I just realized it wasn't [crosstalk].

[Laughter]

MICHELLE: Yeah, that was kind of a weird experience. They just randomly picked me.

JAMEY: I just wanted to start the show by asking you a question, which is, what is your power and how did you acquire it?

MICHELLE: Yes, I believe that my superpower is resilience and it's just come from facing a lot of little barriers over my life. And yes, I faced discouragement at times, but I figured out how to get past that and just keep going. And honestly, with Techtonica, the last few years, that's had to be my superpower. Otherwise, Techtonica would not even be around anymore because it's been one thing after another. But because I believe in the mission so much, that's kind of what kept me going.

REIN: And what is that?

JAMEY: Resilience is a powerful superpower. 

MICHELLE: I think so.

REIN: So I sort of study resilience as a professional hobby. 

MICHELLE: Really? 

REIN: Yeah.

MICHELLE: Ooh, I would love to hear so much more about that. 

REIN: There is a field of study called Resilience Engineering, and it originally comes from studies of safety and [inaudible] like nuclear and trains and hospitals and such things. And then it sort of has branched out.

MICHELLE: When I first started Technica and we were putting together a list of the characteristics we wanted to find in participants, as well as [inaudible] during the program, we had resilience on there and I did a lot of reading about resilience. And I just kept feeling like something was off about having that on the list or like trying to say that we were going to build that in people. And finally, I realized that the target audience we have is already very resilient. They've already faced so much and come so far. And I think that's kind of a thing that people look past when they look at our target audience.

REIN: There's a thing that might resonate with you from Resilience Engineering, which is that resilience is sort of defined as the capacity to adapt. And also the ability to -- this is actually a technique term, it's called graceful extensibility. It's sort of the opposite of brittleness. It's the ability to extend beyond some operational boundary without just completely falling apart.

MICHELLE: Very interesting. I wrote that down. I'm going to look that up later.

REIN: The other thing you learn is that these capacities come from people. They don't come from machines.

MICHELLE: Interesting. Thank you.

REIN: Even in systems that seem very technical, like software systems. That's sort of why we're here, to talk about the other parts, the socio side of socio-technical systems.

MICHELLE: Yes, definitely.

REIN: Can you tell me a bit more about this nonprofit that you do, what its mission is, how you decided that this is what you wanted to devote so much of your life to and so on?

MICHELLE: Yes. Basically, in 2012, I became a software engineer and that tripled my income. And I just couldn't believe how empowering that was. I was like, "This is what stable adult life is like? I couldn't believe it." And I kept feeling like, "How come no one told me about this?" I always thought computers were cool and we'd play around. I knew all these DOS things by heart. And no one knew I'm doing that. So I didn't know about the opportunities I might felt like I had luckily stumbled into it. And then as soon as I got into tech, I kept looking around and saying, "How come there is no diversity? How come I see diversity in my neighborhood every day, but I don't see diversity at work?" And I just realized that the same people we were missing in tech were the people being displaced by tech. I really wanted to figure out a way to provide that same opportunity to people who just couldn't get it because of all the barriers. So I finally said, "These are the things that are missing from all of the training programs I see right now. I think we need to start a new one." So I started Techtonica, and our mission is basically to empower local women and non-binary adults with low incomes by providing free tech training with living and childcare stipends, laptops and job placement that comes about because of the companies that sponsor the program. And by doing all of that, we also hope to make tech more diverse and more representative of local communities.

REIN: How many people are involved in this?

MICHELLE: What do you mean by involved? [Laughs] We have over 900 volunteers signed up. We have, I believe at this point, nine board members. We have six employees. And in the current cohort, we have 11 participants.

REIN: I tweeted a while ago something along the lines of how many of you sort of small nonprofits are just like a person doing their best? [Crosstalk] to have like a board and so on. But I think compared to some of these larger non-profits and charities, that the smaller ones are really the ones that are out there doing a lot of the work. They're really connecting more directly.

MICHELLE: Yeah. Honestly, for the first over two years, it was mostly me doing everything. And that's me trying to delegate to volunteers and follow up with volunteers and make sure they're actually doing what I delegated to them and just trying to pull every string I possibly could and learn all that I could. And for the first year, actually, because we're fiscally sponsored, which means there's an umbrella nonprofit organization that has their own board and lends their nonprofit status to Techtonica as kind of a project, we weren't required to have a board. So I was like, "Oh, we don't need a board." But after the first year, I was like, "We need a board." [Laughs] So I found a board and I'm so grateful to have a board. It is so amazing to have really talented people who care about the mission, who have lots of experience and connections, who can just get on a call with me or reply on Slack when I need extra help or opinions. For the first year, it was so much of a weight on my shoulders to have to make all of the hard decisions and now I have this whole board that can help me. It's amazing.

REIN: What is the board, like how did you pick the board? What do they do for you? You mentioned the help you make decisions and so on. Is that most of it?

MICHELLE: No. Actually, our board is very much a working board. We have calls twice a month and then we're on Slack all the time. And depending on the different needs we have, I'll assign projects to them. So there is one who helps with grant applications and one who helps with marketing and one who helps with curriculum and one who manages the mentorship program. I don't know if you've ever heard of diversity matrix? But it's this cool thing nonprofits do where they lay out all of the different needs and all of the demographics they'd like to represent. And then as they interview potential board members, they check off things to see where their holes are and who can fill in on those needs. So I have utilized that the whole time. And we specifically will say, "Looks like we need someone with legal or finance skills," and then call in someone who can do that. I basically just put a post out on social media, "I'm looking for board members. Fill out this form if you're interested." And then kind of look through the forms, saw who had what I needed and then interviewed probably, I don't remember, 20 people or something and then selected several of them. It's changed over the years, but it's a really great, strong board at this point. I love it.

JAMEY: I want to go back to something that you said when you were describing the nonprofit programs to us, which was something along the lines of, "These are the things that I think are missing from the programs that are out there." And my question is, what are those things?

MICHELLE: What are the things? I almost went into details and then I was like, "Oh, I think we're going to talk about that later." There were so many things that I tried to talk to existing programs about. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to reinvent the wheel. I was like, "If these programs exist, I can just give them feedback and then they'll fix it." Turns out [laughs] people don't just take feedback, especially when they're for profits, because they just are kind of there for the profit. So, I said it needs to be a nonprofit, first of all, because then it will be mission focused. And I had a warning from a friend like, "If you started a nonprofit, you will be begging for money the rest of your life." And I was like, "Oh, no, I don't know about that." But I just felt like that was really important that it be mission focused. And then after that, I said, "Okay, these programs say that they're breaking down barriers into tech, like coding bootcamps, but they cost $18,000 or more. Who has that much money saved up? I didn't have that much money saved up." And I was like, "We need to make it free somehow."

And then somehow you're expected to quit your job and still pay rent and still pay for child care. And I was like, "Even the programs that have scholarships are not providing that." I knew one scholarship recipient who was like, "I had to sleep on someone's couch for six months." And then they all expect you to have the most expensive laptop. So somehow you also have that. None of them felt very safe to parents or underrepresented people. I didn't see a lot of Codes of Conduct out there. And then finally, most bootcamp grads these days take six months to a year to find a job after graduating, which means they seriously haven't had so much money saved up in order to do this career transition. And I felt like an ideal program would place people into jobs, especially because I recognize that if you don't already have a network in the industry, it's so, so hard to get a foot in the door.

So yeah, basically I took those and said I'm starting something that will solve all of those. And the way we'll fund it is by finding companies to sponsor the participants. So that's what I did. That's what Techtonica is. 

JAMEY: That's amazing. I just want to say it. 

MICHELLE: Thanks. 

REIN: Especially in the current climate of tech bootcamps, some of which seem to be frauds, allegedly. 

MICHELLE: Yes. [Laughs] 

JAMEY: Or at least very for profit.

MICHELLE: Yeah, sometimes I see how much money those other ones get. I'm like, "Why are people giving them so much money?" I mean, obviously, people have invested in Techtonica and in Techtonica's participants. But it is very much more like pulling teeth than having an investor give you like a billion dollars.

REIN: Some of them are like selling bundled tranches of student debt to private equity firms. Like all this stuff that seems like how do I put it a moral hazard.

MICHELLE: I get the question all the time, "Why don't you do an income sharing agreement like X coding bootcamp?" It seems so obvious to me that that's not a great option because we already have a target audience that is underrepresented and facing barriers in multiple ways. Why would we put a new one on them after they're done learning? That doesn't make any sense to me. And especially because there's the socioeconomic factor here. Most class straddlers end up supporting their families once they are making white collar money. And so if you say, "Oh, now we're going to take 13% of your pay," or something, it doesn't seem fair to me. If tech companies really value diversity the way they say they do, then they should be the ones funding that.

REIN: Also, if you were a recruiter, you don't say, "I'm going to take 10%," of the person-who-is-hired's salary. You say you're going to give me the company that's going to give me an extra 10%.

MICHELLE: Right.

JAMEY: You said before that there are 11 people in your current cohort. But I'm wondering how many people have passed through your program and been placed into jobs?

MICHELLE: So far, we've successfully placed 100% with companies that sponsored the program. But it is such a struggle right now with Covid-19. We aren't sure we can be able to do it for this cohort. So that's a little disappointing and we're doing our best.

REIN: That's really impressive. I mean, I don't know what the average figure is, but I don't think it's over 50%.

MICHELLE: Yeah, I'm not sure. Most programs don't really include that. They just kind of have [crosstalk] where people can talk to each other and then wave them off into the world.

REIN: Yeah. You'd think if it was a really high number, it would be something they would want to brag about. So it's weird that they don't.

MICHELLE: Yeah. And one thing I really am grateful to have seen is that most of the graduates we placed with companies are still there. Companies get to the end of the six months of placement they agreed to and they say, "This is great. We want to keep you on." And they do. So it's been really great to see people succeed. And most people's incomes have increased two to five times. So, they are doing really well. And I'm so happy to see that.

REIN: I also think the six months is really nice because it gives that person a chance to sort of become acclimatized to sort of get their feet under them and figure out what it's like to work there and to start being able to demonstrate what they're capable of. It's really hard, especially in these complex fields like engineering, where there's so much that you have to figure out to be able to get your job done. If it was like one month, then how do you know whether what they will be like in the long run.

MICHELLE: True. One other thing that I think sets them up for success is that we have the first five months cover full-stack JavaScript, data structures and algorithms, a few other kind of elective topics and then they build the final project based on whatever they are most interested in. And then for the last month, we match them up with the companies that will be hiring. So they know which teams they'll be joining and they can start preparing for whatever that team needs. So if the team is like, "We need you to do Python or Java," then they spend that time learning that. In that way, they don't join without any idea of the new tech stack that they'll be working in. And that's something a lot of our sponsor companies like too.

JAMEY: Yeah, that's great. It could b really intimidating. Even as someone who's experienced in the field, it's really intimidating to walk into a job with a stack that you're not used to.

MICHELLE: Totally. We try to give them lots of experience looking at other people's code, too, because that's something they're going to have to do. Interestingly, we decided not to have it be kind of classroom passive lecture learning because we felt like that's not what happens in the real world. No one is going to say, "Okay, here is your new project. We need it at this time. And now let me give you a lecture on React." No one's going to do that. Instead, we say, "Here's the project." We have an outline for them. It's all open source, by the way. It's on GitHub. Anyone can use it if they would like to. And then they have to start doing the research and figuring that out. And of course, people kind of hate that at first. They're like, "Why won't you just give it to me? Just feed me." But they're not going to learn that way. You want them to be able to stand on their own two feet as quickly as possible.

REIN: So you're building an education system. How much have you focused personally on becoming an educator, on learning all of those skills, how to design curriculums and things like that? That's a thing that people make a whole lifelong career out of. How did his startup level up so quickly that they could do these things effectively?

MICHELLE: One of our very first volunteers used to do Teach for America, and he had been an engineer for several years. And he was like, "I will help with whatever you need." And I said, "Tell me how to do this."

REIN: That was convenient. 

MICHELLE: Yes, very convenient. So he helped us come up with a template for our topic outlines where we break down the objectives. We talked a little bit about the reason for learning those objectives. We have like the project that they work on. We have extra materials they can look at. And then like commonly asked questions and stuff like that. So we had this template. And then just started expanding from there or copying that and filling in topics. And we actually use something still very similar to that. It's only been changed a few times since then. Then he also helped me map out all of these things that we thought they should learn. And that has expanded too as we get feedback from the participants and the companies and their mentors and everything. But yeah, a lot of it has stayed the same.

Honestly, I'm a Python engineer. And so I was like, "Python is so great for beginners. We should do Python." But in the end, after talking to a lot of people, we decided to go with full-stack JavaScript because I felt like if they could learn or use the same language in the frontend and the backend, they could build a strong foundation before they jump off to other tech stacks. And I think that was actually a pretty good decision in hindsight, because we've seen people do really well even as they learn new tech stacks after those six months.

REIN: It also seems pragmatic in the sense that there are a lot of jobs out there for those people.

MICHELLE: Yes. Yes, there are. Very widespread tech stack, for sure. One thing I love to talk about also with regards to Techtonica is the socioeconomic factors. I think in tech, we talk a lot about race and gender within the diversity in tech conversation, but we don't go beyond that very often, it feels like. And maybe Americans or just people in general are kind of uncomfortable talking about class. And there are barriers that come into play when people are what I call class straddlers. When you grew up as a blue collar situation and now you live a white collar life. And you don't really understand how to fit into this new thing.

One book I like to recommend people is Limbo by Alfred Lubrano. He talked to a lot of class straddlers and kind of put together all of the patterns that show up with class straddlers. So I like to talk to participants of Techtonica about that and then to the companies that will be sponsoring them as well so that they kind of can be prepared if they see things like that come up. They hopefully will be like, "Oh, yeah, this is the thing we learned about Techtonica. Let's just have some open communication and figure out a solution here." So it's interesting that I've had graduates of Techtonica come back during our weekly check-in calls and say, "That exact situation you told me about happened to me today." I was at lunch. People started talking about summer camp. And I was like, "I never went to summer yet. I have no idea how to contribute to this conversation." So, I just would like more people to recognize that tech is a very posh world and there are a lot of people who don't know how to fit into that world. And it's just good to consider some of those things.

JAMEY: I would just love to hear a couple more examples of that. Like you were talking and I was wondering about examples and then you said about summer camp, which is interesting. But if there's a couple more quick ones that you can kind of throw out, I would love to hear that.

MICHELLE: Yes. One that I like to tell people is that when I was first invited to a tech company holiday party, they said, "This is cocktail dress." I have no idea what that means. So I was Googling around and I was really nervous that I was going to show up in something that no one thought was cocktail dress. Just like that anxiety of not being sure and not even feeling like you can ask anyone else because they'd be like, "Well, that's obvious to me," or something. Another thing is I've talked to people who had to do a lot of code switching, like they were in the middle of talking about planning a fancy team activity or something. And then their mom called and couldn't pay rent that month and needed some help. So, there was just this huge contrast between their everyday life and talking to their parents.

Often parents don't understand what their class straddler children do for a living. They'll know that it's something to do with computers, for example. But as far as what that looks like on a day to day basis, they don't really understand that. So there can be this expectation that you are the one that provides all the checks to families at weddings and graduations. But then no one really understands. And there may even be a little bit of conflict and people feeling angry at you for leaving behind your family and your background.

ARTY: I'm trying to think of just the similarities of things I've experienced in my own life, with just disconnects with talking to my parents, say, living in tech world and my parents don't necessarily understand what it is I do. We have lots of disconnected conversations and I try and find other ways to explain things, to connect and things like that. But at the end of the day, there's this dynamic of multiple worlds, multiple realities that we end up sort of living in with our social networks.

There's certainly these things that we can look at as class structure things, but I don't know. I kind of like looking at it as one big network. And the connections that we have into creating this grounding of our life of what is our center of gravity through those connections that we have. And then when other folks that we're connected to in that jumping into another network, readjusting their ground and you don't talk for a while, you come back together and say, "Wow, you're like on another planet. Is there anything we can connect over anymore?" It's like, "I had breakfast this morning." "You had breakfast this morning too? All right!" 

[Laughter]

ARTY: With my family, one of the things that we spend a lot of time doing is trying to find things that we can still connect about, especially with regards to the political explosion craziness, create some interesting sort of tensions in the world right now. And question for you, just with your experience with trying to help people with getting into jobs and those kinds of things. You mentioned that a company would say they care about diversity or care about something. And it becomes kind of like an identity statement of something that you're supposed to care about. So we'll put that on the list of things that we care about. But the reality is not necessarily matching up to that. And I'm wondering what you see as some of the biggest reasons for the disconnects there between people going, "We are about these things and we really believe in it," versus the actuality of the identity front and the reality kind of coming into more alignment. What do you see as the main reasons why we get kind of out of touch with it?

MICHELLE: I think people naturally tend to kind of group together and build communities with people who are similar to themselves. So they often will just not even see the issues that other groups are dealing with. And then as they build companies, it's hard for them to recognize, "Oh, we should probably reach out to some other people and maybe they don't even know anyone who has a different type of [inaudible]. So when they do recognize that they need people with different perspectives on their teams, they don't even know who to talk to and they don't know how to reach out. Often, especially with the smaller companies, they'll say, "Oh, we're not quite ready for that yet. We need some more time or some more funding in order to support diversity programs." But then what they don't recognize is if they don't invest in it early on, they basically will never catch up. The stats show they're never going to [inaudible] to turn that around. So you have to do that from the beginning. And at that point, I know it's so hard. You are just trying to even survive. You're trying to find anyone who will invest in you and make sure that this company can do things. But you just have to think about that, too. It's a thing a lot of people are not thinking about and need to, but you can't force anyone. 

And honestly, for Techtonica, when we have talked to companies about sponsoring, we have never yet talked anyone into understanding why Techtonica should exist. It's only the companies where people already understand why this is a need to have sponsors and we've found this just not even worth our time to continue talking to people who are like, "Why would you do this? Why? Why is this a need? Why should we even think about supporting this?" Because they just will never be convince and we don't have time to be their convincers, unfortunately. I wish that we had had more success with that. And that like diversity in tech events, for example, we are not very good at getting the high up decision makers into the room. It's often the people who already care about it. And I've thought so much about how do we get them here? How do we get them to care? How do we make sure they're putting their money where their mouth is and educating themselves, not expecting everyone else around them to educate them? It's a big question and I don't know the answer too. 

Within the context of this pandemic world that we live in right now, I think it's more apparent than ever that there are income disparity issues in areas that have a lot of tech jobs because all of the tech workers are huddled up in their homes and ordering all of these things. And everyone else who doesn't have those cushy jobs has to be the people doing the delivering and putting themselves at risk every day. I really have struggled with that. On the one hand, I want to support people who have to be out there and working. But on the other hand, I don't want to be the one putting them at risk because I need something from the store. So I struggle a lot with that. And I feel like this is kind of the turning point where something is going to have to give and people are going to have to recognize that we have some big class issues that need work. I'm not sure what that's going to look like, but I hope people are thinking about that and that the future work world will kind of deal with some of those issues.

REIN: There have always been health care disparities based on race and class. What's happening now is that these are being exacerbated to the point where it's much harder to not see them be able to ignore them. To put it bluntly, poor people have always died more than rich people. 

MICHELLE: And with class so tied to race in America. 

REIN: Yeah. And these things all compounded, too. Yes. But what we're seeing now is that certain people are ignoring it. And they can't do it in a way that goes unnoticed anymore. And I think that's important. These people who are protesting to open hair salons because they want to get their hair cut because they don't care if it kills some people that work there. That's not something we can ignore anymore. That's not something they can do in a way that doesn't affect very visibly and publicly affect people.

JAMEY: I totally agree with you. But I also do think that for some people, it's been eye opening because there's always been income disparity, obviously. But I think more people are suddenly feeling it in realer ways. I've been kind of experiencing this because obviously I work in tech and I have lived that cushy life or whatever, but I'm currently out of work and I've been like job hunting. It's been very tough during the pandemic. And my husband works at a machine shop. And so, he's an essential worker and going out. And it's been this kind of very crystallized realization, I guess, of what is being juggled because like on the one hand, if he doesn't go to work, then we don't have any income. So it's kind of like a relief that he didn't get furloughed. But on the other hand, now he's going out into the scary world and trying to provide for our family. And I'm stuck at home, trying to find work unsuccessfully. And I'm kind of experiencing some of these things, firsthand, that I hadn't really before. This is the kind of thing that I tried to think about. We do the show and we talk about things like this, but I am sure that there are some other people like me who hadn't really thought about it before, but are now in a situation like this where they have to. And I'm wondering how that's going to affect the discourse around it.

MICHELLE: That's really hard, Jamey.

JAMEY: I'm still very lucky, overall. I'm so much more fortunate than so many people. So it's been kind of interesting, kind of straddling that line. I'm very fortunate I can call up in my house, which I'm probably not going to lose in a way that other people can't. But I am still in a situation that's uncomfortable for me compared to what my life was like a year ago. And so, it's been interesting to navigate.

REIN: A very smart person said to me, perspective is healthy, but it doesn't negate the difficulty of our own experiences.

MICHELLE: There's something powerful about having experienced that lack of stability yourself, definitely. One thing we've been seeing a lot or like hearing from a lot of potential sponsor companies is that they just are being very conservative with their hiring and spending right now. And they'll say, "We just can't afford to invest in juniors. We need seniors." And something I've been saying for years is that if we continue to have this culture where tech companies just poach senior talent from each other, I think that ends up resulting in the cost of living in that area going up and up and up and the cost of housing and everything, because people have to pay more and more to get those senior engineers. And it needs to be everyone's job to invest in juniors, otherwise there won't be seniors in a few years.

ARTY: [Inaudible]. 

MICHELLE: [Laughs] [Crosstalk] become seniors suddenly and there's always that catch-22 of, "We need you to have a year or two of experience." But no one will give you that year or two of experience to start with. And so now, in light of the pandemic, with people being even more focused on seniors than before, I just worry a lot that it's going to be a really hard time economically for people who are trying to get into tech, even more so than before or at least a few years. I'm not sure how to help that, besides continuing to talk to companies to see if they would be willing to invest in one of our participants. But I worry a lot about that. Is this really a result in the tech world being better or is it a reason to just go right back to where we were?

JAMEY: I share that fear. I've been interviewing for senior positions and had several fall through because like, "Oh, well, actually we have to delay because we don't have the budget." And every time something like that happens, it's like a blow to me. But it also makes me think like, "If I am struggling this much, oh my goodness, how much must more junior people be struggling?" I feel so bad about it.

MICHELLE: We had one of our graduates recently get an offer and then it was rescinded 12 hours later. So, it's a really tough world. And I feel like people already for the last several years where there was a higher demand for junior engineers have struggled with that defeat of facing so many rejections. And now, they're going to have to face double or triple that before they find something. And I'm sure what will end up happening is a lot of people will give up on that dream and just have to go back to what they were doing before. Makes me feel really sad and frustrated.

ARTY: And this is one of those things where I think it's important for just perspective wise of tech folks and stuff to remember of just with a turnover of just all the unemployment and things that is happening. The folks in general that have tech jobs already and stuff are okay, and then we've got just more and more people sliding off the edge. And for the people that are in an okay place, for anything to get better, those people that are in a good place can't recoil and just focus on their own selves. And that if everybody does that, we just keep sliding off the rails. And the only way that those junior folks get skills and things is largely through mentorship. I think about the things I tried to do on my own versus having a good mentor, makes all the difference in your software career. And now that we're in this kind of online world and needing to figure out how to spread that knowledge, I think coming up with a way to build sort of a crowdsourced apprenticeship based mentorship infrastructure in the industry. And the tech folks, more so taking responsibility for bringing up the next generation, as opposed to it being an expectation that these people will go and get lots of loans and go to school. I know these expectations and stuff have been the way they've been for a long time. But these new constraints, I really think we need to start redesigning, rethinking the whole system under these new constraints on how we're going to move forward and be okay as a society. If we all just bury our heads in the sand and go, "Well, I'm okay in my cushy little house for now," is a lot of trouble if we all do that.

And so those of us that are fortunate enough, to be okay enough to be able to have the mental capacity, to be able to think about helping out, we got to stick together or figure out how to do it together. And on one hand, there's so much stuff happening right now that's just tragic. But at the same time, it's a catalyst. It's an opportunity. It's changed the game that open up opportunity for new markets, new models and things. And in times of crisis, there's also these huge periods of innovation that happen. And so, I'm trying to stay on that side of hope and creation and building. And what are the things that we can do?

I worked in tech recruiting for a number of years and doing consulting and continuous delivery and running teams and things. We had a lot of folks that were like, "Oh, well, we only want senior engineers," and everybody wants senior engineers. You got all this demand for senior engineers. Then I'd run into these really great, great, talented folks that didn't necessarily have the right skills on paper or whatever. They had a couple of years experience, maybe just struggling to get a job. And so essentially, you've got like a supply demand matching problem. But I got so frustrated because all these really awesome people, I wasn't able to help with these senior jobs.

And so, I started meeting people at coffee shops and coaching people. And I'm like, "We can solve this problem." And so I started teaching decision making skills and thinking skills and just the thinking tools about how you go about breaking down and approaching the work and being able to reason about design problems and things like that. And what I found is when these more junior folks could go have a really good, intellectual, thoughtful discussion about the design of the system and the implications of those things and actually be able to think through and redesign about tradeoffs, it come across as a more senior person, all of a sudden. And it's kind of funny that way.

I started basically coaching people into jobs and getting involved in coming up with ways to help with education and filling those gaps to teach and mentor. I mean, I think those kind of things, we need to figure out ways to break into some kind of open support system for education in tech and bringing people in and supporting ourselves. I think at the end of the day, we need to switch to a mindset of self organizing, self supporting, and figuring out how we're going to all help one another as a community and start rebuilding our social support paradigms of how we're going to thrive as a community, as a society, as humanity.

I'm hoping this situation is enough of a catalyst that wakes people up to see that we have to start taking care of ourselves and then nobody's coming to save us. And we got to step up and save ourselves.

MICHELLE: So the company that was hosting Techtonica sent us all home with about an hour warning on March 4, I think it was. So we immediately had to switch to being remote and learned a lot about that very quickly. But one thing that I'm seeing is so many people feel like because they do have that privilege of having continued work and they're just now at home, they're almost seeing this as kind of a vacation or like a chance to build up some skills on things like baking bread or whatever. I love to bake, so I understand that. But I feel like I haven't had the chance to really process everything that's happening because I immediately went into emergency survival mode. How do we support our participants through this, now that they don't have lunch every day at the company that was hosting us? We need to raise some money so they can buy some lunch. And how do we make sure that they are going to continue in the program, even though everything is scary and hard right now and a lot of their families are affected by the things going on. And then, of course, with sponsors pulling out because they're doing layoffs and hiring freezes. How do we find the placements we need? We've had to switch three people's full time roles to just talking to potential sponsors. And still, we've barely put a dent in the need.

So, it's this weird contrast for me of seeing some people are like, "Oh, this is kind of a switch off of our every day and fun in some ways." And me being like, I haven't had the time to think about this, and I wish I could help more people, but instead I just have to make sure that, first of all, we can place all of our participants and that secondly, Techtonica can even continue so that our employees still have jobs. And then thirdly, that we can continue providing our services.

So at this point, we have canceled the second cohort for this year. It was going to start in July and now we're hoping to start one in January. But unless we get more sponsors for this current cohort, it's going to be really tough, which is frustrating after so many years of jumping over every single barrier and then feeling like this huge one came and we were setup for success for several months. But we don't know how long this is going to go on. And it's really tricky. We'll see. I don't know. Some people are thinking about it and maybe some aren't so much.

REIN: Yeah. The thing about adaptive capacity to call back to the beginning of the show is that it's not infinite. The other thing about adaptive capacity is that this was not just our own, it's also what we can share with each other. So I think that's where mutual aid comes in. And I think that we've been seeing a lot of that. I imagine that your nonprofit has benefited from some forms. They've engaged in and has benefited from some forms of mutual aid at the same time.

MICHELLE: We've seen so many people who want to help, and I'm so grateful for that. But often the help that they want to offer isn't quite the thing that is really going to help Techtonica get past this. I just worry so much about graduating our current cohort, only being able to place a few of them and then just turning them out into this scary world that's on fire when they've already dealt with so much lack of stability in their lives. And we're hopeful that this would get them to a better place economically. If it doesn't, then what? We are planning to provide some extra programming to anyone who is not currently working from this cohort and past cohorts, as we'll be doing some additional project work and pairing and interview practice and other things just to try and give people a little boost to [inaudible] everything. But it might be a very long time before we see as many people working as we've seen in the past, unfortunately.

REIN: It's interesting because the closest sort of analogy in American history might be the 1920's, which came on the heels of both a pandemic and also a world war. So, we haven't had World War III yet and hopefully we won't. But that's about as close as you can get. What happened then was an economic resurgence, the highest per capita wealth of any country, although obviously that was not equally distributed. But you also saw the growth of the class and racial consciousness. So, for example, you have the New Negro Movement that started in the late like 1917 or 1918, that focused on political and social activism. You had the Harlem Renaissance with a bunch of writers [inaudible] and not just that they were publishing their work, but also their work was being patronized and shared by a bunch of white Americans. And so, I think that there's a potential for something like this to happen. But the cost, the cost is so profound.

MICHELLE: I've been looking at this history blog that's been posting pictures of people who are lost to that pandemic between 1918 and 1920. And it's sobering to see all of those faces and to recognize that families were affected by that. And those have long reaching effects. Like several of the ones I was looking at were like newlyweds who is like maybe they were expecting, and one of them died before the baby was even born. I just can't even imagine what a struggle that must have been for those families long term. And now here we are, a hundred years later, dealing with the same thing. Are we learning the lessons they would have wanted us to learn? I don't know. I hope so.

REIN: Well, this has been a fun episode that has made everyone feel better. Please tune in next -- 

[Laughter]

MICHELLE: Maybe we can talk about some of the positive stories that have come from people doing Techtonica to end on a higher note? 

JAMEY: I would love to hear about those stories.

MICHELLE: Yeah. A lot of Techtonica's graduates are doing really well now. The first class, and most of them are still with the companies we originally placed them with, and it's now been almost two years. So, they're making good money. They're supporting their families. We had one person who had grown up in the Tenderloin in San Francisco, which is a poverty ridden area, and she found out about Techtonica because of a coding workshop we did at the Tenderloin Tech Lab with the St. Anthony's Foundation. And she came in. Her excitement was so contagious. She was like, "This is like a secret language no one ever told me about. I wish I had known. This is so cool and I can't believe it." So she applied for the full time program and did really well. We loved having her in the program. And she said that it was because of Techtonica that she felt like she could be more open with her life, with her family because she was still in the closet originally and she ended up coming out to them. She came out to the whole world and is living a more authentic life. And now, she's in this cushy job making five times as much as she was. And she says, "I feel like Techtonica believed in me more than I believed in myself and helped me get even farther than I thought I could have." She was just so coo. I love catching up with her.

We have another graduate who was dealing with domestic abuse issues, and she had a couple of kids and was trying to support them during the program. And we just tried to do whatever we could to get her the support she needed. But now she has been working in a very nice tech job for the last year and is away from the domestic fears, is able to pay rent and support her kids. And she's doing really well. It's so great to see that the thing I wanted so much right after I became a software engineer, to share that with other people is now a reality. It may not seem like much to other people, but it was the thing I wanted to do and now I get to do it. It's hard not to be motivated when I see that there are so many people who can benefit from all that we're doing.

JAMEY: That's really powerful. I like what you said about this being what you wanted to do and doing it because it's such a mutually beneficial thing. You knew what you wanted to do and you made it happen. And now these people in your program are knowing what they want to do and making it happen too. I think that's beautiful.

MICHELLE: Thanks, Jamey.

JAMEY: Should we maybe think about reflections?

MICHELLE: Sure. 

REIN: I was thinking a lot about what we've been talking about, about what's going to happen after the pandemic, after people go back to work. But will things be the same? And I think no, obviously they won't be the same, but how will they be different? I think there's an opportunity here for a huge resurgence in class and racial consciousness. But I also don't think that just appears out of nowhere. I think it starts from mutual aid. I think it starts from communities helping themselves and helping each other. I think it starts locally. And so, I think that's where we ought to be focusing.

MICHELLE: I was really struck by hearing a little bit more from you about how the world has this opportunity to change and we hope it will get there. I feel like as soon as I have a little more breathing room after we graduate and help this current cohort, I hope I can have some greater effect on the direction the world decides to go post pandemic. I have to do a lot more thinking about that.

JAMEY: I really appreciated the discussion we had near the beginning when we're first talking about kind of the things that Techtonica provides, because I think that they are things that might not have occurred to people in tech at all that are taken for granted, like the idea that you need a laptop. A lot of people who kind of come from more tech backgrounds, I guess. I'm not sure if that's the best way to it. It's just taken for granted. You have a machine to work on. It's really great that you're providing this for people. But I think it's also really important to talk very openly about it so that more people are kind of aware of what the barriers are for others, which is something I've been thinking about a lot in general recently. And I was also struck by the story you briefly told about someone who slept on someone's couch for six months while they're in a bootcamp. Of course, that makes sense when you think about it through all the lenses that you were talking about it through, like having to quit your job and focus on this and all that. But I just suspect that that kind of story would come as a shock for some people that are living in this kind of tech bubble that you're talking about. And so, I think that it's really important to have those kind of discussions on this show, but also in daily life. The more we talk about that, the more people are aware and they can talk about it. And that's how awareness gets spread. So I think that that was really important and powerful. And it was something that I kind of thought of before, others that hadn't quite occurred to me in that way. But I think my reflection about it is how important it is to say those things again to more people, I guess. 

REIN: I just want to mention that when I was talking about mutual aid, what I had in my mind, Michelle, was the stuff that your community is doing. So I think we can all learn a lot from the way you've approached this and I think it's a great example.

MICHELLE: One thing I felt was really important was reaching the people who didn't even know about the opportunities within tech. There's this whole attitude within some of the more poverty ridden areas in the Bay Area, for example, where people say, "Tech is taking over." And I talked to this woman who said, "We don't even know what tech is. It's this big word on the wall and no one will hire us unless we're security guards. And then it's through contracting and we don't get benefits and we have to work too. We never see our children." And that really struck me that they're surrounded by this huge industry and don't even know what it is. We started out offering our coding workshops with different nonprofits and the fliers said: Learn How to Code. And people were like, "What's coding?" [laughs] So we changed the fliers to say, "Learn how to build a website." And then they came in, learn some JavaScript. And we said, "This is called coding. You can be a software engineer. It's stable and lucrative and we'd love to help you get there. Here's how you can." So that is one lesson we really had to learn, that you have to start where people are to get them that opportunity.

And then another thing I wanted to mention is just because I think a lot about how to help and empower people doesn't mean that I haven't made a lot of big mistakes. And it hasn't always been easy to learn the lessons from those mistakes and apologize and figure out how to move on in a better way. But it's worth it. And so, for the leaders who were wondering, how do we do better? You just have to be humble about it. Apologize when you make mistakes and try to figure out what the lesson to be learned is and really show people that you care and are trying to do better with each new lesson you learn because you're going to make lots of mistakes.

ARTY: There's this problem that you saw about diversity and socioeconomic diversity in tech that you got really passionate about. And then went, "What can I do to make a difference? What can I do with the power within me to go and make a difference for this problem I really care about?" And you took initiative to go and set a thing up to make a thing happen that genuinely made a difference in real people's lives. I think that right there, that right there, like looking at 'what can I do as an individual to have an effect' is really important because it's easy to look at all these things going on, all of these big problems, these big things and go, "Well, there's nothing I can do, so I'll just make some bread." And there's nothing fundamentally wrong with spending time nurturing [inaudible] loves things and enjoying our life. There's nothing wrong with that.

But at the same time, we're in this mode where there's a lot of people out there that need a helping hand to be okay right now. That in this transition of the world where everyone's hiring senior developers and the education system is going online. All of these sorts of things are shifting. Those people that didn't have that extra bandwidth capacity to try and make a difference, to be willing to put effort and time in those sort of things. Find one another, find our synergies together. There's a lot of magic that can happen of just the synergy of people wanting to help, caring, and changing those things.

So I'm inspired by your initiative to go and take something you're passionate about and really do something that made a difference. And I'm hoping more people see their own power to be able to do similar sort of things and that we all really need to kind of be in a mode of being able to chip out to the extent that we can to be able to shift the world into a positive direction as opposed to kind of downward spiral mode. And like having that energy, that heart to go after and make those things happen, it's exactly the right kind of attitude, mindset. I appreciate you just making some magic happen in the world. And it's a beautiful thing.

MICHELLE: I really believe that people can make a difference. If anyone ever wants a pep talk, let me know and I will give you a pep talk.