Girls just wanna have equal job opportunities, cool challenges and awesome team mates – Hackeress
The gender distribution of the IT field has been a hot topic for a while already. It was women who originally developed computer science, but somehow it turned into a “boys’ club”. Luckily steps away from the male dominance have been taken as more and more tech companies invest lots of time to get more women involved. We want to be part of the change towards equal IT world along with Hackeress, a warm and empowering community that wants to help tech women to find their places in the IT field after graduation. Last week Talented and Hackeress organized a women-only event called The Power of Feedback to discuss the importance of feedback and how and what kind of feedback can be given on someone’s code and design. We had the honor to host a full house of tech women!
The Power of Feedback -event
The evening started with Talented Talents’ career stories. The first woman on the stage was Jemina Lehmuskoski, a multidisciplinary designer who gets excited about ethnography, systems thinking, technology and sense-making. Her career path took her from Design Research and Strategic Design to Service Design, and she currently builds better services, products and processes at Valuemotive.
After Jemina, it was time for the passionate traveler Sonja Jaakkola’s story. Sonja is a self-driven web developer and designer, the organizer of WordCamp Finland & WordPress Helsinki, who has extensive knowledge of WordPress and modern HTML, CSS and JS techniques. Sonja is currently working as a consultant at Columbia Road.
After the career stories, the stage was taken over by Marianne Sirén, a software developer working at Kisko Labs. Marianne started working at Kisko at the beginning of 2017, first as a trainee for six months and then as a developer. Besides work, she’s also studying Business Information Technology at Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences and has mostly focused her studies on software development. Marianne’s topic was how and what kind of feedback can be given on someone’s code and design. Her superpower was the ability to make people laugh with her, and she succeeded to arouse super active discussions with her task done with a pair and story sharing request.
The outcome
Sometimes when you go to events like this you just listen and don’t feel safe or confident enough to share experiences and start discussions, but that was totally not the case last Wednesday evening. The event ran 2 hours overtime when our ladies got excited about sharing stories that led to discussions about a variety of topics, such as salary, how to deal with inappropriate feedback and career development. On top of bonding and making new friends we got useful tips on what kind of questions to ask to get the right kind of feedback (=constructive), and also how to give feedback on someone’s code and design.
There are certain things to pay attention to when both asking for and giving feedback. For example, is there not a big difference between “Yeah that’s nice” and “I like this feature because…”? The questions asked have a huge effect on the type of feedback you’ll receive. Furthermore, we all promised two things: To take the first step towards changing our mindset off from the one that puts ourselves down to the one that is proud of what we do and to ask for more salary at the next job interview or development discussion.
My message to all the women out there:
❤ Ask for salary raise annually and remember professional confidence! ❤
Psst. Follow Hackeress on Instagram and Facebook to keep updated about the upcoming vents!