Category: Engineering

27 March, 2013

Diversity Seems Dismal

By Justin Reyes

Everyone agrees that diversity is important, and companies boast that they are actively working to hire people from diverse backgrounds in addition to promoting diversity programs. However, when CNN Money recently requested companies to provide statistics regarding their employee composition, only three were willing to release information. The lack of participation and the dismal results reported highlight that not only is diversity still an issue, but that there are many who are willing to pay lip-service to the cause, rather than actually follow through with what they are promoting.

The excuse provided by many companies is that the pool of eligible technical talent is small, and a diverse set of candidates is even smaller. In the race to out compete and stay efficient, it’s easier for most companies to poach capable candidates from competitors. Investing in best practices for the long term success of the organization, and helping educate groups that would otherwise not have known about such opportunities seems like a lot of effort to most. Clearly money and resources exist to purchase and refine talent, or is it just that diversity seems uncool?

So while companies are willing to pool money into poaching talent and shutting down products, they still seem to be oblivious to the fact that there is high company turnover in tech, and fewer people are majoring in engineering and computer science. If the trend continues then the talent wars we see today will only get worse. Reaching out to minority groups, educating, and encouraging them to pursue careers in technology seems like not only a valuable approach, but also one where the minority groups would indeed benefit. In fact there are already a number of minority groups like SHPE (society of hispanic professionals), that would be open to discussing ways of working together.

Fortunately, there are a few companies out there that care, such as Etsy. Etsy, the handmade arts and crafts e-commerce website grew their number of women engineers by 500% in one year through a concerted and ongoing effort of campaigns and an educational program. The program is aimed at introducing people who would not normally have considered careers in technology. By actively educating them, Etsy is able to train and recruit a talented pool of capable individuals.

Perhaps most companies aren’t as enlightened as Etsy, because to most talent is interchangeable. However, the true value in having a diverse team is because the world is changing, people are dividing themselves into different subcultures, and want to associate themselves with brands that reflect their identity and needs. This is exemplified by the growing number of niche markets, and people’s desire for these products are also increasing. Moreover, people’s purchasing decisions are no longer limited to price, but also include social good and environmental concerns. But, it’s hard to create products and service customers without a deep understanding of all their changing needs and concerns. This problem becomes even more acute when companies are rather homogenous. Having a diverse employee composition breeds better solutions, because there is a wider set of experiences that results in diverse thoughts and solutions.

The current numbers in tech aren’t great, and masking them certainly doesn’t solve the problem. If we want to continue to build products that connect with customers, then companies need to be active about reaching out, training, and recruiting minority groups. After all, innovation isn’t about buying products to shut them down, and diversity isn’t a marketing campaign.

Justin Reyes is an regular contributor on Femgineer.com.

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25 March, 2013

Femgineer Friendly Company: CoverHound

CoverHound is an up-and-coming startup in San Francisco, CA, founded by Basil Enan, who is currently the CEO. Basil is focused on building his business, which helps consumers find the best insurance policies for their needs. The inspiration for CoverHound arouse after Basil grew dissatisfied at the way customers were being treated by insurance providers. He had been an executive at InsWeb, where he sold leads to CMO Rory Joyce, then at Kemper Insurance. Finally, he left to start CoverHound, because he believed that the insurance market should be open to price comparison.

Basil founded CoverHound in May of 2010. He met CTO Joel Hayhurst, who had engineered a lead system for Affinity Labs, and similarly wanted to challenge the insurance model.

CoverHound has grown in the past 3 years, and recently received Series A funding to the tune of $4.5 million from RRE Ventures.

While Basil is focused on the business, he also believes in building a culture that is is Femgineer friendly. He recently reached out to me to come, and host a Femgineer Forum at the CoverHound offices. He wants his team to learn techniques to attracting Femgineers so they can instill a friendly company culture.

Aside from striving to be Femgineer friendly, CoverHound also has a pretty relaxed culture. It believes in work-life balance, making it different from your average fueled by Red Bull and Monster startup. They do indeed work hard, but aim to take responsibility for things whether small or large while working, and also have time to enjoy time outside of work.

CoverHound also aims to bring the ideas of employees to life. If there is enthusiasm for an idea or even if it’s just a: “Yeah that’s something we can try…”, the proposer will receive resources to support executing the idea. If the project is a success, then great. If it proves to be less than a success, then as a company CoverHound tries to minimize the impact and go over lessons learned, but there is never a sense that failure is to be avoided at all costs.

Join me as I host the next Femgineer Forum on April 2nd sponsored by CoverHound.

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12 March, 2013

How to Transition to a Remote Team

By Alex Notov

I am no stranger to making decisions about whether to work remotely or at the office. I have been a software engineer consultant for more than half of my career. I have always looked for the following in my gigs: less meetings, more focus on productive and creative activity, and flexibility to meet the needs of more than one client at a time. Over time, it became obvious to me, that the clients that did not require me to come into the office, valued the same, and surprising giving me the freedom to work on my own resulted in them getting the best work out of me. I began to see a correlation.

The decision on how much freedom to give employees, and how to structure a team is something a lot of startup and even big companies deal with today. Everyone wants to make progress, and build a close knit culture, but not everyone knows if it’s possible and the steps to put in place to make it happen.

At the start of BizeeBee, Poornima was bootstrapping the business. So we began by working out of out of Poornima’s apartment. Poornima was soon able to get the team into a very nice shared office space in downtown Palo Alto (this is when I joined). Though the office space was boss-status – right on University Ave., it was a 2 hour commute for me each way, from Berkeley. I told Poornima that it made much more sense for me to spend more productive time at home, while reclaiming some of my commuting life back in favor of personal life. It was a win-win. I mentioned that some people tend to be happier when they can do more with their lives, while still loving the work they do. I counted myself among these (ahem, I actually think that’s most people, whom are honest with themselves).

She agreed to my proposal. All of us eventually began to do the same – the office became a place where we all met about twice a week. Poornima then suggested that we move to Palo Alto into our own office space, we all decided to give it a shot. Her main concern was keeping the flow of communication in a young company, not actually office space. Good communication is an exceedingly important part of a successful and functional team, but it’s not made better just by having office space.

I can’t give you a recipe for success, because every company and every team has a different culture and needs. What I can tell you is what has worked for our team at BizeeBee and what is working for us now at Femgineer.

We spent a number of months in our own office space in Palo Alto. A few days there and a few days remote. We used this as an opportunity to fix our communication problems by establishing some very solid processes.

Here’s how we made it happen:

The key element to a successful team is a sense of shared and common vision. Notice that I didn’t say “the key element to a successful remote team.” That is because the subject of remote shouldn’t even be at the core of the discussion. The core of the discussion should be around how to bond intelligent self-sufficient and motivated individuals to work together to achieve a common goal – and, how to remove the barriers to the achievement of that goal, as well as to facilitate it.

Poornima has been awesome at building this sense of shared vision and making it clear to the team. It is fundamentally what has allowed us to get through all the communication issues, and focus on improvements over time.

Now that we’ve got the key element out of the way, let’s talk about more practical take-aways.

At BizeeBee, it took us a while to realize that we can all do very effective work without having to pay thousands of dollars on office space and getting there. When we did, we were all happier for it. Did I mention that it’s a pretty nice advantage that you don’t have to pay rent? Duh. This isn’t why you should encourage remote work, but it sure is a nice benefit. At a certain scale, you probably won’t get away without having an office, but until you get to that scale, get rid of as much unnecessary expenses as possible.

So what are some of the logistics, you might be asking?

The second core element is communication. This is what was missing, even when we had office space.

At BizeeBee we agreed that we needed to communicate on a daily basis. There are tools for that. Use Campfire for asynchronous communication among team members. Or, dare I say email? We got very good at talking about features, deliverables, and plans in quick 1-1 meetings, weekly team discussions, and having postmortems after each release. All of these techniques – which took place entirely online – helped us improve our communication and ultimately almost completely helped us eliminate the underlying problems.

The third core element is keeping track of progress and encouraging individual accountability.

We agreed that we needed to keep track of progress on work. How about using something sprint.ly, pivotal tracker, github issues, asana, etc? Pick one. The world of internet project management tools is your oyster. We used pivotal tracker for keeping track of features and releases, github for keeping track of commits, and campfire for daily scrum status updates. All of these methods helped us keep track of our work, and communicate better.

People execute faster when they have the flexibility to choose how they execute.

Attract the best talent starts with giving your candidates the flexibility to balance their lives with their work – and acknowledging that they are not automatons, but human beings, for whom work is one of the essential parts of their daily lives, but that there are others.

David Heinemeier Hansson had recently written an excellent article about creating an environment for exceptional people to do a-grade work that matters to them, and to the overall direction of the company. I could not agree more:

A star environment is based on trust, vision, and congruent behavior. Make people proud to work where they work by involving them in projects that matter and ignite a fire of urgency about your purpose. Find out who you are as a company and be the very best you. Give people a strategic plan that’s coherent and believable and then leave the bulk of the tactical implementation to their ingenuity.

But there are still traces of some old school thinking: there has been a lot of talk in the press recently about CEO Marissa Mayer’s decision to force all Yahoo! remote employees to come into the office. Though I am a bit late to the game, I thought I’d weigh in and say that I find Mayer’s and Yahoo!’s decision absolutely silly. It’s no wonder to me that Matt Mullenweg of WordPress commented regarding Mayer’s leaked internal memo:

For anyone who enjoys working from wherever they like in the world, and is interested in WordPress, Automattic is 100% committed to being distributed. 130 of our 150 people are outside of San Francisco.

At WordPress, like at many other forward-thinking development shops, the founders and team leaders are realizing that their employees’ lives are just as valuable if not more so than their jobs. Sir Richard Branson recently chided Mayer and Bloomberg - New York’s mayor holds similar views to Mayer – about the foolish policies:

However, on this occasion I disagree completely. Many employees who work from home are extremely diligent, get their job done, and get to spend more time with their families. They waste less time commuting and get a better work/life balance. To force everybody to work in offices is old school thinking.

Don’t run a shitty company. Your employees will quit. And I really hope Yahoo has a mass exodus.

So, in closing, and to recap, to transition to a remote team, start with a sense of shared vision, give motivated individuals the responsibility to execute on parts of that vision by allowing them to take ownership, provide the tools and processes to make that happen, and then adapt to how your team evolves over time in the execution phase.

Oh, and, just one more thing: don’t forget to fire the true slackers. True slackers slack, regardless of whether they are in a cubicle watching youtube videos all day long, or in their pajamas watching a marathon session of the Walking Dead. There’s also nothing wrong with a bit of any of those things in between work. People – your employees are people not automatons – have lives and vastly varied interests outside of work. Encourage them to do what makes them happy and get out of their way.

At BizeeBee we realized it was time to stop paying unnecessary rent. We moved out, and all began to work from home. One of our guys even moved to a different part of the country, and we were still able to ship product consistently!

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7 March, 2013

Femgineer Spotlight: Stephanie Shupe From Civil to Software

Stephanie Shupe has had quite a whirlwind of an engineering career! At the ripe age of 10, Stephanie helped her dad, who worked in construction, on site. This inspired her to pursue a degree in civil engineering at Virginia Tech. After graduation she continued to work as a civil engineer, but felt like she was spending too much of her time as a project manager, going back and forth coordinating projects. What she really wanted was a creative role where she could solve problems, and basically be an engineer! Stephanie also thought about going to get an MBA, and while she was accepted to business school, she ultimately gave her spot up to pursue software engineering.

She started slowly: civil engineer by day, and learning how to code on CodeAcademy at night. Then to make her dream come true, she decided to take a pretty big risk last year, by going full steam ahead, and moving to San Francisco to study at App Academy.

Post graduation she joined Lookout, and wouldn’t you know the first week on the job her company hosted their semi-annual hackathon, and guess who won, Stephanie! Talk about an amazing first week, and first time experience as a software engineer.

Stephanie is a true femgineer, spending her free time as a board member of Women Who Code, where she helps coordinate events for women, and even kids who code!

I’m definitely curious and excited to see how Stephanie’s career as a software engineer will evolve!

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5 March, 2013

Fostering Female Friendly Companies

Word on the streets of Silicon Valley is that companies want more femgineers… And sure we can all invest in the future and motivate young boys and girls to become engineers, like Facebook, Microsoft, and many other companies are doing today, but what about right now? And why is this even important? Well I’ll tell just say two things about the current approach most companies are taking:

Bringing in a motivational speaker isn’t going to work. You can hire Sheryl Sandberg, Marissa Mayer, and whomever else you can cajole to spend time at your company, but you’ll still be stuck. Why? Because it’s all inspirational. There is no plan. Young ladies don’t think “Hey I’ll become Sheryl or Marissa!” Many don’t even know what the first step is besides learning how to code. It’s not their fault. All that is touted lately is that they need to learn to code. Yet there are so many more steps to the process like networking, interviewing, negotiating for a salary, working with a team, producing quality code, you get the gist. But of course none of this is talked about, and there aren’t any clear steps and strategies. So how can companies expect to attract more femgineers right now?

Simply hosting hackathons and showcasing that you have some femgineers at your company will fail too. In the short term you’ll see a little spike in interest, and people will pat your company on the back for being female friendly. However, if you don’t actually implement a support structure in place one that has clear performance review criteria, mentorship, role models, and a flexible work environment then you can and should expect turnover.

I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s parade, but good intentions are just that good. If your company really cares about fostering a female friendly company to attract femgineers (believe me it will benefit males too), then just like you build and maintain a product systematically, you need to have a systematic approach for attracting, recruiting, and retaining femgineers.

And why is this even important? We can continue to crank out coders through a number of methods, but we also need to breed leaders. The only way to do that is to keep people in the industry long enough for them to hone their skills, and learn management strategies. The key to doing that is to have a supportive system, otherwise people will just leave, be disinterested in advancing, or worse yet not even know how to advance themselves! Right now tech is at the forefront of most industries for being known as progressive. We also have the unique position of being able to compensate well for high quality talent. But if we want to keep people in the industry, and maintain quality talent we have to put some processes in place.

Now I know what you’re saying: “Come on Poornima, give us the scoop!” Well here’s the deal, I’m usually one for spilling all my strategies, but this is one issue that I’m dead serious about. It’s NOT a marketing gimmick. You cannot pay lip service to a growing trend because you’re desperate for talent. And don’t make me out to be the bad gal in thinking that I’m holding out on femgineers, I’m not, I’m doing this for their own good too. I care about them working in places that will support their long term career growth and lifestyle. I’m willing to share my strategies with those who have the best intentions, and are willing to invest in putting a strategy in place.

So if you are interested you can reach out to me, and I’d be more than happy to host a Femgineer Forum at your company.

If you’re curious as to what that it entails here’s the approach the folks at CoverHound took. First they reached out to me, asking me to host an event for them, but they said it was really important that their current engineering team participate. I wholeheartedly agreed, and said it was a requirement. Next, we brainstormed topic ideas, and finally came to an agreement on what to focus on. CoverHound wanted me to focus on how females within organizations can change the culture from within in order to attract more females. I agreed to it. I’ll be hosting the next Femgineer Forum on April 2nd at the CoverHound office. You can see additional details here.

Let’s work together to foster companies that are friendly to folks!

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27 February, 2013

Show Your Support with a Sponsorship

Two things happen to me nearly everyday, and if not daily then at least 2 times a week.

I get messages from recruiters, hiring managers, and startup founders looking to hire technical talent

I get messages from engineers, designers, and product managers looking for a new position.

The mission of Femgineer is encourage, educate, and empower women in STEM careers. I want to work with companies and individuals to foster connections, but I also need to know that there is a good fit, and the environment is one that will nurture femgineers throughout their careers. Femgineer a for-profit company, that I’ve personally boot-strapping, so to keep it going I need support!

Here’s how you can show your support, start by sponsoring an upcoming Femgineer Feast! Below are two opportunities.

1. Femgineer Feast at SXSW in Austin, TX on Sunday March 10th 7-10pm (location TBD).

2. Femgineer Feast at PyCon in Santa Clara, CA on Saturday March 16th 8-10pm (location TBD).

I am only taking 3 sponsors per event, but I am open to an exclusive sponsor if there is interest. If you’d like additional details on what the sponsorship entails then please email me by Friday March 1st. Sponsorships will be finalized on Monday March 4th.

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26 February, 2013

Interview with Global Product Management Talk

We all want to to ship quality products frequently. But too often individuals, teams, and companies are limited by resources or struggle with getting buy-in to move forward. This hinders progress and innovation!

Yesterday I was interviewed by Cindy Solomon of Global Product Management Talk. During the interview we discussed how lean product development methodologies provide strategies for building and shipping products that people love. We dug into my approach for product development within the context of operating on a lean team. I defined lean teams as one that is limited by resources (time, budget, and talent) and can reside in either a startup or big company.

There were 5 questions that we covered during the talk:

How do companies usually structure product teams? Is this the most effective structuring? Could there be a better way?

Agile is considered an alternative to waterfall, but what are some of its shortcomings?

How do most people foster collaboration across different roles (engineering, design,product management, product marketing, and sales)?

What are the biggest hurdles to getting buy-in for product vision and roadmaps?

Do organizations acknowledge silos? What are their attempts to break them down?

You can listen to my answers and the full talk here.

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12 February, 2013

Design Resources for Developers

No one questions the notion that design matters, and good design has also been rewarded. I’m a recipient of that reward, having been a founding engineer at Mint.com. While design matters at every stage of a product’s lifecycle, there are some elements to design that matter more than others. For example, in the initial stages pixel perfection isn’t as necessary as one would think to validate a product’s concept. What is important is the overall experience a customer has with the brand new product. Hence one should focus on designing the following experiences:

On-boarding
Workflows

The reason these two aspects are critical is because they will help to convey the product’s value proposition.

Being pixel perfect won’t hurt, but if you’re limited on time and resources, you can de-prioritize it. It’s more important to have a good skeleton, and iterate than strive for perfection in all aspects of a product early on.

As an engineer I’ve been taught mostly how to design software focusing on security, scaling, and test driving development. Designing for user experiences is something I’ve learned on my own. Initially I started with like primers like: Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman and The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda. Both were good at teaching me high level design concepts as well as the need for emotional appeal when designing products.

As I grew more interested in creating products on my own, I searched for resources that would give me a step-by-step approach to prototyping. The first book I came across was Design for Hackers by David Kadavy. This is a great book for those who know how to build a functional product, but could use a little help refining the design of the product to enhance a customer’s experience. Kadavy focuses on web design, and exposes simple concepts that will take your product’s design to the next level.

The second book I’d recommend is Rapid Prototyping in JavaScript by Azat Mardov. In this book Mardov does a great job of exposing the latest technologies that leverage existing design libraries like Bootstrap so that your prototype has a pretty aesthetic from day one. This books also serves as a great primer in general for prototyping.

If you’re interested in reading the other books that have helped me with designing products check out the programming/design section of my reading list.

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21 January, 2013

Femgineer Spotlight: Diana Espino Software Engineer at VMR Products

By Jasmine Lee

This week’s Femgineer Spotlight is Diana Espino. She began her career as a web developer at the tender age of 15 and soon after, created her first company; PeBe Inc. After more than ten years of working on her own, she joined Worth International Media Group, where she built and launched an eLearning web app for the travel industry. Today, she is a software developer on the e-commerce team at VMR Products, a consumer electronics manufacturer and distributor.

Diana’s initial passion for computer science and technology began at age six when she touched her first computer in a first grade classroom. Her natural curiosity for technology was further piqued at age fifteen when her older brother refused to help her when their home computer crashed, taking her college admissions essay with it! After personally poring over computer manuals in order to gain a better understanding, she said to herself, “I will learn to understand this machine better than anyone else!” A few hours and healthy computer later, she connected her family’s computer to the Internet for the first time and introduced herself to the World Wide Web. Ever since, Diana grew a great respect for computers and the learning process it takes to master them.

Diana’s passion for computer science was not entirely encouraged, however. The majority of Diana’s family did not believe in educating girls. Her father refused to pay for her college expenses and her mother, grandparents, aunts and uncles spoke to Diana about raising a family and attending to the needs of the household. Diana responded by going to school and began looking for a job to help offset tuition costs. However, quickly realized because she was so young, no one would hire her. Consequently, she taught herself HTML, CSS, and JavaScript all on her own, so that she could start an e-commerce site and earn the money she needed to put her way through college. She says, “I was always very interested and passionate about coding. It is my passion that got me through life.”

Diana went on to become not only the first in her family to attend college, but also graduate and with multiple degrees: a BS in Business Administration and an MBA. “I’ve always made it a priority to go out there and to learn,” she says, “computer science was my escape. Now, it has become my world.”

Today, as a software developer and active member of the South Florida tech community, Diana says, “it’s great to be a woman in tech!” Her advice to girls and young women interested in technology is “don’t pay attention to the blurriness of what’s going on around you. Stick with [computer science] if you like it. Don’t get caught up in not understanding the math and don’t be discouraged. Math will train you to think logically like a computer scientist. The math is valuable because it will help you solve problems in the real world.”

She advises young women and girls interested in STEM, “remember to be yourself and to be where you want to be. Do what you’re scared of in order to make yourself comfortable. After all, if computer science were easy, you wouldn’t be doing it.” With Diana’s passion for computer science and her work ethic, she inspires me to get excited and to be open to learning.

Jasmine is a freshman undergrad at UC Berkeley majoring in Computer Science. She is a Hackers @ Berkeley club officer and also works as a webmaster at the UC Berkeley Boalt Law School. Jasmine is humbly inspired by the hackers and builders around her and is excited to learn more about the field. Not only does she like sharing her passion with everyone, but she wants to learn how to play the ukulele and says “Carpe diem! Seize the day. Also, I like bubble milk tea.”

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15 January, 2013

Materials Engineer: Discover New Materials & Their Applications

I have had the pleasure and honor of meeting many inspiring women while interning here at Femgineer. Over the weekend I met with a materials engineer named Pascale over coffee to discuss her experiences attending engineering school and pursuing her passion for materials science in Europe and in the U.S. She explained to me that a materials engineer’s expertise lies in the properties and behavior of materials under different conditions, along with the use of these materials in manufacturing and production. Pascale engineers the materials used to produce touch pads and other consumer electronics at Synaptics.

When I asked Pascale whether she thought the lack of females in STEM was a uniquely an American phenomenon, she agreed with my observation, and noted how in her home country in Europe, female engineers are no rarity. As both of us tried to come up with explanations as to why this could be, she mentioned she never felt alienated while working in her home country, for gender reasons or otherwise. Becoming an engineer was just another career track, little different from any other. But here in the US, she noticed the disconnect American women seemed to have with STEM-related topics. I asked her if she herself ever felt uncomfortable being a woman in the male-dominated engineering environment of the Valley. She drew from her past experiences and advised me, “Every workplace has a different culture. Don’t choose a company just because it has a big name and because you think you will be happy. Choose a workplace that matches your personality and where you are comfortable, for only when you are in a comfortable environment where you can learn from your teammates, will you be able to grow.”

Pascale spoke about how she dealt with the naysayers and doubters she faced in engineering school. She advised me, “When you face difficulties, both in school and in life in general, it’s easy to get caught up in believing you can’t overcome them. Ignore those negative thoughts! Believe in yourself and in your abilities. In school, you need to have a mind free of negative distractions. Only by having a clear mind, by trusting in your intelligence, can you set to learning the concepts you need in order to grow as an engineer.”

I will take Pascale’s message with me as I return to UC Berkeley this next semester. Many thanks to Pascale for sharing her insights and stories with me and for inspiring me to further move towards my goal of becoming a Femgineer.

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