\n\nOur podcast today is brought to you by string cheese! (It can be eaten by pulling strips from the cheese along its length and eating those strings.) Our hosts are Jay Hanlon, David Fullerton, and Joel Spolsky, joined today by guest Roberta Arcoverde.\n\nRoberta is visiting NYC on vacation, and she's obviously doing a terrible job taking time off because here she is at work. Roberta joined the team in March 2014 and has been working on Careers ever since. She's currently our only employee in Brazil. (We used to have another employee in Brazil, but he moved to Ithaca, which has Cornell University, rain, and \u003Ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca_Hours\">its own currency\u003C/a>.)\n\nAnyway. Roberta's not from Ithaca. She's from Rio de Janeiro and she works on the Careers team, where her first big project was our internal Candidate Query Language (CQL). As a computer science researcher working with languages and compilers, she was really pumped to work on this project. It's what allows \u003Ca href=\"https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies?utm_source=so-owned&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=dev-c4al&utm_content=c4al-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">employers\u003C/a> to do advanced searches on our candidate database.\n\nMore recently, Roberta's working on rewriting our message processor, Back Office. It used to be written over \u003Ca href=\"https://servicestack.net/\">ServiceStack\u003C/a>, which we're phasing out, even though we love it (and Demis used to work with us). Discussion of ServiceStack and what it's good at (and where it falls short for us) ensues. And \u003Ca href=\"https://github.com/StackExchange/StackExchange.Redis\">StackExchange.Redis\u003C/a>. And \u003Ca href=\"http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html\">Wasabi\u003C/a>. And \u003Ca href=\"https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn\">Roslyn\u003C/a>.\n\nMoving on...\n\nRoberta's been working remotely from Brazil since she started with us, and it's her first time working for a remote company. At Stack Exchange we \u003Ca href=\"http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/02/why-we-still-believe-in-working-remotely/\">try really hard to make remote culture work\u003C/a>. Now we do stuff like Remote Bev Bash, where we get everyone to grab a beverage and hop in a Google Hangout together on Fridays. (\u003Ca href=\"http://stackoverflow.com/users/115866/balpha\">balpha\u003C/a> figured out how to rig two hangouts together so we don't have to worry about participant limits.) One time we made origami, and one time \u003Ca href=\"http://stackoverflow.com/users/2/geoff-dalgas\">Dalgas\u003C/a> joined the bev bash from a pub. It's how we make remote work work.\n\n(Also, very importantly, Roberta's going to get another cat, and name it either Donut or Chelsea (or Alan).)\n\nRoberta didn't apply to work here when she first saw the listing (even though she knew David worked here). She knew we were a great company making a product admired by many, but felt hesitant about applying because \u003Ca href=\"http://stackexchange.com/about/team\">the team page\u003C/a> made the dev team looked like a boys' club. (This was June 2013, when the dev team was 100% male.) Fortunately for us, she changed her mind - thanks in large part to \u003Ca href=\"http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/11/podcast-54-the-one-with-all-the-anachronisms/\">our podcast with guest Sara Chipps\u003C/a> which reassured her that we're aware of our representation problems and we want to make them better. We've learned a lot about how to represent our open jobs over the past few years, and we hope folks from all walks of life feel confident \u003Ca href=\"http://stackexchange.com/work-here\">applying to work with us\u003C/a>.\n\n(We're relieved that Roberta joined our team and discovered that we are not jerks. Well, most of us aren't.)\n\n\u003Ca href=\"http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015\">Here's a link to the results of our developer survey\u003C/a>, in case you got to this part in the conversation and wondered where it was.\n\nRoberta's hesitance to apply with us isn't surprising given lots of her past experiences with programming while female. Example: at a conference last summer, which she attended as a representative of Stack Overflow wearing a Stack Overflow t-shirt, one of the conference \u003Cem>organizers\u003C/em> assumed she was a booth babe. Lots of people visiting the Stack Overflow booth addressed their technical questions to Gabe, \u003Ca href=\"http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/08/introducing-gabe-the-smiling-community-manager/\">who does \u003Cem>not\u003C/em> work as a developer here\u003C/a>. This is the kind of thing that happens all day every day in real life and on the Internet.\n\n\u003Cimg src=\"http://stackoverflow.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/iMePz.jpg\" alt=\"Roberta 'Not A Booth Babe' Arcoverde\" />\n\nAnother relevant link: \u003Ca href=\"https://medium.com/@sailorhg/coding-like-a-girl-595b90791cce\">Coding Like a Girl\u003C/a>.\n\nSo, how can we fix it? How can we make sure we're not turning more amazing programmers like Roberta away from our company because of our image? For starters, we're trying to be more open and public about our commitment to the idea that diverse teams create better products. We toss around some ideas about changes we could make on the sites to improve diversity and visibility, too. What it boils down to is that if you can see people who look like you doing a thing (being president, working for Stack Exchange, etc), you're more likely to believe you can do it, too. (And that's why Joel will never go to a \u003Ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Graceffa\">Joey Graceffa\u003C/a> meetup.)\n\nOne thing we need to work on is shouting at each other less on hangouts, because not everybody likes to make decisions that way. We have a lot of healthy disagreement, and we're proud of that, but we have to figure out better ways to do that without making everyone feel like they have to defend themselves.\n\nSo what can we get better at? We put Roberta on the spot but she'd rather talk about all the stuff we're working on so far. If you (the podcast listeners) have ideas, we're always happy to hear them in the comments or \u003Ca href=\"http://meta.stackexchange.com\">on meta\u003C/a>.\n\nThanks for listening to Stack Exchange Podcast #64, brought to you by string cheese. 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