0:00:02
-- Brenda:
Hi, I'm Brenda Darden-Wilkerson, and welcome to another episode of Be The Way Forward. Today, I'm joined by Liz Fong-Jones, who is currently field CTO at software company Honeycomb.io. Despite being a skilled engineer, Liz is so much more. She is both an advocate and a labor and ethics organizer who wants to make diversity a priority for tech leaders and executives.
-- Elliot:
I think when you start thinking of yourself as a worker, when you start organizing with people, either in your workplace or in solidarity, I think that really opens up a lot of opportunities to demand equality.
0:00:45
-- Brenda:
Liz was previously a site reliability engineer at Google, where she was a leading advocate for workers' rights. She's now working on some new labor projects in support of workplace activism. Liz's mix of talents in the tech space, plus her advocacy work, are so inspiring, and I hope you feel empowered after hearing our conversation. Here it is.
-- Brenda:
So today I am joined with Liz Fong-Jones and Liz is an advocate, a technologist, so many things. Liz, can you tell us a little more about your background?
0:01:24
-- Elliot:
Sure. I'm a technologist by training, but someone who takes a deep interest in systems, whether they be technical or social systems. And therefore I've really turned my attention towards how do we build communities towards a more just world? And how do we empower people to be able to take action in their workplaces? So my work spans a lot of different areas, but I think that common theme is really empowering people to accomplish change.
-- Brenda:
What I love about that is many times when people think about tech, the people are not first. And as you describe that, the people are very centered there. So I love that. People are centered, but they all exist in systems.
0:02:03
-- Elliot:
I think that's the key thing is that bringing that systems understanding really helps you kind of figure out how do you accomplish change. That's awesome.
-- Brenda:
Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. So let's talk about your journey. You come from a whole line of engineers.
-- Brenda:
How did that impact your desire to become an engineer?
-- Elliot:
So obviously I was exposed to technology pretty early on, at least on my biological mother's side. Technology runs in that family. I have several uncles and aunts who have worked in the tech industry for decades.
0:02:38
-- Elliot:
So I had access to my first PC very early on, got started programming with QBasic.
-- Elliot:
But I think that was one of those interesting things where with the right kind of support and education, it means that you can become part of, you know, you can become part of something that is a
0:03:14
-- Elliot:
such an empowering set of tools. It gives you the tools to really help you gain access to opportunities, to income that you otherwise might not necessarily have.
-- Elliot:
So yeah, I think On one hand, you know, there is the aspect to bring up, which is at the time, people thought I was a boy, right? So therefore, there kind of wasn't necessarily at that particular moment in time that kind of, you know, gender-based stereotype about, you know, who's interested in computing that would have worked against me.
0:03:48
-- Elliot:
And what really was useful when I became a high schooler, when I came out as transgender, is that I was able to use those technical skills to support myself financially in an environment where otherwise I might not have been able to transition when I did, lacking the support of my biological family. So, you know, I think there's this kind of interesting balance of things where that early exposure to technology really helped save my life.
-- Brenda:
Wow, there's so much there. There's so much there about the difference between you were, you didn't have the barrier early on because of many of the biases, but because you had that background, it actually helped you as you were becoming who you are today. That's great.
0:04:39
-- Elliot:
Exactly, right? Like going from, you know, going to experiencing misogyny and experiencing transphobia, right? Like those are various biases that,
-- Elliot:
At least in the early 2000s, like, it was definitely a time period in which there was a dramatically lower amount of social support for transgender people. So...
-- Elliot:
Yeah. So true, so true. And we're still on our journey today.
-- Brenda:
Yeah, there's a backlash going on as we're recording this, but things have progressed so much since the early 2000s, I have to say.
0:05:19
-- Brenda:
I totally agree, and I'm encouraged. I'm always thinking about how, when we think about how much is left to do, I remember where we came from, so it's really important. So I want to talk a little bit about your educational background, because I think that's also really impactful and will really encourage a lot of people who might be thinking, oh, what happens if I don't go the traditional route? So you first started at Caltech.
-- Brenda:
But you eventually dropped out because you looked at the financial implications of getting into debt. Yes, exactly.
0:05:55
-- Elliot:
If your parents make sufficiently much money, your biological parents, like, unless somehow, you know, you got yourself emancipated before you turned 18, or otherwise you could demonstrate, you know, circumstances, which today college admissions offices and financial aid offices might be more understanding of, but back then it was like, no like you know if you're a biological parent if you don't receive financial aid and your biological parents stop footing the bill like you know too bad right um so yes i i dropped out in my in my junior year of caltech and i had a couple of options um i'd been working for a small independent game studio um so i could have chosen to become a full-time employee there But also at the time, I figured I would look around and see what was out there. And I had some friends who worked at Facebook. I had some friends who worked at Google. This was in 2007. So they were dramatically younger companies back then.
0:06:35
-- Elliot:
And I interviewed at Facebook and Google, and both of them offered me jobs. And I had this interesting choice of like, you know, what do I want to do?
-- Elliot:
And this, I think, is
-- Elliot:
The types of jobs that I was interviewing for were very unique, are still very unique.
-- Elliot:
It is true that in a majority of companies today, still they have this requirement of must have computer science degree from bachelor's degree.
0:07:19
-- Elliot:
Companies are becoming more flexible about taking boot camp grads as far as software development or software engineering positions. But the positions I interviewed for at Google and Facebook were positions that accepted a much wider range of candidates because they recognized that there is some special magic to bringing together
-- Elliot:
kind of this little batch of misfits who had all kinds of different backgrounds, not necessarily computer science, not necessarily college degrees. And we were the set of people who made the internet work, as it were. So the production engineers at Facebook, the site reliability engineers at Google, Those were departments that were able to somehow bypass the classist and kind of, you know, Ivy League biased hiring processes of Facebook and Google at the time because the founders of Facebook and Google recognized that there was something special going on in their production engineering and SRE departments that you needed to be able to hire people who didn't have college degrees, who came from systems engineer or systems administration, kind of learn as you go backgrounds.
0:07:57
-- Elliot:
So that's how I kind of broke into the industry. I had some experience interning at and then eventually working part-time at an independent game studio, but I wouldn't really have qualified for a traditional software engineering job at the time. But there were parts of these companies that had more flexible hiring policies that really saw value in bringing those different perspectives to the table.
-- Brenda:
That's important, and I'm really excited to hear that that was happening at places like Google and Facebook, because I was really aware of it. Yeah, because you've heard about, at least in 2008, you would hear about people being, that Larry and Sergey would take home a stack of resumes and be like, nope, not that one, not that one.
0:08:59
-- Elliot:
They'd literally cross you off if they thought that the recruiters were hiring too many non-Ivy League grads.
-- Elliot:
But they always made an exemption for SREs.
-- Brenda:
That's interesting. That's interesting. And I think it's an important point to really underscore that. You know, I heard you refer to, you know, this is a set of misfits. I think that, you know, there's still like that attitude that is really unfortunate because Part of innovation comes from having a variety of people from different backgrounds, not the same background. That's when innovation happens. And so they really, that was good for them that they made that decision. And it'd be good for all companies to come along. And like you said, people are getting better at it, but it's still- Yeah, people are starting to hire career changers, bootcamps.
0:09:42
-- Elliot:
boot camp grads, it's really exciting to see how people are leveraging the career skills that people may not necessarily have picked up from going to college in computer science.
-- Brenda:
So now you did return to school and you actually graduated from MIT, which is awesome.
0:10:15
-- Brenda:
What was it like going back to education after being in the workforce?
-- Elliot:
Oh my goodness. I think that more people should work for some period of time before they finish their schooling.
-- Elliot:
But yeah, when I went back to school the second time around, I had a much crisper idea of what I wanted to learn, why I wanted to learn it. I had project management skills. I had time management skills. I was not pulling all-nighters.
-- Elliot:
I think the kind of discipline of being an adult really primes you to learn a lot better than if you're an adolescent.
-- Elliot:
I think there's that. And then also the exposure to the professional workplace means that you wind up adopting a lot of engineering discipline practices that you might not otherwise have when you're in college. If you're just throwing away a project because you're only expecting to use it for one week in a school assignment.
0:10:49
-- Elliot:
It's so different than what we actually do, where we have to live with the consequences of our decisions. So every single semester-long class that had kind of a semester-long capstone project that you were building up to, that was a group project, the teams I was on, we won every single class competition, class team competition, because we were doing unit tests, we were doing regression tests, we were doing code reviews, right? All of these things that a A team that didn't have someone on it who had worked professionally at a tech company, they might not have thought to do that, but it turns out it really improves your quality and speeds you up. But, of course, no one teaches you that in college. You have to either learn the hardware or have someone on your team, like, you know, who's learned the hardware show, you know, insist that we are doing this.
0:11:36
-- Brenda:
you know that that is a great point and i feel like if you know those of us who because i was prior in education if we would even counsel students in that way that that additional diversity of having you and others in the classroom who had experience i did the same thing i left for a while went to work actually as a programmer just as i was i only had two more quarters i was like do I really want to do this thing? Let me go check it out. And when I came back, I was on fire on purpose. I knew exactly what I was going to be doing.
0:12:21
-- Elliot:
Exactly, right? Like, so in my case, I had, you know, in Caltech, I was like, you know, studying biology for the heck of it.
-- Elliot:
But when I had gone and worked for, at that point, four years at Google full-time, I realized that there were parts of the computer science curriculum that I did want to go back and learn, despite having so-called made it as a software developer. I was one of the youngest senior engineers at Google.
0:12:58
-- Brenda:
Amazing.
-- Elliot:
But even then, like, I knew I really was excited about performance engineering, about kind of the art and science of how do you make things run faster and more efficient. So as part of that, I was like, wait a second, like, I can write a program in Python. I can even like, you know, start writing programs in, you know, programs in Java, C++. But like, I was like,
-- Elliot:
how does this turn into something that actually runs? I have no idea. I could pick up a book, I suppose, and read about processor design, but it would turn out to be much more effective for me to work as part of a team and go to a classroom and learn how does the processor work?
0:13:36
-- Brenda:
How does the compiler work?
-- Elliot:
How do all these pieces all fit together so that you can make efficient and fast systems?
-- Brenda:
That's when I decided I wanted to go back and learn, right?
-- Elliot:
Like that was the kind of the motivation as opposed to, you know, oh, everyone says you have to do college. Okay, fine, I'm going to go to college.
-- Brenda:
Well, it's sort of like you knew what you needed better than going in, like you said, as an adolescent. And I think it's something to be said about having these types of conversations with young people and showing them that they really have these choices. They don't have to, you know, I came from the background where you just, you're going to college.
0:14:07
-- Brenda:
And that's good, but it really doesn't give you the same focus as when you have the idea of what you really want to do with your life and you have some idea of what that thing is like. Now you can go and apply that to your learning.
-- Brenda:
So, okay, I want to shift into your journey because your journey and path in tech is so important for our listeners to hear for so many reasons, dropping out of college, working at one of the largest tech companies, but also something even more important. Your journey shows that you can and should be more than your job description. You're an activist. I'm an activist as well, so it gives me gait. particularly with large companies. So first, walk us through your concerns and what you stood up for while you were at Google.
0:14:44
-- Elliot:
Yeah, my journey towards becoming an activist was actually a sideways one. I joined Google because I thought that it was going to be a very great learning opportunity for me. And also, I thought that I agreed with the mission at the time. right, this idea of this idealistic, you know, we're going to make the world's information universally accessible and useful, like, that seemed really wonderful, right? Along with, you know, don't be evil, right? Like, those seem like principles that were really a core part of the earlier employee ethos.
0:15:29
-- Elliot:
And
-- Elliot:
I went into that, you know, in 2008, and I thought, you know, hey, the world is going to be sunshine and roses, right?
-- Elliot:
And then in 2008, for the listeners who are from the US and of a certain age, 2008 was the year of Prop 8 in California, the constitutional amendment to the California Constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
0:16:07
-- Elliot:
And it was a wake-up call for me that while the founders and the employees loudly said, you know, we support gay marriage, the company was saying one thing out the side of its mouth and doing it right. We were getting different messages.
-- Elliot:
Because the reality is that Prop8 passed by a very slim margin, by I think several percent.
-- Elliot:
And at the time, one of the innovative things that both the Yes on Prop8 and No on Prop8 campaigns did is that they were using digital advertising. They were advertising with Google AdWords. They were advertising with Google AdSense.
-- Elliot:
And the company was more than happy to take their money and to assign them account reps and to help them maximize their spend and impact and reach per dollar with homophobic messages like, you know, protect California families from the gay people, right? And when Prop 8 passed,
0:17:04
-- Elliot:
A lot of the LGBT plus employees felt really, really betrayed, right? Betrayed that, you know, while our leadership was, you know, running newspaper ads saying, you know, we support, you know, we support gay families. At the same time, they were more than happy to take homophobes money and to promote homophobic messages.
-- Elliot:
But what I saw happen there was, you know, there was outrage for like one or two TGIFs and then it just, you know, all died down. Like the company just waited us out and, you know, went laughing to the bank.
0:17:40
-- Elliot:
So that was that moment of, okay, this company is not all sunshine and roses, right? Like it exists under capitalism, but what can we do to hold the company accountable to its values was something that started to go through my mind after the events of 2008. But of course, you know, I was a junior site reliability engineer who had just gotten hired without a college degree. I wasn't going to immediately start rocking the boat.
-- Elliot:
But in 2010, there is an interesting moment when the company, at this point, the company was facing headwinds because it was behind in the social game. Facebook was out to eat its lunch in terms of advertising dollars, in terms of the percentage of time that people spent on the internet.
0:18:23
-- Elliot:
And Google wanted to launch social features. And what happened was that they decided that they wanted to copy a lot of the things that had made Facebook successful. So in the course of building Google+, which was Google's social layer to answer Facebook, Google decided that it was going to copy Facebook's already well and resoundingly criticized real names policy.
-- Elliot:
And
-- Elliot:
I resolved at that moment that I was going to speak up against that, that as someone who's at varying points whose wallet name had not necessarily matched the name that they go by, I wanted to speak out against a policy that was essentially saying that people could be arbitrarily banned from the service and then not reinstated if their wallet name didn't match the name that they used.
0:19:16
-- Elliot:
So at the time I was taking this approach of assuming good faith, right? Like I thought, you know, hey, leadership is, you know, in this race against Facebook, maybe they don't understand what the negative impacts are going to be of enforcing a real names policy. So I started writing down a list of reasons why the real names policy was misguided.
-- Elliot:
And then I just dropped the link to the Google document. And a funny thing happened. The Google document crashed because more than 50 people had opened it simultaneously. This is no longer a problem today, by the way, but we crashed Google Docs because too many people opened the doc at the same time. There was clearly interest in people collaborating on kind of this list of who is ill served by a real names policy. Everyone from teachers, therapists, trans people, people facing domestic violence, sex workers. There are so many people in communities who would be impacted by being banned from services unless their wallet name matched.
0:19:52
-- Elliot:
And at the end of this process, after we debugged the problem with the document crashing,
-- Elliot:
People started messaging me and saying, I have nothing further to add. I just want to sign my name to this. There was no like, you know, signature block at the bottom. It was just, you know, Hey, you know, Google plus leadership, here are some things that you should consider, but people wanted to sign their name to it.
0:20:34
-- Elliot:
And then more and more and more people wanted to sign their name to it until suddenly we had, I think over 2000 people.
-- Elliot:
out of, out of Google, which was, you know, a 80,000 person company at the time, more than 2000 people out of mostly engineers out of, out of the 40,000 engineers at Google, that number of people had signed like more than, I think it wound up being more than 5% of engineering, like had, had signed their names to this, uh, what turned out to be petition.
-- Elliot:
And that was an interesting moment because leadership at Google at the time, they only were cracking down on specific kinds of activism, as I discovered. But this was not one of the kinds of activism they were cracking down on. So we actually got a seat at the table. We were invited by Google Plus leadership to nominate several people to sit down and mediate the discussion, figure out where do we go from here.
0:21:10
-- Elliot:
And one of the really useful things there was that this kind of letter crystallized a lot of the, you know, rah, rah, pitchforks and torches, you know, we disagree with leadership into a constructive conversation.
-- Elliot:
Without really, you know, necessarily forming a union, we had a lot of the structures and mechanisms that a union had. gets, but the company voluntarily was willing to listen to that specific kind of feedback at the time. So we wound up with a representative committee to meet and negotiate with management about what the company's products would and wouldn't do.
0:21:44
-- Elliot:
One area that I think is particularly interesting is at the same time as I was doing this organizing against real names, there was also an activist, Erica Joy Baker, who is a Black woman, and she was organizing a spreadsheet of people's salaries and trying to advance the cause of pay equality. And she was pushed out of Google, right, that she she both had her manager override and refused to and refused to grant her like peer bonuses from other people who had said, you know, I nominate this person for a peer bonus because of their excellent work on advocating for pay equality.
0:22:21
-- Elliot:
And because that work was potentially, I think, disruptive to the company's bottom line, because it might expose pay discrimination, she wound up being fired from Google. And I think it's important to recognize that Google was not necessarily this nirvana of supporting employees who were organizing. It was supporting only employees who organized on specific topics. But that established a pattern of how do you tame and get to a constructive discussion rather than people yelling at each other or firing each other.
0:23:19
-- Elliot:
So we did that again with the Ask Me Again Later. Every time you sign on to your Google service, it was like, do you want to turn on notifications? No, yes, ask me again later. Yes. So the reason that Ask Me Again later went away was because of employee uproar, right? Of employees saying, this is not in keeping with our values, right? This is not in keeping with how we comport ourselves in order to not be evil, in order to make the world's information universally accessible and useful.
-- Brenda:
Well, I mean, first of all, thank you for sharing all of that. I felt the process that you went through, and I liked the conversation about changing it. We were figuring it out as we went along, right? I think that's the important thing.
0:23:59
-- Elliot:
There was no guidebook on how to do this. We were writing it as we went.
-- Brenda:
Well, and I think this is another situation where a background in systems and technology helps you to iterate, right, in the same way. So would you say that this was your first foyer into activism? Was this what got you started?
-- Elliot:
Yeah, I definitely think so. I think the other thing that also happened is I am one of the co-founders of the Transgender Employee Resource Group at Google.
0:24:32
-- Elliot:
And therefore, in parallel with the product activism, I was also figuring out what are the needs of the trans ERG that are not necessarily being served by Gaggler's, the broader umbrella LGBT plus ERG.
-- Elliot:
How do we think about advocating for ourselves? How do we figure out, you know, how do we make sure that the company both has products that serve trans users well and also that trans employees are receiving the best possible treatment? So I think that was kind of another organizing and activism thing that also was going on in parallel.
-- Brenda:
I mean, there's so many things to take from that. So first of all, you were not just thinking about yourself, but about others. How could this impact more people?
0:25:15
-- Brenda:
The reaction to Prop Aid, the reaction to, are trans gay people really getting served by these organizations that were created for it? And I like that because it's thinking about the community more than just about the self. Not that there's anything wrong about just thinking about yourself, but you took it a step further. Really wanna commend you for that. And earlier you said that you felt like you were early in your career when things first happened. You're like, I'm just a junior engineer. I'm not really ready to stick my neck out as it were.
0:25:49
-- Brenda:
And that's a real thing. So what is a piece of advice that you could share with someone who feels injustice, but is scared, is apprehensive? Maybe it's financially threatening to speak up to their employer,
-- Brenda:
How can you, what do you say to them?
-- Elliot:
There are some circumstances in which you just have to swallow whatever concern you have and keep your head down, right? Like you're not going to have any impact in the world if you get fired and you're, and you're, you know, um, and you're denied listed from, from future employment, right? Like, so this is the other thing that I think bears repeating is that how I managed to not get myself fired during all of this.
0:26:28
-- Elliot:
was that, number one, I had the backing of 2,000 of my colleagues, right? With real names considered harmful. But I think the other thing is, I was exceptionally good at my job, right? Which made it very challenging if Google did want to try to retaliate against me, they would have to contend with the fact that my management chain backed me, because they knew that I had a very strong performance record.
-- Elliot:
That being said, I do have some projects afoot that kind of are aiming to help reduce the financial fear of what happens if I get fired or what happens if I'm retaliated against. But I think regardless, it is important to recognize when you have sufficient support and when you need to go and lay low and build support rather than, you know, right?
0:27:11
-- Elliot:
You can make the world very temporarily warmer by setting yourself on fire.
-- Elliot:
But it's much better to figure out how to bring the community better and let's build a bonfire out of wood that we're all sustainably growing and chopping down and bringing than small acts of self-sacrifice that don't amount to anything.
-- Brenda:
Right. I mean, there's a wisdom in that. And I'm really glad that you shared that because it's just part and parcel of really being able to make the impact that you really want to make ultimately, right? It might take longer as you're figuring it out. So yeah, I think that's great advice. So let's start talking about where you are now. So you moved from a really big tech company to a smaller tech company. First of all, what was that transition like?
0:27:57
-- Elliot:
I think we have to talk about why that happened. I was at that point a Google lifer. I had been at Google for 10, 11 years. I wasn't thinking about leaving. I was here to keep the culture and to do really excellent work on larger scale systems.
0:28:31
-- Elliot:
But what happened was after the year 2015, 2016, 2017, there was kind of a shift in how Google approached activism.
-- Elliot:
Google started retaliating against activists when suddenly it seemed like the activists were asking the company not to do things that were potentially financially very lucrative. And that was a moment that I realized that even though the company had tolerated our dissent and had incorporated and listened to our feedback, that the techniques that I'd used were no longer going to work and that I also was starting to get marginalized out of the company. In 2017 and 2018, there were all of these various scandals involving the sexist manifesto. There's the incident involving Project Maven, the incident involving Project Dragonfly, and those are efforts that I and others very loudly spoke up against internally.
0:29:18
-- Elliot:
But the result was unfortunately not the same as the result that we saw from our protests against the Real Names Fallacy. Something had changed inside of the company such that it wasn't willing to listen to us and was going to start pushing people out. And kind of that last straw was when we saw the sexual harassment crisis at Google, when we saw the results of the Google Women's Walkout, That kind of was the moment of, okay, number one, I don't think I can sustain doing this without burning out. Like, it is not worth burning myself out to try to save Google, as it were.
0:29:58
-- Elliot:
And also, it was clear from the walkout that there were a sufficient number of people who knew how to do this kind of work at Google and could figure out what the next direction was going to be without me. That I, you know, that I could leave the company and know that other people would carry on that work. So, but what drew you to Honeycomb, the team there specifically?
-- Elliot:
So I had been working as a site reliability engineer in various capacities, kind of helping people think about the intersections of their systems, reliability, architecting and designing them, working with people to make the systems run. And when I was looking around for other companies to work at besides Google, what I was looking at was companies that were doing work in the broad space of operating software. How do we not just provide a tool, but how do we help upskill and empower people? So this meant that I talked to various companies that were also kind of in this DevOps and SRE space.
0:30:44
-- Elliot:
And Honeycomb was one of those companies that solved a need that I had encountered at Google and that I knew that especially the ecosystem outside of Google did not have, that people did not have the ability to clearly and comprehensively understand their systems. So that definitely appealed to me. But I had talked to many different companies and at the end of the day, all of these companies would have offered really excellent compensation, would have offered me a chance to really influence the product.
0:31:26
-- Elliot:
But only one of these companies was led by two women. And all things being equal, I'm going to work to make a bunch of women very rich, as opposed to making a bunch of white dude founders very rich. That was kind of the tiebreaker for me. It was not the primary reason. I kind of had these criteria of tech tool space, transformational change, opportunity for me to influence as a principal engineer.
0:31:58
-- Elliot:
And the cherry on the top of the cake was that Charity and Christine are such amazing founders.
-- Brenda:
Excellent.
-- Brenda:
That's excellent. Yeah, I think there's that.
-- Elliot:
And how I met Charity was by arguing with her on Twitter. It turns out when you can argue with someone and respect them more at the end of the argument, that's a sign that you're destined to do really great working together. Yes.
0:32:33
-- Brenda:
I agree.
-- Brenda:
I agree. And of course, unfortunately, that's sort of like in short supply right now in our social spaces and more ability to have those conversations. I think as people in the tech industry, it'd be great if we could demonstrate that and others could follow because we need to be able to disagree. Many times from disagreements come new innovations, new solutions, new choices. So I love that you gave that example.
0:33:03
-- Brenda:
So you also sat on the board of the National Center for Transgender Equality for a while, for quite some time. So talk about that. Can you share more?
-- Elliot:
Yes, I definitely can. So as many trans people were worried in 2016 during the elections, the presidential elections in 2016, there is a palpable fear among transgender people what the next four years under the Trump administration would bring for trans rights.
0:33:39
-- Elliot:
So that was a thing that really kind of kicked my financial philanthropy into gear because I realized that, you know, there are certainly policy lobbying that can be done. There's kind of direct aid. There's impact litigation. There's so many different areas that really do need to get funded.
-- Elliot:
in order for trans people to survive and thrive under administrations that are supportive and under administrations that are more overtly hostile. So that was what kicked my giving and my spouse's giving into high gear.
-- Elliot:
So we donated to several different charities in the course of our explorations from 2016 to 2018.
0:34:25
-- Elliot:
So, for instance, we were donating to Lambda Legal and the National Center for Lesbian Rights with regard to impact litigation. We were donating to Trans Lifeline with regards to direct aid and services. And we were donating to NCTE, the National Center for Transgender Equality, for kind of the policy advocacy angles.
-- Elliot:
And one of the key themes during the Trump administration of NCT was figuring out how do we slow down or stop any policy changes that the Trump administration might try to impose via executive fiat.
-- Elliot:
So there's definitely this immense challenge that was ahead of us that we felt we needed to help address.
0:35:08
-- Elliot:
And I was invited as part of the NCT board's search to join the NCT board. And that was a really great learning opportunity for me to understand, like, how does nonprofit governance in a well-functioning nonprofit that has, you know, a relatively steady growth curve, what does that look like? And then how can I apply that experience going forward to other, you know, to my philanthropy and to other efforts? So
-- Elliot:
It was a really great experience. I think the one challenge is that we had an executive director who had served in the role for something like 20 years.
0:35:46
-- Elliot:
And her ways of working were very different than the Gen Z staff that she had. And there was definitely a lot of employee unrest and happiness with the working conditions. But I had the requirement to act in the best interest of their organization as someone who served on the board. And at the same time, employees were walking off the job, employees were striking. And eventually I said, look, you have my resignation. I need to not have to take management's side here.
-- Elliot:
So that kind of is the story of how I came to the NCTE board and how I left the NCTE board. It's a very dynamic organization, it's a very important organization, and it taught me a lot about how to be a responsible steward of the money that I donate and the money that other trans people are donating.
0:36:24
-- Brenda:
Well, it's another one of those where we talked about you learn as you go, right? So, wow, I mean, you've had this tech career where you've done some really critical work, some important work, you've been an activist, and your engineering contributions are obvious. So what are you most proud of?
-- Brenda:
The activism, the advocacy, or the engineering?
-- Brenda:
I think it's the kind of synthesis of all of them, right?
-- Elliot:
Like I am the most proud of bringing systems thinking to all of these different disciplines and kind of tying it all together.
0:37:18
-- Elliot:
One side note that I will point out here is that in the Real Names Considered Harmful effort, in the pushback against Project Maven, Project Dragonfly, all of these various efforts were spearheaded and like the initial, like, you know, the core support base
-- Elliot:
was other site reliability engineers, people who were willing to take that systems thinking of how might this break, right? Like who might this disproportionately impact? And we're willing to take that approach from computer systems to people systems, right? So I think it's really hard to disentangle them because I think that it's all very correlated.
-- Elliot:
And I think the other aspect to this is, you know, for better or for worse, I think excelling at your job as an engineer enables you to have influence and it enables you to have money. And I think that both of those things are how you're able to get the ball rolling with regards to other kinds of impact.
0:38:07
-- Brenda:
Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree. So I'd love for you to share, if you would, as a transgender woman, you shared some of the challenges that you faced as you were coming out and as Prop 8 was happening. Can you share any more that would help our listeners understand some of the challenges and maybe how they can be helpful to others in their social and professional life?
0:38:44
-- Elliot:
Yeah, I personally, what's been happening with the so-called bathroom bills across the United States where transgender people are being denied to use the right to use public restrooms, that reminds me a lot of what I went through in high school. In high school, my biological parents were not supportive, and the school administration had no idea what to do with me.
-- Elliot:
They told me that I could only use the single stall bathrooms on campus, of which there are exactly two, right? It was this kind of segregation, right? I was not allowed to use either the men's or the women's bathrooms. I had to use, you know, these other bathrooms that are 10 minutes away on the campus.
-- Elliot:
So it's very strange to watch this now happening not through ignorance, but through a deliberate intention to harm people. That is really, really galling. And I think back to the movie Hidden Figures. I think back to the movie Hidden Figures and the protagonists running to use the colored bathrooms.
0:39:36
-- Elliot:
That is part of why organizations like the NAACP were backing trans people in the pushback against bathroom bills. Because segregation is segregation. Discrimination on the basis of what facility someone can use.
-- Elliot:
That already has a very sordid past in the history of the United States, and it should not be repeated again. So I guess my message is, you know, the fight is going to take various shapes over the next several years, but I think intersectionality is the most important thing that we can and should be doing. I think that means that we should reach out and build intersectional allyship, that we should think about people who sit at the intersections, who sit at those margins, right? If someone is a transgender person and they are a person of color, especially if they're black, right, that dramatically increases the likelihood that they are going to become the victim of violence that is transphobic. I think the number one power that we have right now is we need to think about protecting people's privacy.
0:40:55
-- Elliot:
We've seen the Texas Attorney General attempt to obtain people's confidential medical records over the past six months in order to crack down on transgender people who are leaving his state to seek care.
-- Elliot:
We're seeing this also happen in parallel with abortion as well, that there are attempts by individual states to obtain information about people's abortions that are being obtained out of state. I would like us to think first about the harms that we are a party to before we think about, you know, how can I use my money for good, right? Or how can you use my influence for good? First place to start is, you know, look in your own backyard, look in your own mirror. Are you retaining data that could be used to de-anonymize and identify and single out for prosecution trans people and their families, people who have abortions in their families, right? Like, that I think is the number one challenge that keeps me up at night with regards to technology. And the second one is, how do we deal with transphobic propaganda? How do we deal with the mass spread of transphobic propaganda? And how do we make sure that we are not a party to calls for violence against marginalized peoples?
0:41:40
-- Elliot:
We have to clean up our own mess first, before we start telling other people how to clean up their messes. Oh, I totally agree.
-- Brenda:
Totally. That's a word for us.
0:42:17
-- Brenda:
Let's all think about that, those of us who are in tech. So now you co-wrote a book in May of 2022. Can you talk about observability engineering? What does that book focus on?
-- Elliot:
So my book, Observability Engineering, focuses on the discipline of understanding complex systems, that we're building these kind of more and more and more complex systems, and we're not necessarily developing the scaffolding for figuring out what happens if they go wrong. So that's what Honeycomb does as its core business, and that's what the book kind of is, an attempt to change the way that the world thinks about systems from monitoring the things that you know can go wrong to being able to deal with unanticipated situations where you didn't think in advance that something might go wrong. How do you untangle it? How do you figure out what went wrong?
0:43:04
-- Elliot:
So that is, you know, it's been a best-selling book in the computer textbooks category, which I know is a pretty small category, but it still warms my heart that lots of people are interested in this subject.
-- Elliot:
And I think that we have really shifted the marketplace in terms of educating people what observability means, such that so many people are adopting it. There are observability engineering teams at companies now.
0:43:39
-- Elliot:
you know that the um analysts are starting to call the space observability rather than application performance monitoring right so i i think this shift is is underway and i think it's in part because of the leadership of you know of charity myself and george right the folks who wrote the book well what was that experience like when you published that book
-- Elliot:
Oh, we fell victim to one of the classic engineering blunders, being like, oh, that can't be that hard. That'll only take a year to write. You know, it actually took us, I think, two and a half years to write. So writing a book is a very long slog.
-- Elliot:
And it's hard to make time for when you also have a startup to build and a day job to do.
-- Elliot:
But I'm really glad that we did it because I think that it really kind of took a lot of that knowledge out of our heads and put it onto paper where more people could benefit from it so that it was more scalable than us, you know, having one-on-one conversations with customers and potential customers and kind of made clear, how do you get started with this? Kind of what are the steps to kind of adapt and change your thinking from monitoring to observability?
0:44:43
-- Elliot:
And, you know, when you asked me at the beginning, how does this tie, you know, about what my work is, right? Observability is about empowering people with data, right? So it's a different kind of empowerment than the social justice empowerment, but it is still a form of empowerment because so many people are suffering with really bad tooling. So many people are suffering with their pager going off at all hours of the night. Right? Like, people deserve better than to have to deal with this kind of trauma all the time. From having, you know, from having constant outages of getting burnt out.
0:45:19
-- Brenda:
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. I was thinking this is similar. There's a similarity in your work. You discover something that is something that should be addressed, you address it, and then you share it. So I think that's an amazing, obviously, characteristics of an advocate, of an activist. And I just want to congratulate you for that.
-- Elliot:
Thank you.
-- Brenda:
So you also talked about in the beginning about how both of us started our careers a while ago and things have changed a lot. We've seen a lot of things that are different.
0:45:51
-- Brenda:
What are you most hopeful for in the years ahead?
-- Elliot:
I think for better or for worse, the recent slew of layoffs at all of these tech firms has shown tech employees that we are not special.
-- Elliot:
There is not this idea of the employer is just going to take care of you because they lavish all of these perks upon you. It turns out they can take them away. They can fire you at a moment's notice. And I think that the thing that gives me hope is that people are thinking of themselves as workers rather than as high-paid tech employees. And I think when you start thinking of yourself as a worker, when you start organizing with people, either in your workplace or in solidarity, I think that really opens up a lot of opportunities to demand equality. both in your own working conditions in terms of how you think about products. So this is the place where I think it's important to plug one of my current efforts, which is the Coworker Solidarity Fund, which is aiming to allow people to
0:46:31
-- Elliot:
receive these micrograms, right, that are for the case of, you know, you're afraid you're going to get fired for your activism work. You know, you can point to the activism work that you've done. And then we can help make sure that you can speak up more freely, that you can
0:47:17
-- Elliot:
that you can organize with your colleagues. And people have used our grants for everything from paying their rent money if they've been terminated from their employer, to arranging rides home from protesting and picketing at their workplaces, to making signs and posters for their picket line. There are so many different creative ways that you know we've been listening to workers right we trust workers to know if they need the funds we trust workers to know how is the best use of those funds in order to further their organizing and we're you know this by workers for workers effort that started with this kind of idea that i had while i was at google of we need to have a strike fund right in case we need to declare a google worker strike some of us you know have you know six months 12 months of savings other people don't how do we redistribute that when there's not necessarily a union in place yet.
0:48:07
-- Elliot:
So that kind of was the core of that idea. And now we're starting to see unions and organizing and organized labor make inroads into tech where, you know, 10 years ago, people would have been like, no, like, you know, the tech workers are too prissy. They think that, you know, they're above this, you know, labor union thing.
-- Brenda:
Yeah, well, my parents were both educators, so I know about unions and I know about strike funds. As a little kid, I stood on the picket line with my parents several times. And to me, the strike fund is just another way of being supportive of the worker. And so I congratulate you on that.
0:48:40
-- Elliot:
Right, exactly. And how can we kind of leverage that money from the people who have more money to give at the particular moment and help the people who are in need of that money? And how can we do it without necessarily there being one specific union for that employer when you're instead trying to build cross-employer and cross-job function solidarity?
-- Brenda:
Absolutely. So I always share this with each of the folks that I get to speak to, and I'm so excited that I got to speak to such an amazing advocate and technologist. Your knowledge, your background, I know our listeners have learned so much and are inspired. Can you give them concrete ways in which they can be the way forward? Whether it's inclusivity, progressing technologically, or in other ways?
0:49:20
-- Elliot:
I think the way forward is worker empowerment. I think we need to look around us and identify problems that we need to fix and build the solidarity in order to get those problems fixed.
-- Brenda:
Okay, awesome. And so how can our listeners be better allies of those that are marginalized? Just in general, you talked about intersectionality, which is so important.
0:50:00
-- Brenda:
How can people better arm themselves to be better allies to people who are being marginalized?
-- Elliot:
I think it's super crucial to listen to the people who exist in your workplace who are marginalized and also think about who is not represented in that room, right? Who does not necessarily have a voice because they may not even have been hired, right? And I think that that will get you a long ways rather than, you know, doing the thing that many people do when they're just like, you know, oh, like I'm going to go and build this technological solution to this problem that no one actually has, right?
0:50:42
-- Elliot:
Thank you very much, but that's a waste of everyone's time and energy. So we see this, it's just so exhausting to see people build smart wheelchairs that can climb stairs as opposed to just putting ramps in every building. So that's why I think it's so important to listen to people who are actually experiencing the problems rather than trying to capital B an ally.
-- Brenda:
Yeah, I hear you. I totally hear that. So I am so thankful that you spent time with us today, Liz. And I just wanted one more question to ask you. You mentioned the founders of your current company and how important it was that you went to work for these amazing women. Is there another founder that you'd like to shout out? Yeah, I've got a couple of interesting founders that are that are in my network.
0:51:17
-- Elliot:
So I've started, I expanded my philanthropic giving to also include impact oriented investments. So I'm sure that I'm going to see really great returns as well. But the primary reason for my investment is kind of my thesis around empowering people who are marginalized. So, in that spirit, three of the investments that I've made include Career Karma, so Ruben Harris. The folks at Career Karma are really great because they're thinking about this problem of upskilling, how do you help people not get ripped off by unscrupulous boot camps.
0:51:56
-- Elliot:
I'm really interested in what's going on with Tall Poppy, which provides anti-harassment as an employee benefit funded by the employer rather than people having to figure it out as they go. And the founder of Tall Poppy is Lee Honeywell. And then lastly, there is Alyssa Petersol at My Wellbeing, who are focused on providing a more sustainable business model for online therapy. Basically, you know, all these investments are oriented towards people who have experienced this problem themselves and therefore are committed to fixing it rather than, you know, people who are looking to profit quickly off of, you know, whatever current fad is going on.
0:52:40
-- Brenda:
And that's one of the biggest reasons to have diversity at the table where tech is created. People bring their experiences. Yeah.
-- Elliot:
Yeah. The statistic, right, that, you know, that Black women receive less than, you know, 1.5% of venture capital funding, it's just
-- Brenda:
Yeah, it's bonkers. It's bonkers. Such a missed opportunity. Such a missed opportunity. And women in general, when we know that the numbers also show that many times women-led organizations are more profitable than the men-led organizations. So yeah, we're trying to encourage- It's interesting looking at who's laying off employees because they grew too fast and too aggressively, and who's had to be conservative because they've- Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. There's a lot to learn there. People would really just kind of look at that a little bit more. So, well, Liz Fong-Jones, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for spending time with us today and best of luck with everything that you have your hands on. Thank you so much, Brenda. It's been a pleasure being on.
0:53:26
-- Brenda:
Thank you again to Liz Fogg-Jones for joining me on today's episode. Now, if you enjoyed our conversation, then please follow Be The Way Forward wherever you listen to your podcasts. And you can also watch video episodes of this podcast on the anitab.org channel on YouTube. For more on how you can be the way forward, head on over to anitab.org.
0:54:11
-- Brenda:
Be The Way Forward is produced by Dominique Ferrari and Paige Heimson. Sound design and editing by Neil Innes and Ryan Hammond. Mixing and mastering by Julian Kwasniewski. Associate producer is Faith Krogalecki.
-- Brenda:
Executive produced by Dominique Ferrari, Stacey Book, and Avi Glijanski for Riveter Studios and Frequency Machine. Hosted and executive produced by me, Brenda Darden-Wilkerson for AnitaBee.org.
0:54:51
-- Brenda:
podcast marketing from Lauren Passell and Ariel Nissenblatt with Riveter Studios and Tink Media in partnership with Carolyn Sneller and Coley Boucher at AnitaB.org. For more ways to be the way forward, visit AnitaB.org.
Last time it was about OpenTelemetry being added to Mastodon, and this time it's about something to do with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). I'm not sure what the significance is, but it smells fishy to me. Notably, Liz and his troon buddies 
v1 public roadmap doc: 
Honeycomb employees aren't unionized. Charity Majors may be woke, but she rules with an iron fist!
