{"id":17,"date":"2016-01-26T10:00:35","date_gmt":"2016-01-26T18:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2015\/?p=17"},"modified":"2016-02-05T09:30:12","modified_gmt":"2016-02-05T17:30:12","slug":"have-hammer-will-travel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2015\/have-hammer-will-travel\/","title":{"rendered":"Have Hammer, Will Travel"},"content":{"rendered":"

FIONA TAY TURNS OVER HER STICKER-ADORNED<\/strong> laptop to reveal a fitting emblem: a claw hammer.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always been one to smash glass ceilings,\u201d she says with a smile.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true. In high school, she became the first woman to win the Singapore Physics Olympiad. The 2012 computer science graduate finished Harvey Mudd in just three years and is already a leader in tech at just 25. The self-identified feminist is working to empower women through organizations like Write\/Speak\/Code and Women Who Code and by sharing her experiences through Twitter and blogging.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are so many things I care about changing in the tech industry,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Tay is a full-stack software engineer for global hospitality giant Airbnb, whose meteoric ascent and bizarre advertising tactics have attracted attention both positive and negative. Airbnb offers over two million listings in 34,000 cities worldwide and gets more than 870,000 unique visitors daily\u2014with forecasts for continued growth.<\/p>\n

Tay played a prominent role on the three-person engineering team that oversaw Airbnb\u2019s major 2014 rebranding campaign, leading the reskinning of its mobile web and email platforms. She spoke at CSSConf Asia 2014 and CSSConf Australia 2015 about the monumental task of rolling out the website\u2019s new CSS framework.<\/p>\n

Tay says her passion is \u201ccreating infrastructure that is scalable and works solidly.\u201d She describes her job as equal parts creating new tools and figuring out how to migrate the legacy code.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s also worn other hats. She jumped from infrastructure to product work for six months, developing better tools for users to find answers on the help center. At a 2013 hackathon, Tay and her team of mostly female engineers and designers prototyped a smarter and simpler listing page that was eventually launched by the search team.<\/p>\n

Diversity and inclusion are really important to me personally. I\u2019m passionate about raising awareness of the issues that exclude women and people of color.<\/p>\n

\u2013 FIONA TAY \u201912<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But she\u2019s more than an engineer, having undertaken an advisory role raising awareness for underrepresented groups on the company\u2019s Tech Diversity Leadership Team (TDLT) and revamping the interview process for front-end engineers along the way.<\/p>\n

\u201cDiversity and inclusion are really important to me personally,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m passionate about raising awareness of the issues that exclude women and people of color. Software engineer is my job title, and if I stopped writing code I\u2019d be out of a job, but as far as my role on the TDLT, I\u2019m helping shape our approaches to interviewing and mentorship.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tay grew up and attended high school in Singapore, where she says boys and girls alike are encouraged to excel academically. Her mother, an accountant who worked for Ernst & Young, was also more educated than her father\u2014uncommon in Singapore.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat kind of worked to my advantage. I was like, I\u2019m a girl but I\u2019ll just do math and be smart,\u201d she says. \u201cNo one cares if you\u2019re cool.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI came [to Mudd] with a lot of extra preparation,\u201d says Tay, who tested out of first-year chemistry and physics, helping accelerate her graduation. Now, she\u2019s eager to talk with current students and help prepare them for life beyond the Mudd \u201cbubble\u201d\u2014especially those headed to industry jobs in Silicon Valley, which she admits was a difficult transition.<\/p>\n

\u201cI definitely feel like I had a big culture shock coming out of Mudd, so I do my best to kind of pay it forward,\u201d she says. \u201cI meet [current Mudders] and can\u2019t help but see, oh, this is a younger me.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FIONA TAY TURNS OVER HER STICKER-ADORNED laptop to reveal a fitting emblem: a claw hammer. \u201cI\u2019ve always been one to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":91,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}