Empowering future engineers
LinkedIn made it so comfortable for me to work during the pandemic by setting up my home office environment and providing everything I needed. Working from home created new opportunities for collaborating and optimizing how my team works together. When working in the office, I would troubleshoot small challenges by asking the person next to me for help. But the pandemic helped us value other people’s time and empowered us to set up meetings even for the little things, enabling us to nip problems in the bud and work together more creatively as a team. With the pandemic settling down, I opted for fully remote work to stay close to my family.
I love to connect with my colleagues, not just about work but also about the little things like shows or sports we watch outside of work. I love to set up times to talk with my team members where it feels like we’re not in different cities but sitting right next to each other. Every Friday, my team sets up one hour to connect with others and play games to get to know each other better. Most of our many team members have joined in the past three to four years and haven’t met face-to-face, so these meetings have helped us get to know our colleagues better. There’s a welcoming culture here of community and connection that brings all of us together.
One program run by the India Women in Tech group is the LinkedIn Coach-In program. This group selects a few aspiring women engineering graduates interested in entering the technology field, and provides mentorship on how they can learn engineering roles in product-based companies. This is a program that I feel inspires change because even though more women are choosing technology as a career, it’s still a low percentage. When I saw this program, I was impressed and excited to volunteer for this cause. I had the chance to mentor two awesome students interested in developing their problem-solving skills. The program spanned over four months, during which we taught them the basics of programming and conducted mock interviews. One of my mentees is starting a summer internship soon, and it’s rewarding to see her launch her career with the aid of this program.
I advise aspiring engineers to never stop learning the topics that interest them. Develop your problem-solving skills and learn about the architecture for beginning developers. To become a good engineer, it’s not just about coding; you need great teamwork to help your team grow. Always be contributing and building upon your ideas with others; there’s no limit to what your team can accomplish together.
