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Region F SWE
A Day in the Life of...
Angie Ruan
MS Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara
BS Computer Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing
Intern: Programmer at Panasonic Speech Technology Lab
Senior Development Manager at eBay Inc.
Working for eBay in the engineering department is a very rewarding
experience. I am surrounded by the most energetic, devoted and smartest
people. I am provided with the most technically challenging problems in
the world to solve in terms of the volume of data, a codebase that
rivals many of today's popular operating systems in its size and
complexity, and a business unit that demands short time to market for
its initiatives. But most importantly, I know that my efforts benefit
millions of eBay community members all over the world. Do you know that
more than 1.3 million people make their living on eBay (excluding ebay
employees)?
I am a senior development manager at eBay. I joined eBay two and a half
years ago. My team is responsible for building asynchronous systems to
meet eBay's scalability, performance and reliability needs. We
developed and patented many of the infrastructure components which
outperform anything commercially available. Part of my typical day as a
leader and a manager in the development organization is to help the team
to prioritize the tasks, to provide the vision and strategy, to
collaborate across different organizations to reach a goal, and to do
resource and project management. I also spend a fair amount of time
drilling down into the details of the technical issues, monitoring our
code in production to ensure high availability and that we are
efficiently utilizing our systems. Another interesting task is to
provide a fun work place for the team(s). My team enjoys going to
Yoshi's Jazz club in Oakland or playing Bocce ball in Los Gatos as much
as white boarding complex problem resolution and sharing laughs over
non-work related activities. My job really unites my passion of working
with people and my drive for cool technologies together.
I started programming in Panasonic as a part-time employee when I was in
graduate school. Finding my first job after school was very straight
forward. I joined a few start-up companies, then later a few bigger
companies (like Compuware and Netscape/AOL), and I finally landed at
eBay a few years back. What motivated me besides the technological
challenges the most is the influence I can make. It is extremely
rewarding to know every day that tens of thousands or even millions of
people may depend on what I do today.
Back in college in China, women in the engineering school were called
oasis. In the work place, woman engineers are still the minority.
However many of the woman engineers I have known are the best engineers
and the best engineering managers. I see many great woman engineers who
are very detail oriented and they make few mistakes in design/coding.
This makes a huge difference to the mission critical business. I also
observe that great women leaders do fabulous jobs with collaboration
tasks, people management and mentoring. Many of them are the best made
managers.
Now, it's up to you to go search your passion, build your credit, be
aggressive and enjoy your success in all aspects of your life.
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