Thank you for participating in the discussion. I have a bunch questions if you don't mind me asking.
When you left after 10 years in the field and were working as a professional chef, how long did you work as a chef before returning and during that time what did you do to remain current on how tech evolved during those years?
When you returned, did you join a company working with a relatively "fresh" tech stack (read: currently popular) or did you return to a company that worked largely with the technologies with which you had worked before leaving?
When you returned, how do you feel about your own technical skills upon returning? Were they as good as before? Were they worse? Were they other softer skills you learned as a chef that you found useful upon returning? (my older brother was a professional chef d'cuisine and it's remarkable career that teaches you how to lead like few other industries do).
The feelings you had as a women in tech after returning, did you feel the same way prior to leaving to become a chef? If so, how was the experience similar? If not, how did your experience after returning differ from your experience before?
What were the primary motivators that originally lead you to pursue a career in cooking? Was it a love for cooking? Were you already cooking a lot and decided you wanted to go to school for that and then pursued it as a career? I'm particularly interested in this question because I've known people who have taken a similar path and also wouldn't mind getting into cooking after tech. A friend of mine was a senior engineer at one of the "unicorns" and is now pursuing a career in baking and plans to open a bakery.
I totally understand the desire to avoid the headaches in tech, and one might choose a different career without those headaches. I'm curious to get your opinion on the women with whom you worked on in tech that chose to become a SAHM and traditional gender roles instead of choosing an alternate career without the headaches you tried to avoid. My instinct suggests that women like you truly left due to the headaches, but I find it harder to reconcile someone leaving due to sexism in tech and then adopting traditional gender roles. That strikes me as a contradictory path to take if their motivation for leaving were the headaches you describe. What do you think about their motivations and do you think many of them probably would have ended up as SAHM and in traditional gender roles even if tech had not had the headaches you endured?
For the women who pursued careers in other field, it seems to me that moving into academia is likely to stimulate people in similar ways as software engineering. They are both similar in that they involve lots of reading, research, learning, problem solving, hypothesizing, and then application and observation. In other words a career in academia is a different way of enjoying the scientific process. For the women with whom you worked that didn't follow a path towards another career that is similarly rewarding in its daily application of the scientific process, what kinds of careers did they gravitate to? Were they strikingly different careers like moving from working with computers and technology to working with people, or something else entirely? What do you think the level of satisfaction is for these women in their new career relative to their career in engineering, once you discount or attempt to control for the headaches women encounter?
Lastly, regarding women your age in tech: when you see fewer women your age in tech, do you also see fewer men your age in tech? How much of the effect of seeing fewer women your age is due to age and how much gender? Which do you believe to be a greater problem? If you worked and returned to work in tech in the SF Bay Area, do you think that housing prices and starting a familiar may account for some of the reason why you see fewer women your age in tech (per the thought experiment I put forth as a hypothesis here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9960338 )
(Sorry for the barrage of questions. I know it's overwhelming and can be especially so when there aren't many women in tech who can also help address these questions leaving you as one of the few voices that can offer firsthand perspective. Answer only what you feel like answering)
