🥊The Good Fight : diversity, promotion and real inclusion

The Allyance newsletter provides many useful references on recruitment, diversity and inclusion.

Good morning everyone!

✨ The Allyance wishes you a fabulous 2024 ✨ The team - Belody, Léa, Morgane, Alexandre & I - shares its wishes for an amazing year :

• less tech bros 🫡

• more inclusion 🫡

• more accountability 🫡

• more books, podcasts, conferences 🫡

Here is a video wishing you a Bonne année in French! Whichever the language we use, we want to keep supporting your diversity and inclusion efforts.

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✅ The Allyance newsletter provides many useful references on recruitment, diversity and inclusion. What follows are some articles about DEI being challenged in the C-suite, disability in the workplace, tech women being promoted, landing a tech role in a FAANG company and coaching.

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😬 The fight over D.E.I. in the C-suite

The DEI debate is far from over. I have been thinking a lot about this article from The New York Times. The eviction of Claudine Gay as Harvard president has started a wider conversation about diversity, equity and inclusion policies at universities and in business. Even if she resigned following plagiarism allegations, a broader debate emerged and DEI detractors are feeling emboldened.

Claudine Gay’s words in reaction ring true far beyond her own personal case and should serve as a warning:

“At tense moments, every one of us must be more skeptical than ever of the loudest and most extreme voices in our culture, however well organized or well connected they might be. Too often they are pursuing self-serving agendas that should be met with more questions and less credulity.”

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👉 Companies should do better when dealing with disabled candidates

Celia Chartres-Aris wrote a piece in Metro about a recruitment process she went through. While she was qualified for the role she applied to, as soon as she mentioned her disability and the adjustments she needed, the recruiter’s tone shifted.

Unfortunately, this kind of story is much too frequent. Her testimony is enlightening in as much as it helps us fully understand how discrimination works and how broken our organizations are. What happened to Celia after that? Well, she started her own company!

“That same day, I received an email that they no longer thought I was suited to the role and had chosen another applicant. They didn’t believe, the email stated, I was going to fit in with the team dynamic because I was ‘different’, and they weren’t able to offer adjustments.”

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🎯How Paola Ducolin got promoted to Staff Engineer

Women are underrepresented in tech. Even when they are part of tech teams, their journey is tougher in comparison to male engineers. Paola Ducolin is a brilliant engineer working at Datadog. She recently got promoted as a Staff Engineer. She wrote an honest piece about what it took her to get there. Here are the 5 things she learnt during the last 3 years :

1. Talk to people and build a trust network

2. Communicate honestly with your manager

3. Find a project that has a business impact

4. Reduce boilerplate to increase adoption

5. Iterate and prioritize decisions that will help most of the use cases

“The greatest misconception I had over the staff role is that you could achieve it by working on a complex technical project individually. Turns out there it depends, find out what matters for your company. In my case IC stands for Influential Contributor rather than Individual Contributor.”

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🤓 How Steven Zhang prepared for the toughest tech interviews

Steven Zhang landed 18 offers from the biggest tech companies with the most challenging tech interviewing processes. This article is a mine of gold for engineers who are looking for resources to get ready to interview. From setting up your laptop before the interview to accepting the offer, everything is described.

“As you do all this, it’s best to be transparent with your recruiters (i.e. what other offers you’re considering, if you’re still interviewing, etc.). You don’t have to share every nitty gritty detail, but please don’t lie.”

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✨ The Allyance propose un programme de coaching sur-mesure pour les professionnel·les de la tech

Depuis 2020, The Allyance a accompagné plus de 100 personnes dans le cadre d’une recherche d’emploi, d’une négociation salariale, d’une préparation d’entretiens chez Google ou Netflix, d’un retour de congé maladie ou bien d’un besoin spécifique. Chaque coaching nous fait grandir car nous suivons chaque personne de façon personnalisée. Aucune IA n’est utilisée 😈

Morgane et moi avons pris le temps de décrire ce que nous faisons en donnant des exemples concrets d’accompagnements réalisés. Pendant qu’elle se prend pour Ted Lasso (qu’elle adore)  et que je me compare à Camille Cottin dans 10 pour cent, on vous dit tout ici :

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🔦 The Allyance in the spotlight

🌈 I have been awarded as a LGBTQ+ role model in the “CEO” category by L’Autre Cercle.

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🤫 Backstage secrets

✨ Congratulations Pascal on joining Resilience.

✨ 2 coaching processes have been completed ! Congratulations Akvile for getting  hired at KissKissBankBank and Begona for landing a leadership role in AI.

✨ We are honored to welcome Karos as a new client!

✨ Shirley Almosini featured The Allyance in the documentation list dedicated to DEI.

🕵🏻‍♀️ Caroline is hiring a Senior Data Engineer in Machine Learning for Zalando.

🕵🏻‍♀️ Morgane is looking for a Senior Backend Engineer in Python.

You can contact us : contact@theallyance.one

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😇 Once again, happy new year!

Caroline Therwath-Chavier, The Allyance CEO