Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

How we create an environment where everyone feels welcome and has equal opportunity

At Sourcegraph, we want to make it so everyone can code, so that technology’s benefits reach the whole world. To do that, and to even understand what’s necessary to do that, our team needs to represent a diverse set of perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds. We also believe that talent is equally distributed, so we strive for our team to demonstrate that by being inclusive of and equitable toward all people. This page describes our efforts and commitments to work toward these outcomes, and we expect to improve and expand our plans here as we learn and grow.

— Quinn Slack (CEO/co-founder)

Sourcegraph’s first steps towards creating a diverse team came with the decision to work remotely, and engage the right talent regardless of the country, city and timezone they were located in. Besides allowing us access to talent across the globe, this decision enabled us to engage talent who are otherwise unable or unwilling to spend each day in an office, such as talent who take care of dependents at home, may not have access to transport, or have physical restrictions that make commuting difficult.

After deciding to work remotely, we also:

• Chose to offer compensation that was independent of location.
• Made sure our talent was supported in working remotely—including offering home desk set-up, coworking space, and internet benefits.
• Decided to work asynchronously as much as reasonable, to ensure our teammates across time zones and working schedules are included in conversations and calls for input.

Our initiatives since then have been focused on identifying and acting on the potential obstacles our teammates and candidates feeling welcome and having equal access to opportunity existing teams and hiring process—the most impactful steps we could take to reduce bias and discrimination from our processes and interactions.

Specifically, we…

• Have standardized, benchmarked compensation criteria related to each role
• Screen for our “Be welcoming and inclusive” value throughout the hiring process, with questions asked by recruiters, hiring managers, and teammates: such as asking what candidates have done to ensure their co-workers feel a sense of belonging, how they’ve advocated for someone else, how they’ve contributed to building cultures of inclusivity in their previous workplaces.
• Train managers and teammates on how to identify and reduce their own unconscious bias while interviewing and leverage Brighthire to ensure interviews are standardized, consistent and free from bias.
• Have guidelines around paid time off that are inclusive of multiple reasons for PTO: including wellbeing PTO, religious PTO, and life PTO.
• Ask all teammates to participate in anonymous surveys around what could be improved in our culture and ways of working, allowing all teammates to provide feedback on what could enhance our value of being welcoming and inclusive
• Provide access to Modern Health, our independent wellbeing provider, offering 10 counseling and coaching sessions per year for each of our employees, as well as access to a range of diverse support groups (COVID-19, LQBTQ+, Black Lives Matter, Asian communities, Latinx communities)

In addition, we aim to roll out the following initiatives:

• Pay transparancy and job leveling across teams, aimed at ensuring our managers use skill-based criteria to assess each contributor’s level of impact and ensure that teammates are paid fairly for their level of impact
• Provide detailed guidance and support to our teammates on how they can create their own internal Cohorts and how to surface and escalate insights and ideas that will positively impact Sourcegraph as a whole.

We appreciate that this work will never be fully done, and will update this page as we identify, launch and complete future initiatives that will help us make Sourcegraph a place where all teammates feel they belong and can grow their careers.

We encourage all teammates to give us ideas and feedback at any time via their managers and/or the PeopleOps team. If appropriate, questions can be submitted anonymously via our company meeting form (which is automatically posted to #general on Slack each week). If you are a candidate and have questions, you can email hiring@sourcegraph.com.