This episode's guest is Rupa Dachere, an engineer at VMware and the executive director and founder of CodeChix, a 501(c)3 charity dedicated to education, advocacy and mentoring of women engineers in industry and academia. Rupa founded CodeChix because she found that, regardless of where she worked in the computer industry, she was the only woman on the team, which led to difficulties in advancing and keeping up with technologies that continue to pop up. The organization started out with small group meetings at Rupa's house, grew slowly through meetups and regular meetings, and now boasts over 400 women engineers as members.

The topic of this episode is primarily DevPulseCon, a two-day technical and educational micro-conference focused on women engineers, developers, users, administrators and geeks working in industry and academia. The conference began in 2015 as Coder[xx] with about 100 attendees, grew to about 120 in 2016, and this year's edition has already sold over 200 tickets. DevPulseCon takes place April 20 and 21, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. It is sold out, except for a number of tickets reserved for students, who may use discount code STUDENT-FREE to register for free tickets.

DevPulseCon has three components: technical talks, panel discussions, and hands-on workshops. The full agenda for DevPulseCon is already posted. For those unable to attend in person, the technical talks and possibly some of the panels will be recorded and made available through the DevPulseCon and CodeChix YouTube channels, alongside the videos that are already available from 2015 and 2016.

This year DevPulseCon features three panel discussions, which are popular, interactive parts of the conference that tend to run over their time budgets because the audience doesn't want to stop talking. Rupa is moderating a panel on toxic environments, which tend to affect women more strongly than men, for reasons that are not well established. To encourage participation, the panels are “safe space panels,” meaning that social media use is banned during the panels and attendees are encouraged to forget who says what.

Rupa gives some advice on interviewing women for engineering roles. Some of it I had heard before in unconscious bias training, but some of it was new to me and easy to act on:

With women, you do a little extra background, reading up on what their interests are, what drives them, and then phrase your question along those lines, maybe have a few outlier questions if you think they'll be able to answer it impromptu, and go that way. Most women like to have a scripted set of questions, to make them feel comfortable when they're going into an interview, so they know what to prep for essentially.

Rupa says that CodeChix's primary goal is not recruiting of women to engineering roles but retention in engineering roles:

Recruiting becomes a secondary [goal]... but retention is and always has been the focus for CodeChix and that is mainly because of the way I feel about it. I've been in the industry, I've been on the technical ladder and actually I've fought to stay on the technical ladder. Most places they will try to push you into program management, project management, some sort of management track, and you really have to fight to stay on the technical ladder...

Now that I have CodeChix, I know that I'm not the only one. That has always been and still is the number one goal of CodeChix, to retain the women engineers who are on the technical ladder, keep them on the technical ladder. In fact, this year I am going to go ahead and say that I have invited program managers and product managers to the conference—and these are all people with CS degrees and EE degrees, that are very qualified—I want to bring them back into the technical ladder, out of their program management and product management tracks, and see if I can do that...

I personally feel that it is really a horrible thing if you try to push somebody who is a good engineer out of the technical track into something else that, maybe they might be good at it, maybe they're not good at it, I don't know... I don't want to waste them because it's so difficult to find good engineers... Also, I'm tired of being the only female on the team again.

Ben tells a funny anecdote from the beginning of Nicira, but you'll have to listen to hear it.

DevPulseCon and CodeChix are available through their websites and all your favorite social media channels. You may also get in touch with them through email at contact@devpulsecon.org or contact@codechix.org.

OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The intro music in this episode is Drive, featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumper music is Yeah Ant featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro music is Space Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.