SINGAPORE— When she was 17 and a junior college student, Ms Ainul Razib was engrossed in the world of manhwa (Korean comics) and fervently wrote fanfiction about the characters in the comics and posted it on her Tumblr account.
The Stories Behind : This Malay-Muslim woman shows outsiders how she broke into the cliquey tech sector
This fascinated Ms Ainul, now 26, who shared with TODAY how she went down a rabbit hole of learning to code and how to customise her Tumblr page. Once she learnt the basics of JavaScript code , Ms Ainul added a Google translate plugin to her Tumblr page that could translate her writings into any language.
Ms Ainul also regularly goes"live" on TikTok to answer any burning questions that anyone in her community and beyond might have about breaking into the tech industry in Asia. While it was a dream come true for Ms Ainul, who majored in information systems, to be immersed in the world of coding, her other “big goal” was to graduate with a job offer.“I already felt so far behind and there were classmates in my class who seemed to get it right off the bat.
Ms Ainul took every opportunity to connect with her career advisers and dived into career fairs and networking events. There were many moments where Ms Ainul was on the verge of giving up and was “seriously thinking” of switching careers if all her efforts did not pan out. She was on to something: I had to admit to her that I didn't know the difference between a product manager and a backend engineer, much less how one can get such jobs.
After that, she started sharing more about pay transparency, what it is like working in a tech firm once you are there, and navigating the workspace as a person from a minority community. Ms Ainul said that there is a perception of coding or programming — that “all you have to do is sit at a computer, write code and go back home”.
She spoke candidly about being a member of a minority community in the tech scene and although she has not received any nasty comments at her workplace, she has received some online.
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