 Live from San Francisco, it's The Cube. Here's your host, Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here. We are on the ground at Pier 48 in San Francisco at the Top Coder Open 2014. So the event's been going on for about 14 years, bringing a bunch of people together, kind of a hackathon to solve all the hard problems. But we came up with The Cube today because they had a new program, really targeted to high school girls and keeping them in STEM, getting them interested in STEM and talking about STEM. And most importantly, really presenting a panel of mentors for them to look up to who are not the biggest stars that they'll ever see, but people in the industry working hard and sharing their stories. So we're really excited to get some time with the panel. So I'm joined by Grace Norton. Welcome. Thank you. And you are a technical program manager at Google. That's right. Awesome. And I think you said you come from the hardware side as well, right? You're doing chip design and so you're a hardcore, not just a wimpy software stuff. Hardware is cool. Hardware is cool. So talk a little bit about your journey. You came to this country. You just jumped in with both feet. Went to Oregon State up in Corn Valley. So talk a little bit about your journey and how you got involved in computer science. Yeah. So I love solving puzzles ever since I was a kid. And in high school, I love science and math. So I came from Malaysia. I came here to Oregon State and just jumped in with both feet. And the chip design for 13 years before I switched to become a technical program manager first at Facebook, then at Google. So talk about, you said you were one of two girls in your program with like 200 people. Yes. You're obviously full energy, got a lot of life. For girls that are not necessarily maybe so confident, what advice would you give them if it feels intimidating to be one of only a couple girls in these CS programs? I say don't be afraid. If you don't know 100%, that's okay. Just raise your hands. Just go for it, people. And you mentioned that you're still really close friends with that other gal, right? Yes. So I'm actually going to her baby shower in a month. You've probably been in each other's weddings and seen the kids and everything. Yes. Great. So talk a little bit about this event. A great event. 200 girls from about a dozen high schools. Even a girl scout troop. Kind of coming down and sitting down and getting to listen to you and listen to your story. And ask questions. What did you think of the girls? I'm super excited to meet them and to just give them a perspective of what I think to and ask them to just go for it. Go for it to do something that they're passionate about. Yeah. And as you said, it's really about problem solving. And you really like problem solving. And that's been guiding you along this path. The other piece that came up was really the ability to touch a lot of people with code and to have this long reach. Talk a little bit about why you like that part of being involved in software. Yeah. I think technology has a big impact on the world. Just look at Google search. Tons of people in the world use that and look at Facebook connecting with all your friends and families all over the world. So this is just really amazing. The impact that we can do. Yeah. And just hardware versus software. What do you think? What do you like better? I like both of them. You like both of them. That was an easy answer. I don't know. I mean now it's all about cloud. But cloud's really driven by hardware. Nobody likes to talk about the hardware. It's like the magic up there. And you're in big distributed systems. You're at Google. Yeah. The amazing thing about cloud is that the hardware, you don't have to deal with hardware anymore. The cloud providers take care of it. That enables a lot of different companies and people to just start small businesses with that. Yeah. So last question. Why is an event like this important? Why is it important for you to take time out of your day, for Google to let you take time out of your day to sit and talk to these 200 girls? I think it's really important to have more young people in the pipeline to fill up, to help with the technology industry. Great. Thank you for stopping by. Thank you so much. So again, we're here at the Girls in STEM at the Top Coder Open 2014. I'm Jeff Frick. We're on the ground in San Francisco. You're watching The Cube.