Being a girl in the software engineering world

Let’s begin by clarifying something: Software engineering is the fine art of carefully crafting beautiful software, but is layered with many stereotypes. Most people would think of a software engineer as a big-bearded guy working in a dark basement, surrounded by chip packets and soda cans. Of course, this is wrong, but strong stereotypes tend to persist. Anybody can be a software engineer — and that includes women.

Computer Science has always attracted me, for as long as I can remember. However, when I had to choose my studies, I thought Computer Science wasn’t for me. I thought it would be “too much maths” and “a man’s world”, all those things that are ingrained in us since childhood. Moreover, it was my orientation counselor herself who suggested I should consider something else, such as healthcare. I ended up completing 3 years of study to become a dental technician.

Moving to engineering.

Turns out, dental prostheses were definitely not for me. I was getting frustrated, and needed to live doing something that I love. It was then I decided to just go for it, and get started myself to see how I could become a software engineer.

I registered for a self-paced course online that would result in a software engineering bachelor’s degree once completed. As soon as I’d completed it I started looking for jobs in the field, and saw an advertisement for a software engineer at Jellysmack. It would be the perfect start for me, and my passion clearly came through in my application — I got the job. I started work in the summer of 2017, and excitedly began to take my first steps as a software engineer.

Immediately, it was incredible. My colleagues were a far-cry from the loner in the basement, and in them I not only found workmates, but also real friends. My fellow Jellysmackers are always taking care with their work, and never mock someone’s junior clumsiness or lack of knowledge; they considered my junior level with kindness, and worked with me to help me broaden my skills. The software engineering world is very open-minded, and a world where mutual aid is king (which, for instance, I didn’t find to be the case in healthcare).

Being a software engineer at Jellysmack.

Let’s talk about my occupation. Have you ever heard of that Star Trek USS Discovery’s spore drive in the new Netflix series? Well, my job’s nothing like Star Trek, but it is a little like Netflix. Jellysmack is making video entertainment around passions that engage people, and broadcasting these videos onto social network platforms. Like Netflix, we use tons of state of the art technologies to provide the video content people want to watch. This technology is the secret sauce that allowed us to become one of the best video publishers in the world, with more than 175 million subscribers and more than 3.6 billion monthly video views.

One of the core projects in this tech ecosystem is the software with which our employees publish our content on social networks, that’s why we called it JellyCore.

JellyCore basically allows our community managers to plan and schedule publications on all of our channels. There is a publishing tool (namely, here at Jellysmack, “The Publisher”) which allows us to tag and categorize our content with super-fine granularity, and an efficient A/B testing tool to find the best combinations of video assets before we hit the ‘publish’ button on our planning pages, which control the scheduling of all the videos across our different channels. JellyCore also hosts the inevitable dashboards with tons of insight graphs and internal scoring systems applied across our verticals, channels, and videos, as well as some other very cool stuff that I’m not allowed to talk about.

So, you probably get it: I work in the JellyCore team. This job is fascinating as it requires constant thought about the issues to be solved and aspects to enhance. In our field of work, our languages and technologies are continually evolving and it’s essential to keep yourself updated on new developments in the technological landscape, and constantly update your skillset. It’s a very human job, where helping and listening to each other is key, and the team is significant as a group as well as individually.

Essential skills to be a software engineer.

The required skills to be a reliable software engineer are definitely not “be a male mathematician” — hell no. You just need to have a good knowledge of one or more languages and a broader tech culture, which today isn’t a big deal. You need to have the desire to learn continuously, acquire more and more skills and competences and never rest on what you’ve learned. You need to know how to adapt, have good interpersonal skills, and… well, that’s all! Hey girls, is there something in that list that isn’t for women? Of course not! That’s why I strongly encourage any girl to take on a computer science grade and to become a software engineer if they want to! It is not an area reserved for men.

— Cyrielle Salmochi, software engineer at Jellysmack Labs