Meet Briseida Pagador

I had the honor of speaking with Briseida Pagador as our featured member this month. This is one of the most impressive young women that I have had the pleasure of speaking with, and I am grateful that she took the time to speak to me.

Briseida’s journey to Portland — and eventually PDXWIT — started with a decision to make a change after spending 7 years in New York stuck in what she calls “an endless wheel of production.” She says that she is grateful for the time spent in New York as it taught her about survival and community, but it did not teach her how to rest. Feeling a need to strategize her next steps, she decided that the west coast was the best place to start, and after considering other cities, she settled on Portland. While looking at different career options, she discovered a PDXWIT event hosted by New Relic that discussed the career opportunities available in the tech industry. This became Brisieda’s first experience with the PDXWIT community. She tells me that PDXWIT was her lens into the tech industry, offering her a range of events, and community gatherings that spoke to her and the things she was curious about.

Seeing the wage disparity between her, a young Indigenous, immigrant woman, and her white male coworkers for what was the same level of effort, Briseida felt that she could — and should — close that gap and decided that she would do something about it. She enrolled in a 6-month coding bootcamp, which she completed in September of 2020. In December of 2020 she started her first job as a Software Engineer, but she considers herself as having been a Software Engineer from the moment she made the decision to become one.

So what is next for Briseida? That is a question for which the answer is still in flux. She tells me that she is constantly questioning the why of everything. She wants to demystify the barriers that stand between this flexible and profitable industry and the talented people who deserve to occupy space in this industry. She believes that watching the same people solve the same problems in the same way is not only boring, but also inhibits the kind of innovation that contributes to the collective good in addition to just selling a product. She is dismayed at how many more examples there are of this powerful tool being used to destroy instead of build.

Eventually she would like to be able to help others witness themselves in roles that have been traditionally hard to reach due to the gatekeeping inherent to the tech industry. In the interim, she practices authenticity and transparency in her everyday life and strives to be an “orator for justice.” She does this by calling out workplace micro and macro aggressions, to make it uncomfortable to be sexist and racist in professional settings. She views her path to her current role as a software engineer as part of the rebellion. Having bootcamp training instead of a traditional 4-year degree is a way of showing others that options are available and,most importantly, attainable.

Briseida is also involved in the Alchemy community. She encourages others to become involved as well to witness the ingenuity of a group of strangers who came together to execute a working product. She is especially eager to see those that hire in the tech industry to interact with that community so they can witness the large pool of talent that is available without a traditional 4-year degree.

Briseida, we congratulate you and are excited to see where your journey will take you!

Author: Coretta Knight