Personal: My leap into the unknown
Why I decided to learn how to program
In short, and as a small forewarning, this is a bit of a journey post — to share with you all why I decided to go become a software engineer.
1. I knew nothing
Right after graduating from undergrad — I quickly landed a job working in business development and marketing for a small tech startup based in the San Francisco Bay Area. I loved the fast-pace of and quickly changing environment of working at a start-up. Everyday is so different from the next as you’re forced to wear multiple hats to adapt to the shifting needs of company.
Although I was constantly being challenged in my role and really loved my everyday job — working in a smaller business environment exposed to so many parts of the business that I hadn’t ever been expose to before: content development, product development, project management, and yes the ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT.
Every few weeks or so the engineering department would present to the entire company product features they had worked on over the course of that sprint — and it was so cool. Prior to working at this company, I had really NO insight into the the world of engineering and programming. No one in my family was a software engineer and neither were any of peers. But what attracted me the most to programming was how it allows you to build, create and problem solve — and the fact that it was so foreign to me.
2. Time to take a chance
So after working for a few years in a few different industries, I finally decided to take a chance on myself — although it wasn’t easy. You quickly realize that with trying to tackle something new, that feels so distant — such as programming for me — you begin to doubt yourself.. a lot. I started to look around and found that the very typical profile for a software engineer…especially in the Bay Area…was a young white tech male. And this thing called the imposter syndrome begins to creep in.
Wikipedia describes the Imposter Syndrome as ‘a concept describing individuals who are marked by an inability to internalize their accomplishments and a persistent fear of being exposed as a “fraud”’.
I felt like I was trying and really excited to learn this really cool new skill — but so afraid to commit to because I thought others would see me as a “fraud”. Although it’s not easy to get over this self-hindering perception, in my personal journey I spoke with many many engineers and was quite surprised to find that they all felt the same way at one point or another — this was especially prevalent amongst those who identified themselves as females and minorities. Even though this feeling of imposter syndrome may never go away — I finally decided to take a chance on myself. And leap into this world that was so unknown to me.
3. Bridging the gap
As I briefly mentioned earlier — once you’re introduced to programming you quickly realize the world it lives in. Which is often that of young, techie, white guys. Despite a huge push to diversify the tech industry — according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. — still only 12.85% in the workforce are Black and only 16.3% are Hispanic. Within some of the largest tech companies — such as: Yahoo, Twitter, Microsoft, LinkedIn & Google — the numbers are: 2%, 3%, 3.9%, 3%, &3% respectively for Hispanics.
For female engineers — according to an article published by LinkedIn — amongst the all of the U.S.’ software engineering working force women only makeup about 15% of the total representation.
Needless to say, as a young Latina female — these are the gaps I wanted to bridge. I can’t sit here and complain about the lack of female representation in the software engineering world and the even smaller percentage for hispanic women. I took these chances on myself and took these leaps because 1. I knew I could do it, and 2. I wanted to show others that they could too.
