STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) courses have traditionally been a boys’ club, but things have slowly and surely started changing because of incredible, smart women who dared to be the first and the second and the third. At Meesho, this first was set by Asha Ashok, our first woman tech employee, who came on board the Meesho Rocketship in January 2019, and now, a year later, 17 percent of our Tech team is made up of women.
Meesho is committed to creating a truly diverse workplace, which includes a diversity of ideas, experience, race, ethnicity, age, background, education, and gender. This allows for the talented women in the field of Tech to rise and shine in our company, and so many have.
Here we are highlighting five incredible women among them, who do ground-breaking work at Meesho and are exemplary examples of women excelling in the field of technology. All of these ladies come from different backgrounds, while one had to convince her parents to pursue a career in IT, another had to convince herself that she is fit for a “man’s job”. Their fight to reach where they have today is incredible, but more importantly they are far from satisfied with all that they have achieved.
Without further ado, let’s hear from the incredible women themselves.
Nandita Dubey, SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test) — II
Fighting for STEM:
Where I grew up, in Uttar Pradesh, I had to fight for my right to pursue a career in IT much like other women around me. My parents tried to get me to teach at a nearby school, but I fought hard against that mindset. Now, having stepped out of my hometown and having come to Bangalore, I see first-hand that opportunities are aplenty if you are willing to push yourself. Today my parents support me and are proud of my work.
Technically speaking:
Both my grandfather and my father were engineers, which is what pushed me towards BTech, but watching my older cousin getting placed and pursuing a good career after college is what convinced me that I too, can live life on my own terms and forge my career ahead as I please. I work hard in a field I love, so there is no question of getting bored, if anything investing that time is nothing but fulfilling. Not to mention the IT sector pays well, which is something we as women should prioritise as well.
My Life at Meesho:
My work involves me testing and deploying all the features and the APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that are developed at Meesho. I also maintain a server from the UI (User interface) as well as the backend, and help automate the APIs I have tested as well. Recently, I have gotten the opportunity to contribute in equal parts towards manual and automation, which is something I have been wanting to do for a while now.
Think 10X and Respect for Everyone:
Of our Meesho Core Values, the ones that resonate most with me are Think 10X and Respect for Everyone. As someone working in the QA (Quality Analysis) team, I have to think about the corner cases of all services. I need to know how every API would work, where it would fail, where can I break a particular feature without causing the whole system to crash. So, thinking 10X is integral to my line of work. Meanwhile, Respect for Everyone, especially my team members is important to me personally. Thankfully at Meesho respecting others is instilled from top management to the lowest rung employee.
Work hard and come to Bangalore:
Try your luck and work hard in the field that you love. Believe in yourselves and come to Bangalore. You will find a job in this IT hub.
Ritika Agrawal, SDET — III
STEM and me?
When I was younger, I used to wonder if I was intelligent enough to take over a “man’s job” in the field of engineering. However, in the 2000s, during the IT boom, I saw that women were no longer barricaded by predominantly feminine career choices like teaching or being a secretary. That was the trigger that made me break down this internalised false notion, and I consciously chose to break free from them.
The journey has not been easy for me, especially with a placement opportunity that fizzled away due to recession, and an internship that barely paid enough to cover my cab costs in Bangalore, and so on. What kept me going, however, was the joy of the work. I put my heart and soul into it to now reach where I am now.
From pressure came love:
Being the youngest and the only girl in my entire extended family, I was under a lot of pressure when it came to my career. Initially I felt like I had to follow in their footsteps and pursue engineering but thankfully, I fell in love with the field. That love has kept me going through years of college, college placement, my career so far, and now Meesho. Moreover, I am very persevering and would never leave anything halfway.
My Life at Meesho:
I am in the NPS and Fulfilment team, and we basically handle the post-order experience of users. Since we are an e-commerce company logistics is a huge part of this role, and we directly impact the business. I am on the manifestation side and manage all the features that directly impact the logistics supply chain. My other responsibilities include quality assurance on all the features and automation, as well as, debugging all the issues we get from the Production side.
Not only is the work at Meesho very dynamic and challenging, every small choice we make can directly impact the business. Our constant goal is to minimise the shipment cost per order, and we work along with the DevOps team and the Development team to help the company grow, save money, and generate more revenue. Whether we do good or bad, the result will have a huge impact, which is good because it keeps me on my toes and allows me to learn constantly.
Taking Ownership:
I have always incorporated this core value of Meesho in my work, but once I joined this company, I have felt the importance of this even more so. I make a conscious call to work independently and give my 100%. The way I see it, if you sign off a good release you can take credit for it, but if you sign off a bad release you should be able to stand up, accept your mistake and fix it as well.
I also ensure that I am constantly honing my skills to perfect my work and for this I have taken courses on Udemy as well, with the support of Meesho.
Quality and automation for the win:
At the moment, my goal is to pace up my feature testing so that I can concentrate on automation even more. Testing efforts can get monotonous when done manually and the only way to get rid of that is to incorporate automation, which is something that my teammates are currently working on and I cannot wait to start contributing as well.
Succeed or learn:
At Meesho I see some of our female techies producing quality code and that makes me really happy. I would advise everyone who wants to come up in tech to work in a start up environment. It keeps you motivated, excited, and on your toes. You will either succeed in your attempts or you will learn something new.
Karunya S, Application Support Engineer
In theory and practice:
There is a myth that girls are better at theory than practical and logical thinking, which is obviously, an unfair generalisation to make. Because my brother was better than me at Maths, my parents used to hold this belief too, despite the fact that I outranked him in every other subject including Science. According to my parents, I lacked practical knowledge because I was not great at Maths, and I took this as a challenge and worked harder to prove them wrong — which I did — and sought out a focused career.
I studied in a girls’ college in rural Tamil Nadu, where the focus was primarily on “behaviour” and “character” of the students as opposed to their education. I still remember one of the first days when our professor asked us why we chose Computer Application as our course, and I said that I wanted to prove to everyone that doubted me wrong but also invest in a subject that interests me.
For the love of data:
I am a ’90s kid, which means I was growing up when technology was booming in India. I have been fascinated with computers since my first ever class in sixth standard and I realised that everything we do on a computer more or less happens in the air; you cannot feel anything. Even a doctor can see their patient but when we need to fix a bug we cannot see what is causing the problem. Through this fixation I fell in love with data, which is precious and valuable and translates to money for every company.
My life at Meesho:
I joined as an App supporting engineer, but I was happy to join Meesho at any capacity and was laser-focused on my goal of working in a data team. I expressed my interest to my manager as well, when I saw an opening for a job I liked, and he supported the shift. Now I am entrusted with report generating, where we collect data from several teams and general data for analytics and value-worth purposes. Our job is to advise on performance optimisations and best practices for scalable data models, pipelines and queries and to create automated pipelines to ingest and process structured and unstructured data from source systems into analytical platforms.
One of the biggest blessings here at Meesho is that everyone is approachable. I came here as a fresher and found so many people who guided me, pulled me up and told me that I am going in the right direction. This has helped my vision for the future clear as well.
Dive deep and solve problems:
Meesho is a very fast-moving company and you are in for a rude awakening if you think you can let errors fix itself at its own pace. It is a huge issue if an alert comes and an error is thrown, and a reseller or a customer experiences it before we spot it. We have to quickly resolve any issue and get to the bottom of things regardless of what time of the day it is, which is why Dive Deep and Solve Problems is the core value to which I relate the most.
Paving the path for python:
Previously, I was not all that equipped in programming language, because of which I decided to learn Python, which a lot of my team members already use. Now my aim is to practice as much as I can so that I can pitch in as well.
Seeking more girl power in IT:
Our engineers create important, core computational logic everyday. The strength of women in the field is currently too few, but I hope that more and more women are able to convince themselves and then others why this is an important and potent field for them.
Khushboo Singh, SDET — II
Sarkari naukri or IT?
I am from Bihar and both my parents and the society we live in, give a lot of weightage to government jobs, and I felt this pressure too. A lot of my friends are discouraged from moving out and pursuing a job and are instead asked to latch on to a government one, especially if you are a woman. Thankfully, my parents have been supportive of my choices since the very beginning and they supported me when I chose an IT job over a sarkari one as well.
The ever-growing learning graph:
Until college, all I knew was that I liked computer science, but while in college I got attracted to coding, which continues to date, from my time at Ola to here at Meesho. I have learned that there is no development that is going to be constant. A program that you are using today could be obsolete tomorrow, which is why I make it a point to constantly learn something new.
My life at Meesho:
I work as an SDET in the Activation and Community team and whatever we do directly impacts the lives of our resellers. Whatever programs we develop, features we test and infra we set, they impact their lives in a huge way — quantitatively and qualitatively. A simple error I make has the potential to affect about lakhs of end users for two days. My job as QA is to maintain that stability for every function, which gives me a lot of responsibility, satisfaction and joy.
Make resellers successful:
When I had just joined Meesho I spoke to some resellers where they spoke about how happy they were with Meesho’s performance. She told me how she thought of herself as “just a housewife” earlier and how now, thanks to Meesho, she sees herself as an entrepreneur. It makes me happy that Meesho is giving these women the platform to be more than housewives.
So, for me Make Resellers Successful is the core Meesho value that I live by. We are working for them, and so if they are happy with our work, we are successful is how I feel. Our main objective is that with our work resellers’ life should be a little better.
Learn. Automate. Repeat:
My constant goal is to learn new technologies that we use in our services and implement them. It is not possible to grasp everything, but I do learn whatever I can and lend my hand in automation in developing a new framework. In every field, automation is a must in order to reduce manual input and to ensure a smooth release.
A steep learning curve:
Everyone has the opportunity to learn, especially in an environment like Meesho, your learning graph is very dynamic.
Vanya Jaiswal, SDET — II
Not just a quota:
At home, I have never been treated differently from my brothers in any way, and I did not experience any hindrance in pursuing a career in tech, just because of my gender either. Even at the beginning of my career I did not face any disparity, probably because when you are good at your work, your gender stops being a priority. However, a little after I got on in my career, I learned that I was called for an interview and hired only because they wanted to fill a quota, which set me back.
Turns out, a lot of offices do this, especially within the Tech division. This disheartened me because I wanted to go there because of my skills and not just for my gender.
Computer problems and solutions:
Even as early as my school days, I remember being interested in computers and I wanted to learn more. And I have always enjoyed solving problems. So, when it was time to decide what my career would be, I decided this is what I wanted to do.
My Life at Meesho:
I have always dreamt of working with computers and I get to do that in Meesho. I am a part of the QA team, wherein we use an automation tool to execute the test cases which helps in speeding up the manual process. Over time it gets easier because we don’t have to invest too much of our time or hard work to do the manual part.
Think 10X:
In my line of work, the Meesho core value that is most applicable is Think 10X. I cannot build up something and then see if it works out or not. I should always be able to anticipate whether whatever I am building is scalable or not, considering Meesho is growing very rapidly and has no time for short-sightedness.
Next stop, Android automation:
While I have gotten my hands full with the website and services, I would love to get into the Android part of the Meesho App. I am currently working on the web services testing, but have never gotten the time or a chance to invest in doing mobile automation. Hopefully, I will get to do that soon.
You are worth it:
I hope that the women in tech are able to walk into a room knowing that they deserve to be there.
Do not go assuming that people are discouraging you or that you are being hired because you are a woman. No. If you are being interviewed, you have something in you. You are not getting a special concession. There may be times where this is the case, but you shouldn’t have that mindset. On the contrary you should walk into the room and know that you have the power to change the other person’s mindset.
Want to join Nandita, Ritika, Karunya, Khusbhoo, Vanya, and team Meesho in creating 20 million entrepreneurs in 2020, then we are hiring across roles. Apply here!
