The Indian Girl Who Was Facebook's First Female Engineer
Ruchi Sangvi grew up in a small town in Pune. In her teens, Ruchi always wanted to be like her father, who is a business man. "My dad owns an engineering company that lends equipment to industrial projects. I've been obsessed with taking it over since I could talk. I'd follow him and repeat conversations about how many tons of cranes were a
rriving. But he said it was a man's world,” and according to Ruchi, that was one of her biggest motivations. “I wanted to prove him wrong.” The determination had brought her into one of Silicon Valley’s most respected tech personality and an inspiration to women who wish to break into the male- dominated field of engineering.
After finishing her engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in 2005, the technical skills and enthusiasm opened her doors to one of the most celebrated startups at that time, Facebook. She was the first female engineer hired at Facebook.
“I did notice a few things, though, as time passed by. For example, if you are female and you are an engineer, it’s really difficult to be likeable, especially if you’re ambitious and trying to get your point of view across. To be heard, you needed to be aggressive, and you needed to be comfortable with asking for opportunities and not just waiting for them to come your way,” she said in an interview with OPB.
In an urge to pursue her passions and dreams, Ruchi left Facebook in 2010. According to Ruchi, “I no longer ‘felt inspired’ by the work I was doing at Facebook.” So she set up her own company Cove, with her husband Aditya Agarwal, who was also an early Facebooker.
In February 2012, in order to own her talent, Dropbox, the cloud storage service brought Cove and made Ruchi their VP of operations.
From the first female engineer of Facebook to the VP of Dropbox at the age of 30, Ruchi has an advice to the aspiring women community:”My philosophy is that you should go full force ahead until you are ready for the next step. A lot of women decide to take a back seat in their professional careers even before they are pregnant or are ready to have children.”
Source : siliconindia.com
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