Building the Life of a Software Engineer

Women Who Code
The stories of women living in the Bay Area working in various fields of engineering

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Building the life of a Software Engineer
By Tara Giddings

After Erin Allard (30) restored a 100 year old house, doing most of the physical labor herself, she was inspired to make a list of things she thought she could never do and coding was at the top of the list. Allard is now working at her first job as a python engineer at the San Francisco company InfoScout.

Allard was able to fulfill her lifelong dream of renovating an old house while working in previous career of real estate. This included using power tools, lifting heaving items, and ultimately executing a vision all of her own. Her accomplishment lead her to feel “up to the task of challenging myself to think about what else I could learn how to do” leading her into the world of software engineering.

Allard’s role as python engineer means she works on “the back end”, she describes her work as “everything that you can’t see if you are on a website”. While employed at InfoScout she works out the logic and connections that produce data for website users and the database for companies.

InfoScout is a market research company working with around two hundred eighty consumer packaged goods brands. These are generally companies that sell regular use items, such as toilet paper or paper towels. InfoScout allows those clients to answer questions about how consumer’s react to their product by giving them informative data, such as what products consumers typically buy at the same time.

Growing up in the Bay Area, Allard was surround by the tech world but assumed it was not available to her since she did not study computer science in college. Allard attended Mills College in Oakland California, a local and all women’s institution, and graduated with a degree in economics. She went on to get her master’s in real estate through Florida International University by taking classes online.

When Allard began her new personal challenge of learning to code she became entranced by her new interest and decided to change her career. Living in the Bay Area she says she also “realized that if I wanted to stay I had to make a lot more money than I was making and that is possible with software engineering.” This new opportunity changed the direction of Allard’s life.

Allard has only been working at InfoScout, her first software engineering role, for about six months. However, before working at this job she spent two years in the computer coding world learning skills and teaching at coding bootcamps. She attended Hackbright, where she learned coding and met many valuable female peer mentors. Allard then went on to teach saying “I think so far the best success I’ve had was in my role as a software engineering instructor”.

She taught at Girls Who Code, a summer program for young women in high school where the girls were very motivated and many actually went on to major in computer science. Allard also taught a Techtonica, another non-profit, offering tech training to women of color and women with low incomes in the Bay Area. Allard’s pride for her work shines as she says “my work with both of those organizations allowed me to essentially be a face that people could connect with and see hey there’s this woman out there doing tech stuff and I wanna do tech stuff”.

While Allard loved her role as a teacher she began to feel like “it was my turn and I wanted to go out into the world and build stuff”. Her passion for making things lead her to find a job at InfoScout. After initially applying for a job as a data analyst, she ended up finding a role as a content engineer. Now she creates the content that the clients see on InfoScout’s web tool. Early in her career Allard explains she has not yet built a lot, rather she is focusing on the “little building blocks that help the more experience engineers build those things that go and wow the clients.”

Allard is proud of how her work helps senior engineers create complex projects. She is also proud of how quickly she has learned coding through asking questions. Her curious, hardworking, and grateful outlook allows her to work well in the team atmosphere of InfoScout. Allard says she appreciates her role on the Insights team, working on the software product alongside a product manager, designers, and other content engineers on both the back end and front end. She really enjoys working at InfoScout saying “it’s been my first professional environment that actually feels incredibly healthy!”

Allard dispels engineer stereotypes saying the idea that “we are all socially awkward introverts and we code in the dark and we’re hunched over our computers and we don’t like to talk to people” is absolutely not true. She describes the work environment as requiring communication and creativity. Allard says the teams are made up of people with a variety of skills and different levels of expertise. For her the most important part of working on software is communicating with others and having “the ability to know how to ask good questions and give good answers”.

 Allard also says she has not encountered the “bro culture” full of “young white guys who are super offensive”. Allard feels lucky that as a woman she has also not encountered any rudeness or professional obstacles due to her sex. Though she believes she is an exception to the standard with this experience. Her outstanding experience may be due to her making  “an effort to surround myself with people who understand the importance of cognitive diversity” such as getting involved in women in tech groups. Allard says that working at InfoScout she has been introduced to a great engineering culture.

In terms of difficulties in her line of work for Allard “the biggest obstacle I’ve faced has been myself”. She struggled with making such a huge career transition as an adult since she would need to start from the bottom to work her way up. Allard was able to get past negative self talk with guidance from others, both at coding bootcamp and her new job. She has also found ways to work past the biggest difficulty at her job which is getting stuck, a feeling common to people in all fields. Allard has taught herself to step away from feeling frustrated and isolated when working on projects. Ultimately her team at InfoScout provides support and is able to help her past her struggles as she continues to learn.

Growth through learning is essentially Allard’s favorite part of her job. Her face lights up as she describes the joy she feels after “encountering a roadblock and figuring out how to get past it” to solve the problem. She enjoys being taught by advanced engineers which is a huge part of her job. One of her future goals is learn more about management, hoping to experience leading her own team and helping others to be inspired to do their best work.

Another one of her goals is to create her own software product, SAAS or software as a service. This would be a monthly pay website that she would be able to build and maintain using the skills she is currently developing at InfoScout. As Allard thinks about creating such a software tool she works on studying what is used to build it, how it is put out into the internet, and how to gain clients. In her role at InfoScout she has learned that it’s not true you have to be brilliant in order to code. She says what is required for coding is that you “learn how to think differently and to use that different thinking as a tool for solving problems.”


For Allard working in the world of software engineering is not necessarily based in having the skills to work technology, but about having a problem solving mindset. She wants people considering working in this field not to think about technical abilities beyond using the internet and knowing how to type (hopefully without looking at the keyboard). She also wants people not to worry about whether or not they studied computers or know how to build a website. Instead Allard says “in my opinion, software engineering, the point of it is not to code, the code is the tool, software engineering is about do you like to solve problems, do you find it exciting to learn new things.”