Julie Zhuo
Director of Product Design at Facebook
Julie Zhuo is the Director of Product Design at Facebook heading up News Feed and core experiences.
What got you into tech?
Since elementary school, I’ve loved playing video and computer games. I was awesome at Mario and Number Munchers, not so great at the Oregon Trail, and definitely terrible at this 3-D maze game on Prodigy, but I rarely met a video game I didn’t like. In seventh grade, my science teacher introduced my best friend and I to HTML and making websites. I still remember how she sat us down, taught us the tags, and in half an hour, we had made a page link to another page. The moment when it worked — clicking on that blue link pulled up another page with the words that we had typed — It felt like pure magic, it was such a powerful sensation, like “holy crap, I made this!” After that, my friend had I were obsessed. We taught ourselves digital illustration with Photoshop, got involved in the online artist community, and showed off our work on websites that we would redesign every three months. I knew even in high school that I wanted to learn to code and make digital things as my profession.
Describe a time you’ve felt discomfort or discrimination in the workplace or classroom. How did you handle it?
I have been fortunate in my career to never have had a terrible, explicitly discriminatory encounter myself. I know many women have, and I’ve seen it happen online too many times to count. But more common to me and many of the women I know are the implicit, mostly unintentional effects, like getting interrupted more often in meetings, or sensing like you’re different from others folks in the room which can lead to feeling like an imposter, something I wrote about here: https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/the-imposter-syndrome-9e23e2326d88.
What makes being a woman in tech worth it?
My answer isn’t particular to women or men, but my goodness, is the tech industry a good place to be right now. Where else do you get to dream about the future, usher it in by building the things people want to use, and work with brilliant people every day? I love that my day to day is filled with a sense of optimism — yes, we can make things better — and with a spirit that embraces change rather than being afraid of it. The thing that is crazy to me is that half the world is women — which means half the consumer base for the tech industry are women — and so if we want to make the best products and services for everyone — shouldn’t half the people building those things be women as well?
What advice do you have for any girls pursuing a future in tech?
Remember the core of what you love, and the moments that give you the most satisfaction. Is it talking with people about the problems they face, and brainstorming ideas to help them? Is is the satisfaction of building something and seeing it work? Is it the joy of working with different people and utilizing everyone’s talents to make something larger come together? Focus on those moments, and forget the rest — especially the preconceived notions of what somebody in tech should look like or act like or be good at. Tech is an industry that thrives on passion. If you have that, you are going to be great.
