This is Sara Haider — an Android Engineer, advocate for women in tech, and advisor to startups. She’s one of the top 10 women in Silicon Valley, and is best known for her work at Twitter, Vine, Secret, and Periscope. This is her story — from where she grew up to where she is today.
It was 4:45pm in mid-August, and speed-walking was a terrible decision. Passing by fellow pedestrians, I felt little beads of sweat forming under my hair, on the nape of my neck. It was “record-breakingly” hot — literally! Still, I hurried to Sara’s condo and flung open the door. I instantly felt the cool draft from the AC. After being greeted and accompanied by the concierge attendant, I rang the doorbell. Sara answered — she wore casual clothes and had an NFL game playing in the background. We sat by the window, overlooking the city, and started this conversation.
On Growing Up & Computers
For most people, it’s simple enough to answer where they grew up, but Sara’s story is a little more complex. She was born in West Africa, but her family frequently traveled between Benin, Togo, Côte d’Ivoire, and Toronto.
I consider myself a citizen of the world. I’m half Filipina, half Pakistani, but I hold Canadian nationality and live in San Francisco. To add to the mix, I was born in the beautiful country of Côte d’Ivoire. I don’t really think of any place as home — I love to travel, and the world is my home. — Haider
In this peripateticism, Sara found stability in Ballet and Figure Skating competitions, which taught her the significance of discipline and how to deal with failure — something she still turns to today. Sara continued competing until she began programming full-time.
She was six when she got her first PC, and used it to play video games that came on 5.25" floppy disks. At the age of eight, she discovered the Internet for the first time — that changed everything! It wasn’t long before her older sister and she began wandering into the great abyss of webpages, soon learning they could create their own.
We spent a lot of time figuring out the internet, how it worked, and putting web pages together, just for each other, on things we liked — video games, Backstreet Boys, TV shows, etc. It was very early days of the Internet, and we kind of just… figured it out! — Haider
They created web pages using Windows Notepad, a simple text editor, to write straight, raw code. They weren’t familiar with syntax highlighting and IDEs at the time, but that didn’t stop them. They found answers to their coding questions however they could.
We were literally in IRC chat rooms, asking questions from hackers, and whoever else was on the other side of the screen. We were talking to complete strangers in unregulated chat rooms, but we didn’t know any better. — Haider
Sara and her sister also used HTML Goodies, a website full of examples, tutorials, and resources, to learn the markup language. Wanting to do something more sophisticated, they advanced to JavaScript Goodies, where they learned “real” coding for the first time.
We were obsessed. Within days, weeks, months, we were going as fast as we could to make cool stuff! — Haider
It was Sara’s love for videogames that continually drove her towards programming. Having played tons of video games as a kid, she became captivated by the idea of telling immersive stories. Because she couldn’t create the stories quickly enough with websites, she made powerpoint presentations, similar to choose-your-own-adventure walk-throughs, using VB scripts to count variables, keep track of state, and make logical decisions based on what the player was doing. At the time, programming was purely a form of fun. The idea of turning it into a career hadn’t occurred to Sara or her sister.
On Education & Career Choices
When Sara started high school, she began staying in Toronto more regularly. She attended Havergal College, the rigorous, all-girls private school, located in the affluent Lawrence Park neighborhood.
By this time, programming tools had become more sophisticated, and Sara was miles ahead of her classmates. She took grade 11 computer classes in grade 9 — and even those were too easy for her! A project requiring the use of FileMaker Pro, a cross-platform relational database application, resulted in address and recipe books from her classmates. Meanwhile, she created a fully functional and searchable Pokédex — a database for Pokémon. She brought in various images and worked really hard on the UI to make it look Pokémon branded.
I was a total classic nerd. My favorite subjects were Math and Science, I took as many computer courses as I could, and I hated English. But one thing I liked about an all-girls school was… the idea of impressing boys was completely separate from academics. Prior to Havergal, in a co-ed school, raising my hand and knowing that boys would tease me for being smart was a thing. Here, I didn’t care if the girls thought I was being a teacher’s pet. — Haider
Even with her evolving enthusiasm for computers and programming, she didn’t realize it would become a career path until her sister began Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, a very technical, no frills university. Sara wasn’t sure exactly where she was headed, but she knew CS was what she wanted to do.
After high school, she commenced her CS journey at Waterloo. Although she was a middle-of-the-road student, she was elected to be the Software Engineering Student Representative for most of her time there.
High school was so easy for me that I never learned how to study. Now I was presented with these very technical problems and had to spend a significant amount of time to complete projects. That’s something I just wasn’t used to. — Haider
She hated everything related to discrete math and statistics, and still does, but her favorite class was Theory of Computing, a precursor to Compilers, her second favorite class.
It’s Computer Science in its purest form… The laws of nature that make any of this possible. To me, it’s just… beautiful! Other than that, I spent a lot of university absorbing everything. — Haider
Meanwhile, her sister’s boyfriend (now husband) was interning at Google. When Sara heard about his experience, she wanted the same.
That’s when I realized, Silicon Valley is where I have to be. I’m going to do everything I can to get an internship at Google and start my future there. And I did exactly those things. — Haider
Google, Silicon Valley, & Investment Banking
In 2007, Sara was at Google for her final two internships (of six). That’s when she experienced Silicon Valley for the first time, finding something phenomenal about it. Partially because engineers weren’t the bottom commodity. Rather, they were at the top of the pyramid.
The amount of effort that goes into making sure engineers have a creative and comfortable environment to work in is unbelievable. I was also blown away by the fact that discussing companies, technology, or coding wasn’t unusual here. — Haider
Her first internship at Google, entailed working on a project that doesn’t exist anymore — it did internal testing and dashboards. During her second internship, she worked on the JotSpot team, a company acquired by Google, later becoming Google Sites. She used Java, JavaScript, and Python to build a JotSpot component that was aimed at schools and education.
Working within the Google codebase is unlike anything else. It’s massive and heavily managed. The scale at which Google operates just blows your mind. The first thing I learned was how much care goes into the code before it’s checked into the repos. Google really cares about craft, which manifests in their coding style, and in thinking forward about its effects on anything downstream. — Haider
Sara saw that Google’s coding style was very rigid. Engineers had to get style approvals before checking anything in. Going through that as an intern helped her gain a new perspective on programming, and being able to think about products for a company like Google gave her a taste of how Silicon Valley (and startups) think about products and users. Her learnings at Google laid the foundation of her career.
After graduating, Sara joined PA Consulting in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She spent 50% of her time programming, and another 50% learning about the management consultant role. She immediately drew the discrepancies between the two worlds — comparing the formality of business suits, ranks, and fancy titles, to the casual, creative, hacker environment of Silicon Valley. According to Sara, the consulting world was one where people worked hard, and played hard. Their work lives were completely separate from their personal lives, even if they were with the same people. In Silicon Valley, it all bleeds together — going for drinks with coworkers often involves talking about work, and potentially doing work.
In Silicon Valley, there’s this kumbaya idea that ranks don’t matter. As long as everyone is working hard, then everything is good. In the consulting world, names are followed by a comma, rank, and location. It’s a very different way of thinking about things. I think hierarchy and ranks are equally important in both places, but Silicon Valley likes to gloss over that. The consulting world is very explicit about it. — Haider
At PA, Sara wrote code for finance and medical care company systems. Clients usually consisted of big pharmaceutical companies and hedge funds. She built an entire application from scratch, which moved excel spreadsheet forecasts to a website. This allowed companies to have multiple users login and adjust data to recast the forecasts based on new information. Her biggest challenge was supporting IE 6, a requirement in those industries.
Sara also worked with, and observed, incredibly talented consultants who had mastered the art of negotiating deals, managing projects, and resolving conflicts.
The idea of managing projects, timelines, and budgets is something junior engineers at big tech companies don’t get exposed to early in their careers. I got exposed to that very quickly. Understanding exactly what each team member’s dollar worth was per hour, and factoring that into the team’s overall budget, was illuminating and critical to understanding how to run projects effectively — Haider
Being Amongst the First 100 Employees at Twitter, and How it All Began
In 2009, when Sara had been at PA for a year, she received a job offer from Google. She knew she’d be returning to San Francisco, but wanted to explore her options before signing. Her application at Twitter was ignored, so her boyfriend’s friend (a designer at Twitter) put her resume in front of a recruiter. That’s when the whole process began.
Twitter was my top choice because I wanted a smaller environment and I felt like Google would always be there. Twitter was riskier, but I had a good feeling about it. I wanted to work on something that impacted millions of people. Twitter had this cool vibe to me. It was new and people were still figuring it out. But what really sold me was a phone call with dick costolo, CEO at the time. He told me, “This is a rocket ship. I’m going to do everything I can to make this a great company. You should come along for the ride,” and I said, “I’m in!” — Haider
Sara first joined Twitter as a Support Tools Engineer, working on admin tools that monitored and diagnosed user problems. She gradually moved to a management position, and grew the support team to 10 engineers who worked on the Zendesk integration to relaunch support.twitter.com. By then, her team also managed ad operations, including ads tools, visibility tools, and campaign management.
The first billing system, as we counted Twitter’s first dollars, was from my team. — Haider
As the ads team took off, they split off the operations engineers from the support engineers, which made sense, but that’s when Sara began missing coding. Twitter for Android was the perfect way to get back into it.
