Women in Tech: Take Your Career to the Next Level with Practical Advice and Inspiring Stories

by Tarah Wheeler

They’re deliberately pressure-filled situations to evaluate you as close to your real self as possible. Your best option is to find a character and a pattern that you can adopt that is really you but is also artificially constructed enough that you won’t have your feelings hurt if you’re rejected.

The interviewee is assumed to be grateful for any offer and willing to do anything to get the job, and it’s solely the company’s decision about whether the interviewee will be working there.

Never buy this myth

You’re trying to get past them as a gatekeeper to the people you actually want to learn about: your potential team. That’s a good thing: it gives you the chance to poke around and kick the tires of the culture.

FTE employees are paid less, have some job security, are part of the company culture, and work longer hours. Contractors have zero job security, are paid approximately 40 to 100 percent more than FTEs, are often excluded from company culture and goodies, and can never be legally forced to work unpaid overtime.

vendor agency can do so with total impunity because they’re negotiating on behalf of two parties—themselves and their client, not you.

We have the statistics and research behind this fact: women’s likability decreases with their success, while men’s likability increases with their success. Likability is not a trivial or meaningless concept; if a woman is disliked, her economic status is directly affected.

TACTIC 1: “We’ll need you to tell us what you’d expect as a salary.” Hell no, they don’t.

“The salary you offer me tells me a lot about this company, and I think it’s really important for me to have that information so I can compare you with my other offers.

I’m happy to give you some time; why don’t I follow up with you tomorrow if I haven’t heard your offer by then? I know it can take some time to get the i’s dotted!”

TACTIC 2: Never, ever say yes to the first offer.

Here’s your script: “That’s a great place to start!”

I want you to believe with every ounce of your being that the person talking to you wants you to work for them much, much more than you want to work for them. Here’s why: it’s true. It costs in excess of $30,000 to find and recruit a single top developer, put them through interview rounds, and do onsite evaluations, and I promise you right now: they’re exhausted.

TACTIC 3: “This salary is not negotiable.” This line is often used by companies who have a salary band that is based on some kind of “quantifiable” metric for parsing résumés.

You’ll be negotiating with a professional salary negotiator in human resources, and their job is to make you doubt yourself and your value just enough that you’ll take the first offer, gratefully. You don’t realize it, but they’re not reporting back to your team and future manager to tell them that you’re a hard case in negotiations; most of the time, your team and manager won’t even know what you’re being paid.

“That’s a great place to start! I understand that you cannot go outside the salary band, so let’s work on finding other ways to get your offer commensurate with my others, because I love this company and I really want to find a way to work here. What can you do in the way of stock options and telecommuting? If you can contractually add two days a week where I don’t have to fight Seattle traffic, we’re all winners!”

TACTIC 4: “This is the average market salary rate for people with your job description, so that’s why we’re offering it.” They may justify it with a reference to Salary.com or Glassdoor.com

“I’m here and interested in this job because I think your company is extraordinary, not average. I don’t think you want to fill this company with average developers, and I don’t think you’d be offering me this opportunity if you did. Glassdoor has a salary for someone of my abilities and training at [number that is at least 20 percent more than what they cited you]. Is that a little closer to what the amazing people I’ve met so far have started at?”

Think of it this way: you’re offering a better option that can make both sides happier and helping yourself in the process.

Be wary of a situation where you’re the first woman on the team and you get the spoken or unspoken message that they’re glad to have you because they expect you to make the team grow up and act like professionals.

In reality, one or two women will not civilize a team of brogrammers. It is management’s job to not hire jackasses. It is not the job of the new web developer who also happens to identify as female to civilize them. In addition, those newly hired women will rarely have any power, and a hiring manager who initially thought that it was a good idea to hire male coders who have sexist jokes on their T-shirts isn’t likely to be sympathetic to complaints

The other problem with the assumption that women will civilize a dev team is that it presumes that women who want to be developers are women who have low, sweet voices, courteous shyness, and a Guinevere complex, and require coats to be thrown on puddles.

If you find out after being hired that the perceived reason for your hiring was to make the boys grow up, start looking for a new job.

Your skill set is the requirement for getting in the door, and the rest of your career is based on how you treat people and how you allow yourself to be treated.

People are forgiving of others who don’t make the same mistakes again and again, and of people who use real compassion and integrity in their dealings with others. If you bring kindness and humility to your interactions with others, you’ll find these situations a lot easier to handle, and your colleagues will have a better opinion of you than they would have otherwise.

I used to interrupt and cut people off all the time. I was doing it because I could already tell what they were going to say, already had a response for the next four things they’d say, and I was jumping the conversation forward for maximum efficiency while paying them what I thought was the compliment of assuming they could keep up. That’s not how people interpret someone interrupting them, however, and I had to realize that the insult of cutting them off almost always cost me more time fixing the situation than just listening would have.

This is honestly more of an issue with heterosexual couples who have assortatively mated. That is social science jargon for two people who have gotten married and have equally successful and fulfilling careers.

Not always married anymore. LGBTQ+ couples also have kids. Too many hetero assumptions.

Last but not least, don’t brain your spouse with a mop handle when they say “Have you considered just not cleaning the house so often?” Blood is very sticky, and you’ll just have to redo the floors.

Recruiters are much lazier than stalkers, and you need to make their job as easy as possible for them. At a bare minimum, you should have your email readily available on your personal website or on your LinkedIn profile.

There’s a stereotypical headshot of CEOs in tech: it’s a down angle of folded arms in rolled-up sleeves and a confident smile. I have that one because it communicates rapidly who and what I am. Go with the tried-and-true; you’re not an avant-garde photography artist building a portfolio.

If you are a black woman and don’t have your picture on LinkedIn, I think you might be absolutely stunned to find what would happen if you made that information available to potential recruiters.

I’d also rather work for a company deliberately selecting diverse candidates (even if they’re being awkward about it) than one deliberately de-selecting diverse candidates.

The lesson here is this: whatever you say you can do, I had better be able to see samples or a portfolio on the Internet somewhere. Ask yourself this question: What would convince me to hire myself? What could someone see about my work that would let them evaluate my skills without ever meeting me?

One of the biggest factors contributing to the gender gap in salaries is the fact that many male hiring managers expect to hear from women themselves what their accomplishments are.

“Never get involved in a set of fast-loop replies with someone on the Internet. It teaches them that they’re important and you have nothing better to do with your time.”

“You don’t have time to be a professional at everything. Stop doing everyone else’s job and do yours.”

The only thing you need to know to be a mentor is one more thing than the person you’re mentoring. Mentoring someone actually benefits you more than the person you’re mentoring.

You must maintain your own energies, health, career, network, and relationships as you see fit,

There is a direct and nontrivial relationship between you as a mentor and you as a successful career professional. As a mentor, you will gain insight into others, which translates directly into more opportunities in your own career, perhaps by understanding a new market.

You can and should grow your own network from working with your mentees. They have access to ideas and people that you do not.

Part of your career should be invested in the development of yourself, your brand, and your skills, and part of that development should involve reaching out to others to help, advise, nurture, and learn.

If you are a differently gendered or minority technical worker, you have some strengths that are unique to you.

Becoming a mentor is nonoptional. You are teaching others something all the time, whether you want to or not.

Take control of those messages and start thinking about the lessons you are teaching to the people you work with and have relationships with. Make a deliberate choice to be an example of a kind, courteous, respectful person who reaches out to people with a helping hand. Your effort will pay off personally and professionally, and you will notice rapidly that others who are not even your mentees will begin to invest you with authority and respect. That respect is worthwhile.

The vertical connections needed for mentoring and being mentored are vital to being successful in your career.

A sponsor is someone who is all of these things and has also personally put money in your pocket or gotten you a job directly. Sponsorship is mentorship on steroids.

Find people who will put their name and power behind you, and then find a way to help them for it.

Your job does not merely consist of keeping your current job. In this economy, your job is (1) keeping your current job, (2) keeping your skills more current than is necessary for the job you are in and preferably ahead of the market as well, and (3) keeping your network ready for an onslaught of job request emails.

Add ten hours a week to your current job, and start thinking of that time as nonoptional professional development time. Use three-quarters of that time to improve your current set of skills by working on projects or your side gig, or taking classes. Use the remaining quarter to build your network.

introverts can really shine on social media.

Having a reputation for thinking of others and providing useful information to your contacts will spread out past them to the second and third degree in your social network as well.