Issuetrak

I'm going to be brutally honest here -

I was a single mother making less than $30K a year without a college degree. I had completed all of my major course work and all of my general education work for my degree, but I still needed to complete a minor in order to graduate.

I had friends in the IT field at the time and I bought into the "You can be whatever you want to be" mentality and chose to pursue a minor in programming - not because of a passion, but because I wanted a well-paying, sustainable career.

I do not regret my decision! It's been a wonderful ride so far.

I'm not going to lie, it was not easy for me at first. However, at this point in the journey, my company has taken several measures to ensure that I can be and can stay involved in the organic/spontaneous collaboration with my team.

One such measure is our use of Zoom. My team and I use an "All Day" Zoom meeting that allows us to collaborate in real time. We've also made use of our chat client, Slack, in order to publish relevant ideas that can be shared with everyone at the same time.

Great questions!

1. When I was studying CS in college, I was typically the only woman or one of 2-3 women in a class of 30+. At times, it was intimidating. My advice to young women entering tech is to not let anyone or anything intimidate you! You've got this!
2. A couple of years ago, I attended a local Dev conference and one session that resonated with me was titled, "I'd hire more women if only they'd apply!". The many points were: If your company's website portrays a "Boys Club", it could turn women away from applying. Examples of portraying a "Boys Club" were only men in leadership, listing perks as "a kegerator in the breakroom" and no mention of family leave/time off. Another important point from that session was the research statistics that show that a man will apply for a job even if he doesn't meet all of the listed requirements, while a woman will hesitate if she doesn't meet all of the listed requirements.
3. Now that we've all lived through 1.5 years of COVID-19 with so many companies keeping their workforce remote, I think the possibility of working fully remote is much less challenging than it was in the Before Times. I'll tell you a few things that have made my experience much more successful - A chat client such as MSN Messenger, or Slack and a video client such as Skype or Zoom.

Cage match, typically.

Seriously though, I'm fortunate enough that I work with a team that has a high level of respect for each other. We don't see eye to eye on a daily basis, but we have the communication skills necessary to talk out our differences and come to mutually agreeable resolution most of the time.

Funny story. While I am the Director of Development, I am also the current Scrum Master and have been since we adopted Scrum. So, I've never interviewed for a Scrum Master.

But, I'll say I would ask "Do you have any experience motivating a team?" as I see being a motivator as the most important quality of a Scrum Master.