On Feb. 21, Mayor Ed Murray held his first-ever roundtable dedicated to any one specific industry since he came into office last year. The tech industry was privileged to be chosen for this first-of-its-kind event. Over a dozen tech leaders met the mayor along with City’s CTO and the director of its Office of Economic Development (OED) in the land of Moz (aka, the headquarters of Seattle startup Moz).

We’ve been working with OED for months to organize this meeting. It’s part of our efforts to activate tech leaders into more civic engagement with our government so that we can work more closely together on achieving shared goals for making our region the best place on earth to live, work, play.

Seattle’s Startup Advocate Rebecca Lovell kick started the meeting by stating the city’s commitment to engaging the tech community, building innovation hubs throughout Seattle, and being a “megaphone for the region.”

Leaders who participated came from tech companies of all sizes and stages along with non-profits training future tech leaders like Technology Access Foundation (TAF), Year-Up, and AdaDevelopers Academy were also represented.

Mayor Murray started off the meeting with introductory comments that expressed his appreciation for the amazing innovation and economic expansion that is occurring within Seattle’s IT sector and his commitment to maintaining a connection to the industry to ensure ongoing success.  He also introduced  Michael Mattmiller, the city’s new CTO and pointed that he was the first in his position to have any industry experience and that the city is currently overhauling its website and online services under his leadership.  Mattmiller described a lot of interesting new efforts like Performance Seattle and data.seattle.gov that I’m going to have to return to in another blog post to do it justice.

Before the meeting, WTIA and OED surveyed industry leaders for possible discussion topics and came back with “education” and “infrastructure.” In my experience, whenever you bring together tech and government leaders to discuss the biggest challenges facing our region, it inevitably comes back to the tech workforce.

Below, I’ve recapped some interesting things shared at the meeting broken down by the stage in which we engage tech workers: train, recruit, and retain. There is one more stage that I have yet to come up with a pithy name for, so I refer to it as “harness the power of tech workers for societal good.”

Train

Non-profits from three different stages of training tech workers were present. TAF trains high school kids of color, Year-Up works to place college age kids in internships at technology companies, and Adas trains women who are looking to start a new career in technology. They all rely on strong partnerships with industry many of whom were also in the room.

There was a shared concern that we need more diversity in the tech industry overall. Trish Millines Dziko, the executive director of TAF, said that diversity in the tech industry has not increased much since she started out as an engineer in the late 1970s, and that’s due to the lack of attention developing the pipeline of talent. She said, “The talent is there.  Companies need to decide if they want the best talent available or the best talent possible.  Getting the best talent possible starts by having underrepresented minorities–the people who are being impacted–leading the discussions on education reform and using their voice at the decision making tables.”

Recruit

All agreed software developers are in the highest demand. WTIA just released a study that shows Washington companies are generating jobs for SDEs 10x faster than we can fill those jobs with local talent. Each SDE also generates, on average, two non-technical jobs in the same company.

Elisa Fink, CMO of Tableau, said, “Only  one-third of our jobs are for developers. We have a lot of non-tech jobs open too. If you’re smart, hard-working, love data, are computer-savvy, we want to talk to you.”

Sarah Bird, CEO of Moz, pointed out, “My real problem is getting people with graduate degrees in computer science. How do we get more people trained up?”

Mayor Murray stressed his desire to see educational opportunities available for more people.

Retain

Millines Dziko also pointed out tech companies are losing tech talent from communities of color because “if people don’t feel welcome and valued as someone who contributes to the company’s success, they will not stay.”

Tech leaders also bemoaned the need for better infrastructure to support the transit and housing needs of the drastically increasing number of tech workers too.

Redwood Stephens, president of Synapse, said, “Our company culture embraces biking to work, using mass transit, and trying to reduce our use of single occupancy vehicles. In 2007, we moved Synpase to downtown Seattle in order to full utilize the transit system. Unfortunately, since 2007, bus commute times have dramatically increased to a point when some of our people are switching back to cars.”

Liz Pearce, CEO of LiquidPlanner, said, “I have people commuting in from Mill Creek and Bothell and they have to leave at 6 am to avoid the traffic. This puts pressure on us, because team members loses collaboration time by not being in the office at the same time of day.”

Harness the power of tech workers for societal good

Mayor Murray said he wants to crowdsource more solutions from the tech industry to solve problems. The city has also started hosting some civic hackathons hosted by the Police Department and Department of Transportation (Hack the Commute coming up on March 20-22).

WTIA CEO Michael Schultzer pointed that the city’s traffic problems will never get solved by building more bridges. “We need to take into the creativity of the tech workers here if we’re going to get anywhere.”

In the short 90 minutes we had with the mayor, many provocative ideas were shared that can’t all be captured in this post. Fortunately, the mayor concluded by saying it would not be his last meeting with the tech industry. Indeed, this is just the beginning of a much longer conversation.

This year, with nine open City Council seats, will be an opportunity for Seattle’s tech workers to influence city policy with our ballots.