 Okay, so I think I was bragging about my own event, but when I was researching on these things, I was just so amazed and inspired. And you guys are in for a treat. So before we get started, there will be a Q&A after this. So that's when you're listening to a discussion, you have a question, just start thinking about it. Okay, so let's do a quick round of introductions. Hi, I'm Audrey. I was a practicing lawyer and I turned into a full-time software engineer. So I taught myself programming two years ago and I've been working professionally for close to two years. So, yeah, I'll share more of my experience there on. Hi, I'm Olivia. So I founded Sucrose Garn, which is a software and technology company. I've been in tech for about 15 or so years, even though I don't count when I was a bit younger. So this is really fantastic to see so many people turning out in this size of women in technology. I think I've done technology events in a number of different continents and it's really impressive to see how many women are here. Hi, my name is Nitya. I'm originally from India and I did bachelor's in computer science and I've been in this industry for the last five years. I've been working in different countries and continents through these five years and seeing the scene of women in technology across. And I really believe that this is an amazing field. Everybody should come on board and enjoy the benefits. So I work with Facebook. I'm a partner engineer in Facebook and we basically work with different partners and I helped millions of developers, so software developers out there to build rich and engaging apps using the Facebook platform. So basically we work with anything that you see like login with Facebook, play with Facebook, share on Facebook or any integration that you have with your apps like Candy Crush. You see what your friend is playing on which level he's playing. We basically work with developers out there to help them integrate with Facebook. So facing all of the developers and helping them build with us is something that I do day to day. So really passionate about this technology and industry. Okay, so Olivier had to leave at night so let me ask you your question first. Sure. So your company is amazing. For Facebook has like what, 2% female engineers? Probably a little bit more now. Wow. When we first started we didn't have that many engineers that were female. It was mainly a male dominated kind of business. But we put our heads together with, I don't know if anyone here is familiar with Malcolm Treadnick from the open source community. He worked for me for many years in a previous role and he was always a great supporter of women in tech. We started to target to get more women involved and not just women but quite a diversity of different types of people. So we're very outcome driven in what we do in our business so we don't really care who you are, where you come from. In fact we prefer it. We give people around the world ticket after they've worked for us for a year so that they can learn different experiences around the world. And because of that flexibility we've ended up with a lot of women as well. So women with children, so on and so forth. So flexibility is a secret to diversity? I'm not too sure, kind of snowballed. So we started off with a few women and then more women would apply because they saw other women in it. And yeah, I guess that's how it's happened. So awesome. So I want to ask the next question to Audrey. So when you talk about a woman engineer, I know Nitya is from school. She has a CS degree but Audrey, you are like a white thing. She went from lawyer in Singapore to software engineer in Silicon Valley, just like a makeup tech industry in two years. So big fan for now. Not for now, like before I asked the question now. So tell us about your learning journey. How was it like, was it tough to look for the language to learn? Yeah it was. So the whole journey is definitely not a walking part. It's very tough. I started because I wasn't interested in practicing law and I wanted to look for something else to do. And I looked up programming and I started with JavaScript, frontend programming. And it seemed interested to me and that kept me going on. And I didn't hit a brick wall when I was deciding back in language to learn. So I was choosing between languages like Ruby, Python, Node.js. Before I decided to pick up a language for a goal. And that just kept me going. The more I built stuff and the more I practiced programming, I found that I really liked it. So that keeps me going. And I mean, for somebody who knows CS degree, I think it's a lot tougher because you have to teach yourself and you have to pick up things yourself. And back then when I was learning, there wasn't a program like this. There wasn't a program like Tech Ladies that had this mentorship program which was what I was looking for at that point in time. So a lot of the learning was just done by myself online with whatever materials that I've got. But I do think that I would have benefited a lot if I had a mentorship program like this. So it's tough. You'll get rejections. You'll face some rejections. You'll face people telling you that being skeptical of the fact that you don't have a CS degree, you have to prove to yourself, especially in Silicon Valley where people have really strong CS fundamentals and people with like 10, 20 years of programming experience. So a lot of the journey is about learning and proving yourself and just being very self-motivated. I want to explore that topic a little bit more. So apart from facing rejections and going without you, what are the biggest challenges you had while you were learning how to code? Biggest challenges, I think maybe it was one of the challenges was looking for mentorship. So I didn't mention it was really important. It's difficult to find a mentor who truly understands and truly has a patience to guide you along. I think that's very rare in the industry at least from my experience. Because sometimes people who are experienced are so good and they assume a lot of concepts that you may know, but they've been in this industry for so long and they've forgotten what it was like to be a beginner. So finding a mentorship is one thing. Another thing was it was just really like facing skepticism from people, people looking at you, wondering if you're up to the task and other people who have like a lot more experience than you do. But I think you get over it by building and shitting stuff, improving that you can build like equally good products. Okay, so the next question I'll probably expand it out to the whole panel. So for Olivia, your perspective as a Hira, your perspective as someone who works in a team and also Audrey without a CS degree. So do you think that having a CS degree really matters in getting a software engineer a job? At the first thought, like me saying it like, yeah, I have a CS degree, but if I say no, you don't require it, it would sound a bit lame, but I'm just taking an example of my fiancé. He doesn't have a CS degree. He's pretty much basically from the same background as me, but he's really successful and way higher in the career ladder than me. It was just that he studied electronics and then he was like, I don't think this is what resonates with me. What resonates with me was solving hard problems like you pretty much the same, like exit sheet throughout the day. There should be a better way to do things and if the better way is what, and he really enjoyed. So I think this is the trucks he really enjoyed solving the problem and it didn't feel like work to him. Like when he was one of my mentors and when he mentors me, it doesn't feel like work to him, but it feels like work to me. Like, hey, come on, let's take a break. I'm like, no, we're not working, we're enjoying, we're solving problems. So I would say like looking at him, I think there's practically no advantage that I have or disadvantage that he has in the whole scenario. You think you are creative, this industry is for you. You think you want flexible job, this industry is for you. You think you can think of groundbreaking solutions, this industry is for you. Nothing is going to be stopping you from entering here and being a successful startup or next Zuckerberg if you can say. I totally agree with you on that. I think there's some things that you can learn which are skills. I mean software, learning software, learning to code are very much skill-based and if you're creative it comes even easier because it's all about problem solving. If you come from a design background, I think it's much easier to move into the problem solving that's around it which sounds a little bit against the norm. But some of the most creative people I know are very, very good programmers and in fact the majority of people that work for us either do art or they do music is the most popular thing that people do or just travel. Which is also a good thing. But if you've got the right attitude you can always learn the skills. And not all software engineers that are really good software engineers have got a CS degree for a number of different reasons and on industry certifications and specializations are always extremely important to be able to take you to the next level. In saying that obviously, if you can indulge in something that you're learning to be able to achieve then that's something that you look for but we wouldn't reject someone just because they don't know how to say its degree. So I think that CS fundamentals are still very important in software programming but one thing that I've discovered along the way is that even without a CS degree or CS education you can still teach yourself CS. The materials are out there for you to learn by yourself. And one interesting thing that I noticed is that if you come with a fresh mind you are approaching a problem with a fresh mind and from a unique set of perspectives that's your own and that's not affected by a formal education. So you bring with you fresh perspectives when you tackle a problem and you can turn that into a strength if you want. Okay, so we'll talk about what it's okay you don't have a CS degree as long as you have CS fundamentals. So I want to... So basically like Lita, a coding user, you know what Java, PHP, HTML5, is there anything you don't know. And Sakuraskai does a lot of different kind of technologies and Audrey, you started with the Python movie eventually ended up with Go. So could you share with beginners in the audience how do you pick what to learn out of the mess of all the different languages? How do you, where do you even start? Okay, I think maybe my answer might be a bit different from the rest of the audience and even like the task that is there for the techniques but to me programming language was never a barrier as in like the fundamentals are always the fundamentals across all the languages. And I think the different languages came up for the reason of each language trying to solve a different problem. So it's basically same fundamentals, different problems are to be solved so different languages came up. The way, and for example, for recruitment in terms of like Facebook, Google and other tech companies, languages never a barrier. You can practically code and solve a problem in any language that you're comfortable in and that's how I came here. But in terms of starting to learn a language I started with Frontend because again like they say, I was an artist and I was really creative and I'm a very visual person. So back in was not something that was really attracting and pulling me versus seeing something on the screen and me making a site, making things there was the most attractive thing and that's how I started with Frontend and even with Frontend, even with HTML5, CSS, JavaScript you can cover pretty much the entire computer fundamentals. So it should be basically you picking up what is the most important problem you like to solve and then using that to really break through all the fundamentals and computer science and understanding it and it could be Ruby, it could be PHP, it could be anything. Do you want to take this side? No worries, okay that's easier. I actually taught myself to program when I was about 15, 16 and was working for a radio station at the time on the media front and the web guy went away on holidays and so I took over his duties because I really wanted to style it a certain way and much like yourself I actually was studying at art college and have some qualifications in fine arts so I think if you're a visual person and you want to see something very immediate it makes a lot of sense to be doing something that is web tech or something as a front end or objective sea of swift or something along those lines because you can see very rapidly what you're doing and create something and feel like you've got what you're creating. If you're more interested in something a little bit more analytical Python is great although you can kind of get lost in your web so Ruby is a great team sport we find that with our teams we can have a lot more people working on the same thing I know that other people will argue with that and there's more purist thoughts and many are political and religious argument but really go with something that makes sense to you do it, get some results see something visual and feel like you've achieved something because there's no one way to do it whilst there's protocols to learn to do it there's no one way so I think the biggest barrier especially for women when they're learning it because they don't see many of their peers doing it is that they don't think what they've done is right and you're usually right it's just really hard to get to the result so you've just got to persevere Okay, so we'll short pause on this and I'll describe it for a while although you have to go before she because she has to call at nine so give her a round of applause to Olivia she's really great Audrey, why go? Right So to answer the question I think you should just go with one of the languages that you like Is that right? Go with one of the languages? Maybe People will come and tell you that you should learn this and you should learn that but ultimately if you like a language, you're well motivated to carry on with it so just check out the different languages try them out and if you like them, just go with that but having said that if you're surrounded by a community of a certain language people who can guide you for the language, for example, Ruby then it might be easier for you to just go with language but it's a strong community because it's a lot quicker to get feedback and analysis and as to why I chose Go I think I just liked it I looked at Baikon, Ruby and then I looked at Go and Go just seemed to me like a really nice language but you can't explain it you just like the way it looks the glossopies and the concepts behind it so I went with and I really did like it Awesome So when it comes to learning new languages, what are some of the common Thank you What are some of the common misconceptions that you see coming from women or it could be coming from men Is programming all about math? It's one I always hear Okay, I'll be really honest I do think it's about math However, having said that I've read that even the creator of Rails thinks that it's not a new math he thinks that if you grew up languages you can program because programming is an expressive thing but for me when I'm programming, I'm looking at it from a mathematical point of view I love math and when I got to programming this really this is so in line with my mathematical sensibility so I would say that it's a math thing but I mean whether it's women or men I think it doesn't matter women can love math too women can love programming too so you just try it out you might find that you like it, just go in there with it I have a slightly different opinion maybe because I think we code on different stuff like when I do front-end or when we develop websites it's not essentially always math so some of the misconceptions that I hear is programming is really difficult even to get started with and that CS degree is like a groundbreaking thing that I can never get over and it's a really stressful job and it's not for women and in the sense women have an inherent disadvantage but trust me I think it can never get as flexible as it gets for us I would believe, you just need a computer sit in front of the computer when you want to it could be 2 am, it could be like 12 pm it doesn't matter and most of, I think most of our industries focus on impact in the terms of what you build, like what is the product they don't really see whether you are doing it 9 to 5 or whether you came in like 5 minutes later or how hard you worked, all of those actually don't matter, so I think there's like no issues in terms of degree there's no issues in terms of like you being good in math at some point of your time in your school or it's really it's again just to me it's just problem solving what your brain does naturally, you just tell the computer do this, so that's basically like programming for me so for example one of the algorithms that we learn in CS degrees, shortest path algorithm where you say point A to B, what is the shortest path your brain can exactly tell walk this way, this is the shortest path and that's practically what we tell the program to do, like okay if these are the various options, tell me the shortest path I think that's how I would recommend you look at this whole scenario say like, yeah it's something that I can understand and I should be able to put it in words and like that actually I would like to add actually, none of you mentioned it I think it really depends on which area of programming that you're working on because for example a language like CSS where you style your HTML I don't think that's very mathematical at all it's not very logical language if you have experience with it so really depends on which stack of the technology you're working on I think you can talk a little bit about the industry, how it's you know don't care what I'm sure it's not things I've done, so I know that you have experiences working in India and also Singapore and Argy and Silicon Valley and also Singapore so could you share with the audience how is it like in these different countries is there sexism or is there diversity in different countries and what do you observe well my experience may be I might not be able to make that comparison between Silicon Valley and Singapore company because when I moved to Silicon Valley I was still within the same company from the Singapore office to the US office so most of the operations were generally the same except that you get like more perks over there for free lunch and but I do care about people like my friends my female friends who have had sexism, sexism remarks made to them very like a lot of Parismen online and online I was fortunate. I didn't get any of that sexism like over sexism within my company or outside of my company in fact the community that I hang out with and mostly the global community in the US they're all pretty civil, pretty nice so yeah I think my experience was quite different in the sense that I guess we are really fortunate back in India that basically I would say pretty much 50% of the early career stages 50% of the employed forces women so we actually like I never felt this was a problem until I came out of India to see the rest of the world that people are not actually even encouraged to get into this career saying you don't do well in maths or science because we never had that issue back then like 50% would graduate from engineering, 50% would join the workforce but we only had a problem of retaining amazing women in the pipeline going up in the career path because they would drop off at some point so looking at that and then coming here I would really encourage you girls to say that there's really nothing stopping you from doing what I did back home or the rest of the women do here because it's something that's totally equal opportunities are available and there's like no physical barrier physically stressful job and you are there's absolutely no disadvantage that we have in this job because we're just going to be creative and we're going to be thinking so I think I had an amazing experience from where I came from and I think Singapore should also have that soon like pretty soon we should be able to see a lot more people. Awesome At this point in time I'll take another brain independent discussion. Does anyone have any question for these ladies? No one? Any questions? Okay then my last question there so you know this audience is a group of people who are really looking to learn programming or are interested to learn what is one advice that you would give to them? Well I can only share my experience the thing that keeps me going is that I love programming and so that keeps me going it's a tough industry especially if you come if you're so new and you don't have a CS background you didn't start programming and you were 10 years old so I mean just find one of the help you can get. You have to benefit from this program I get to know your mentors I get to know people within the community there are lots of meet up groups that you can attend. If you're interested in Ruby go and attend Ruby groups get to hear about what people are talking about Ruby to meet the Rubyists there's like a meet up for Python so get to know all these people who have experience and learn from them I mean I wouldn't call this advice per se but imagine a time when there was no programming and you had to do all the tasks you had to manually do all the tasks exactly. Just go back five years and think of yourself doing all of those and think of yourself doing them in your day to day jobs. Can you imagine what a drastic change this has made and this is not superpower it is like normal human being who's done all these stuff so I would definitely like try to think for a moment what if I could make this change for the next person or today it's so easy to be able to impact so many people in this world like make a great app or make a website it could be like for an NGO it could be for yourself, it could be a timer app it could be anything and it costs nothing and it just really impacts your life, makes your life easy automates things that you hate to do basically like copying and pasting from an excel sheet so that's basically the whole motive of this and it also ends up connecting all of us into a one global village so I would say anytime you feel frustrated like hey this is really difficult for me just take a pause and see how much this has changed your life change everybody's life around you and you just need to take that one extra mile of effort and you would be the next person changing the world for the next generation awesome, thank you Nitya such a great and really incredible person this is all the time that we have so they will still be hanging out if you'd like to talk to them, ask them questions thank you so much