I’ve been working at Doximity as a Junior Web Developer since February 2017. It has been an amazing and rewarding journey. I feel like I have finally found a company that trusts in my ability to learn and grow. Here is the story of my experience as a Junior Developer, and a woman, at Doximity.
One of the things I’m most proud of is our culture of ‘Straight Talk.’ If you speak, you will be heard. If you have a great idea, actions will follow and your idea will become a reality. When I first joined the company, my mentor was great at guiding me through every step, but I felt a lack of female mentorship. After discussing this with my manager, I now have a female mentor in addition to a technical mentor. It has given me the confidence to communicate my needs and provide feedback through the right channels.
Another noteworthy fact: Women hold many leadership positions at Doximity. Our Head of Product, People, Marketing, Client Success, Mobile, are all women, just to name a few! We also have several programs to empower women at the company:
1. Engineering Mentorship
You’ll be assigned a mentor, regardless of your experience level, location, gender when you joined the engineering team. Your mentor helps set up your development environment and introduces you to the team. Mentors also walk you through your first-day assignment and assist you in pushing it to production. Yes, you heard it right. As a first-day assignment, you will push code to production! Your mentor will be your best friend, biggest supporter and frequent code reviewer. The mentorship usually lasts 3 months, but if you’re joining as a Junior Developer, like me, this can be extended longer.
2. Junior Developer Curriculum
When you start as a Junior Developer at Doximity, we provide you with structured self-study materials so you can become a competent developer. The program consists of video lectures, books, slides and in-house tutorials. The program is also flexible enough to be molded depending on your interest, experience level and pace. Speaking from personal experience, additional advice from our experienced engineers was really valuable in the process.
3. Code Review
Every team can benefit from code reviews, regardless of development methodology. It's a great chance to demonstrate your ability to solve a problem and expose areas where you can improve. In my experience, code review at Doximity is not about experienced engineers telling me how to code. It's more about helping me learn how to think and grow. Our code review stimulates conversations around code style, architecture, and overall workflow. A reviewer will often ask "why" more than "how." All reviews I received were with a positive attitude of constructive criticism and warm encouragement. This helps keep everyone engaged and distributes best practices across the team. I have personally learned so much from each conversation during code reviews and am grateful for the opportunity to interact with and learn from other awesome engineers.
4. Buddy Program
As a new employee at Doximity, you will be offered a "buddy" or "female mentor." This is especially helpful for newbies who want to make friends at the company and enjoy all the perks we offer. It also builds a supportive network from the beginning that is the hallmark of our company.
5. Women@Dox Monthly Breakfast
Doximity has an active "Women@Dox" group, a monthly breakfast series meant to initiate discussions that support women in tech. The meetings are lead by senior managers who empower us to speak up and have our voices heard. We discuss everything from personal development to company hiring policies and management practices. At the last breakfast, we talked about inviting influential women in tech for lunch-and-learns and reviewed company benefits like maternity leave. The breakfast is a great opportunity to meet female leaders at the company and "straight talk" over avocado toast.
6. Women-in-Tech Support
I've been most excited about how passionate Doximity advocates for women engineers. We host various events to help us grow, including an algorithm night with Hackbright Academy, a women-only bootcamp. It was awesome to see talented women developers pairing with our engineers to solve algorithm and data structure problems. All the women wowed us with amazing problem solving skills and impressive backgrounds. So much so that we ended up hiring a talented engineer from the bootcamp! I’m really happy to see Doximity put in the extra effort to hire and support women engineers like myself.
7. Quarterly Offsite, Explained
The offsite is a core part of the culture at Doximity. I was bit nervous before the first offsite, but it was actually much better than I had imagined!
First, we have Hack Day, typically done on the day of code freeze before offsite. Hack Day is fun and you will have a chance to work with people that you normally don’t get a chance to work with.
The main activity during the offset is a retrospective of how we did last quarter. We speak freely about the good and the bad. Our offsite isn’t a huge brainstorm where we try to come up with the best solution to the biggest problem we have. Rather, it’s a humble discussion on what we’ve done and how we can do better. We also take the time to plan for the following quarter based on lessons learned across the teams.
Another thing I appreciate about the offsite is flexibility. We have core activities but you can opt in/out of additional activities. There is no pressure and no judgement. If your thing is visiting science museums or famous jazz bars, you can do that after core hours. For me, the offsites have been a great chance to meet remote team members. I truly enjoy every minute of the three days with my teammates.
I feel very lucky to be at Doximity. Obviously, no company is perfect but I appreciate all that Doximity does to be better. I am not afraid of straight talk and happy to give my feedback if something doesn’t feel right. I also appreciate the company’s interest in valuing and supporting women, minorities and people from all types of backgrounds.
If what I’ve said sounds like it would be a good fit for you, take a look at our job page to see what teams are hiring! And I can say from firsthand experience that one thing I liked about Doximity from the start was its well-structured hiring process. To find out more about how we hire engineers, check out this article from our engineering blog.
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