I worked in the Computer Science department at Stanford for nearly one year. Contrary to many good reviews posted here, my experience was dreadful and eye-opening. One thing people should know is that working as a full-time employee at Stanford is a completely different story versus being a student at Stanford. Ever since the very beginning of my employment, I constantly got insulted, publicly humiliated, and criticized in front of other students, which made me feel extremely uncomfortable and awful. In the end, as I found this distorted environment very uncomfortable and harmful to my personal growth, I decided to resign from my job.
"I know people working in research institutes are laid back. Don't think about coming here to relax! You are here to contribute!" This was what I was told during the first video chat. Since I previously worked in a research institute, I felt uncomfortable and was wrongly judged once I heard this. And all the excitement I had felt when I received my offer was half-way gone.
I started as a volunteer for three months during my time at Stanford. During the first three volunteering months, I was outside of the country and completed nearly 20 Github tickets. In the middle of this period, one of my important family members was diagnosed with a severe disease which I notified the team so that they could be aware of my limited bandwidth working on this project. I was never informed any negative feedback during this three months until the first day of my employment, which was around late Sep.2019, when our team had our first video meeting, I was publicly criticized for my speed upon finishing those tickets in front of everyone in the team who I had never met before. And at that time I realized that I was the only female engineer on the team.
Two weeks later, during our 1-on-1 meeting, I was told that I got criticized on speed earlier was because I only replied "okay" when I was assigned with tickets. I was quite confused at that time. But I certainly wanted to give it more time to try out.
Things got worse later. Our communication is primarily through Slack from the beginning of my employment, face-to-face communication happened rarely, which made it extremely hard. When we had a one-on-one meeting, I wasn’t given clear expectations upon finishing my tasks, such as speed and detailed features. Instead, I consistently got criticize during our group meeting, in front of all other male group members. For instance, when the quarter started, I was thrown 15~ 20 Github tickets, and no more details. Then I followed whatever documented in the tickets and submitted my implementation. In the middle of the quarter, during a group meeting, which happened once per week, I was assigned a completely new goal that I wasn’t even aware of in the past. Then, at the end of the quarter, I was shouted and wrongly judged in front of other team members on trivial things that others won’t get blamed about. By then, since I didn’t feel things go well, I asked for expectations and the reasons behind all the judgments. What I got was: I got pushed because the previous developer didn’t pay attention to those details. A few months later, in our one-on-one meeting, the meeting that I decided to resign, I was told that I got more criticized in the first quarter was because I was slow in finishing those tickets. You can see there was not only unreasonable judgment (I was blamed for the previous developer’s fault) but also a clear inconsistency during the feedback, which is neither authentic nor helpful.
Furthermore, I didn’t have any freedom to express my own ideas. Whenever I brought up different designs for the topics that we discussed, I always got insulting facial expressions and violent verbal comments.
In the Github ticket review, I often got random, meaningless comments from others who didn’t pay any effort to carefully look through the changes I made. Moreover, many of the feedback I got included sentences like: “I don’t think this would work.”, “Your behavior is unreasonable.” “Can you appreciate how clean the code is now?”, which are never true and valid. I feel very frustrated whenever I saw or heard this type of comment that involved personal, biased judgments. I had tried several times to bring up my concerns, e.g. set up a clear goal of what to accomplish for each ticket. But each time the reply I got was “you should make an educated guess.”
Then I was publicly judged in a group meeting: “she just listens and says yes to whatever others said, without any of her own opinions.” When this happened, no one did anything to stop his behavior.
As the only female engineer in this team, I never felt I was supported in this environment. I really don’t know what’s wrong with Stanford’s culture. It’s a shame that they are cultivating an atmosphere that undermining and devaluing female engineers is a natural and valid behavior stemming from this school, a school particularly famous for its leading position in computer science in both academia and industry. Those swirls of negative energy not only inhibit female engineers from reaching their true potential but also deeply diminish motivation for those who want to advance in computer science or work at Stanford.
