00:00:02

All right. We have another DevOps confession today. Remember, these are the stories that we don't always hear from the stage. And as Dr. Richard Cook said, we often hear them over drinks at the bar after the event, um, because we don't get the outcomes we had hoped for, or because of the tolls they took on our people and organizations. So our two confession presenters today are from Comcast. Michael Winslow is director of software strategy and transformation. He has recently been recognized as one of the top 20 most influential technologists in Philadelphia. He is also joined by many others that this conference is one of the 23 devil's leaders to follow online, a list published by new Relic. He was also one of the tech beacon DevOps, 100 top leaders, practitioners, experts to follow. He he's a fierce advocate for the professional branding of engineers and engineers, and encourages them to take control of their careers.

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Michael is joined today by Leslie Chapman at Comcast. Leslie's a distinguished engineer like Maxine, the lead character from the unicorn project. She's a recipient of two technology Emmys for her work on Comcast X, one operating system and voice remote we'll post a link in slack to a video of an example of her work with inspiring young women who want to enter the stem field. Plus it currently leads the team of engineers dedicated to improving the entertainment experience for all Comcast customers. Michael and Leslie will share their work helping engineers at Comcast find the voices. Michael Leslie

00:01:29

Hi, thank you. Thank you for that introduction. Well, thank you, Jean. Hello, DevOps enterprise summit. How's everybody doing today? That's what I like to hear. Awesome. Well, we are so excited to be here. Yeah,

00:01:48

We're very excited. I want to specially thank Jean. The DevOps enterprise summit. Uh, also Jeff, uh, for just allowing us to talk about this important subject in the format of the DevOps confession. Uh, so in order to you guys will find out what the subject is in a minute, uh, in order to stick with how most of the DevOps confessions work. I think it's, we should probably just get right into it. And Leslie's going to read this dev ops confession.

00:02:12

That's great. I remember feeling very left out this one time early in my career, I was working on a dev team where I was the only black man, and there were no women like many times before conversation at lunch was about the national hockey league. Everyone else on the team were huge hockey fans. I decided that I needed to start watching hockey in order to fit in. I was in Philadelphia. So I looked up when the next flyers game was. I sat down and started watching the game at around 6:30 PM. The flyers were playing the Pittsburgh penguins as much as I tried to get into the game. I just could not, not only was this sport not interesting to me, it seemed to go on forever. And when I say forever, I mean, forever as luck would have it. On the very day, I decided to start watching hockey, the fliers and the penguins would play the longest game in NHL history. It went into five over times when Keith promo finally scored the winning goal at 2:30 AM. I could only think one thing, these white boys are crazy.

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Of course, I would later find out that this was a playoff game and that it could not end in a tie. So it was not a common occurrence, but still I could not bring myself to embrace hockey. Since then I've gone skiing, tubing, whitewater rafting, and camping as attempts to fit in with my colleagues each time, it was very noticeable that my colleagues had been doing this all their lives. And I was struggling to make myself useful. As I got higher and higher in positions in my career, it seemed like the conversations and activities of my new peers became even more alienating stories, about $200 pours of scotch flaw, Gras trips to the outer banks and climbing Mount MOCA Picchu. Well, I can look back with fondness while I can look back at Fon with fondness that these memories and smile because they are uniquely part of my story.

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There is an aspect that I don't find funny. Those hockey fans that I started with outpaced my growth by several years. And most of those scotch drinkers were several years. My junior, I knew I had the technical chops. So what was the reason not having these things in common? I believe slowed the growth of my career and allowed my peers to leave me behind. You may think that these exclusionary conversations offend me or make me angry. That's not exactly how I would describe the feeling, not in the moment that it's happening. I want to work with happy co-workers who want to speak openly, but when talking about hockey leads to getting invited to hockey games and those hockey games lead to job recommendations and cultural fit conversations, we need to talk about it, but here I am now a high ranking leader of the organization.

00:05:29

I can flip the script. I can, fast-track the young black men like me and have them outpace their peers, not so fast. It doesn't work like that. Does it. If I say we need programs for black employees, I hear responses that change black to underrepresented or diverse. And since diversity pretty much means anything other than white heterosexual male. It can really water down the effectiveness. I don't want to take away from any group trying to improve the professional landscape. But when I say black, I mean black men and women, I do hope our industry can stop claiming false victories for diversity because they've made strides with women and often non-black women. Perhaps we can encourage goals more specific to each group. I'm not sure what the answer is. I want to work together to come up with a solution. Let's just please make sure that the conversation continues and not feel as if the mission is accomplished. Thanks for the opportunity to share my thoughts anonymous.

00:06:50

I think that was awesome. I had a chance to read it ahead of time. And, uh, it was so exciting to know that we were going to be able to read this on stage. How did it make you feel when you were reading that letter ahead of time?

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So what's really funny to me is I fell into the trap that he's speaking about at the end of this letter, because the first thing I started thinking was it resonates with me as not just a black person, but as a woman, because those conversations about scotch and hockey, I don't fit into those conversations as a woman either, but I fell right into that trap. Um, so it, it just really resonated.

00:07:28

Excellent. So I know that, uh, when we did this and most of the, most of the DevOps confessions kind of end at this point, but Jeff and Jean had asked me to see if I can try to hit this home a little bit. So I want to quote a very popular poem, uh, by Gil Scott Herring, has anybody ever heard of Gil Scott Herring? Awesome, awesome poet from the last poets, their most popular poem is the revolution will not be televised. And the very end of that poem says the revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be televised will not be televised. The revolution will be no replay brother. The revolution will be live. And if you think about these lyrics, if you're not, you know, I'm going to translate what I believe they are. And I think most people believe they are. They're saying that change cannot happen if you have a lot of observers and not a lot of practitioners.

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And so everybody has to participate. So the idea that is if we want to change, it has to be a sport where everybody's participating and not as many people are observing. And I can tell you that at Comcast, uh, and our group called the, the engineers that was started a couple of years ago by movie and ransom. And, uh, and, uh, of course I'm going to forget Justin Lee rose, uh, was a group of about 150 black engineers. And when I came to DevOps enterprise last year and had a great conversation with Jean about, uh, more diversity in tech, more blacks, uh, speaking on the stage, uh, he said we don't get a lot of people filling out the CFPs. And so when I went back to Comcast, uh, who told the story yesterday, there was this army of black engineers that confirmed that they didn't fill out the CFPs. So we started something called technically speaking, uh, which is a workshop that actually trains black engineers. In the beginning. It was black engineers, uh, at Comcast had to fill out CFPs how to go through our internal speakers bureau, how to write compelling abstracts and things like that. Uh, and I'm very proud to say that this year we had 13 black engineers speak and get accepted at external talks, uh, for Comcast. Can we get a round of applause for those guys

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Now that's success. Uh, while, while it was very successful, it lasted about six months before, uh, it became so successful that they wanted this program and other parts of Comcast. And that's where we got into this thought in the letter, the same, like, is this going to get watered down? Because I guarantee it was such a good workshop that once you make it globally available, are we still going to get the black participation that we intended to get from the very beginning? So what we've done is we've made technically speaking at Comcast, a Benjamin near branded, uh, item. So no matter which group that we work with to try to get them speaking at tech conferences, they always know in the training that it was born from black engineers. And, uh, that we always try to make sure that our black engineers feel a sense of pride, that they were the ones that started it.

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And that has caused us to keep the numbers up, uh, as far as black participants. But now, uh, just today we had just yesterday, we had Roshni from Comcast, uh, get accepted and, and speak yesterday here and as well, uh, Chuck mounts, uh, neither of which are black men or women, but they went through the same program and, uh, was able to get accepted. So we're really excited about the program we gave the workshop yesterday. I believe it was recorded. Please check it out. Technically speaking, built by engineers at Comcast. Uh, did you have anything else to say before we say goodbye? No.

00:11:14

Thank you so much for giving us your ears today. We really

00:11:17

Appreciate it. Thanks everyone.