Talking Tech With Lever's Jen Wei

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Jen Wei is a full-stack engineer at Lever developing software to help companies hire collaboratively and effectively. Before joining Lever full-time, Wei studied electrical and computer engineering at Olin College, worked with Rough Draft Ventures, and interned in engineering and user research roles at Tableau, Lever, 3D Robotics, and Boosted. In her spare time, you might find Jen playing beach ultimate or running around SF.

Frederick Daso: What led you to become a software engineer?

Jennifer Wei: In high school, I was fortunate enough to have a supportive computer science teacher. That teacher made programming fun and accessible by showing how it’s just another form of problem-solving. That ultimately influenced my decision to study engineering in college. After gaining experiences in a handful of roles (user research, general engineering, software, venture), I decided to pursue software engineering. Software engineering provides opportunities to solve problems, both theoretically and practically, which intrigued me.

Daso: Why should college grads work at a startup as their first job rather than a large, established tech company?

Wei: Despite being someone who chose a startup as their first job, I’m wary of telling others what they should or shouldn’t do. Many factors can and should be taken into consideration when picking your first job, like industry, stage, mentorship, team. People often have different priorities. Now, there are so many flavors of startups and teams within large, established companies, that the line between the two is a bit blurred.

However, I’d encourage them to figure out what they care about and want to prioritize but not to stress too much. Your first job can but doesn’t have to be, your only job.

Daso: When you were selecting companies to apply to, what were your main criteria for joining a particular firm, and why?

Wei: When it came to full-time opportunities, I optimized for personal growth, mentorship, and people.

I chose to join Lever because:

• the team was still small (~15 in eng), with plans to expand quickly, which would be a forcing function for me to level-up and keep up with that growth.
• The team skewed towards the senior side, which (in theory) meant that I’d have a lot of people to lean on and learn from.
• Across the company, the people I met during my internship were supportive and empathetic. Given that I’d be spending 40+ hours a week at work, I wanted to be sure I was surrounding myself with great people.

Daso: What do you think are some common misconceptions of software engineers, whether they are at a startup or tech company?

Wei: Software engineers need CS degrees: Studying CS is helpful when talking through technical concepts and with interviewing, especially when many places are still using data structures and algorithms questions to assess candidates. However, a CS degree (or any degree) is no longer a requirement for most places. Fortunately, more complex CS terms and concepts can often be picked up on the job or from online resources.

Software engineers are just “code monkeys”: Most software engineers aren’t coding for eight hours a day. Coding is part of the job, but being a software engineer involves so much more. It requires skills like understanding problems, ideating potential solutions, making tradeoffs, and communicating design changes.

Software engineers love to code: Some might, but it’s not a requirement can be a software engineer who codes for work and doesn’t outside.

Daso: Do you feel that your rate of learning has increased since leaving college since you joined Lever?

Wei: In some ways, yes, and in some ways no. In college, classes have some structure, and learning is often scaffolded for you. When I joined Lever, there was some scaffolding, but once I finished onboarding and ramping up, the onus of structuring what and how to learn was on me. Initially, my rate of learning seemed to drop because of the whole “I don’t know what I don’t know” situation. Also, I felt like I couldn’t ask for more time on a task to spend on investigation or learning (or even some time in general for purely learning). Once I understood how to structure my learning independently, my rate of learning began to increase.

Daso: What are some essential skills that every junior software engineer should aim to develop?

Wei: Prioritize what you want to learn - attempting to process and learn everything at once is difficult. Choose a couple of areas to focus on first, and be sure to tell your manager and tech lead so they can help you find opportunities within your project to work on developing those areas.

Ask many questions - the fear of being judged is often a reason for withholding a question. Especially if it seems basic, but people on my team like to say, “questions are free!” It’s better to ask questions early and often than to make bad assumptions and later have to fix those.

Be communicative - beyond questions, it’s helpful to learn to be frank in other ways too, from vocalizing goals to your manager, talking through technical limitations with product and design, to writing good commit messages and pull request descriptions.

Proactively plan - if you’re intentional about the work you ask for and do, your efforts will compound and accelerate your growth.

Set boundaries - work is important, but it’s okay not to be online 24/7 as long as you’re responsible and hold yourself accountable (e.g. being communicative about risky changes and keeping tabs on it as it makes its way to production).

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