How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Coding Like a Girl
A few years ago, I was sitting on the floor of my college dormitory with my best friend. She was a gorgeous blonde, a whip smart swimmer about to graduate with an Aeronautics Engineering degree. We had one too many beers.
“Do you ever wish you were born a man?” She asked me. She was not joking.
Our responses were the same: “Always.”
It’s no secret that being a woman in the technology workplace is rough. The numbers are dismal — less than 20% of the engineering workforce is women, and of that already small population, 40% of them leave before they turn the age of 30 (full report here). Girls are constantly given signals that they are somehow not good enough, and that their value is tied solely to their gender; eventually those voices become their own. I grew up battling demons of low self-esteem and anxiety, and after a while I had internalized the chorus of “ew, you do (x) like a girl” or “girls aren’t good at math.”
Girls are constantly given signals that they are somehow not good enough, and that their value is tied solely to their gender; eventually those voices become their own.
While a lot of my peers have stories of workplace sexual harassment, my scars are from my childhood. When I was little I felt like a mixed bag of contradictions. I loved nail polish and cried when Sailor Moon died (yes, she does!) but also played Yu-Gi-Oh cards and begged Santa for lego sets for Christmas. I remember the ruthless teasing from the boys the first time I wore lip gloss to school, and the icy stares from the girls who were convinced that my obsessive Pokemon card collection was a ploy to get male attention. Even more clearly I remember the shame that would propel me to bury who I was.
Somehow, to an eight year old, the greatest embarrassment was being a girl good at boy stuff.
The truth is, at first, this profession made healing harder. I was afraid to date — one boyfriend was convinced that the insane gender ratio in tech made me more likely to cheat, another insisted on seeing my paycheck to ensure that he was making more than me. One time a guy went from hitting on me to pitching me, the moment he found out I was a software engineer. I was afraid to wear nice clothes — at one internship, I was mistaken for a designer because of the colorful dress I wore. And when making new friends, I still instinctively dodge answering questions about my work or education.
I was afraid to date — one boyfriend was convinced that the insane gender ratio in tech made me more likely to cheat.
I wish I could say that I know the moment when things changed for me — when I stopped flinching at unconscious bias and questioning myself for being over-sensitive, when I stopped internalizing micro-aggressions and instead turned them into opportunities to educate. I wish I could also say that I have changed completely, that I am this 100% confident, capable individual 100% of the time.
The truth is somewhere in the middle — I am an awkward twenty something who loves Harry Potter more than what is probably reasonable, who is in vicious pursuit of the truth, and who dreams of being the best engineer to ever walk through Amplitude’s doors.
The day of my Amplitude interview was nerve-wracking and fun. We got salad (this was a negative — I was afraid this company was full of health nuts!) and played board games (definitely a positive — I needed somewhere whose choice of leisure was casual and inclusive) in-between coding puzzles on the whiteboard. I noticed that the number of female faces in the office was dismally low (5 out of 29, to be exact), but they were passionate, friendly women that their colleagues held in high esteem.
Two of the #womenofamplitude
There’s no company with perfectly accepting and inclusive culture, but there are places with people interested in improving culture by improving themselves. At Amplitude we talk a lot about the a-ha! moment in your analytics — when you discover the magic factor that encourages people to retain. My a-ha! moment was more a series of realisations — over the next few weeks, I would see for myself how such a young company could still manage to be thoughtful in dealing with difficult questions such as diversity and culture.
First was the actual interview: I approached it as much as an opportunity for me to interview the company as it was for them to interview me. I asked difficult questions about culture and transparency and measured their responses against a barometer ranging from corporate doublespeak to blatant honesty. I found that my future co-workers’ responses were measured and thoughtful in their level of transparency and highly reflective of the respect they had towards me. I knew at that moment that I had found a place where I could express myself, and where the people are so wholly committed to their core values that even if management went astray, they would not.
I asked difficult questions about culture and transparency and measured their responses against a barometer ranging from corporate doublespeak to blatant honesty.
When I received my Amplitude welcome gift, which included a Neko Atsume cup and a Persona 3 art book, I cried. I cried for the little girl inside me who collected different nail polish but never wore them to pre-school, the teenager who pretended not to have crushes on boys so she could still sit with them during lunch, and the college student afraid to be proud of her intellect. I cried because I felt like for the first time I would be around people who would not only accept me for who I am, but also celebrate those contradictions that make me unique. And I cried because I really, seriously love both of these games and would be spending the better part of each day with people who embraced that about me.
My awesome Amplitude welcome package!
A few weeks after I started at Amplitude, my team and I went to a JavaScript meetup discussing best practices for React, the framework that powers our app. At this meetup, there were about 50 people there. I immediately noticed only one other female face in the audience.
“I’m the only other girl here,” I nervously whispered to one of my co-workers.
“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” he said.
I smiled. “So am I.”
I don’t wish I was born a man anymore, and I’m not ashamed of my brightly colored cardigans or of my opinionated point of view.
But it can still be hard to remember when surrounded by so much raw talent and intellect that I am here because I code like a girl, because I code like a first generation Chinese immigrant, because I code like someone who grew up with Backstreet Boys and Harry Potter. Because my opinion and insight is valuable because I have been lucky enough to accumulate the diverse experiences that I have.
And that these are all the reasons why I code like an Ampliteer.*
*Note: ‘Ampliteer’ is one of several ways we refer to Amplitude team members.
Me achieving all my dreams at Harry Potter World!! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
About the Author
Victoria Sun is a front-end software engineer at Amplitude. She graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. She loves Harry Potter, sushi, and dogs, in that order.
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Originally published at amplitude.com on December 22, 2015.
