Celebrating🎉the Code-Savvy Supermoms💪of Tech

Photo by Xavier Mouton Photographie on Unsplash

As Mother’s Day rolls around, it’s time to talk about a special breed of superheroes in the tech world — developer moms. 

In some companies, they are rare due to the lack of anything other than white men in the programming game. Recently though I’ve seen this changing and want to celebrate those who are juggling more than one 100% full-time job. This isn’t about claiming one gender is superior in multitasking (the trash claims about that need to stop), it is simply about celebrating those who work hard every day this Mother’s Day.

The Tech Leads

I’ve been lucky enough to work with a couple of tech leads who are also mothers.

At times I have heard a crying baby on the other side of a Zoom call, or calling to a teenager “Are you warm enough? Should I turn the heating on?”

When you are working this requires patience and balancing tasks while right in the middle of a call. This is nothing short of awe-inspiring work from those involved.

The Testers

I’ve had the pleasure of working with efficient and hard-working QA over the years.

I heard that they not only made our work better but rewrote the narrative on work-life balance. They set boundaries between work and home life meaning that they could be relied upon to efficiently complete their work. I imagine they were as efficient at completing homework as they were to testing the next big deployment, and for that we could all be grateful.

The Developers

Developer moms don’t just write code; they rewrite the narrative on work-life balance. They debug their children’s homework, patch their tears, and still manage to deploy features on time. Their secret? Prioritization and coffee — lots of coffee (as long as they are not breastfeeding).

Conclusion

It’s a cliché but imagine juggling a teething toddler on one hip and debugging with the other hand. Yet moms in software development are running tasks in parallel all of the time, without the benefit of multithreading (probably. I don’t know how the brain works).

It is time we appreciated those who do more than one job, and I think tech moms are certainly being successful in multiple roles and should be applauded for doing so.