When it comes to “programmer”, most people equate it with “male”. But in recent years, more and more women are becoming part of the tech industry as they are recognized for their quality and management skills.
Female engineers wanted in the U.S. Army, 1945
Although the best equality is not to emphasize the difference, the power of example is so great that we still want to approach female technical practitioners and understand what qualities a good female programmer should have at different stages, so as to inspire more women to go further into the industry.
On the eve of goddess Day, we chatted with five sister engineers working in different technical positions at IQiyi. Among them, there are algorithm engineers and product managers who just graduated two years ago, senior R&D engineers who have worked in their positions for nearly 10 years, and team leaders who have stepped into technical management positions.
Regardless of their positions and working years, they all use their own experiences to illustrate the growth story of an excellent technical practitioner in IQiyi.
“There is no difference between boys and girls,
Only the professional direction is different “\
Between 2018 and 2020, the number of “program girls” in China increased by nearly 70 percent, according to a report on The Big Data of Chinese Female Programmers. As a result, the field of programmers is no longer just for men, and more and more young women are joining the field.
As a new generation of female developers, the “program yuan” born in the 1990s almost grew up with the tide of technology. They have been the natives of the Internet since they entered the society, and therefore have a more unique view of Internet technology and technology companies. At the same time, as more and more women enter the technology industry, their perception of the difference between male and female engineers becomes less and less obvious.
As a representative of the “program yuan” born in the 1990s, Sai Sai is an algorithm engineer who has been working in IQiyi for less than two years. In the second year of graduate school, she started her internship in IQiyi and became a member of the intelligent platform department of iQiyi.
The atmosphere of getting along with the technical team is very simple. In her job at IQiyi, Sai Sai said she hardly felt any discrimination due to gender. She also laughed that she had “never seen the evil of society”.
* “It’s not just gender, it’s actually rank differences that I barely feel here.” * Cesay said when asked what is different about women at work.
“In fact, technology always comes first here, and there is only a difference between ‘big bull’ and ‘rookie’. The biggest difference is in the field of their own professional knowledge.”
Even in the professional field, iQiyi engineers also hope to “seek common ground while reserving differences” and “transfer learning” as much as possible. Every Wednesday at 10 am to 12 PM, the department will conduct a highly efficient “paper will share”, each colleagues take turns to 2, 3, to share the latest technologies within her own professional papers, after, you will again to share content, thinking whether to related technologies “migration” to their own professional direction.
“Sharing has a sense of thesis defense, which is very rewarding,” Sesay said, adding that sharing also gives team members a chance to learn about each other’s work, which opens up more possibilities for research and work.
Like Sai Sai, her colleague Ling Yu, a product manager, believes that professional knowledge is the most important part of the job.
Compared with the differences between men and women, Ling Yu thinks that the differences between people are greater. * “Everyone should have a way to communicate with that person” *, and in communication, people value whether they are proficient in professional knowledge rather than gender.
Ling Yu is also a new product manager. In more than two years of growth in IQiyi, if there is anything that female identity brings to the job of product manager, she thinks it is more an advantage in communication.
In her job as a product manager, Lingyu has to deal frequently with operations, algorithms, and front and back engineers, and women naturally tend to be more accommodating and flexible in communication, thus reducing avoidable conflicts.
Perhaps because of this, product manager is a relatively high percentage of women in the Internet industry. Ling Yu believes that this is a job with great creativity and a sense of accomplishment. Through her own efforts, she can solve the difficulties of some people or even an industry.
“I don’t think women are at a disadvantage in this job. Women can do what men can do.”
“With an engineer’s mind,
Work like a baby.”
According to a 2019 study by tech consultancy SlashData, there are about one female developer for every 10 men in the world. In other words, there are 1.7 million female developers and 17 million male developers worldwide, and the percentage of senior tech professionals who are female is even lower.
This time, we also talked to two senior female engineers in the R&D department of IQiyi, who have worked in iQiyi for more than five years.
Female engineers who have been working in this industry for more than 5 years are the generation of technical practitioners who contacted the Internet earlier in China, and have personally experienced the social changes brought by technology and technology. Compared to the younger generation of developers, they have a deeper identity as engineers, a more mature view of the technology and Internet world, and a different view of work and family than their parents.
Salad is a front-end development engineer at IQiyi. He has been working on front-end development related to players since he came to iQiyi in 2012 and has been working at iQiyi for over 8 years. A computer professional, she chose to work as a development engineer. “At that time, I was still unfamiliar with this industry and thought it was a powerful and mysterious job.”
A few years after entering the profession, Salad still strongly agrees with her choice of that year. She thinks that engineering is a well-paid profession with a simple working circle and colleagues with high INTELLIGENCE and strong logical thinking. At the same time, she also believes that the position of engineer is a job that requires a lot of experience accumulation and learning, and she has never stopped learning after working for many years.
“The ability to learn determines how well you adapt to changes in society and how well you can keep up with developments at work.”
For newly started engineers, Salad also suggests that you start thinking early about your future career direction, whether you want to be more professional or more integrated toward management.
Regarding the advantages of women as developers, Salad believes that women are more patient, softer in communication, more careful in work, and more in control of details.
With regard to disadvantages, Salad only mentions that women have a harder time balancing their families than men.
Her colleague Amy, another female development engineer, knows this too. Amy has been working as a back-end engineer at IQiyi for more than five years. Back-end engineers have higher requirements on work intensity and response speed to demand, and temporary overtime is inevitable under sudden demand, sometimes requiring long-term business trips and closed development.
As a result, Amy spends less time with her children than other mothers. But she feels that there are gains and losses, and that the engineer’s way of thinking has also benefited her in the process of raising children.
For example, when teaching children how to do addition and subtraction within 20, Amy demonstrated the perseverance and concentration of engineers to children: first explain the rules and methods clearly, children understand, and then repeated training, emphasizing to her that practice will be fruitful, and will get better and better. This method of learning also proved to be effective, with children getting better at calculating accurately and for longer periods of time.
The engineer’s sense of rules and planning imperceptitiously influenced her child and made her time with her child more quality.
Not only can she use the thinking and working style of an engineer when she is raising a baby, but Amy also shows the spirit of raising a baby at work.
Being calm and able to calm down tests patience, perseverance, concentration and learning ability. This is Amy’s understanding of being a development engineer, and she also requires the same for herself.
Amy has a long list of courses she takes to “brush through” during her day job. She is currently taking a course on “microservices” in her company to prepare for future system upgrades.
Amy: I made a list of things to do for myself
At the end of the interview, Amy also gave a piece of advice to young engineers: be strong in heart, let alone set boundaries in life. “Do not think that I am a woman in the technology industry is inherently weak, think almost enough, no matter what you choose, choose to do well.”
“Engineers are artisans,
It also needs craftsman spirit.”
Cooperated national strategy center, a senior adviser, cooperated think-tank, a senior fellow at the horse cen has said publicly that women to work in coordination and communication to promote improvement has advantages, team atmosphere, performance is stable, learn to spend more time and energy, but disruption during the examination of career, let them return after working hard to keep up with the needs of the development of enterprises.
In enterprises, we generally find that the proportion of female managers is relatively low, and the number of women under the two labels of technical circle + manager is also becoming less and less.
In this interview, Maisie, a female manager of iQiyi Advertising Sales Department, was invited. As an engineer with a technical background, she gave her own unique views on the identity of managers and female engineers.
Maisie, who joined iQiyi in 2011, has been working for the company for 10 years. She is a real engineer who has grown up with iQiyi.
When asked about her most impressive project, Maisie mentioned the launch of an advertising system, which was her first project as an engineer at IQiyi. “At that time, the team was still very small, it was really one person when n people use.”
It takes ten years to hone a sword. Maisie considers engineering a “craftsman” job, which requires polishing and concentration on details, a flashy job that can be seen as an application creator or inventor. But at the same time, it is also a job that requires learning ability. You should often look up from the details. “There are many excellent managers and engineers in the company, and learn more about how they do, how their peers in the industry do, and apply good experience to your own business.”
In 2015, Maisie underwent her own shift from project manager to team manager when she returned from maternity leave as a new mother.
“Before, I only needed to be responsible for specific projects, but after I led the team, I began to be responsible for the team. How to coordinate the team and make the whole team productive is a big challenge.”
Maisie speaks of the “power of an example” when she transitioned from being “accountable” to being “accountable” to her team.
“Another woman who runs my own team once said to me something that really stuck with me: ‘Fully empower and take responsibility for results. At the time, I didn’t know how to implement it, but over the years, I’ve come to understand it better. Let each student have their own goals, everyone’s goals from the big goal disassembled down; Being accountable for the results is the integrity of the dismantling and follow-up of the big target.”
In fact, it also coincides with the classic “management by Objectives” concept of Peter Drucker, the founder of management: it is not that there is a job to have a target, but that there is a target to determine everyone’s work. If there is no goal in a field, the work in that field will inevitably be neglected.
Maisie also says her training in corporate management helped her a lot, including a three-day performance management training.
When it comes to team coordination, Maisie also mentioned her own experience: face-to-face communication.
Maisie says engineers rely on online communication tools, but she believes face-to-face communication is more effective, brings people closer together, and communicates feelings and feelings, especially for women.
Maisie also believes women as managers are more empathetic and prone to empathy. “For example, if there is a conflict with your peer, how can you look at it from the peer’s point of view and find a compromise? The students in the group can think about what he/she needs more and what help I can give; Give your supervisor a lot of thought about what the big goals are and how I can contribute to that goal. It’s also a sign that women are more empathetic.”
Despite being a technology manager for 10 years, Maisie still enjoys watching videos in bed as she did when she first joined iQiyi.
“What do you see as the disadvantages of being a female tech manager?”
“There is no disadvantage. What men have, women have.”
Conclusion * * * * * *
Since the birth of the Internet, female engineers have been actively or passively burdened with too many labels: “programmer”, “mom”, “strong woman”; But in recent years we have also been pleased to see that, as labels and discrimination have receded, we have found more non-gendered traits in our engineering sisters: integrity, maturity, wisdom, tolerance.
In the interview, we can easily see that in IQiyi, more and more female engineers are getting rid of the bondage brought by gender and creating a different “miracle” world. On the occasion of the arrival of the Goddess Festival, may the “sisters” be able to ride the wind and waves and march forward bravely on the road they choose and love.
Maybe you’d like to see more
Engineer interview | in this 6 years, we made a meaningful thing for user \
Engineer interview | every day to do the best you can be a refined, sophisticated life and great job \ in parallel
