<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  How many times a day do you go on Instagram? If you&amp;#039;re Brina Lee, it&amp;#039;s more than the normal user. And it&amp;#039;s not because she&amp;#039;s addicted to taking selfies. It&amp;#039;s because as Instagram&amp;#039;s first female engineer, it&amp;#039;s literally her job. We spoke to Lee about how she fell into engineering, what it&amp;#039;s like working in a male-centric office, and of course, what her favorite filter is. How did you get interested in engineering and coding? My dad&amp;#039;s an electrical engineer, so I always had the latest and greatest technology. But I wasn&amp;#039;t interested in coding. I hated it. My first class of coding was in high school and it was so boring. And then I got to web coding, which is very much instant gratification. I could just code something, refresh the page, and see it pop up in a picture. That&amp;#039;s when I started getting interested. I decided to take some more classes and ended up loving it. Related: How Google&amp;#039;s Megan Smith Is Changing the World for Working Women For people who don&amp;#039;t know what engineering is, can you give us a crash course? Engineering can be a bunch of things. In all cases, engineering is building things, whether it be with your hands like a mechanical engineer, or with code. To me it&amp;#039;s a creative tool to build communication in many different ways. And solving problems. We all know that there&amp;#039;s a huge gender gap in this field. Were you able to find any female mentors? No. I had to seek them out. A lot of the women in the field don&amp;#039;t stand out or push themselves to say &amp;quot;Hey look at me,&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m really good at what I do.&amp;quot; Related: 10 Reasons You Didn&amp;#039;t Get That Job Do you recognize the gender gap on a day-to-day basis at work? Yeah. I think when I talk in a meeting [I] have to talk more assertively, even kind of lowering your voice helps sometimes. It&amp;#039;s hard as an entry-level engineer to even build your reputation in a company, so I&amp;#039;m not sure if it&amp;#039;s being a woman, but I&amp;#039;m pretty sure it does hinder me a little bit compared to an entry-level male. You have to be more aware as a woman. You have to understand that you may not be listened to, you may not be respected as much as the male engineers. I think a lot of women say they run into the Imposter Syndrome\u2014that we&amp;#039;re not taking credit where we deserve credit. For women it&amp;#039;s really hard to internalize our own accomplishments. Who are some of the women you&amp;#039;ve been able to look up to in your career? It&amp;#039;s great now that Instagram is a part of Facebook, so we can leverage all the women here! It&amp;#039;s so awesome seeing Jocelyn [Goldfein]. She&amp;#039;s one of the highest engineering directors here at Facebook, and because Sheryl&amp;#039;s at the top, I think all the male engineers here do look at women differently and allow us to go up the ladder. What&amp;#039;s the most fun thing about your job that someone would find unexpected? A lot of people think that coding is boring, but you have to understand the impact that you&amp;#039;re having by submitting one or two lines of code. Just submitting one extra line of code into the Facebook repository impacts a billion people. Same thing with Instagram! What&amp;#039;s your favorite filter? I actually like no filter at all! Wow, no filter from the Instagram staff! Yeah, but if it was the video filter I like Vesper, Vesper is probably the best one.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/tech/interviews/a14050/brina-lee-instagram-engineer-interview/>