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Angie Chang: So our next session is Michelle Yi from RelationalAI. She is a Senior Director of Applied AI, and she’ll be speaking about harnessing knowledge and data and show us relational knowledge graphs in action.

Michelle Yi: Great. Thank you so much, Angie for the introduction. I’ll just go ahead and screen share, make sure everything is going smoothly. And let me make this big. Here we go. Okay. I think we are good to go. Okay. Yes. So happy International Women’s Day, everyone. And I, plus one, I saw in the chat, a comment about Reggie for president. So plus one to that.

Michelle Yi: So my name is Michelle Yi as Angie said, I’m super excited to share a little bit of perspective on why I believe knowledge is the future of data and how my personal experiences in the data space also align to this common vision that brought me to RelationalAI.

Michelle Yi: And so I thought I could start with sharing a little bit of context and background on myself and the journey that has brought me to RelationalAI. Our vision for what we’re doing really spoke to a lot of the challenges and problems that I saw in the machine learning and data space.

Michelle Yi: And actually to make this a little more fun and interactive, if you guys want to share a little bit about your own journey technology. I’d be curious to see what did you all study, whether it’s undergrad, PhD, masters.

Michelle Yi: What was your last educational focus? Something Heather said in the last talk actually really ties to the demo I have at the end of my talk, which is going to show a little bit of the backgrounds of the women that signed up for this conference.

Michelle Yi: So for me personally, I spent the last 16 years or so in the AI/ML space working with data from both our products R and D side, as well as a consulting perspective. So specifically, I don’t know if anyone will remember this, but in 2012, one of my first projects that I worked on actually aired as IBM Watson and this whole thing with Jeopardy where the computer was playing against the humans.

Michelle Yi: So that’s my one claim to fame. And then after that, I moved more into management consulting because I really wanted to understand the data and data science problems that many customers across many verticals were facing. And so through these experiences over the last couple of decades, I really got a lot of exposure to the impacts of the constantly shifting technical paradigms and how that impacted business.

Michelle Yi: So to give you an example, when I started at IBM ML 16 years ago, was on mainframe. This was before the Cloud. If you can even imagine an era before the Cloud. And then we were after we started getting migrated and pushed to go more Cloud oriented, moving away from on-prem, there was a big, no pun intended, big data movement.

Michelle Yi: Essentially saying, like, “Go collect all the things.” And we didn’t… We collected a lot of data without really always thinking about why did we need that data? And then we were sort of pushed to like, “Okay, well, if you want to use this big data thing and you want to make all those things that you collected useful, you need to go to MapR and Hadoop.”

Michelle Yi: And then what ultimately resulted was this data swamp architecture where we had data everywhere in different silos of many different types. And then that shifted into what’s now more of the modern Cloud data warehousing. So think about BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift et cetera. And then after we consolidated all of these things, we’re like, “Oh, okay. We finally got it figured out.”

Michelle Yi: But then you kind of see another kind of paradigm around machine learning and for people to take advantage of that you need yet another patchwork tool chain. And we’re going to dig into this a bit more, but the question is why is it that every time we see a paradigm shift, or a new technology, or a new data structure that we kind of go through the same motions over and over again.

Michelle Yi: And so just to speak to a little bit of those problems, I don’t think this is going to be new to anyone in the data space, but basically with each iteration that we’ve gone through, we still see the same needs from the business and the technology side.

Michelle Yi: There’s this desire for kind of more data driven decision making across the board from your executive teams all the way down to the engineering teams. And then there’s this other problem of like, “All right, we went through big data and we collected all the things, but now we don’t really understand everything that we’ve collected.”

Michelle Yi: So we even today, I think many of us would agree that there’s really kind of a lack of understanding of the full extent of the data assets that an enterprise or even a startup has.

Michelle Yi: And then as a result of that, there’s this third bucket of problems where we’ve really seen a rise of just too many point solutions or too many point data applications that sometimes can be repetitive of each other.

Michelle Yi: I don’t know how many times I’ve [inaudible] this and seen to a customer and we’re like, “Hey, you’re interested in a fraud detection, no problem. Oh, by the way, they also built their own fraud detection solution over there in teams D or E.” And so we’re kind of seeing like this common theme across companies and across a long period of time. And again, we need to ask ourselves what’s the root cause of this.

Michelle Yi: And ultimately I think what I saw over and over again is that there’s really something missing from this modern data stack. If we’re really evolving the way that we think about data, why are we seeing the same problems manifest over and over again? And so this is the question I really want us to kind of hone in on and specifically around this concept of knowledge and I’m going to share because you’re like, “All right, knowledge.” That can mean so many different things to basically everybody on this call.

Michelle Yi: And I’d be curious how many data scientists, more on the ML side we have in the room today versus more of the software engineering data app side, I’ve lived in both sides of those worlds. And they’re converging in many ways, right?

Michelle Yi: Because a lot of intelligent data applications today at the core of them, they really are having embedded machine learning whether that’s a machine learning model that you and your teams build or managed service that you receive from a vendor that you buy.

Michelle Yi: And so from my personal experience, I wanted to share an example of a day in the life of a data scientist or a software engineer working on an intelligent application and really hone in on this question using a workflow example of like what happens to the knowledge. And tell me in the chat, let me see.

Michelle Yi: I want to make sure I have it topped up in the screen, but please tell me in the chat if you resonate with this, but one common thing that I think people really have experienced is that we tend to spend like 80% as a data scientist or someone building an intelligent app.

Michelle Yi: We spend like 80% of our time productionalizing things and maybe 20% of our time really modeling, collecting the requirements and the data, et cetera.

Michelle Yi: And if I go into this just like one more level deep and not to get too trapped in the weeds, but just to really hone in on the pain point and why knowledge and embedding knowledge in a workflow is so important is let’s say like all of us are on the same team together.

Michelle Yi: And we want to build this fraud detection application. And at the heart of this application is a machine learning model that gives some predictive score of like, “Yes, that transaction is 50%, 60% likely to be fraudulent.”

Michelle Yi: Well, let’s think about this. So step one, what do we really go do? We let’s say one, we get a sense of our own intuition of what kind of data we need. We probably need something about transactions.

Michelle Yi: And we probably need something about accounts and people related to these transactions and maybe that lives in, I don’t know, BigQuery, let’s say it lives in Teradata, and then it lives in Excel because how many of us store data… Plenty of us store data at Excel. And then let’s also say that we probably need some information from the public web because when people steal things, they need to go sell them and make money.

Michelle Yi: So we get this intuition, we make a list. And then we ultimately, what we end up doing is we go to the business owners or the business experts and saying, “Okay, does it make sense to have this kind of data? What are we missing? Oh, I see, this data has this flag that has a transaction type one. What does that actually mean?”

Michelle Yi: And so we spend a lot of time upfront collecting and gathering data. We work on a subset and that in this 20% bucket of data science work, in that 20% of time, we get a model working that we’re pretty happy with.

Michelle Yi: Let’s say we use Python and a Jupyter Notebook. steps one and two are done. We’re happy. And then we need to scale this up to production. And then what we end up spending 80% of our time on is rewriting everything that we learned in terms of collecting the knowledge from different business stakeholders and our own data science knowledge.

Michelle Yi: And we rewrite that in like Java, Spark and much more heavier imperative programming languages, just so we can productionalize what we already did in steps one and two.

Michelle Yi: So the question is why can we not preserve knowledge across the data, across this entire workflow end to end. And that’s where I really kind of started to think more about this problem, because imagine how many like teams, how much time it would save if I could just preserve all of my learnings that I collected up front from the business about the relationships between transactions and customers, and accounts, and then also like the different constraints.

Michelle Yi: So for example, if I am looking for pictures of cats, I know that cats have two ears. I shouldn’t even think or waste any time processing things with four ears or five ears. I mean, this is a toy example, but I think you get the idea. And then 0.3 is really like, “Okay. If I on team A, I’m building this fraud detection app, why can’t I just easily share this knowledge with somebody in team D so that they don’t have to go do the same requirements gathering?” Because you know, that happens in any organization. And so when we talk about knowledge, it’s how do we preserve these relationships and really save ourselves time and.

Michelle Yi: We preserve these relationships and really save ourselves time and make that accessible to more than just one team. So, there is this concept of a knowledge graph and so you’re like, “Okay, well, yeah. I’ve heard about knowledge graphs.”

Michelle Yi: And there’s sort of like this way of structuring and thinking about data that can somewhat solve this issue, but not exactly and let’s… I want to get into that a little bit really quickly.

Michelle Yi: And so, one of the things is that, here is just an example of a knowledge graph concept, right? And the thing about this picture is even if I don’t give you all the details of like, oh, this lives in inquiry [inaudible], this one lives in another database.

Michelle Yi: Conceptually, you can kind of get that a product has a brand and a product has a category where shoes is an example of a category and a company sells products. It doesn’t matter if you’re an engineer or a business person, you can pretty quickly see what this is.

Michelle Yi: And now imagine if you could actually just query your data as easily as you can read this picture. The thing with knowledge graphs though is that they’re actually not necessarily a new concept.

Michelle Yi: So, it was coined by Google when they created the Google knowledge graph. They wrote this paper that came out in 2012, over 10 years ago now, and it’s been a core competitive advantage to them.

Michelle Yi: So if you ever wonder why search is so powerful at Google, this is one of the secret sauces to that. And when you’re shopping on Amazon, if you’re like, “Wow, my recommendations are amazing.”

Michelle Yi: That’s also another reason why they’re so powerful, is that they’re using this thing called knowledge graphs. And so a lot of other companies have really adopted this thing called the knowledge graph. And you’re like, okay, you can do all these cool things. You can express your business knowledge in the same place as you would do your programming or your data querying, why isn’t everyone else adopting this?

Michelle Yi: Well, the problem is that, and there’s many, many problems, but there’s kind of like three that all high level boil it down to. But one of them is that yes, knowledge graph expertise is kind of rare and not everyone is Google or Facebook or LinkedIn, and they can’t hire hundreds of engineers to go build these things for them, right? There’s not enough people out there to do this.

Michelle Yi: And the second thing is that building and scaling knowledge graphs is really difficult because a lot of the existing solutions are built on really old paradigms. So like the Google knowledge graph paper came out 10 years ago, a lot of the commercially available systems today make it hard to use.

Michelle Yi: Some of these systems are based on theories that came out in the seventies in terms of navigational systems, right? And so it’s really, really hard to use any existing thing to build your own knowledge graph if that’s really what you want to do. And so similarly, operating and maintaining them is really challenging as well.

Michelle Yi: So it’s an amazing concept that just really hasn’t been more commercially viable and accessible to a broader audience. And so, there’s one thing that I want to quickly over is we’re kind of taking a slightly different take and then I’ll show a really fun example to make this more real and in honor of international women’s day here.

Michelle Yi: But one of the things that we’re trying to do is say, let’s build that next generation thing. What does that really look like if we were to take a knowledge graph and make that supercharged and really available to a broader audience.

Michelle Yi: And one of the things that’s key is you see the word knowledge graphs, and then you see this thing called relational and RelationalAI. So I’ll share a bit more before jumping into the demo quickly and then wrapping up.

Michelle Yi: But essentially when it comes down to what we’re trying to do is build this next generation database platform that really gives you that infrastructure layer that’s going to help you consolidate and keep knowledge in the end to end workflow based on a solid shared foundation of a relational knowledge graph.

Michelle Yi: So one of the things that being a relational knowledge graph does is, and this is a bit of an eye chart, but I’ll summarize it in one point, which is that the relational paradigm, when you think about why SQL databases, for example, or you think about why snowflake or BigQuery or Redshift are so popular today is because it separates a lot of the what from the how. So you don’t worry about this huge list of super technical things in the middle, right?

Michelle Yi: A lot of that is actually handled for you. And so that’s something that’s really, really cool about a relational knowledge graph versus other systems. Because again, we share those same technical foundations of what you really expect from that modern data stack and including things like warehousing, et cetera. And so when you think about your favorite SQL system or your favorite database system, I guarantee a large part of that adoption is because your business users, not just your engineering teams, can use it.

Michelle Yi: And so in the future what we’d love to see is like, because we share these same fundamental architectural paradigms, we’d love to see that layer of knowledge that sits across and really pairs with and augments the work that many organizations have already done to consolidate and clean up their warehouse. Basically all the work that everyone’s done going from Hudu to cloud data warehousing, et cetera. This is the thing that we want to say is missing from that modern data stack and that we want to augment and really bring out the power of these things across your organization.

Michelle Yi: All right. So with that said, I’m going to take a look at the chat here and just see at some of the backgrounds. Okay. I love it. Business management, psych. All right. So, in the last three minutes or so I want to wrap up again with just like a simple example where we took some data, thank you to Girl Geek X for providing some of this as well.

Michelle Yi: But basically we took some data on the types of folks we knew would be presenting and attending the conference today. And then we also took some information that’s already… So, for those of you that don’t know about DIFA, we took some information from them. They actually structure all of the information on the public internet in a knowledge graph. And so it’s super easy for us to be able to leverage that in our system. And we took a high level view of kind of the women participating.

Michelle Yi: And basically what you’re seeing here is we put a visualization of what’s called the weakly-connected components graph, right? And so it’s a type of graph algorithm where what you can see quickly is like there’s certain densities and there’s certain areas that are less connected on the edge here.

Michelle Yi: And so we took a survey of sort of what did people study, right? And for women that are in engineering or technology, what did they study as the most recent education? And so what I thought was really fun about this is that when you zoom in, you can kind of see the clusters you might expect.

Michelle Yi: This is a New York if I remember right. And then in New York, there’s lots of people with computer science degrees, et cetera, et cetera. But when you get to the edges a little bit further out, you see a lot of really, really cool majors and folks of women that are in our fields and that have really, really diverse backgrounds.

Michelle Yi: And I love seeing this. So you see like economics, I saw English, English literature. I saw health informatics right here, design and art direction. And so I thought this was like a really fun way using knowledge graphs to quickly show that it doesn’t matter what background you have, but there is a place for you in tech.

Michelle Yi: And the thing is that when you are kind of one of these weakly-connected components, you might sometimes feel like you’re the only one. Right? But actually it’s not true. There’s so many of us that are out here.

Michelle Yi: And so I thought this was a fun way to show that using some real data. So yeah, I thank you so much for all of your time. I think we’re right at the 45 minute mark. And so, really appreciate it. And if you have any questions or you’re interested in graphs or the tech, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Thanks so much.

Angie Chang: Thank you, Michelle. That was very informative. I love the chart and the graph and for explaining everything so clearly. 

Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!

• Check out open jobs at our trusted partner companies.
• Watch all Elevate 2022 conference video replays!
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Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!

• Check out open jobs at our trusted partner companies.
• Watch all Elevate 2022 conference video replays!
• Does your company want to sponsor a Girl Geek Dinner? Talk to us!

Sukrutha Bhadouria: So up next, we have Raji. This is a great segue actually into our next session with Raji who is the VP of Engineering at Opendoor. She’s joined by Heather, Head of Engineering for Seller and Consumer Growth at Opendoor. Welcome to both of you, Raji and Heather.

Raji Subramanian: Thank you.

Heather Natour: Thank you. So first I’d like to introduce myself. I’m Heather, I’m Head of Engineering at Opendoor responsible for the core product experience for home sellers, along with growth initiatives and retail partnerships. And I am very excited to sit down with my colleague Raji Subramanian, Opendoor’s VP of engineering. So Raji do you want to share your role at Opendoor and experience in tech?

Raji Subramanian: Yes. Thank you, Heather. I’m very, very excited to be here. So again, as Heather mentioned, I’m a VP of engineering at Opendoor where I’m responsible for Opendoor’s and to end real estate transaction and operational platform build out.

Raji Subramanian: The goal of this platform is to enable Opendoor to create remarkable consumer experiences and enable the company to scale. Prior to Opendoor I co-founded a company called Pro.com which was acquired by Opendoor late last year.

Raji Subramanian: And at Pro, I was the COO and the head of product and technology as well before starting Pro I had a long stint at Amazon where I was a pioneering member, as well as led a lot of teams within Opendoor… Within Amazon’s marketplace, as well as AWS and also led teams within Amazon’s Kindle organization, as well as Yahoo Finance.

Raji Subramanian: I care deeply about diversity. I also care deeply about ESG. Both of them are very inter related. I’m a board member and advisor to BoardReady a not for profit. that’s improving the board diversity in public and private company boards.

Heather Natour: It’s an impressive background and really excited to dive in. Before we do that, I wanted to provide all of you just a quick overview of Opendoor. So our mission is to take the complex traditional home buying and selling transaction and make it simple and on demand. And we’ve completed more than 150,000 customer transactions. We operate in 45 markets nationwide, and we continue to scale the company and the team rapidly.

Heather Natour: So as I mentioned, we have a great talk planned. Raji is going to share insights, advice, and experience on setting goals to advance a career in tech.

Heather Natour: Deconstructing, common career roadblocks and delivering measurable impact that helped her get to where she is today. And the goal of the discussion is to help you make the most of your career and serve your organization well by setting meaningful and measurable goals.

Heather Natour: So Raji you co-founded a successful technology platform and helped it grow to one of the nation’s largest general contractors. You were the pioneering member of teams that helped develop Amazon’s online marketplace and AWS.

Heather Natour: How did you set personal and professional goals that empowered you to make the most of your career while impacting the tech industry?

Raji Subramanian: That’s a really good question, Heather. And again, I use a sort of like a self-developed framework, which I call three P framework. The three Ps stands for passion, purpose, and people.

Raji Subramanian: Passion is all about what I like doing, it’s what you really enjoy doing. And you can do day in and day out with the same level of intensity that you started doing it when you started the journey. For me, that’s building businesses at scale, as well as engineering.

Raji Subramanian: The second P is purpose, just about taking your passion and applying it to something that you really care about. In my case, I care about creating transformative customer experiences. An example of it is about how homes impact the lives of so many people. And that’s why I started Pro and that’s what brought me to Opendoor as well.

Raji Subramanian: It’s a purpose that I deeply care about and the last of course is the people. It’s just about loving the work that you do and doing it with people you enjoy working with who are very smart and help you grow.

Raji Subramanian: With that said, with that framework, I actually apply or do a goal setting exercise which is four parts to it. The first thing that I do is I ask myself what’s the value I’m creating. It’s anchored along value creation. Are my goals enabling me personally, as well as where I am working, create value for its customers, employees, and stakeholders, and the business itself. Value creation is one of the most fundamental things from a goal setting perspective. And that’s kind of what, when you create value, you move forward in your career.

Raji Subramanian: The second aspect of goal setting that I look at is a scale of impact. Again, things that you can do can have a small impact and can have large game changing impact. As your revolving in your career it’s important to slide through the scale of moving and transitioning your goal setting from small impact to larger and larger impact. It does not mean you don’t go about making incremental changes, but there is a moving forward in terms of the scale of impact.

Raji Subramanian: The third thing that I look for from a goal setting perspective is, are the goals that I’m setting, helping me grow in a multidimensional way, from a leadership perspective. It’s about bringing in that intersect between engineering, what the customer cares about. It’s about the product, it’s about the P and L of the company.

Raji Subramanian: And being able to operate in that space are the goals allowing you to operate in a multidimensional way is a third thing, or the third prong of goal setting I look for.

Raji Subramanian: And the fourth is very important and close to my heart. It’s about, be purposeful. Diversity is something that I care about very deeply. That’s kind of what took me to BoardReady. Again in the teams that I built, whether at Opendoor or outside, I look for diversity. I seek diversity. I’m an advocate for diversity. And I also promote diversity.

Heather Natour: Yes. Passion, people, purpose. I really love that. And I totally agree. It’s always been important to me to join a company with a mission that I’m passionate about. I really want to be working with people who are smart or challenge me to grow and learn in a positive way.

Heather Natour: And I really want to dive into some of these goal setting parts. I’d love to also hear from the audience, what role does goal setting play in your own career while we move on and post in the chat.

Heather Natour: But before we do that, as one of the first and few women technical leaders and principal engineers at Amazon, what were some of the common career roadblocks you faced and how did you overcome those challenges?

Raji Subramanian: Yes. Again, the challenges that I face and what I’m going to be sharing, you’ll find that there’s a lot of similarities with what all of us have faced. And in fact, as you called out earlier, as we are having this conversation, I’d love to hear from the audience as well, where they can post what the challenges that they faced. Again…

Raji Subramanian: And you’ll find that there’s a lot of commonality. But again, to touch upon a few things, and this is not specific to a certain company, but it’s more specific to the journey itself.

Raji Subramanian: The first, I’m sure all of us as technologists in whatever role that we play in technology, one of the biggest challenges is to become a recognized technical expert. And this is a nuanced topic. The reason I say it’s a nuanced topic is, there is being recognized as a leader, and then there’s being recognized as a technical leader.

Raji Subramanian: There are so many preconceived notions that we as women might be recognized as a leader even amongst our organization but are we recognized as technologists and engineers who can transform that world.

Raji Subramanian: And so how do you break through those preconceived notions?

Raji Subramanian: The next is about being in the know and being in the know is a lot about the ecosystem that you’re working with, the network that you have access to and the network you have deep relationships with.

Raji Subramanian: And as women how do you go ahead and build those deep relationships, whether it’s with peers, with colleagues, with managers and with mentors, and wherever you work is one of the key gateways for you to be in the know and being in the know within any workspace that you are in is what takes you… Is what gives you one aspect or one dimension to what you can… What actually takes you to the next level.

Raji Subramanian: The third is something that I’ve observed. And I’ve personally followed. It’s about leading from the front.

Raji Subramanian: We as women do an incredible job at work, but often we find ourselves that we ourselves sometimes or because of the forcing function of the environment leading from behind. We are silent leaders. It’s important that as we are making the transformation, we not just lead from behind.

Raji Subramanian: We also lead from front. Examples of that include as women leaders, and women technologists, and women engineers, we might vision something. We might be strategizing on something. We might be driving something.

Raji Subramanian: It’s important to also hold the mic and be actually the representative, who gives the voice to it. And that’s super critical, and not let our demons hold us back. I’ll give one example, Heather, both you and I, for example, are leading two of the most critical initiatives, literally the top two initiatives at Opendoor. In many ways as a part of that, it’s important for us to not just lead from behind, but also lead from the front.

Heather Natour: Yes, definitely. And becoming recognized as a technical expert really resonates with me. I personally didn’t study computer science in college. And so I always had this imposter syndrome about my technical aptitude and frankly, it took half my career to realize I was often the tech technical expert in the room.

Heather Natour: Also, as you mentioned, we are each leading from the front driving key engineering organizations at Opendoor. And, I actually think it was a result of very conscious decisions that we’ve respectively made to transform the technical vision in order to make greater impact. So I think these are all really great, helpful points.

Heather Natour: You mentioned Raji that you’re also very passionate about diversity, and environmental, and social governance. How are you working towards bringing change in in the tech industry and at Opendoor?

Raji Subramanian: It’s a combination deal, Heather. And there’s two parts to it. The first is it always has got… It’s always got to start from home.

Raji Subramanian: We’ve got to walk the talk. For example, I’m looking to hire 50 plus people on my team and I’m sure you are as well. And again, it’s about how we walk the talk and make sure that we build the diverse teams and building those diverse teams is what helps companies become durable and generational. And for example, that is one of the core values that we follow at Opendoor.

Raji Subramanian:And so it’s important that it starts at home, we’ve got to live, breathe, and make sure that our hires are the diverse. And we should never compromise on that. It’s got to be a non-negotiable goal, and the second part of it is about what you do beyond just your workspace.

Raji Subramanian: As I called out earlier, I do a lot of work in the ESG space and DEI is the S, the social part of ESG. And it’s one big component of ESG. The other two being environmental and governance, to make sure that we have a holistic approach to how we look at not just DEI but beyond DEI as well.

Raji Subramanian: So the work that I do with BoardReady is about, how do you make sure that management teams and boards are the most diverse? So I do a lot of work in that space. I also publish in that space, the research that I do.

Raji Subramanian: And I also work with a lot of companies, as a part of BoardReady to make sure that we are able to bring in the diversity. The last thing I’ll share is something that my parents actually had conversations with me when I was very, very young and this hit me then, and it still hits me.

Raji Subramanian: And one of the conversations that we had, we’ve had this conversation multiple times is what if women were engineers, innovators, and builders as a part of the Industrial Revolution? Would the companies stream of products may be very different than what they are?

Raji Subramanian: My heart says, “Yes, they would.” Then it’s super important for me that as we go through the digital revolution, women are not just key players, as a part of this revolution, but all the builders, innovators, founders, entrepreneurs, and creators, because that’s when you know, diversity really breaks through all of the ceilings and breaks through all of the biases.

Heather Natour: Yes. I mean, yes. Absolutely, yes. More diversity on boards, we’re getting women in places where decisions are being made, even at the smallest level, your point about it being non-negotiable is I think about being in multiple technical meetings at Opendoor a week where there are multiple women and you don’t maybe notice it when they’re not there, but it makes a huge difference in how you come to work and how you contribute when you do have that. I’m interested as you reflect on your career journey, what is your advice to other female engineers or women in technical roles looking to take their career to the next level?

Raji Subramanian: Yes. And again, and this is something we’ve all asked ourselves and it’s so timely given where we are in the year today, the first thing that I have reflected on my career journey and I’ll also encourage all of us to reflect, visible versus invisible results. Again, two simple words.

Raji Subramanian: So a lot of times you’ll see that as we have done a lot of work and as women, after we put in a ton of effort, we actually feel that the results that we’ve delivered are invisible results.

Raji Subramanian: It’s important to make sure that as we are going through a career, we’re delivering visible results, results that are measurable in their impact. And the measure need not be just a number.

Raji Subramanian: It need not just be a metric quantified, it can be qualitative in terms of the impact that you had on a customer’s life, on a platform that you built, on a pattern that you created, or an innovation that you drove, or an impact to a P and L. It could be any of those.

Raji Subramanian: It’s super important to parcel out. If you look at 2021, it would be great if each of you look at what were the visible results and the invisible results, and where do you spend most of your time? So that’s one, the second we talked about goal setting earlier, I use that framework and I use that framework in most things I do in terms of goal setting.

Raji Subramanian: The three P framework that I called out earlier, even when I try to find a new job or things to do.

Raji Subramanian: The third thing I look for or the third thing that I did personally and I highly recommend is work with mentors who question and challenge you.

Raji Subramanian: Work with mentors who enable you to break through your blind spots, work with mentors who approach you with a growth mindset. I think we, as women need those type of mentors to keep pushing us beyond and enable us to adopt that growth mindset. And the last I would say is be authentic.

Raji Subramanian: This is something that I’ve had to do. And I’ve had to learn how to do, coming in culturally from in the workspace. I think we have to build a leadership style that is unique to us. And that is one thing that I would recommend. And it goes a long way once you reach that point.

Heather Natour: Yes. Those all resonate with me. And I love those challenging the status quo is something I learned from my father. And while it’s sometimes uncomfortable for others, it’s really served me well.

Heather Natour: And I think we’re running out of time, but I encourage people to tell us what advice has made the biggest impact in their career. In the chat, Raji and I will answer a couple questions there and post how you can get in contact with us. Raji, anything else you’d like to share before we say goodbye?

Raji Subramanian: No, again, the only thing I’ll kind of share is that feel free to connect with both Heather and me. Happy to talk about our experiences, happy to talk about the transformation that we’re bringing in with Opendoor, as well as we grow our teams.

Angie Chang: Thank you, Raji and Heather for all your insightful thoughts on technical leadership. That was a fascinating conversation. Thank you.

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Angie Chang: Our next session is a Strava coffee session. I think we’ll have to rename it up to, as Sukrutha said, chai, or other teas. We love Strava. So now let’s welcome Shailvi Wakhlu from Strava. She’s here to help us humble brag and advocate for ourselves.

Shailvi Wakhlu: Awesome, thank you so much for the introduction. Angie, let me share my screen. All right, hopefully you can all see that. Hi everyone, my is Shailvi Wakhlu. I go by the she-her pronouns and I’m the Senior Director of Data at Strava. Welcome to the Strava coffee break on the topic “How to humble brag effectively.”

Shailvi Wakhlu: If you want to get better at self-advocacy or know someone else who does, then I hope this talk resonates with you.

Shailvi Wakhlu: So first off I wanted to briefly cover what is self advocacy. It is speaking up for oneself and one’s interest. It’s a simple enough concept, but I found it to be very powerful for us to incorporate for our career success. Understanding, prioritizing and communicating our needs is how we grow ourselves and our careers.

Shailvi Wakhlu: So self advocacy is unfortunately not a skill that comes naturally to most people. Many folks, face difficulties in shining a light on their achievements or talking themselves up.

Shailvi Wakhlu: If that sounds like you, then you should know that you’re not alone. I think culturally, anything that remotely even resembles boasting can be considered a vice. And I also belong to one of those cultures that really encourages people to keep a very low profile as a norm

Shailvi Wakhlu: . Sometimes it’s for safety, sometimes it’s for acceptance and sometimes it’s purely out of habit. Women and marginalized genders also often receive direct and indirect feedback, “Do not be too loud and to focus on being a supporter rather than a promoter.”

Shailvi Wakhlu: Society in general also tends to really discourage self-promotion. Appearing, salesy or flashy often tends to have very negative connotations to it. Our brains have been programmed from society to sometimes just ignore messaging where our people are praising themselves.

Shailvi Wakhlu: And finally, usually at least for me, this has been true. It’s usually our own inner voice with whom we struggle to reconcile the desire that we have to be seen and heard, and to not be seen as bragging. And all of these in many other reasons can make self advocacy very hard.

Shailvi Wakhlu: So while it is hard, it’s still remains extremely important. And I’d like to say that advocating for ourselves is not bragging. In fact, it is a key skill, we all need to practice and learn to make sure that we are doing the right thing by our careers.

Shailvi Wakhlu: Self advocacy is absolutely crucial when it comes time to make more money, negotiate, better salaries. Because after all, how can someone pay you more than they think you are worth when you are the one responsible for telling them your worth.

Shailvi Wakhlu: Promotions also tend to be very heavily dependent on people, clearly articulating how they continue to add value to the business leaders who are in a position to sponsor or promote you, they often tend to need reminders of that.

Shailvi Wakhlu: If you’re a leader of a team or a project, your ability to get resources and head count often needs buy-in from superiors and peers alike who need to comprehend the value of what you and your team are doing.

Shailvi Wakhlu: Your ability to attract talent can really depend on how easy it is for you to convince someone that you’re working on something great. And it’ll be helpful to their career path as well.

Shailvi Wakhlu: Overall, I feel unless you get lucky, success really depends on your ability to make sure that people understand your value. So my pitch is, “Take that time to practice being comfortable, confident, and genuine and advocating for yourself.”

Shailvi Wakhlu: So many of you today in the stock are in the mid to senior part of your career. And I wanted to take this opportunity to plug that self-advocacy, isn’t something that only career professions need.

Shailvi Wakhlu: In fact, you are absolutely never done with self advocacy in your career. Even if right now you are in a stable situation, you’re successful in your role, know that situations can change any time with or without notice.

Shailvi Wakhlu: Maybe you currently have a good boss who’s an advocate for you, but bosses can change. If your current company and or your team supports you remember that can change too. Or maybe you switch something out, maybe you decide to switch companies or you get assigned to a new team.

Shailvi Wakhlu: So in that situation, you will lose access to some known situations that maybe you felt a little bit more prepared for, where you knew how to amplify your message.

Shailvi Wakhlu: Even if absolutely nothing changes, the fact remains that your legacy compounds. You cannot hope to rest on your past successes forever. And if you want your legacy and your impact to grow, you have to continue investing in your success to make sure that people don’t forget about it and make sure that people don’t overlook it.

Shailvi Wakhlu: And finally, this is an example that I often bring up that even CEOs need visibility. How else will you otherwise in that position, get funding, hire great people, support your employees, or get the best outcomes for shareholders? So just separating out that feeling, that you’re at the top of your career and you’re well respected doesn’t mean that you no longer have to invest in self-advocacy.

Shailvi Wakhlu: So with all of that in mind, how do we actually get better at self-advocacy?

Shailvi Wakhlu: I have three things to walk you through. We will first learn how to reframe our own internal narrative mental narrative. And we’ll walk through couple of examples. Then we reframe the external narrative, which is how we choose the right words.

Shailvi Wakhlu: And finally, we will practice, which is why my #humbleragchallenge comes in. So let’s examine some of our mental narratives that tend to hinder our self-advocacy.

Shailvi Wakhlu: The first example is “I am too busy for self-advocacy”.

Shailvi Wakhlu: How many of y’all feel that you just don’t have the time for a lot of things in your career leave alone self-advocacy? However, I feel that if you don’t make for self advocacy, you will hinder the progress you can make in your own growth.

Shailvi Wakhlu: Investing in your growth early is important, and it is essential. You don’t know what tomorrow holds and putting in the habits and processes in place today that might help you get to the next set of opportunities that you desire can really pay dividends when you need it.

Shailvi Wakhlu: Next example is that feeling of my talent to just speak for itself. And a lot of us have actually been told that if you do really good work, you will eventually be rewarded for it. Shine rightly and the world notices, but maybe, maybe people are just not in the same room.

Shailvi Wakhlu: So at the end of the day, if people can’t see something, they can’t acknowledge it. So we tend to assume that our talent will shine and everybody will know that we are great. But maybe everybody around us is really busy and they can’t keep track of the tiny details and examples of how you add value. So acknowledge that you need visibility, and it’ll be much easier to talk about your achievements.

Shailvi Wakhlu: Another mental narrative is that, as you get to more senior roles, the ambiguity increases, and that is true. Often, I think just the previous talk was talking about this, that sometimes there’s no defined part.

Shailvi Wakhlu: There’s no job description, there’s no… Especially for senior roles. And the implication is almost at a lack of defined path means you don’t need to focus on self-advocacy because everything is a little bit of a gamble.

Shailvi Wakhlu: And so focusing on your own visibility may not lead to predictable outcomes and may instead be a distraction. And to that, I say that self-advocacy is indeed taking that time to create your thoughts.

Shailvi Wakhlu: Write your own job description, define what success looks like and connect the dots on how it adds value to the company that you work for. The need for self-advocacy, doesn’t end just because there’s no defined playbook. It still needs intentionality and it still needs attention for you to move forward and grow, even if you’re not sure exactly what the destination is going to be.

Shailvi Wakhlu: And my final example for the mental narrative is that feeling that we have that hey, maybe celebrating wins is just… It’s flashy. It’s unnecessary. And maybe some of us find it inauthentic. However, here again, I say, and I especially say this to leaders that celebrations aren’t just for yourself. They are for absolutely everyone around you. Therefore, that colleague who’s struggling with their work.

Shailvi Wakhlu: Therefore, the people who are looking for their examples of success, or just your teammates, anybody who is involved with the project and anybody who’d like some validation that their work produced something that was good. You are essentially thanking the universe for that opportunity to produce value. And you’re expressing gratitude for that successful outcome. So you’re acknowledging the hard work behind it is going to help really boost everybody’s morale in the process.

Shailvi Wakhlu: So now we’ve covered a few of the mental narratives. We’re going to pivot to the external narratives. And once we feel comfortable in our own mind, that self-advocacy is the right thing to do.

Shailvi Wakhlu: We can focus a little bit more on improving the specific messaging that we use to talk to others. So I’m going to walk through an example of how you might choose to talk about a project that was just finished. That went well.

Shailvi Wakhlu: And there are obviously multiple ways that you could do this. So the default way you maybe… Maybe it’s not default for you, and that’s great. But maybe it’s just downplay it. Project was no big deal. Anybody could have done it. And that’s it. Then there’s the other extreme, which is that you brag about it, which you say, “I did the best job. Nobody else could have done it.” And that’s sort of the other extreme.

Shailvi Wakhlu: So here’s my version of it, which is the team came together to land an incredibly challenging project which also became a fun way to expand our skills. We pushed hard and were able to finish it in half the time that it was expected to take. So this is a mix of sharing a win, but with authenticity that translates into a humble brag.

Shailvi Wakhlu: So notice the keywords that I highlighted here, acknowledging that something was challenging and that you worked hard on it. It shows your ability to accept and shine on tough problems.

Shailvi Wakhlu: Highlighting that you’re capable of bringing together a team to actually collaborate and you are sharing credit for it. It shows important leadership qualities, including a measurable achievement provides something which is a tangible win for people to focus on.

Shailvi Wakhlu: And showing that you actually learned something and grew from it and had fun doing it. That just brings it all together to confirm that this was a natural fit for you. And you’d like some more opportunities like this in the future. So coming up with the right words is helpful, but you don’t need to overthink it.

Shailvi Wakhlu: If you sit down and think about the true feelings that you have about a success story, the words will come to you and your messaging will be authentic. This is just an example. So don’t try to retrofit every story into a success template. Just be genuine and talk about what you truly care about.

Shailvi Wakhlu: I think you’ll be humble bragging effectively in no time. So finally, no commitment is complete unless we figure out a way to go practice it so that it comes naturally. And for that, I have two simple challenges. If you’re new to this, you can start with something small and one is personal, one is public. It really depends on your comfort level.

Shailvi Wakhlu: So on the personal side, this is something you do for yourself. You can just start documenting your wins, make a habit of it. It doesn’t have to be something big, just anything that you’re proud of. Anything that you feel you hit some success on. It can be as simple as, “Hey, I connected two people and they made something else successful.” That’s a win.

Shailvi Wakhlu: So additional guidelines here is be specific so you remember the details and it’s easier to tie back that connection later on and do it with the intention that you will plan to use it for your next promotion. If not the specific example, then at least the themes that you come up with over time, and maybe you don’t end up sharing the list exactly. But it’s really helpful to have that place to reflect back on things that you do well on things that work for you.

Shailvi Wakhlu: And it also makes it easier for you to talk about your work and not blank on it if someone asks you questions about it. So my suggestion here is to do it at least weekly at the bare minimum. And I think it’ll go a long way in building confidence.

Shailvi Wakhlu: Next level is to go public. So whatever your team’s shared mode of communication is find one avenue that you’re comfortable with and post your achievements there. Make it into a team thing. Make it where you share learnings.

Shailvi Wakhlu: Do it at least once a month. And that’s a good way to get everybody involved. We used to definitely do this in one of my teams previously and everybody found it a good way to actually learn from it and just grow from it.

Shailvi Wakhlu: And yes, if you do decide to do this, please… If you do this on Twitter or LinkedIn, please tag me. I would absolutely love to hear about your personal success stories and celebrate with you and amplify you. Thanks all for listening.

Shailvi Wakhlu: I hope this was useful. You can follow me on social media if you’d like to stay in touch. And if you’re interested in the content that I share.

Shailvi Wakhlu: I am also releasing a book later this year on self advocacy and would love feedback on any of the subtopics that might be relevant to you. And finally, a big thank you to Angie and Sukrutha from Girl Geek X for hosting today. Thanks.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you, Shailvi. 

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Angie Chang: So our next session, I want to bring up a panel of three mid-to-senior technologists who changed jobs for a bigger role at another company. And they’re here to talk about how it’s a hot job market and how to know when it’s time to leave. This is very timely with the great resignation, or great reshuffling, you all hear about. And so now let’s welcome Aliza, Rocio and Sharon! And I’ll let you introduce yourselves.

Aliza Carpio: Hello everyone, and welcome to our session. I’d like to take a moment to recognize that we are all in challenging times. And for those of you out there with family, friends, and loved ones who are impacted by the conflict in Ukraine, our hearts and our thoughts are with all of you.

Aliza Carpio: Now, we hope that our story and the tips we’re going to share are helpful for you and we’ll inspire you as well. But before that let’s do some intros. We’ll start with Sharon.

Sharon Hunt: Hey everybody, my name is Sharon Hunt. I am the Head of Product at a company called Clovers. We’re fairly new. I’ve had a pretty, I would say eclectic career journey.

Sharon Hunt: So I’ve done everything from selling cars and bartending to spending the last 10 years in product management and in technology where I had the good fortune of meeting these two ladies, add into it first hand. Rocio, tell us about you.

Rocio Montes: Hi everyone. My name is Rocio Montes. I am a Senior Engineering Manager at GitHub. My team, that compute engine team powers, all the runners that provide the compute power to all of the actions workflows.

Rocio Montes: Like Sharon said, I have also recently switched jobs from Intuit to GitHub. And it was definitely a challenging decision and an emotional rollercoaster to really make that jump. But you grow and you challenge yourself. So here I am very happy with that. So we’re here to tell you all of about it.

Aliza Carpio: Rocio, what’s your fun fact?

Rocio Montes: My fun fact, you always get me on this one Aliza, I can lay on the beat for eight hours straight.

Aliza Carpio: That’s a good one. Hey, everyone, I’m Aliza Carpio, Director, Technology Evangelist at Autodesk. In my role, I get to work with teams and leaders from across the globe to amplify the engineering magic that’s happening at Autodesk and help build our tech story.

Aliza Carpio: Now my fun fact is that, and I think these ladies know, my favorite song to sing in karaoke, if you can get me to sing is Britney Spears “Hit Me Baby One More Time”. So for those of you out there that are Britney fan, I’m definitely with you. So we chose the title. It’s a hot market – do you stay or do you leave?

Aliza Carpio: Because as Rocio mentioned, each of us were faced with this question and the opportunity last year and the year before during the height of the pandemic. Now this pandemic accelerated existing trends in remote work, eCommerce and automation. And many as you all may have heard, even from Angie may have heard the term passive recruitment or job search because for technologists like yourselves, you probably are not having to pour too much energy in searching for that next opportunity.

Aliza Carpio: And I’m sure many of you out there, the opportunity is already knocking at your door. Sharon, let’s start with you.

Sharon Hunt: Yeah, it’s such an interesting time right now. In fact, that’s why we started Clovers because it’s such a candidate’s market. And a lot of companies just don’t know how to create a great candidate experience and that bleeds into creating a great culture, creating a great place where people feel like they can grow. A

Sharon Hunt: And if you really look at what’s going on right now, this whole era of the great resignation, it’s really highest among people between 30 and 45 years old, right in that middle career. And there’s a lot of theories about this. Now that there’s been some really definitive, causal factors there, but there are certainly some indicators. So the fact that it’s, mid-career definitely is a big indicator.

Sharon Hunt: And I think the fact that so much of technology now has opened up to remote work. It really just blew up the landscape of opportunities for people. Because you don’t have to think about, “Hey…” Especially for people with families, “Where can I travel? What’s close by? What’s convenient? How can I grow my career at a place that also lets me live my life?” A lot of that is now way more…

Sharon Hunt: There’s so many more opportunities to do that across the country and even across the world. So one thing I read it in Bloomberg recently actually, is that the number one factor for people, even companies is culture 12 times more likely than compensation? Which is really interesting, especially for us ladies out there.

Sharon Hunt: So I think there’s a lot of… I look around and look at my colleagues. I see the career shifts that people are making and I think there’s a lot of women, other folks as well, but especially women who feel like maybe they’ve reached a little bit of a ceiling at their current roles.

Sharon Hunt: And that’s baked into the culture to a certain degree. And company who are attracting that talent are going to win in the long run. And I really believe that’s a big driver for especially people are leaving. It’s that culture? It’s that feeling you want to grow? And finding that all of a sudden you’ve got way more opportunities than you’ve ever had before because of the nature of remote work. Rocio, what are some things that you’re seeing in the job market?

Rocio Montes: Oh man, Sharon, definitely. These are significant shifts. I also read that as many as 25% of workers may need to switch occupations than before the pandemic. Also saw an article from Hack Reactor where the demand of engineers will continue to increase due to these shifts, right? So it’s definitely a hot market out there. Things are changing.

Rocio Montes: And I have some friends and past colleagues like YouTube who are lending new opportunities, sometimes bigger ones, sometimes different ones. As for me, I recently moved to GitHub from Intuit. And this happened after eight years of being with the Intuit family.

Rocio Montes: And it was definitely a very big decision to make. Some of the things, and I’ll walk you through some of those motivators for me to switch, was that in the last road Intuit, I was reporting to the chief architect with Aliza focusing a lot on development productivity. We founded the open source office and started to kick off the inner source initiative.

Rocio Montes: And GitHub was at the center of both of those things. So for me, it was more of a natural, transition, because I started to get very passionate about all of the features that GitHub was releasing, getting involved with, GitHub as a maintainer, et cetera.

Rocio Montes: And when I saw the opportunity at GitHub as an engineering manager, it just made sense for me as the continuation of my career growth, the continuation of the journey I had been as an engineer.

Rocio Montes: So that was for me, right? Aliza and Sharon, what shifts did you make? And what elements do you think we need to consider when planning your next move?

Aliza Carpio: So you probably all heard that we all kind of came from Intuit. I also made a shift last year. I actually started at Autodesk late August of last year and I actually was seeking growth and learning.

Aliza Carpio: I had been in the company for a long time, started off as an engineer and did a lot of different roles, including product management, dev manager, and even marketing and what I ended up doing, and we’ll talk a little bit about, this is I did write my job description and I’ll tell you all about that.

Aliza Carpio: But my big thing that I’m going to say out there is a principle that I learned from a mutual manager that Rocio and I had, which was the chief architect. Where he always gave people the same advice, “When you were looking for that next role, make sure you are running to somewhere or to something versus away from something.” And it’s a big principle. Hey Sharon, I want to ask you what about you?

Sharon Hunt: Yeah, that’s a great principle, reflecting back on my own career journey for the last few years. When I left into it both of you were there as well. And I was really looking for more ownership as a product manager, those of you and the audience might commiserate with we’re a little bit of control freaks.

Sharon Hunt: We like to be in control of things. And I really wanted to own more strategy, more of the roadmap. And I just realized at a really large company like Intuit, that was going to be much harder to do in the time period that I was looking to get it done at. So I moved to a company called Housecall Pro really exciting, well established startup that was doing field service management work. Spoke to my soul because I come from a family of painters and landscapers and tree climbers and the whole blue collar scene.

Sharon Hunt: So I was building software for people that I love, but really, then was quickly promoted into director at that role and got to fully lead and owning the roadmap and realize what it meant to experiment in the product led space. And I fully felt like I realized what I was looking for in that position. Then I hit another little bit of a, I would say, not a ceiling, but the company shifted.

Sharon Hunt: We went into more operational mode we had product market fit. It was time to scale. And at that point we had been running very lean and we brought in more product management talent and the company wanted to bring in a VP that had gone through a period of massive growth before. Because there are certain lessons that you learn when you go through that if you haven’t been through it before you can’t bring to the table, which was quite fair.

Sharon Hunt: And I actually had a one-on-one with Aliza, because at that same time, my current opportunity fell into my lap as the Head of Product that a new startup. And I said, “Aliza, what should I do? How do I even navigate through this?”

Sharon Hunt: And she really encouraged me to write down all the things that I was looking for in my new role. And why I thought that, I was qualified to do it at Housecall Pro and really be transparent with my manager that time around what I wanted and why I thought I was a good fit.

Sharon Hunt: And he heard me, but I think he had already made his choice. But the exercise of doing that, just writing down what I wanted really codified in my mind what that was. And it helped me make that decision between, “Okay, do I stay here? And I’m going to learn going to continue to grow through a product position. That’s going to go through crazy growth or do I go back over here into a new opportunity to really build something from scratch, to establish processes, to establish leadership principles that I’ve sometimes felt were a gap in previous companies?”

Sharon Hunt: So writing it down really helped and what it made me realize, and this kind of goes to I think what you’re saying Aliza about running to versus away from something is, “What are your hygiene factors? Are you feeling like you’re not appreciated or you’re not paid well enough or you’re being mistreated in some way. If that’s the case, then you might be running away from a position – and that’s probably not a bad thing.

Sharon Hunt: Maybe that’s a toxic position for you and you deserve and belong to something new. But don’t let that make you underestimate or under serve yourself when you go to the next position, because you might not fully bake and understand what truly motivates you, what you really want out of your next role.

Sharon Hunt: And you might just jump on the next thing that at least meets your basic criteria. So it really helped me kind of codify what are my hygiene factors at my last position I felt like I was getting that. But what did, what did I want on top of that was going to help me to grow?

Sharon Hunt: So I would say a principle here is make sure that if you’re leaving your current role, because your basic needs aren’t being met either monetarily or from a respect position, don’t move to your next role just because if they meet those baseline criteria. Still understand, what on top of that you want, and then still aim for getting that full package in your next role.

Rocio Montes: Yeah, I think I would add again, I would go back to what, “What are you passionate about? What excites you in the morning?” To me, it was really clear year about what are some of the things and the features that I wanted to work with and how I was always trying to pull in GitHub features and trying to onboard to all the new features that you know were coming out and it was just that what motivate me…

Rocio Montes: What I realized that I was very passionate about that drove me to really find and to make the leap, to changing roles.

Aliza Carpio: Folks, this is really golden. Let me share a couple of things here. I love what you all are sharing and Sharon and Rocio please do add if I miss anything. But in that question around what elements do you need to think about or consider when planning their next move? Do you want to take that first one, Sharon, and I’ll take the second one?

Sharon Hunt: This is your journey. Take a moment to self reflect. Yeah, I think this kind of pairs with the last one, honestly. What is it that motivates you? It’s all kind of boils down to that. Are you motivated by trying to escape or are you motivated by trying to grow?

Sharon Hunt: Sometimes it’s a combination of the two, but don’t just escape if that’s what you’re trying to do, escape and grow at the same time. Why are you looking? What is it that is driving you out of your current position? Fully understand that.

Sharon Hunt: And then a click deeper really is once you understand what is driving you… Do you understand where that driver comes from? Is this something that you really want? You yourself as a fully formed human, or is it what you were told that you should want by your parents or by society, or by your significant other or your church or your religion?

Sharon Hunt: There’s so much of that influence that is imposed upon us from the outside, that it takes some really deep thinking to truly know what it is that’s driving you so that you can make sure that the next thing that you pick is going to really check those boxes in a deep way, in terms of motivation. So I’d say Aliza, that kind of combines…

Aliza Carpio: The one and three?

Sharon Hunt: Yeah.

Aliza Carpio: That second one I mentioned already around making sure that you don’t do a couple of things. That you avoid running away from something, but shift your mind to running to something thing. And then there’s this second one, which I actually got from Shannon Lietz. She’s VP of Security at Adobe. And I really love it when she asks me, “Are you letting your current job interfere with your career aspirations?”

Aliza Carpio: You might love what it is that you do, but you really need to also think about the fact that you own the destiny of your career. So think about what is it that you are aspiring to do or want to achieve and not let the current job interfere with that. There’s a lot more potentially that you could be doing to be more impactful. So thanks for that. I’m going to stop sharing and get back to our chat. Rocio, I know you were going to maybe have a story about a friend who reached out to you.

Rocio Montes: I wanted to share that I recently had a friend reach out to me because she was contacted by a recruiter and she wanted my advice about what are some of the things that she should consider when switching jobs? And I’m sure that both of you have advise that you could give us, right?

Rocio Montes: What are some thoughtful techniques in searching for the next role or your next organization? What are those things that we should take into account? I can start with one and obviously we all have a great value, a great worth. So look out for compensation. You want to grow, you want to make sure that all of your skills are getting compensated correctly.

Rocio Montes: Think about when you’re asking for your new offer, why are you leaving behind? If you have stocks that you’re leaving behind, really try to think about that monetary aspect, because obviously yes, we need to follow our passion, but we don’t leave out of love. There are bills to pay and things to buy. So it’s really good to sit down, look at numbers. And if you need advice on that, always try and find someone that could give you that advice for those calculations. Sharon, what do you think?

Sharon Hunt: Yeah, I think it got two pieces of advice. One goes back to what we were just talking about around really understanding your motivations. Actually came across a really great article a while back called How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) by a fantastic writer named Tim Urban. He runs a blog called Wait But Why. I highly recommend, its hysterical. But the article is really about deeply understanding what motivates you.

Sharon Hunt: And he has this concept called the yearning octopus, where sometimes you can have conflicting needs. Sometimes we want social status, but we also want to give back to humanity, but we also need to support our parents. So sometimes these things are really in conflict with each other. So really diving deep and articulating all those disparate needs. He breaks this down in a really wonderful framework. The blogs called Wait But Why? And the article is called How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) by Tim Urban.

Sharon Hunt: I really recommend it. It’s a bit of a read, but he actually provides a series of exercises to go through. I actually did it myself and it was one of the things that made me choose to lead my position at Intuit and really helped me understand what it was that drove me, which person was doing work that was more aligned with helping people that I loved, which is why I picked Housecall Pro, which built software, or like I said, for people that I care about.

Sharon Hunt: The other tip that I have is if you are thinking about doing something that is a little bit new, definitely go find someone that does that job and just if you’re able to shadow them, literally sit with them and see what their job is like.

Sharon Hunt: That might be a little tricky, but in lieu of that, at least have a deep conversation. Actually tell them to walk you through what their day was like. “Tell me what you did yesterday.”

Sharon Hunt: Ask them what their favorite parts about their job is and what their least favorite job parts are. And really do that a few times with folks that are in that position to get a deeper understanding of what the role is because your assumptions about the role might not actually be the reality. And so really getting that ethnographic connection with the person who’s doing the role might really have help you understand whether or not it’s going to meet those motivations that we just chatted about. So my [crosstalk].

Aliza Carpio: Sorry, I know we’re running at overload time because we have one more minute, but let me just squeeze this in.

Aliza Carpio: I do recommend that everyone write your own job description. What is it that you want to see in your own reality in what you want to become? And I will tell you right now that I have my role because I wrote my job description and I presented it to a couple of VPs in Autodesk. I also did the same exact thing in my last role at Intuit. And it will actually help you also find your ideal, not only target state, but your ideal job out there.

Aliza Carpio: Whether you’re looking at LinkedIn or just looking around and talking to people. And so we hope that these tips are great. We’d love for you all to connect with us. We’re out of time, but please to connect with us and let us know how we can help you.

Angie Chang: Thank you for sharing job search experience and strategies.

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