Why am I able to chill at/take advantage of on-sight chefs/ping pong tables at Stack?
Because they participate in a program called The Fog Creek Fellowship. Fog Creek (another software company with which Stack shares a co-founder) started the fellowship after having noticed that only 14% of their developer applicants were women and that all of their current developers were male.
Brainstorming ways to overcome this lack of diversity, they decided to allow select female graduates of the Flatiron School (an intensive 12-week coding course from which I graduated) to have 8 weeks of access to space at their offices and a mentor. The mentors "...help fellows prepare for coding interviews, offer assistance comparing offer packages, build confidence, and help create long-lasting professional relationships."
So, with no cost on my part, I get all the stuff mentioned above. And my mentor Jon Chan, a brilliant developer and creator of Bento, has been nothing but supportive and awesome (and has really helped me with my website from both a technical and business standpoint).
What has also been invaluable is having the opportunity to observe this world for the first time. The only office culture I'd engrossed myself in previously was the small management consulting firm I'd worked at -old-school, finance - need I say more?
And although the Flatiron School (FIS) is a developer community as well, it didn't exactly paint a picture of what the professional community is really like. FIS trains non-developers to be developers and so our class was not really representative- we were more than 50% women - and people used to do all sorts of things before joining the school - consulting, finance, HR, teaching. Thus, my sense of who developers were was kind of skewed.
In contrast, many of the developers at Stack and Fog Creek/Trello, to put it bluntly, are the cliché.
Between Fog Creek and Stack, 2 of the dozen or so mentors got kicked out of school for hacking computers. They're all male and many wear glasses. And Stack has not 1, but 2 video game stations...
And the office- well...it's amazing - I'd had the opportunity to visit Google as well and this was like a mini-version. We've all seen articles in Business Insider or Gawker about how Facebook has nap rooms and video games but somehow, it's not really real until you see it for yourself. My jaw still has not reattached itself to my face- why isn't every office like this!! - how did I work in finance so long? -unlimited snacks, beers, 2 chefs (1 dedicated solely to pastries) who cook gourmet lunches everyday.
Despite not knowing what it's like to actually work for one of these places, there are a few things you can just see. People at Stack (developers and non developers) are open, happy, and excited about what they are accomplishing. Being there has made me rethink what a business is and made me more excited about being a web developer- someone who actually builds things that add value to people's lives. I'm very lucky to get this insider look into what the world of tech can be, and instead of working on my golf game... X-Box all the way.