NOEL: Hello and welcome to the Tech Done Right Podcast, a podcast about building better software, careers, companies and communities, sponsored by Table XI. I'm Noel Rappin. If you like the podcast and would like to encourage us to continue, please follow us on Twitter at @Tech_Done_Right and leave a review on iTunes. iTunes Reviews really do help new listeners find our show. Thanks. Today at Tech Done Right, we're talking about technical conferences, speaking, diversity and inclusion and CallbackWomen. We have two guests. First, we have Carina Zona. Carina, would you like to introduce yourself? CARINA: Hi. I'm a longtime developer. I'm also an advocate within the tech community and my side gig is being a certified sex educator. I'm also the founder of CallbackWomen, with a mission to radically increase gender diversity at the podium of professional programmer's conferences and that thing, I want to talk about it today, if we can. NOEL: Sure. We also have Mark Yoon. Mark, could you introduce yourself? MARK: Hi. I'm a developer and the Director of Talent at Table XI. I'm an occasional conference speaker and I'm very interested in diversity and inclusion in the tech industry. NOEL: Carina, you want to talk about CallbackWomen, which is your organization? You want to tell us what it is and how it came to be? CARINA: Yeah. As I mentioned, there's a very specific mission and it was narrowed down in part because I believe there are a number of things that really benefit speakers and if you're going to be doing a lot of free labor as a speaker, which you are, the pay back at minimum should be, that for instance you've got a really good experience of hallway track, that is, networking, that you're able to focus on exactly what's relevant to your career, rather than something that is generally tech. That's where the mission got narrowed down to the podium of professional programmer's conferences so that it's in-person, at conferences that are very specifically related to our niche in the industry. NOEL: How do we find CallbackWomen and what is it actually do? CARINA: The main way to find CallbackWomen is on Twitter. It is @CallbackWomen. There's also a website, which has more background information and links to a lot of resources and that's CallbackWomen.com. The project started over four years ago. It was launched in February of 2013 but really had its genesis the year prior. I was interested in becoming a conference speaker and then took that first step, got an abstract accepted and there were a number of women in the community who basically stepped up and said, "I will help you do this. I have done this. I know how to do it well and I will help you get through this first experience successfully," and that was I think really important because having someone to even just validate that you're going to be fine at this and also point me at specific conferences and say, "This is one that's going to be really relevant for you, where what you have to say is going to be something that they'll value and want to hear," especially since I do pretty off-beat topics. I don't show a lot of code demos. I'm much more bigger picture than that. NOEL: So the people helping you at the stage where you were trying to get to the conference podium in the first place, then also helping you once you've been selected, or one more than the other? CARINA: Originally, it started on the DevChix mailing list that has hundreds, if not thousands of members and there were people just periodically putting out, "Hey, this conference has an open CFP [Call For Proposals] or that conference has an open CFP." Often it was coming from someone who was themselves an organizer. It was very few of those announcements but when you did see them, it was easy to see OK, if this organizer is a woman who's saying, "I really want to hear from you as a generic whole you," that it made it easier to take that step of, "I'll try putting in a proposal. Let see how that goes." Part of where I came from is that Sarah Mei was one of the people putting out one of those emails and she said, "As someone who's been on the program committee, as someone who knows the organizers well, I'm telling all of you, we really want to hear from you and if someone here gets selected, I will work with you to make sure that all that syncs up well, that you have a good time, that they hear something valuable from you." That made it a lot easier. Several of us did apply because of Sarah's advocacy. Two of us were accepted directly because of her helping us. She wasn't helping on the conference side but once you were selected, she was answering every question we had, which we had many and generally being a confidence builder. Then Sandi Metz, is also a very accomplished speaker. Even then, she was, I believe doing quite a few keynotes and was about to publish her book, POODR [Practical Object Oriented Development in Ruby] and she, likewise stepped up not just to the few of us who had applied to GoGaRuCo, which was where my first talk was. But in general, I want to see more women at the podium, I'm tired of being the only woman. Sarah was as well. Oftentimes, it's not just the only woman at the podium but one of less than 10 women in the audience. Their assistance was, in some ways you could argue, selfish. It was, "I want more people to be there. I want more women to be there. I will do what helps to make that an audience that's more relatable to me." NOEL: Do you remember what kind of questions you had as a first time speaker that you were trying to get answered, that were particularly valuable? CARINA: My questions were so naive because I had never even been to a tech conference. In fact, I learned a lot of stuff on Day 1 of the conference and thankfully, my talk was on Day 2. But most of my questions, I think were more logistical because I didn't know yet to ask questions about the culture of the conference. Because I didn't know many of the speakers on the roster, I didn't know enough to actually be all that intimidated by them, until I saw them on stage and went, "Wow, they are at a whole other level than what I just prepared for," and I went back that night and spent the whole night just rewriting my talk, to try to step up at least closer to their level because I was just learning sort of seat of my pants. But there were a number of us who had had talks accepted to other places who were helping each other through that summer. I'd been accepted in the spring and the talk was in, I think September. People like Kerri Miller and Nell Shamrell, all three of us were developing our talks at the same time for different conferences so we were getting together to help each other out and get feedback on draft talks and learning from our own feedback. "Oh, that's something to think about." A lot of our questions were less directed at Sandi and Sarah, as they were at discovering what kind of questions we would have at all. MARK: Carina, I think you've said something really important there, which is that there was an invitation and I've always had a commitment to help people who ask for it and Noel did the same for me. But I think if we're trying to get more representation at the podium from folks who are under-represented, they may actually need that actual invitation, "We want to hear your voice. You're important. Please consider speaking," not just, "If you're speaking, we can help you with that." CARINA: Both are really valuable and this applies not just to new speakers but even to very experienced ones. I get a lot of invitation at this point to speak but I also periodically get invitations to, "We would really love to see a proposal from you," and sometimes that's meant to be me specifically and sometimes that's, "We have a whole list of people that we're reaching out to because it would be really exciting if we got some subset of those people to put in proposals." All those types of outreach, each of them is a separate thing that's contributing value to bring people into the pool, both inexperienced speakers and experienced speakers. There's a big difference between knowing, "Potentially, I'd be interested in speaking at a conference," and, "I know definitely I would be very welcome and they would be excited to have me and I would be excited to be there." That's something I'm going to prioritize when I'm choosing out of hundreds of conferences that theoretically I could propose to. I'm honing that down to a handful all year and that kind of outreach is certainly something that makes me take it much more seriously and look closer. NOEL: One thing that I often hear from people who are considering being speakers if they're relatively new to the profession is that they don't feel like they're expert enough. They feel like they need to be the world's leading expert in something in order to give a talk on it. That's really not the case. One thing I say back is a conference made up just of people who thought they were the world's leading expert in a topic would be horrible. I really like to encourage people to think about the idea that their own experiences lead them to think about tools or practices in a different way from anybody else and that they have something to offer, even their own experiences on tools or processes that other people have used or that other people may have used more, those experiences can still lead to interesting talks. You may still have an interesting experience to share about how you came to learn something or how you came to use something or how you came to decide something or other, or some perspective on an issue that is uniquely yours. Those are the kinds of things you would want to invite people who are newer to the community, people who you don't normally see on the podium, to get those kinds of perspectives. What did you do in the wake of this that led you to create CallbackWomen? What does CallbackWomen itself do? CARINA: After having given that first talk, I was very fortunate that it went well because I'm really confident that if it hadn't, I never would have done this again, that I would have been scared off in ever trying but it went really well. I was extra fortunate that out of sheer coincidence in something else unrelated to my talk at all, Avdi Grimm just name dropped my talk in a blog post and said, "If this is what diversity brings to conferences, then bring it on." He wasn't intending to make a recommendation but it was nevertheless implicit. I suddenly was hearing about more conferences. It wasn't invites, but I suddenly knew much more about what is available out there and if somebody heard from me, they felt like they recognized my name, even though Avdi is the only reason for that at the time. But that was a real door opener that someone, I respect and the industry respects, essentially looked at that talk and said, "I respect her and there's good reason for you to look closer and perhaps respect her too." That was a really powerful thing and I would say, giving those endorsements to other talks, do that. When you see a talk you like, really do the advocacy in some way and say, not just on the individual level to that person, "I like that talk. I think it really should be given again elsewhere." Be proactive about as publicly as possible saying, "My gosh, that was a good talk. Here were the takeaways. Here is why I think it's really useful and why I think other conferences should pick it too," and even reaching out to specific conferences if you think there's a great fit in saying, "I think that person's talk, blah-blah name, would be a really great fit." All those things make a huge difference. The more we as audiences put forth this specific person has something specific of value to offer, boom. I was lucky in that way and that led to hearing more information but what I really didn't know is how much more information there was to get. I had heard of a handful of individual conferences. Most of them in the Ruby community, went to their website and I signed up for their neat little form that says, "We'll contact you when we are ready to accept proposals," and then funny thing, I never heard from any of them. They all forget that they have a little form. Little by little, I discovered that where all the announcements actually are is on Twitter so I started collecting names of conferences for professional programmers. When I started, I thought that list would be, including not just Ruby but other languages and other topics related, I bet there might be somewhere between 100 and 300. It could even be as high as 300. It turns out that it's not 100 or 200 or 300 but it's actually, at least 1300 and that's as many as I've found at this point. It's growing constantly every month. We have a tremendous number of opportunities to speak and most people have no idea. CallbackWomen was really launched with a very modest mission of simply, as long as I'm picking up the names of these conferences and I'm noticing their Twitter account, why don't I make that information public so other people don't have to do this leg work too. Over time, what I realized maybe in the first six months to a year is, funny thing it's not just women who are following this. It's people of all genders and then, oh funnier thing, there's a lot of conferences and organizers who are just automatically doing follow back, which means I had suddenly a new vision of what was possible to accomplish beyond just providing, "Here is a CFP opportunity. Here's an opportunity for a proposal. Here is a time to have a conversation. Advocate to conference organizers. These are the things that you need to do if you want to get serious. These are things that are obstacles. Here is a bunch of people who are highly qualified," because there was an interesting assumption that essentially, women equals inexperienced. That is not the case. There are plenty of really experienced speakers and the problem had much more to do with limited networks that organizers were -- as discussed a few minutes ago -- tending to draw from a pool of people that were very well-known or that they knew personally or had spoken there last year or had spoken to another conference they've been at. The perception of women are inexperienced was really not coming out of that reality so much as it was coming out of the networks of organizers and the networks of women who already were speakers or who were prepared to be speakers were very little overlapping. This was a way to create much more of that overlap and start pushing -- getting really pushy -- because I heard a number of times from conference organizers who essentially said, "We can't do diversity outreach because we can't lower the bar of quality," and that's a really interesting assumption. NOEL: That's a very frustrating assumption. What kind of things do you tell the conference organizers who want to engage? What do you tell them the barriers are? What kind of suggestions do you make to them? CARINA: One of the most important baseline things you need to do is recognize the pay gap. That women as a whole and then women depending on how you break out on things like race or ableism or location in the world, have a really big financial disadvantage, compared to men in general and particularly, white men based in North America or Europe. Those differences financially are huge, not just in terms of pay but the cumulative ability to use that disposable income. If we all have the same baseline expenses, then the pay gap is really much more visible in women having a much smaller amount of disposable income to spend on doing a conference at all, versus a nice big chunk for the men. In addition, women have statistically much more likelihood of having to do caregiver duties at home, which means there's an additional expense burden on women to be able to participate in conferences. Even just to attend conferences, let alone spend quality time on preparing a talk. Conferences need to be serious about money. Cover travel expenses and frankly, pay speakers, especially speakers who you want to see and cannot otherwise participate. Put money on the table. You're just not going to be able to achieve true diversity without that. MARK: I think the craziest thing about that is that for most conferences, the idea of paying or covering up expenses is such a gray area. It's a gray area that then privileges those who are in the know, who are more likely to be well-represented, rather than underrepresented in the industry. The typical speakers on a speaker circuit will know to ask to have their travel covered or maybe even have an agent who would say this is how much it costs for this person to speak versus somebody who doesn't even know to ask and is struggling to make it work, just without knowing that those things... NOEL: Yeah, it's certainly not unheard of to be able to get a speaker for your travel expenses covered from a conference just by asking. It's also not unheard of for the conference to react poorly to that. The question is well, so you can... CARINA: When you asked earlier what were some of the questions that I asked, a lot of them I didn't know and that was one of them where people like Estelle Weyl said, "You can ask," and I thought, many of us thought, if you ask essentially, it will be insulting to organizers and they'll decide to withdraw the invitation to speak in the first place because you have been so terrible to be pushing for expenses for your flight or your room. She was really saying, "No," and if there's ever a conference that does that, they're jerks. You don't want to speak at that conference. It's great that you know that before you waste so much time and money on it. NOEL: That's what I was going to say. They're definitely telling you something if they react poorly to that suggestion. CARINA: Yeah and the fact is I've never had a conference respond poorly and I always have to ask. I'm not in a position to do this otherwise. There have been a handful that said, "We're so sorry but we simply can't," in which case I said, "I totally appreciate that. I understand and sadly, I won't be able to speak. Maybe in a different year. Please, do invite me when it's more viable for both of us." Another big thing is that for a lot of people, if you're working in Silicon Valley or New York or one of the other major tech centers for a large company, those companies often will provide all of the expenses for the speaker and the speaker is doing that work on company time anyway so they're being well-compensated without having to ask a conference for anything. A lot of times, conferences, especially at the beginning of CallbackWomen, had been operating under a premise that all speakers essentially are getting paid through their employer. That there's no need to be adding to the wealth that programmers already make and that's making some interesting assumptions because not all programmers are, in fact, making a fantastic living. It is overall, generally a high-ranked income but there's even across the US, a lot of regions where it's an income that's far more modest than is a fraction of what you make in Silicon Valley. Then if you expand that globally, there's whole countries where what a Silicon Valley programmer makes in a week is most of the year's income for that person. The disproportionate expenses that just cannot be in any way overcome until we overcome our assumptions about everyone has the same financial ability and the same access. It's just not true. NOEL: I had that come up in my own world in self-publishing books where somebody from a country... and it's one of the reasons why my self-publish books tend to be relatively cheap is because every now and then, I hear from somebody who does not live in the US and does not make a US programmer's income and for whom, even $25 or $50 a book is a prohibitive expense. I really struggle sometimes with how to manage that. It is a really complicated issue. CARINA: It is. Another thing that can be difficult for programmers coming from outside of the US, Europe and parts of Asia is the visa suspicion that a lot of border patrol in a number of first world countries assume that anyone coming into their country from the developing world has an agenda to actually overstay their visa. It's very hard for those people to be able to overcome that assumption that essentially there is no possible way that you could be a genuine expert in the field enough to be coming just to give a talk and then go home to a country that you actually like living in. That bias means that it's not just reaching out to speakers is a thing that you need to do but also recognize that there's distinctive barriers that are purely geographical. With our conferences, mostly focused on presence in the US and Europe. By far, it means that it's a much better expense to come from, say Brazil as opposed to from Montreal. If we don't recognize that these are inherently really different, if you want genuine diversity not just gender diversity, you got to be able to look at the big picture and say, "There are different burdens on different people." Approach that burden with individualized realistic support, not just say for instance across the board, "We provide $500 for speaker expenses and you figure out how to cover that on your own." That's just not going to work. MARK: We've identified a lot of external barriers but I also want to bring attention to some of the internal ones and some of them are related to the external ones. If my topic is of great value, I don't know if I can ask money for it or I don't even know if I have, like we said before, something of value to say or it's hard to turn it into something like a curriculum versus just sharing a story. All of those are voices inside of our heads and I'm sure that the external barriers just serve to amplify those voices. A lot of times, when I'm speaking to a new or potential speaker, those voices happen inside my head as well so I find myself speaking just to those and what you have to say is valid, even in the face of all these other challenges. It's important that your voice is there and that it's heard. CARINA: We've kind of hit on this earlier and I want to circle back to it that everybody has something really valuable to contribute to the industry's understanding. When you focus just on people who are visibly expert in a particular, usually, framework, then you missed a tremendous amount of expertise, as well as perspectives on topics that seem like they're already well-hashed over. Just taking say one thing. Let's take Ruby on Rails because I come from the Ruby community. You could have, say DHH talk about it, you could have Matz talk about it, you could have someone who is just learning Rails talk about what kind of obstacles they encountered and what actually blew their mind about how easy it is. That person can also be someone who's talking about, say for instance their local user group working together to work through individual problems and what things they learn through that process. You can have someone who is a junior level talking about learning about how do you scale Rails app or learning about the process of testing. Now, they've learned that, here are a bunch of fresh things -- perspective -- that's not limited to text about what they've learned. What they know specifically about RSpec, for instance or Cucumber, rather than generic knowledge. Each of us has, at different levels something really valuable to contribute, even when it's on a single subject. NOEL: I have this whole list of prompts that I suggest to people and a lot of them are things like what was the last thing you spent two hours looking up and researching? You can save somebody that two hours. What's the last thing you started doing? Why did you decide to start doing it? What's the last thing you stopped doing? Why did you decide to stop doing that? None of those are things that you need a tremendous amount of experience to start talking about. I think that everybody's path, through learning this framework is interesting and has potential insights, that are valuable to other people in the community. Everybody knows something that somebody else in the community doesn't know. CARINA: Yeah. You raised a great point. I like that technique. One that I also advocate with a lot of people is look at what you rant about. Look at what you spent the whole launch hour not being able to stop yourself from talking about whether it was rant or love. These are the topics that your passionate about. These are the things that you put a proposal too and don't worry about, whether you think the industry is just dying to hear about it. Your passion is probably shared by someone else or you feel so strongly that people should share your passion about it. This is an opportunity that you should share something that either is not understood enough or something that needs to be productively critiqued or something where there's a little side problem that hasn't yet been noticed and should be raised up and brought to people's attention. These are all really interesting fodder for abstracts with people who think they have nothing to say. NOEL: Right and the twist from turning it into something you rant at launch and to turning into a conference talk or an abstract or a talk is to try and think about it from the audience's perspective and to think about, if I rant about this in front of somebody in a hotel ballroom, what will somebody be able to do at the end of this or how would somebody think about something at the end of this? In a way that they didn't think about it in the beginning of this. If you can do that, that's basically the alchemy that turns your cafeteria rant into a conference abstract. Just thinking about it from the audience's perspective. CARINA: Absolutely. I agree wholeheartedly. It should be in the abstract. It should be clear takeaways, not just you will think about this better but literally, these are the concrete things you will take home and be able to apply to your work or to your life. Things for instance like mentoring, you may or may not do that on a professional level but maybe it helps you to think about yourself as someone who could benefit from mentorship. Even though what you saw at the talk was how to be a good mentor, that might help you for instance, in filtering out potential people to approach thinking, "OK, Would that person fit this criteria? Could they be a really useful mentor to me?" It's not just the so-called hard topics but also the soft topics. You need to give -- in the abstract and in the talk -- really specific, "This is what you will take away and this is something that directly applies to the audience members." It's not just generally, "You'll learn." NOEL: When I first started writing talk proposals, I had a really hard time getting accepted. One of the things that I eventually realized was that I was approaching the talk proposal as if it was the synopsis in a TV Guide or something and it didn't want to give away the ending. CARINA: Oh, yeah. NOEL: I felt like I had to protect the surprise of the talk for the people who would show up so it wound up with an abstract that was really, really vague. "I'm going to talk about this thing and something magical is going to happen." Especially as a novice speaker, you can't really expect the conference organizers to be okay with, "I'm going to talk and something magical is going to happen." You really need to say like, "People are going to walk away from this and they're going to be able to write tests better or mentor better or pair program better or whatever it turns out to be," but you really need to spell it out in that abstract. MARK: That's a tough lesson to learn. It's one, Noel that you helped me learn. It's tough for me to reconcile that with what I want from conferences, which is sometimes I don't want a curriculum: this is the problem and here's how you solve it. I actually want, "Here's a new perspective." Rather than a lesson, I want sometimes a story or even just a new frame for looking at something that I've looked at 100 times over. Noel, one of the speakers that you've introduced me to was by I think Nadia Odunayo. It was about looking at juniors and seniors, instead of looking at them with those names, looking at them as a host and a guest. That's such a different perspective and it's something that I carry with myself all the time. But it's not like, "Oh, here's a problem. Here's how to solve it." It's just a new frame on something that we see every day. NOEL: Yeah. CARINA: I agree. I like storytelling, even when it seems like it should be really narrowly about code. Tell a story about the code. Tell a story not just about here it is but your experience of it or some of the emotions associated with it. I was fortunate because I came out of a theater background long before I was in tech. For some of my early experience, I already had something to draw on, understanding of how to bring people in emotionally. I think of it as sometimes grabbing them by the throat and bringing them in emotionally. NOEL: There's definitely one of the hallmarks of a Carina talk is that you feel emotionally invested in it by the end. CARINA: Yeah, and I deliberately structure it to be that way. That is not by coincidence. As I'm writing, I'm very carefully bringing the audience in to where I want them to laugh and where I want them to feel shocked and when I want them to have time to digest in between and giving them some room. Each of those things, I learned from theatre. I also do a lot of stuff about, essentially in manipulating space. If you notice in my talks, oftentimes I'm the only talk that has a dark room for some reason... because it's theater. Controlling the lighting. It matters. All of those little tricks I learned were helpful for me to begin but I think in general, the bottom line is the content. Some of the talks that I have most loved are independent of content, the person cared and because they cared so much about their topic, it just draws you in. You don't need to carefully build in emotion if you're already invested yourself. I think the tendency to pick talks on the basis of, "I'm sure this is the only thing that the industry wants to hear about," is actually cheating potential audience about something that's far better. Something that they're really going to take away and remember. That GoGaRuCo talk from 2012, people still on a regular basis come to me and say, "I remember that. I still use that." That's amazing to me. I think talks that are about big picture and as I learned along the way are actually much more useful to the audience. The stuff about the latest, exciting development is only going to last for about a six-month shelf life and then the newest even better development will have come along. NOEL: One tricky thing about the super hard talks is that it's very hard to get the amount of detail in a conference talk to so you can have to have that thing be useful, whereas again like a new perspective, the kind of lever that you can give people to change their thinking in that kind of talk can be much more effective in that time frame. CARINA: I agree. MARK: How do you get a new perspective talk, a different frame, a sort of storytelling type of talk accepted when the qualifications for acceptance are basically this little abstract that has to read out on, "Here's the contents. Here's what the audiences going to learn"? CARINA: This was one of those huge revelations I received from the various people who mentored me and another thing that I was doing in the fall of 2012, prior to launching CallbackWomen and was part of the impetus, I just started organizing these little hangouts with various conference organizers and it was really kind of secretly about, "I want to talk to them," and if I make it more beneficial to a number of other people, then they have more incentive to talk to me. Also, great that other people can benefit from this and adds more questions to the pool. But I was doing a series of these of talking to individual conference organizers and just them give me a lot of freedom to interrogate them. First of all, one of things I learned is it is okay to interrogate conference organizers. Usually, they would end up with, "Wow. What a great question. I need to put that into the CFP. I didn't even think about that." NOEL: Most conference organizers really want to put on a good conference and they want to find the best talks so getting questions about how to solicit that is something that the conference organizers are generally interested in. What kinds of things that you learn from the conference organizers? CARINA: One, obviously was I was set free to ask questions, not just in those hangouts but in general and that was a really big thing that I had mental barriers on and let me loose. Another was an interesting talk I had with an organizer of Fluent. It was a JavaScript-focused conference. It since broadened its scope but I said, "I barely do any work with JavaScript. I can't imagine having anything to say." The topic I really want to do actually is about this whole other thing that's kind of funny. The title has in it, I think it sounds something like the 'Evil Overlord's Guide to Being a Senior Developer' and he said, "No, that's perfect!" The reason is because, sometimes we get talks that are really intense and deliberately structured so that there's something after that that's really light, that the audience has a chance to catch their breath with. We need proposals like that that can fit that space. I think that was a revelation for me of if you assume that something is wildly off-topic for the conference, it might be the most on-topic thing of all. It might be something that excites them because they've never seen any other proposal like this and they like how it can fill a niche. NOEL: To Mark's original question of about how you get a big picture that kind of lever talk accepted, Carina have you done Ruby Central acceptance for Ruby Central Conferences? CARINA: I got turned down in a couple and then I got invited to give a keynote so go figure. NOEL: Okay. I've been on the program committee for a couple of the Ruby Central Conferences so I have read a gajillion abstracts. One thing that, I think it's definitely possible to make it clear in an abstract that you are offering a perspective change. In fact, Nadia's conference talk -- the host guest thing -- was one of the conferences that I was on the committee for. If I'm remembering correctly, I remember being struck by the perspective shift as it was described in the abstract so you can do that. The takeaway doesn't necessarily like I'm going to be able to write React code better. You can explicitly say the takeaway is you're going to think about this thing differently at the end of this than you did at the beginning. Obviously, all of this is time and traffic, like some organizers are going to be more receptive to that, some people are going to be more receptive to that kind of thing than not. But I think that being clear about what you're trying to get across and if you really have a cool insight and a cool change of perspective, then I think that making that clear is perfectly valid and cool thing to do. CARINA: Yeah and this was another thing I learned from that same hangout. Every conference, every year gets whatever the flavor of the month's last year is and gets inundated with proposals that all center on that one topic. For the most part a conference only wants to pick one, maybe two talks on that and most likely, if it is the new flavor, it's going to be from the person who created it. It's statistically a poor gamble, and overall is kind of less interesting. Whereas if you can find something where statistically, either if they like the topic, they have to take it from you. You were the only one who put that in. You have far better odds to play and that was something I learned very early as I started deliberately picking topics where it was, "Take me or leave me." There's no one else. NOEL: Yeah. If you look at somebody like Nickolas Means who has done these really interesting talks at the Ruby Central Conferences and other places about the Citicorp Building in New York or what happened in a particular plane crash. These are really interesting storytelling talks about project management without necessarily being about technology. They're very unique. Nobody is submitting talks like that. CARINA: I loved his talk that you just alluded to at RubyConf 2015, "How to Crash an Airplane". The title alone is intriguing and it is very specifically telling the tale. He's a great storyteller, telling the story that how in fact there was this crash, in which most or everyone survived. I think it was -- NOEL: Most people survived. We actually just screened that locally here at Table XI for everybody, in particular because it was a really interesting talk that was not just for developers. CARINA: It was unexpected and for me, I wouldn't have cared what he talked about because he is such a terrific storyteller. Anything that he thinks is worth telling, I would be excited to sit down and listen to. NOEL: Perhaps you could each quickly talk about selling to people who are on the fence as to whether they want to try to be conference speakers, even though it makes them nervous. Like talk about what the benefit for having done that has been for your careers. MARK: I don't know, if there's been a direct impact on my career yet. I'm still a relatively new speaker so it hasn't gotten me a job or it hasn't got me any sort of fame and I'm not particularly interested in fame. I would say though that the classic teaching something or speaking about something, means that you have to learn it in a new and deeper way. Trying to take something that I'm familiar with and coalescing it into a package that can be easily delivered to another person as coherent within the amount of time, it's really helped me develop my learning. I would say it has also help me develop in confidence. Once I've had a speaking gig or two, I realized that first of all that the other speakers are also people, that they also sometimes feel like they don't know what they're doing and it's really made me a lot more comfortable just approaching people and talking to them. One of the greatest benefits for me as a speaker is that people come and talk to me. That's something that takes a lot of courage for me to do for others. At least, on a human and social level, I see a lot of benefits just interacting with others. CARINA: I hear from a number of people who are introverts who say that they actually really love speaking because they don't have to approach anybody. People come to them and what a relief that is socially. NOEL: You can't see me raising my hand but I'm raising my hand. [Laughter] CARINA: Yeah. I think particularly introverts can be really surprised by that. They think that it's something that only extroverts would want to do or as an introvert, you'd probably be absolute terrified on stage. Anybody can be terrified at stage. One of the biggest phobias in human nature is of speaking on stage. If that's the only thing holding you back, mentally find a way to set that aside. If you have something valuable to contribute and you're willing to step up there, that can be dealt with. In another day, I'll tell people how. NOEL: I'm weird in that respect, especially because I also have a little bit of a theater background but I have no problem speaking in front of large groups of people and significant problems speaking to one or two people at a time. If you're like me, then speaking is way easier than just talking to people at conferences. CARINA: I agree. I am not particularly an introvert but certainly for me, if there's no one in the room I recognize, I'm a complete wallflower. It's not easy for me to approach crowds of people I don't know or even individuals I don't know because I feel like I probably intruding and kind of stupid and fumbly and rude so I'm just going to stay here and hold up this nice wall. But it just takes one or two people. It makes a huge difference to how extroverted I can become once I have that social relief. Ruby Central has a terrific program, the guides program that does that, that provide someone to just be your individual sort of wing man or wing woman who can break some ice, introduce you to few people, make it comfortable to interact with others, even if you don't know them by feeling okay. NOEL: Yeah, it's a great program. Is there anything else you guys want to say before we, unfortunately have to close this out? MARK: What I'm interested to see, what has this done for Carina's career. CARINA: For me, the benefits have been huge. I spent at that point, a very long time consulting and feeling miserable and not at all respected and just feeling over time like maybe there's good reason for that. I have no value to offer. Why would anyone want to listen to me and just burned out and ready to completely leave the industry. I was at point where I was crying because I was going to have to do this again tomorrow. Speaking was transformative. Finding out, first of all that my expertise did have value to more than one person was really affirming and allowed me to go have more things to say. Another really concrete thing for women specifically is that -- we know this from countless research -- women are seen as dominating the conversation. If they speak more than, I think it's around 30% of the time, it's perceived as dominating and more than 50% of the conversation so we often get interrupted, we often get shut down, our ideas are often co-opted by someone else. What I love about public speaking is you're on stage. You're the only person who's allowed to talk. You get to speak without interruption for 10, 20, 40 minutes or whatever it is and make them hear you and there's a video recording that proves that it came from you, not the person sitting next to you. That's fantastic. That's really, really useful for your career. It certainly is useful to have some sort of 'brand reputation' as developed over time through your speaking. It's fantastic networking opportunity. Realistically because conferences are, at minimum, providing a free ticket. It makes it a lot more viable to attend a conference if it's as a speaker so all those things make it possible to benefit from the networking that happens only there or the number of job opportunities that are sitting on a job board. For people who are juniors, if you can find a way to attend some of the major conferences, you'll just be stunned to find out how many job opportunities are out there that you just will never otherwise know exist. It has really transformed my career. I don't do development anymore. I'm a Developer Evangelist. I get to spend my whole career trying to convince people to care about things that I think are worthy of caring about. That's so exciting to me. I absolutely love it. People think that another benefit of Developer Evangelism is getting to travel a lot. When you travel a lot for business, it kind of sucks actually. But if that means that my network of friends throughout the world went from zero to many and that's really exciting. I love that additional cultural perspective and I also love coming back to a country and immediately knowing people and getting to see them and all of that cool stuff that would not be possible without my specific career. It's a curse and a blessing both. I know a number of people who frankly make more money because they are seen as respected by the industry and it's because they gave talks. If you could have even one talk that people remember, let me tell you, bring that back at salary review time and it will make a difference. Companies want to be associated with your brand. They want to be the one who essentially owns your voice. Don't let them control your voice but if they want to be able to, essentially have their brand benefit from your brand, they're happy to put money into your salary to keep you there. NOEL: I think that's a good note to end on. Tech Done Right is sponsored by Table XI and hosted me, Noel Rappin. You can find Table XI on Twitter @TableXI and me at @NoelRap. The podcast is edited by Mandy Moore and you can reach her on Twitter at @DevReps. Tech Done Right can be found at TechDoneRight.io or downloaded via iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. You can send us feedback or ideas on Twitter at @Tech_Done_Right. Table XI is a UX design and software development company in Chicago with a 15-year history of building websites, mobile applications and custom digital experiences. Find us at TableXI.com where you can learn more about working with us or working for us. We'll be back in a couple of weeks with the next episode of Tech Done Right.