You might have heard about DEI or allyship, and then not know what to do next. You want to help your teammates from underrepresented groups, but you’re not how. Or if you should.

Let me challenge that. ICs can be allies. ICs can advance DEI in your company, even without a big management push. You don’t have to do anything flashy or complicated.

Furthermore, being an ally is a continuous process. It’s not something that you can just learn in a day and be done forever. No one is asking for perfection. Good-hearted action with a few mistakes is better than waiting for perfection and never doing anything.

So, here are five ways that you can be an ally today, even if you think you’re “just a low-level IC”.

1. Compliment your coworkers when they do a good job

When someone does a good job, tell them. Give them a sincere, specific compliment based on something they did. And compliment them publicly.

This might sound like such a small thing, but it’s very powerful. People from under-represented groups (URGs) often get less credit for doing the same work as their peers.

Don’t feel pressured to give a compliment for the sake of giving a compliment. Cynical people will read this and think, “Fine, I’ll compliment Bob on his haircut,” or “Bob doesn’t deserve any admiration. He hasn’t done anything remarkable in weeks.”

That’s not the point. It’s more about attending a presentation, learning something, and then sincerely telling the presenter, “Hey Bob, I noticed you put a lot of effort into your presentation. The latency metrics you presented were very insightful.”

At a personal level, a genuine compliment brightens their day.

At a professional level, acknowledging a job well done helps to advance others’ careers. If Bob is excelling in his role, and everyone on the team agrees, the manager will see that as a positive signal. People that hog all the credit don’t succeed in the long run.

In addition to acknowledging others’ work, it is also important to be mindful of the tasks that are assigned to team members. Some duties are seen as less valuable, such as taking meeting notes. I call this “grunge work”.

2. Establish a rotation for grunge work

Oftentimes, grunge work disproportionately falls to women. This can have a negative impact on their careers, as they may be seen as less valuable engineers than their male colleagues.

For example, one of the most common duties that women get handed is taking meeting notes. Having to multitask in meetings makes it harder for the note taker to contribute to the discussion. And unfortunately, taking notes won’t advance your career as much as improving your system’s API.

Instead of having the same person take notes in a recurring meeting, establish a rotation. Don’t allow excuses, either. If someone’s handwriting is “bad”, respond by saying, “No worries, this will be good practice.” Or if they don’t want to write by hand, they can type the meeting notes.

Pro tip: Being bad at something doesn’t mean you should never do it. In fact, sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something.

This goes beyond taking notes. Other responsibilities often get shoved onto women’s shoulders, such as planning team events and scheduling meetings. You could roll the week’s team duties into other on-duty rotations, like bug triage or responding to client questions.

Hopefully your team does more than just grunge work. There are bugs to be fixed and features to be implemented, right?

3. Check that project work is equitably assigned

Most software engineers want to continue learning new skills and advance in their career. But if every bug gets assigned to the same person, the recipient doesn’t have time to work on new feature development.

When someone is stuck working on the same type of bugs week after week, they have no opportunities to learn something new. In fact, the team as a whole suffers because the team develops a silo and a single point of failure.

When bugs and projects are assigned, check to see that everyone has opportunities to develop new skills throughout the year. If you notice a colleague hasn’t been assigned a stretch project, talk to them. Ask them what they want to work on. You or them could take their requests to your manager.

The point of this is to keep the team happy and effective. You may not be the team’s manager, but you have a part to play in creating a culture of candid feedback and learning within your team. And another way to do that is to ask this next question.

4. Ask “How can I help you?”

One simple question is “How can I help you?”

Now the context around this question is not so simple. In order to receive genuine requests, the other person has to trust you. They have to believe that you’ll act on their response. And if they give you constructive criticism, you have to be able to nod and say, “Okay” even if you feel emotional in the moment. This is a very hard thing to do.

It’s funny: Everyone in tech wants feedback. but not everyone can handle negative feedback. Yet, negative feedback is so important for growth! Only giving compliments is doing your colleagues a disservice. It is possible to give negative feedback in a constructive, direct way that demonstrates good intentions. And if your colleagues cannot handle genuine constructive criticism, perhaps you’re in a toxic workplace and ought to leave.

Now, if you randomly go up to a colleague and ask “How can I help you?” They’re probably going to do one of two things:

• Give you a trivial request (“Uhh, can you review my CL?”)
• Make a joke (“Yeah can you grab a cappuccino from downstairs?”)

This question is best asked in a recurring 1:1. When a new engineer joins your team, it’s easy to schedule a calendar event like “Intro with Alice”. First, you meet weekly, then bi-weekly, and then just monthly or quarterly. And in each meeting, you ask “How can I help you?”

But what about your existing teammates? If you want, offer to set up informal meetings with each of your teammates once per quarter. As part of the agenda, ask “How can I help you?”

Some of your teammates will decline your invitations. Others will attend once, find you have little to talk about, and then decline future events. One or two teammates will find these meetings extremely useful. Those are the ones you want to keep meeting with.

And after each meeting, you get to work resolving their reasonable requests. This should take less than an hour per week. You should NOT do unnecessary work for other people. You should unblock them and connect them with useful information.

In addition to helping your current teammates, there is one more thing you can do.

5. Mentor engineers from historically underrepresented groups

Mentorship is a valuable tool. Sometimes, people from historically underrepresented groups don’t have access to mentors.

Check if your company has an official mentorship program. See if you can mentor someone, and express interest in any DEI sub-programs.

The point is not to prioritize, say, Black women over other groups. But if a Black woman wants a mentor, one should be available just as easily as for a White man.

Local high schools and colleges might also have ways that you can talk to students. It could be as easy as a quick presentation slot at career day, as intensive as an after-school course during the fall semester, or even a part-time job at a university.

I have also found mentees through Reddit (I reached out) and LinkedIn (they reached out). One time, I even met a professor on the street and he ended up being a mentor for a short time.

Mentoring other people is not necessarily an allyship thing. In fact, these five things are just things that good teammates do.

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There are lots of other ways to be an ally–everywhere from the interview process to planning offsites. I hope you can pick one thing from this list and put it into practice this week.

1. Compliment your coworkers when they do a good job
2. Establish a rotation for grunge work
3. Check that project work is equitably assigned
4. Ask “How can I help you?”
5. Mentor engineers from historically underrepresented groups

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This article was inspired after reading Karen Catlin’s “5 Ally Actions” newsletter. You can find her at betterallies.com.