First two weeks as a female engineer at Coffee Meets Bagel

Hi, I’m Ann. I have a Masters in CS from Virginia Tech and I’ve been working in the SF area for 3+ years. I heard about Coffee Meets Bagel(CMB) from a couple of friends and I was attracted by the positive dating experience many of them enjoyed on the app, which is tailored to create a service that women feel excited about. In addition to that, three female founders forming the senior management of the company is rare and special to come across in the Bay Area.

It has been two weeks since I joined the Server team at CMB as a Software Engineer and I’m really excited to be part of this team working with a great group of motivated, talented, fun people on engineering challenges that provide value to our large user base. Read on to find out my answers to two questions I’ve been asked a lot.

What did my first two weeks at CMB look like?

On my very first day, I had a welcome breakfast with, you guessed right, Coffee and Bagels! It was a great opportunity to meet my immediate team and others at the company. Neatly organized on my desk was — a new laptop, notebook with clear instructions and credentials for the different services we use and company schwag. Smooth start!

We use Github wiki pages heavily here for documentation, which served me really well while getting my dev environment setup. It surprisingly only took me a total of 2 hours, which included lots of on-boarding meetings, reading setup docs and many friendly, smart engineers on my team volunteering to help me debug issues.

The next few days involved picking up small bugs that were well prioritized on Asana, writing tests, reading lots of code, asking questions, opening pull requests, writing reviews, making comments and finally putting out a release that included a few of my bug fixes. Success!

Each day, I had teammates check up on me to find out if I was blocked on anything, seem approachable and offer their time generously to help out. A humbling experience was when Dawoon, the COO, despite her busy schedule checked in to see how I was doing via Slack while traveling abroad in Taiwan; which goes to show how invested management is in the team. Karim, the CTO, made sure to spend time with me explaining processes in place and challenging me to think about how I could tie my personal dev goals to the goals of the company and follow up promptly.

I had several “Coffee Chats”, where we go out for coffee and informally learn more about each other, and that definitely gave me a chance to ask questions about the company and others there. Common interests and hobbies have made for some really interesting conversations. “TinyPulse” is a platform we use to acknowledge colleagues and give anonymous feedback a couple times a week that I personally think is a constructive and supplements transparency here. Weekly tech talks, bi-monthly book clubs, monthly poker nights, and lots of lovable dog buddies add to the awesome work environment at CMB.

What is it like to be a female engineer at CMB?

I’m the only female engineer in an office with about 15 other engineers. Everyone was definitely excited not only for a new addition to the team but also for the increase in gender diversity.

I joined my previous company in similar circumstances and I can still remember my first two weeks vividly even after having worked there for three years. Some experiences there definitely warranted some of the fears I had coming in with respect to my race and gender. Will I be given tasks just like any other hire and be able to make contributions from the get go? Will I be judged on the questions or clarifications I ask? Will my manager be too busy to onboard me or not want to invest in my ramp up time? Will my team show genuine interest in getting to know me, ask for my input or be superficial?

I alluded to some of those concerns earlier in this post but I think it is worthwhile to re-emphasize that every member on my team “collectively” made me feel very welcome, which is special. From day one, I was involved in planning sessions for new projects, meetings on projects actively being worked on and was tasked with challenging projects. This also includes inviting me to lunches, coffee runs, helping me debug issues, giving me helpful hints on tasks and always making time for me despite their busy schedules.

I feel like I fit in well and am in the right place, people-wise and technology-wise. Definitely reach out and if you want to learn more ping me at ann@coffeemeetsbagel.com.