Smile group's female talents Alexandra Gnimadi

What is your position?
I am an Android developer. I code in Kotlin and Jetpack Compose. Most of the time, I am integrated into a development team with one or more designers, a project manager, and other iOS and/or Android developers. Sometimes I’m solo on some specific Android projects.

What is your background?
I went to an engineering school in Energy, UTBM, then 5 years after my first job, I did a professional conversion to join the world of IT via OpenClassrooms. It was training that I was doing in parallel with my old job, and then in parallel with the care of my first child who was born at the time. Neopixl gave me a chance for an internship that allowed me to validate my training. At the end of the internship, I joined the team on a permanent contract, it’s now 3 years. I’ve always been passionate about coding since I was very young, but oddly enough, despite the fact that there was computer training in my engineering school, I didn’t follow that.

What is your vision of the place of women in digital technology?
I think that, without making generalizations, women have a different approach to their way of thinking and acting, and this difference can only be a huge added value for the digital world. It is by confronting different ideas that a product becomes better. If in a development team, several ways of thinking coexist, we could only give better products for our customers, and everyone would win. We are still too under-represented, but times are changing, we already see it with renowned developers who are firmly contributing their stones to the building.

What advice would you give a woman who wants to work in this sector?
I would tell him to find out more about the field that interests him (mobile, web, IoT, video games, etc.), and then get started. From a distance, the image we have of developers is very, "These guys who are withdrawn, who don’t talk to anyone, who is in their world...". And women may feel blocked or uncomfortable working in such an environment. That is only half true. The reality is that the developer’s world is much richer socially, open, and very family-friendly ultimately (self-help is a keyword in our business.). There are all kinds of profiles, and it’s an environment where a woman can fully thrive.