Diversity Ai And Junior Engineers With Meri Williams
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 Today's guest is Meri Williams! Meri is the CTO of Pleo and the host of LeadDev conferences for more than 10 years. With Meri, we talked about:
Today’s sponsor is Augment Code the only AI engineering platform built for real engineering teams. Learn more at augmentcode.com! 🥇 Interview SummaryIf you are a 🔒 paid subscriber 🔒 you will find my own summary of the interview below. It’s the 10-minute, handcrafted takeaways of what we talked about, with timestamps to the relevant video moments, for those who don’t have time to sit through the 1-hour chat. Here is the agenda for today:
Let's dive in 👇 1) 🚀 Meri's Unique Career Journey (01:55)Meri's path into tech began with hardware hacking as a teenager, including the remarkable experience of helping build part of South Africa's first satellite at age 16. After studying computer science in the UK, she spent her first decade at Procter & Gamble — an unusual start that gave her early exposure to corporate leadership development. Her transition to modern tech came through an unexpected opportunity. Tom Loosemore called her with a proposition: "Hey, we're going to fix the government. Come help us do that. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity."
At GDS, Meri built the team that created Gov.UK, experiencing rapid scaling from 30 to 300 people in just nine months. This unconventional journey — starting corporate, then moving to government, and finally to scale-ups and startups — gave her a unique perspective on leadership.
This reverse trajectory provided Meri with leadership and commercial skills that most engineers don't develop until much later in their careers, if at all. 2) 🌍 The Case for Diversity: Data, Challenges & Solutions (12:16)When confronting skeptics of diversity initiatives, Meri leads with data: diverse teams are more innovative, profitable, creative, and likely to succeed. But she goes deeper into why this matters:
Meri reframes the meritocracy argument: if someone from an underrepresented group has reached a senior level, they've overcome additional barriers that others haven't faced. This suggests higher capability, not lower. The Three Critical QuestionsPeople considering whether to join or stay at a company ask themselves:
Getting the Order RightMost organizations approach diversity backwards. Instead of starting with recruitment marketing, Meri recommends:... Subscribe to Refactoring to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Refactoring to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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