WWCode Conversations #63: How to Transition Into a Tech Career: Panel Discussion
Charlotte Jackson, Product Analytics at Meta, Director at Women Who Code DC, and Traffic Safety Advocate at Data Driven Streets, Shanna Gregory, Chief Program Officer at Women Who Code, Stephanie Nguyen, Python Leadership Fellow at Women Who Code, Nadya Primak Front End Developer at Pluribus Digital, Stephanie Sydorko, Senior Data Engineer at Color, Lisa Smith, Engineering Manager at Netflix, Founding Director at Women Who Code Raleigh-Durham, and Advisor at Strategio, and Amanda Brown, Senior Software Engineer at Test Double.
CJ: Can you each share a little about your journey into Tech?
SN: I didn't pursue tech or anything design related because I didn't think it would make me any money. I ended up working in a very secure industry. I was doing a lot of design work and was very fortunate to have a lot of clients who gave me a lot of business. And then, they eventually said they would like for me to build their apps and websites. That's what pushed me into tech. I've worked in tech for several years, but I have over a decade of experience, including all my consulting and freelancing work.
NP: Growing up, I was very creative. I liked to draw, paint, and write stories. I liked to play games, which got me into computers. I didn't do any coding growing up, except for a little bit of HTML and CSS in late middle school and early high school. That was before developer tools. It was very challenging and frustrating. I didn't do any programming until college. I got a visual arts degree with a concentration in computer science. Two years after graduation, I worked in the art department and the media lab at my alma mater. I decided that I didn't know where my career was going and wanted to improve at programming. I was into web development. I started teaching myself JavaScript. I moved with my then-fiance to St. Louis, where there's a program called LaunchCode. They help people get their foot in the door, people who have a non-traditional background, and they don't charge. A recruiter put me at a startup called Legal Insight. That was how I got my first software engineering job.
SS: I had an undergraduate in Physics but graduated and didn't use that at all. I started working as a conference and exposition planner. I did that for several years, ran trade shows, and traveled around the country. It was fun, but it wasn't what I wanted to do. I learned some Python to help with some work stuff. I fell in love with the idea of doing programming and working in IT. I tried to do some self-study at the time but wasn't able to get any traction with it. I ended up going back to school for a computer science degree. I have been working as a Python engineer, primarily doing backend work. In my current role, I work at a healthcare company, and I'm one of the data engineers. I help the data scientists and the data analytics teams with their needs.
LS: I was a librarian in my youth. I was always a tech nerd. I always heard that I couldn't do it, so I didn't pursue it. After I got my library degree and worked in libraries, I taught myself programming. At the time, it was HTML, CSS, and a little bit of JavaScript, back when we laid out pages with tables. I've been working online for a long time. I built websites for a lot of years. I worked for agencies for a bunch of years. I worked on an e-commerce monolith site. I worked for a FinTech company. Now, I'm an engineering manager for Zapier, an automation firm. I manage the team that works on our developer platform, serving internal and external developers who want to build apps on Zapier.
AB: I told my mom I wanted to be an engineer in high school. She told me that it required too much math. I ended up going to college for communications because it was the easiest and made sense, and I was good at it. I knew I didn't want to keep doing communications, but I figured I would get it over with. I ended up graduating early, just pushing through the classes. I started taking some computer science classes right after I graduated. I had always had this vision that I would be a web designer. I never felt like I could live up to the portfolio. After taking some community classes, I got my first job as an office assistant. I ended up working at a rock climbing gym for years. I got pregnant and needed to figure out something to do with my life. I knew that I wanted to be a web designer before, and I knew I liked technology. I did a bootcamp in 2015, and the rest is history. I did ThinkStart, and I got a job as a technical consultant, then a web developer, and now I am a software engineer at a company called Higher Logic. We make a content-sharing platform. I'm getting my Master's in Computer Science starting in the fall from Georgia Tech.
CJ: Working with other people, particularly men who have been studying computer science their whole career, did any of you ever experience impostor syndrome in the workplace?
LS: I was always the only woman engineer wherever I was, so I founded our local chapter of Women Who Code to try to help other people not feel alone. Impostor syndrome doesn't, for me anyway, go away. I continue to push ahead and have a strong voice wherever I am. I typically get noticed. I'm only 4'11, so I can sometimes get lost. I make sure that it doesn't happen. That's basically how I combat it.
SN: I experience Impostor Syndrome now. I'm heading up a few different departments and am still fairly young. I don't have that many years of experience. When I entered Tech, I entered as a software developer. I can't tell you how many comments I've received from men. A man approached me and asked me what I was doing. I said I'm a software developer. He said, "You don't look like one." I said, "What does that mean?" He said, "What were you doing before that?" I said, "I was a designer." He said, "Okay, that makes sense." When you hear those comments, it can be very challenging to push through.
SS: People have assumed that I'm the secretary or the assistant. You can't be the engineer, not even a junior engineer, because you're the only woman in the room. It is assumed that you're the person who can go get pens from the supply closet.
LS: I had one place where I was called office mom because I was the only mom in the office. That pigeonholed me the entire time I was at that company. Nobody took me seriously there because I was just everybody's mom.
CJ: Have people asked you how you refill the coffee in the coffee machine? How do we respond to questions like that when they come from a place of you're a woman, you must know this. Is there a good way to respond to those types of questions?
LS: My job after the office mom job, I stayed as far away from the food and the kitchen as possible. That was my conditioned response. It can be a challenge because I do like doing those things. I like cooking for people. I like taking care of people. At work, I have just to step back and not do that.
SN: I'd probably say, "I don't know, you could probably Google it." Depending on my rapport with that person, I don't necessarily mind getting a little sassy here and there. It's some friendly banter. That's usually how I approach those situations.
CJ: We hear a lot about ageism in the Tech industry. Is that something that you feel has impacted your career journey?
LS: Personally, yes. I also lean into it now. I self-identify as old. I work a lot for inclusion and diversity on multiple axes. I remind people that age is a diversity factor, especially in tech, where old is 41, an actual statistic. The majority of folks in Tech are 30 and under. I am the constant voice of age as a diversity metric wherever I am. You can lose a lot of institutional knowledge if you devalue people with experience. I understand that startup culture is very youth-oriented. It makes sense because younger people might be more willing to work 24-hour days. Once a company matures past that startup phase, you'll find them hiring in people who have more industry experience and are a little older. We have plenty of age diversity in our upper ranks.
SS: I've been fortunate to work with many federal agencies as a government contractor. They tend to be a little more diverse in terms of age, not so much the startup culture. I have run into more sexism than ageism.
CJ: What forms has that taken? Has it been, “we don't think you can do this because you are female,” or has it been a little bit more subtle?
LS: I've had both.
SS: Yeah, I've had both. Most people are smart enough to keep their prejudices under a veil of politeness. People who are very forward about a woman can't work on data engineering because that's real man's programming. Women should work on the front end. I like doing hard coding.
CJ: Knowing that in tech, there is ageism and sexism. What would you tell people considering transitioning into a tech career and maybe worried about that?
SN: Just go for it. I've climbed up the career ladder fast because I have blind courage. I say I'll figure it out when I get there and go for it. It can be intimidating, but everything worth it is intimidating. It's not easy.
LS: Women Who Code is crucial. Find Women Who Code around you and talk to them. They will remind you why you're doing this if you forget. They will also constantly boost you up with support because that's what we do. Women Who Code has been a wonderful place for me to find friends and allies, make connections, and help other people make connections.
NP: I was super anxious when I first got into coding. When I was going to work with LaunchCode, they placed me somewhere remotely. They were giving me assignments and setting me up with stuff. The first time they talked to me on a video call, I was terrified because they were trying to set me up with GitHub, and I didn't understand. Now, I realize these things are just like regular parts of the job. Every time I switch jobs, I have to ask questions constantly. It's just part of what you do. Growing up, I had a lot of anxiety. Asking questions was not okay, especially asking lots of questions. I was programmed to feel like asking questions was a bad thing. I realize that that's just part of the job. I see people make mistakes and realize that even people who've been programming for ages. There's no point in beating yourself up about it.
AB: When you're working with new people who ask questions, they move much faster. Having the courage to ask questions makes all the difference. If you don't ask, your career will suffer more than if you do.
CJ: That's an awesome reminder. Nobody expects you to come on the job knowing everything. We should always be aggressive about asking questions instead of worrying about looking like we don't know what we're doing. That's something many of us constantly struggle with, no matter our career stage.
SG: If someone doesn’t have an engineering degree and is commonly asked about their experience in tech while in interviews. How did you address that early in your career or first tech interview?
NP: I built a portfolio of things I enjoyed making, the ones I was most proud of. One that gave me the confidence to apply to my first few programming jobs was a game. It proved that I know how to code.
SN: I didn't have any tech experience. I was essentially a freelance designer who decided to drop 10K to learn how to code in nine weeks. All I had were the projects that I did at the bootcamp. What I tried to do in those interviews when they asked me about my experience was talk a little bit about how I worked with my freelance clients. I tried to sell them on how quickly I could learn with some of those projects.
LS: A good thing to remember while working on those kinds of projects is that you're solving problems. As a hiring manager, that's appealing to me. I want to know what kind of problems you have worked on. I want to hear about what your approach was. If I know you're a bootcamp grad, I don't expect you will have a wealth of industry experience. I expect you will have tackled some pretty interesting problems while in bootcamp. So, tell me what value you can bring to me. What sort of things that you enjoy working on or are enthusiastic about working on, and what problems can you figure out your way through using technology?
SS: I used to do technical interviews in my previous role. If you don't have a tech background, start working on a portfolio. Start working on projects that you can use to showcase your skill set and talk about how you planned it out. What were the problems? What were the successes? What are the next steps? What technologies did you use? Use that as your training tool. If you could show us that you already have a lot of that enthusiasm, self-education, and ability to push yourself without being spoon-fed, that would take you pretty far.
AB: I had two strategies that got my foot in the door. The first was a very creative cover letter where I talked up the bootcamp that I did with all the projects. I may not have a computer science degree, but I do have a very specific set of skills. Because it's a tech interview doesn't mean it's rocket science.
LS: Prove what you have matches what they're looking for. Don't just send somebody a link to your repo without any explanation. As a Code School grad, you're also going to have the ability to learn something quickly, and under pressure, which is a situation you will never be under at work. You'll never be expected to have that kind of velocity, you'll have a little more leisure to learn a thing. But the fact that you're able to do that is super important. You have chosen to take on something new speaks volumes to me as a hiring manager.
SG: What is your take on bootcamps right now?
AB: I love bootcamps. I think they're great. I did a ton of research before signing up for one. I'm really happy with the choice I ended up with. It was cost-effective, had a job guarantee, and was all online. I have a child and can't go to DC every day.
NP: LaunchCode, in my case, is somewhat of a bootcamp. I already had two years of teaching myself JavaScript, they told me they didn't think I needed more training on that side. So They had me do a mock interview. It turned out for I didn't need that extra training. It was a very lucky situation for me, and I realized that not everyone gets those situations. If there were another situation, I probably would have considered a bootcamp.
SN: I did a bootcamp that's now Technically General Assembly. It is worth it if you're trying to build out your skill set. It's made me a well-rounded tech individual. If you depend on this to get you a job immediately after, I would strongly consider how ambitious you are, and how serious you will take it. Many people fail if they're not doing the extra work. You're only going to go as far as you're going to take yourself with bootcamps.
AB: There are part-time bootcamps.
SG: You can find something that fits your learning style, your availability, your location, and your actual technical interest. If you want to go into data science or web development, there are a lot of mobile bootcamps.