Meet The Indian Girl Who Was Facebook's First Female Engineer


“I did notice a few things, though, as time passed by. For example, if you are female and you are an engineer, it’s really difficult to be likeable, especially if you’re ambitious and trying to get your point of view across.  To be heard, you needed to be aggressive, and you needed to be comfortable with asking for opportunities and not just waiting for them to come your way,” she said in an interview with OPB.

So Ruchi changed her style of work to better fit into the “aggressive” environment demanded.    

In her five years of career at the social network, Ruchi held responsibility for building some of its key features like Newsfeed. “When we launched it, in 2006, users hated it. There were 'I Hate Facebook' groups; random people organized protests. We even hired a security team. But people ended up using the site twice as much, and then FriendFeed and LinkedIn launched similar feeds.”

Later, she saw the company grow from a startup into world’s biggest social network and then she thought, it's time to take the next step.