Tonight, I attended a Women Who Code NYC event at Facebook. The event featured lightning talks given by various "solutions engineers."
Before the event, I did not know what a solutions engineer was. I could look at a job description, but titles are sometimes meaningless.
Since I did not know what a "solutions engineer" was, I was not sure if the event would necessarily be relevant to me, but I decided the best way to find out was to attend.
So, what is a solutions engineer? Well, the presenters used many words to describe these engineers, but my best understanding is that the role is a hybrid of a technology role and a business role. More specifically, one of the solutions engineers described it as the "intersection of software engineering and digital advertising." Other words were used to describe this like one presenter talking about how solutions engineers take on a sort of CTO role and also discussing the entrepreneurial spirit they have.
50% of their work is client-facing and 50% is coding.
Just because the role is only 50% coding does not mean that the candidate is off the hook with the technical interview. According to the presenter who discussed the interview process, the candidates are held to the same standards in technical interviews as the software engineering candidates.
There were a total of four speakers tonight. Two were men and two were women. The women talked about their personal career trajectories. One of the men discussed the interview process and the other one showed us some of Facebook's products.
During the Q&A portion of the event, I asked if candidates were allowed to use Javascript during the technical interview. The answer was yes, but there are some libraries available in other languages that may be helpful. This topic of picking a language for a coding interview has me intrigued and I may do some research and write a blog post on it at some point in the future.
I definitely think it was an interesting event. I could see it being especially relevant to the Women Who Code group. Many women in the NYC chapter of Women Who Code are making a career shift for various reasons and may be interested in roles that have more variety than the traditional software engineering role.
Facebook provided swag for attendees so that was pretty cool!
Thanks for reading!
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