Tech Leadership Meetup with Thalia Pillay (Software Engineer, Team Lead)

Join us at our next in-person Tech Leadership meetup. There will be drinks and snacks to kickoff the evening.

The event will be hosted at the Stitch offices in Gardens, Cape Town.

The agenda for the evening will be as follows:

17:30 - 18:00 - Arrival: Drinks and snacks.

18:00 - 18:05 - Introduction and house rules.

18:05 - 19:00 - Main speaker - Thalia Pillay.

19:00 - 19:30 - Networking and wrap up.

Topic of Main Talk - Transforming Tech Teams through Gender-Inclusive Hiring and Growth

Of the 70 853 responses received in the Stack Overflow 2022 survey, only 5.17% of respondents were women. Companies of all sizes desperately need to practice active inclusion when hiring and growing women engineers to make headway on this massive gender gap.

Some of the things to work on before reaching out to women engineers are to create an employer brand that reflects your company’s diversity and to build a company culture that celebrates diversity. Some tips for hiring women engineers include having a diverse interview panel and minimising bias in the process. It's also important to invest in growing juniors into seniors as there's a definite drop-off in female engineers as seniority increases.

Simply aiming to hire for diversity isn’t enough. You need to start with hiring practices that make candidates feel like there is space at your organisation to be seen, heard, and grow.

---

Thalia Pillay is a Team Lead and Full Stack Software Engineer at Stitch where she gets to work with amazing people to build financial infrastructure for Africa. She writes most of her code in Typescript but has been known to dabble in C# and Golang. She has worked as a software engineer in corporate environments and startups and is a strong advocate for building diverse teams. She enjoys playing her flute and ukulele, and building assistive robots which improve the lives of others.

Thank you to our sponsors Peach Payments, OfferZen, and Root

Peach Payments (https://www.peachpayments.com/) make online commerce and digital payment acceptance easier and more accessible across all Africa. We believe in the potential of Africa and aim to grow into more countries. Based in Cape Town, South Africa, we work with small and large merchants in South Africa, Kenya and Mauritius to provide a complete toolkit to accept, manage and disburse payments through web and mobile. Our merchant partners include your favourite food delivery services, whether you are ordering in or using a meal kit, travel services that can help you book your next getaway adventure and even your neighbour’s side-hustle e-commerce store. For these partners and their customers, we aim to provide brilliant experiences that make it as easy as possible to facilitate online payments.

---

OfferZen (https://www.offerzen.com/) is an online job marketplace by developers for developers. Our mission is to help people unlock their potential by helping them build awesome software. That’s why we are connecting actively looking developers with exciting job opportunities from over 1000 companies in South Africa and the Netherlands. We flip the normal recruitment process on its head – companies reach out to candidates with upfront salary information.

---

Root (https://rootplatform.com/) is a platform for modern insurance designed around data, flexibility and control. It allows for end-to-end digital insurance that streamlines product launches and digital engagement. Our easy-to-use APIs handle compliance, regulatory, and reporting complexities. Our low-code platform, designed for software developers by software developers, simplifies workflow and fosters innovation. We prioritise the needs of developers, designers, actuaries, and data scientists to build modern insurance products. Our APIs, product data models, and low-code environment empower product teams to prototype and launch tailored experiences for customers. Our mission is to bring insurance to the internet age and make it more accessible to all.