Whitney, User Experience Designer
“You can be an engineer or work at a bakery. Both are perfectly acceptable.”
I got into tech by accident.
I was working at a bakery. Decorating cakes. I had been in design before but was having trouble getting back in. Someone from my church mentioned her company was looking for a designer and illustrator. I didn’t have much to show, but I got the job.
The company was a startup developing mobile apps. I was working on a game. Kind of like Angry Birds. One day I was using another app my company made and was thinking, “I don’t feel like this flow makes sense” and “I don’t understand why this screen is like this and this button is over here”. So I started giving them feedback.
They were like, you can give us more feedback if you want. So I did. And that’s how I started making suggestions about the user experience even though I didn’t really know what I was talking about. [Laughs]
Now I’ve been doing it for five years. I’ve thought about going back to school for HCI or UX, but it feels silly to get a degree just to get a piece of paper that says I know things I already know. I also think there’s an openness to being self-taught. At least at the companies I’ve worked for.
I’ve been at my current company for almost two years. It’s a small to mid-sized startup. At the largest there were 50 employees. Now we’re at 20. There have been many versions of the company, even since I’ve been there. Leadership has turned over a bit. Now, most people in leadership roles are actually working directly on the product as well.
I know it sounds odd, but I think having fewer people has made us more productive. Now there’s only a handful of us to decide what we should be building. We’re the people making the product, the people closest to it. We have limited resources, so we all have to agree or we should just go home.
Everyone here is really friendly and has respect for each other’s skills. I really appreciate the way we all move forward in a positive way with each other. Of course we screen for that in interviews. We look for different types of people who seem like decent human beings who want to work hard and are interested in our mission. Otherwise, why be here?
My experience as a woman in tech has been incredibly good. Sometimes I feel conflicted with the talk of how unfairly women are treated. I recognize there’s a reality to it, but I’ve never experienced it personally. Some of my biggest fans and supporters have been the men around me that said, “You’re good at this. Keep going.” So I feel like that should be said.
How do I think more women will get involved in tech? I think to some degree we just have to wait. And by wait, I don’t mean sit around and not be proactive. But if we’re starting to ingrain in the minds of young girls that they can be engineers, we kind of have to wait until those girls grow up.
I know there’s a lot of groups trying to get girls involved and interested in STEM. Sometimes I get worried about “movements” — that instead of correcting a problem, you just swing things too far in the opposite direction.
I’m curious if women want to be engineers. It’d be great if they wanted to be in science and technology but if they don’t…I would hope nobody felt pressured. Or that other options were inferior.
My thought on it is you should encourage kids to be whatever they want to be. You can be an engineer or work at a bakery. Both are perfectly acceptable.
