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

by Tarah Wheeler

When someone with social capital takes an interest in you and your work, and contacts you to offer help or a referral, you should enthusiastically and courteously respond.

I quickly learned that networking isn’t always about the people you purposefully seek out. It’s often about the accidental meetings that barely register at the time.

If I want promptness, kindness, diligence, and joy from the people I lead, I’d better damned well exhibit those virtues in marked excess of that which I expect from others. Otherwise, I’m hypocritically demanding virtue from others based on my power, not on my example.

One of the best CEOs I’ve ever heard of thought of himself as the support staff for his team.

You may be one badass engineer, but if you cannot communicate your purpose and assign tasks to your subordinates in such a way that they’re enthused about the tasks you set for them, you can’t be an executive.

Start assuming that everything you say online will be read by your mom, your boss, your potential descendants, and a background check officer at a federal agency (which isn’t far from the truth anyway).

don’t be the smartest person in the room.

Now what matters is that the people who I’m talking with feel as though they’re heard, not that I’m smart. That is how I can help build consensus on the right way to solve a problem.

When you move into your first management position, you’ll realize that developers and engineers are often allowed to be much more eccentric or difficult than managers, simply because there’s no need for them to develop those skills.

People who are habitually punctual usually have a whole lot of other life skills nailed down. They manage their time well. They’re honest with themselves about how long tasks will take. They have the logistics of their city and transport down. They respect you and your time.

Developing yourself outside your profession is the key to being a well-rounded person who can connect with others.

I have some comforting news for you. The only people who don’t suffer from impostor syndrome are actual impostors.

leader’s job is to make good decisions about everything from which pencils to buy to which vision of your company to embrace.

It’s difficult to practice the kind of compassion and empathy necessary to acknowledge the hurtful effects of unconscious social bias without hating others.

half of all American women will not have children, and anecdotally at least, that population is overrepresented in tech. In addition, the majority of millennial men expect to share parenting and care duties at least equally, meaning that there’s no way anymore to tell by sight or gender which of your incoming hires will expect a great deal of parental leave. A thoughtful and farseeing manager would create egalitarian policies now to deal with the influx of men expecting extended parental leave.

The gender gap in pay almost completely disappears when the words “salary negotiable” appears in job notices; otherwise women will assume that the salary is set when the position is advertised.

Women are team members just like everyone else. All people are different; treat them all differently—but equally. The understanding that a woman needs during the hiring process or during maternity leave is different from but equal to the concern that a chronically ill male colleague requires. As long as you are spending the same amount of mental and social energy handling your employees, worry less about difference and more about equality.

When is the last time you, as a manager, faced training that taught you that you have profound power over the lives of the people who work for you and that your thoughtlessness is deeply cruel when you force people to operate in an environment that harms them?

Many managers don’t realize how much harder it is to get a job when you’re differently abled, transgender, female, older, or any of the other categories that aren’t single, white, young, straight, and male.

One of the biggest issues I see new managers struggling with is the idea that the team is theirs. Their responsibility, their charge, their trust.

“It’s not my fault; I didn’t know that poster would make her uncomfortable, and if it did, why didn’t she tell me?” Don’t blame your employees for not doing your job for you.

Managers often think to themselves, If someone has a problem with these arrangements, I’ll hear about it. They’ll just speak up. Wrong.

Your leadership is especially important when your team is traveling somewhere. When people are moved outside their comfort zone, they have needs that they expect you to be thinking about and to handle.

How are they supposed to speak up? They have no power, you pay their bills, and if they complain, they’re a party killer instead of a friend and colleague. This is not an analogy; it’s happened to me—I’ve been the one who chose not to say anything because I didn’t want to be the bitch who killed the party.

It’s your job to put yourself in the position of each person on the team and to ask yourself if they’ll all be comfortable and able to succeed in the environment you’re forcing them to operate in.