Timothy Bardlavens is chaotic good in its purest form. He is a Gay, Black man from the Carolinas, the youngest son of a single mother and everything institutional trauma and oppression says you cannot be or become. He is a Design Leader, a Cultural Strategist, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) specialist, a Fellowship Co-Founder, a writer and International Speaker & Facilitator.

Transcript (interactive)

Transcript (PDF)

This is InEx, a show about inclusive design.

I'm your host, Matt May.

In this episode:

I think if you are an individual contributor and you don't

believe in the work that you're doing is equitable, or you don't believe that

the organization itself is equitable, or whatever the case may be, find a new job.

Because you don't have the power to make the changes and you are going

to create so much harm for yourself by trying to go against the grain.

A conversation with Timothy Bardlavens.

And welcome.

We are now into our third episode.

And with that, it is my great pleasure to introduce you all to Timothy Bardlavens.

I have his bio here, and it's beautiful.

Timothy Bardlavens is chaotic good in its purest form.

He is a Gay Black man from the Carolinas, the youngest son of

a single mother and everything institutional trauma and oppression

that says you cannot be or become.

He has a product design leader, a cultural strategist, diversity equity

and inclusion specialist, a co-founder, a writer and an international speaker

and facilitator on topics of design and tech culture, equity, white

supremacy, and systems of oppression.

Timothy, thank you for joining us.

Thank you.

I appreciate you for having me.

And we want to start with the land acknowledgement.

OCAD University acknowledges the ancestral and traditional

territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the

Anishinaabe and the Huron-Wendat.

Timothy and I are presently on the ancestral and traditional lands of

the Duwamish and Coast Salish, peoples Kiikaapoi, Jumanos, Tawakoni and Wichita,

who are the original owners and custodians of the land on which we stand and create.

We've gone back a while.

I've known you for some period of time here.

I want to talk about your career and how you came up and out of what

motivates you in the design space.

So we can we can take it from there.

Yeah, absolutely.

How did you start?

What was your motivation for becoming a designer?

How did you break into design?

Yeah.

I think it started with undergrad.

So I was actually an English major and I wanted to become the editor-in-chief

of Jet magazine, which is like the Blackest magazine that I knew of.

And so at that point my minor was in philosophy.

And so basically I was like, I should take some design classes.

So I ended up taking a couple of design classes, change my

minor from philosophy to design.

And then I was also at the same time working in the office of student

activities and leadership or what you would call a student union these days.

And basically are these two amazing people who were my

supervisors, two Black women, Ms.

D, Ms.

Diane.

And they're like, basically, you should just do this.

Like you should just go in for it.

And at that time I had created what we call tissue talk, which was

basically this weekly periodical of events happening across campus.

And then we would have student workers go and put them in all the bathrooms, i.e.,

why I called it, I named the tissue talk.

Funny thing about life.

I graduated almost 10 years ago and they're still doing tissue talk.

So I feel like that's my claim to undergrad fame.

But yeah, that's what switched me into graphic design as a major.

And then from there, it's kind of history in the sense that, it was

kinda tough at first because I wasn't like an artist by trade or anything.

I didn't draw my life or anything like that.

And most of these people had been in their major for at least

a good two years before me.

So I had feel like I played catch up a bit.

But then after I graduated I went off to, I actually, first job was like

at a trophy manufacturing company.

I got fired from that.

Actually quit design for about three years and went into retail.

I became a store manager in a couple of stores, and then it's really

an, a, another woman this time a Latinx woman, or a Latina woman.

She came into my store and she was at the time.

And I think she still is the internal like vice president of

internal communications, that bank.

This while I was living in Charlotte, North Carolina and

she basically was like, your life doesn't start until your thirties.

Like your twenties are a time where you're just trying to figure things

out and you feel like you're not moving fast enough and all these things.

And so basically she just gave me the encouragement to keep trying.

And he should actually even let me come to bank of America and tour and meet

a bunch of people internally as well.

It's like pushed me back to wanting to get back into design.

I made a goal to find a job.

I started off as a contract worker in a manufacturing company and

their only marketing designer.

And then, yeah, I was in marketing until I think 2015, 2016.

And then I learned about user experience and I learned about what that means

and all the pieces of his research and all this in service design.

At the time I was working at Capital One, they had just acquired Adaptive Path,

which was like, I guess if IDEO was the big one, like Adaptive Path was the IDEO

of UX in a sense is from my understanding.

And I went to their intensive in DC.

It was a week long thing.

And I left there like, oh, this is everything I've thought about.

Just a totally different language.

And so I just went down that path and I ran for it.

And so I went to.

A startup where it was like run by this guy who was actually a

contestant on The Bachelorette.

And it was a terrible company, but I joined as the senior director of creative

and UX, which was such a BS title.

Cause it was me and one other person.

But that I was there for four months and then Microsoft called and I was

like, y'all, don't want to hire me.

This is not going to happen.

And then I found a manager who was actually crazy enough to say,

yeah, we want to offer you a role.

And that's what moved me into Seattle for almost five years stint and going

from Microsoft to Zillow to Meta.

And yeah, it's been an interesting ride.

So maybe it was the "senior" that did it.

Maybe if you had just been director, Microsoft wouldn't come calling, but

now you, yeah, that level, that matters.

Exactly.

It was that thing because it's so funny.

Cause I, went from "senior director" to "designer 2."

And I was like, oh, okay.

That's cool.

So getting into the business, how did that evolution

kind of strike you in terms of the kind of work that you were doing?

Like the the environment that you were in?

What did that progression feel like from, you got a graphic design

degree to this sort of moment of, UX is the thing you want to do,

to settling in as a practitioner.

Yeah.

I don't know, like it's, a lot of, it has been a series of like partially, luck, or

blessing, depending on what you believe.

Part of it has been like me just being willing to take like

risk and big leaps of faith.

Like I wasn't, when I was in Charlotte I actually had gotten a job at Ernst

& Young and I was supposed to move to DC as a graphic designer for Ernst & Young,

which is for most people who don't know is like a big accounting firm.

Is one of the big three or something like that.

And it was a week before I was supposed to get in the car and drive up there.

When something just told me, I was just, I'm tired of surviving.

I want to thrive.

Financially, especially, it was like a big thing for me.

It was actually for a senior designer role.

I think that when I was sitting there, I was like, you know what, moving to

DC, making this kind of money, like I'm going to get a really small apartment.

I'm not going to really enjoy it.

And so in, at the time Capital One had just called in.

I was like, you know what?

I think this is the right thing.

And that was like, I basically told Ernst & Young, sorry, I can't accept the role

that y'all just gave me relocation and all this other stuff for, to go and take.

And I sat and I waited for six weeks for Capital One to call me back.

And then I had to fly out to Dallas to interview.

And there was no guarantee I'd get the job.

And then once I got the job, then I had to figure out, okay, how do

I even afford to get to Dallas?

I have no money.

Cause I sat for weeks without a job.

And so I had to go back and ask him like, hey, can you give me my bonus?

So there's things like that, that I had to do.

Even me leaving Charlotte was interesting, because as like my first real design job,

true design job, like one, only reason I converted from a contractor to a full-time

employee so quickly was because I needed to get a car, but they wouldn't let me buy

it if I was a contractor and so I talked to my manager and they basically hired

me that same day, and then just backdated the hire letter so that I could get a car.

But then it turned out to be one of the most like oppressive

places I'd ever worked.

Like I was the only Black person in the corporate side.

Everyone else worked in the warehouse.

And so I had no one who really looked like me.

And then also, like my manager was this white woman who I'd

never engaged with people with passive aggression in that way.

My mother is a very direct person.

I'm a very direct person.

So like, how do you counter passive aggression with directness when

then you're always the aggressor?

And I had to deal with that.

And it was like all this other stuff and I just, it was so terrible.

Like it got to the point where it, the final days where I just didn't know if

that was the day I was going to get fired.

Like everyday I just went to work thinking, today's the

day I'm going to be fired.

And it was a really, it was a really tough space to be in.

Especially as someone who wanted to continue to get better and design who had

like really lofty goals to be a creative director until doing all these things.

And, at that time I was just trying to figure out a new way to create a email

template for this new machine that they created or wherever the case may be.

But I think that it was good.

I think it was a series of the right decisions.

Like me not going to Ernst & Young, I think it was a really important decision.

And even learning about UX, but also being willing to say,

okay, now I've learned about it.

I'm going to trust myself enough to just throw some stuff together on my report.

Like I literally, when I got back from the intensive, when I was working at

Capital One I was an email designer basically there as well, but I was

supporting copywriting, things like that.

And basically what I did was I created a bunch of wireframes and stuff.

I was like, okay, cool.

Like I'm just going to create the journey of what this email campaign would be.

And then map that out.

Or I did this like landing page thing.

So I'm just going to articulate what are the different parts of the landing page?

It's very rudimentary stuff.

I should not have gotten a job anywhere.

I lucked out that the startup had no idea who like what design

should look like, or they didn't have a high bar quite honestly.

And I think that I'm really good at telling stories.

And so I was able to get my way into that.

And then I had to learn Sketch on the spot.

Up until this point, all I've been using is Illustrator, all

I've been using is like Photoshop.

Like I haven't been using anything else.

So I had to learn on the spot and rush and go.

I had to figure out how to create journeys for this new checkout

flow and a bunch of other stuff.

And so I was like learning as I went along in that four months was super

intense, but it gave me at least one portfolio piece, in addition to some

of the stuff I worked on at Capital One to help me interview at Microsoft.

And I lucked out that the person who I interviewed with quite

honestly, I think that they had a very flashy view of design.

But also how Microsoft did design was a bit more like they saw me as a pure UXer,

not so much a visual designer, which helped me out a ton, but I was also,

I was a solid visual designer as well.

But I think that's what helped me was, I was a strong storyteller,

which they really emphasized strong storytelling on that team.

And I had a pretty good rationale around product implementation and product design.

That's kind of what helped me slide in the door a little bit.

So I I think throughout my whole career, if it wasn't for the storytelling piece,

if it wasn't for having that gift of being able to connect a bunch of stuff

together and get people to believe what I'm saying, then I don't think

I would've made it as far as I have.

It's always been a thing that has helped me out a ton.

Yeah.

And that narrative capability is just being able to explain your own

designs, I think is so difficult.

And, the portfolio emphasis, I think, just compared to the experiences I've had

with interviewing where you just don't see the completion of the vision, that seems

to be the part that really stands out.

So how was your experience as an employee because you're building

all of these skills, right?

You're developing things.

You're learning things on the fly.

You're also standing out because you're showing new ways of doing things in this

startup and then, over at Microsoft, like how does that affect your work experience?

Do you feel like in these places, like everybody's all the same?

How do you feel that you, as a Black man in design spaces, how do you

feel that your performing equitably?

How do you feel like you have equity in that system and the

places that you've worked?

Yeah.

Honestly, I don't think I've ever really, I don't think it was ever fully equitable.

And it's so funny cause I've actually, I actually I got a therapist, a few,

like a couple of months ago and we've been working through this because I'm

in this transition point in my life.

And one of the big things that I realized is that it was two things.

One was that I had spent so much time putting so much energy into

work and into sort of proving my value and proving like I'm good

enough both to myself and to others.

Because I think that's the thing about especially being a Black or brown in

these spaces is that especially as heavily white and even like really heavily,

especially in tech, heavily white and of Asian descent folks, if you don't

look like one of those two demographics largely then it's like this proving

of belongingness that you have to do.

And so I'd done that for almost the past decade, but definitely

for the past, five or six years.

And in doing so, work became a major part of my identity.

And an assault to me, institutionally from work was also an assault to my identity.

Even to this point today, I'm realizing some of the trauma that I've

experienced institutionally and some of the institutional betrayals that

I've experienced, and realizing that a lot of the reason why they hurt even

more was because I'd wrapped so much of my personal identity into work,

and my own personal value into work.

And so the results of that is also is that I've spent the majority of my career

hustling, like constantly hustling.

I was talking to Steve Johnson, who's the head of design for Netflix.

He told me, you're at a level now where you don't need to hustle anymore.

You need to be strategic.

And it's actually been a transition that I'm trying really hard to do.

Because I'm so used to, I go into a company, I'm usually under leveled.

I have to prove that I'm valuable and worth being at the company in general,

and then have to prove my value and my ability to operate at the next

level or at the level I should be.

And I do that constantly over and over again, every company.

And I wrote in my first article of Navigating Whiteness that I've

never joined a company at the level I feel like I should have

been, I've always been under level.

That's still true to this day and it's actually funny because when I wrote

that, especially working at Meta, they're like, can you change this

sentence, because it makes it seem like the same thing happened to you here.

And I was like, no, because it did.

I'm under level.

And even with me being promoted, I'm still under level.

And so one of the big things that I've been trying to work through my

life too, is how do I stop hustling?

How do I disconnect?

This exercise I was doing through my therapist just this morning.

We were talking about words that define me.

And she was like, do you know what words define you that are outside of your work?

And I was like, I'm not really sure.

So she pulled up this document and shared her screen and she was

like, here's a bunch of adjectives.

Pick out the ones that you feel like are related to you or you feel represent you.

I started with things like approachable and communicative and leader.

And I was like, wait.

And I had to pause with them and say, wait, I'm defaulting to looking

at how I want people to look at me from a professional perspective.

And so I had to go back and start over and pick four different words that I

felt would represent me a bit more.

And so the ones I picked out were happiness, generosity,

empathetic, and balance.

And for me, I don't really know what happiness looks like.

Happiness for me was always the thing I did at work.

As opposed to what do I do when I'm off work?

Cause when I'm off work, I just sit on the couch and I just like,

I'm just like, non-existent.

I think there's like this thought process that some people have a

belief that you're the only real thing and everyone else is like robots.

And so when you don't see them, they just like power down until you see them again.

Like The Truman Show, you're the center of the universe and

everybody's an actor that's like you.

And how I operate is, I was the person like who powered down.

So you'd see me and I'd be all in.

I'll be at this conference now, speaking of this thing and I'd be like at work

and so on and so forth, but then I get home and I just powered down and I'm

just in my own little bubble and no one sees me until I power back up again.

And I think that's something that I had that I've been having to

work through is, okay, how do I create that balance in my life?

And how do I create happiness that's not attached to work.

And these other things, because I spent so much time proving worth, proving

value, proving that I should be in this space, like all this proving.

And it basically became a deep part of my identity that I now have to

like dismantle and transition out of and become like, figure out who am I?

Who is Timothy now?

If let's say I get the title that I want, I get all these other things.

Okay, great.

But then who am I beyond that?

And that's something that I've had to work through.

It's fascinating because that touches on the kinds of discussions

that people are having about the idea of belonging at work or the extent

to which your work is your life.

And not just work life balance.

Like I get off at five, but I still carry this stuff with me, but to

feel like when I'm at work, that I'm doing things that are ethically

aligned with what I want to be doing.

That I don't have microaggressions toward me in the office, that I have

spaces that are mine, that are safe.

And I want to get into your current job at Meta, and preface it by saying, when

we talked about this before you started.

And my reaction to that was, give or take: what?

This is where you wanted to ply your trade, but as you become a manager

and thinking about the role and the work that you're doing as leading a

team of people, and making sure that they feel that they have a sense of

equity and that they have a sense of community, and that you're demonstrating

your value at a different level.

How does that change for you?

Like how does that change your perspective toward work, toward

managing people, et cetera?

Yeah, I think any manager will say the hardest thing

to do, is balance your own personal growth with that of your team.

Or your own personal happiness with that of your team.

There's always this thing of, if you're a good leader, then you really want to

make sure your team is taken care of.

And I tell every anyone who's on my team I believe that it is my

ethical responsibility to ensure that they can have a job anywhere else.

If they left next week, they would have everything on every tool necessary

to get a job at any other company and be able to be successful in doing so.

And so I feel as though there's a lot of responsibility that we have

that I have especially like even with hiring, like last year between

myself and one other person we worked on this initiative and alone, like

us alone, just two people, like two design managers, plus one recruiter.

Our once talent sourcer, actually.

We single-handedly tripled the number of Black women product

design managers at Meta.

Like when I joined the company, there were zero.

Then Joy Roberts, who I worked with at Zillow.

She was the one.

Now there's I think, eight.

And mind you, like that's still not a lot, but that's the way more

than what it was two years ago.

For me, a lot of the work that has been on the more, how do I build more

equitable systems side, or how to like, think about my team is really,

how am I actually being an example?

One of the things I did was I actually ended up switching teams,

but one of the things I did on my previous team was I hired and

built an all Black leadership team.

Black managers.

Majority were Black women.

One of the most senior people on our team that was in that see she's one step from

being a director, also a Black woman.

And not only that, but she's a Black queer woman who is younger than me.

And she is one step from director.

And when I say younger than me she's 10 years younger than me.

I think she's just hitting maybe 25 or 26, something like that, which is crazy.

But the thing is that I saw her talent and I like saw, like I

actually, I intentionally reached out.

Or I intentionally spent time understanding her in her work before

we even hired her to make sure she'll succeed, she was going to be successful.

I even sent her profile to all of our recruiting team that we worked with.

I say, hey, if you were to look at this person's LinkedIn profile, what would

you bring them in and level them as, and hands down, all of them said two to

three levels lower than her actual level.

And she has not only met expectations, but exceeded expectations at her level.

For me, that's been a really important thing, to say hey, I'm going to prove it.

I'm going to show you better than I can tell you.

And then not only am I going to show you, better than I can tell you, but

I'm going to make sure that every single person on this team feels as though

they have what they need professionally, personally, whatever the case may be.

I think that while that's great, the downside of it is that also means

that many times I'm sacrificing myself for my team, right?

Like I'm being the umbrella for them, which means, okay,

who's the umbrella for me?

And I think that is always one of the challenges is when you have to sometimes

make the choice between you and your team.

It seems like it's an easy choice, but it's really not.

And I've had to work through the guilt of making the decision for myself as opposed

to my team and being like, look, I'm here for y'all, I'm still going to support

you, but I gotta do what's good for me.

And so those are some of the things that I've had to work through that are

just like hiring challenges, making sure people get like adequately promoted

and level of making sure that even before you joined the company, are you

at the level you re you deserve to be?

And like even getting challenged by other leaders and being, hey, you're

advocating too much for this person.

Or if I'm saying like, hey, I think you're under leveling

this person, here's my story.

And then the feedback is when you tell people that it shuts

down the conversation, it makes them not want to argue.

I was like, that's fine.

They shouldn't.

it's still the reality.

And so those are some of the things that, that I have to work through

just on the people side of things.

And that doesn't include the normal hey, because this person

is a woman how are they being treated by their male counterparts?

And are they actually supported and so on and so forth?

And how do I make sure that I'm a champion for a whole bunch of different types

of people and also be seen as impartial and fair, but also like I, it was like

this balance of having your team's back, but don't advocate too much because

I can be seen as a negative thing.

And it's like a weird dance that you have to play.

And this is why the conversation is, okay, so we're increasing the

diversity of the organization, but they're all only at the lower levels, right?

You have these new hires that are coming in, that are diversifying

the organization, but being a people manager, you have an umbrella effect

of the people that are below you.

But then you have to do this kind of grassroots effort to create a coalition,

not just an employee network, but one-to-one relationships with people

just to make sure that you've raised the volume enough about the people

that need to advance from there.

Absolutely, and the big thing is for me is, even

setting people up for success on faster trajectories and promotions

where I need to I've had to make sure I do that at least for my team.

Again, I can show better than I can tell.

But the other piece to that point, and this is actually why I started

focusing on specifically Black women, but Black women leaders was because I

realized that it's about network, right?

And if you're coming in as a leader, like especially people manager and you

are of a historically underinvested group, nine times out of 10, you

have a network of other people that look like you, that you can bring in.

And so if you have the power to hire or influence in any way, then most likely

that's going to drive more people who like you coming into the organization.

I really realized, especially when it comes to a lot of these efforts is like

it has to be a top down kind of thing.

And actually, no, it has to be a sandwich, has to be bottoms up and tops down.

But I think that.

You have to get a bunch of the middle managers who are like Black

women or Black, gay or whatever the case may be because that's

where you get that, that closer connection to building up the teams.

I think where it can fall apart though, is one, it's really tough

to get people of color executives.

We're just not promoted quickly enough as our counterparts.

But also I think that the other part is just we also run into some of

those folks who are of historically underinvested or marginalized

backgrounds who feel as though they can't, or shouldn't do the work.

Or don't want to do the work when it comes to diversity, or whatever the

case may be, because they're like I just, I don't want to do that.

I just, I don't want to be known as the Black manager.

I just want to be known as a manager.

And I think the downside of that lack of intentionality is one, we always have to

pay the tax as leaders if we do the work.

But if we don't want to, that also means that the impact of that is

we end up upholding the status quo.

Like we end up wholly upholding white supremacy or whatever

the case may be because of it.

So it was kinda like this, it can sometimes be a damned if you

do damned if you don't scenario.

Yeah.

On the one hand, the bring your whole self to work, but then there's a lot of

baggage that goes along with that too.

So that's actually a good place to pause here so we can start getting into what

an equitable environment looks like.

And then start talking about kind of UX not just from the career

perspective, but from from the inclusivity of user experience across

racial divides for example, across like the, all forms of human difference,

as we say in inclusive design.

So we are going to take a break.

We'll be right back with Timothy Bardlavens.

InEx is a major research project by me, Matt May, as part of the master

of design degree program at OCAD University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Episodes and transcripts of this podcast can be found at inex.show.

That's I-N-E-X dot show.

Follow InEx on Twitter at @inexpodcast.

All right.

We're back with Timothy Bardlavens.

In the first segment of this, I think was there was a lot of career stuff.

And I wanted to connect this back to inclusive design because one of the

key principles in inclusive design is about there being equitable interactions

and having people in the room.

That we're making decisions collectively.

And when you don't have an organization that's diverse and more importantly, the

diversity doesn't get to express itself.

The actual division between like diversity and inclusion used to be the, at first

they were just juking the stats, right?

Trying to increase, basically women and ethnic diversity in the workplace,

but not really giving them any power in changing the system as it was.

Equity comes in here as not only do we have a workforce that sort of reflects

the population of where we're at but that there's an equal amount of power being

shared among all of the people in the system or participating in the system,

whether they be customers or people that are in user groups or what have you.

So talk to me about the role of equity from kind of an

advocate's perspective on that.

Yeah.

So there, I guess there's so many ways to look at it.

I guess let's start off by defining our terms here.

Like how would you define equity in this context?

I think equity, equity in this space of let's say organizations.

So how I think about it is to look at a few ways, but let's say you look at

the entire employee journey, right?

You have sourcing, recruiting, hiring, onboarding.

And then it is development and performance, things like that all

the way around to off-boarding and leaving the company.

And mixed in there is of course conversations around pay, around

growth trajectory, all those things.

And I think that when you think equity, I think...

It's not just fairness.

Cause I think a lot of people, they say, hey, we just wanna make sure

things are as fair as possible.

But I think fairness in my mind lends itself to equality.

It's like, hey, we both have the access to the same resources, but in having access

to those same resources, one part, one set of people are going to have a better

experience than the other most likely.

Ultimately equity within the space of let's say an employee's experience

is, not only do they feel like they are getting paid equivalent to their

counterparts, but also they have access to sponsorship, and clearly

articulated, intentional sponsorship.

Cause I think intentionality is a super key here.

Is it set up in a way that is specifically made for this person or

set of people or is it serendipitous and just so happen they have access to it.

But there's also things of like, when you're on the team,

what is your experience like?

Are you actually heard, when you say here, this is a problem I'm having a problem.

If you actually take action, do they actually look into it or are

you saying hey, it'll be okay.

Just give it time or wherever the case may be and they're gaslit.

So I think there's an experiential piece of it, of course.

But then I think there's also the actual, tangible things, like pay, like equal

voice at the table, quote unquote and equal voice when it comes to deference.

Will people actually listen, but also not only listen, but actually take action

and in taking action where they come back and give you credit for the things that

work really well, so that you have that promotability, trajectory, et cetera.

It's a very long-winded definition, but it's just so all encompassing, it's

hard to define it in one specific way or another, like it's more than belonging.

You can belong at a place and still be underpaid and underleveled.

And you wouldn't know unless someone tells you, so it.

Yeah, it depends.

I think a part of it is, a lot of the discussion that happens

around this is about just the working environment, the money situation.

But to go back to your own story or earlier on about things like paying for

relo, or even allowing work from home, that the working environment itself is

something that has barriers to it, coming and hiring somebody new into San Francisco

is just one of the most expensive places in the world, has implications.

Not only if you have to move away from your family, if you have supports

that you use at home that you're not going to have somewhere else.

That's a part of it too.

Sometimes just the structures of an organization dictate

who is going to work on it.

Yeah.

So I think about this a few different ways.

I was working with this person who they worked in the Bay for years,

because that was where work was.

And so they'd been at the company for some time, but they worked with in the Bay and

then they realized, this is a Black man.

And he realized, I want to be around more of my people.

I want to get married one day.

I want to have kids.

And I want to be in a place where I have access to that population of

people, because the Bay doesn't have a lot of Black people in general.

And he made a decision to move from the Bay to Atlanta, but in doing

so, he was forced to transition from being a manager, to being an IC.

And he was basically held back from a levels perspective.

Like he didn't get the same kind of growth and development over the subsequent,

three, four or five years as his peers who were directors and even some VPs, because

he wasn't in the center of power really.

He wasn't in the Bay.

And it wasn't until pre post COVID where they actually had to correct his

pay to make it more equitable based on new policy, where he was able to then

transition back into being a manager, to get promoted up relatively quickly to

level that he believed he deserved to be.

But if it hadn't been for COVID, he probably would not

have this same opportunity.

When you have these companies that are based in a specific area, but then they

say, hey, we want to increase diversity.

But then in doing so you're ripping people out of areas of comfort, and

you're wooing them with all this money, but then you realize that the money is

actually, maybe it doesn't go that far, because in the Bay it doesn't go that far

because you realized oh, like I'm making $130,000 a year, but my rent is $4500.

And so I only have enough to maybe buy groceries after that.

Or I can never buy a house because I don't have enough money

or whatever the case may be.

It's really interesting to see how companies have become more

equitable from the perspective of especially location, thanks to COVID.

While also understanding that, what they perceived as equitable was the I'm

going to pay for you to come to this or travel across the country or whatever,

to get set up and work in this place.

And in my mind, like something that was always weird to me was, especially

when it comes to teleworking is you would have people let's say who,

let's say there's an office in Menlo Park, but there's also offices in New

York and Seattle and other places.

And so for whatever reason, A person could have a team that's

across the entire country, but still be based in one location.

But for some reason I was very different than you working from your home office and

having a team spread across the country.

And for some, whatever reason, people never really seem to understand that

those are the exact same situations.

Only thing that was different was whether you go into an office or not.

But it's interesting how a lot of folks sort of, their mindset shifted so quickly.

But they were also very stuck in this very one dimensional way of work.

I think what I appreciate with these changes are things like being

able to work from where you want.

So me, I moved to Dallas and I work fully remote.

And for me that's great because my money goes much further here.

I can get a nice size house.

I know I can build a family.

I know I can pay for things and not be worried about well, is it

going to take a vacation, or saving money to buy a house or paying rent?

Like I don't have to make those choices as much.

So this is funny.

I did the same thing.

I moved to Texas after having been working at the same company for a

few years, from Seattle and just the oh, wow, this is very different.

What my lifestyle was like in this place that was cheaper, changed dramatically.

And yeah, spot on, that feeling of, why can't I have this level of compensation

for the place that I want to live?

And I think even now though, I still struggle with

companies who do this whole hey, we're going to shift your pay based

on where you live in the country to make it more market appropriate.

And it's...

Yes.

I hate that because ultimately what you're telling me is that

I can do the exact same work as another person, because I don't live in the same

area, all of a sudden I'm less valuable.

It doesn't really make sense to me.

And it doesn't matter how you slice it.

It just doesn't make sense.

Because let's be honest, I feel as though on some level, even people who work in

the Bay, in Seattle, in New York, places that are higher cost of living, they still

don't really make enough to really thrive.

That being said, I do think that's the one thing that is still, left to be desired.

If knowing me moving from.

San Francisco to North Carolina is going to change my pay by 20%.

Do I really want to do that?

Do I want to take that much of a hit?

I think that's something that some people are struggling with is, I

don't want to take the financial hit.

I want to be able to take my same paycheck and go in somewhere else.

When I bought my house, one of the conditions they had for me closing that

home was showing that me moving from Seattle to Dallas, it wouldn't patently

changed my pay in the way that would make owning my home more difficult.

And so it still is some issues from an equity perspective that I think are tough

and that needs to be worked through.

And I think at least people being able to work from whoever

they want is a good start.

Yeah.

There are lots more pieces to that we can discuss about the working

environment, and the cohesion.

How people end up working together.

But what really struck a lot of people in the disability community

about this was that these discussions were a non-starter before COVID.

Anything that required anything out of the ordinary for you, even if it was

something that was legally obligated for an employer to provide, was something

that was just technically far too complex.

If somebody needed to be working from home regularly, it was like, oh, we'll find

some other accommodations so that you can come in and work in the office for this.

And then suddenly everybody's, oh yeah, you can work from home.

Your kids can go to school from home.

And then now we're actually seeing these things start to be peeled away in

the return office discussion as well.

And so if you had this opportunity to provide a working environment

that people were satisfied with, then what gives you reason other

than economy to take it all away?

I think even with that, like one of the things that struck

me as so interesting was when there was this transition to work from wherever you

want, these leaders who maybe just a year or more ago were so adamant against it.

All of a sudden they're like these big proponents.

It's almost like the work-life balance thing.

Oh yeah, you can work wherever you want.

Like I'm going to go.

And I bought a house, I'm living in Hawaii.

Like a fad or a fashionable thing to do, to work remotely and to pick

some random place like, oh, I'm going to go to Utah and work from

there, from now on or whatever.

And it boggles my mind because y'all were so adamant against this.

Or aw, man, I miss people so much.

I miss people so much.

You miss people so much, but at Meta, at least, we always had the ability

to fly to different office locations.

That's never been taken away.

So what exactly is the excuse now?

With the return to work, really does the excuse boil down to, hey, we have these

leases and these buildings and we have to justify keeping them for some reason,

because this sort of stuff feels like.

That's the only thing that's come to mind for me about this, that

it was, there was a certain amount of a face to face interaction and a

certain amount of surveillance that people were going to do their job.

Because you look in the business magazines and you see all these

articles about everybody's doing a side hustle while they're in the office.

It just scares people into thinking that they're being cheated out of labor.

And that the only way to avoid that is manual oversight, which

has a lot of implications as well.

It's still a thing that, that sticks in my craw.

I want to change gears and talk about the discussion of equity at a product level.

We were talking about my model for how this works, which is when we talk about

all forms of human difference, which we do in inclusive design all the time, that

when we talk about disability inclusion, we're talking about we're talking about

accessibility, like software accessibility and that when we talk about any other

form of racism, gender, LGBTQ, language, literacy, culture, all of that is not

considered to be a software issue.

It's considered to be more an HR, hiring, promotion kind of issue.

But that leaves two huge gaps, right?

There's the disability employment that remains a major problem.

And there's also the sense of inclusion at a product level.

One of the reasons that this is so important, the career path and making

sure that everybody is spread out within the organization that is at all

levels of the organization, is that it affects what you create in the end.

That the decision-making is filtered through all of these lived experiences.

And, can you talk about that?

Can you think of issues that you run into or that you can see, that a white

designer that's only ever lived in San Francisco doesn't see in the way that

they are developing UX, portraying users in imagery, what have you?

Yeah, one thing that we've been pushing on for a while,

there was like this stronger transition of focus on product development through

the lens of social identities, right?

When I was in communities, we were looking at how to just help people join.

But then when you start thinking through, what does safety look like

and how do you think about safety from the lens of communities on

Facebook, but also through the lens of, let's say the most marginalized,

let's say a Black trans woman.

Hell, you can layer on a Black, trans, disabled woman, and then you have the

most marginalized of the marginalized.

And so you can say, okay, what does that experience look like?

And you start to think through, there's examples where you know, a

couple of years ago when we had the killing of Breonna Taylor and everyone

else, like all those folks that were murdered and so on and so forth.

And we had the whole social uprising and things and what we found, we actually did

the research it's happened to me as well.

Like I actually had personal experience, but also we did, we saw it come up in

research where we saw these Black folks who were in these plant lover groups.

And in that plant lover group, they're like, we don't want

to talk about social issues.

That's not what we're here for.

We here only talk about plants.

And some people were like, we're still humans.

And there were a group of people who have built some level of relationship.

Shouldn't we have these conversations about what's happening in the world?

You have this big dichotomy and where people like even myself, like I felt

unsafe all of a sudden because like wait.

So we can talk about one thing, but when we talk about social issues

that are deeply affecting us, then all of a sudden this group is in a

safe space and isn't right for us.

And this is something that especially Black folks do, but I think most people

do who are of a marginalized identity, is like they bifurcate what part of

themselves shows up in what spaces and to have to do that through digital

experiences, it makes it even harder because the assumption is that through

a digital experience, you actually can be more of yourself because it

takes away some of that judgmental barrier as in human interaction.

And so it becomes really tough.

I think another good example is, we were looking at some potential

product experiences and these folks, they were getting really excited

about doing focus on humor and in the space of communities and groups.

And there was a suggestion around hey, what if we gave people

the ability to create memes through the composer on Facebook.

And I was like, nope!

Not going to do it.

Not at all.

Nope.

And people are like, no, this is so great.

I was like, I can see the New York Times article now, that says that

Facebook has allowed someone to create some misogynistic, xenophobic,

racist, sexist, whatever post.

And it's being shared across the whole world.

I can see that headline it right now.

No, we do not have the mechanisms in place to be able to effectively

read what it is on an image and assess whether or not it's harmful.

We can't do this.

This is a no.

An attractive nuisance.

Microsoft had, that AI, that they put out on the internet and it was trained

to be racist through a chat interface.

There was the Snapchat filters.

All of these things that you see pop up and you're like, was there one

person of color in the room where the decision was made to do that.

Did you think fully about the consequences of this?

I think Facebook, the app as supposed to Meta the company, like Facebook has

this as probably one of the biggest issues, just because it's a blank slate.

There is content moderation all over the place, but then the discussion of

what's in and what's out tends to be the important part, the user generated

content is 99.9% of what Facebook is.

And then you have these sort of debates and discussions of who's allowed to

say certain things in what spaces.

And that to me is why there needs to be more voices that speak up

and that like in those rooms so that there are more of those nopes.

You're like, instantly, let me give you the list of why this is a bad idea.

Yeah.

I think even that though is and this is where, like I said, this damned if you

do, damned if you don't scenario comes in for folks under represented communities.

People always ask this question was there at least one person of color

in the room or so on and so forth.

And it's one, does there have to be?

Do I always have to be in the room for you not to do something stupid?

Or if I'm in the room, do I always have to be the one to speak up?

Then what happens is I'm always willing to speak up and push against it, then I

become the contrarian, which means I'm now the troublemaker, which means it's

now affecting my growth trajectory and my promotion ability and like my likeability.

Yeah.

The culture fit, that kind of argument.

Oh, you didn't fit with the culture and yeah.

And this gets to another issue of this.

So if I'm talking about something, cognitive, something that relates

to my ADHD or neurodiversity, there are things that I bring to it

that it's this is actually for me.

I'm self-advocating.

And there are lots of different people that are representing one or more

marginalized communities in this space.

Ultimately, there needs to be some cross-pollination, that people need to

start to understand more deeply that this is happening because for all of

the other privileges that I express, I get to be in a lot of rooms and surprise

people with the fact that I'm not going to go along with whatever racist, anti

trans kind of decision that's being made.

How do how do you foster an environment where people stop only

listening if there's one person in the room doing this, but instead

start sticking up for one another.

Yeah, I honestly, and it's something that somebody wrote

about in part two of Navigating Whiteness, which was really around addressing

sensibilities and your own sensibilities.

And it's a thing that.

There is no way to create a system around it.

It's, there's no way to create a framework for it.

There's no checklist for it.

It legit takes people being intentional introspective and doing the work.

And I think that's what makes it so hard, is because you are asking people

to have a level of humility to say, it's not about me, it's about this

other person, this other thing, this other group, or let me go and learn and

understand and do my best to do that.

And again, have enough humility to make myself uncomfortable, to be able to

learn, and then in learning, be able to take that and move forward with it.

And I think that's the thing we struggle with the most.

A good example at the most basic level is masks, right?

Some people are like, I don't want to wear a mask.

It's against my freedom.

I don't care.

And other folks like, no, you need to wear a mask and it's not just

for you, but it's for everyone around you, it's for your family.

So on and so forth.

But the vast majority of us are very, whether you know

it or not, we're all selfish.

And so unless you've grown up in a society that is innately community oriented.

Honestly, if you look at like places in the Middle East or Africa or

Latin America, like these quite honestly nonwhite countries, that

there's more of a community orient.

And so it's less about I, and more about we.

But us as Americans, we're all about American exceptionalism

and about us and our individual liberties and our individual rights.

And we forget that there are other humans around that we have

to think about and care about.

It's a dilemma of innovation.

To be innovative, you have to do a thing in the corner by yourself and

don't let anyone see it and then rush it to market as quickly as possible.

But in actuality, what you're doing is completely cutting

out a whole subset of people.

We should actually have opinions and thoughts and perspectives on

that thing because it then becomes not only effective and successful,

but also it reduces the harm of it.

And I don't think people really understand yet how to get out of their own way.

And like you remember, like there was a whole wave of empathy in design empathy.

We actually already had this conversation before.

I bring up empathy in these interviews because I have a particular

perspective on it, but the word humility has come up just as often.

And I think even if you have cognitive empathy.

Not just that you're putting on the outfit of somebody that has been

expressing their lived experience to you.

Like that the movie is playing for you, right?

Like the, we were talking about earlier, but that you, from your perspective

can genuinely see and understand the perspective that's aside from you.

That can be beneficial.

But, without the humility to understand how limited your perspective on that

is, when you turn empathy into something that gives you pride or gives you

status or something that makes you different or better than anybody else,

then you've completely lost the plot.

Right?

You're now basically just acting out all of these different kinds of people whose

experiences yet that you've never had.

Yeah.

And it also becomes this thing of I've seen it two ways, but a lot of it really

ends up landing on the area of saviorism.

I learned about these people, I'm going to help them because I

understand how to help them best.

And it's worse.

It becomes really paternalistic.

I think that is the biggest struggle when it comes to this.

People ask all the time, hey, how do we create more equitable products?

How do we do this?

How do we do this, how do we do this?

I can't help but always answer the same way, which is you

need to do some internal work.

Like you need to be introspective.

You can literally have all the questions that you would ever ask about racial

justice and equity and all these other things to make sure you're doing the

right thing from a product perspective.

You can answer all of them thoughtfully.

You can have a whole 600 page dissertation and still create

the most harmful products.

And you will look at it and someone will say, hey, you harmed me.

Or you harmed this whole group of people.

And they'll say, I don't understand how, we did all this work.

Look at all what we did.

It can't be possible.

And then they'll be in complete denial.

And it's because people just don't understand how to do the work.

It's not just doing the work internally, but I think there is always still that

external component of, do you need to have the right people in the room because

you should be able to gut check and be like, hey, these are my thoughts.

What are your thoughts?

Or, do you see this differently?

And you can have a conversation about that as opposed to sometimes being the

token in the room and you having to be the voice of, hey, Black person.

Do you think this is okay?

Is this racist?

No, it's not.

Okay, great.

We're going to do it.

Here's another thing you're forced to one person to be the

monolith for the entire race.

So you have to have an internal work which is paired with having the right

people in the room who have an actual voice that is valued, that has deference,

and that will actually move the needle.

I think there's this idea of needing to be validated for the for the

work that if you are, if you're saying that you're an inclusive person and

you're very empathetic and you've done this thing, and then you're sitting

there waiting to receive your laurels for being a good person, that any criticism

of this just takes the mask right off.

That suddenly I had a tweet about this, of the the woman's screaming

at the cat of the, like the empathetic person does something and

says, actually that's problematic.

And then immediately they're like, oh, I am a good person!

That just shows the ego that's involved in that whole interaction that, it's

not about the person that you ostensibly were supposed to be helping at all.

It's about how good that makes you, and that ends up making

things worse in a lot of cases than if you had ever left it alone.

Yeah.

I was talking to my little brother who's technically my stepbrother

and he was just lamenting on, like he really wants to help his sister.

Cause she she wanted to go to law school, but now it seems like she

just goes to work and then goes home and then that's all she ever does.

And his mother who has a visual impairment and like trying to help her and he like

decided to move back in and make sure he can cook for them and this and that.

And he was like, I just want to make sure they have a better life, they do better.

And I told him like, I just want you to realize that while you think

you're doing the right thing, but what you're really doing is you're selfish.

And what you're doing is that you're saying that this is my view of

what I think they should be doing.

And because of that, I'm going to push them to do the things that I

think, as opposed to saying hey, are they happy with where they are now?

If yes, then let them be happy.

Allow them to live.

Because you feel bad, you feel anxious.

You have this guilt for having some level of success yourself because

you're selfish and you want to reflect yourself in your other family members.

And so in doing so, if they're not reaching that, then you feel

the obligation to help them.

The equivalent of oh, look at these savages, let me help

show them the word of God.

It's the same thing.

I think that we do it in product design and UX all the time.

Like we always had this thing of, oh there's a predetermined path that we

tell people, this is the right path.

This is the golden path.

And that's what you should take.

And then someone comes back and takes a different path and

say, hey, that path is broken.

Or that path doesn't feel right.

And you blame the user.

You blame the person as opposed to understanding that actually,

maybe you did the wrong thing.

And it's like a math class, I used to hate this.

Whereas you have an equation.

Teacher tells you to solve it, you solve it and you get the exact right answer.

But because you didn't use the specific equation that they gave

you to solve it, then it's wrong.

But is the ultimate goal to get the answer or the process to get to the answer?

Because I'm going to get to it as quickly as I can.

And so I think we certainly do look at people who like humans

who use our products the same way.

They will navigate and find things, specific and unique ways.

So how do we create as many avenues to get there without over-bloating the

product and making it overly complex?

And I think there is a balance there.

Like I think Adobe is a good example.

I use Illustrator all the time.

I know there's two ways to get to the the arrow tool.

Either I can hit A, or I can go over to the left bar and click on the thing and

then I'll select it, but at least there's a couple of ways for me to get there.

And whichever one makes sense for me is.

But it doesn't force me down just one specific pathway.

Yeah.

Having multiple different ways to complete something, and that takes

time to understand, to absorb.

And it doesn't happen all at once.

It requires listening.

If it had just been invented and here, it's this is what we have to

offer you, this, that sort of the cathedral model of developing systems,

the results are you get what you get.

And I think that just the fact that software is easy to evolve

compared to construction of buildings or things like that.

That we have a lot more of a responsibility to make sure that we're

reaching people where they're at.

So I want to take one quick break and then I want to come back and talk

about hopes and dreams for the future.

We'll be right back with Timothy Bardlavens.

On the next episode of InEx:

Every year I go and do a little talk on

neurodiversity for the first year psych residents at my university.

And this is the kind of stuff I talked to them about.

It's like, no, you have to like, actually talk to people who have

lived experience about what we want.

And don't assume that psychiatric medication is like

the end all be all of access.

Cause it's, it's really not.

A conversation with Aimi Hamraie.

All right.

We are back with Timothy Bardlavens.

And, um, we're going to start talking about speculative futures.

As we were talking about creating inclusive and equitable environments,

creating inclusive and equitable products, there comes a question of,

how do we create those structures?

Where would they need to be created?

And I broke these up a little bit as, how do you take an organization that's

already operating in a certain way and make the changes that are necessary to

have something where everybody feels that they are participating equally, equitably.

And that's kind of the hard one.

I think maybe we should tackle that first.

Because this is probably if people are listening and thinking about their

organizations, the question that's probably on most of their minds is, what

do I do as an individual contributor?

What do I do as a lower mid-level manager?

Somebody that's not the CEO that could just say, hey, guess what?

We're going to change our way of working to this.

From that bottom up, grassroots, how do we start to instill a sense

of equity in the work that we're doing, in the work that we output?

Okay.

I'm giving you a transparent response.

And it's you don't.

The reason why I say that is I think the problem with the eye is that it

is always aggressive effort, right?

Like it's always a small set of people who want to grow it into a bigger thing.

And then there might be a program that's created, but then HR takes over it and

then it gets bastardized or whatever the case may be, same narrative all the time.

And so, you don't.

I think if you are an individual contributor and you don't believe

in the work that you're doing is equitable, or you don't believe that

the organization itself is equitable, or whatever the case may be, find a new job.

Because you don't have the power to make the changes and you are going

to create so much harm for yourself by trying to go against the grain.

And you might be successful.

You might find allies or you might just be disillusioned or want to leave anyway.

And that's what happened with me the first time I tried to do this work.

I think that if you're a middle manager, then you have a bit more power.

I would think about what is your power within your circle, being your core

team that you're supporting as well as maybe your peers in other allies

that may be around your peers, as well as folks who are within your direct

leadership chain, you could potentially influence in some meaningful way.

I think that where the real change happens, isn't in middle management.

Like at first I thought that was like the layer that was really broken.

But in actuality, I think the layer that's actually broken is in upper

management in like the director level.

Cause VPs are too far.

They don't really know.

They can't really see, they have aspirational visions, but they're not

actually tracking progress usually when it comes to these types of

things and they like the things that they're graded on a very different.

And so where it makes the most difference to me is that director level, because

they do have a closer look at the results.

They have a closer look at the work while also being able to see pretty

broadly across an organization, as opposed to middle management.

They are so deeply focused on the work itself that many times they have to

figure out is this a choice of the work or the people or something else.

And so I think that's the thing to assess is like these

directors, what are you doing?

And how are you setting the example and how are you hiring leaders who

should be doing the work and how are you advocating using your power?

Because directors have a very broad set of powers that aren't, that isn't given

to everyone managers, senior managers.

Okay, can you do within your circle, your sphere of influence

and how can you drive that forward?

Whether it's through your teams or through your peers in their teams sees,

how can you, if you would like, if you feel safe, how do you bubble up concerns

or feedback, and in doing so, see if you have leaders who are responsible of this.

And I see all those things as a preface, but in actuality, again, you

go back to the like the employee life cycle this is a multi-pronged effort.

And so to build equitable products, that means that you have to

not only look at who are you hiring, promoting, or letting go.

But also excuse me, you have to look at that in addition to looking at

where does the work actually come from?

Who's building.

The priorities.

How are those things being gauged?

How are we building metrics?

Do the metrics support, or do they come against what you're trying to achieve?

If they go against it, then how do you build it and bring in other metrics?

So some folks you have, like some companies, you have a

quantitative and qualitative metric.

And so how can you have balance between those two things?

The right organization has done the work to understand what is the quantitative

and qualitative metrics that we want to associate with more equitable products,

as well as more equitable organizations.

We have directors who are hiring leaders who have that right focus and they're

leveraging their power to enact real programs across the organization.

And then we have middle managers who are continuing to grow their sphere of

influence in being able to both bubble down the things that needs to go downward,

but also bubbling up the information that's coming from their teams.

And ultimately That should hopefully influence VPs in the C-suite who

many times aren't telling you what metrics attract and they're

asking you to develop them.

And so the directors should be able to bubble up and say, hey, this is where

we believe it's important and what we believe we're actually doing really well

and where we believe we have gaps in, they can work with VPs to build out that

strategy and then build out the narrative, the corporate narrative around that, which

is then ultimately it becomes external to shareholders, to users, to whomever else.

In my mind, that's actually the right way to approach it.

When it comes to this sort of organizational shifts, it has to

be at the director level which then has the power to drive up and down.

Yeah.

As you were talking about this, I was thinking about the NFL's Rooney rule.

The idea that for hiring a head coach that you needed to basically interview

one racial minority candidate.

And the effect of that has been a lot of, I guess, drive-bys, like courtesy

interviews that have resulted in head coaches' times, if they were Black

and they were hired as a head coach in the NFL being short and not having

the same kinds of opportunities.

These little ideas of quick fixes are the things that stick with me.

There's a culture problem in the league.

And finding one kind of bandaid over that problem.

Doesn't make it go away.

It doesn't get to the heart of the problem.

It's complicated and it takes time to change cultures.

It requires a lot of people to put effort in.

And as you were talking about what it takes out of you and

encouraging people to quit, that's something that I do too, actually.

My number one advice to people who are stagnating in their

careers is, don't set yourself on fire to keep other people warm.

If you are the only one that is trying to make this work inclusive, to try

to diversify an organization, to try to make them focus on something other

than making more money, then, you know, there comes a certain point where you

just have to realize you're beating your head against a wall, and that there are

other places that you are going to be more receptive to that kind of work.

What that resonates most with, in the people that I talk with, are basically

gen Z and the newest generation of people that are coming into the industry because

they have an ethical point of view, generally, that is really well evolved.

They want to be doing work that aligns with their ethical values.

And I don't know if you've seen the same kind of thing, but if you are looking

for a culture change, finding it in people who actually have that passion

and represent an entire generation of people that are going to coming into to

the workplace that you it's going to be hard to pick apart the overall groundswell

of that need for the work that you do to have some kind of ethical alignment.

Have you seen that too?

Absolutely.

Even I'm trying to get better about.

I've heard people talk all the time around hey, I love this company, it's

so mission driven, it's mission driven.

Like I love the mission, its mission.

And for a long time, even personally, I'm like, I don't

really care about the mission.

I just care about am I going to get paid well?

And is it generally just not like killing babies and stuff?

Is it like just generally an okay kind of environment?

But I'm seeing more and more there is this phrase of mission driven and

caring about the mission and caring about the impact that I'm seeing.

And when I'm talking to especially new grads it's so interesting.

Because of course working at Meta, there's a ton of opinions about the company and

its impact on society and et cetera.

And part of the conversation I have to have with people is usually around it's

usually something is around hey, It's sometimes it's not where we are, but

where we can go, or where you want us to go or where you believe we should go.

And you're like, I don't know, it's this dance that I see a lot of

people having to do now of, okay.

I want to be a change maker.

Can I join a company and be able to be the change should that I see.

Or can I'm not really sure about, the more like the ethics of this

or the impact of this on people.

How do I like make that decision?

Or a lot of folks are like, hey, I don't want to go into big tech

because I just don't feel like it does great things for the world.

And I want to do work that is more impactful and so on and so forth.

And then I have to the biggest challenge that I've been having is

really in explaining how to get people, to shift their perspective on it.

Like for example, there's one person who I was talking to, who recently accepted

an offer to Meta on the stories team.

And at first he was like, I'm not sure if I want to join that team because I

really care about helping support people who want to build community, and to help

people build community and connect with people like them, so on and so forth.

And so one thing I had explained to him was if you think about stories, you

think about most young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 give or take.

They're using stories because they like they like the quick sort of access to

like quick snips of sharing their life restore or their journeys, whatever.

And most people, especially small businesses are leveraging stories

as a way to get their workout or get their products out in the world.

And so by you actually supporting that team, there's actually a trickle effect

or like a connection to actual people in the real world who are leveraging the

product in this specific way, to be able to connect with community, to be able to

articulate their story, to be able to sell their products and build their business.

And so I think the biggest challenge I've seen is getting people

to understand a level deeper.

Because I do see gen Z is especially as being really anchored on ethics,

morals, and like the impact on the world.

But I think that part of the challenge is that sometimes they look at in a very

surface level and it's like, how do we, how do I help you take it a level deeper?

Like how do I be a good custodian of the work and have the opportunity

to say there's one level deeper?

And if you go one level deeper and you're doing the work and it doesn't

feel right, then how do you make a decision on what you want to do next?

Because the other part that I try to explain to folks, especially Black

folks who tell me, hey, I just don't want to work for another company where

I'm the only Black person on the team.

And I tell them all the time, sorry, that's just always going

to be the case for the most part.

That's just going to be what it is you have to live with it.

The thing is what does it feel like being on that team?

Are you actually going to be supported, developed, grown, or not?

Have these conversations that these folks want to have they're anchored on.

And I don't think we talk about power enough when it comes to equity, when

it comes to ethics and all these other things, like it's just a power thing.

And so as much as you see this groundswell of gen Z as, especially

who and really I'll say gen Z and the younger millennials, I think you see this

groundswell of these folks, like asking these really hard questions of preexisting

structures and organizations, and like really wanting them to have impact.

But also they get really frustrated quickly because they don't have the power

to enact the change that they believe in.

And that's where the next thing is how do you identify leaders who are doing that

and say, hey, I want to work for them or model myself around them or whatever.

I think that's the thing that has helped me be successful as a hiring manager.

Model what a lot of people want to see.

And so they feel more comfortable with taking a week to come to a place like

Meta that they feel like isn't for them because they see someone like me working

there, who's still doing the work.

So then it becomes, okay, we have a groundswell that they don't have power.

So how do we, as older millennials, gen Xers, boomers, all those looks like,

how do we, and the higher generations or older generations actually start

modeling those behaviors that give them sort of that, that hope that things

can shift and that people do care.

Cause I don't think we communicate enough about how much we do care.

We just do the work in silence and no one really knows that

we're actually doing the work.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's true.

I think it's hard really to even open up to talk about that with

people as they're coming in.

Because there's a sense of the party line, right?

There's the things that you say to your employees and not

getting into the personal stuff.

And that kind of reinforces that barrier.

The safety to actually extend yourself in that space is one thing.

But also if everybody is kind of in their own box, having their own

issues and everyone is uncomfortable expressing them to one another, then

the stagnation there can be unbearable.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's such an interesting thing.

This is such an interesting phenomenon and sorta like shift that we're

seeing happen in the workforce and how people approach work.

And I'm curious to see how it shows up in like in the near future, because

I would say in the next decade, not near future, I say the next decade,

because I feel as though a lot of us in the like millennial generation.

Are like really many of us are like really annoyed with, let's say,

especially folks who are in the more baby boomers, boomer generation, and

even like the older gen Xers because we're like, hey, get out of the way.

We want to be there now.

We are ready to take the reins.

And then again, interested to see how, when millennials are more solidly

in those executive and C-suite roles and you have more gen Z who are in

those like middle management roles.

It's just to see how the industry changes, or if it changes, or if there's some

kind of reversion that happens of, I learned from this leader what to do.

So now I'm going to do that thing.

And it just becomes like a continuation.

Yeah, I'm fascinated about this.

And I think that as long as we're not sort of ruled by crypto barons by that point,

I'm really interested in the evolution.

Like, what are the structures that need to stay, and what need to go?

I want to wrap up by giving you the opportunity to highlight people that you

think of that our listeners should be looking into, people you think are doing

great work, that are doing inclusive, equitable work, advocacy, research?

Yeah.

There's so many people out in the world.

I would say of course I'd always shout out.

My best friend first and foremost, Antionette Carroll.

If people don't know her, then you're living under a rock

because she is literally the best.

And then I'll also say there's a really, an amazing person named Demma Rosa

Rodriguez, who she's the head of community safety, trust and safety at Meta.

But even before that she'd built the team and the equity engineering team

at Google, like amazing person to just know of and then, there's us co also

Vivianne Castillo, who's like the best.

She, she's now leading full time, HmntyCntrd, and which

is an amazing organization.

And I think it's really great if nothing else, like I've learned a ton just about

like, how to think about organizational trauma, organizational betrayal.

What does that even look like?

How do you heal from it?

How do you like all those things are just like really interesting.

It's just like different.

Like, she approaches a lot of these topics, especially when it comes to

people's lived experiences within organizations from the place of therapy,

because she used to be a therapist.

And so she has a very clinical way of looking at it while also mixing in

her experience, coming from a theology background will also look coming through

like her research background and working in these big corporations and so amazing.

Like even just go to LinkedIn or to Twitter and just look at some of the

video clips from it, just amazing and really intriguing conversation.

We'll put links in to the show notes.

Yes.

Three amazing Black women.

Thank you so much for participating.

I really appreciate all our conversations, but I think this is

the first one that's been recorded.

So, thank you.

And we have more to come.

Yes.

I'm looking forward to seeing what's next for you and,

yeah, we're going to keep in touch.

Thank you, thank you.

That's our show.

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