Why I don’t code, and other stories
Living in the Bay, I hold this little private shame because I don’t code. I know I could do it — I love math, I’m a try hard, and there are hundreds of resources at my disposal — but frankly, I’m just not interested in being an engineer. Yet, by living and working out here, I developed this gnawing feeling of inadequacy because I can’t do what most come out here to do.
I constantly wonder if I should have gone for it. I could have broken into the field, inspired young women like me, earned a lot of money, made my parents proud. I always think about how much easier it would be if I had this quantifiable, specific skill set that would deem me a rightful member of the startup world. I wouldn’t be embarrassed to tell people what I do. I could build things.
So this week, as part of a greater effort to “seize every opportunity” and “get off my ass”, I enrolled in a coding class. And, as I read through a very sassy online reader and made little program named Karel dance around, I thought “oh wait, I’ve done this before”.
Join me for a flashback:
Back in the days when Sean Paul made music, I attended a private Jewish high school. A place where the gifted and the problematic alike are given every chance to make up for the fact that they aren’t star athletes. Every day, I’d get dropped off at an office building where I’d walk in, take off my shoes, and strut the halls with the unearned confidence of someone told they were training to be the next Zuckerberg. We took Hebrew classes fully based on Israeli tv shows and ate french toast casserole every other Thursday.
We were “eccentric” and “alternative”, not a “fake” school. Our esteemed graduates have gone off to do great things like publicly ask the difference between fiction and nonfiction, and proudly proclaim New York City our capital.
At one point throughout my two year fever dream, I signed up for this after school program. An exciting opportunity for girls to learn to code and be mentored by actual engineers at established tech companies. Since I was scared of the volleyball coach and my dad couldn’t pick me up until 6, this seemed like a great option. I was also told we’d be getting jackets, which is what really sold it for me.
Once a week, 16 of us piled into our parents’ mid size luxury SUV’s (and our advisor’s Camry) and drove 4 miles down the road to the LinkedIn campus where we got the full Silicon Valley experience. We sat in bean bags, put stickers on our laptops, and ate all the free snacks we could get.
Let me tell you about the snacks. Holy shit the snacks. There were tables and tables of snacks in the back of the room just available to us. KIND bars, weird organic potato chips, stevia soda — none of it was really good per se, but it was very free and very distracting.
The promise of the program was that in ten weeks, we would learn some coding basics, build an app, and pitch it to a panel of judges. The winning teams would have an opportunity to move on to a national competition where they got more resources and new mentors to help them take the app to the next level. Young women would be empowered to break into the STEM field and build something for themselves. In retrospect, it was really a badass mission, but in practice, we couldn’t care less.
It took all but 30 minutes for us to figure out that we absolutely did not belong there. The other groups had come from East Palo Alto and East Bay public schools. They were making a trip especially into the Google Campus whereas we were spending ordinary weekends biking around Shoreline. We came from a privileged background where we rarely questioned our place in the tech world and saw this more as a fun after school activity than a real opportunity to learn. The fact that the most vivid memory of this time in my life has to do with snacks just goes to show how this program was absolutely wasted on us.
Nevertheless, we kept at it! My team came in 17th place which is pretty good considering our app absolutely did not work. Our mentor also quit half-way through to start a makeup line for redheads or something like that.
Sometimes I think about this silly little program and how much I hate KIND bars now. Maybe if I had taken it just a little more seriously, I could have kicked off a straight path into an engineering career. I would be bringing in the big bucks and I would probably be “essential” enough not to be fired right now. It’s tempting to think about what could have been.
Of course, every time I indulge in the fantasy, I quickly snap back to the now and realize that I’m happy with where I am, and how I got here. How I’m where I’m supposed to be and all that good stuff. And when I enrolled in this coding class, it’s not because I needed an after school activity, or because I want to impress my parents. Well, it’s a little bit because of that, but mostly its because I want to build something for myself. I see the real value in this skill is not how other people see it, but what I can do with it on my own. I feel so empowered when I can craft stories using English words, so just wait until I get to creating experiences through code. I’m excited to see what comes out of it.
Oh and this time, I packed my own snacks.
