Who run the world?

By Ida Bylund

One weekend in April, three non-coder Comprendians set out for an adventure in the Stockholm archipelago. The goal? To learn basic coding and for each of them to build their own website. 48 hours later they came home with portfolio websites, an embryo for a new Comprend career website, and one website describing their code camp experience.

Finding more female developers is a constant challenge, so when our CTO Andreas Bergström read about an all-women code camp he thought it might be a good idea to ask some of our non-coder employees if they wanted to learn more about coding by joining the camp. Veronika Zitko and Charlotte Svedberg, both designers, and I – Ida Bylund, People & Culture Manager – were the first ones to sign up for the camp, and off we went!

Gain a deeper understanding of your colleagues’ work to support recruitment and personal development

We all had different goals. Veronika and Charlotte wanted to learn more about coding, since it would benefit their work, and to gain a deeper understanding of, and improve collaboration with, their developer colleagues' work.

For me, it was also about gaining a deeper understanding of development, but with the aim of better supporting the organisation with things like recruitment, personal development, training etc. As a bonus, we got to network with some brilliant women coders – both new beginners like ourselves, but also our coaches, one of whom is going to start working at Comprend as a direct result of us meeting at the code camp!

Attracting and recruiting developers is hard, and finding female developers is even more difficult. We need to investigate all the possibilities to connect, but also to try to encourage and support women who want to code. So far this year, we have sponsored students who wanted to participate in Women in Tech, and we are also looking into other activities where we can contribute, such as coding activities for children.

Diverse teams perform better

But why is it so important to hire female developers? Well, for us it's important to have a mix of people in all of our competence areas – we know that diverse teams perform better. When it comes to our developer community, we have the biggest challenge to make it happen. But we'll never stop working on it. We’re aiming for 50/50, a big and bold dream that we are very proud to be pursuing!

Are you a female developer looking for a job, collaboration or some kind of sponsorship? Get in touch with Ida at ida.bylund@comprend.com or +46 70 971 12 90.

And if you’re curious about the website describing the code camp experience, visit it at https://veronika19880221.github.io/.