Yesterday afternoon I presented at the “Diversify” hackathon in the offices of Spotify in Stockholm, Sweden. The event was aimed at increasing diversity in IT by inviting a group of students that represented a good mix of gender and ethnic background to work together on hacks with music and music data. There was no strict competitive aspect to this hackathon and no prizes or winners – it was all about working together and seeing how a mixed group can achieve better results.

Photos by Sofie Lindblom and Ejay Janis

When I was asked to speak at an event about diversity in IT, I was flattered but also confused. Being very white and male I don’t really have a chance to speak from a viewpoint of a group that brings diversity to the mix. But I do have a lot of experience and I looked into the matter quite a bit. Hence I put together a talk that covers a few things I see going wrong, a few ideas and tools we have to make things better by bettering ourselves and a reminder that the world of web development used to be much more diverse and we lost these opportunities. In essence, the break-neck speed of our market, the hype the press and events living on overselling the amazing world of startups and the work environments we put together seem to actively discouraging diversity. And that is what I wanted the students to consider and fight once they go out and start working in various companies.

Diversity is nothing we can install – it is something we need to fight for. And it makes no sense if only those belonging to disadvantaged groups do that.

This talk is pretty raw and unedited, and it is just a screencast. I would love to give a more polished version of it soon.

You can watch the the screencast on YouTube.

The slides are available on Slideshare.

Resources I covered in the talk:

• Unconscious bias @ Work – an excellent talk at Google about bias, how to overcome it and lots of great information on how to increase diversity at work. Do yourself a favour and watch this one – full of great information and research.
• Project Implicit – an initiative at Harvard to research unconscious bias with lots of tests to take for yourself to see where your bias comes from.
• Understanding Prejudice – another resource with tests about bias and information on how to deal with prejudice.
• We have a massive recruitment problem – my post about the discrepancy between jobs offered and people available.
• Why nerd culture must die – Pete Warden’s analysis how “We’re still behaving like the rebel alliance, but now we’re the Empire.”
• JobLint – a tool to check job descriptions for sexist, racist or elitist language.
• Wheaton’s Law (“don’t be a dick”)
• The greater internet fuckwad theory

The feedback was amazing, students really liked it and I am happy I managed to inspire a few people to think deeper about a very important topic.

A big thank you to the Spotify Street Team and especially Caroline Arkenson for having me over (and all the hedgehog photos in the emails).

This blog started as a scratch pad of simple solutions to problems I encountered. So why not go back to basics?

It is pretty easy to get an ordered list into a document. All you have to do is add an OL element with LI child elements:

<ol>
  <li>Collect underpants</li>
  <li>???</li>
  <li>Profit</li>
</ol>

But what if you want to style the text differently from the numbers? What if you don’t like that they end with a full stop? The generated numbers of the OL are somewhat of that dark magic browsers do for us (something we work on dragging into the sunlight with ShadowDOM).

In order to make those more style-able in the past you had to add another element to get a hook:

<ol class="oldschool">
  <li><span>Collect underpants</span></li>
  <li><span>???</span></li>
  <li><span>Profit</span></li>
</ol>

.oldschool li {
  color: green;
}
.oldschool span {
  color: lime;
}

Which is kind of a terrible hack and doesn’t quite scale as you may never know who edits your list. With newer browsers we have a better way of doing that using CSS counters. The browser support is ridiculously good, so there should be no excuse for us not to use them:

Using counter, you keep the HTML structure:

<ol class="counter">
  <li>Collect underpants</li>
  <li>???</li>
  <li>Profit</li>
</ol>

You then reset the counter for each of the lists with this class:

.counter { 
  counter-reset: list;
}

This means each list will start at 1 and not go on through the document tree. You then get rid of the list style and style the list item like you want to. In this case we give it a colour and we position it relative. This allows us to position other, new content in there and contain it to the list item:

.counter li {
  list-style: none;
  position: relative;
  color: lime;
}

Once you hid the normal numbering with the list-style: none; you can create your own numbers using counter and generated CSS content:

.counter li::before {
  counter-increment: list;
  content: counter(list) '.';
  position: absolute;
  top: 0px;
  left: -1.2em;
  color: green;
}

If you wanted to remove the full stop, all you need to do is remove it in the CSS. You have now full styling control over these numbers, for example you can animate them slightly moving from one colour to another and zoom out a bit:

.animated li::before {
  transition: 0.5s;
  color: green;
}
.animated li:hover::before {
  color: white;
  transform: scale(1.5);
}

Counters allow you for a lot of different times of numbering. You can for example add a leading zero by using counter(list,decimal-leading-zero), you can use Roman numerals with counter(list,lower-roman) or even Greek ones with counter(list,lower-greek).

If you want to see all of that in action, check out this Fiddle:

Pretty simple, and quite powerful. Here are some more places to read up on this:

• CSS Counters on MDN
• W3C Spec

Simple: go try guest writing someplace else. This is my personal blog and if I am interested in something, I come to you and do it interview style in order to point to your work or showcase something amazingly cool that you have done.

Please, please, please with cherry on top, stop sending me emails like this one:

Hi,

I’m {NAME}, a freelance writer/education consultant. I found “Christian Heilmann” on a Google search and thought I would contact you to see if you would like to work with me. I own a website on Job Application Service that I’m currently promoting for myself. I thought we could benefit each other somehow? If you are interested, I’d be happy to write a very high-quality article for your site and get a couple permanent links from it? While your website is benefiting from my high-quality article, I’m getting links from your site, making this proposition mutually beneficial.
Shall I write an article that matches your niche and send it across for your review or do you need me to write on a particular topic that interests you and your readers, I’m open to any topic, thoughts please?
If this does not interest you, I am sorry to have bothered you. Have a good day! If this does great I hope we can build a long-term business relationship together! If you wish to have a chat on the phone please let me know your phone number and when a good time to call is :) If you’d like, I can share samples with you.
Regards,
{FIRSTNAME}

I am very happy you know how to enter a name in Google and find the blog of that person. That’s a good start. Nobody got hurt, you didn’t overdo it with the research or spent too much effort before asking for my phone number and pointing out just how much you would get out of this “mutually beneficial relationship”. Seriously, I would love to be a fly on the wall when you try dating.

I’ve worked hard on this blog, that’s why it has some success or is at least found. Go work on yours yourself. That’s how it should be. A blog is you. Just like this one is mine.

A few months ago, I flew over to see my parents for their 50th wedding anniversary. As some of you may know, I have a humble background. My dad was a coal miner and then factory worker and my mother has always been a home maker / housewife. I am the only one in my family that went to college and I skipped university as the thing to do was to make money in a job as soon as you are 18.

It was humbling and almost embarassing to have conversations with my family. Half of them are either unemployed or worried about their jobs. The rest are unhappy in their jobs but see no way to change that as they need the security. Finding joy in family life and leisure time is more important than enjoying the work. A job is a job, you got to do what you got to do and all that.

That’s why it feels surreal to come back into “our world” and get offers for jobs I don’t want. A lot of them. Some with ridiculous amounts of money offered and most with perks that would make my family blush and sense a trap.

Why are we not recruiter compatible and vice versa?

We’re lucky to be that sought after and yet it seems there is no happy symbiosis between us and recruiters. On the contrary, as soon as you even mention recruiting most of us techies start ranting.

I feel uneasy doing that. I feel like an arrogant ass and I feel that we should be more grateful about the opportunities we get. The relationship of recruiter and job seeker should be high-fives and unicorns. Instead there is a massive sense of dread: “Oh god, another job offer, how tiring”.

There are reasons for our dismay:

• A lot of headhunters/recruiters work on a commission basis and are measured by how many contacts they had that day. This leads to a scattergun approach and you get offers that are not “you” at all.
• Many recruiters seem to just look for keywords and then send the offer out to you. That’s why you get Java positions when you have a JavaScript background. Just like you would send car mechanic jobs to a carpet expert.
• Others go for company names. A great example was this recruiter trying to hire someone’s dog as a Java/Python developer.
• Many recruiting sites are very pushy to get you into their database to show potential hiring companies just how many job searchers they have. This leads to very old and outdated profiles and you get offers for jobs you’ve done years ago. Basically they don’t want to find you a job, they want you as an ad.
• People write ridiculous job descriptions and send them to us. In the past I wrote what kind of people I try to hire and once it went through HR and recruitment review something completely ridiculous ended up online. You’ve seen those. Asking people for two degrees, but not older than 20. Seven years experience in a half year old technology, and similar confusing points.
• There is probably nothing more intrusive to someone who feels at home online to be called by somebody. Recruiters, however, seem to see the “personal touch” as the most important thing.

On the other side of this issue, we are not innocent either:

• Instead of telling people why we didn’t want their offer, we just ignore them. There is no learning on either side.
• We love our own tools and are not too interested in changing that. Every recruitment department I worked with needed a CV in a document format for filing and keeping. Instead of having one of those at hand we love to create online CVs and portfolios or point people to our GitHub account as “real people who would hire me find all they need there”. This is navel gazing and arrogant. If I want to go on a bus, I need a bus ticket. A macaroni picture with glitter on it saying “most amazing responsive bus ticket” will not get me on there. Have the tool for the task.
• We don’t keep our presence up-to-date. If you’re not seeking, say so on LinkedIn. Have a template to send back to recruiters telling them “thanks, but no.”
• We also shouldn’t create profiles of our dog on LinkedIn. This is a professional tool, if we don’t use these in a professional manner we shouldn’t be surprised that they go to the dogs.
• Keep your skills up-to-date. If you never ever want to work with a certain product any longer, remove it from your online presence. That way keyword searchers don’t find you.

We need to communicate better

I feel there is a massive waste going on and an accumulation of frustration on both sides. We need to get better in helping another to make this the natural partnership it should be. I feel terrible hearing about friends not in our world who send out hundreds of applications and don’t get answers whilst we complain about people trying to offer us jobs. It feels almost unreal.

There are a few good ideas around and there is a start to clean this mess up. Joblint is a tool that comes to mind. It is an analysing tool that takes job descriptions and allows you to

“Test tech job specs for issues with sexism, culture, expectations, and recruiter fails”.

A lot of miscommunication could be avoided simply by using that.

Considering giving a helping hand

Maybe I should do something about this and use my time off to reach out and try to change something. I wonder if a workshop for recruiters about issues to avoid would be of interest? In any case, let’s try to be more understanding. Recruiters do their jobs the same way we do ours. By understanding their drives and goals, we can make both of our lives easier. By being arrogant and come across as divas we shouldn’t be surprised if job descriptions start calling out for rockstars, ninjas, gurus and mavens.

Let’s highlight the great experiences we had, and share what worked. Maybe that could be the lever we need to crack this nut open.

Four years ago I announced that I will join Mozilla as principal evangelist and I was the happiest person alive. I exclaimed that I want Mozilla to be the “Switzerland of HTML5” and an independent player in the great browser wars around the early days of this new technology revolution. I also announced that I am excited to use my flat more as I can work from home.

Now I am here and I have hardly had the chance to do so as I was busy getting from event to event, training to training and meetup to meetup. And whilst this is exciting it is also superbly taxing. It is time to lean back a bit, relax and have some me time.

I feel the first signs of burnout and I think it is very important to not let a fast and seemingly glamourous lifestyle on the road as an official spokesperson get in the way of finding peace and tranquility. I spoke in my last TEDx talk about getting too excited about one’s own online personality and living for that one and how dangerous that is.

And here I am finding myself being excited about Chris on the road and forgot about Chris who just lets go and leaves things to sort themselves out.

This is why I am taking a break from Mozilla. I am going on a sabbatical for a while and be a spectator watching the rewards of all the work we put in the last years. Firefox’s 10th anniversary is coming and great things are afoot.

I think we’ve shown that we can be the “Switzerland of HTML5” and it is time for me to have some time for myself and see what my colleagues can do. That’s why I am stepping down as “the Mozilla guy” and be plain Chris for a while.

I want to thank all my colleagues over the years for the great time I had. It is amazing to see how many dedicated and gifted people can work together and create something open and beautiful – even in traditionally very closed environments like the mobile space.

I will of course be around and you will be able to meet me at selected events and online. People in London and Stockholm will also see more of me. I will only take it slower from now on until the new year and represent myself and not the large, amazing and wonderful world that is Mozilla. As it stated on one of our summits: it is one Mozilla and many voices. And I will lean back, listen, and enjoy.