In 2017, when Ycenter was looking to build it’s own web/technical team in India, we started looking out for candidates through LinkedIn, Angel list and other channels. This was also the time, when Google was in the news for wrong reason. One side was a Google Employee who wrote a controversial memo regarding women in tech and other side was Google CEO who fired this employee without a much needed public discourse. We actually used this case as a question to ask our candidates and their opinion. It was important for us to have a coder with an opinion on this, regardless of right or wrong, as opposed to having none. We also had questions that were purposefully setup to fail the candidate. The goal was to see their ability to attempt, their ability to communicate to us about their failure/trial or lack thereof.
One such candidate was Manshi Dubey. After our first round of technical interview with her, we took time to review her answers and compare with other shortlisted candidates. One of the biggest things that came out for us to have her on-board was her ability to accept her shortcomings and willingness to try and learn. She also in her second round of call, mentioned that regardless of what happens to her chances of working with Ycenter, she was excited about the work we were doing and she spoke about it to her friends. She even connected us to one of her friends, who eventually also ended up working with Ycenter (stay tuned on this part of the story in our upcoming blog post).
Manshi started with being a Front-end web developer to being promoted to being a Full-stack developer through her meaningful contribution to creation of our Experiential Learning online platform — EPIC. Not only did she contribute to fulfilling her core responsibilities for the position she held in the company, she also doubled up as a tie-breaker in our intense product development meetings, mentoring young women in tech in our design thinking workshops across India, on-site photographer for our workshops in India (she is a co-founder/photographer at Project 1 previously) and also a co-facilitator for our workshops.
Here is our Interview with Manshi Dubey.
What got you into this field?
I clearly remember it was standard 5, when “Computer” was introduced in our syllabus in our school. And I was super excited as I knew I would get to study with Papa(software engineer), which was a welcome change from the typical routine of my mom teaching me. As soon as I got hold of my computer book, I ran to my dad and told him that I needed to complete the first chapter that very night. With all that excitement we opened the book only to find out it had basic image and description of all computer hardware parts. Too boring. Computer parts was not an alien topic, hence nothing exciting.
I think my dad noticed all this and without saying much he started making some calculations in my notebook. I was in no mood of learning any mathematics then. However in the absence of any other option (it was I who invited him to teach me), I had to look at all the division my dad was doing with “2 digits”. “Ain’t I too old for this?”, I thought. Soon I realized it was not just any regular division but Binary calculation. I would have never imagined that something like that could exist in the universe. By the end of that 2 hour session, I knew how computers understand, synthesis and run complex processes using 0 and 1. As far as I can remember, I like to believe that, that was my moment when I decided this is all I want to learn and do. This simple, yet complex world of computers fascinated me.
Do you have a role model? Why?
I feel “role model” is a strong word and I don’t follow anyone to that extent. There are people who I draw my inspiration from. And these people keep changing based on my aspirations and circumstances in life. Precisely, I have a flexible model where I can choose who to follow, when and to what extent. Currently I am obsessed with Karuna Ezara Parikh and her approach towards travel, sustainable living and her writing. She has nothing to do with coding, and maybe that’s what attracts me. She brings a very fresh and unique perspectives to my life. To add to my recent favorite list are Michale Janda, Ryan Vizzions, a photojournalist and Native American Rights activist.
What’s your favorite book?
Before I start speaking about books, let me thank my brother, had he not been there to inspire me, I would have never got in to reading. He had a library subscription and would bring all these books from different genres and would give me a deadline to finish it. It was annoying as it would take away my precious time from Whatsapping (just made up that word). And after almost a year of reading, I found my love in fiction. It helps me understand perspectives and circumstances of people better. I constantly put myself in character’s(from the book) foot and try to make sense of his/her situation. All this has largely help me design and develop better product as I connect with my user on more human level. I mean, I can make better user journeys as in I don’t have put an extra effort to add empathy or distinct personnel emotions and judgements when I am thinking of the user. Hence, I don’t believe in the philosophy of “users are stupid”. They are smart, not just the way we expect them to be, at times. All we need, is to introduce cognitive learning for them to understand our product better.
On that note, my favorite book so far is The God of Small Things by Arundhadi Roy. This book helped me noticing nuances of everyday life, people around me and also added perspectives to the way I see the world in general.
Share a story of your most memorable coding moment.
I had an amazing experience designing EPIC. It helped to overcome so many of my own limitations and go beyond my comfort zone every single day. Amidst all this excitement we were struggling to provide our users a platform to share their ideas and thoughts while at the same time Ycenter Team would have the ability to moderate those conversations post the lesson is complete. So we did what was obvious, started looking online for third party integrations to solve the purpose. We came across some cool ones. The free versions were not user friendly and the ones we liked were beyond our budget. We took a step back and started looking for other solutions. So, if I were to point one event, it would be making our own “Discussion Portal”. Not only did it give our users a seamless experience, it also gave us control of our data and keep it safe. And we did exactly that. The only difference was this time I had to build this product feature alone. I had never undertaken such a huge project all by myself without a collaborating partner. Setting up timelines for myself felt almost impossible, no one was around to test or debug my code if I was stuck or to even give the feedback. Slowly it started to feel like an impossible task to finish. So I decided to do what I do best, take a break. Went to a friend in a different city, spent the weekend. Listened to her problems at work, helped her solve them, went out to cafes, did some shopping and most importantly relaxed. I came back to work and shipping out my first product — our discussion portal LIVE. It was an enriching experience.
What is your philosophy of tech development and why?
Make simple and easy products. Being a designer and developer, I aim to design products that are simple and intuitive for the user to understand and write code in a way that the system can process it faster and other developers can modify it easily.
Finally, what are some of your favorite places to hunt for, when solving a tech problem?
Free frontend, codepen, codyhouse, codedrops, Awwwards and of course stackoverflow are my goto places for any design and coding solutions.
You can connect with Manshi Dubey on Instagram and LinkedIn.
