Diversity & Inclusion in Nested Engineering

Diversity & inclusion are extremely important to us in the Nested engineering team. We recognise both the broad array of cultural / performance / team benefits and the ethical responsibility to promote diversity as a concern for startups.

This page provides an up to date view of all the initiatives we are currently pushing forward as an engineering group to action this. Diversity isn’t just a “People Team responsibility”, it is everyone’s responsibility and publishing this ensures we hold ourselves accountable as a team. This covers:

• Our Current Team
• Tackling Bias
• Promoting Inclusion
• Investing in the Community

Our Current Team (as of 08/18)

N.b. There are many forms of diversity that we consider and actively push to promote (gender, sexual orientation, age, disability etc). Although we strive to ensure we meet the needs of all demographics & groups, at our current team size our team metrics only cover our representative score for the larger demographic groups, namely sex and race.

08/18: With our current team, we are well below the industry average and where we would like to be w.r.t. diversity of the sexes. A recent discussion raised by one of our female product managers at all-hands highlighted how this could impact the feeling of inclusion, leading to a number of initiatives to challenge this.

Tackling Bias

Our team has taken a number of steps to ensure we tackle any systemic / unconscious / circumstantial biases in our technical recruitment.

• Software Language Agnostic Interviews
  Our primary language of choice is Elixir, it’s awesome for creating well written & fast services. As a new language (in relative terms) it’s not so great for diversity and presents a circumstantial bias. This is why we’ve taken steps to ensure we attract, fairly evaluate and invest in training people from any language background.
• Interview Scoring
  Consistent structure and transparent calibration are key to addressing unconscious bias in interviews. We have introduced a consistent structure and are introducing scoring in technical interviews to push this. Interviewers provide feedback independently before discussing candidates, to avoid cross-interviewer influence.
• Interview Panel Selection
  We strive to tackle unconscious bias with training and structured scoring, but we know this can never be a 100% fix. When possible, we ensure appropriate demographics are represented on our interviewer panels.
• Metrics
  We’re a data-driven company with our product, we know this gets the best results. The same is true for diversity. We’re now introducing metrics to track acceptance rates at different hiring steps, broken down by demographic, to measure and highlight anything that may indicate bias.

Promoting Inclusion

We recognise our starting point as a team (predominantly white male) can unintentionally lead to a feeling of isolation if we aren’t proactive on inclusion.

• Equal Pay
  We take a hard-line approach to this and guarantee that all salaries are fixed across the same level*, regardless of sex, gender or any other grouping.
• Flexible hours
  Not obvious at first, but fixed hours from 9–5 can act to exclude or neglect the needs of different groups (be it religious, family oriented etc). We allow for flexible working hours to ensure we accommodate individual needs.
• Language
  It’s a simple one but something we are trying to tackle. Terms like “guys” and phrases like “man up” can do a lot to create a one-sided culture. We use https://textio.com/ to filter written language, and take it on ourselves to self-regulate our chat around the office / in meetings.
• Office Space
  Our office is fully accessible, with de-gendered bathrooms each with sanitary packs.

These are a great starting point, as our team grows we’ll keep pushing more efforts to ensure we build a great working environment for anyone coming in.

Investing in the Community

Discussed above, we’re aware tech has an innate demographic slant. It isn’t enough to lean on this as a justification for low levels of diversity, it’s our responsibility to contribute to building diversity in the community.

• Training
  We contribute to training the community, be it our own on site training or our developers who’ve contributed to programs like ElixirBridge. Efforts like these help to push forward the community as a whole (and attract a more diverse group to Elixir, which we love as a language!)
• Awareness
  Our team have attended a number of diversity-oriented conferences over the past year, to raise awareness and show support.

These are really just the beginning, we recognise the issue and know there’s a lot more we’ll need to do as our team grows. We’re making progress but would love to hear your feedback. What puts you off applying to places? What strategies have you seen that have driven inclusion in a meaningful and sincere way?

*For internal context — “same level” includes TRM in the definition of level