Sounds Promising - Sr event producer Lesbians Who Tech Employee Review

If you're excited to learn a ton, want to solve problems you've never seen solved before, are eager to work hard alongside passionate people and ultimately help elevate an incredible community, then Lesbians Who Tech & Allies will be a game changer in your career. Each member of the team makes a true impact on everything Lesbians Who Tech does, whether that's producing world class events, sending underrepresented techies to coding bootcamps through the scholarship program, or elevating leaders through The Queer 50 and many others. Your opinion and creative ideas are welcomed and encouraged and often brought to life by you and your colleagues personally. The small size of the team and event cycles mean that every day is different. There is no autopilot internally; the team is constantly trying to do better, provide more for our community and partners, and level up. I've worked harder and put more of myself into the work here than I ever have before and I have gotten back everything I've put in and more. I was also given the time off I needed to do my best work. Leadership not only agreed to extended time off requests, but set up time to ask me questions and try to understand more about what I needed in that moment and we problem solved together.

This type of a company is not for everyone. Lesbians Who Tech & Allies sits at the intersection of Events, Tech, and Diversity & Inclusion. All three spaces are very fast paced, complicated, always evolving, nuanced, and demand a level of curiosity, empathy, self awareness, hard work and heart. The team here is truly trying to build something amazing but there are a lot of obstacles. The reason why Lesbians Who Tech & Allies is so beloved by the community they serve is because there is really truly nothing else out there like the spaces/events they produce; and the reason for that is because building them is really hard. This means everyone on the team works really hard, has a scrappy approach, tries something new, fails and then tries something else, and sometimes work long hours or weekends. If you are looking for a 9-5 job where when you sign off at night you don't give work another thought, each day feels similar, and you can dictate how you spend most of your time - then this job is not for you.

Lesbians Who Tech (and Tech Jobs Tour) do needed work in the tech industry to boost diversity recruitment.

Highly dysfunctional leadership and management, lack of organizational structure, lack of HR and/or internal review processes, highly problematic boundary issues between leadership and staff, overall tone of mistrust from leadership, high value on results over people (at whatever cost). Inappropriate "carrot dangling" to motivate higher productivity, without follow-through (ex: if you can just give us 120% these next two weeks, we think you have a lot of potential and will move up). Extremely high turn-over (longest lasting program staff member - 1 year). Leadership/CEO talks negatively about former employees to current staff. I came to Lesbians Who Tech (LWT) after being recruited out of a large Fortune 500 tech company - for as hard as I was chased, I had high hopes, especially as a queer-identified person. I was deeply (and quickly) disappointed by my experience with LWT, and made the decision to resign because of general mistreatment and hostile management. Bottom line: If you want to be treated with respect, do not work here. If you want to be mentored and/or are looking for managers to help you develop professionally, do not work here. If you want to be home more than you are traveling, do not work here. If you have a personal life that you actually care about, do not work here. If you want to be paid a reasonable salary for working 60+ hours/week, do not work here.