Who’s your host?
Years ago after lockdown, everybody I met was either recovering a breakup or getting married. No I’m not getting married - keep reading! These days, it feels like everybody I meet is either job searching or creating a podcast and/or organising a conference. A very stark contrast!
To both of these groups of people I want to share my advice; research the companies who are represented at tech meetups. Whether this informs your decision on the types of companies you might want to work for, or the types of companies that might be able to support your own events - identify the motivated companies by researching who is sponsoring existing events and being represented by conference speakers or attendees (i.e. they provide a learning and development budget or pay well enough that employees pay themselves).
Let’s use MoT’s London meetup as an example, who have so far had four hosting companies. I’m not connected to any of them, but each of these companies show us the culture they’re striving for (without repeating the same generic handful of mission statements), and there are hundreds more supporting local MoT meetups monthly around the world.
The first to host MoT London was Lyst, showing their principles by being the first hosts. They have historically also hosted meetups for Next Tech Girls who were setup to tackle the under-representation of women seen in the UK tech industry. This tells me that they’re a company who try to action their principles of levelling up, inclusivity, safety and trust.
The next hosts were the Zühlke Group. Zühlke’s accessibility lab teaches us how issues with dexterity, hearing, eyesight and neurodiversity, need to be considered when designing websites and products that work for everybody. That tells me their engineering culture is more likely to be one that strives to build the right thing and build it once.
More recently the meetup has been hosted by Dunelm, who regularly post to their engineering blog (engineering.dunelm.com has 18 posts this year, one every 12 days) and Monzo who recently published their Diversity and Inclusion Report which stated their progress in representing women and people of colour.
These are the types of companies I’d want to work with - because they invest back into the community and showcase their desire to build from strong engineering foundations. As with the TestBash sponsors, we couldn’t host these events without these companies support - financially or in office spaces and catering. So to each of the organisers and sponsors, thank you!
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A photo of Emily with two Ministry of Testing hosts; Simon the main host of TWIT and Gary Shannon who is responsible for organising, hosting and running MoT London.
