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
TL;DR — This isn’t a self-promotional post about landing a job. It’s about embracing failure and hard lessons as a necessary part of the process in making a lofty dream become a reality. These days when people ask me how I’m doing, I would often ask if they’ve seen “The Pursuit of Happyness” because life for me is like the movie (mainly the ending). Through the pursuit of my own “happiness” — I learned valuable lessons in making a dream become a reality. Imagine celebrating your birthday with family and
After about 9 months teaching myself how to code, I have accepted an offer with the Guardian Newspaper to join their Digital Fellowship programme as an Associate Software Engineer. In this article, I want to support readers who are already teaching themselves how to code or are considering it. For others, I hope this article sheds some light on how we can support those trying to become engineers without bootcamps or formal education. What does self-taught mean? To me being a self taught engineer means that you haven’t completed any formal
Posted in Open Design by Sara Zhang “Product Designer.” When I first moved to San Francisco and was looking for a job in the design world, this title appeared in listing after listing, and I had no idea what it meant. I wondered, What is product design? What is product? And what on earth is Sketch? The year was 2013, and I was fresh out of Florida State University with a shiny new art degree. I’d been creative since I was young and began taking art classes in middle school.
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
Arlan Hamilton — founder and managing partner at Backstage Capital — summarized best why investing in Black Female Founders (BFF) isn’t just important, but could produce high yields: “Less than 0.2 percent of all early-stage venture funding goes to Black women, while we make up approximately 8 per cent of the U.S. population and are one of the fastest-growing entrepreneur segments in the country,” Arlan wrote. “It is my firm belief that because Black women have had to make do with far less for centuries, equipping them with early-stage capital that is
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
As a technical recruiter, I love understanding the composition of a team, learning what skills are missing, and recruiting people who will round things out and help the team perform optimally. But most of all, I love being able to work for a company where I can cast a wide net to untapped communities that include underrepresented people because we truly value inclusion. As a woman and the daughter of Peruvian immigrants, I sit at the intersection of two groups who struggle to get into the recruiting pipeline. I know
Obsidian Security is hiring on pocitjobs.com Techies are not only into tech When Steph Yeo started at Obsidian Security as a Marketing Associate, the first things she noticed was her colleague’s wide range of interests. “There’s a guy who knows how to pick locks, someone else who’s good at Rubik’s Cube.” We have opera singers, concert pianists, people who can unicycle.” Steph continues, “there’s something about the people who are in tech. When they’re good at something, they’re obsessively good at something.” As a recent transplant from the arts, it
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
