I’ve been thinking a lot about self-advocacy lately.

I feel lucky to be at Medium—where I have incredible mentors who have been helping me grow as an engineer, as well as the opportunity to work on a product I care about—but sometimes I forget that I am an asset, too. I’ve struggled to balance gratitude with confidence.

It may seem that all that glitters is gold in tech; the perks of working at a tech company in San Francisco are outrageous. (Especially that tech company avocado stash because WOW. I can never refuse a Californian avocado!)

But beneath the veneer of casual excess, I know that women and other underrepresented folks have been screwed by this industry before.

With this in mind, I advocate for myself early and often. I want to persevere, and I want other underrepresented people in tech to succeed, too.

In the spirit of our ongoing tenacity, I’ve written two vignettes about my self-advocacy at Medium, and a bonus one from WaffleJS. At the end of each vignette, I share a takeaway about self-advocacy.

Leveling Up 🔝

My engineering manager and I had a conversation about my level, which measures my expertise and, fittingly, my salary. Since I had just started to work two weeks prior, my level had been pre-determined in my offer letter. My manager nevertheless sat me down to go through the leveling system with her.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the leveling system treats engineers as full-on humans rather than code monkeys. To increase one’s level, an engineer needs to demonstrate not only improvements in their technical skills but also in their “soft” skills, such as initiative, communications, mentorship, et cetera.

(Take note of the quotations because “soft” skills can be the hard ones!)

Though I feel quite green as a software engineer—especially one who is currently working on iOS—I knew that my past work in developer evangelism and community-building could give me an edge in many of the “soft” skill categories that go into calculating an engineer’s level.

I asked my engineering manager if I could take my ample experience in these “soft” skills into account on my next level assessment, and she responded with an emphatic yes. She suggested that, since that the Medium engineering leadership didn’t know me while I was in college, I should go out of my way to give them detailed examples of how I demonstrated these skills.

I hadn’t expected such an enthusiastic response, but I loved it! Besides reminding me that advocating for myself is the clear-cut right thing to do, my engineering manager took it a step further by giving me concrete advice on how to make my “soft” skills shine in my next assessment.

Self-advocacy is letting others know the awesome things you’ve done.

Speaking Up 💬

I picked up a small feature that I wanted to work on a few days ago, and then cringed in horror at the design mock for it. The mock no longer made sense in the context of new design decisions that had recently been made.

I spun up a quick version of the feature, and then showed it two more senior engineers. I then spoke my piece about why it felt out place, redundant even. Though I’m a junior engineer, I know that I have a stake on what direction the iOS app should be taking.

The conversation that ensued confirmed my feelings that the feature was redundant, yes, but my fellow iOS engineers showed me that it was merely a placeholder for a better-designed feature with more sensible functionality. They suggested that, since I had taken the initiative to build out the essence of the feature, I should build the new design as well.

This will be the most complicated iOS task I’ve done at Medium so far, and the chance to tackle it came from speaking up to my co-workers with my design opinions.

Self-advocacy opens doors to opportunity.

Standing Up 🙋🏻

On Wednesday night, I nervously ambled into a gaggle of food trucks looking for a meetup called WaffleJS. I had applied to speak at WaffleJS about how reading equips engineers to better do their jobs, and magically got my talk accepted despite being new to the meetup and to San Francisco.

After bantering with a handful of other attendees and eating doughnuts (surprise!), I got up on stage to give the first talk of the evening to ~75 people, the largest audience I have ever spoken in front of to date.

And, what do you know: my talk was well-received! My favorite memory of it was when I dropped what was (in my opinion) my most powerful line:

“Though we tend to praise ‘geniuses’ in the tech industry, I believe that we should just as strongly exalt people who are curious.”

I heard applause and cheers of affirmation. Damn, did that warm my heart.

Several attendees introduced themselves to me throughout the meetup and told me about things in my talk that had struck them. I even received some book recommendations!

Although technical speaking isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, it’s something I find quite fun. I received encouragement from WaffleJS to keep creating spoken and written technical content—encouragement I would never have received if I hadn’t sent that fateful email to the organizers in July.

Self-advocacy is stepping out of your comfort zone.

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