Building an Inclusive Technology Organization at Grubhub
Building an Inclusive Technology Organization at Grubhub
By: Anthony Cardone and Bhuvana Husain
Millions of people from different backgrounds use Grubhub’s products every day to order from hundreds of thousands of restaurants across the country, and our goal is to bring that same variety of perspectives to our work environment. At Grubhub, we celebrate differences and believe that our diversity strengthens the quality of our products and technology. We’re committed to building an equitable and inclusive technology organization that ensures many voices are heard in our decision-making processes.
Project Overview
As part of our efforts related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, we’ve been working to remove subtly racist terminology from our systems, tools, and processes. The English language contains many colloquialisms that have been around for centuries, and which imply, even today, that white means good and black means bad. Terms such as blacklist, whitelist, master, and slave, are antithetical to our goal of inclusivity at Grubhub and must be changed.
To that end, we’ve been working throughout 2020 and into 2021 on a project to replace these and other words throughout our systems, services, configuration, user experiences, training materials, documentation, and communications.
How It Started
To kick things off, we identified non-inclusive language and suggested alternative terms:
These lists of subtly racist terms and alternative neutral terms were identified by a group of senior leaders, with some crowdsourcing of ideas from team members across our technology organization. When we announced this project, feedback from our colleagues was extremely positive; several people reached out to say thank you and that they felt heard or empowered because of this effort, much of which was led by Clark Malmgren, a Vice President of Engineering, with support from Technical Program Managers (including the two of us) within the organization.
We consulted several articles published by psychology researchers and professionals as references, including “Blacklists” and “whitelists”: a salutary warning concerning the prevalence of racist language in discussions of predatory publishing, Confronting the Language of Subtle Racism, and Why is ‘black’ always a bad word? | Editorials.
After this, we put together a list of almost two hundred services within our tech stacks and their corresponding codebases, databases, and documentation, all of which needed to be updated. We then proceeded to coordinate with hundreds of engineers around the world to make those updates. We’ve been tracking the updates via spreadsheets and tickets, ensuring that leads continue to plan these changes into their teams’ schedules as needed. We’ve also incorporated the ongoing tracking of these changes into our regular sprint planning processes, as well our weekly and monthly review meetings.
How It’s Going
This has not been an easy effort — think of how many places the ‘master’ branch of source code is referenced — but it’s a worthwhile one. We’re not done yet, but we’re proud to say that over 85% of our services have been updated, and the rest have been scheduled to be updated soon. We’re also working with our vendors to address external company tools and dependencies where we couldn’t simply change the terms (i.e. Contentful, Github, and others). Our engineers submitted requests to those vendors to ask them to consider updating their verbiage; Github already had a plan in motion and we’re planning to implement their solution to move away from ‘master’ to ‘main’ for our primary branch.
This project has led to changes among all of our employees, partners, and customers. We’ve evolved how we think about and talk about what we do. And we’ve observed team members holding each other accountable in group meetings, code reviews, comments in documentation, and more. One team member suggested to a restaurant partner that they substitute the term ‘blackout’ with ‘temp close’. Another employee noted that a campus partner has used our recommendations to stop using the terms ‘whitelist’ and ‘blacklist’ entirely across their own organization.
Doing More to Build an Inclusive Environment
We recognize that changing this terminology is only one part of a multi-year, multi-team, company-wide strategy for greater diversity, equity, and inclusion. In addition to the effort described above, we’ve launched and added to our Voices Council and Employee Resource Groups. Throughout 2020, we also hosted a webinar series focused on inclusion, featuring notable guest speakers such as Bryan Stevenson, Katrina Lake, Linda Johnson Rice, Luvvie Ajayi, and Chloe Valdary. In 2021, we’ve hosted multiple events in honor of Black History Month and Women’s History Month, amplifying voices from underrepresented groups. And all our people leaders are attending inclusive leadership training with industry experts in this field from Paradigm.
We’ve also focused on improving our job descriptions to be more inclusive, changing our sourcing techniques to find more diversity in our candidate slates, and enhancing our interview techniques to better include underrepresented populations. We’re proud to have launched a Reconnect Returnship program with PathForward, targeted at individuals who have at least five years of professional experience and have been out of the paid workforce for at least two years to focus on caring for a child or other dependent.
If you’d like to join us in reinventing the way that restaurants and diners connect, we’d love to meet you! Check out our Careers site to learn more about our team, our culture, and our jobs, and tell us what you’d bring to our table.
