It's estimated that there are 40 million jobs available in AI and DevOps. This will grow to 58 million by 2022 in APAC alone. But women currently only make up 41% of the current workforce.

We interviewed Hebe Hilhorst, Head of Deployment at Staple to discuss why she chose to work in an AI Startup, and what it’s like to be a woman working in tech.

Where and what did you study?

For the longest time, I planned to go into the humanities — Philosophy and Economics were my top picks. I started tech in high school quite by accident, when my philosophy course was canceled last minute and the only class with slots open was Digital Technologies. I was honestly not very invested in the course at first, and my teacher sensed that. He told me that he expected I would fail. I took affront and ended the year at the top of my class. However, I still expected to stick with the humanities.

It wasn’t until my second year of Uni that I realized I wanted to change my focus fully. As my humanities courses got more esoteric and theoretical, I grew to really appreciate how tech allows me to build something real. Don’t get me wrong, I still love the analytical side of the debates, but using tech to solve a problem gives me a far stronger sense of achievement. I like building things.

I then went on to start the NUS hacking society, which I was chairperson of, so I had an excuse to build more things.

What led you to embark on an international education/career path?

I came to Singapore for college, at Yale-NUS. It was a new, liberal arts university, and I liked both the freedom of a young school and the fact I didn’t need to choose a major straight off. I graduated with a BSc with honors in Computer Science and have never had cause to leave Singapore since.

Overall, the college gave me a pretty good grounding in the breadth of computer science, teaching me how to think about code. I had a great amount of fun covering a range of subjects, with my favorite being an in-depth exploration of how to build an Operating System from scratch.

What is your motivation behind joining the tech industry?

Moving to the industry was still a pretty big learning curve. We solve very real-world problems, instead of the abstracted pieces of academia I was used to. The industry is a lot messier than I expected; we need to handle a lot more possibilities, and the data is a lot rawer. I need to build out the whole pipeline, not just the one main function.

The priorities are also very different. There was generally a ‘right way’ to solve something in academia, and you needed to get there. A startup is very different; you need a solution that works, and you need it fast. The actual method is far less important. That took some adjustment; my first couple of weeks on the job, I spent a lot of time nit-picking implementation details that were ultimately unimportant.

What made you choose Staple?

One Halloween I was dressed up as the Black Widow from the Avengers and had built my own Widow Bites that could give out an electric shock to people via a concealed battery pack. One guy asked me how they worked, and we ended up having a long conversation about tech, ending up talking about his startup. That was Joshua A. Kettlewell, the CTO of Staple. I knew I wanted to work in a startup, learn at a faster pace, and see the things I built to have an actual, real effect. I liked how he talked about the company. Document processing is not an immediately interesting problem to many, but it’s often the method of finding a solution I find compelling in tech. Staple had developed some truly cutting-edge and interesting approaches, and I wanted to be part of building them out.

What projects are you working on now?

Since I joined, we’ve built out several of those approaches, and have found one in particular that works the best. It is very unique to Staple and has significantly better results than the traditional methods we tried from the academic literature. My job right now is integrating that solution through the rest of our codebase and making it more generalizable for processing any kind of document.

Before that, I spent a couple of months moving our deployment to Kubernetes and Helm. Staple had reached the point where it was no longer a small company that could afford to break things as we moved fast, and our infrastructure needed to reflect that. As part of that, I’ve done the first on-premise Kubernetes deployment with a major Swiss bank.

Do you feel that women have the same opportunities as men in the tech world?

The treatment of women in tech varies hugely across specializations, companies, and countries. I’ve been lucky to always find myself in a niche where I have been valued and respected for what I bring to the table. Staple has been particularly great for that as it's 30% female, which is actually quite high for the industry. When I joined the company my main teammate was Dr. Ashima Arora, who was an early employee at Staple, and it was a comfort to be working closely with another woman when first starting. I would like for the presence of women in the tech industry, in general, to become more normalized and less awkward, and it seems like things are rapidly moving in that direction. In my own, albeit fortunate, experience, I find that a general awkwardness around women is much more common than outright discrimination simply due to a lack of exposure to the opposite sex in both the university and industry computer science circles.

What advice would you give to women who would like to start a career in tech?

I’d encourage any woman interested in tech to go for it. It’s a fun industry where you can build things that have a real impact. If you don’t find the specialization or community you’re looking for straight off, keep looking! I promise there’s someplace out there you’ll love. Be confident in your own worth, and look out for people who are excited by the same things you are.

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