We have ADOPTED a public Oakland school starting in the pandemic 2021-2022 school year, serving students grades 6-12.
Our goal is to support students at Coliseum College Prep Academy in Oakland, California serving grades 6-12 with a computer science pathway, by providing access to role models from the professional community for these students.
If your employer wants to Adopt an Oakland School for the upcoming school year, please email osv@oaklandfund.org.
Girl Geek X CCPA Volunteering School Year in Review 2021-2022:
Thank you to our volunteers for August 2021 BACK-TO-SCHOOL support of CCPA teachers in East Oakland. Here’s a group pic we remembered to snag before we spent the afternoon helping teachers prepare their classrooms and hallways for back-to-school reopening! (Read more)
Thank you to our volunteers for November 2021 CAREER PANEL for CCPA students! Volunteers shared invaluable career advice with 11th and 12th graders about showing up, making connections, and more. (Read more)
Thank you to our volunteers for December 2021 support of CCPA senior capstone projects in Oakland. (Read more)
Thank you to our volunteers on April 26, 2022 who attended Day 1 of Senior Capstone Project Presentations. (Read more)
Thank you to our volunteers on April 27, 2022 who attended Day 2 of Senior Capstone Project Presentations. (Read more)
May 11, 2022 Teacher Appreciation Luncheon at Coliseum College Prep Academy in East Oakland with Anthony’s Cookies and Girl Geek X goodie bags. (More pictures)
This partnership is facilitated by Oakland Public Education Fund, a non-profit connecting groups with schools to make a positive impact on school culture and student achievement through relevant and meaningful volunteer projects.
November 12, 2021 (10am-12pm):CAREER PANEL – Girl Geek X volunteers from Amazon, Microsoft, Planet, and Afresh spoke about careers in tech during 11th and 12th grade seminar.
Tuesday or Wednesday, April 26-27, 2022 (4pm-6pm): SENIOR PROJECT PRESENTATION – The school would like to invite as many volunteers that are interested in attending and providing feedback. The students voiced that they enjoyed having professional feedback and this is the perfect opportunity! Give crucial feedback on students’ Senior Capstones (apps that address a need in the community).
Wednesday, May 11, 2022:TEACHER APPRECIATION – Girl Geek X isbuying lunch for educators to say thank you for all that they do. We also assembled goodie bags for the educators, with supplies for the classroom and self care.
In the “More About You” section, it says “Choose the Option that Best Describes You”. Volunteers should select “Adopt an Oakland School Partner“.
Once you click that, another question pops up asking “Where do you work / where are you affiliated?”. Volunteers should write “Girl Geek X“
Look out for an e-signature email (subject line “Verify: Signed Response for Form “One-Time Volunteer Registration”) and you have to sign that form as Covid-19 liability waiver.
“We wanted to host a fun office event, and also give our employees an opportunity to do some public speaking in a really safe, supportive environment. They had so much fun. It was such a great event!” said CTO Heather Rivers, who leads engineering, product, design, and security at Mode. Hiring and recruiting talent is one of her priorities as an engineering leader in the San Francisco Bay Area, and she attributes Girl Geek Dinner as influential to multiple engineering hires!
Company: Mode (Industry: B2B software, Employees: 100-500)
Funding Stage: $46.4M total raised – Series C (2019)
Event Capacity: 130 (Tickets Sold: 271)
Successful Hiring: 2 (1 sourced, 1 influenced within 4 months post-event; expecting more long-term)
Mode CTO Heather Rivers sponsored the Mode Girl Geek Dinner with objectives in mind: “Get our name out there, get brand exposure, do a really fun event, have the community here in our office, etc. It was a great opportunity to showcase our culture! We expect it to pay off longer term. A couple years later, these attendees will remember being in our office for this great event and they’ll come back to work with us, or they’ll go out and tell friends about us.”
How Girl Geek X partnership fit into the bigger recruiting & inclusion strategy
“It was great for engineering — and not just engineering, but employer brand awareness. Hiring in technology is competitive here in the San Francisco Bay Area, so we always have to be doing more — and we’re always trying new stuff to get our name out there and get candidates engaged,” said CTO Heather Rivers about how Girl Geek X contributed to Mode’s successful engineering recruiting plan.
Advice for folks PLANNING a Girl Geek Dinner
“Invest in the talks and the event experience! If we had thrown it together last minute, we may not have gotten nearly as much out of it, and folks may not have been as interested in following up to learn about the roles we’re hiring for. We created a lot of community goodwill with attendees who recognized the effort we put into making it a great experience,” said Mode CTO Heather Rivers.
The Mode Girl Geek Dinner was rewarded with high attendee rating, and earned rave reviews for excellent content.
Advice for women ATTENDING a Girl Geek Dinner
“Get to know the people there. Make a point to talk to speakers and employees. Make connections! We invited attendees in our hiring pipeline (women who were considering joining the team, or even who we were just hoping to influence to apply). One signed after the dinner, and it’s not clear she would have signed if she hadn’t experienced the event. Another candidate who heard about us from the Girl Geek Dinner was hired as well. She is now an engineer at Mode!” said CTO Heather Rivers after the Mode Girl Geek Dinner yielded two successful engineering hires.
Girl Geek XMode = increased employee morale!
“An important side benefit or happy accident: our Girl Geek Dinner was a fun internal event!It was great for morale-building and reinforces with the team that we’re part of the community here at Mode, not isolated. It was great for retention. People were thrilled with it. Overall, it was a great experience! I’m already recommending it to everyone I know. You should host one!” encouraged Mode CTO Heather Rivers.
Angie Chang: I want to say hi to everyone. My name is Angie Chang, the founder of Girl Geek X…
Morgan Cole: And welcome to Girl Geek X Opendoor Dinner! I’d like to spend just a few minutes chatting with you all about how you can start or continue cultivating a successful career by prioritizing your own self-awareness…
Heather Natour: One of the things I love about Opendoor is seeing that demonstration of leadership every day with every single person I work with. And I’ve personally seen that leadership demonstrated by these particular panelists…
Annie Tang: …Really keeping in mind that execution matters. It’s not all about like coming up with cool ideas. We need to keep a high bar for what we do.
Maggie Moreno: There’s no shortage of good ideas, only people to make those ideas a reality…
Amy Yang: I’m going to give you a flavor of the type of problem and a project data scientists are working with at Opendoor. Specifically, this is a multiple hypothesis testing problem…
Sumedha Pramod: I’m going to start with an opener. We actually filled out a variety of customer experiences and dashboards, which spanned from educating the customer on buying and/or selling their home, all the way through to actually digitally closing on their home…
Angie Chang: Thank you all for sharing your insights and your journeys with us! Really enjoyed all the talks and the conversation about this is what leadership looks like. Cool. We are going live with our Opendoor Girl Geek Dinner. I want to say hi to everyone. I see people are joining us. Can you chat to us where you’re coming in from. I’m coming in from Berkeley, California. How about you, Sukrutha?
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi everyone. I’m Sukrutha. I’m dialed in from Yosemite this weekend.
Angie Chang: Cool. Awesome. Quick intros. My name is Angie Chang, the founder of Girl Geek X. When we started Girl Geek Dinners over a decade ago, I was the only female engineer at a startup, and I really just wanted to meet other women in tech.
Angie Chang: I started asking companies to host Girl Geek Dinners, so that we could go to different companies and hear from the women on stage about what they’re working on. And then also be able to meet other amazing people like yourselves, which we’ll be doing after the talks. I was able to meet people like Sukrutha. So Sukrutha, why don’t you just tell us a bit about you and what you’re up to?
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah. I met Angie because I was looking for things to do outside of work and that’s how I ended up finding out about Girl Geek Dinners and Angie. Honestly, I think everybody is craving a network now more than ever, and this is part of why us doing it virtual makes it possible. We encourage you to have your respective company that you work at to sponsor a Girl Geek Dinner. We hope that at some point in the near future, we’ll be able to see you all in real life.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: By day, I also work at a large company, namely Salesforce, and we’re also transitioning back into the office. The way people are working right now is so different. We can work from anywhere, so we should also be able to network from anywhere. So yeah, I look forward to tonight’s content and the speakers are all amazing. Over to you, Angie.
Angie Chang: While we wait, we have a few minutes to say some things. I wanted to quickly say some things that we’ve done since we started. We have a virtual conference every International Women’s Day called Elevate and it’s March 8th. And it will be again, March 8th, in 2022. And all the talks are recorded and hosted at youtube.com/girlgeekx – you can actually find all those conference talks, all the Girl Geek Dinner events, and tonight’s talks. If you have to drop off, go make dinner, we totally understand that. Everything’s available on YouTube later in case you can’t stay for the entire hour or two.
Angie Chang: And pro tip, look at the playlists, because they’re actually categorized into different things like career journeys, management, engineering, machine learning, and you can dig into what you’re interested in and see what other girl geeks have spoken about over the years on those topics.
Angie Chang: We also have a podcast. So if you like to listen, like I do, we have two seasons, I believe, of podcast and we have another season coming out this summer, so stay tuned for that. We’ll have some new content coming out.
Angie Chang: And then we also are going to be contributing to our local community here in the San Francisco Bay Area and adopting a middle school/high school and really contributing to enriching and helping support the students there who are interested in STEM. So stay in the lookout for news on that.
Angie Chang: That’s another opportunity where we can see you and hopefully engage you with some students and get them inspired to stay in STEM. So a quick note, I want to kind of say, who is here tonight. I looked at our attendee list about half an hour ago, and I saw that we have about 45% of you, have over a decade of work experience.
Angie Chang: Often when I go to networking events, people always say everyone’s junior or they just got out of college or they’re looking for their first job out of a bootcamp. That might be true, that might not be true, but also at the same time, there’s a lot of really, I would call mid-career people, who are out there, and continue to come back to these events, so I really say thank you for coming back! And continuing to dig in and learn more about companies and the people that work at them.
Angie Chang: And I’m really excited that tonight we are going to be listening to the women at Opendoor. If you haven’t heard of Opendoor, it is a real estate startup company and I’m sure the women will be talking more about what they’ve been working on at Opendoor, so I’m going to turn it over to them, the experts.
Angie Chang: Our first speaker, the keynote speaker, is Morgan Cole. And Morgan Cole joined Opendoor in 2017, where she’s helped many, many customers transition to their dream homes and served as a people leader for sales and support. And she’s currently supporting learning development team as a senior trainer and curriculum specialist with an emphasis on instructional design, internal partner relations, and creative problem solving across multiple organizations. So when she isn’t navigating the world of L and D, you can find her spending time with her sour patch, pup, Arthur. So welcome Morgan.
Morgan Cole: Hello. Thank you so much for the warm welcome, Angie. I really appreciate that. I am going to go ahead and share my screen and then we’ll go ahead and get rolling. All right. Can you see that okay?
Angie Chang: Yes.
Morgan Cole: Very good. All right. Hello everyone. And welcome to Girl Geek X Opendoor Dinner! My name is Morgan Cole, and I’d like to spend just a few minutes chatting with you all about how you can start or continue cultivating a successful career by prioritizing your own self-awareness.
Morgan Cole: Now, before we dive in, I should share just one quick tidbit about myself. I am a words of affirmation girl. It is the love language that rivals all others, in my book. So that said, I am going to need your help just to make sure we’re all on the same page this evening. So if you all are ready to kick off this conversation, just take two seconds for me and go ahead and type the word yes, Y-E-S in the chat box at the bottom of your screen, just let me know you’re ready to rock and roll. Go ahead and type Y-E-S. Oh, they are trickling in. I like it. Very good. Very good. That was a test, and you all pass with flying colors. So let’s do it.
Morgan Cole: So a few years ago, Dr. Tasha Eurich, who is a best-selling author, she’s a psychologist and founder of the Eurich Group, her and her team, they conducted a study with nearly about 5,000 participants. And the purpose of this study was to better understand the meaning of self-awareness. Here we are. The research team’s findings, they were actually pretty astounding, they learned that there are actually two types of self-awareness. The first one is internal self-awareness and the second is external self-awareness. Now, the thing to note here is that these are not mutually exclusive, meaning it is possible to possess one or both types.
Morgan Cole: Now, before I dive into each type of awareness and the role that it plays in our professional and in our personal lives, I am curious to know your thoughts on this next question. So if you look on your screen here, you’ll see the question reads, how many people do you believe are actually self-aware to some degree? Do you think it’s A, 10 to 15% of people, B, 15 to 20%, C, 20 to 30%, or D, 30 to 40%? If you had to guess, how many people do you think are actually self-aware? Go ahead and type in A, B, C, or D in the chat box for me and let me know your thoughts.
Morgan Cole: Oh, a handful trickling. It’s a mixed bag. Very good. Thank you all so much for the responses. I appreciate that. So while you all are still continuing to put in your choices, I’ll tell you the not so fantastic news is that the average human believes they’re self-aware, but only 10 to 15% of those people actually fit the criteria.
Morgan Cole: The good news is that self-awareness is a learned behavior. What that means is that we can strive to inch just a little bit closer to fully understanding how we tick and what truly motivates us and how to dissect the depth of our perceptions of the world around us. And it also aids in stronger leadership competencies too.
Morgan Cole: Going back to the two types of self-awareness I spoke about a few seconds ago, let’s explore internal self-awareness first. Now internal self-awareness, it represents how clearly we see our own values and passions and aspirations, your thoughts, your feelings, your impact on others.
Morgan Cole: Studies have shown that this type of awareness correlates with higher job and relationship satisfaction, as well as just general happiness. Meanwhile, external self-awareness, it represents understanding other people’s perceptions of our value systems and our thoughts or our feelings, right?
Morgan Cole: Essentiall,y folks that drift toward external self-awareness, they typically understand how others view them and they’re more skilled at showing empathy and taking in other people’s perspectives as a result.
Morgan Cole: The takeaway here is that it’s most impactful to try to strike a balance between both subtypes of awareness, rather than over-indexing on one or the other, because here’s the truth, being crystal clear about who you innately are, your own behavior patterns, and what you need and want is form of leadership.
Morgan Cole: Self-awareness – it catapults your ability to clearly articulate your desires and ask for help in forging the appropriate path to get you there. This next slide, it’s a quick map that actually breaks down four self-awareness archetypes, which is basically how we present to the world based on the depth of internal or external self-awareness that we possess. I’m going to save you a bit of time, and I’m just going to give you a quick overview of these four categories. No need to read through each line.
Morgan Cole: The top left quadrant, it shows how high internal self-awareness and low external self-awareness is typically referred to as introspective. It depicts people who clearly understand themselves, but they rarely challenge their own views. And in some cases, this particular quadrant can limit their interpersonal relationships.
Morgan Cole: Now, the bottom left quadrant symbolizes seekers. These are folks with low internal and external awareness. And people that are currently navigating this quadrant, they might be in a state of self-discovery and may perhaps be a bit unsettled or in a state of flux in their personal or professional lives. Now going over to the bottom right quadrant, low internal and high external awareness, those are telltale signs of a people pleaser. This means that someone may be hyper-focused on how other people view them, sometimes to the detriment of their own personal or professional contentment.
Morgan Cole: And in many instances, folks that work through this category, they’re known to make decisions that are not always in service of their own success. And in some respects, it can be considered a self-saboteur. And last, but certainly not least, at the top, right quadrant, that depicts high internal and external awareness, which insinuates that a person is keenly aware about themselves or the external environment and they value candid feedback from other people. There was a study specifically from Gallup that show people in this particular category are generally proven to be good leaders in a plethora of environments because they intentionally seek out balance and inter and intra personal skills. So those are the four archetypes.
Morgan Cole: Now with those four archetypes in mind and in the spirit of bravery and transparency and leadership, I would love for you all to just take a few seconds, just to think about which one of those four categories you believe you are currently in, in your career. Go ahead and just write it down on a sticky note, or perhaps the note section on your phone or a piece of scratch paper, whatever you have nearby in your home. And this is only for your personal use. But take a look at those four categories and jot down which category you believe you’re currently in. Now, I wouldn’t ask you all to do anything that I wasn’t willing to do. So in my case, I’m actually going to share my self-awareness experience aloud. So full transparency, I toggle between being aware and the people pleaser. I do.
Morgan Cole: And I’ll share an example that clearly depicts this. Two of my former leaders at Opendoor, they taught me very early on in my career that in order to gain sustainable success, it was going to be my responsibility to always ask questions, to always raise my hand for help and to speak up and finish what I started. But here’s the only problem with that, I interpreted most of those tasks as signs of weakness, almost like a bird’s eye view of my professional inadequacies or inefficiencies.
Morgan Cole: And let me just tell you this, thank goodness for patient and nurturing leaders, because it took about two years for me to really get over this hump. And while it sounds a little half witted for me to say now, I truly believed asking questions or raising my hand for help would inadvertently highlight the things that I had not yet mastered. And my aha moment was, “That’s the point, Morgan. That’s the point.” I needed to acknowledge the things that I had not mastered because you can’t fix what’s hidden and you can’t practice what you refuse to acknowledge.
Morgan Cole: So when I finally came to terms with what was holding me back, myself, I held onto this quote from Thomas Edison that I love, and it reads, “Having a vision for what you want in life is not enough. Vision without execution is hallucination.” So while I could go on and on about this topic for days, I do know that time is of the essence, but I want to leave you all with a parting gift. So I challenge each of you to take about 30 seconds, and I want you to recall a book or an author or a podcast or perhaps maybe even an article that has been especially helpful in building your leadership skills or self-awareness or interpersonal skills, anything that has helped you in your career.
Morgan Cole: Go ahead and take a few seconds to just think of that one resource, or maybe there’s a few of them that you always go to when somebody asks you for a recommendation. And once you have that resource in mind, I would love it if all of you can go ahead and type it in the chat box below for me. And while you all are typing and putting in your resources, I’m going to share three books that have been especially impactful for me.
Morgan Cole: Now, the first one is called The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. It’s really a good book about getting out of your own way. And it was really helpful for me about a year and a half ago. The second one is a person that we all know and love, Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead. It’s a classic. I would venture to say reading it once a year is always a good idea. I always get gems from Dare to Lead. And the last book that I loved is actually called Get Over It! by Iyanla Vanzant. It’s a really great self-help book that talks from a professional and a personal standpoint about removing yourself from yourself, so that you can present your best self when you are in a professional setting. So just to recap, my top three books, The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks, Dare to Lead by Brene Brown, and then Get Over It! by Iyanla Vanzant.
Morgan Cole: Now, let me see what you all have in the chat box here. I’ve got a couple coming in, The Power of Gentleness. Ooh, very good. Thinking Fast and Slow. Thank you all. Continue to go ahead and put them in as you see fit. And as books and articles come to mind, please continue to trickle them in for me. This is actually my first time reading about some of these titles. So thank you. Thank you to everybody who’s sharing so openly. This chat is chock-full of resources, and it’s an endless gift to each of us. There’s an African proverb that says, if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. And tonight’s conversation and your willingness to offer resources to cultivate your peers will continue to build an equitable bridge between different ethnicities, self identified genders, and neurological differences in this ever evolving world of business.
Morgan Cole: So take that sticky note or that note on your phone with your self-awareness type on it that I mentioned earlier, and the plethora of resources that you now have in this chat box, and I would love for all of you to use it as a first step to discovering how you can continue to evolve into the best version of yourself in business and in life. So thank you all so much for your open hearts and your listening ears and collaboration and huge thanks to Girl Geek team for cultivating a platform that acknowledges and celebrates women in tech. I am so, so appreciative.
Morgan Cole: For our next speaker, I would love to introduce the one and only Annie Tang. Annie is a Senior Design Manager for Seller at Opendoor where she works on drastically simplifying the home selling experience. And in her time at Opendoor, Annie has worked on designing various aspects of the Opendoor consumer experience like trade-ins, buying and mortgages, but outside of that, she loves to hang out with her sweet pup. So without further ado, Annie, I’m going to pass it off to you.
Annie Tang: All right, here we go. Sorry. I don’t use Zoom every day. Oh my gosh, Morgan. That was such an amazing and inspiring talk. This is actually not my first time hearing it from Morgan, but actually I always feel inspired the second time around too and it really got me thinking about the internal self-awareness piece, especially because I think as we think about self-awareness, it’s easy to think about the external piece, at least for me. And so this really got me thinking about the internal piece. With that, I’ll transition over to my talk for the day and that is about design and strategy at Opendoor. So like Morgan said, I’m the senior design manager for Seller. Seller is one of our teams here at Opendoor and I manage the team of designers that work on that experience for our customers.
Annie Tang: A little bit about me. I started out at architecture, so did not study UX design at all. And worked at a couple of various larger scale companies before I found my way to Opendoor. And the reason why I joined Opendoor about four and a half years ago was really I wanted to work on a very complex real-world problem. And at the time, it was a pretty small startup and I was really excited by the opportunities that it gave.
Annie Tang: But most importantly, I was really excited to design for online and offline experiences where I wasn’t really selling an app or an interface, but I was actually thinking through selling a service that included both the digital experience and a real world component to it, and that felt really exciting to me.
Annie Tang: And so today, I’m going to talk to you a little bit about design and before I get into it, I wanted to get a signal maybe in the chat, you can put it in the chat if any of you guys have been watching Mythic Quest, it’s been a favorite around our house lately. Angie definitely has. There’s a couple other people. I personally am loving it. My husband and I really love to watch this show. But one gripe, I will say, that I do have about this is that it really centers around this myth of the creative genius where you’ve got this creative director who over the course of the night comes up with these amazing visions for the new game and the art director and team just creates it and there’s no research or anything and makes for great TV!
Annie Tang: But unfortunately that is not really how design actually works in real life. And so over the course of designing and my design career, what I’ve realized is core for design and for product design actually, and creating products is that the genius-ness, the coming up with the ideas isn’t actually the hard part.
Annie Tang: And it’s a good thing and a bad thing. It means that even if you feel like you’re not an ideas person and you don’t have that, it’s not the end-all be-all to being a designer and also at the same time, being a designer doesn’t mean that you’re just the one coming up with ideas and other people execute.
Annie Tang: A lot of being a designer is validating the idea, effectively communicating across the company and figuring out how to build it out. And so I’m going to go over that little bit with a two-part agenda.
Annie Tang: I’ll talk through some of the principles that we have within design team at Opendoor that help guide us to make sure that we’re really being diligent about how we design for our customers. And then I’ll also walk through a case study for what we did for our Seller experience last year where we designed the experience end to end when COVID hit and really helped our customers figure out a way to sell their home faster and on their own time.
Annie Tang: Principle number one that I have with our team is we always start with research, we never forget the data. Every idea should be backed by reasons why people’s lives will be better with it. What we do is we spend a lot of time talking to our customers, our users, to discover problems and validate possible solutions before we even get into any ideating phase. It’s really important for us to really empathize with our customers and really understand what those needs are.
Annie Tang: A couple of ways that we do this, at a high level is qualitative research and quantitative research. On the qualitative level, that’s really talking to our customers, doing user interviews. An insight that we might get out of qualitative research could be something like I have here, which is, meet Linda. Linda’s looking to sell her home and buy a new one. She is completely overwhelmed with the process of coordinating two transactions to line up her move, and that’s the buy and sell transactions.
Annie Tang: We’re talking to customers and really getting at what is really difficult for them in their process. Quantitative research is really about sizing this opportunity. So it could amount in something like this, like Linda, 70% of home sellers in the United States are simultaneously buying and selling a home at the same time. This basically tells us this is a real need. And actually, a ton of people are experiencing this need. And so that really centers around a problem that we can obsess over then that we can ideate upon. So the second principle that we really adhere to is first visualize the experience, not just the UI.
Annie Tang: I’ve worked with tons of designers over my career, designers junior and senior. I’ve seen so many folks, when we get a new prompt, or we get a new idea, we immediately hit the pixels and we design out a shiny experience, and it’s really, really amazing.
Annie Tang: We forget that actually the customer needs to be the star of the story. It’s not about the UI. And so what we really emphasize is when we start thinking about new ideas or solving problems, we think about the story, we think about the customer and how they experience the flow from end to end. And sometimes when we do storyboards like this, sometimes we do flow charts, but it’s really about putting the customer at the forefront of the story first and then the UI and the pixels fall to support that.
Annie Tang: Here’s an example of some work that we do when we put together flows and comps. You’ll see that we have the digital experience, but also first, we have images that support kind of telling a story of what happens in real life. We’ve got text updates and someone on the couch receiving them, we’ve got a walkthrough prep and imagining that a customer is cleaning their home and getting ready for a walkthrough before they log onto their mobile app to do that walk through. Really putting it situational with the designs is really core to how we try to think about designing new products.
Annie Tang: And then the last principle that we have is really that execution matters and we sweat the details. Again, design isn’t just about the idea and the strategy, equally important is the craft and the execution. Actually, a lot of times what I’ve seen is the final idea that gets executed might not be the most novel thing, but if we execute it really well and really diligent about it, and we track it, and we learn from it, that’s really what makes a product successful. What we really enforce is every detail, every pixel of experience matters, not just the strategy, also exactly how we execute it so that we’re delivering a high quality experience to our end customers.
Annie Tang: With those principles, I’m going to walk you guys through a tactical case study to kind of bring this to life and show you guys at a high level how we go about big design projects at Opendoor. What this case study is at a high level, I’m going to walk you through how we ended up designing a centralized dashboard for our Opendoor experience, where the design team created a vision to unify several parts of our experience, which guided a lot of the product roadmap throughout 2020.
Annie Tang: Starting with the problems and the research. What did we find? In 2019, throughout the course of the year, what we found is that our experience that Opendoor was just really disjointed. Customers were telling us that they were getting dead ends, that there was a lot of long wait times in between parts of the experience, and one thing that we give to our customers is they come to us and we give them an offer on their home.
Annie Tang: Starting with the problems and the research. So what did we find? So in 2019, throughout the course of the year, what we found is that our experience that Opendoor was just really disjointed. Customers were telling us that they were getting dead ends, that there was a lot of long wait times in between parts of the experience, and one thing that we give to our customers is they come to us and we give them an offer on their home. There was a really long wait time and they didn’t know what was coming up next. There was a lot of scheduling coordination going on. There’s a lot of things happening and a lot of dead ends and people didn’t really know what the next step was, and that was really impacting our customer experience.
Annie Tang: At the end of the 2019, what we did is we got together a group of cross-functional leaders, PMs, designers, engineers, and operators and we did a sprint over the course of a week. What we really wanted to do was figure out a strategy to solve those problems that we have identified from our research team and try to help to come up with a visualization of an end state, a future state that we want to aim towards by the end of the year that would solve all the identified problems that we had, and that would hopefully guide our work. And that way we can break it out into chunks that we can kind of slowly build towards over the course of the year.
Annie Tang: And the output of that sprint, what we created was a single narrative for that in-state. So we actually did, was we created a deck that included pieces like the images that we see on the right where we actually just laid out a story for our customer, Jill, who was looking to buy and sell, and we put together a couple screens, but really focusing on the story and how she feels and what she’s interacting with. We created this vision deck, and we actually tested a couple of these high-level concepts with potential customers.
Annie Tang: What we aimed to do is we really want to show strong concepts that were new to the experience that we could refine at a later time, but it was really about thinking about this new experience for our customer (Jill) that would solve all of her needs by the end of the year.
Annie Tang: A couple of the big ideas that came out of this was the idea for the Opendoor dashboard where we would centralize all of these disjointed experiences into one place where our customers can come back to see what’s next.
Annie Tang: But a couple of different ideas too, was like this idea of an instant offer. Previously we were having customers wait 24, 48 hours. What if we can give them an instant offer? As they were telling us information about their home, we can update their offer live.
Annie Tang: What if we could give them clear milestones? We always internally call it pizza tracker kind of like the Domino’s pizza tracker, but what if we could make it super clear like that for every stage of this buying and selling process on their dashboard?
Annie Tang: Another big pain point was that customers were having to schedule these inspections and figure out how to line up having people come to their homes. What if we leverage technology and help customers do self guided inspections where they could just upload a couple of photos of their home and we could do the inspection without having to actually go into their home?
Annie Tang: All of these ideas culminated into this vision deck and what was really cool that came out of it, is once we had an aligned vision where we were wanting to go towards for the end of the year, we could then formulate a roadmap and piece off different projects that each team would then take to work towards that vision. And we could get really tactical and figure out what the right way to execute towards it would be.
Annie Tang: And the great thing about this is that the sub teams then had a more or less unified idea of where we wanted to head towards and build towards for the year. So these are just some screens about how we sweated the details. We started from each project then, went through various rounds of research and low fidelity mocks on the left side to high fidelity mocks in the right side. Ultimately, whittling down to one experience that we ultimately shipped. I have Q and A on here, but we’re actually going to save Q and A until the very end, but that’s it on an example of how we design at Opendoor, both on a principle level and also in terms of case study.
Annie Tang: And with that, I’m going to introduce Amy. Amy is a Senior Data Scientist on the advanced analytics team at Opendoor. Her responsibilities include defining and leading pragmatic, casual learning practice at a company level using advanced experimentation and decision science techniques. So welcome Amy.
Amy Yang: Hi everybody. First, thank you, Annie, for the great showcase of all the cool design work your team have been working on. I’m a senior data scientist at Opendoor. I’m going to give you a flavor of the type of problem and project data scientists are working with at Opendoor. Specifically, this is a multiple-hypothesis testing problem. As you all know, this multiple-hypothesis testing problem means when we do more statistical tests, we’re more likely to make a type one error, which is a false positive discovery.
Amy Yang: Here is an illustration where we test 20 kinds of colors of different colors of jellybeans and how they show a correlation with acne. One out of the 20 tests will show a significant correlation, even though it’s purely out of random noise. That’s telling us whenever we do statistical tests, we want to control the overall type one error rate in case there is cumulative inflation by… The more tests we do, the more likely we are going to see a significant result.
Amy Yang: At Opendoor, the problem came up frequently specifically for product improvement, sometimes we want to track multiple outcomes of interest, not just one. When we want to evaluate the effect of certain product change, long-term or short-term outcomes, we are encountering this problem. Or if we want to dissect the data set into multiple subgroups and then do a statistical test within each subgroup, we are encountering the same problem.
Amy Yang: Sometimes we want to run an experiment with multiple treatment groups, not just one case which is one control group., where we have multiple treatments, we want to test each one compared to the other one, which one give us a [inaudible]. So other scenario we’ll generate this multiple hypothesis testing problem. If you look at the literature, you will find out statistically, there are ways to control this type of type one error rate inflation by adjusting your p-value.
Amy Yang: For example, some common measure you will see are Bonferroni corrections or a Holm’s method, false discovery rate control. Those are all thoroughly researched statistical methodology to control this problem. However, practically we have some objections when using this type of statistical method.
Amy Yang: People will say p-value adjustments are actually pretty arbitrary by the number of tests we are going to consider. How do you decide what’s the correct number of tests we are doing to adjust? Should we adjust tests we have done in the past? Should we adjust tests have been done in other teams but not specifically our teams.
Amy Yang: This number becomes very arbitrary and sometimes people will use this arbitrary concept to falsely adjust the total number of tests. The other objection is when we reduce the type one error, we are inherently increasing our type two error rate, which means we don’t have enough power to detect a significant true result which also means we are going to increase our total sample set.
Amy Yang: To solve this controversial problem as a data scientist, we come up with a very practical recommendation and strategies not only for researcher and the data scientists, but also for leaders and stakeholders who are going to review and read those report.
Amy Yang: For example, we would recommend not just focus on interpreting the p-value part, but also focus on the true magnitude or the effect size of the finding from the data. Also, we want to pay attention to the quality of the study and the data set.
Amy Yang: Focus on more from the design and the data quality side of the report and the study, not just purely based on the p-value from the study. For researcher and the data scientist, we come up with a set of statistical methodology recommendation, for example, when handling correlated outcome or metrics.
Amy Yang: We have this index method that can utilize the correlated information from multiple outcomes. Try to aggregate the common information and reduce the type one error rate, or we have this Bayesian multilevel modeling method. Completely move away from the frequent test p-value based decision making process and move to a more Bayesian probabilistic recommendation system.
Amy Yang: Practically, we also give recommendations. One of my favorite recommendation is rewrite the error rate into family-wise error rate control system based on theoretical related test groups. Let’s say you have two set of tests. Three tests, all measuring user satisfaction. You may have different metrics, but you are going to run three tests, they are all follow the user satisfaction category. You have another set of tests which are testing the total error rate or page load speed, which can fall into the safety metrics category. In this case, instead of submitting the total error rate across all the tests equally, you can divide them by the two family. So each family can share their own overall error rate.
Amy Yang: Now that’s just one project data scientists are working on at Opendoor. I also want to use this opportunity to introduce some of the other projects data scientists work with at Opendoor. Why is Opendoor investing so much on data quality and data rigorous and that data science role? It’s because Opendoor business is really unique and it’s very complex.
Amy Yang: If you think about housing transaction, it’s very important, and maybe you only do one or two housing transactions in your whole life. It’s very complex, the transaction process. Second challenge is our data is super sparse. Due to it’s a rare event, we don’t have repetitive interaction with a customer. Sometimes we only serve the customer once or twice in their whole lifetime. It brings a lot of analytical and statistical challenge. We don’t have the luxury of the e-commerce or internet type of traffic.
Amy Yang: A lot of the decision we are making need to depend on statistical influence and statistical expertise at Opendoor. The last point is optimization. We want to produce the best user customer experience with constrained amount of time and constrained cost. We want to work within limited costs and trying to optimize within the constraint and the produce the best customer experience.
Amy Yang: I’m going to share with you some other typical projects our data scientist team work with, for example, in the buyer team, we study the local housing demand and the price elasticity, and we feed that information to our resale pricing team in order to better or more accurately price the resell price for the home we acquired.
Amy Yang: In the seller team, we try to target specific seller group and provide more customized seller experience by serving based on seller input. Their characteristic provide a different type of unique service. So that’s our optimization model our data scientist team work on. From pricing side, we want to understand how to combat risk, adverse selection, and the competition and build other factor and the macro information into our pricing model. So that’s an overall introduction for the data science team and some of the cool project we’re working on.
Amy Yang: I’m going to introduce our next speaker, which is Maggie. Maggie is a Senior Software Engineer on the sales and the support team at Opendoor. Maggie has been a part of a wide range of projects at Opendoor, and recently she co-designed and is currently implementing a new role-based access control system for the company internal tooling. Outside of work, Maggie is a competitive swing dancer. Welcome Maggie.
Maggie Moreno: Thank you, Amy. Hi. I’m Maggie. And I’m going to talk about role-based access control at Opendoor. In this talk I’ll go over what role-based access control is generally, what the design goals were for Opendoor’s RBAC system, technical design of our RBAC system, and some challenges and recommendations from our experience. If you aren’t familiar with the term role-based access control, I can almost guarantee you are familiar with the concept. At a high level, in an RBAC system what a user can and cannot access is based on their assigned role. There are three main data entities, users, roles, and permissions. Let’s take GitHub as an example.
Angie Chang: Hey, Maggie. Real quick. Can you share your slides? I don’t think we see them.
Maggie Moreno: Oh, yeah. You know, it goes to show all the preparation in the world…
Angie Chang: Perfect.
Maggie Moreno: Let’s take GitHub as an example. Can you guys see my slides now?
Angie Chang: Yes.
Maggie Moreno: Excellent. Thank you. GitHub. I am part of the backend infra team, which means that my role is an administrator on the web Repo, which means that I can access admin features like merging pull requests without all the checks passing.
Maggie Moreno: For Opendoor’s role-based access control system, we have some very specific design goals. As a result of going public in 2020, we needed to comply with the Financial Operations Act, widely known as SOX. SOX compliance can mean different things for different companies, but the most pertinent part of SOX compliance for Opendoor was showing that only authorized employees were allowed to perform financially sensitive actions.
Maggie Moreno: Other goals for the system included easy use of maintenance for engineers, straightforward management for IT, and peace of mind for security. Security was a bigger concern than usual for our new RBAC system because we would be trusting the system with protecting financially sensitive actions from both internal and external users. We wanted employees to follow a clear process to change role and permission assignments.
Maggie Moreno: In our design, we assigned roles to users in Okta, an industry standard authentication and authorization tool, bringing a lot of advantages for security and IT. We already have moved towards using Okta for authentication for our internal tooling and this change felt like a natural extension of prior work.
Maggie Moreno: We store our permission to role mapping in a separate service config, which means that changes were handled through GitHub. It also means that for every API we call a role to permission service Gatekeeper to check the users roles. API end points are tied with permissions directly in the code, which is easy for engineers to implement and maintain. And once we get the users roles from Gatekeeper, we check whether they match the permissions for that API end point.
Maggie Moreno: Our biggest challenge for this project we encountered in the design phase. We had a big challenge understanding what SOX compliance would mean for Opendoor and what actions we should take to limit access first. Like many companies, Opendoor has a few different deployment environments for our internal tooling, and one of our biggest questions was whether we could limit our RBAC gating to one of these deployment environments. After further exploration, we discovered that that was not the case and this significantly changed our design requirements.
Maggie Moreno: Additionally, this project stress tested how major engineering design decisions are made at Opendoor. Getting alignment on the critical design decisions was especially difficult given the lack of clarity on the scope of the project. If you happen to find yourself in a similar situation in the future, we recommend that you clarify and align on your RBAC project goals before you start the design process. We also recommend involving cross-team stakeholders early in the project and communicate to engineering management early and often if the project needs more resources. Thanks.
Maggie Moreno: The next speaker is Sumedha. Sumedha is a Senior Software Engineer at Opendoor on the seller core experience team. She builds out various tools and interfaces to help customers find a home selling experience which best suits their needs, whether that is listing or selling their home using Opendoor services. These range from dashboards to see their home value to a digital closing experience.
Maggie Moreno: She also manages and maintains Opendoor’s design systems and React UI component libraries, which power the Opendoor site and admin tools. Outside of work, Sumedha is an avid baker and always trying to find ways to fit more plants into her environment. Welcome Sumedha.
Sumedha Pramod: Hi. Thanks Maggie. Sorry for taking over a little bit early. Role-based access control and SOX compliance are so important now that we’re a public company. It’s really great to see what went on behind the scenes to make that all happen. Hi. I’m Sumedha.
Sumedha Pramod: On the Seller team at Opendoor, we actually filled out a variety of customer experiences and dashboards, which spanned from educating the customer on buying and/or selling their home all the way through actually digitally closing on their home.
Sumedha Pramod: As you can imagine, the UI gets increasingly more complex as the functionality gets more and more important. This means that customers need to be 100% sure that they’re trusting their home and their money with Opendoor and that the site that they’re on, and that they’re signing contracts on is legit. Delivering on these expectations while continuing to add new features requires pretty thorough testing and it also helps us as a company build trust, brand, and consistency across all of our customer experiences.
Sumedha Pramod: With different UIs, it’s not as straightforward to catch a lot of UI changes and things like colors, font sizes, mobile responsiveness, and all those little nitty gritty things aren’t as easy to catch. Especially when there’s a ton of engineers working on the same UI, it’s pretty easy to miss if one person’s change unintentionally impacts everyone’s experience. I spend a lot of time personally staring at my team’s customer experiences, so I tend to notice some pretty nitpicky changes, but that doesn’t mean that an engineer from another team has the UI memorized the same way. This is amplified even more with design systems and shared component libraries, because a lot of these components that are changing are used across tons of different experiences.
Sumedha Pramod: At Opendoor, we have a bunch of micro front ends and a single change to a shared component like the button here on the left-hand side can have an unintended side effect on pretty much every experience at Opendoor without people really realizing it. UI regression tests are one of the ways that we found to actually help mitigate a lot of these unintentional UI side effects.
Sumedha Pramod: It allows us to compare screenshots of the UI or visual snapshots against a predefined baseline. It really helps us catch a lot of these really nit picky things. And it also helps us QA the user experience in a way a lot easier. And it helps us QA against design expectations. Additionally, we can also develop a lot of these components in a completely isolated environment without any kind of network calls. We don’t have to worry about data loading or any of that, we can really focus just on the UI and the pixel perfect stuff.
Sumedha Pramod: At Opendoor, we use a combination of two frameworks called Percy and Storybook, which are two different open source tools that enable the development and documentation of UI components and also automating a lot of that UI screenshot testing. In this example, you can see that we have a dashboard being rendered, but what we can actually turn this pretty simple unit test into something that renders a component.
Sumedha Pramod: If you want, you can have it mock out some data calls, do all that stuff, and you can actually render that and test it against a specific baseline. UI regression testing or UI visual screenshots don’t actually replace your standard unit tests or smoke tests or integration tests. Since those actually validate the expected behavior and experiences, this is really just to focus on the nitpicky UI things, so things like the CSS changes that I mentioned earlier.
Sumedha Pramod: Also you have all those other tests to validate behaviors such as whether or not a [inaudible] pops up when a user clicks a button or typing something in an input field will enable a button somewhere else. And this isn’t just useful for engineering, it’s been extremely helpful when QAing new features and designs. It’s also greatly reduced the amount of back and forth as we’re launching new features with design where we’re like, “This is a little bit off, this pixel is a little bit off.” As we’re developing, we can send these over and we can make sure that any future changes isn’t actually breaking that experience.
Sumedha Pramod: All of these things combined allow us to develop really beautiful and seamless experiences for customers and really make one of the most expensive and biggest transactions in people’s lives a little less scary.
Sumedha Pramod: Now, I’ll turn it over to Heather for our next segment. Heather brings 22 years of engineering experience to Opendoor, having led teams at Lyft, Capital One and Blackboard. At Opendoor, she leads the engineering organization focused on the core product experience for home sellers along with growth initiatives and retail partnerships. Heather lives in Berkeley, California with her husband and two boys. Welcome Heather.
Heather Natour: Thank you, Sumedha. And thank you so much for presenting on the Storybook and Percy testing. I’ve personally seen the impact of that on our quality and productivity. And I’m really excited to host this next session which will be a Q & A with our panelists.
Heather Natour: I’d like to invite everyone back to come back on the screen. And while they’re doing that, I wanted to talk about leadership in this Q & A, and as an engineering leader, I believe we should be creating opportunities for leadership at all levels, whether you’re an intern or a staff engineer.
Heather Natour: And one of the things I love about Opendoor is seeing that demonstration of leadership every day with every single person I work with. And I’ve personally seen that leadership demonstrated by these particular panelists.
Heather Natour: I’d love to ask each of you first, what do each of you believe has contributed to your ability to demonstrate leadership at Opendoor? I think we have everybody on now. So Morgan, maybe we’ll start with you.
Morgan Cole: Sure. Thank you, Heather. I appreciate the question. There’s two things that come to mind for me. The first piece I would say is, it sounds pretty simple, but I have practiced the art of assuming good intent at all costs in every scenario. Because I think sometimes in leadership, it can be quite easy to become a little bit defensive because you want to do well and you want to show up correctly, and so I think if you operate from a perspective of no matter what’s thrown at me, I’m going to assume that this was thrown at me with good intention, it will help calm that defensiveness so that you can respond in an appropriate manner. So that’s the first piece.
Morgan Cole: The second piece I would say is the team that I’m on specifically has done a really good job of teaching me how to lead collaboratively. I think it’s super important that whenever you are leading, whether it’s a new project, whether it’s a team, whether you’re just building new relationships with other partners throughout your business, it’s vital, it’s paramount that you don’t look at yourself as the single source of truth, but rather you work in conjunction with the parties that are involved to make sure that you all are leading in the same direction. So the two that I would say is assuming good intent and leading collaboratively.
Heather Natour: Yeah. That’s so true and really insightful, Morgan. I really appreciate your thoughts. How about you, Annie?
Annie Tang: Hey guys. I am unable to start my video, but I’m here. If whoever’s hosting could start my video for me, that’d be great. If not, no worries. Oh, here we go. All right. I’m back. This is such a great question. I think that my ability to demonstrate leadership at Opendoor has really been stemmed from as a designer and as a design leader related to what I was talking about in my talk, really helping everyone at the organization really obsess over problems, over ideas, and really… One of the key values that we have at Opendoor now is to start and end with the customer, and I think a lot of being about a designer is building that empathy and really obsessing over our customers. And that ultimately gets you to obsess over problems rather than solutions, so I’d say that’s one aspect.
Annie Tang: And the other aspect is really keeping in mind that execution matters. It’s not all about coming up with cool ideas and cool visions and stuff. That at the end of the day, we need to keep a high bar for what we do. And so execution really amounts to making sure that teams are working really collaboratively, that designers and PMs and engineers are working collaboratively and are in sync, can we do these workshops to make sure that people are in sync? So I think the dual sense of just making sure that we’re obsessing over customers and problems, and also making sure that we’re really executing to high level is kind of my leadership style.
Heather Natour: Yeah. That’s really great. And I agree, I’ve seen so much of that at Opendoor, the collaboration, especially collaboration that you facilitated. And it’s certainly a differentiator, I think, how much Opendoor obsesses over their customers. So that’s great. Maggie, what are your thoughts on the topic?
Maggie Moreno: Yeah, I feel like one of the best things about working at Opendoor is that there’s no shortage of good ideas, only people to make those ideas a reality. Opendoor’s business has a lot of different facets and there are opportunities everywhere for taking on more responsibility. So for me personally at Opendoor, I just feel like getting more leadership opportunities and developing myself as a leader has mostly just been a matter of raising my hand.
Heather Natour: Yeah, that’s very true. And I think the business complexity at Opendoor is really interesting and absolutely creates those opportunities. I love that. Amy, how have you experienced leadership at Opendoor?
Amy Yang: Hi. Not only the complexity of the type of problem Opendoor trying to solve, but also I would say, I admire this whole industry is still very new and young, like a startup feel when you join Opendoor compared to… I used to work at a more mature, larger technical company. I can definitely feel the culture difference here. Not everything is perfect is set up already. You don’t see maybe a perfect data engineering team prepare a perfect data that can be consumed by data science team. A lot of times you need to do the heavy lifting and see where the gap is, where the problem is, not just complaining for the missing pieces, but actually propose a solution and just do it. So that naturally you creates a gap create an opportunity for emerging new leader, especially for me coming from an IC now transition into a leadership role.
Amy Yang: The other thing I want to mention is this one team, one dream culture that is core value for Opendoor. So when you see area for improvement, even not within your immediate team, maybe it’s a cross-functional team, but you can contribute. There is nobody will stop you and say, “No, just do your own team’s work.” There’s always collaboration opportunity and you can just extend your influence outside of your immediate team and service area.
Heather Natour: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s spot on and the sense of ownership that everyone has and doing that as a team, it’s so much more powerful, it becomes real multiplier. How about you, Sumedha, how do you feel the Opendoor experience has allowed you to demonstrate your leadership?
Sumedha Pramod: Okay, sorry about that. Honestly, one of the best ways I’ve been able to actually demonstrate leadership and grow is every week, every other week we have these kind of architectural meetings, and it’s really allowed me to not just have ownership of the code and the surface areas that my team operates in, but really expand that beyond that. And gives us a lot of opportunities to propose and facilitate a lot of discussions that have impact beyond just your specific team. And so really getting to establish that level of ownership at a much, much, much broader level and really expand your impact across the company. Yeah, that’s been really one of the most unique and interesting ways that I’ve been able to really develop leadership here.
Heather Natour: Yeah. I’ve seen that there’s a lot of people and we really want to include everybody in that process, and I think it’s really elevated a lot of amazing ideas, much more long-term thinking and has really pushed the organization to the next level. That’s a great example. Clearly each of you have developed deep domain expertise, and so on top of that, each of you have considered the direction in which you grow and whether it’s moving to people management or focusing on deepening your multiplying impact.
Heather Natour: Were there specific things you considered in order to decide which direction to take your career? And maybe we’ll start with Maggie.
Maggie Moreno: Thanks, Heather. I have been thinking a lot about going into people management. So I’m working on that transition right now. About a year ago, I got the opportunity to be a tech lead for a team, and I found that performing the leadership role was a lot more rewarding than being an IC. So I’ve really been taking on pursuing that and getting involved with the crafting of our transition role and starting to craft those documents.
Heather Natour: That’s great. And I think your selflessness that you demonstrate every day is really a huge impact to the rest of the team. And so it’s really great to see you moving into people management. Amy, how about you, you mentioned you were recently transitioning more from IC to leadership, what were some specific things you considered?
Amy Yang: Yeah, I think I’ve summarized the decision making process. I consider two factors. One is what my strength is, two, what my passion is about, three, is what’s the company goal is. I think the perfect position is how the three factors can align the best. Sometimes what you want to do doesn’t really align with the bigger picture of what the company want to go. Either the long-term goal, I haven’t seen sometimes, especially technical, a very deep technical person, they just want to utilize specific technology or tooling but that doesn’t necessarily solve the immediate business problem. That is a misalignment. I think the perfect position are when everybody would try to evaluate what’s the best role is. Do you see opportunity or can the next position that help you align the three factor better?
Amy Yang: For me, I joined Opendoor relatively recent, end of last year. I joined as a senior IC. Now I’m in the tech lead position. I enjoy my current position. It gives me both the freedom to do some project roadmap planning management, and also stay close to the technology while I’m still learning about the business, but eventually, based how I feel, how I evaluate the three factor alignment, I will make my decision for the next step.
Heather Natour: Yeah, that’s great. It’s so great that you’ve gotten these opportunities so quickly and yet, you can always change your mind and feel supported in how you grow here, I think that’s great. Sumedha, how have you thought about your career direction?
Sumedha Pramod: For me, it came down to as simple as I really just like writing code, as nerdy as that sounds. Writing code and really spending a lot of time diving into our customer experiences, whether that’s from a product design or even engineering standpoint. Obviously, as I grow more as a senior IC, it’s definitely less about doing a lot of the nitty gritty code myself, but really figuring out how I can better enable those around me to accomplish whether it’s technical goals or OKRs or things like that. And then also, how can I set some technical standards around best practices while really starting to think a lot more big picture about our systems and those are the challenges that really excite me and made me really want to go down the route of becoming a more senior IC for sure.
Heather Natour: That’s great. It’s hard to debate not liking to code. Annie, you’ve provided leadership at Opendoor for quite a while, how have you thought about your career direction?
Annie Tang: Yeah, so I started off at Opendoor long time ago as a senior designer as a senior IC, and I worked on much of the end to end experience and various part of the experience. And then, about two and a half years ago, I moved to management. And I think one guiding principle that I really had about my career has always just been to optimize for growth because I am happiest when I am learning and challenged. And so I was honestly really happy being an IC. I loved designing, I learned a lot, especially going from designing, just digital experiences at previous gigs to Opendoor, where I was really challenged and designing these online and offline experiences. And as Opendoor grew, I got the opportunity to manage.
Annie Tang: And when there was the opportunity, I was actually really excited and I actually told my manager that I wanted this opportunity. And I think that’s one thing that I would advise everyone too, is I actually don’t believe there is a certain stereotype for ICs, like if you are this way, you’re a great IC or if this way, you’re a great manager. If you’re curious and you want to grow into one or the other, make it known to your manager. It might not be that immediately you can do it, but that’s one thing I always tell, especially females. If there isn’t a right or wrong answer, if you’re curious about something, just to say that, because that’s ultimately how I ended up in management. I was really curious about it. I saw an opportunity, I told my manager and he helped me work my way through it.
Annie Tang: And as our company grew, I got to scale our team and I have really found a lot of enjoyment in supporting my team and not being the hands-on IC. I also haven’t ruled out though that maybe in the future or next gig, I want to be an IC again. And so I believe that there’s a lot of fluidity to this.
Heather Natour: Yeah. That’s excellent advice. I wholeheartedly agree. I have similar experiences. Morgan, you inspired us with just your self-awareness talk. How do you think personally about your own career direction?
Morgan Cole: Sure. Well, let me just tell you Heather, my career has been nothing short of a jungle gym. I have been a senior manager, an entry-level IC, a senior IC, a lead, back to management, back to IC. All of that’s happened in the span of about six years, and in different sectors too, whether it’s sales, whether it’s marketing and advertising, leadership and development, or learning and development, rather.
Morgan Cole: My decision-making process generally speaking, is with regard to the skills that I like to nurture. That’s basically how I base my decisions. So the trajectory of my career, it’s based on the skillsets and the acumen that I hope to cultivate at a specific time. And whatever those skillsets are, I am going to look for a position or role in which it will specifically help me get to that next step, and I’m less concerned about what the title is and more concerned about what the end result could potentially be.
Heather Natour: Yeah, that’s great advice. It’s sometimes hard to take the time to even think about that, but I think it’s really important. I appreciate all of the panelists’ thoughtful answers and that’s a wrap for the presentation portion. I also wanted to thank the Girl Geek team for all you do for the community.
Heather Natour:Here’s my LinkedIn – feel free to connect with me and reference this event if you want to hear more about Opendoor. I’ll invite Angie back on the screen to share the next portion of the breakout sessions.
Angie Chang: Awesome. Thank you all for sharing your insights and your journeys with us. Really enjoyed all the talks and the conversation about this is what leadership looks like. We will be sharing some Opendoor jobs via email. Keep an eye out for that.. that’s actually an event survey, and also links to the Opendoor jobs!
Here is a list of recommended resources – crowdsourced by attendees to help each other evolve into the best versions of ourselves in work and life!
Short on cash? Here’s a helpful hint: It’s easy to find sites with used copies if you Google the book title. In the results, there’s even a section to see the library closest to you that has the book!
The key to resilience with a career in tech is your network, especially for women and introverts. Here are strategies from the Girl Geek X community for maintaining trajectory of jobs, careers, passion projects, and more.
#1 — Leverage the buddy system
For the past decade, Sukrutha Bhadouria and Angie Chang have carpooled together to Girl Geek Dinners, from San Francisco to San Jose, when schedules align. This makes sitting in traffic almost enjoyable as we happily catch up about family and friends, work, and more. At Girl Geek Dinners, we stay abreast on current technology trends and the latest career advice for women in tech.
Meeting interesting new people at inclusive women’s events is easier to do than you think. Some confess they are dreaming of working elsewhere but are afraid of making the leap. Some inspire us to do more with our time and abilities. Some remind us how we can do better. Onstage, executives and engineers take turns on the microphone sharing best practices, giving lightning tech talks, and hosting panel discussions. You can listen and learn intently, or sit back (because talks are recorded for Girl Geek X’s YouTube channel) while your brain processes a work problem with a welcome change of scenery. Also, be sure to check out the company’s snack, beverage and women’s toiletries collections before leaving with some company swag.
Girl Geek Dinners are a force multiplier — a safe, inclusive “third place” apart from work and home, to recharge and recoup. Staying in touch with people you meet shouldn’t be a chore to sweat over — just add new friends on your preferred social networks because you just never know when you may want to drop them a note.
#2 — Do the work & communicate it
A common feeling in tech workplaces is that men are promoted at higher rates than their female counterparts. Doing excellent work will not be rewarded by more pay and a better job title.
Women succeed by rigorously communicating progress and learnings — from writing and sharing lists of accomplishments, and asking regularly about getting that promotion:
“Never in my professional career had a situation, I mean NEVER, had a situation where a manager has said, ‘Great, Arquay, you’re doing awesome. Time to promote you to the next level.’ Every single promotion that I’ve ever gotten has been me saying — ‘I am operating at this level. I’ve done all of these things, and I think I’m ready for the next level and here is why’ and you hand this [accomplishments list] to your manager and have a conversation with your manager to demonstrate these things.” — Arquay Harris, VP of Engineering at Webflow
Transparency is key for companies: provide regular audits and share promotion rates across gender and race for every promotion cycle and level. Industry leader Salesforce audits employees salaries annually then spends millions to reconcile any gender or racial discrepancies in employees pay, and shares annual Equality data and quarterly Equality updates.
People of color leave tech workplaces in droves citing unfairness. Such high rates of turnover ring up a $16 billion a year problem for the tech industry:
“Tech companies spend millions of dollars finding, recruiting and onboarding top-level talent, but the data show they must focus real attention on retaining the talent they’ve got. Unfair, non-inclusive and subtly-toxic cultures drive people out, and the trends are particularly pronounced for women, LGBTQ employees, and underrepresented people of color.” — Dr. Allison Scott, lead author of Kapor Center’s Tech Leavers Study
The Tech Leavers Study quotes female engineers who reported about the unfair promotions, and Black employees who bristled at being called “diversity hires” and being otherwise other-ed in the workplace. Diversity and inclusion trainings have always been in the toolkit for corporate HR to leverage, and while the Black Lives Matter movement rallied white people to utilize their privilege to dismantle systems that oppress other groups and increased awareness for equity globally, myriad organizers are still working on elements for long-term, systemic change in the world.
By attending Girl Geek Dinners, women can investigate alternate workplaces that may have better work cultures and different coworkers / managers, and meet more women in tech who will refer fellow girl geeks to their next job. Because Ally is a verb.
#3 — Move those goal posts
We’ve heard that what got you here won’t get you there, but how can you find role models for new goals, ambitions, and careers? If you don’t work at a company with tens of thousands of employees to provide dozens of women executives to look up to, Girl Geek Dinners hosted at various companies provides an endless parade of role models — speakers — with tables of girl geeks sharing their experiences, challenges, and connecting over dinner over shared experiences.
Learning to move her goal posts at work is a winning plan for Sukrutha Bhadouria, who has been managing high-performing teams at Salesforce for seven years. She was recently promoted to Director of Engineering, and welcomed the good news as she eased back into work from taking parental leave.
Sukrutha reflected on how her mindset has shifted over the years:
“I was so burned out after grad school, so I coasted for a few years. I started to see people zip past me, and I realized that I needed to find new goals to achieve, and once I achieve them, find more goals, rinse and repeat. My advice is to always look ahead at your goals, but when you get close, don’t underestimate the achievement. Take a moment to reflect on how far you’ve come. Then look ahead again and fight to the finish line!” — Sukrutha Bhadouria, Director of Engineering at Salesforce
If you’re facing a particularly tough challenge at work, you may benefit from enlisting some help. Some employers provide or subsidize the cost for professional development thru third-party coaches who work with underrepresented groups (minorities, women) to move up corporate ladders, reported NPR. This is important because all-white and all-male executive boards and executive teams are common, visible, and troublesome symbols of company cultures that are ripe for transformation.
Minji Wong coaches executives at Fortune 500 companies for decades, and focuses on coaching Asian women leaders. Through discovery, her clients find that 80% of challenges lie in misalignment of their strategic leadership vision- and how it’s embodied, expressed, and perceived by their teammates. For Asian-American women, making the most of your Asian assets at work means reconciling traits like humility and work ethic with what works in American workplaces. You can find yourself in a cycle of frustration and resentment you learn that assertiveness and informal relationships catalyze career growth, not simply doing excellent work.
“To bridge gaps between expectations and behaviors, Asian leaders benefit from understanding how they show up at work. Self awareness of gaps between your intended leadership brand and how it actually lands is critical for career ascension and success.” — Minji Wong, executive coach, At Her Best
She works with individuals to “identify the top behaviors or actions necessary in order to be seen, felt and heard by others. Common themes include taking up space and self authorization. Being aware of intersectionality in gender/race and taking action is critical for career success.”
Leading authentically lets others to see who you are, so they can more fully understand your point of view, bringing detractors to your side.
Asians in tech hold a unique “mix of privilege and exclusion that gives us just enough power to speak up but not enough to gain equitable access to opportunities and safety,” write Ellen Pao and Tracy Chou — “It’s no coincidence that those who initiated the first wave of lawsuits against tech monoliths (Kleiner Perkins, Facebook, and Twitter)” and that those who called out investors for harassment were almost all Asian women.
Research from Ascend foundation has found: “From a racial perspective, Executive Parity Index analysis shows Whites overall are overrepresented in the Executive level, while all minority races are underrepresented at the Executive level, with Asians and Blacks the least likely to be Executives. Asian women and Black women are the least likely of all cohorts to be Executives.”
For the time being, the onus is still on the individual to do the work and be recognized by management as a high-potential candidate for promotion. Companies may have a budget for leadership development, bringing in executive and career coaches to support their ambitious new leaders. You can also tap an executive coach to work outside the corporate structure and get that development work done for yourself.
And if you find yourself feeling burned out, depressed, or always irritated or angry, consider enlisting support from a licensed therapist for a short-term or long-term goal. Therapists work with people facing a wide variety of struggles, from depression, anxiety and trauma to trouble with relationships, multicultural issues and difficult life transitions.
“I like to focus on micro-progressions. People beat themselves up as they come in and want to make change, and they want to change faster than they are. The 25-year habit they want to change needs more time, self-compassion and self-realization of micro-progression. Let’s say, you are a big spender — celebrate that moment of hesitation when shopping online, and reflect back that, hey, you did think about making a different decision and didn’t, but that didn’t used to happen before, acknowledge that growing self-awareness.” — Nicole Chung, PsyD, licensed therapist
Many women have found EMDR therapy beneficial and proven in treating PTSD from work and other traumas, so they can rewire the brain and resume living full lives.
Support groups (facilitated in Facebook groups for people of a certain job title, recovery from addictions, or health afflictions) can be helpful in providing feedback and camaraderie. Whether you’re silently struggling with infertility or being a new mom, there are folks who understand where you’re coming from, and will empathize — and maybe share a tip on what has worked for them in their journey.
Girl Geek X Community: Have you overcome a personal/professional challenge, or want to share a story about a transformative experience?
Please email us at hello@girlgeek.io — we’d love to hear your story. If you haven’t solved a problem yet, and want to share your current challenge, email us too! While we may not be able to personally respond to every email, please know we will read every single one of them. Thank you in advance!
Our 4th annual Elevate virtual conference hosted over 4,000 around the world—the largest gathering yet of mid-to-senior women in tech celebrating International Women’s Day. By the numbers, Elevate hosted 26 speakers across 17 sessions,supported by 13 sponsors — check out their jobs, they are hiring!
Top 10 Highest-Rated Sessions from Elevate 2021 Conference
Here are the top-rated talks from Elevate 2021, as voted on by attendees! You can watch (or re-watch) them at the links below:
Building High-Performance Teams in a Pandemic – Elaine Zhou, CTO at Change.org, Rachana Kumar, VP of Engineering at Etsy, Tina Huang, CTO & Co-Founder at Transposit and Sukrutha Bhadouria, CTO & Co-Founder at Girl Geek X
Special Thank You To Elevate 2021 Sponsoring Companies
Thank you to the great folks at: Atlassian, Slack, OpenAI, U.S. Digital Service, Carta, Salesforce, Intel AI, Johnson & Johnson, MaestroQA and Amazon Web Services for supporting the 4th annual Elevate virtual conference for International Women’s Day!
#1 – Kellee Van Horne (Director of Client Success at Affirm) shares guidance on career moves: choose your boss and reporting chain carefully, prioritize roles where you have a differentiating skill or area of expertise, and be clear on what skills or content you want to learn in your next role.
#2 – Anu Bharadwaj (VP of Product at Atlassian) encourages attendees to lead with your strengths to find resilience. She talks about self care and allies in her keynote.
#3 –Sukrutha Bhadouria (Director of Engineering at Salesforce), Elaine Zhou (CTO at Change.org), Tina Huang (CTO & Founder at Transposit), Rachana Kumar (VP of Engineering at Etsy) discuss building high-performance teams in a pandemic.
#4 – Ashley Dudgeon (VP of Engineering at Salesforce) shares stories climbing the ladder at Salesforce, and navigating two maternity leaves. Hear advice on decision-making in the face of career challenges, and negotiating for impactful projects to secure career growth.
#5 – Nicole Salzman Page (Product Manager at Zumba) shares her new communications strategy for staying aligned with Engineering, Executives and Business Stakeholders to release products faster while working from home.
#6 – Kat Chiluiza (UX Researcher at Google) shares tips to empower folks on how to advocate for more inclusivity at their job. With real world examples, she will discuss dos/don’ts for research surveys or interviews.
#7 – Dessa discusses her viral hit “Who’s Yellen Now” — a 90-second Hamilton-inspired send-up to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen — one part biography, one part brag rap. She talks about her creative writing process and what she’s up to now.
#8 – Vrushali Paunikar (VP of Product at Carta) speaks candidly about her own career journey and why a problem-oriented mindset has been such an important tenet. She shares her problem-solving flywheel framework.
#9 – Amy Quispe, Julie Meloni, Elizabeth Schweinsberg, and Gina Maini (Engineers at U.S. Digital Service) discuss solving gnarly problems in government tech, and how they are using their skills to improve government services and benefits for all Americans.
#10 – Tracy Stampfli (Senior Staff Engineer at Slack) talks about modernizing and refactoring code, with lessons drawn from an overhaul of the mobile codebases at Slack.
Our 4th annual Elevate virtual conference hosted over 4,000 around the world—the largest gathering yet of mid-to-senior women in tech celebrating International Women’s Day.
We hosted 26 speakers across 17 sessions – scroll down to watch (or re-watch) their talks:
Anu Bharadwaj, VP of Product at Atlassian, in her morning keynote shares tips like leading with your strengths and how to find resilience.
Faylene Bell, Director of Digital Marketing at Nvidia, talks about extending opportunities in digital marketing to drive growth for technology leaders.
Kat Chiluiza, UX Researcher at Google, shares tips to empower folks on how to advocate for more inclusivity at their job. With real world examples, she will discuss dos/don’ts for research surveys or interviews.
Amy Quispe, Julie Meloni, Elizabeth Schweinsberg, and Gina Maini, Four Engineers at U.S. Digital Service, discuss solving gnarly problems in government tech, and how they are using their skills to improve government services and benefits for all Americans.
Ashley Pilipiszyn, Technical Director at OpenAI, discusses how prompt design and engineering works to build a variety of GPT-3-powered applications. Check out her final slide in her talk for her contact info to request access to the GPT-3 API to build your own!
Dimah Zaidalkilani, Director of Product at GitHub, shares her journey from Palestine to Microsoft Product Management: accessing resources to learn how to interview, to overcoming imposter syndrome, with the support of allies. She chats with Iliana Montauk, CEO & Co-Founder at Manara, on elevating engineers in emerging markets.
Ashley Dudgeon, VP of Engineering at Salesforce, shares stories climbing the ladder at Salesforce, and navigating two maternity leaves. Hear advice on decision-making in the face of career challenges, and negotiating for impactful projects to secure career growth.
Amrisha Sinha, Infrastructure Engineering Team Lead at MaestroQA, covers 5 DevOps insights that are essential for engineering managers to know to unlock their true potential.
Sukrutha Bhadouria, Director of Engineering at Salesforce, Elaine Zhou, CTO at Change.org, Tina Huang, CTO & Founder at Transposit, Rachana Kumar, VP of Engineering at Etsy discuss building high-performance teams in a pandemic.
Swati Raju, Head of Confluence Experience Engineering at Atlassian, shares her learnings on Confluence Cloud of building a reliability habit in the team, treating reliability front and center in team processes, tools, and decisions.
Tracy Stampfli, Senior Staff Engineer at Slack, talks about modernizing and refactoring code, with lessons drawn from an overhaul of the mobile codebases at Slack.
Nicole Salzman Page, Product Manager at Zumba, shares her new communications strategy for staying aligned with Engineering, Executives and Business Stakeholders to release products faster while working from home.
Kellee Van Horne, Director of Client Success at Affirm, shares guidance on career moves, from choosing your boss and reporting chain carefully, to prioritizing roles where you have a differentiating skill or area of expertise.
Vrushali Paunikar, VP of Product at Carta, talks candidly about her own career journey and why a problem-oriented mindset has been such an important tenet. She shares her problem-solving flywheel framework.
Hema Chamraj, Director of Technology Advocacy at Intel AI, talks about responsible considerations to address limitations presented by AI in healthcare and drive better patient outcomes for all.
Suzanna Khatchatrian, Senior Engineering Manager, Product Security at Slack, covers several best practices and explores how Slack’s Product Security team collaborates with other Engineering teams.
Dessa discusses her viral hit “Who’s Yellen Now” — a 90-second Hamilton-inspired send-up to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen — one part biography, one part brag rap. She talks about her creative writing process and what she’s up to.
Special Thank You To Elevate 2021 Sponsoring Companies
Thank you to the great folks at Atlassian, Slack, OpenAI, U.S. Digital Service, Carta, Salesforce,Intel AI, Johnson & Johnson, MaestroQA and Amazon Web Services for supporting Girl Geek X: Elevate 2021 virtual conference!
To celebrate International Women’s Day, Girl Geek X hosted our fourth-annual Elevate virtual conference. The March 8 event featured luminary engineering and product leaders who came together to elevate the conversation around women – an important opportunity to empower the women globally in a pandemic with diverse set of talks from technical women leaders on the hard and soft skills needed to succeed.
Events such as these, along with our Girl Geek Dinners, are important ways to elevate women as experts in their profession, to provide a safe space to speak candidly about career development. The inspiring speakers shared nuggets of wisdom and encouraged each other to persevere.
Here are 5 key takeaways from Elevate 2021 Conference:
#1 – Lead with your strengths
“Resilience is the capacity to deal with setbacks, yet continue to grow. It is also the cornerstone of mental health. Good mental health doesn’t mean never being sad,” saidAnu Bharadwaj, VP Product at Atlassian in her morning keynote:
“When you start a movement, you have a chance to move the Overton window. As a leader, you should shift the frame of reference, that the unthinkable and radical can happen. As a leader, my personal style is to be the activist, the person who shifts the Overton window, doing so energizes me.”
She weighed in on prioritizing strengths over weaknesses – that while it is important to build skills in your career, Anu encouraged conference attendees to “really lean into your strengths” – because it is when you are happiest, and helps you to be resilient.
#2 – Make problem-solving a virtuous cycle of communicated learnings
“Share that you’ve solved a problem, or what you learned by trying. Women often shy away from this step. You won’t earn the right to solve bigger problems without sharing what you’re working on,” said Vrushali Paunikar, VP of Product at Carta.
It is totally OK to fail! In fact, “a failure will be full of learning and it will help you form your next hypothesis.” She is adamant that “your solution hypothesis matches the problem.” Her problem-solving flywheel framework is here:
“Tell your manager what you want to grow toward. Flag things early, and communicate specific idea(s) as to how you want your career to grow so they can keep it in mind as the org changes,” said Kellee Van Horne, Director of Client Success at Affirm.
She distilled guidance into 3 key principles: choose your boss carefully, prioritizing roles where you have a differentiating skill or area of expertise, and being clear on what skills you want to learn in your next role – so you can look for growth opportunities.
Research suggests mid-career women are often held back from the C-suite due to lack of experience managing a P&L, for example. Here are some skills to consider:
“Executives aren’t thinking about your project all day. Don’t overload them. They may only need to know the goal and how you’re going to measure success. Make sure you’re giving the right information to the person receiving it,” said Nicole Salzman Page, Product Manager at Zumba.
She shares her framework to release products faster while working from home – check out her new communications strategy for staying aligned with engineering, executives and business stakeholders to launch products faster!
“It was my childhood as a refugee that taught me that resilience was the key to not only surviving, but thriving. At 18, I thought I might have ruined my future by not pursuing medicine. Studying computer science seemed easy compared to what my parents went thru,” said Ashley Dudgeon, VP Engineering at Salesforcein her afternoon keynote.
She talks about her experiences in childhood, growing up in east San Jose with encouraging teachers and coaches. Ashley made a big bet on herself in college, spending two years taking computer science classes to see if her GPA would be high enough to be accepted into the selective major at UC Berkeley:
“I remember seeing my name above the [computer science major] cut line and feeling the weight of the two years slipping off my shoulders. The bet that I made on myself paid off. It has nothing to do with the data structures, the compiler I built, the mathematics I applied. What I did gain was the sense of resilience and confidence in myself.”
Fast forward 15 years — Ashley successfully led a multi-release project at Salesforce that solved a problem that hadn’t been solved in 17 years, and navigated two maternity leaves at Salesforce (which has an amazing parental leave policy).
She shares a story about negotiation:
“I believe the transition back from maternity leave is one of the most vulnerable in a female’s career – and it typically happens in the mid career. So what did I do? I was far too stubborn, or, dare I say, resilient, to put my ambitions on the back burner. I sought support from my trusted circle, and reached out to every technical leader I knew and talked to each. After two months, my boss told me a new project was on the horizon – and that he believed I was the one that I could deliver it. That’s when I knew I had to negotiate. I told him that if I committed to the project and helped make it a success, he’d put me up for promotion in exchange. It took 1.5 years to build and release, and the reception from customers was phenomenal. My boss held up his end of the deal, and I was promoted to Vice President.”
Sukrutha Bhadouria: We will move on to our next talk. Our next talk is going to be given by Ashley. Ashley leads OpenAI’s developer ecosystem and creative application strategy, where she helps accelerate developers and startups build new applications with positive impact. She has also helped lead the launches of OpenAI’s research and commercial products, including Usenet, Jukebox, Rubik’s Cube, Multi-Agent, Image GBT, GPTC API, CLIP and so, oh my goodness. That was a lot. Welcome, Ashley.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: Excellent. Thank you so much for having me. Let me go ahead and share my screen. All right. Excellent. Let me bump this over here.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: Okay, great. Well, thank you everybody for joining this session. I am very excited to walk you through prompt design and engineering with GPT-3. As mentioned, my name’s Ashley and I’m the technical director at OpenAI. So, just a quick introduction here. If you haven’t heard of OpenAI before. So, we are an AI research and deployment company with the mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: And what’s unique about us, is we’re actually made up of three distinct pillars focused on engineering startup, research lab, and safety and policy group. And so, a little bit of background here in the lead up to GPT-3. So, nine months ago, we launched our very first commercial product, which was the OpenAI API.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: And this has really become our core platform for accessing our latest AI models. And unlike most AI systems that maybe you’ve interacted with before that are typically designed for one use case, our API actually provides a general purpose text in, text out interface, which I’ll walk you through in a live demo in just a bit.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: And so, this enables our users to try it on virtually any English language task. Since launching, we’ve already seen 200 production-ready applications built using the variety of capabilities that GPT-3 offers. And so, what we’ve seen is actually this incredibly new ecosystem of applications. Spanning things from legal to HR, game development, customer support, productivity, science and education, and both new companies being developed and startups as well as other companies integrating the API. So, a little bit about GPT-3. So, this model doesn’t have a goal or objective other than predicting the next word.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: And so, the key thing to take away here, and this is going to be key as we begin to dive into this prompt design, is it is not programmed to do any specific task. So, this single API can perform as a chat bot. It can perform as a classifier. It could do summarization because at its root level, it’s able to understand what those tasks look like purely from a text perspective. So, really the best way to really… If there’s one thing to take away about GPT-3, it is really just trying to predict the very next word based on all of the previous text it’s seen beforehand.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, prompt design and engineering. What do you need to take away here? So, if you have ever played the game charades, this is actually a really great exercise for figuring out how to program with GPT-3. Because what essentially you’re trying to do, again, if it’s just trying to predict the kind of task that you’d like it to perform, you basically want to provide enough context, but not have to give all the information at once. And so, you want to be able to just provide some guidelines about what you’d like GPT-3 to do.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, for example, if you want to do classification, want to be able to provide some information about what you’d like done and then maybe a couple of examples. And then try to even provide some counterexamples as well. And so, I’ll show that in just a second. Before we dive in, I just want to highlight some of the settings that are going to come up. There are things called Temperature and Top P. These again, back to thinking about prediction. So, these are not necessarily creativity dials, but they’ll control randomness.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: Another thing we offer is “Best of.” And so, again, GPT-3 in the API is trying to think, “Okay, what is the best response here?” And so, what is the highest average value of the tokens being generated. Frequency, we also… Basically it’s saying, “Okay, we don’t want to repeat what’s already being generated.” And then the Presence setting is also trying to figure out, “Okay, do we want to change topics here and being able to move forward from that?”
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, we can come back to that, but I’m going to go ahead and move over into… This is the OpenAI beta site. And so, let’s just move this down here. So, this is the Playground setting. So, here on the right hand side, you’re going to see all of these settings that I was just talking about. So, for example, you can determine what the response links will be and to generate with. As I mentioned, this is the Temperature setting. So, we have it currently set to 0.7. So, that’s a pretty standard setting. We also have the Frequency Penalty, the Presence Penalty, and Best of, which I had mentioned. We won’t dive into these just quite yet.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, what we have here is what’s known as a prompt library. And what we’ve done is, actually with our developer community, figured out what are some of the best prompts that people are able to get really good results on and what are those settings?
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, for example, let’s say we want to summarize for a second grader. If you’ve ever received an NDA or any type of legal documents. Actually I, myself, am not a lawyer. And so, many times if I’m reading a legal document, I really don’t know what the essence of that document is really saying. So, actually this prompt, Summarize for a 2nd grader, is really helpful because essentially it is transforming more dense text and simplifying that into maybe how you would explain that to a second grader.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, the prompt here. This is actually talking about Jupiter. So, it’s saying that it’s the fifth planet from the sun, the Roman God it’s named after, et cetera. So, again, as I was talking about before, you’re providing the example, so you’re already telling GPT-3 here, “My second grader asked me what this passage means.” You’re already putting that context of putting it into something that a second grader understand, then you’re separating it here. And then you’re actually putting a content that you would like summarized. And then you’re telling GPT-3, okay, you’d like it to be rephrased in plain language a second grader can understand. Here, it will also tell you, “What are some of the ideal settings for a prompt like this.” So, let’s go to Playground.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: And just a second, there we go. So, then all the settings, everything pops up in my Playground setting. And so, here the prompt is, and let me bump this up and let me hit submit. So, “Jupiter is a big ball of gas. It’s the fifth planet from the sun. It’s bright. You can see it in the sky at night. It’s named after the Roman God, Jupiter.” That’s pretty good. It pulled out kind of all the main pieces that we’d want from the prompt and the original text.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: Now, the cool thing here is, too, let’s say you don’t want to use Jupiter… Or figure out more about the solar system, but let’s say you did want a section of a legal document. What you could do is you can just edit these prompts right in your Playground. So, you could delete this and go ahead and delete this as well. And then you could go ahead and copy and paste your own text in there as well, because you’re still retaining those key guidelines. Again, imagine if this is a game of charades or even if you’re working with a coworker and you’re trying to give a set of instructions. So, the key instructions here are asking the second grader–saying, “My second grader asked me what the passage means,” and you want it rephrased. But you can always insert different types of content here.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, let’s do another example. So let’s go back to the prompt library. So, a very cool thing we also understand. Remember how I said GPT-3 is focused on text. However, it is able to transform text into emojis. Which actually, thanks to one of our developers who discovered this, we were actually not aware of this capability beforehand. So, if you want to convert a movie title into emoji, you could give some examples. So, Back to the Future might be, you know, boy, man, a car, and a clock. Batman might be a man and a bat. Game of Thrones will be some arrows and some swords. And again, you’ll have the settings on here to get you started.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, we can open this up again in Playground. And so, let’s see what we’ll come back for Spider-Man. So, it’s got some spiders, some webs, and that’s pretty good. Let’s see if… What it might come back with if we try it again. All right. So, it looks like it’ll repeat itself on that one. But also, you can begin to combine some of these as well.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, you can imagine using chat. So, obviously chat bots are a really popular application. And as I mentioned before, you can think about in customer support scenarios, you can think of in all different types of applications.
Ashley Pilipiszyn:Many of us have already interacted with chat bots before. So, let’s say you want to customize your chat bot. So, the base prompt here is, “This is a following conversation with an AI assistant. The assistant is very helpful, creative, clever, and very friendly.” And so, we’ll begin this dialogue. So saying, “Hello, who are you? I’m an AI created by OpenAI. How can I help you today?” Let’s say, “What movie do you recommend I watch this week?” And we’ll set AI. And submit, oops. My apologies.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: Looking at works of Christopher Nolan. Interstellar, Inception, The Prestige. That is actually a little bit freaky. Christopher Nolan is one of my favorite directors and I love, actually, all three of those movies. So, very spot on actually. But you can begin to actually customize these even more. So for example, let’s say, “The assistant is very creative, clever, very friendly, and an expert on sci-fi.” So, let’s say, “Which books should I add to my reading list?” The Left Hand of Darkness. The Gate to Women’s Country, The Ship Who Sang. Interesting.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So anyways, you can begin to play around and begin to add that additional context. So, for example, we’ve seen people say, “Okay, this AI chat bot is a science teacher or a bookstore clerk,” and you can begin to actually create these various personas to kind of probe GPT-3, or nudge GPT-3 into the direction, or have that context that you would like it to have. So, let’s do one more.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, I mentioned earlier before, Classification. So, you can imagine this being a really useful example. Whether you think of product classification, here is an example of a list of companies and the various categories that they’ll fall into. So, if we open this up in Playground.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, again, we’re telling GPT-3, “Okay, Facebook. You want the tags, social media, technology.” LinkedIn will also have that, but maybe enterprise and careers. McDonald’s, you’ve got food, fast food, logistics. And so, this is an opportunity also to create different types of tags. So, let’s see. Logistics transportation. Let’s add… What’s another one. See what comes back for TikTok, social media entertainment. So, that’s pretty good.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: But you can imagine again, applying this to a variety of different products. So, let’s say you’re building a different kind of app for different types of clothing or different types of foods. These kinds of things. And so, you can begin to actually add all of these different capabilities together. So, let’s say for example, the chat bot from the previous example also was able to then help you classify the different products you had in your application.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: And so, as I had shown before for the different startups we’ve seen, et cetera, all the different applications you’re seeing with GPT-3, all boil down to these prompts. And so, your ability to actually help GPT-3 understand, “Okay, what is the end result that you’re trying to get GPT-3 to do,” is really where a lot of interesting things can happen. And so, some of the best applications we’ve seen have been ones where you actually combine these capabilities. So, not just doing a single classification or a single chat bot, but actually being able to integrate those because that’s where GPT strengths lie. As I said before, GPT-3 can do a lot of different things. It’s not programmed to do one or the other, but it actually is very good at, essentially, multitasking.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, with that, I wanted to… I’m not sure if any questions have come through, but I wanted to leave a time for just a few questions. But I know this was a very, very rapid fire, deep dive into prompt design and engineering. If A), you have any questions, please feel free to email me. If you are interested in getting access to GPT-3 or building an app or product with GPT-3, again, please email me. I’d be delighted to discuss and very excited to have more people join our developer ecosystem and build with GPT-3. So, thank you so much. And I’d be happy to take any questions with the remaining time.
Angie Chang: There’s some questions in the chat. Most of them were like, “How do we get access to GPT-3?”
Ashley Pilipiszyn: Okay.
Angie Chang: You just answered that question, but if you would like to look in the chat, there’s a question about how OpenAI overcame bias about, for example, food suggestions, American versus Western food, or summarizing New York Times, Wall Street Journal, short article or headline. Let’s see if you can answer in three minutes.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: Okay, awesome. So, and I can not see the exact question, but I think… So, on the question of bias. So, excellent question. It is a, first of all, a very big industry-wide issue at OpenAI, especially we’re really focused on addressing this. Especially with our safety and policy work.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: Actually, I highly recommend checking out if you haven’t last week, we released a new research release about multimodal neurons in our latest clip model, which is our most powerful vision model.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: And the reason I bring this up is because, this is kind of demystifying what’s happening underneath the hood with these AI models. Because obviously, these models are trained on all of the internet. And so, they’re basically integrating what they’re learning from us on the internet. And so, what this multimodal analysis allows us to do, is actually peek under the hood and understand, “Okay, so how are these associations being made?”
Ashley Pilipiszyn: And this allows us to figure out, “Okay, then how can we begin to address these,” by identifying where these associations are happening. And so, this is really borrowing a lot from neuroscience. So, but to address bias in the case of prompt design and engineering.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: There is an opportunity actually to address some of this in text form as well. And so, whether it’s modifying your prompts. So, I think the example was for like foods or recipes, being able to provide a little bit more context to be able to help nudge where you’d like GPT-3 to go. And this actually will help with giving examples as well.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: So, actually one quick example that might help address this is… Question/answer. So quickly, what you can do in a situation like this is you also can provide, for example, a question that’s rooted in truth. I would get the answer. If you ask me a question that’s nonsense, or it doesn’t have a clear answer, I’ll respond with unknown. And so, you can also provide facts or essentially give those examples of how you’d like GPT-3 to respond. So, that’s another way again, is through that prompt as well.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: And then the second question… Angie, I forget what was the second question on?
Angie Chang: It was on headlines, for summarizing media company headlines.
Ashley Pilipiszyn: Oh yes, yes. So, summarization, I guess more broadly. So, GPT-3 is excellent at summarizing. Actually, it can do data parsing and summarization. And so, if I’m understanding the question correctly, could you take a variety of headlines and then summarize a bunch of different headlines and what’s the TLDR main takeaway from that? GPT-3 would be very good at that. Pretty much summarizing, again any text, it will be quite strong at.
Angie Chang: Great. Thank you so much, Ashley. That’s all the time we have today. I know people will be definitely signing up to join the GPT-3 beta and trying it out. And thank you for leaving your contact information on the slide..
Ashley Pilipiszyn: Yes.
Angie Chang: Where you can get in touch with Ashley directly.
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Sukrutha Bhadouria: And we will move on to our afternoon keynote, which I’m super excited about.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Our afternoon keynote is with none other than Ashley Dudgeon. Ashley Dudgeon is VP of Software Engineering at Salesforce, where she has worked for over a decade. She began her career as a software developer after graduating from UC Berkeley with a degree in computer science. She believes cultivating engaged, innovative, and transparent organizations is a prerequisite to building amazing software, and I have had a courtside view of that. Welcome, Ashley.
Ashley Dudgeon: Thank you, Sukrutha. Thanks so much for having me.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: So we’re going to get it right in! As they say, every good story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, not necessarily in that specific order, with so much of what defines a person is really based on how their story actually began. So I’d like to rewind a little bit, if you don’t mind, and I’d like to hear about your early years.
Ashley Dudgeon: Sure. So since we’re talking about resilience today, I’m glad that we are starting from the beginning. So while I certainly didn’t know it then, it was during my childhood and upbringing that taught me that resilience is not only critical to surviving, but it is the key ingredient to thriving. So my family and I immigrated to the United States as refugees. We had escaped Vietnam after the war, when I was only an infant. We’re now what history calls the boat people, fleeing to the wide open seas, packed in small ill-equipped fishing boats, willing to risk death for a better chance at life.
Ashley Dudgeon: I have no memories of this, of course, but it was the most influential event that has shaped who I am today. And while I never knew it or felt it, growing up, we were quite poor. My parents would move from orchard to orchard, harvesting tomatoes, cucumbers, or whatever was in season, from sunrise to sunset, to provide for their six children. When my father saved enough to start his own business, my mom would mow lawns and rake leaves beside him in these pristine neighborhoods that felt so foreign to our own. And despite our hardships, my parents provided a privileged and happy upbringing for my siblings and me. We had everything we needed. We had food, shelter, safety, and a loving environment.
Ashley Dudgeon: We played like normal children and focused on school and not because we were forced to, but because we figured early on that access to education would be the greatest gift that my parents could ever give us. So for us children to excel academically would mean that all of their sacrifices would have been worth it, and would also mean that we contribute back to a country that had given so much to us. And I’d say my high school years were also pretty transformative. I went to school in East San Jose. The student body was made of the surrounding lower and middle-class families. There were gangs and teenage pregnancies and drugs, but I also found myself amongst some of the smartest and brightest peers, many of whom I still have contact with today and have built their own successful careers.
Ashley Dudgeon: And I think we were really fortunate to have a set of AP teachers that believed in us and successfully prepared us to get into top universities. They had the audacity to coach East Side kids mock trial and send us in to compete against schools whose teams were coached by their attorney parents. We actually ended up making it to the semi-finals, which I thought was pretty remarkable. And I was also on the tennis team, with a coach that insisted that we compete in the top league, even though we were consistently coming out near the bottom. We would drive to these richer districts and get clobbered by girls who belonged to private tennis clubs and have their own private coaches.
Ashley Dudgeon: It was brutal, but sometimes we would come out on top. I didn’t see the brilliance then, but our teachers and coaches were preparing us to show up, to compete, and pushed us to succeed in a world that was beyond the East Side. They gave us confidence to believe in our abilities so much that we began to believe in them as well. One teacher, in particular, so inspired us that we gathered annually for the past two decades, hoping that he continued to see the impact that he made in our lives.
Ashley Dudgeon: And when he passed away a few years ago, we got the opportunity to reunite with all of our high school teachers, and that was just such an amazing and touching event. And so, as an adult, I realize now that much of my determination and unwillingness to accept defeat was seeded very early on by simply observing my parents throughout my life, and then it was also reinforced by the most dedicated and amazing teachers. So those are my early years, and they definitely had an impact and who I am today.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: That’s just amazing to learn more about how it all started and how it has played a part in where you are today. But along the way, you’ve obviously made some bets and you made some decisions, and we all have to continue to make decisions where we continue to question which direction to go in, whether that’s the right one for us and for everyone around us. And I, myself, have struggled with making the right decision, and it’s really hard to say, but hindsight is 20/20. So what’s the bet that you think you took that had a substantial impact on where you are today?
Ashley Dudgeon: Yeah. Oh boy. So I’ve certainly made my fair share of bets. And I have to say a few turned out pretty awful, but in hindsight, I can’t say they were truly losses, because collectively, they’ve led me to where I am today. But there is one big bet that stands out. Because I can still remember how it feels, or how it felt, to carry that immense weight of the decision around for two years to see how it would play out. And I’m referring to my years at UC Berkeley and the huge bet I made when I decided to pursue computer science. I’m totally dating myself here, but let me take you back to 1997. Google didn’t exist yet. About a third of US households owned a computer, and accessing the internet sounded like you were trying to make contact with ET through your telephone.
Ashley Dudgeon: That’s something our children will never know. I was a freshman and I thought I wanted to pursue a degree in business after ruling out medicine. And as one of the pre-reqs, I happened to take a course, Intro to Programming, which I believe was taught in Lisp. And from the start I was hooked. My mind was blown by the fact that you can use the keys on your keyboard to make your computer do things. It felt like magic, but the only problem was the only way to get admitted into the computer science major was to take two years of the curriculum, apply, and then pray that your technical GPA was in the top 50 of all applicants.
Ashley Dudgeon: It was the simplest acceptance algorithm, but it was also pretty cutthroat. I mean, I couldn’t even use the English or Asian-American studies to prop up my GPA. Those didn’t even count. So all I could do was think about what kind of degree I’d end up with if I didn’t get in and what would happen to my life as a consequence. It sounds a bit dramatic now, but remember, I was 18 and I felt like I might’ve already ruined my future by not choosing medicine. Anyhow, it felt like a pretty big gamble. I remember sitting in lecture halls of two to 300 computer science students, and all I could see was this auditorium full of males. I swore that many of them knew how to program before they probably learned how to talk, and come to think of it, I don’t think I had a single female computer science professor my entire time there.
Ashley Dudgeon: So it was no wonder I was constantly fighting this inner voice that told me that I was out of my league, but fortunately, there were also louder counter voices that gave me the confidence and determination to succeed. When things feel impossible, I find courage in all the stories my parents would share with us growing up. I remember the war stories of my mom running, heavily pregnant, from the bombings with three kids in tow, while the fate of my soldier father was unknown. Or, how we shared a two-bedroom apartment with two other families when we first arrived in the United States.
Ashley Dudgeon: And while they were mostly met with kindness, there was also the occasional encounters that reminded them that to some, they were just cheap laborers in someone else’s land, but yet they persevered. So did I believe that I was capable of studying hard and earning a place in computer science? You bet. It seemed like the easiest thing I could possibly do when I compare it to the challenges that my parents faced. And I vividly remember the morning that I made the long trek up to Soda Hall, praying that I would see my name above the dreaded cutline of those who got into the major.
Ashley Dudgeon: It all seems really cruel now how they would so publicly post the names and GPAs of the victorious and the defeated. I remember seeing my name above the line and finally releasing the weight that I had been carrying around for two years. At graduation, as one of the few females in the program, I was asked and accepted the honor of speaking at the commencement ceremony. So in that moment, with my parents in the crowd, I felt invincible. The bet that I had made on myself had paid off. So I guess, in summary, those years in college laid a solid foundation on which I would build my career in technology.
Ashley Dudgeon: And it has nothing to do with the data structures we learned or the compiler we had to build, or the many mathematical theorems I had to apply. In all honesty, I don’t think I retained much of it at all. I hope I never have to ever take a test on that again. But what I did gain was a sense of resilience, defiance, and confidence that has helped me get to where I am today. And while I still find myself amongst the sea of males in this field, though, it is getting better, I actually don’t really see or feel it. So I come to every meeting, and I lead every project without a consciousness of gender. And I find that really empowering. So how’s that for a bet?
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Oh, I mean, the comments that we’ve been getting in, everybody is getting very emotional, listening to you talk through your journey. But you’ve given me great advice, because I had the honor of working with you while we spun up this amazing big project of Work.com. So what advice do you have on negotiating for impactful projects that one can do in order to secure career growth? Because people often feel like opportunities aren’t presented to them, and most people, opportunities aren’t presented to them. And if they feel like there isn’t interesting work, then they need to make it for themselves. So what’s your advice?
Ashley Dudgeon: Yeah. I think the best advice that one can give comes from your own personal experience. So when I think about a time when I had to negotiate for a path to promotion, my mind goes immediately to how I earned my current role as Vice President of Engineering. If you guys don’t mind another story, I’ve got one for you. And I think this story is particularly relevant to tell today on International Women’s Day, because it’s centered around the unique challenges that women face when they choose to have children in the corporate world. I think it also emphasizes the importance of negotiation, which I believe many people, especially women, don’t do often enough when they hit roadblocks in their careers.
Ashley Dudgeon: So to tell this story, I have to take you back about four years. Thanks to the amazing parental benefits that I got from Salesforce, I was about to go on maternity leave with my second child for a long seven months. And I had never stepped away from my career for that long, but I felt completely confident in doing so. At that point, I had had multiple career conversations, with my then boss, about what it would take for me to grow into a VP role. And while I was not quite there yet, I did feel that I was at the pinnacle of my career. I had just successfully led the delivery of a multi-release project, solving a complex search problem that had been left unsolved for the past 17 years.
Ashley Dudgeon: And on my last day of work, heavily, heavily pregnant, I remember I was handing off a high-priority project plan that was solving a critical and deal-blocking gap for a premier customer. So in short, I felt confident in my place in the organization and the value that I brought to the company. I was leaving, or at least I felt like I was leaving on a high note. So when I returned seven months later, I went from feeling confident and secure to being lost and searching for a purpose to anchor me. The team that I had led directly was no longer intact because victory had been declared. My other teams were executing well under their manager. Of course, business had continued while I was out.
Ashley Dudgeon: My responsibilities had been delegated across multiple leaders and there really wasn’t that much to return to. And in some regards, I succeeded in what I was supposed to do, right? I put in place a transition plan that worked, and I built a team that could operate without me. My boss, who had always been a straight talker, told me that funding for our group didn’t quite play out the way that he had hoped, and he no longer saw a path for me to grow in his organization. He had suggested that perhaps the timing was perfect to switch groups and try something new.
Ashley Dudgeon: And if I hadn’t just spent the last six months nurturing a newborn around the clock, I was an emotional wreck because my nanny had unexpectedly quit two weeks after I came back to work. And my infant son was now living with my mom an hour away, Monday through Friday, until we figured out childcare. And if I wasn’t pumping every three to four hours to try to keep up my milk supply through all of this, I might’ve been in a better position to rationalize my work situation. Instead, I felt utterly crushed and defeated. I was struggling to find stable ground at home and at work. I wondered if it was time for me to step back from my career and just bring my son home. It just all felt too hard.
Ashley Dudgeon: And what was punching me straight in the gut was the reality that so many women go through when they choose to have children. It’s an impossible choice between bonding with your child and being present in your career to hold onto your relevance. It’s a part of the maternal experience that I think even the most supportive and progressive companies have yet to fully solve for. Having had two children, I believe the transition back from maternity leave is one of the most vulnerable times in a female’s personal and professional life. And it typically occurs during mid-career. So if we really want more females in senior leadership roles, reentry into the workplace has to be formally addressed.
Ashley Dudgeon: And I’m not saying that every woman encounters this challenge, and I hope that I’m not discouraging anyone from taking maternity leave, because you absolutely should, and you absolutely deserve to. But if you do find yourself in a similar situation, hopefully sharing my personal story can help you be better prepared. So what did I do? Well, I was far too stubborn, or dare I say resilient, to put my ambitions on the back burner. I sought support and encouragement from my most trusted circle, but for the most part, I was unflinching at work, because I believe that’s what strong leaders were supposed to do. I started tapping into my network and reached out to every technical executive that I knew, simply stating that I was seeking new opportunities.
Ashley Dudgeon: And they were actually all really helpful, and it led to a few interviews, but I really didn’t find anything that excited me. And I felt like I had worked far too hard in my career to compromise now. So about after two months, my boss then told me that a new project was on the horizon, and he asked if I would stay to lead it since he knew that I was already talking to other groups. And I won’t lie, it felt really validating when he said that he believed that I was the only one that could deliver it. And that was when I knew I had to negotiate. I was no longer willing to put in the work and hope that it would be good enough to get me promoted.
Ashley Dudgeon: I clearly told him if I committed to the project and help make it a success, he would commit to putting me up for promotion in exchange. The project actually turned out to be one of the most exhilarating projects in my career. It took about a year and a half to build and release, and the reception from our customers was phenomenal. And to my boss’s credit, he followed through with his end of the deal, and I was promoted to vice president in 2019. And in fact, he would later play a pivotal role in pitching me for my current position, which has been the biggest stage and opportunity of my career thus far.
Ashley Dudgeon: So if faced with a similar situation, only you can really make the decision on what path to take and what’s right for you. But I think that the advice that I can give that can be universally applied, is to be resilient. Be clear with yourself about what you want, be committed to putting in the work, and don’t let setbacks discourage you from obtaining your goals. And if you’re passionate about what you do, you’re far more likely to succeed. And in terms of negotiating career growth, I honestly hope that you don’t need to. If you don’t already have one, co-create a plan, a career plan, with your manager. You should be clear about what you want to achieve, work with your manager to align expectations for reaching those milestones, as well as identify the current gaps in skills and impact.
Ashley Dudgeon: And if you find yourself struggling to make progress, be honest in assessing whether or not you have the right skills, the right goals, or the right boss. And if required, don’t be afraid to negotiate. It may be obvious, but negotiations only work if the other party needs what you have to give. Thus knowing when to negotiate is also key to being effective. And if you’re not entirely sure, I say go for it. The worst that can happen is you lose one of the many bets you’re going to make throughout your career. And if you’re resilient and if you’re courageous, then you’ll end up finding a path that’s right for you. So that was a really long story, but I guess that’s my response.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Well, it didn’t feel long. I was hooked, and I was also monitoring the questions and the comments and people are just really resonating, saying that they’re so thankful that you’re sharing your stories. And when you spoke about how you were put up for promotion at that moment, there were a lot of people cheering you on, because it was like almost like they were watching a movie where it has a happy ending. But this is just the middle, I’m sure. The biggest takeaway is to be absolutely intentional in your career growth and focused on what you think you can do and keep at it, don’t give up. So Ashley, on that note, do you have any final thoughts or advice for our amazing listeners who are just hooked and totally queued into your story?
Ashley Dudgeon: Yeah. Well, first I want to thank you, before my time is up, for having me here today, and for you and Angie’s inspirational work in elevating females in tech and for creating a forum to encourage women to learn from each other’s experiences and to uplift one another. And I do hope that I’ve been able to make a small contribution to that today by sharing my story. And while I’ve taken everyone through a really personal journey, behind my narrative is a basic framework that can be helpful to anyone setting out to achieve a goal.
Ashley Dudgeon: First, you should understand what drives you, because that will be your motivation when things get difficult. Next, define what success means to you and be honest about how much work you’re willing to put into it, to achieve your goals. Don’t forget or neglect to revisit and refine your goals as needed. Don’t be afraid to change them, up the ante, or dial them down, because just like in poker, how you choose to play your hand changes with each card that’s dealt on the table.
Ashley Dudgeon: And I encourage you to not be afraid in making the big bets, because those are the ones that will most likely change the course of your life. And finally, be resilient and be courageous. The path to reaching your goal will rarely ever be a straight line. When the road takes an unexpected turn, remember that it is within your power to forge a new one. And finally, it occurs to me that, as I give this advice to all the attendees today, it’s really not my advice to give at all. I’m merely giving voice to the framework that my parents taught me, starting from that fateful night when they set out to sea. So that’s what I have to share today.
Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you, Ashley. That was just phenomenal. If you do get the chance to check out the chats and all the cheers that you got in the comments. We’re so honored to have you as our afternoon keynote Thank you so much.
Ashley Dudgeon: Thank you for having me.
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Sukrutha Bhadouria: We’re going to move on to our next segment which is our amazing USDS panel. USDS is United States Digital Service. It is a tech startup at the White House with a diverse group working across the federal government to build better tools and services for the American people. Julie will be moderating the panel with Amy, Elizabeth, and Gina. We’re so excited to hear from them. Welcome, ladies.
Julie Meloni: Hello, this is awesome. I haven’t seen you all for a couple years but it’s good to be back in my favorite, most favorite, conference ever. So we’ll just gonna jump right on in so we can get to the good stuff. I’m Julie, I’m an engineer with US Digital Service. I was with USDS from 2016 to 2018, took a little [inaudible], came back in October, it’s pretty awesome. And I’ve got some of my most awesome compatriots here who are much more interesting than I am and I will allow them, and by allow, I mean beg them nicely, to introduce themselves. So we’ll do that in just a second. I should probably tell you what USDS is. I am really out of practice, something about a pandemic.
Julie Meloni: All right, USDS. US Digital Service is a tiny little startup, we say, except that we’ve been around for seven years now so I think that the startup shine is off. We’re just small so, we’re just small. But we’re scrappy and we sit inside the Executive Office of the President in the Office of Management and Budget in the US Federal Government. None of that is important. All you need to know is that we’re a bunch of folks who go out and try to make shit better for everybody. We say citizen-facing services but it’s citizens and people who want to become citizens, because this government owes lots of people lots of things and the technology is really bad. So we try to fix it with a small group of UX researchers, designers, product managers, and engineers of all flavors. We are the flavors. And each of these folks will tell you about that and what they do and some of the gnarly problems that we disentangle. President Obama created our group in 2014, we lasted through the rest of his administration into the next one and we are still here because the work is hard and whoever’s in charge in the White House just makes it hard or harder. Right now, it’s just hard so we’re all glad to be here and we hope that lots of you will come and join us. All right. Amy, we’re gonna go alphabetically. Tell us about yourself.
Amy Quispe: What’s up, everyone. My name is Amy Quispe. I’m an engineer like everyone else here at the US Digital Service. I started last May, so we were already in the thick of it. I’ve been working from home this whole time. And prior to USDS, I worked in a pretty typical tech career I think. So we’ll be hearing more but I’ll hand it off to the next person.
Julie Meloni: E. Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Schweinsberg: Excellent. Hi, I’m Elizabeth Schweinsberg and I am an engineer here at USDS also. My particular specialty is security engineering so I’ve spent most of my career doing threat detection, incident response, and digital forensics. But I’m actually kind of a generalist, it turns out, so I’ve worked at a couple of brand name companies before this, but have been enjoying my time at USDS since August. And to Gina.
Julie Meloni: G for Gina.
Gina Maini: Hey, I’m Gina, I’m an engineer as well and I’ve been at USDS for two and a half years, maybe more than that now. And in the beginning, in my USDS tenure, I worked on asylum adjudication at DHS for a brief bit, and then I worked on Medicare for a few years and then moved off of Medicare modernization to now working on organ transplant, so I’ve done a lot of different stuff at USDS, a lot of fun times, a lot of hackathons, civic hackathons, which I really enjoy. And yeah, that’s me in my USDS tenure. Before USDS, I have no idea why I got this job, I often say that to myself because I’m technically a functional programmer by trade so I had really focused highly on really niche stuff that most people in government don’t even care about. They’re still on COBOL mainframes. And then I got here and had to work with what I had, so I guess more on that later but yeah I’m a SRE library engineer and I guess all around back end developer.
Julie Meloni: I need to learn how to use the chat because I’ve just been chatting away with my panelists and not all of you. So my job in here is to learn to switch that to everyone and try to answer questions as they roll along. But we’re going to hear some really gnarly stories, gnarly for those who don’t know the word, think of the most gross to sing intertwined, intertwingled pieces of crap and that’s the technology that runs the US government and from a state and local and federal position, probably also all governments, let’s just be honest.
Julie Meloni: And our job is to go in and disentangle that and try to make it work. And making it work can be things like taking paper forms and putting them on the internet. I know it’s crazy. It could also mean taking 45-year-old or sometimes 50-year-old mainframes, things that are actually older than me, and making them not mainframes.
Julie Meloni: Or make them some sort of nice hybrid model because there’s not actually anything really wrong with mainframes except that they might fall over and that’s bad, but that’s why we have Gina and Amy and Elizabeth, we have all the… Oh my God, it’s a good thing we’re not on a plane together because if the plane went down all mainframe folks in the government wouldn’t… Yeah, it’d be terrible.
Julie Meloni: All right, so we’re going to talk about gnarly problems and I’ll just give you guys a little heads up, not all of the gnarly problems in the government or in your jobs, really, are technical problems, they’re people problems. So we’re going to talk a little bit about people but also a lot about technology, but also a little bit about people, and how people skills, not just tech skills are what we need. Also, big plug, USDS.gov/apply, come join us.
Julie Meloni: All right. Gnarly problems. Who wants to go first? We can do the star technique situation: task, action, and result or you can just talk.
Amy Quispe: I’m happy to go first. So like I said, I started last May and if you remember anything about last March, April, May, lots of people were unemployed, a lot of people were filing for unemployment, a lot of people it was for the first time. State systems, which have been built to serve unemployment were overwhelmed. I remember just trying to help my family and friends follow yet they [inaudible] the sites back up in various states.
Amy Quispe: So when I joined USDS, my first project was actually something a little unusual, we were working with states. Because unemployment is kind of a weird hybrid of federal and state work and so these state systems were falling over, had to go and fix them make, sure people could get their money, make sure people could live right now, and I think that I saw some really crusty old systems. I gotta say, before USDS, the companies I’d worked for, the oldest was maybe like 15 years, 17 years old. And then I’m working on these systems that are way older than that.
Amy Quispe: I remember my first time running into like seeing a Y2K fix and just kind of being floored because I was like, “Oh, 20 years ago, someone wrote this kind of hacky fix, 20 years into the lifetime of the system thinking that, oh someone’s gonna fix this and make this good down the line.” I’m telling all you right now, never underestimate the longevity of your worst code. Never underestimate the longevity of your to-do’s. And so we started investigating one state system trying to figure out where the core of the problem was. Eventually, we figured out there was one point of the system that was like the point of failure. Everything needed to be written to this one place and one at a time. There was no parallelization, that was the bottleneck.
Amy Quispe: And when we discovered this bottleneck, we realized that we wanted to make different fixes. The people that were in charge of that part of the system did not want us to touch their shit, which was… And so here we’re in the middle of a few different things, we’re in the middle of a technical problem. We’re in the middle of a people problem, we’re also in the middle of a bureaucratic problem, systems that are in place already that have been built over time, both at a process level. And so what we ended up doing was we actually ended up building another system on top of that to do some queuing to slow that down to make sure that things didn’t fall over before hitting the mainframe.
Amy Quispe: And so a lot of times I kind of wish we’d fix things the right way but sometimes you have to figure out how to work around that and I think that that was that project has really informed a lot of how I think about what’s going on and fixing these systems, and also I think it’s gonna make me write better code in the future and be a little less precious about what’s mine.
Julie Meloni: That is a really good point and I’m trying really hard not to ask all of the questions I have on my little list because I want to get through like, the what are you going to take away from USDS when you eventually go back into the private sector or do you stay in the public sector, I don’t know, I don’t know your plans. That’s going to be a super interesting question.
Julie Meloni: I should probably say, US on a tour of duty of model which means we’re not here forever. And one of the reasons that we do that, come in for three or six months stay up to two years, renew again for up to two more years, it’s so that we don’t become entrenched in the technology that we are fundamentally trying to fix or make slightly better. The fresh perspective is incredibly important. It’s really easy to slide into complacency in a large complex organization, be it the government or anywhere, and taking a step back, refreshing and doing something new is super duper important.
Julie Meloni: Also, shit changes really fast. When I was in USDS the first time, Kubernetes wasn’t a thing, really, and now it’s everyone wants to keep kuberentify everything like, “Whoa, where’d that all come from?” And I remember that Gina’s has been here the whole time and now it made a lot more sense. Sorry, Gina, you can tell me that you don’t actually like Kubernetes later, but I needed a prop. So hey, tour of duty, what are you gonna do afterwards? We’ll get to that next, but, Elizabeth, I want to hear about your gnarly stuff and I hope that you guys have different gnarly things because I didn’t pregame that.
Elizabeth Schweinsberg: Yeah, good thing I got to go before Gina because my gnarly thing is a project that I picked up from her and have taken off with. So I also work at Center for Medicare and Medicaid Systems. I turns out because this program is very old, they still use mainframes to, say, pay doctors money. And one of the main projects I’ve worked on is building in security monitoring for it, which has several challenges. The first being, getting the logs off the mainframes into a system that is modern for log processing. Fortunately, that had already been done when I got there. And then it’s making sense of it, mainframes are a different paradigm from the server model that we use today. In a server application, you have the users who run the servers and those are separate from the users who use the application, and there are two different types of accounts.
Elizabeth Schweinsberg: Mainframes, that’s not true. Everybody who can use an application is just a user on the mainframe. So understanding that took a little bit. My most favorite part is mainframes were invented before TCP/IP. TCP/IP was bolted on afterwards. So the thing you do in threat detection is you want to know what IP address people are attempting to log in from. That has been my most gnarly problem because in this instance, people are typically on a internal network so everything’s a 10 dot something IP address to start. But then they don’t write it, they don’t really record it because that was not a main concern. So yeah, learning about the security of mainframes and figuring out what the actual threat models are going to be and how to really fix them while trying to deal with little things like, I don’t know what IP address people are coming from, so it’s been super fun. And there was question in the chat, CMS uses IBM Z/OS as their mainframe. So how about you, Gina? What gnarly stuff have you seen?
Gina Maini: I’m just laughing because don’t you love when the person before you starts a crazy project and then you just completely leave the new person to rock it out? But no, I’m so glad that you took over that project because it’s so important, it’s so, so important. And yeah, you were one of the few people who saw through my insanity and wanted to support me because we’re really… I mean, it’s really radical stuff in the government to teach people that security and compliance are separate topics. In the government, it’s very easy…
Julie Meloni: Wait, wait, wait, Gina, let’s be honest, it’s not just the government.
Gina Maini: Yeah, that’s true. I mean you see it in healthcare, you see it in finance, you see a general laziness in STEM, in certain areas in STEM too, there’s a general laziness about it. But in the government, especially with systems that deal with such sensitive data, teaching our stakeholders the differences between security and compliance have been challenging. So even just getting a security review at Medicare to get the appropriate stakeholders in a room looking at the same view of data and being able to talk about the same semantics was such a huge leap, that was like a light year’s leap. Because now the agency is prepared at least in some positioning to address serious security issues in production, which really before USDS, before our poking and prodding and trying to get data in the cloud, no one had really… There had been attempts but they were not successful so the agency had gone through a few different phases of modernization but it really took a huge amount of people to succeed. And so anyway, that’s that’s a shared victory and you are making the magic continue so thank you.
Gina Maini: But yeah the gnarly problems, I feel like I’ve just had gnarly problems after gnarly… I feel like I don’t have any problems that are not gnarly at USDS. I’ve never seen it, I mean I’ve never seen a government system that was better than I expected it to be. It’s never happened to me yet in the two and a half something years. And I actually forgot I even worked on unemployment, I had forgotten that in my intro, but that’s how I would work.
Julie Meloni: Oh, we’ll get there, We’ll get there.
Gina Maini: Yeah [inaudible]. But there’s so many gnarly problems. The thing that that sticks out in mind is the time that, during an onboarding process at Medicare, I had discovered a massive production vulnerability and it was really just a vulnerability because no one had thought through the process from an end to end life cycle of managing accounts. And so just because I’d had experience thinking about enterprise security, just kind of naturally followed some conclusions and then had to basically vary immediately to my engagement with Medicare, make a decision, do I take a massive bug disclosure to the CIO who doesn’t know me yet and has never worked with me. It’s like, “Hi, you don’t know me, here’s a massive issue that you need to address immediately.” And it was really gnarly too because I was meeting a lot of the security people for the first time so that was their first way of getting to know me and that was really challenging, I think, from a stakeholder management perspective.
Gina Maini: But I think the way that I disclosed it, I ended up building relationships with those people that lasted throughout my engagement with Medicare. So we ended up getting it fixed and it was kind of because I had gone to them as more of an ally than kind of come in from more of a hammer perspective. But anyway, that was one glimmer of the many bizarre situations.
Julie Meloni: I wrote down like five things that popped up in the chat so I’m going to try to like right through them real fast and then we’ll and then I’ll tee up the question for you all so you can be thinking about it. Resiliency. That’s all I’m going to tell you. All right, so a couple things that came up in the chat. Is the current administration throwing large sums of money at us to fix this? Fun fact. The last three administrations have thrown amounts of money to us to fix it. Fixing technology problems, believe it or not, is a bipartisan problem and Congress likes to throw money at bipartisan problems when there is continued success and we have been able to spend money successfully over the last seven years. But we are about 200 or so people, there’s hundreds and hundreds of thousands of federal employees and 400 agencies and a metric shit ton of technology problems that us 200 people can’t solve.
Julie Meloni: We are intentionally small so as a forcing function to spend the government’s money wisely. We get appropriated funds which means we do not have to pay them back. We get a certain amount of money each year, 99% of that money is spent on the salaries for the people that work at USDS. And so as many people as can literally be hired within that budget we will hire them and we are the empowered and entrusted, like Gina said, to go out to the highest levels of government and tell them that their shit’s broken.
Julie Meloni: USDSers have stood in front of Secretaries of Defense and said, “You have a security problem right here.” And that’s fine, that’s who we need to be yelling at so that we continue to have the risk ability and the ability to get in there and fix it, like Gina said. Hello, I got a big vulnerability I’d like to disclose right now, CIO I don’t know, don’t even really know what a CIO does because what the hell does a CIO do. But I’m gonna tell you your shit’s broken and you need to fix it now or it’s gonna be really, really bad. So that is the sort of empowerment and emboldenment, enbiggenment, if you will, that we all get when we join USDS. It’s why there’s a relatively rigorous application or interview process. We really only hire people who’ve got some really gnarly experience and that get any type of organization.
Julie Meloni: Generally we don’t care what school you went to, where you worked, where you’ve done your work, or what you’ve worked in. If you have consistently solved gnarly problems in and around technology as an engineer or product manager or UX researcher and designer, you’re someone that we want to talk to because something is going to need that type of help. But we can’t fix everything. We are also not responsible for anything and we do not have the power to purchase anything. So you know those interview questions where you learn a lot about how does your candidate manage without authority? We ask a lot of these questions because we have absolutely no authority but all the responsibility to make sure shit doesn’t fall over. It’s super fun.
Julie Meloni: And so our budget is not being cut, our budget is attempting to be expanded but each of the last three administrations, Obama, Trump, and Biden, we have been here, we have worked hard for the American people and people who want to become the American people and there’s no sign of slowing down, so we are grateful for that. Applications. Yes, we do have a lot of people applying. Inauguration week was a big week for us, we had about 5,000 applications that week. And we’ve gotten through all of them, we’ve adjudicated them, we are a band of people who want nothing more than more colleagues. So please, yes we do have a lot but like if any of the things that we talked about describes you, apply. If you apply and do not make it through the process, that’s fine. There’s about eleventy billion other places for you to help.
Julie Meloni: Go to codeforamerica.org. Look at 18f.gsa.gov. USDS. Code for America will hook you up with local and state civic tech groups, volunteers. Civic tech is a growing area of interest and there are always ways to help wherever you are, be it your local state or federal area. And talked about empowerment blah blah blah blah, I think I got all my things. All right, how do you build resiliency into systems when people are the problem, Elizabeth?
Elizabeth Schweinsberg: So my traditional approach does not currently work. Normally I start with cookies or some other baked good but I actually haven’t met any of my co-workers in real life and the contractors that I’m working with are also all over the country so the the typical endearing yourself to them through baked goods isn’t working. So I have been trying to build my social capital by answering the problems that they have. So the people who actually run the mainframes are contractors. And these people know mainframes, they’ve spent their entire three, four decade long careers in mainframes with a few exceptions and that is what they know. And having some other person come in and be like I’m going to tell you how your mainframe should function differently, well not function, but how you need to look at your mainframes differently.
Elizabeth Schweinsberg: It can be a little unsettling so in addition to having them give me what I want, I have also been trying to make sure that they get what they want. And in specific, we are doing a hybrid cloud mainframe so some of the things that the mainframe vendors have been in charge of the data is moving to the cloud and that makes them a little concerned because the data that they were responsible for is going to be outside their control. So I’m helping them get more of that information starting with very basic things like we have APIs. The APIs come through a gateway in our cloud. Why don’t we check and let the mainframe managers know if somebody’s trying to use the APIs from an unusual IP address. And they seem really receptive to that sort of thing so there’s a bit of a give and a take and making sure that they get some of what they want has made them more willing to give me what I want.
Julie Meloni: Amy, go. Resiliency. People.
Amy Quispe:Resiliency. People. I think that one way to build resiliency is actually to build process. And another way to build resiliency is to remove process. I think that thinking very intentionally about how you work is really important and how you work with the other people that you’re working with is going to be really important to figuring out what your cadence is, what people can take on, not making assumptions or writing down your assumptions especially since we’re all working remotely. I think that this is also part of building a resilient software system so not just building a resilient team and a resilient way to work but actually thinking about how to intentionally build something. If you can define well what everyone is doing, if you can define how you’re working, then if someone has to leave the team, if someone has to join the team, you have a way to make that work smoothly. And that’s going to make your systems continue to work smoothly no matter what the team is, if you’re building actual teamwork.
Julie Meloni: Awesome. Gina, bring it home.
Gina Maini: Yeah, I echo what Amy just said. I think that’s how you get resiliency, for sure, is some level of process. And the old engineering teams I worked on, right, we called it lore or the playbooks or some document that would be wisened and if you get blamed it it’d be like a tragedy the commons and everybody had contributed. That was kind of what I was used to working like. But then you arrive in government, there are no engineers. You’re it. There’s nobody else coming. That’s kind of what it felt like for us to get started, especially at a new engagement, in the case of Medicare and unemployment with the Department of Labor, you’re kind of coming in and there’s nobody there doing your job which is why it’s so exciting to be there and why we’re so valuable in these spaces. But when you’re thinking about building a product, you’re not actually building a product, you might be working with the policy arm of the agency to craft some kind of pilot, right? And that pilot may be procured by someone who isn’t you. You might be setting up a contract play for the agency to hire the right thing which isn’t very exciting and I think if someone had told me that years ago I would have been like that doesn’t sound like anything I would ever want to do or be a part of.
Gina Maini: But it is the most value add I think any of us really give at USDS is the dollar value that we save American people by pointing out, you don’t need to buy Ferraris if you just want cup holders. Because these systems evolved to buy battleships, these systems did not come about to buy software, so they’re going to look for different signals that are just noise and so we kind of come in there and we tell them what to focus on in the procurement and actually that sets them up and a good procurement and a good contract, these contracts last for 10 to 12 years, maybe more. And so setting up a contract to be really flexible to have the right kind of outcomes is actually, that’s kind of resiliency across decades in government. Because a lot of these systems they span many administrations, many decades of policy and that’s why there’s such amalgamations. There is no such thing as product, there is just policy and then a bunch of contractors scrambling to implement it, right? That’s the reality of the United States Tech.
Julie Meloni: Awesome, we have eight minutes left and I want to address just a few questions real quick but also plug everything that Amy and Elizabeth and Gina have said today. Yeah, we’re talking about working in the government, in the federal government in this case, but everything… Please listen to everything that they said and take those… Elizabeth would you just like to read your mug that would be…
Elizabeth Schweinsberg: No.
Julie Meloni: Okay. Yeah, go for it, read it.
Elizabeth Schweinsberg: Okay. I picked a special mug for today. “Women belong in all the places where decisions are being made.” [inaudible] illustrious RGB.
Julie Meloni: RBG. Yes, that’s much more interesting than what I was going to say, which was all of these lessons you can apply in your gnarly complex hierarchical organizations as well. However, being at the table where the decisions are made, being in the room where it happens, if you wish, that is one of the reasons that USDS was created: just to get technologists at the table. They didn’t tell us that when we applied and we’re going to be an engineer, we’re going to fix it shit. I’m like, why am I reading this bill before it becomes a law? School House Rock did not prepare me for this, hence the title of this little chat.
Julie Meloni: We all know about how bill becomes law, but we don’t know that sometimes bills get sent around in Google docs and your friendly neighborhood USDSers and a whole bunch of other people just randomly comment on them about that’s dumb, that’s dumb, please don’t write API specs into law, just stop at, you should have an API. That’s great, big fan, don’t write specs into law.
Julie Meloni: And so we’re all in the rooms where it happens now and we keep things from that happening but we keep things like, you should share data at the forefront. Don’t make dumb decisions, don’t enable 53 distinct territories and states from creating their own unemployment systems, maybe just have one, maybe share. [inaudible 00:33:54]. And that is a really, really, really important part of what we do. And probably if that had been part of the pitch, none of us would have joined because policy is really boring. Except it’s not really boring when you get to write a law in a bar that enables technology to be put in place and you can see my 2018 Girl Geek talk. But anyway, last question for everybody, most important question. What do you want the takeaway for all of these fine folks who have listened to us, what do you want the takeaway to be and what are you taking away from USDS when you eventually leave us and go somewhere else? You can all fight over who goes first. We don’t fight at USDS, Gina, you can go first. Or Amy.
Gina Maini: Yeah, can Amy go first?
Julie Meloni: No one’s ready to think it through.
Gina Maini: Sorry, Amy.
Amy Quispe: No, I’m fine to go first, I’m was just trying to get the vibe here, vibing over Zoom is so hard and so important. I want to say that one thing that comes up when you’re in the room where it happens is that as technologists, we all have kind of a fresh perspective on what’s going on. But also, we all have just our own personal perspective on what’s going on. One of the values of USDS is find the truth, tell truth. And I think that’s one place where I’ve been really able to be valuable in USDS. I was in the meeting earlier today where I had to just stop and say, “So we’re talking about a technical solution to a non-technical problem and there are also non-technical solutions, non-technical problems, but ultimately we’re talking about non-technical problem.” And just sitting down and laying that out in plain language changed the conversation and I think that that’s one thing that I see USDSers do all the time is bring clarity to the conversation and change the conversation, whether it’s about technology or not.
Amy Quispe: And I don’t know what I’m going to be doing in the future but I hope that you all realize that you can also bring the truth to these conversations. If you are in a place that does not allow you to speak the truth or does not hear the truth, please find a way to get your voice heard and understand how powerful you are, understand that this power is so important in the US Government but in all sorts of systems, including the technology that all of you are creating everywhere, because technology is something that is scalable, it is something that is big, it is something that is powerful and it’s something we are building right now and you have the ability to change the way that the future works.
Julie Meloni: Man, that was such a good quote, we’re putting that on a sticker. We do stickers a lot. Amy: you have the way you change… Okay, change the way the future works, please change the way the future works. I’m old, I need a better future in my retirement years. Elizabeth, you know that means we’re going to wind up with you again at the end, just be prepared. Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Schweinsberg: Okay, so I know we said that we got 5,000 applications the week of inauguration, mostly due to news organizations picking up some comments in the html. Now this is not official. I helped review a lot of those resumes and looked at pretty much all the names that came into the engineering. Just based on names, it was not the most diverse set of applicants. There were a lot of traditionally white male names in there. So apply. Because we really value diversity because everybody has something different and interesting to bring to the table.
Elizabeth Schweinsberg: And yeah, I mean it sounds like a really, a whole lot of people and we’re going to hire some. We have to replace probably a few dozen people this year. And maybe it’s not right now but it will be in the future and there’s also a slew of technology-oriented non-profits that are coming up. We’ve had a couple talks through USDS with them on building tools to help people file for bankruptcy more easily, improve access to voting machines, so there’s some really great stuff out there if you keep your eyes open. The gnarly problems aren’t just in the government or at your large tech firms. 100% the thing I’m going to take away that I was actually hoping to get out of this is all of my jobs have been very operations focused and I am terrible at getting my project work done.
Elizabeth Schweinsberg: But here, I’m working with product managers and designers who really think through how we are designing the programs, talking about how we’re going to build them, and seeing that cross-disciplinary work towards project management, hopefully absorbing some of it, I think will be really useful whatever I do next.
Julie Meloni: Awesome. Gina, you get the last word before Angie kicks us out like she did to me in 2018, because I just can’t shut up about gnarly problems and how everybody can fix them because you have the power. Go.
Gina Maini: So last word. What I’m going to be taking away from this job? Definitely not one thing. This job is really… I don’t think I really understood how government worked before I got this job. So I think I know how the sausage is made now and it frightens me deeply. So I think that’s half of what I will take away from this job. The other thing though is I think I never really understood myself very well in my career in the sense that I worked for a bunch of e-commerce companies and the biggest moral dilemma was if I was gonna disappoint somebody buying a TV on Black Friday. And the thing is getting a TV on Black Friday is a really important problem and I don’t mean to diminish any value that e-commerce has. E-commerce has amazing value it’s so important to our everyday lives.
Gina Maini: But I didn’t feel super satisfied, it didn’t drive me, personally. I didn’t come into work wanting to optimize a pricing algorithm or optimize… It didn’t make my heart sing. Every day on this job I feel that. I feel that spark that I never had and it’s interesting how I used to think I was the slowest engineer or the worst engineer on the team. I think I just was unhappy in a lot of my work and now that I’m here and working on stuff that really motivates me, producing is weirdly not an issue anymore, it’s more about… Oh, I see, a wild cat has appeared. It’s more about actually managing my time well here because there’s so many fires and so many great people to work with. So it’s been more of a time management issue these days anyway.
Julie Meloni: Awesome. All right. Thank you all for hanging in. LinkedIn, it’s a thing that works. I actually use it. I will answer all your questions. I just said that out loud in front of everyone. Okay, don’t forget to love each other, wear a mask, be safe, wash your hands, do a good job. Bye, everyone.
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