In college, I was interviewing for a summer job at the travel publisher Let’s Go when the editors seemed about to wrap up our meeting. Before I got up to leave, they had one more question for me. “If we hire you,” they said, “what will you be remembered for around the office?”
“My tendency to bring in homemade sweets,” I said, thinking, perhaps, of my Toasted Oatmeal Pecan Scones.
Clever as it was, my response might have been bad for my career, according to one of the other coders in a recent Skillcrush HTML/CSS course I took.
One Friday during the online course, we were exchanging emails about the best career advice we’d ever gotten. I was surprised by the tip this other student had received.
“My mentor once told me, ‘Dear, don’t bake,’” she wrote.
Here’s the backstory:
“[The mentor] came up in the 1960s at this all-male magazine. She really was a pioneer, and was one of our first female senior editors. I think what she meant was that the guys in charge are all too eager to dismiss you because you are a woman. You don’t need to remind them with cookies. Let them think about your excellent work, not your excellent recipes, when they think of you…Either that or my cookies really sucked.”
That summer at Let’s Go, I baked everything in my apartment into cookies, especially as our deadline neared. (Granola cookies, anyone?) We got Let’s Go: Europe finished, and I got a job there again the next summer. Since then, I’ve baked at least once at every job or internship I’ve had.
But this advice made me wonder if baking can cause pigeonholing, in spite of the affectionate (or hungry) visits to your cubicle that homemade cookies may bring. So I was curious, do you bring sweets to work or steer clear of toting baked goods to the office?
P.S. Cookies for your colleagues, if you do decide to bake.
