Podcast 252: a conversation on diversity and representation
This week we chat with two Stack Overflow employees, Ian Allen and Syeeda Briddell, co-chairs of the company’s Black and Brown (BNB) affinity group. Ian is an engineer working on our talent product and Syeeda is a senior sales executive on the Advertising team.
EPISODE NOTES
Syeeda and Ian talk with Sara and Paul about how affinity groups came to exist within Stack Overflow, and how the BNB group helped to lead the design of the company’s short and long response to issues of systemic racism. You can find more about Stack’s plans here.
More generally, the group discusses how people at all levels of their organizations are putting a renewed emphasis on diversity and inclusion, and how individual contributors, managers, and executives can come together to find new ways to listen and learn.
You can find Ian on Twitter and Github. He has also written for the Stack Overflow blog. You can find Syeeda’s images and writing on Instagram and more about her education and career on LinkedIn.
Our lifeboat badge for this episode goes out to IsVForAll, who answered the following question: How to check if a value exists in an object using JavaScript?
A written transcript of this podcast episode is available here.
Tags: bulletin, stack overflow, stackoverflow, the stack overflow podcast
2 Comments
Sad to hear that the company has systemic racism in it, especially to the point that people have to form affinity groups.
Racism at work is like carrying a label in your back that everyone can see and you know you have it, but you can’t get rid of it and probably don’t even want to.
It’s uncomfortable to be treated as having an undesirable label that others perceived as bad, and you know they see it that way; however, this label has value to you. It’s not the label what bothers you, but how others see it. They feel sorry for you, while you feel proud.
They treat you different because they don’t see you for whom you are. And you just can’t stand it.
All we need it’s to talk about it and stop all the silliness.