In this episode, Allie and Michelle try to think of contributing from a new person’s point of view. When you’re looking to build a career in tech, how can volunteering time to contribute to WordPress help you achieve your goals? There are tons of answers to that question, and we break them down here!

Episode Transcripts

Allie Nimmons:
Welcome to the Underrepresented in Tech Podcast, hosted by Michelle Frechette and Allie Nimmons. Underrepresented in Tech is a free database, but with the goal of helping people find new opportunities in WordPress and tech overall.

Michelle Frechette:
Hi, Allie.

Allie Nimmons:
Hi, Michelle. How are you?

Michelle Frechette:
I’m good. We’re laughing because Allie said, “Hold on, I have to yawn.” She yawned forgetting how contagious yawns are, and I can see her and hear her on the screen. She starts recording and I’m yawning. We’re laughing about the fact that we were starting with the yawn. We’re not bored. It’s just one of those days.

Allie Nimmons:
It’s just morning, being alive on planet earth. So I’m yawning.

Michelle Frechette:
Some days are just like that. You just yawn. That’s the way it goes.

Allie Nimmons:
For sure.

Michelle Frechette:
Anyway.

Allie Nimmons:
I’ve been good. Ooh, last episode we talked about this guy. I can’t really lift up my sleeve to show you, but my tattoo is here. It’s peeling already, which means it’s going to be healed soon. I love her. I’m so happy with her.

Michelle Frechette:
If you want to see it, go follow Allie on Twitter because she’s posting pictures there.

Allie Nimmons:
I posted a bunch of pics. Today, I wanted to talk about tattoos. We’ve done that. And now I wanted to talk about.. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about… I mean, I spend all of my time thinking about underrepresented people in WordPress and like how we can serve them better and how we can bring more people in and all those sorts of things. I think that I’ve met so many people in tech, who work in tech, who are black, who are women, all of those things, who work in other industries.

Allie Nimmons:
Maybe don’t work in WordPress, but work with other softwares and things like that. WordPress is so unique in that we’re so kind of community focused and a lot of the benefit of working in this community or working with this software is the community. There are so many things that you then get back out of that community in a professional sense, as well as a personal sense. I think that that’s really difficult for people from the outside to see, right?

Allie Nimmons:
If you walk up to someone and you say, “Hey, you should contribute to this software,” to them a lot of times it sounds like, “Hey, you should come do free work,” right? It’s hard enough as an underrepresented person to break into, I mean, any industry in America, but tech specifically. To go up to someone and say, “Hey, you should volunteer your time to work toward this project with the promise of maybe later on down the line getting various benefits from that,” that’s really difficult for people to kind of wrap their minds around.

Allie Nimmons:
I think that that’s kind of one of the like marketing problems that the WordPress Foundation has at the moment where it’s like we don’t sell contributing as broadly as we could. That’s kind of a whole other conversation. Today, I really wanted to talk about what the benefits are of contributing to a professional in this community, right? If you’re being paid to contribute, that’s a whole different thing, or if you’re semi-retired and you contribute because you love what you do, that’s a whole other thing.

Allie Nimmons:
But if you’re a young black woman coming out of college with a computer science degree, why should you contribute? I think there are lots of reasons for that. There are people, I can’t say too much at the moment, but there are people who are trying to make those benefits more apparent. I just wanted to talk to you about like… I mean, we can really only speak anecdotally, but what are the benefits of contributing in a professional sense, right?

Michelle Frechette:
First, I want to interrupt you about the word should, if I can interject really quick.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah.

Michelle Frechette:
I hate the word should because it implies that somebody else has to be doing something, which may or may not benefit them, right? We use it meaning like, oh, this is a great idea for you. You should do this. But the true meaning of the word should actually puts a burden on the other person of your intention, not their own intention, right? I try to remove the word should and say, “Here are opportunities that can benefit you if you choose to take advantage of them,” which is a lot longer than just say should.

Allie Nimmons:
That’s such a great distinction. Thank you. I’ve really never, ever thought about it that way and that’s so interesting to think about.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah. Well, I especially think about it as a woman when somebody says, “Oh, women should do this.” If you take out the word you and put a general class of people, like if I said to you, “Oh, black people should XYZ,” you immediately be like, “Excuse me? The white woman just told the black women what?” Right? I try to take the word should out and just present opportunities and explain why they can be beneficial. Before I get off my soapbox, the other word I hate is just, and you did not say it.

Michelle Frechette:
But somebody said to me over the last weekend, “I’m just a,” fill in the blank, right? I hate when people say I’m just anything because it belittles yourself and it takes power. It takes your own power away. I just wanted to put that in there too as long as I had my word soapbox out. We’re not just women. We’re not just. I hate especially when somebody says, “I’m not a developer. I’m just a WordPress user,” or whatever. Mm-hmm (negative). You’re not just anything.

Michelle Frechette:
You are a WordPress user. Own it. Anyway, okay, back to whole benefits of contributing. I think it’s great. I stumbled into it myself, just a little bit of my backstory. It’s all over the internet. If anybody knows me, they know that it started with spaghetti and that’s how I got into WordPress. But the guy who was running the local Meetup, came back to a Meetup one time and he’s like, “Hey, I just got back from WordCamp Toronto,” and he just spreads all this cool stickers and swag on the table.

Michelle Frechette:
He was like, “Hey, if you guys want anything, take it.” And I’m like, “A GoDaddy sticker?” How would anybody… I’ve seen them on the Super Bowl commercials. How would anybody get GoDaddy sticker? That was like super cool to me. It was just a sticker, right? I mean, of course, now, like years later, I have so much swag and whatever, but the idea that there were these things you could go to meet people. I’m not even talking about contributing. Just like showing up and being in the room and learning from all these people.

Michelle Frechette:
It was like $25 for a day. It was like insanely easy to attend. Take out the travel costs and everything else. I understand that there’s more to it than that. But the opportunity for you not to have to spend hundreds of dollars just for the ticket made it so much more accessible to a single mom like me at the time. And then you go back and I actually go there and I start to like meet people and network. Fast forward two years, I’m at WordCamp US and I meet Andrea Middleton.

Michelle Frechette:
I’m like, “Hey, we’re thinking about maybe someday having a WordCamp in Rochester.” And she’s like, “Why wait? Just do it anyway.” Okay. The next day we had WordCamp Rochester. I started speaking at different WordCamps because I get this like bug in me. I’m loving meeting people, and I’m loving building my network and learning skills that, I was freelancing at the time, like really elevated what I was doing for my customers and my clients.

Michelle Frechette:
And then I out of WordCamp meet the people at GiveWP, and within four months was working full-time at GiveWP, which then helped me catapult into even more of the roles that I have now. When people say like, “How is it that everybody in WordPress?” Because I took a chance. I started listening. I started attending. I got into the Slack communities.

Michelle Frechette:
I wished that I had a mentor that had said, “Here’s all the different ways that you can be involved and all the different opportunities you have to grow in all these different directions.” I didn’t have that person. I think in some ways you and I serve… In this podcast, hopefully we give people some of those ideas. Although we’re not officially mentoring anybody, that at least they’re kind of able to kind of take some of those things and move forward with them. I think that there’s lots of opportunities for people to grow.

Michelle Frechette:
Maybe you don’t want to work for another company. Maybe you want to continue to grow your own freelance business, or you want to start to build people underneath you and build your own agency empire, or whatever it is. You can still do that. There’s so many paths to growth and potential within the WordPress community. Contributing, attending, all of those things help you or can help you achieve that if you have a basic idea of how to move forward. I don’t know if I answered your question. I rambled a lot.

Allie Nimmons:
No, you totally did.

Michelle Frechette:
You rambled last week. I’m rambling this week.

Allie Nimmons:
No, you totally did. It’s so bizarre in this community too. Everyone’s experience is so different, but also exactly the same, right? So much of your experience resonates with me. I attended my first WordCamp and I had already started working at a company that used WordPress. Gated it, and so I was freelancing and I was struggling with that. Going to my first couple of events, does that in and of itself… Again, like you were saying, for the price of nothing is… Not nothing.

Allie Nimmons:
For a much cheaper price than you might pay to go to other larger like industry conference, blah, blah blahs, I learned so much and I had direct line of communication. I could go up to a speaker after their talk and say, “Hey, I didn’t understand that bit. Can you maybe sit down with me and help?” The people that are there are there to help you. I constantly compare WordCamps to one of the only other tech conferences I’ve ever attended in person.

Allie Nimmons:
I’m not going to say what it is because I don’t want to bad mouth the people that ran it because my experience had nothing to do with them. But it was a gigantic, like 1,500 people conference. Huge and sponsored by Google, Apple, Stripe, PayPal. The big, big, big companies, right? The global companies. It was supposed to be specifically for women in technology, and it was awful. I hated it because it was so big that I felt like this itty bitty little grain of sand that… I couldn’t connect to anybody.

Allie Nimmons:
Everyone who was there was very much focused on like, “Well, I’m here so that I can go to the sponsor table at Apple and talk to someone and try to get a job there,” right? It was more of like this big career fair, which is not how it was like advertised. It was advertised as like a networking education opportunity, and it was this giant corporate career fair. I didn’t connect with anyone. I tried to. The speakers were very like they got up, they spoke, and they vanished, right? They were not there to chat with people.

Allie Nimmons:
They were there to give their presentation or whatever. It was so cold and so impersonal, and I’m sure that tons of women got jobs from that fair. I’m sure that that served the purpose for them. For me, it just felt like such a waste because it was like I learned a few things, but it was all just so lofty, right? The benefit of not only like going to a WordCamp, but like being active on Twitter, contributing in the Make WordPress Slack is you have a direct line of communication with other people who have the context of I’m here to help other people, right?

Allie Nimmons:
Like you said, we don’t have really like official mentor-mentee matching program sorts of things, but I have so many mentors in this community. I have so many people that I can go to and ask for help and say… Even if I just post on Twitter and say, “Hey, I’m using this plugin and it’s doing this weird thing. Has anyone experienced this?” I’m going to get like 10 replies from people who are interested in helping me. It’s so rare to get that anywhere else, right?

Michelle Frechette:
I agree.

Allie Nimmons:
It’s so rare to have just this direct line to all of these other people who know what you’re going through and who are invested in your success, if you ask for it. It does take asking a couple of times to get that integration and to get people to hear you. But I feel like the benefit of this community really is the people. And through the people, you can learn any skill that you want, right? If you are looking to become like the greatest PHP developer in the whole world, there are people in this community who are willing to help you with that.

Allie Nimmons:
If you’re a marketer and you’re using WordPress to achieve your goals of getting a senior marketing manager position at XYZ company, there are people who have that experience and who are here to help you with that. The cost to entry for all of these skills and… I mean, even the software in and of itself, if you’re sitting down and building a site as a marketer, the things that you need to do that are so affordable not only financially, but like there’s so many resources out there to help you.

Allie Nimmons:
If you’re sitting down with a theme or a plugin or something for the first time that you’re unfamiliar with, I guarantee there’s like eight courses about it that people have made. We’re a community that’s so obsessed with educating each other. All of it is just right there at your fingertips and the ability to contribute in various ways. For example, if you want to start a podcast, there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from doing that. Look at us, right?

Michelle Frechette:
We muddle through it on the weekly.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah. You work on multiple other podcasts. I work on multiple other podcasts. It’s a great environment for that. If you want to contribute to WordPress core, the barrier for entry for that, I mean, granted there is a little bit of an onboarding issue I think with contributing to WordPress in terms of like the open source project, I think it can be a little bit challenging for folks, but that is being worked on.

Allie Nimmons:
There are people… If you make a connection and you say, “Hey, I really want to contribute, but I’m not sure how to do it,” somebody will get on a Zoom call with you and walk you through how to get there. I know it. I will. If you’re listening to this, I will.

Michelle Frechette:
And I’ll do what I can too.

Allie Nimmons:
I mean, the two times that I’ve contributed to WordPress in Make WordPress Slack, it was hard. It was really hard. My experience is very much like I do my own thing at my own pace. I have run my own business for quite a few years, and it was hard for me to learn to work asynchronously in a team with people I didn’t really know. It was difficult, but that is also such a skill.

Allie Nimmons:
If you want to work in tech, that’s a skill you’re going to need to know how to have is collaborate virtually with folks in a Slack channel and have it be confusing and a little bit messy. It’s a great skill to learn and to have on your mental portfolio, as well as your physical one, right? I mean, I think if I’m trying to sell this to like a college kid, those are the two things I’m really going to say is like, the network is here for you. They want to see you succeed, especially if you’re an underrepresented person.

Allie Nimmons:
Right now, we are experiencing in the community a huge surge I think of people and companies who are like, “We need to do better. We need to invest more of our money and our time in the underrepresented folks in this community and lift them up.” Right? That alone is a great reason to take advantage of the opportunity. That and the experience of contributing in Make WordPress Slack is a great incubator for you to learn how to contribute to a company project.

Michelle Frechette:
I think so too. Yeah, absolutely.

Allie Nimmons:
I think if you can master how to do that with our Slack channels, any company you join, it’ll be easy peasy. We do our absolutely best. I know we do our. The team leads for these things do their absolute best. It’s a huge amount of people coming and going, and it can be very messy, right? I think if you can learn to thrive in our Slack communities, you can make it absolutely anywhere.

Allie Nimmons:
Honestly, walking into a company and being able to feel very comfortable using Slack, contributing in that way, that’s going to be impressive to the people you’re working with, right? Like, “Oh man, this person really knows their way around,” right? That’s a great thing to have on your… Checked off your to-do list of things to learn. I did kind of want to circle back to the mentorship thing. Well, you had some ideas about mentorship. I mean, I feel like I’ve been really lucky in that people…

Allie Nimmons:
I have all these I call them in my head like my WordPress aunts and uncles. You’re one of my best friends, so you’re kind of not on that list. You’re like my WordPress mom. I literally referred to Chris Wiegman as my weird WordPress uncle the other day to someone else, right? Because like anything I need, Chris is there and has my back. Topher DeRosia is the same way. He messages me like once a week and asks me how I’m doing.

Allie Nimmons:
I have all of these amazing mentors who care about me professionally and personally, but I wanted to hear also your thoughts on the way our mentorship works now and maybe how it could work, or what were your feelings about that?

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah. I think sometimes we think of mentors as just people we can ask questions to now and then, and that definitely is a mentor, right? Sometimes I think we put a huge burden on our mentors by expecting them to also be like job coaches or business coaches. I think there’s definitely a line to walk with that. Finding a mentor is not always the easiest thing. If you’re looking for… I’ve mentored people before. I’ve mentored people where we had a weekly meeting. They could ask their questions.

Michelle Frechette:
I could give guidance. I wasn’t giving business advice. I also have coached businesses, right? I’ve coached people in businesses through marketing and growth and those kinds of things. I’m talking more about the personal mentorship and not even job coaching, but answering those questions that people have about how they move up the ladder, how they integrate into WordPress or whatever company or whatever that it is.

Michelle Frechette:
It’s a little bit of all those things, but it’s really more focused on the individual than it is on specific questions about how do I use Twitter or whatever it is. I’ve never like put myself out there as like, “Hey, I have an opening for a mentee. If somebody’s looking for a WordPress mentor that I could be helpful to,” that kind of thing. Whereas people have come up to me and said, “Look, I’m really looking for a mentor that I can meet with on a regular basis. Are you available? Are you open?”

Michelle Frechette:
Sometimes I’ve literally been underwater and said, “I really wish I could. Here are some other people that you might approach.” And other times I’ve been like, “Absolutely. How often do you want to meet? Let’s figure out what this relationship looks like so that I’m not letting you down. You’re not flaking on me so that we know and we set some parameters.” I think a couple things can happen.

Michelle Frechette:
Number one, approach people that you are interested in working with or learning from and seeing, number one, if they have the time, the mental ability, the mental capability. Remember that what you see on Twitter, what you see on Slack, what you see wherever is only what they’re putting out publicly. Sometimes people are dealing with these… I lost my dad recently, so taking on a mentee right now is not within my capabilities. I have too much going on in my head right now.

Michelle Frechette:
As much as I love to help people, I just don’t have the capability to have one more meeting a week or a month even. When you do approach somebody and say, “Hey, I’m looking for mentor. Do you have the capability?” No is an unacceptable answer and it’s nothing personal. It really isn’t. If somebody doesn’t have the time, please just understand, but it really has nothing to do with you and everything to do with what they have on their plate.

Michelle Frechette:
And if they say, “Yes, I’d be very interested in discussing this with you further,” be prepared to answer those questions. What are you looking for specifically? If you don’t know specifically, that’s fine, but give some ideas, right? I’m looking to grow in and understand more how I can be part of the WordPress community. I’m looking to understand how I can do better at public speaking and getting myself… Have some basic ideas that way. Also, have a goal in mind.

Michelle Frechette:
What do you want to see out of a mentor relationship in six months, in a year so that you have some milestone ideas that you can start to work towards together? And then also just make sure that the person that you’re asking sees you as a good fit and that you see them as a good fit. And here’s the other thing, if in two or three weeks working together or a month working together it’s not working for you, it’s okay to say, “I don’t think that this is working for me. It’s nothing personal,” blah, blah, blah, whatever it is.

Michelle Frechette:
It’s okay to break those relationships without breaking friendships and without having negativity. There’s just a lot that goes into mentor relationships. A true mentor relationship isn’t as simple as just liking what somebody does and asking them a few questions, right? Yes, there’s a lot of mentors that way.

Michelle Frechette:
But if you’re looking for an actual working mentor relationship, then you really want to make sure that things are working well for both sides and that both people are approaching it with the level of engagement that needs to happen in order to move that needle and hit those metrics. Generally speaking, mentor relationships are not something that you pay for. That’s not what a mentor is. Business coaching is. Public speaking coaching is. Job coaching is.

Michelle Frechette:
If you’re looking for somebody who’s a coach, then expect to pay for those services. If you’re looking for somebody who can mentor you, have coffee once in a while, or those kinds of relationships, you shouldn’t be paying for a mentor relationship. Really kind of pay attention to what people are looking for that way too.

Allie Nimmons:
Absolutely. Something you said too really resonated with me of like… A couple years ago, I was working with Ebony Butler as like she was mentoring me because I really wanted to try to learn how to code. I really wanted to get back into it, give it another stab. We were working together on a project where we were meeting on a regular basis, and I was just really struggling. I really hated it. I felt like I didn’t have the time.

Allie Nimmons:
I just had to tell her, “Look, we’ve been at this for like a month and I’m really struggling. I don’t know. I feel like I don’t really want to do this anymore.” She was like, “That’s fine. We’re still really great friends.” We organized a Slack group together, right? I don’t even know she remembers about that, right? It was not a big deal, but it was important that I communicated with her instead of just like not showing up to our calls or like showing up without the…

Allie Nimmons:
Because she would give me like homework every week of like something I should work on. Instead of just showing up every week without my homework done, I was like, “You know what? This isn’t what I want to do anymore.” She was like, okay. It’s as simple as that, right?

Michelle Frechette:
Integrity. You have to bring integrity to it. That’s absolutely correct. I love that you owned up to those kinds of things. I thought this is what I wanted and what I had time for. It turns out not so much right now at this point of my life. Absolutely.

Allie Nimmons:
I think all of that definitely plays in like there’s so much untapped potential for I think more mentor-mentee relationships in our community. We don’t really have right now a system for that. I think it’d be something really cool to have. I’m trying not to fall too much too in love with the idea, because I don’t have time, but like that’s something that I would love to… I would love to add that to my like legacy of things I leave with WordPress is like…

Michelle Frechette:
I’m thinking, ooh, is there a place on Underrepresented in Tech where we could like have a mentor database? We could just add a box that says, “I’m interested in mentoring.”

Allie Nimmons:
We have to give it some more thought. We should give it some more thought.

Michelle Frechette:
We’ll talk about it later. If anybody has ideas about these things.

Allie Nimmons:
That’s what I was going to say. If you have any ideas or if you think this is a good idea, please let us know. If we get bomb rushed with people who are like, “Yes. Yes. Do this,” then I think we should definitely give it some more thought. I know we’re both super busy right now, but maybe it’s something to look for in the future. I mean, I think it’s a great idea. It’s a great thing to have and so many people would benefit from it.

Michelle Frechette:
We’ll give it some thought. Here’s the thing, we could have good ideas that other people can own. If we’ve said something and you’re like, “Oh, I could totally do that,” we will support you in that way. We’ll give you all our ideas.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, absolutely.

Michelle Frechette:
We don’t have to own the digital space for it. If we’ve inspired you, by all means, let us know and we will give you the rest of the ideas that goes with it.

Allie Nimmons:
For sure. All right, we’ll wrap up there. But yeah, if you liked anything we talked about today, if you have any additional ideas to tag onto what we’ve said, please let us know on Twitter. We’re always looking to start a conversation with you. We’ll see you next week.

Michelle Frechette:
Sounds good. Bye.

Allie Nimmons:
Bye.

Allie Nimmons:
This episode was sponsored by the following companies. WP Wallet. WP Wallet is a free, simple, intelligent tool that helps WordPress professionals effortlessly manage all of their license keys and invoices for all sites and clients. Never forget a renewal, lose a license key, or miss out on a reimbursement again. Join WP Wallet for free today. LearnDash. LearnDash is taking cutting edge e-learning methodology and infusing it into WordPress.

Allie Nimmons:
More than just a plugin, LearnDash is trusted to power the learning programs for major universities, small to mid-size companies, startups, entrepreneurs, and bloggers worldwide. If you’re interested in sponsoring an episode, using our database, or just want to say hi, go to underrepresentedintech.com. See you next week.