In our new blog series, we introduce women who work at PriceHubble in the areas of tech and engineering. We would like to show what their career paths have been so far, what their daily work looks like, what they are particularly interested in and why they enjoy working at PriceHubble.
Today we are talking to Jiwen Cui, Full Stack Developer at PriceHubble.
Hello Jiwen! Tell me something about yourself?
Hi I’m Jiwen, I come from China and now live in Paris. I finished my Master degree in France and since then have stayed in Paris for work. My major in university was telecommunications, but we also had programming courses. I think that software is more interesting than hardware, which is why I have chosen web development since my first internship. PriceHubble is my second real-time job.
What was your dream job as a child?
As a child I dreamed of becoming a Veterinarian.
You have been at PriceHubble since June 2020. What is your role?
I’m a full-stack developer.
Can you share a little bit about what it is that you do and what a typical day for you looks like?
My typical day starts at 9am. I first check my meeting calendar, usually there’s no meeting in the morning. I continue with my tasks, a new feature - adding filters for the dossier list. A new feature contains two main parts, the UI (front end) and the handling behind the scenes (backend/api). I start from the api part. While coding, I receive some messages from Slack. My colleague wants to talk about my comments on her codes. Yes it’s called reviewing, meaning we give feedback and comments to other colleague’s codes. Then at 11:45am, we have a short daily meeting, in which everyone talks about what they did yesterday and plans for today. After a one hour break of lunch, in the afternoon we have a one hour meeting discussing new features and improvements with our product manager.
Did you always know that working in tech was what you wanted to do? What made you pursue a career in tech?
Yes, I always knew. Because tech companies are very fast changing, it affects our daily life. Websites and applications we use everyday all come from tech companies, for example shopping in Amazon, chatting with whatsapp, posting photos in instagram etc. I like that the application I participate in developing is used by other people.
Most technical courses are still predominantly taken by men, and thus there are still few women in tech and engineering. Did you have the impression you were treated differently as a woman?
Not really.
Do you notice a lack of women in tech? If so, why do you think that’s the case?
Yes, that’s true. A lack of women in tech is only a result, because at university and early in high school, there are already less girls in STEM (Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) majors. The reasons are too complicated, but I think the main one is that girls are not encouraged enough to study STEM majors.
What advice would you give to a woman considering a career in the tech industry?
Don’t be afraid of technical positions. The difficulties are equal for everyone, for both men and women. Don’t care about the stereotype. You can do it if you want.
What do you like most about working at PriceHubble, and what motivates you every day?
I like the freedom of work as you can choose the topic you like. One thing I really like is that PriceHubble puts efforts into sharing information about product and strategy company-wise. As an engineer I know why we want to build a product or feature and who we are developing it for. In my last company, as developers we didn’t always receive this information.
Do you have a favourite feature?
I like the editability of our portfolio product. Because the new features are all developed by the B2B team, they are not limited any more but well extended.
What do you do in your free time? Do you sit a lot at the computer as well?
Not at all. I like reading, walking in the city, and gathering with friends.
Thank you very much, Jiwen, for the interview!
