Hi Friends,

I’m not a nerd. I don’t love math. And I am certainly not a man. So, what am I doing here in tech?

That’s a ridiculous question, right? 

Anyone can learn to program computers, or manage IT infrastructure, or build hardware. It’s true that aspects of these fields might involve complex math. So do aspects of biology, but we don’t have that mythology around people who study the living world. 

Yet the cultural belief that you have to be a certain type of person, or even a certain gender, to work with computers, is deeply ingrained in many of us. 

At Radial, we hire a lot of bootcamp graduates. This helps us tap into a group of people who did not initially see themselves as the “programming type.” When I ask them how they got into tech, many of them say they had a friend who went through a bootcamp and recommended it.

That changes the story. Suddenly you see your friend, a former Spanish teacher who loves trail running and can’t calculate a tip to save her life, as someone who writes code for a living. And you think, if she can do it, maybe I can, too. 

In my spare time, I sew, draw, run, read, write, backpack, listen to music, and I like to be as far away from a computer screen as possible. 

I’m also here, writing code professionally, doing it well, making cool applications that improve people’s lives. The more people like me (and not like me!) who work in tech, the greater variety who see themselves writing code as their job. And a tech company with nerds and artists, a variety of genders, math lovers and math haters, will make products that work better for all the different people in our world. 

Tech curious? There’s a place here for you.

Cheers,

Stephanie