From bootcamp grad to Engineer #1 at Blue Fever
I am a bootcamp grad and a woman transitioning into the tech industry.
My previous life was at an established global investment manager where I was one of 8,000+ employees. I was on the sales team and I was good at my job, but I didn’t feel like I was learning anything anymore. If anything, I almost felt like I was getting dumber. The money and benefits were good which made it difficult to want to leave. I was comfortable.
I’d always been fascinated with computers from an early age, but I wasn’t necessarily encouraged to pursue that.
As luck would have it, change was forced upon me when I was laid off from that job. When considering my options, it felt like I needed a reset. I’d always been fascinated with computers from an early age, but I wasn’t necessarily encouraged to pursue that. My brother was, though. He’s a software engineer. But to be honest, I don’t think I was mature enough back then to put in the hard work that is actually needed to be successful at it. I was now at a point in my life where I was very curious to see if I had what it takes. The common way to become a software engineer nowadays is to go to a coding bootcamp.
Bootcamp was a hard three months, but it didn’t compare to (nor did I feel prepared for) the six months I spent looking for my first software engineering job. Like any career, the market is competitive, and employers expect top, youthful talent with experience (think entry level with three years of React and Node.js). And although there has been a lot of effort to include women in tech over the past few years, it doesn’t change the fact that most of the teams I was interviewing with were male-dominated and sometimes felt unwelcoming to women.
Even in the “Women In Tech” meetups I would attend, I would notice that a lot of the amazing women I met wouldn’t stick around for long on engineering teams. Many would move on to project management or get burnt out and leave tech altogether, rather than progress to Senior Engineer roles.
…although on the whole they may have been diverse and inclusive, their engineering teams were still predominantly male.
I finally did get a couple of offers from larger, well-funded startups. The first one I got came in super low and seemed to completely disregard the intangibles I could have brought to the team. Although I was a new engineer, I had more than 10 years of professional experience on large, high-performing sales teams. With other companies, I just didn’t feel comfortable given that although on the whole they may have been diverse and inclusive, their engineering teams were still predominantly male. Like 90%.
Was I holding out for something that doesn’t exist?
I had already heard the various horror stories of constantly being underestimated or being viewed and treated as the diversity hire just because you are a woman. Not that working on those teams would be impossible, but especially for my first job in engineering, I felt that I would be sabotaging my potential success. If possible, I would prefer not to have to deal with all of that on top of the regular stresses of being a new software developer [imposter syndrome goes here]. However, the longer the job search went, I began to wonder if this was even possible. Was I holding out for something that doesn’t exist?
Finally during the summer of 2018, I found Blue Fever — a company that provides teen women with a big sister to help navigate everyday moments through a texting platform with an empathetic AI. Oh, and it’s led by two female founders. Wait, so I get to work for a company building tech to help empower women AND have two badass girl bosses? Score! 🙌🏽
It definitely isn’t your typical Silicon Beach startup. There’s no kombucha on tap, no massages on site, and you don’t get catered lunch everyday. But that’s OK because I don’t like kombucha anyway. What I got though, is so much more important to me.
Everyday I get to work with a team where I feel completely supported and encouraged to speak my mind.
Everyday I get to work with a team where I feel completely supported and encouraged to speak my mind. Where they want to know my opinion to make a thoughtful decision since it affects everyone. Where even if I make a mistake or spend time on a project that gets scrapped, that’s completely OK. Every week at our company retrospective, we highlight our learnings and our wins. Even if we failed, we’re asked, “What did we learn? How do we get better?” Then, we’re totally supported to get back up and be better. And if it’s a great week, I have a ton of cheerleaders excited for my accomplishments.
I went from finishing a bootcamp to becoming Engineer #1
Oh, and I built their API on Google Cloud Platform’s App Engine along with their custom Facebook App to handle the 100k+ users that have signed up since I’ve been here. I’ve also been working with our amazing majority-female engineering team on a React app with Google Firebase on the back end to help scale our app. Alongside the engineering team, our product team is constantly training our empathetic AI on Dialog Flow with all the data we receive from our 170k+ users. If I ever need to understand how our users are interacting with our product to help decide how I need to build a feature, I can sprinkle a little SQL into BigQuery to draw the insights we need from our data. So yeah, I get to play with some pretty cool tech, and know that what I’m building is being used by our ever-growing user base.
It still blows my mind that I went from finishing a bootcamp to becoming Engineer #1 at a company who is literally trying to make the internet a better place.
Was it hard to get here? Definitely. This is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.
Can anyone do it? Yes, BUT you have to really WANT it to make it happen.
Was it worth it? Hell yes.
I had to make an active decision to determine what I wanted my career path to look like and stick to it even when there were easier ways out. I had to clearly define what my own personal values were so I could continuously strive to work for a company that matched it.
Luckily for me, I found Blue Fever, and they are helping shape me as an individual just as much as I am helping shape them as a company. If you had told me a year ago I would be in this position, I wouldn’t have believed you. That’s why I felt it was important to share my story to help you believe that if this is something you want, YOU can make it happen too.
