12 Questions with Lydia Fernandez
Software Engineer at Uber
Lydia Fernandez is is a software engineer at Uber. A math geek at heart and computer scientist by education, she leads Uber’s routing project, building and scaling models of how to get around cities.
When she isn’t whispering to computers, she spends time playing her piano, dancing, working on art projects, or being out and about in San Francisco.
1. What is your favorite book?
My favorite recent one is a graphic novel called Tokyo Ghost. It’s this cool, grim story about the conflict between a population of consumers feeding corporations and a more “earthly” society. The world of unfettered consumption is tied inherently to the digital age, while the tight-knit community consumes only what they can produce and forbids technology as a logical foil. As someone heavily involved in the technology space, it’s an interesting read; it’s important to be aware of what future to avoid as someone who’s helping shape it.
2. Where is your hometown? How do you think your upbringing affected who you are today?
I was born and raised in Miami, in a small suburb of the greater Miami-Dade area. Growing up in a place like Miami threw a lot of the things that were different about me into sharp relief. Many people, including my dad’s side of the family, are Cuban, and there’s a lot of Catholicism, a lot of heavy religious influence, and unfortunately, a lot homophobia that come with the culture. It was present among my peers, and it was interesting how the boys around me were able to identify I was queer before I understood it myself. The only word they had for it was “gay,” and that’s what they called me. I don’t like boys, in fact it’s the farthest thing from the truth, but they’d somehow been able to suss it out. I’ve talked with other queers born and raised in Miami, and they’ve had similar childhood experiences with kids being able to call it out.
Miami also felt like a very anti-intellectual environment. For years, my defining characteristic was being the “smart kid,” and that got me ostracized in many ways. Intelligence seemed to be something people looked down upon. Miami’s also very big on conspicuous consumption, on clothing with large and conspicuous labels, and it many times felt prioritized over substance. And Miami is an extremely car-focused city, which ended up shaping a lot of my views on what problems I would eventually put effort into addressing to improve people’s quality of life as an adult.
3. So when you applied for college, were you pretty set on leaving Miami?
I was hell-bent on leaving the state honestly. My father wanted me to stay and go to University of Miami because he loves football and was a fan, but I was having none of it. For as long as I understood what an engineer was, I knew it was what I wanted to be, and that was the dream I’d nursed for years. There was a lot of media representation of engineers coming from MIT so I wanted to get into MIT. I didn’t get in, but I ended up going to Carnegie Mellon which also has a great computer science department.
4. How was your experience at Carnegie Mellon?
It was definitely eye-opening, being in an environment built for people pursuing the growth of their own knowledge for the first time in my life. It was refreshing.
“I had really strange notions about what coming out would mean and why I shouldn’t do it, and it fed my own sadness.’”
There were things about college that weren’t so great, including emotional issues extending from the fact that I hadn’t come out yet. When I started college, I was just beginning to understand this thing about myself, and as the years went on I’d convinced myself that there was nothing I could do about it. I had really strange notions about what coming out would mean and why I shouldn’t do it, and it fed my own sadness, my depression. It made it difficult to get work done, and it’s a shame because so much of that work was learning new, amazing things. I wish I could have prioritized things a bit differently to get more out of college, but at the same time I don’t know if I’d be where I am today had I gone about things differently. It’s hard to say that I’d change anything in my past because I’m really happy with my life.
5. How did you end up in your current job at Uber?
It was my senior year of college, and I was a broke college student in Pittsburgh, which meant I had no car. Pittsburgh has terrible public transit so getting around anywhere sucked, and I’d grown up in Miami where having a car was basically a requirement. I became really frustrated with the state of car ownership in America; there are so many cities where you literally can’t acquire a job if you don’t have a car. You need to own a car, but in order to own the car you need a job to make payments on the car. It all felt like an exploitative cycle. Given the state of the government, public transit wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, at least not serious improvements in cities like Pittsburgh and Miami.
As I was looking for a job, a friend who’d gone to Uber pretty early on in its trajectory was recruiting at CMU and told me to come work for them. As she was explaining the company to me, I thought to myself, “This sounds ridiculous, there’s no way it’s going to be successful.” Keep in mind this was three and a half years ago. I wasn’t plugged into Silicon Valley, and I had no clue what Uber was. I thought it was ridiculous and that there was no way Uber was going to make money — but it was a way for people to get around without having to own a car and a plausible means by which autonomous vehicles could be made available without anyone having to own them. This was when interesting autonomy projects were getting into the public eye. I was young and idealistic, so I thought to myself, “Sure, I’ll do it. It’s gonna tank in a couple of years, but I’ll do it.”
6. How has your experience at Uber been so far?
It’s certainly been interesting, having joined a company for rather idealistic reasons and seeing the types of people it’s attracted over time. I landed a job at the intersection of my interests: how computer systems work and the theory behind them.
One of my most transformative classes in college was Operating System Design and Implementation, where we had to implement an operating system in 8 weeks, and it really piqued my interest in what’s under the hood — what makes computers work, what makes them fast. At the same time I was interested in theoretical computer science, particularly graph theory.
“I ended up… joining a team responsible for building the routing engine. It gave me a huge impact on the product, which was exhilarating. If I did my job better, I could create efficiency in the physical world.’”
I ended up interviewing for the team at Uber that would eventually become their mapping org and joining a team responsible for building the routing engine, which is just applied graph theory. It was awesome. It was incredibly performant, but also had very real computer science theory governing it. It gave me huge impact on the product, which was exhilarating; if I did my job better, I could create efficiency in the physical world. It’s a weird thing to think about given the scale at which we operate. From pretty early on I helped shepherd the project, and now I’m the most tenured person on my team.
7. Silicon Valley is known for a fluid job market with a lot of company turnover. Can you speak to staying at Uber for 3 years and developing as a leader?
A lot of it’s been growth by necessity, but then again, so much of my life has demanded adaptability of me. I picked something I cared about, stuck with it, voiced my opinions, and made it clear to my bosses from start that I wanted to take the helm on our software. It definitely only works if you have a receptive boss. Fortunately my current manager is pretty sweet, but I’ve also had not-so-great managers who caused my experience with certain projects to be less than ideal. A lot of what’s kept me going is plain stubbornness, but also the ability to get support from people who are in positions of power. My team deeply respects me; when I speak, I’m listened to. It feels awesome to be respected by my team and to be able to work together on something that we all care about.
8. Who’s someone in your life that you look up to?
That’s a tough one. I’ve known a lot of really talented women in engineering who get shit done, including my first manager. At the same time, there aren’t a whole lot of other trans women engineers that I can look up to because, proportionally speaking, there’s just not a lot of us. The one or two examples I personally know of ended up going down the managerial track, and I’d rather grow as an engineer.
So it’s hard, because there are definitely a lot of amazing women engineers to look up to and learn from, but there’s also a lot of unique difficulties that come with navigating Silicon Valley as a trans person. Even when you get big groups of trans women together there’s this huge awareness of survival bias and wondering how much of our success was because of personal agency or pure luck.
9. What’s a challenge you’ve faced, and how did you work through it?
The biggest challenge I’ve faced is definitely coming out. Having the conviction to be who I want to be and not who other people tell me to be. The process of coming out was radical, and hard. Looking back, I had lots of misguided expectations about what coming out would mean, but once I realized it was all about making sense of myself to myself and not about making other people happy, it all clicked.
“The first time I met another trans woman in real life, I just noticed how happy she was, and that was the first time it became a possibility to me.’”
There were a lot of tears and a lot of fear. There was a lot of talking to friends and a lot of meeting strangers who had gone through a similar experience and come out happy on the other side. The first time I met another trans woman in real life, I just noticed how happy she was, and that was the first time it became a possibility to me. I went from, “This is something I’m going to have to deal with for the rest of my life and not talk about,” to “Maybe I can do it.” Maybe I could be happy. It’s probably the best decision I’ve ever made.
10. When did you come out?
[Laughs.] Well, this is actually funny. People balk and think I’m nuts when I tell this story, but in the span of about two weeks I moved across the country from Pittsburgh to San Francisco, came out of the closet, and started my first full-time job. It sounds really intense — and it was — but it was also a clean break. No one save for a few close friends knew me by my previous name, and I didn’t have to maintain any relationships from college that would have been problematic. I pulled it off with just enough of a support network to know that I could do it. I hit the reset button on who people thought I was.
When I moved out to California, I had basically no money in my bank account and the first adult purchase I made was a mattress. It was amazing. At the time it was probably an irresponsible fraction of my net worth, but the mattress was so good. You spend a third of your life sleeping so might as well do it somewhere enjoyable.
10. Can you speak more to your financial struggle coming here?
Well one big problem coming here was the fact that our relocation bonus was offered as reimbursement, which meant I had to front the cash and potentially not get reimbursed until months down the line. I couldn’t float that on my credit card, and I only managed it because of people helping me out along the way. I’m also not out to my parents yet. When I moved out here I was trying to start a new chapter in my life, and I didn’t know what their place in it would be so I didn’t want to ask them for anything.
“If you want people, especially those of color, from low-income backgrounds to be in the room, you need to figure out how to make your job more accessible to them.’”
The delayed relocation bonus is definitely something many tech companies get very, very wrong — expecting people to be able to front the cash, buy the plane ticket, put down a security deposit on an apartment, and all right after graduating from college, no less. Financial privilege in general is a huge thing that Silicon Valley misses often. If you want people, especially those of color, from low-income backgrounds to be in the room, you need to figure out how to make your job more accessible to them. One solution is making the relocation bonus up-front. It would be a significant quality of life improvement, or at least a reduction in the amount of borrowing people have to do to start a job.
11. What are you most proud of?
Wow, let me think because there are so many things… And I guess that’s a good thing, being able to say, “There’s a lot of things I’m proud of!” I’m proud of coming out, and I’m proud of being the person I want to be. I’m proud of the level of self-expression I’ve come into, in interpersonal relationships both in and out of work. I always make my feelings known, and I’ve gotten pretty good at doing it in a way that feels genuine to me while also being constructive. Also, two years ago I started making art and working on really weird, interesting lighting projects. I’ve gotten to contribute to some large-scale pieces, which has been very satisfying.
12. If you could give your 18-year-old self any piece of advice what would it be?
Trying to be who you want to be, even if it’s not in line with what the world is telling you, is more than okay, it’s amazing. It’s a transformative experience, and that level of honesty and self-awareness will help you become a better person. It’s a huge weight off your shoulders once you’ve done it, and yeah, there are certainly dangers and risks associated with being out, but the other option was draining. I gained nothing from it once I was ready to come out.
