Hello,
Mostly I have used this blog to detail my life updates and travels, but I am switching gears here as I want to update everyone on my recent career experiences. Please note as you read this post that you are reading my personal truth and experiences. I am happy to share more with friends, womxn, and POC but largely uninterested in explaining myself or proving the truth of my story to people who are suspect of my experiences.
Last year I graduated from Wellesley and moved to Seattle to start work at Google as an Engineering Resident. Engineering Residency is marketed as an incredible opportunity to “kickstart” your career, but what I found in my work there was an apparent diversity program with discriminatory recruitment practices, an egregious wage gap, and condescending treatment of their employees. As a woman in software engineering it’s difficult enough to feel valued, seen and heard in the room without a company creating a second class community for you to work in. Each day I went to work at Google I felt less and less valued until I realized that I was crying in the bathroom most days and so stressed I’d developed stress-induced medical conditions. Google claims that being an engineering resident builds confidence and sets you up for career success, but my confidence took a massive hit as my mental health deteriorated working for a company that did not value me or most women in general.
Luckily for me I have a wide network of friends and connections in New England who connected me to opportunities and helped me find a new role in Boston. I’m thrilled to be rebuilding my confidence as an engineer at edX and to continue growing in my expertise as an engineer. I know that I have always been smart and hard working, but we all need to work somewhere where we are valued for being smart and hard working. Google was always doubtful of whether I was smart enough or hard working enough and it was insulting. Embedding a fundamentally condescending nature in an educational program is another misstep Google has made with their residency program. It’s high stress with little reward when engineers could work in places that value them and their identities from the beginning.
I know first hand as a woman in tech that I have to prove myself over and over to be taken seriously. Even in high school when I made perfect scores in my CS courses, and many of the boys failed, I was bullied for out performing. Sometimes when we’re clearly good we’re still damned. It’s a tricky game we’re all playing to build a community that is truly diverse and inclusive. All I want to share now is my story, experience and feelings as a backdrop to help you consider which environment you want to work in. Ask yourself if you’re being valued, if you’re being paid equitably, and if you’re happy.
There’s a lot more I could say about my ten months at Google, how we rallied people to fight against the injustices we were observing, how we gathered support from engineers outside of Engineering Residency, and how we gathered evidence to support our claims and experiences so that we could enact institutional change. However, I am legally bound against sharing many of these details publicly and I would like to protect all of the people who worked with me on our movement to ask Google to do better and treat us better. You do not have to believe that Google discriminates against people or that I had a negative experience there, but if you are a past, present or prospective engineering resident and you ever want to talk I’m happy to share more about my experience and help you get out of the fire.
Now that I work as a software engineer at edX I am still struggling with what it means to be an underrepresented minority and how to navigate advocacy with self-preservation, but I am also feeling valued and happy with my work. My health and happiness have improved dramatically and all it took was a workplace where I was an equal human to my peers. I know that no workplace is a perfect workplace, but many workplaces are not worth the suffering. Realizing when and where to move on was an important lesson for me. I hope all the underrepresented minorities out there in their respective industries will value themselves highly, and take what they’re worth. Trust me; it’s worth it.
