A tale of unconscious bias

This post is a bit different from my usual fare. Susanna Holt, a colleague I’ve known for more than two decades – and have a huge amount of respect for – recently posted on LinkedIn about an encounter we had soon after we first met. She was amazing throughout the process of sharing the information: she made it anonymous, was unnecessarily complimentary and even made sure I was fine with it being posted. So I have no idea why I feel the need to post something here. It’s just a bit of an itch I feel like scratching, I suppose.

I’ll set the scene by describing some context. It happened back in the spring of 2004, which was an incredibly intense period of my life…

Professionally, I was in the first few months of a position in Bangalore, India, where I was tasked with helping build a large, offshore development capability for Autodesk Consulting. It was the Wild West (but in the East!), hiring into engineering positions in Bangalore at that time: it reminded me of the…

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