DEV Community: Sue Loh

Performance, security, and ethics: influencing effectively

Sue Loh — Sat, 28 Mar 2020 21:05:22 +0000

Performance engineers need to be an interesting mix of data-lovers and people-whisperers.

A month ago I had an interesting conversation with an old friend. He worked on security for a long time, and is now part of the small group of people in our ethics team working to spread good ethics practices. He knows me from my long history of working on performance. Up to now most of his ethics work has involved working with teams who are enthusiastic about finding and fixing ethical mistakes they didn’t know about. But he’s starting to go beyond that, pushing diligence work (things like “find the biases in your data,” or “think carefully about how bad actors can abuse your platform”) onto teams that are less interested in it.

Engineers: “We’re all trying to be ethical people, so we’re doing ‘ethics’ correctly already, right?”

Narrator: “They weren’t doing it correctly.”

My friend thought maybe my history on the performance team – influencing other people to work on performance problems – would give me some perspective on how he could influence other people to complete the ethics work he wanted them to do.

It turns out that people who work on performance, security and ethics at software companies have some things in common. You’re an expert in something the rest of the engineers are not. In fact, the rest of the engineers will give lip service to the value of what you work on, but they don’t really want to work on it themselves. They vaguely hope they’re doing it right, vaguely fear the consequences of doing it wrong, and generally compartmentalize it away. We engineers, we’re sometimes a little too good at abstraction and encapsulation. But sometimes people need to pay attention. They need a wake-up call. So, you end up needing to influence others, and that’s not always easy.

Principle 1: Those people are humans, not robots. Appealing to pure logic is usually the wrong approach. When you are convinced that other people need to work on performance [or security or ethics], and they continue to resist all your logical arguments, it usually boils down to a couple of root causes.

They are not convinced the work is as valuable as whatever else they’re planning to do.
They are scared of the work.

When you’re the expert and you need to get others to wake up to your message, you can’t come down on them like a police force, expecting compliance. When you know you have the moral high ground, lording over people is the exact wrong way to gain their willing cooperation. To be effective at protecting performance [or security or ethics], you need to be a good partner. That means you need to be good at dismantling the two root causes of their resistance…

Setting priority – To convince someone to do work, you need to show them the value of the result in terms they understand. Sometimes you also need to demonstrate that you understand the value of the OTHER things they want to do, and STILL think your task is more valuable. This means you can’t just talk at them, you have to ask questions and listen. You need to learn enough about the world of that person across the table, to understand their priorities, their goals. You need to let them know that you understand and value what they’re trying to accomplish, too. Then show them how your task fits in.

Removing fear – Remember, you are the expert here. To you, this work is understandable and finite. To them, it is a hairy scary monster. They’re don’t understand what they’ll have to do, and they’re afraid it will become an awful drain on their time and energy. Once again, you have to ask questions. Ask about their capabilities, their assumptions about the work, and their scheduling concerns. As much as possible, have the process documented before you even approach them. Whenever people get confused, fix the documentation/process. Have an easy way for them to ask questions, and be responsive when they do. Be a good partner! They’ll be more willing to do their share of the work if they feel like you’re there sharing responsibility. That doesn’t mean do the work for them – they need to learn and you don’t have the time to or expertise to get into everyone’s code. But be there for them when they’re stuck.

Principle 2: You are human, too. I learned something about myself when I was on the Windows performance team. This will surprise nobody who knows me, but I tend to be soft-hearted. As a result, I let people get away with too much. I fall for their sob-stories and let them delay or shift responsibility when it would be better to hold firm or escalate to get external support.

But for years I served on a performance impact review-board, and found that my teammates on the board were different. We had some hard-liners that would not let even the smallest details go – things that really were not impactful. Together, we balanced each other. I’d convince them to let go of the small things, and they’d keep me from letting important things go. We knew we had a good-cop/bad-cop dynamic, and we used it to check ourselves. We worked on keeping interpersonal friction at a minimum, because our relationships were built on mutual respect. We tried to be united and clear in front of other teams. We had a policy to always do review meetings with at least 2 board-members, so none of us were left to operate on our own. This wasn’t needless process; we all preferred it that way.

You probably know whether you’re the softie or the hard-liner. Find someone you trust to balance you out, and always work together. That way your requests to other teams will be firm but fair.

Engineering Diversity

Sue Loh — Fri, 31 Aug 2018 20:49:49 +0000

The way we talk about engineers impacts whether people try engineering, how confident they feel, and our perception of their competence.

Sue Loh has been developing operating systems at Microsoft for over 19 years, and is now a Principal Software Engineer working on Windows performance. She has also been participating in and running programs to get more high school students into computer science for over a decade. This talk is part of her http://EvilPlanToSaveThe.World! She also plays with and organizes for the Seattle women’s ice hockey community, which helps her have the energy to keep up with her 3 active children.

This DEV Live Stream was recorded on August 28, 2018
Join the next Live Stream. See all upcoming events here.

Engineering Diversity

Sue Loh — Wed, 11 Jul 2018 04:00:03 +0000

The way we talk about engineers impacts whether people try engineering, how confident they feel, and our perception of their competence.

My TIM Talk

About a month ago I attended my 20-year college reunion, for which I was nominated to give a “TED Talk” style presentation. (It was called a “TIM Talk” because I went to MIT and our mascot is a beaver named Tim – get it?) I spoke about how we need to change the way we talk about engineering and science in order to bring more people in and keep them there. You can check it out here: [2018 Class of 1998 TIM talks – Engineering Diversity]

The entire video was 5 talks; mine is from 32:00 to 51:00 in the overall video. It actually turned out quite well, except for some messed-up slide formatting.

In Written Form

This is not a transcript of my talk, but it is an adaptation of the content for blog format.

My subject here is “Engineering Diversity,” and it is intentional that “engineering” can be used both as a noun and a verb. I’ll be discussing how to engineer a world with more diversity in engineering.

The last few minutes of my talk were a discussion of data about women in computer science, which I am omitting here. That is partly covered by my prior blog post here (https://EvilPlanToSaveThe.World/2018/02/22/fascinating-stuff-in-our-software-pipeline-numbers/), and I’ll write more on that subject soon.

Introduction

Let’s get warmed up with an illustration. Consider the pygmy marmoset.

I love babies, but OK, these animals don’t happen to be that photogenic. In fact, they’re practically wookies. So, in this picture you see an ugly little baby and its ugly… now stop yourself, and think about how you finished that sentence in your mind.

If you were thinking “mother,” you just proved a point for me. Male pygmy marmosets are the super-dads of the animal world.

Now let’s unravel what it means, that most of us would automatically assume that this was the baby’s mother. Women are naturally the default nurturers. Men are not expected to be the primary nurturers, or in many (animal) cases won’t participate at all.

You can argue about how much of this is nature vs. nurture, but it doesn’t matter. In a world where we aspire to let women & men become equal partners, we cannot be blind to the biases we all carry inside us. It’s part of being human. It doesn’t make us bad people, but if we deny this part of our nature, we can’t be better than it, either.

You see, I care just as much about raising my son to be a great father and partner someday, as I care about raising my daughters to believe they can choose to be scientists or engineers. Our biases have negative impacts for both men and women, though the side effects are different. So when I look at pictures of animals with my kids, I try very hard to be fair: to call that parent a dad just as often as I call it a mom. The ugly truth is that it’s hard, though: even when I don’t slip up (and I do!), a lot of drawings are subtly gendered, or titled against me. But we aren’t slaves to nature. We have the power to control the stories we tell each other, if only we try. And those stories have power to influence how we behave.

How we talk about engineers

Let’s examine the story we tell about the kind of person that becomes a scientist or engineer. I would posit that the message we’ve been sold for a long time is that they are:

White
Male
Socially awkward geeks
Who love science/engineering as an end.

In pop culture, almost every example you find will have 3 out of 4 of these traits.

I am not saying white males are bad, or even that nobody wants to change the message. On the contrary, I have faith that a lot of people are trying to change stereotypes away from the first two bullet points. To bring balance. But it is going to hurt a little more to talk about the second two.

Ask yourself, why do we cling to geek culture? Does it give us power, to feel a bit like an outcast? Is it a reaction to something? Are we banding together to exclude some perceived enemy? Scientists and engineers aren’t really any more socially awkward on average than anyone else. We’re actually a pretty well-adjusted bunch. Why do we accept an image to the contrary? Is it so important to us that we’d cling to that image, even after realizing that it pushes some people away? A co-worker told me a week ago that her son chose not to enter computer science because he felt it was only for nerds. Is that worth whatever we gain from calling ourselves nerds?

Secondly, who can love a career? Surely, there are always a set of people who feel a natural affinity for a subject. But there are also the people who come to love it while pursuing other interests. Science and engineering are not everyone’s first love – but a lot more people can come to love them.

This thought came to me when I was reading an article about a guy in sewage treatment. Nobody aspires to a career in sewage treatment. But he was talking about how he started out just thinking of it as a job, and realized one day that he loved it. And this thought really hit home for me when I started talking to high school students about how to apply computer programming to fields of their choice. I realized that every single career field can be enriched by building software to solve their problems – I challenge you to find one that can’t – and what’s more, we NEED those cross-discipline experts to build the world of tomorrow. As our world is changing, we need more scientists and engineers, and more people need those engineering jobs.

The subtle effect of messaging

Attitude is everything: is the glass half empty or half full?

When you see yourself as conforming to a stereotype, when you perceive yourself as being part of the in-group, you gain confidence from that self-image. As a result, when you hit a common everyday problem, you’ll tell yourself that it’s a little thing, that you can solve it, and you power through.

When you see yourself as counter to a stereotype, as being in the out-group, you may not realize it, but it is easy for you to similarly lose confidence from that perception. When you hit the same everyday problem, it becomes that final proof you were secretly expecting, that you weren’t cut out for this task – and you quit. Even if you don’t quit, your confidence is far more shaken.

This is independent of competence. Two people with the same competence, one deriving reinforcement from popular messaging and the other deriving a negative self-image, can end up with two completely different outcomes. Self-perception is crucial to the choices we make, and it makes a difference in our success too.

Without confidence, someone:

Won’t apply to a job;
Won’t ask for a raise / promotion;
Won’t negotiate salaries as aggressively;
Assumes the blame when things go wrong, but credits others when things go right;
Is perceived as less competent by their customers / peers / superiors (including you!).

Notice how many of those bullet points commonly apply to women.

Let’s dwell on that last bullet point for another moment. Other people associate your projected confidence with competence, when it’s sincere. Genuine confidence is believed, while people can usually see through bluster. But on the flip side, a lack of confidence is also associated with a lack of competence. You’ve probably heard the saying: “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re probably right.” Well, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, everyone else believes you.” Confidence can keep you in a field, and get you rewards; a lack of confidence can lead you to drop out, and make it harder to get those rewards. The stereotypes and media images we all internalize, convey (or don’t) a certain amount of privilege we don’t even realize is there. And it isn’t always about race, or gender.

What can you do about it?

I believe most people are fundamentally good, and want to do the right thing. I also believe that “fairness” is a hard problem, and most people don’t even know where to begin. What power do we have? We start by not being jerks – and that’s a good start, but it’s not enough. So let’s talk about what you can do, that will make a difference.

Step 1 is to have an impact on the people around you: those you see and work with on a daily basis.

Look around you. Do you know anyone who lacks some confidence? The answer is yes, I’m sure it is. Build their confidence. Help them to see how awesome they are. Tell them when they’ve done a good job, and thank them for it. Tell them you want them on your team. Tell them they’d be awesome at that open job you just heard about. Help them pick themselves up off the floor after a defeat, and show them why they need to keep trying. Whatever it takes, help build their self-image. Find role models they identify with, and make them visible. Set them up with a mentor. Have them mentor someone else, through which they’ll realize how much they’ve got to offer.

Also, be fair. Advocate for those who wouldn’t advocate for themselves. And whenever you make a decision that impacts anyone’s career, whether it’s to give them that job/pay/promotion OR NOT, write down your reasons. Write them down. I know this sounds like I’m asking a lot. But writing down your reasons on hiring/pay/promotion decisions will help you compensate for your biases, and your own tendency to believe others’ confidence (or lack thereof). I know this takes precious time, and is no fun. I know how hard it is, but it’s part of being fair. If you don’t have time to put in the work to be fair, you risk being part of the problem!

Step 2 is to have an impact on the wider group of young people you influence, both directly and indirectly.

Bring more people in.

Here’s the part where I suggest we all stop calling ourselves geeks and nerds. Ouch, sorry! But we don’t need that label. Let it go. I promise that you can keep doing all the things you like doing. But I want you to try to internalize how normal you are. If we can get rid of the geek/nerd label we assign to scientists and engineers, we remove some artificial barriers. It’s not true that only the kids with the best grades can succeed in science or engineering. Book-learning is not everything, and grades don’t tell you everything about a person. We need people with ideas, with imagination, who understand all kinds of people, who understand the problems that need solving. It’s also not true that the kids with the best grades are all interested in science and engineering. Let’s let them decide what they want to try, instead of assigning labels.

And we need to stop talking about science & engineering as something to love for their own sake. Of course there are lots of people who love science, or engineering, purely because it draws them in. They think it’s cool and they want to share that love. It’s OK! It’s great to have that love, and to want to share it. But someone who doesn’t initially share that love, may be pushed away while you’re trying to share. If they don’t feel that same attraction that you do, they’ll assume it’s not for them. Those are the people you have to find another approach with. Know your audience, and talk to them about what they love, not what you love. Tell them how science and engineering can be applied to what they want to do. I challenge you, actually, to find a field that can’t be enriched by the involvement of some passionate scientists and engineers. As technology disrupts all sorts of traditional careers, it will be more and more important for people to be working across fields, applying technology to the pursuits they love. They don’t have to love science or engineering, but they have to love what they’re accomplishing with it.

If you could change the way you talk about science and engineering, about who can do it, who can love it, how it can benefit them, you would impact the lives not only of the young people you directly interact with, but also those you impact indirectly. Young people will talk to their friends. Other adults will talk to other young people. You can touch a lot of lives. Give it a try.

Step 3 is to have an impact on the whole world.

I know, I’m not asking for much, am I? It sounds impossible, but it’s not. Each one of us is participating in the popular narratives of the world around us. We are surrounded by media: books, movies, ads, blogs, comics, theater, music, podcasts, radio. We choose with our eyes, ears, and wallets. We promote by discussing, liking, sharing, re-tweeting. We also participate in the creation of new works. We might produce new works ourselves, but even if we don’t, we know people who do. We participate in their creation by talking to them about what they’re doing, by reading or watching and giving them feedback, by commenting and encouraging them to continue. As we participate in bringing more creations into the world, we need to be conscious of the narratives we’re setting up or tearing down. Think about how inclusive these works are, and do what you can to involve everyone. Think about the impacts I outlined above, on how popular narratives can set someone up to succeed or fail. Let’s help everyone succeed.

This, my friends, is why I am working on my “Evil Plan to Save the World.” To create a new story of what some young people might do with computer science. To make my own attempt to change the norms. I don’t want to write white men out of the picture. But I do want to write a wider diversity of people in, not just of race and gender, but of motivation and personality. We need all races, all genders, all political persuasions, all economic backgrounds, all people participating in science and engineering. The engineers of the future should represent the people of the future. That is my goal.

In Summary

I have only about 10-15 years until my own children start entering the work force. But I have less time than that to convince their peers to go with them. It’s not enough to empower my children to do whatever they want to do. That will only change the future of a few people, and it will not change the environment they work in. I need to convince a whole generation that they’re capable of becoming scientists and engineers.

So I need you to help me. You. You have more power to make a difference than you realize. The first step is to get involved; to make conscious choices about how you participate in the cultural narrative. To speak about the world as you want it to be, not as it is. That, my friends, can ultimately change the world.

Fascinating stuff in our software pipeline numbers

Sue Loh — Tue, 10 Jul 2018 08:09:29 +0000

Capacity of the pipeline

The US federal government has been gathering and publishing statistics about education annually since… forever? There’s a useful collection of data out at https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/current_tables.asp. This includes diversity data about the pipeline that’s producing trained software engineers for our industry.

Check this out: We’re currently awarding an all-time high number of CS degrees. Awesome!

Over time, we’ve gone through a couple of peaks and valleys. There was a decline in the early 2000s – probably related to the dot-com bust. Not surprising. But what’s that peak in 1986? Answering that question took me down an unexpected rabbit-hole, and the answer is fairly fascinating!

A pretty credible-sounding explanation is offered by Dr. Eric Roberts of Stanford, here: http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/CSCapacity.pdf The declines in 1986 and 2004 both trail events in 1984 and 2002, due to the lag-time as students filter through the pipeline. The 2002 “event” was indeed the dot-com bust, and even though the industry itself recovered fairly quickly, student interest in CS cooled as the prevailing (but incorrect) perception came to be that jobs were hard to get and being shipped overseas. (I observed this myself first-hand, when I visited local high schools in Atlanta around 2006 and spoke to the students about software careers. They all thought there were no jobs, when the reality was quite the opposite!)

In 1984, the events were entirely different. In the time leading up to 1984, the new wave of personal computing, and especially the advent of the Mac, drove excitement in this new field. The field itself was growing quickly, and demand for software engineers outstripped the supply. Meanwhile, fairly understandably, academic departments moved slower than industry. Professors and teaching capacity were not added fast enough to keep up with the growing pool of interested students. Added to that, demand for industry professionals was so strong, companies hired away many of the professors who were teaching those students. The academic capacity to teach students collapsed, and departments had no choice but to institute stricter limits on the CS student population. Competition went up as capacity to produce CS graduates went down.

Dr. Roberts also issues another dire warning: the current growth curve is likewise un-sustainable. Once again, our academic departments are not growing as fast as student demand. Something is going to have to give: either we need to grow CS departments faster (increase capacity), or go through another industry decline (decrease demand), or eventually physics dictates that we’ll hit another collapse in production of CS students.

Diversity in the pipeline

Of course, I am interested in how diversity fared over this time. The NCES data had a breakdown by sex but not race/ethnicity. So I graphed the same data set, split by gender, and it blew my mind!

Those peaks and valleys did bad things for our female population. In the beginning, the percentage of women in CS steadily increased for 13 years, until 1984, where it hit its all-time high at an amazing 37%! I never knew we had that level of female participation in the past! When the first CS drop happened at the capacity collapse, the percentage of women declined from 37% to a level around 27% for another decade. Then when the second CS drop happened after the dot-com bust, the percentage declined again to a steady-state around 18% for another decade. (And this is where I start getting especially angry, because I entered the work-force in 1999, and can’t help but feel like some of it happened on my watch!) Even if you ignore the percentages and look just at the pure number of degrees being awarded to women, despite the record number of CS degrees being awarded today, we haven’t yet reached the numbers we awarded to women in 1986 and 2003. We’re still off by about 30% from our peak female degree production.

Curiously, the first percentage-drop started in 1984, when CS-education capacity started collapsing, not 1986, when its effect became apparent on total awarded degrees. The number of women getting degrees was still going up for a couple of years, but the percentage dropped during that time. Women were a leading indicator of the collapse. Those women who never got their degrees in 1985/1986 might have been casualties to the increased competition for CS program space. But that is pure conjecture. There was no female lead on the drop during the dot-com bust.

I would love to understand why the percentages of women dropped at both events. As I mention above, the decline that started in 1984 may have been due to increased competition in CS degree-programs. Maybe it was a side-effect of implicit bias in an imperfect meritocracy; maybe women either self-evaluated themselves as unable to compete or decided they had no appetite for the competition, and opted out. Likely a mix of all of these. The decline starting in 2003 did not involve real competition; in fact degree programs were dropping in size so likely easing in competitiveness. However there was a public perception that software jobs were scarce and being sent overseas. So there was still a strong perceived competition in the software industry. That does not sound entirely satisfactory, either; I could believe competition driving women out during the contraction phases of CS programs, but it should not have kept them out during the growth phases.

One thing I do know, though. If we do go through another contraction in CS degree production, we can’t afford to let the percentage of women slide again with it!

I’ve been trying to decide how worried to be about this. On one hand, if I’m right that increases in competition drive women away, then there’s a risk that we’ll slide further. On the other hand, we could have bottomed-out to the bare minimum number of women who don’t shy from competition (which means these are a pretty premium group of employees – scratch that, CEOs – y’all!). The industry is also different than it was in 1984 and even 2002. In 1984, we were not only ignorant of imbalances, but open and flagrant unfairnesses were everywhere and widely accepted. In 2002, the flagrant unfairnesses were gone, but there was an awful lot of ignorance and indifference still. I truly believe that now in 2018 people are a lot more aware and care more. During another academic contraction, there’d be a lot more attention to preventing another backslide in gender equality. So overall, I’m cautiously optimistic that at least we won’t backslide.

Clawing our way back to 37% and beyond… Well, we have a lot of work to do.

A novel to break software developer stereotypes

Sue Loh — Mon, 16 Oct 2017 05:41:33 +0000

I would like to share my side project with this community. I call it, "My Evil Plan to Save the World." I am very interested in increasing diversity in the software community. For the last couple of years, I've been telling myself that one great way to bring more people into computer science, and to fight stereotypes that encourage people to drop out, is to write a novel for young adults, showing a diverse group of people who rock at CS. Think of it like this: after Hunger Games came out, lots of girls started taking up archery. We need that for CS!

So I've been working on ideas for a while, and figured out a plot and characters that I think are really interesting and exciting. But ya know, I'm a software developer, not a professional writer. Not to mention, still working full-time and raising kids now too. So now I have a ghostwriter picking up the reins and making this thing really happen! She and I have been working together on it for a couple of weeks, and she is truly making it great.

I have a Kickstarter promoting the project, though to be honest, the point isn't really to raise money. I'm trying to get the word out and build a community of people who are going to want to read the book and share it with the young adults in their communities. So anyway, you can check my page to find out more. I would love it if you guys would help spread the word, track our progress, and check out the book someday! After it's published, the proceeds of the novel will be donated to related charities. (I also welcome suggestions for good causes!)

Check out the Kickstarter

Thanks for listening,

Sue