DEV Community: Judy Cha

Nevertheless, Judy Coded

Judy Cha — Fri, 06 Mar 2020 20:28:29 +0000

Around this time last year,

when I had participated in this international celebration of women in the field of programming, I wasn't as comfortable in my workspace as I am today. I didn't touch on the subject at all with my post as I felt that it might be too on-the-nose. Additionally, I wanted to leave the post with a note of passion and conviction for change, instead of listing off all the reasons why I felt so drained at work.

Just to be clear, my colleagues are not those god-awful people you read about on subreddit, nor is the company I work for at all conservative, or harbouring some toxic corporate culture. I'm going to steal a joke that was made at the Independent Spirit Film Awards a couple years back, and say that if we leaned any further to the Left, we'd be in the Pacific Ocean right now :P.

The prerequisite for not being heard or involved with work contributions has perhaps very little to do with working with colleagues who don't understand how the menstrual cycle works. This can still happen with colleagues who fully respect people of different genders, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. Based on my observations, the prerequisite for not being heard or involved with work contributions is the very simple act of being overlooked.

Then, what the heck does that mean? "Being overlooked"?

It is quite literally as it sounds. You are not considered.

The reasons for which you're not considered are the factors that may reveal whether there were any malicious intents against you. Were you disregarded for a task for which you had the necessary competencies? Were you disregarded for a task that you were not prepared to take on? Or is the point of contention the very fact that there are disagreements on what you are/aren't capable of?

I've found that in my workplace, the reasons for being overlooked for a lot of female developers were simply that their names had not been taken into account. There were no malicious intents of demeaning anyone, or unnecessarily doubting anyone's skills. Our dev team at the time was predominantly male (~70/30), and a lot of the members of leadership (which was also all male at the time) was simply just more accustomed to the other male devs. Our Product team also did not approach all tasks with a very protocol-heavy mindset, so sometimes things were thrown together in a much more casual impromptu fashion.

To some readers already, this point in itself might be frustrating. How could they be so inconsiderate? How can people become selectively invisible to them at the focal points of decision? And I have no desire to excuse anyone from anything. I've been through my share of pain as employee #8 having watched this company grow enough to have more than one hundred employees working together in the same space. I've also had many moments when I went on private mental witch hunts to find the people responsible for wrongdoings against me, or the female colleagues (dev, support, marketing) around me. Just as I've grown and learned that this is not the way to handle injustice, especially in a close-knit place as ours, our Product culture has also grown and evolved to understand what it means to give equal opportunities for women: make room for them.

It may sound like I'm still over-simplifying things, but hear me out.

We're creatures of habit. And, we're imperfect.

How many of you right now can recall every single movement you made this morning up to this point right now as you're reading this post? Can you recall all the brands of every product you've used to get ready for work this morning? Unless you have a photographic memory, or a very well-established routine, or perhaps an outstanding mnemonic method, I doubt many people can answer these questions fully and accurately.

I'm in no way trying to directly compare being able to recall the Braun electric toothbrush you used this morning to being able to recall that there are competent female developers on your team. My point is that our memories are unreliable, and it becomes more inaccurate the more stressed we are. When you have very little to no capacity to think, your mind goes on autopilot and begins relying on habit. If you're used to assigning the same three devs for tasks regarding updating public APIs, in the middle of one-on-one coffee dates with your teammates and a Q3/Q4 pipeline discussion with the heads of departments, your brain just may jump to those same three devs all the while completely forgetting the fact that they're all male.

Then, how do you fix this problem of human unreliability? Make humans better?

Hahahahahaha, no, that's impossible :)

But you can make your team better by having better representation for individual contributors at the leadership level.

The issues of unintended ignorance towards female devs began to decrease at our company as we hired/moved more women into leadership roles in the Product team. When you have a peer next to you that calls you out on missing details, you're less likely to miss them (as a lot of us have probably seen on pull requests). When you have someone next to you that says "Hey, you've been asking those 3 male devs to do all the public API related work lately. You know we have a couple female back end devs, right? Shouldn't you be asking them as well?" One person raising questions about the status quo makes all the difference. And that is precisely the difference I've seen over the last year since my last post on dev.to.

Most of the readers probably don't have the power to make the call about hiring team leaders, or Product management in general. And even if you do, hiring someone you can rely on is like trying to find truffles in a random park nearby - you might be lucky, you might not be. But I strongly encourage everyone to take a look at representation at the leadership tier of their workplace, and see if they're being represented in at least one aspect of life, whether it be your gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. I can promise you that having someone go to bat for you will change your experience at work.

Nevertheless, Judy Coded

Judy Cha — Sat, 09 Mar 2019 01:39:05 +0000

Growing up, I was seen as a bit of a wild child.

Not so much in the sense that I was up to no-good or getting into trouble with the neighbourhood kids, but when I wanted something, I went for it head-first with not much thought for consequence. On top of that, I was a tomboyish kid (still am), and I loved physical activity. That's why I was always covered in bruises and scratches from rollerblading too fast, or getting hit by a baseball bat, or being too reckless on the playground.

My parents still make fun of the fact that, at any given day, I had a toy sword in one hand, and a toy gun in the other. I loved playing with transformer robots, legos, guns, and anything else that appealed to me because of its functionality. In my under-developed child brain, guns, swords, and robots were the best things because you could use them to fight evil and bring justice. This ideology bled through into other interests in pop culture like TV, movies, and electronic games.

The point I'm trying to establish with my little anecdote is that I've never been one to adhere to more traditional gender roles as a young girl. It was not innate to me, and I was fortunate enough to have parents who understood this, and didn't enforce such expectations on me (or maybe they tried, but it didn't take :P). I was decent at math and sciences, and I grew up to continue down the path of STEM. I studied Biology (Cell Bio & Genetics) at a nearby public university, and worked in the Biotech field as a molecular biologist for a stint after graduation. I can still remember how excited my parents were for me when I got my first co-op job in the Biotech field, and how proud of me they were for pursuing a STEM career.

And soon after these high points in my life, I came to a major crossroad. After being introduced to the reality of the business of Biotech, I felt I could no longer morally stand to work in a field that I believed prioritized revenue over people. I loved working in a lab, and I loved the science behind the innovative techniques used, but I had felt they were used to hold people hostage, not to help them. Maybe I would've felt different had I worked for a smaller company. But Biotech/Pharmaceutical industries are not feasible as startups as a full development of a product can take up to/more than 10 years (due to clinical trials mostly). I wanted to work on genetic therapeutics for more rare genetic diseases like muscular dystrophy, but Biotech was not a place that would have supported such endeavours easily. So I quit.

Then, came the lowest points in my life so far. I didn't know what to do with myself after that. Not only did I lose my job, I had also lost my purpose, and by relation, any confidence in myself. From the moment I learned about the Human Genome Project and Dolly the cloned sheep back in high school, I knew genetics was what I wanted to do, and I was so certain that it would be my life. So, when I stepped away from that, I became empty. I didn't have any backup plans. Just like the time I was racing down a giant hill on my rollerblades as a kid, I didn't have a plan B and I crashed and burned.

My family understood, and they were supportive through everything. Truthfully, I had never considered working in software engineering or web development. I loved playing computer games, and I had even built my own custom PC, but I never connected the dots together. It was my brother who suggested that I pursue a career in coding. His coworker had graduated from a 8 week bootcamp and was a pretty successful web dev at his company. He understood my propensity towards STEM, and he thought programming would be a good fit for me.

And he was absolutely right.

I took the bootcamp, graduated, and got a job where I've been working as a fullstack web dev for the past 3 years.

I've been privileged enough to have all the resources I need to work in STEM, in addition to a supportive and loving family who never discouraged me from it. And even for someone like me, whose life has been aligned very closely to STEM, there have been struggles to get to where I am. I can't imagine how difficult it must be for women who haven't had the support system like I had, and I know so many women come from families where being self-sufficient, or knowledgeable in STEM is discouraged, whether it's outright or passive. My heart will always break for the fellow female cohort in my bootcamp buckled under the pressure and dropped out of the program, echoing her father's words that "she was never meant to do math." Only 3 of the 11 that graduated from the bootcamp were women. Looking back, I wish there was a better support system for women in that bootcamp, so that women like her were less likely to drop out.

I wasn't able to reach her or provide her with enough support then, but now that I'm working in the field, I believe I have more resources to support women in tech, and I vow every day to elevate other female developers in my community in any way I can.

Because sometimes, it really sucks to be a woman in STEM. Femaleness is readily ignored and put aside for a male voice. Even with all of my expertise in genetics and coding, I've been ridiculed by men for saying that "genes and code are quite similar." I've had my ideas shot down multiple times for another male developer to pitch the same suggestion, and receive praise. But society's ignorance is not enough to stop me in my pursuit of good code.

I continue to code in 2019 because it's the most effective way I can bring my ideas to life and help others.

Women code.

Women have coded, are coding, and will continue to code as long as humanity and technology sustains. And women should code.

We should celebrate, and encourage women in our lives not only to code, but to engage in math, sciences, and engineering more enthusiastically. If their refusal to join these fields isn't because they're not interested, but because they're afraid or believe that they're "not meant for math/science/engineering/programming", then it's our duty to challenge that line of thinking and break the stereotype.