Fatin Fatihah Zahari is Cloud Adoption Engineer at Culture and Cloud Experience Asia - Global Cross Solution Delivery at Microsoft.
Fatin makes each day of her presence as a Microsoft employee be an intentional cause for her to advance women empowerment as a Developer Community Champion, Diversity, Inclusion Allyship co-lead, Accessibility co-lead, and in her latest involvement, AI Lead of Code; Without Barriers program.
Especially for the WomenTech Network, Fatin Fatihah agreed to give an interview and share her story.
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Congratulations on winning a WomenTech Network Global Technology Leadership Award! How did it feel when you found out you had won?
It was midnight in Malaysia, and I was holding my boys who could not sleep, excited seeing their mum still up waiting for the award announcement. When I saw my photo pop up, I froze. A lot of thoughts ran through my head, "Did I just win? Do I deserve that? I mean look at the finalists, they are ALL AMAZING. Could you just have won?".
The biggest lesson learned is even though your name and photo come up on the screen as a winner, impostor syndrome will still hit you. Especially having to juggle work and my life with my two boys, I always felt I had not done enough. There is always room for doubt, sometimes it becomes too toxic I break down before even crossing the finishing line. So, to win this means more than just doing something great in the AI domain, but to remind me and every woman out there to give credit to yourselves when a job is well done - no matter how small. There will come a day that you might end up numb like me, winning an award with my photo up on the screen and I still felt like an impostor.
Now after almost a month, I could say I am glad to be born in an age where women could celebrate their successes like we did back in December 2021 at the WomenTech Network Award - kudos to Anna Radulovski and the organizing team for making this happen.
Tell us about your background, journey in tech, and what inspired you to develop your career in this direction.
The first big decision I had to make was when I was 9 years old when I passed a national IQ test. I had to weigh the pros and cons quickly (a month to be precise), consequences of taking on this rather unique path that I did not have anyone to look up to or would be given the chance to comprehend potential outcomes if something does not go right. I was sure I did the right thing, choosing the path that scares me the most - I skipped the grade and started my academic career being the youngest one in anything that I sit in or do.
Years after, once again I had to make a huge decision about my undergraduate major. I envisioned the path where it would help me to solve a problem I had back in my hometown whereby coming from a small town, internet connectivity was a luxury. Now that I was 16 and had to make such an important decision, I spent hours in cyber cafes with my mom and researched my options. Being in that cybercafé daily gave me the opportunity to take a pause, look around, and think about ways how I can improve things for the community. After a few weeks, I finally made up my mind. Not having anyone in my family who took electronics engineering before, I decided on that major because yet again, I just had to choose the one thing that scared me the most.
In between my undergraduate studies, I must have gone through so many lab sessions that I started to scare myself again because now 11 years later, I found a post in February 2011 where I told myself "Always do what you are afraid to do". I was in my second year, moving to the third year and there was a lot of pressure of doing well, especially because I was a scholarship holder of Malaysia’s national telecommunication Government Linked Company (GLC). I felt the pressure of doing my best, but I also learned to pick myself up whenever I failed.
Failure – I feared failure, but for the sake of doing the things that I am afraid to do, I let myself fail and learn from them. Just like making the decision of furthering my studies after being in the corporate world for 4 years. While I was in the UK, I was constantly in my fear mode but after a while, I realized fear is just part of life and I learned to befriend. I have learned to become a mother, a wife, and a student again in a foreign country. I pushed myself to the edge, studying at one of the finest institutions in the UK, Warwick Manufacturing Group, University of Warwick. I once questioned my command of English, but now I earned MSc in International Technology Management.
For believing that at the end of conquering my fear is a celebration of my growth and newfound confidence, today I am a mother of two curious and adventurous boys and enjoying my time at Microsoft as a Cloud Adoption Engineer while helping others through women in tech communities.
Any advice you would like to give to girls in STEM on pursuing their dreams?
You are the owner of your story. Most impactful stories are the ones with meaningful destinations or ending, no matter where they began. You might be in the second or third chapters of your life and sometimes it feels like you want to rip off the earlier pages that you wrote, wanting to change your mistakes in the past. I want you to recognize that those pages are just your fears, and they are an integral part of your whole story. The best way forward is to not dread the past but to learn from the experiences that you were afraid of and move forward. If me, Fatin, can do this, you can do it better, 100%. Looking forward to your successes!
