Today was a not so good day at work. I’ve had better days. The issue itself isn’t even regarding my day-to-day work with clients or my immediate team. The issue is regarding how one of the largest technology companies in the world fails to understand and account for my personal living situation, during COVID-19. But that’s a whole different story, for another time. Regardless, it’s moments like this that remind me why it’s so important — more now than ever — to share our stories and our experiences with the
In the decade I’ve worked in the tech industry I’ve come to learn how common lay-offs are. In 2012 when I was a manager at Groupon, I had to lay off teammates I had hired after the share price slumped post-IPO. When I was a manager at HotelTonight in 2015, I watched as some of my fave teammates were laid off to cut costs after the founders tried and failed to raise another round of funding. Just last week I joined the millions of professionals affected by the COVID-19 pandemic
Two years ago, I decided to radically change my career from nonprofit STEM education to software engineering. I had no background in coding, outside of a single programming class in 7th grade and a little HTML when I was a teenager. I entered a coding bootcamp, Ada Developers Academy, in January 2018 and had full-time software engineering offers from two of Seattle’s tech giants in December of the same year. Being a nontraditional Black female software engineer, preparing for the interview process began as a terrifying and mysterious endeavor. Through much
This post first appeared on Elpha, a community for women in tech to talk candidly online” If you’re a woman (particularly a woman of color) in tech, you’ve probably felt it. That feeling that you’re the “only one” in the room. The feeling that you don’t belong, that you need to prove yourself, that you’re alone. According to a study by Leanin.org and McKinsey & Company, one in five women report being one of the only women in the room. In senior leadership, this is twice as common: 40% of women are the only
Meet Carmen Bocanegra, a first-generation, Peruvian-American Senior UX Designer. In this interview, Carmen talks about her journey, explains why UX is so much more about the people than it is about the technology, how using twitter helped her career, and why working in UX can mean so many different things. TrussWorks is hiring on pocitjobs.com Tell us about your career path? I was a really curious kid. I asked a lot of questions. I had a love of science because my parents were both in the medical profession. I grew
Originally published here by Frauenloop Over the past three years of training women at FrauenLoop to enter the tech industry, this question comes up again and again. Between my female mentors and students, I’ve heard the doubts and insecurities from women with high voices, women with children, women wearing headscarves, women with accents, women with brown skin, women who have female partners, women without valid passports, and women worried about finding work because their faces or figures no longer suggest they are thirty-two. “Is this a good company?” FrauenLoop students
Think about a time in your life when you felt most included. What was going on, and how did it feel? Now take a minute and think about a time in your life when you felt excluded. What was going on there, and how did that feel? Everyone wants to feel included. We all want to feel safe. We all want to have that power. Some of us have more power than others, but as individuals, we can take a number of thoughtful actions that add up to create a better, more inclusive
In the first installment of this series, we talked about strategies for learning to code when you’re starting out. Now we’ll move on to a topic that has been the source of blood, sweat, tears, and flipped tables for many a developer… Debugging, also known as the “why the $#!%* isn’t this working?” phenomenon. Stuck on a Coding Problem? It’s impossible to describe just how demoralizing it can be to try and fail at bug fixing. If you haven’t yet, at some point, you will feel like a prize idiot despite
Coding is damn hard. When you’re just starting out, coding is hard as hell. There’s just a lot of stuff to learn in web development. Front-end or back-end? React, Angular, Ruby, .NET? AJAX, JSON, SQL, MySQL, noSQL?? You may feel at times that you’re drowning in technobabble. Thanks Data, that helps a lot. The good news is, you can get good at coding. The bad news is, you are not going to master it in 12 weeks. Sorry if you’ve been told otherwise. Now, you can certainly pick up some of the
What does it take to be a really good web developer? If you’re working at your first programming job, you probably found out quickly that it’s not easy. It’s one thing to watch coding tutorials, read programming books, and make portfolio sites. It’s quite another to have to build websites from the spec, to meet deadlines, and most importantly, to make sure that your bosses and clients are happy! On top of all that, technology changes fast. You may feel like you have to stay on top of trends or risk
