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Angie Chang: Aashima Lakhanpal is a search product lead at Google. She spent a decade selling ads, inclusive teams, and writing dad jokes. Having managed global teams across Europe, Asia, and America, she’s on a mission to make teams bias free with training and group exercises that can inspire teams of all sizes to feel included and achieve their potential. So welcome Aashima.

Aashima Lakhanpal: Thank you so much. Hi everyone. I’m glad you all are here to celebrate, you know, Women’s Day and to elevate yourself. This is fantastic. I am Aashima LakhanpaI. I in my day job am a search product lead for retail <laugh> In simple terms, what I do is I channel product feedback to teams at Google based on whatever inputs I get from customers, retailers on search shopping. If you have questions on what do I do exactly, I’m more than happy to connect one-on-one later. But for now, that’s the easiest way I can say what my job is. But that’s not why I’m here.

Aashima Lakhanpal: I’m here today to tell you something about why I’m, what am I passionate about? And you’ll hear that in exactly a minute more. Let me give you a quick question so that you get a sense of where am I headed to now? It said that we receive 11 million bits of information every single moment. I would love to hear from all of you, what do you think is how much of this to we consciously process? Feel free to drop responses in the chat, but I’m curious to understand if, you know, you have guesses on this. Out of 11 million bits, how much does a human brain consciously process? Oh, <laugh>. Okay. 5%. I see that. Yeah.

Aashima Lakhanpal: Well, surprisingly, out of this 11 million bits of information that we receive, we actually only consciously process 40 bits of information, which means 99.9% of the times were actually making decisions based on our subconscious or our unconscious biases I like to call it. Imagine the amount of decisions, like which coffee do I want, which elevator to take. Simplest of our decisions, we’re actually taking as fast as our subconscious brain can process, which is the topic that I’m here for, to talk about is that, well, ladies and gentlemen, bias is something that has been a part of all of our lives for so long, driving almost 99% of our decisions, and we have never ever given it a second thought.

Aashima Lakhanpal: This June, I complete a decade in tech, which is 10 years of working in tech. If someone asked me at the beginning of my career, I would laugh it off and think, well, I’m not gonna be here for long. But ten years is, is what I have done in in tech. And as I look back at my ten years in, the one thing that stands out to me is that I have had a lot of first moments, only moments as as a woman, as the only woman in the room, as the first woman in the room. And it’s been a proud moment, but also quite learning because I have had time to contemplate what these first moments mean. For example, if I remember my first ever conference, it was for an automotive company, and I was supposed to present these really cool gadgets and say why data is going to help these cool gadgets, et cetera.

Aashima Lakhanpal: I remember that session bombing because the entire audience was, you know, room full of men. I don’t know if they wanted to hear what I had to say. That was my very early entry into understanding a room full of men and feeling like, oh, is this something I’m going to experience every time I enter a workplace, a room full of bias? Got to a few years later, I received my first international job opportunity and I remember thinking, well, this is great. I’m gonna be abroad. I’m gonna relocate.

Aashima Lakhanpal: I was also double questioning myself. This means I have to relocate my entire family. Am I doing the right thing? Is this the right thing? I should be focused on building a family. I don’t know if I’m doing the correct thing, which is when I also realized in addition to being at the receiving end of a bias, I am now the person who’s also causing bias. That’s how human brains are. This ten years has taught me one thing. It’s that you are biased.

Aashima Lakhanpal: I am biased. We are all biased. This is a byproduct of being a human. Each time we see a decision, we’re making a judgment, and that’s how our biases erupt. So while if you ask me, is this a good thing, is it a bad thing? Well, it’s a thing. We’re living with it, we’re taking decisions based off of it. Good or bad, the first step to understanding these biases is acknowledging that they matter. It’s important that each time you enter a room, know that every person there has some sort of biases including yourself. And if you can acknowledge that, that’s step one taken. Let’s figure out what does this mean for, for all of us, right? We’re all working in this, this, you know, tech space where we’re constantly working with teams, we’re working with people in remote setups, we’re working with people in global teams, we’re working with people in diverse multicultural teams.

Aashima Lakhanpal: All of this makes it even more complicated because imagine if our personal lives are so much of bias being trickled down into our decisions. Now think about how much biases enter into our decisions at our workspace. You know, think of simpler decisions like hiring a new person for the team or who gets this project. Imagine all of those decisions being taken and now the amount of biases that help those decisions. So as I went through Covid in 2020 and I kind of worked remotely, a lot of these questions always bothered me that, well, Aashima, I know what biases I have, I’m learning as I grow, I’m learning what means, you know what, what, what kind of biases have I seen as an Asian person, as a woman? I mean, I’m not, you know, ignorant of the fact that as I entered this workforce, I was really docile.

Aashima Lakhanpal: I would hate questioning someone. My biggest bias was that I couldn’t talk to a senior person in the room because I felt it was rude to question them. Now cut to so many years later, my first thought in this process is that, well, now that we’re all working remote, this is only going to get worse from here. How else do I talk to a room full of people who probably have similar passionate interests, but are so diverse in how they operate? How do I take benefit of the fact that we are all biased? What can we do from here? So here is what I decided to do. I kind of made a framework for myself, and I urge all of you to think about your own frameworks as you start to work with different teams, global teams, you know, different people coming from different motivations.

Aashima Lakhanpal: I kind of put a framework for myself to say, each time I work in a new project or in a new space, I would love to understand where this person comes from. And the easiest way to do that, you don’t need too much of research into this, and I’m very conscious that this is also a biased process. But the idea here is to say, look, each time I’m in a new space, I’m gonna try asking someone what is their main motivation or what drives them to work better? And if I can club that into four main buckets, I have a better way of working with each of them. Now I will come to the end and promise I will make this worth your time to say, well, what do you do with this four style model? And what’s gonna benefit us in the long term?

Aashima Lakhanpal: I will come to that. Let me first little tell you a little more about what this model looks like. I kind of said, okay, look, each workspace typically has one of these four people. And this is how I simplified this for my decision making. I said, well, typically someone says, I love working with people. It’s my passion. I wanna feel like I’m working with family with home. It’s this person is showing you traits of a relator. He’s this person who’s actually meant to build more relationships and he drives off a lot of energy of this particular trade. This person could be called a relator.

Aashima Lakhanpal: The second type of person I would see is someone like an influencer. They are the people who kind of love winning others over. It’s almost like they like viewing you day in and day out because that’s how they operate. You know, they’re the swift talkers. You see them sometimes. I’ve personally been at the brunt of someone who’s been an influencer and felt, look, am I being, you know short sold because this person is so good at what they do. But that’s what influencers do. They kind of persuade you to an idea or a concept, and they do it really beautifully. And I’m sure you see it in some teams yourself too. Even if you are in college school working through some, you know, recently created teams, you will always find this one influencer sitting in your team ready to talk about something.

Aashima Lakhanpal: The third kind of person I’ve typically found is a strategic person. They can literally spot a trend from a mile away, talk about any concept, and they will try finding trends in saying whether this exists, what kind of issues, consequences, problems they can already, it’s almost like they have seen five steps ahead in advance and it’s a good thing because that’s the part that excites them.

Aashima Lakhanpal: The final part is someone like an executor, which I personally relate a lot to. It’s from the idea of, you know, how many people get a high when they kind of tick things off their list. This is me. I love being the fact that I’m so productive. I have done ten meetings today and I’ve kind of ticked so many other things off. That’s my motivation to work, is that I love to implement things and kind of push them until I see it till the end. Now, I know that this is, you know, a typical workspace.

Aashima Lakhanpal: You may have someone fall into one of these four buckets, but I, like I promised, I’m gonna tell you what does this mean? If you are working in a team like this, I realize the benefit of all of us being biased or having judgments or making decisions based on biases that we have is the fact that you can actually benefit from a team member who has a strong motivation like this.

Aashima Lakhanpal: For example, in my case, the fact that I have been an executor and I have loved working, you know, to tick things off my list, I would make a great pair with an influencer. Imagine me and an influencer working together on a project. We could actually make this project look so better than it already is just because my skills and their skills are complimentary.

Aashima Lakhanpal: I urge you to think that each time you enter into a team, think about what is actually complimenting you and anyone else’s skills. And that’s what I call a strength spotter. It’s an easier way because look, we’re all biased. We’re gonna operate from decisions that, that are from our own biases. We could be the ones causing it, we could be the ones at the end of it. But I actually love the fact that this framework helped me think, look, I am a person who’s an executor.

Aashima Lakhanpal: What is the best thing I need for this project in order to move forward? I’ve also had examples where someone like a strategic person and a relator have worked really well. Now imagine if you’re trying to get a project right off from the ground, this relationship builder can actually go and bring anything that that kind of, you know, brings that relationship in. And a strategic person can help you build that framework. So many times you’re just missing those one, two parts that this other person in a team can bring.

Aashima Lakhanpal: As I promise that’s my takeaway for you here, which is the next time you are in a team, right? Remember these three things, acknowledging biases is never going to be out of fashion. Each time you are a person in a room that you feel is awkward, remember that someone else is also feeling awkward.

Aashima Lakhanpal: I love the fact that my manager asked me this question and she’s a female manager by the way. She asked me, Aashima, how are you feeling and how did this make you feel? I remember the power of this question because it meant that wow, someone actually understands where I come from. The next time you are with someone else, acknowledge someone else’s bias. It’s never going to be out of fashion. You’re going to uplift someone so much that is gonna make their day. It’s your key differentiator. And so is it mine?

Aashima Lakhanpal: Working in teams only going to get tougher. We’re gonna adjust to a new reality. Remote, global, complex teams, diverse teams, multicultural teams, it’s going to get better or probably as I say, complex. But if this gets more tougher, learn that your team members key motivation and learn how to pair it with yourself. There is no harm in realizing the fact that these decisions are being taken based on how we think or belief or our system. t’s almost like saying biases is, is going to help you take these decisions, learn your team member’s key motivation to pair it with yours. That was my strength supporter model that I had. I might, and I’m very conscious that this is again, bias at its best because I have simplified it to no extent.

Aashima Lakhanpal: I would love to hear from all of you if you feel like there is anything that has helped you personally work through a team as you work through biases, their own yours and what has helped it work better. But let me know if there’s any more questions here. Oh, I love the comments, ladies. I really appreciate all of this. It makes me feel like you all have been in the same boat at some point and this is a fantastic way of saying we all acknowledge each other’s status where we are at.

Aashima Lakhanpal: Thank you for sharing these comments. It means a lot. I see Susan, your question, which pairs best, in my opinion, it totally depends on the project that you’re trying to do. I have noticed myself work better with an influencer if I need to kind of market my project a little better. Like I am an executor and I feel like I really wanna get extra hours done to get this out. But when I pair myself with an influencer, I feel it’s fantastic. They know how to market it, they’re kind of filling the holes that I don’t have. I also have seen an executor work really well with a strategic person just because they kind of build the bigger picture and I’m kind of, you know, filling in the gaps. I kind of feel like it totally depends on the project, but you can make a pair out of anything.

Aashima Lakhanpal: It’s just a matter of knowing what that motivation is and how you can pair it with you. I love Jennifer, your comment. It is better to lead with your dorkiness, but I I really appreciate this comment. It means so much. Which type of struggle do you collaborate with most and what strengths do you lean on to make it successful? I have worked through three different global jobs and all of them have involved working with people from totally different cultures. I remember working in Ireland at one point and I could feel no relation whatsoever to the audience just because I have been an Asian all my life. It was very difficult to understand what motivates a general Irish person to say, I’m going to go to work today. And that was my, my struggle is because I couldn’t understand where someone comes from.

Aashima Lakhanpal: Marketing was in general an issue. I couldn’t understand what meant work was, you know, what kind of work could I get for myself? Just kind of setting that example or an idea of where does someone come from? You’re not going to live their life. It’s going to be tough to walk in their shoes, but even if you can get an inkling or a fraction of an idea of where someone comes from, it makes it so much more easier to take that journey together. And I think that’s where my struggle has mostly been. It’s just understanding that now I’m in a new setup. It’s an entirely new vulnerable environment. How do I understand where this other person is from? Sarah Love that lead with Dorkiness. That’s absolutely happening. Thank you Susan. I know an executor cuz I feel like I always put in the hard hours and yet at the end of it when someone says, well, you didn’t challenge us enough, it almost feels, you know, that I’m breaking my heart because, you know, it is just a bias that I’m learning to live with and working around.

Aashima Lakhanpal: But yes, I, I appreciate the perspective too. One challenge is multiple time zones and setting a meeting time. Greta, I cannot plus one this comment so much just because having, you know, living ha I have an entire family in India and each time I’m trying to get basic things done and, you know, making time for my parents, making time for my family here, it just seems like a massive task to kind of understand that, you know, just showing someone that I’m trying to be inclusive is an appreciation in itself, which is what I started doing here. Each time I had a festival back home or each time I had something that was important to me, I made sure that my team members were aware of it too, just because that would just drive home the point that, look here is my motivation to doing what I’m doing, or here is the motivation why I’m doing it.

Aashima Lakhanpal: I think people are in general nicer because they want to pick up on things that you’re learning, doing, et cetera. But I I generally love the fact that we have so much more to learn from each other as teams that it makes me excited that I love the fact that people here are accommodating and I say, look, I’m trying to adjust this time to make it work for you. Just acknowledging that is enough for me and I think that’s done wonders for my wider team too. Shannon, I love the fact if you feel like you know, your main trait is a relator you would absolutely pair well with someone who’s a strategic person, especially because you are the person who’s going and building out that relationships and driving off people’s energy.

Aashima Lakhanpal: A lot of people I know, especially in the tech space sometimes kind of feel like this, it does the opposite for them when they’re trying to build this relationship trait. You know, it’s, it’s an effort, you know, it’s wearing them out, but this strategic person can actually bring in those extra traits and see those five steps ahead. I love how you’re thinking about it.

Aashima Lakhanpal: There is a project, this is a perfect way of thinking about how better to pair your team members. Like how better to think about who works better in pairs. So absolutely. Plus one to that. Michelle thank you for sharing. You had a project in the rest, were in Germany and India. They asked me for my preference. That is fantastic On your end, Michelle. I think these are smaller things and you do not even, I can’t even begin to place how much it means for people who are in different time zones to know that someone else has appreciated their calendar.

Aashima Lakhanpal: I really think that’s a plus one to saying, well I acknowledge where this is coming from. So yes, absolutely. Plus one to that. Melissa, someone who’s worked with a team mostly in India and East Africa, it’s tough. I agree. It is absolutely tough and it’s a nightmare at some points. But I like I keep saying, acknowledging step one, step two I think is, you know, your action always kicks in. You’re always doing the right things by saying, look, I’m trying to adjust the calendars to the best way I can. I wonder how these categories pair with Myers–Briggs. Jennifer, you bring a fantastic point and I think this is a good, good insight into this is that Myers–Briggs has evolved over a point. It feels like, you know, what we used to ask before in terms of, you know, where do you fall and what kind of personality trait are you that has become better with time.

Aashima Lakhanpal: We also have more modified versions. Anisha, you are pointing out to StrengthsFinder. That’s another fantastic way and I urge all of you to take a look at these tools. Sometimes they’re a fantastic way of throwing an insight into are you this person or not? They are more detailed, they’re more technologically advanced in terms of how they’re asking you the right set of questions.

Aashima Lakhanpal: In fact, StrengthFinder gives you all of your 35 plus strengths listed out for you. And that’s a fantastic thing if you’re trying to analyze yourself. Like it helped me understand how much of these traits were needed, which were my dominant traits, which were my lesser dominant traits. Kind of gives you an insight into where can you lean more. But this is fantastic because these are tools that are actually helping you guide to understanding yourself as an individual. I had just, like I said, this is bias at its best giving you a four point decision to say, look, here is what you can do for the next time you’re trying to work in a team better.

Angie Chang: Thank you. Thank you so much. This is an excellent talk. I think we have lots of questions. If you’d like to hang out, I’m sure people will like to chat with you in the lounge. Thank you again. Absolutely.

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

• Check out open jobs at our trusted partner companies.
• Watch all ELEVATE 2023 conference video replays!
• Does your company want to sponsor a Girl Geek Dinner? Talk to us!

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

• Check out open jobs at our trusted partner companies.
• Watch all ELEVATE 2023 conference video replays!
• Does your company want to sponsor a Girl Geek Dinner? Talk to us!

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Our next talk is by Odette. She is the head of growth at Onramp, a company that builds technical apprenticeships for companies. Before Onramp, she spent over 12 years at Girls, Inc, where she worked with corporate partners to design and skill programs for girls of color in Oakland and New York City to explore careers in STEM and finance. What an amazing, amazing journey. Welcome, Odette.

Odette Nemes: Thank you. Thanks for having me. And can we please give a shout out in the chat to this Girl Geek X team? They have just been working their butts off to put this fabulous conference together so that we can all celebrate International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month together. Thank you to the team. It is so much work. And you’re at the homes stretch today. So here we go, y’all welcome. We’re gonna talk today about the talent system and how it’s broken and finding better ways to hire. As was shared, my name is Odette. My pronouns are she, her and ella. And I’m the head of growth Onramp. If I don’t get to your questions, feel free to reach out to me over email or on LinkedIn. My contact information is there.

Odette Nemes: First and foremost, I wanna ask you to brace yourselves. I’m a straight shooter. I was born in Puerto Rico and I grew up in Jersey, so I can’t help it. I called things out and we’ll see how this goes. I wanna just start with my identity. It’s important for me. It frames this presentation of my journey and my transition into tech – and now working to change the talent systems. I’m just really honored to be here today in the space with these powerful women and to celebrate this great day.

Odette Nemes: It starts with how I grew up for me and my interest. I was always really interested in everything that girls quote unquote weren’t supposed to be interested in – so talking about I love sports, I still play sports, I’m still getting injured. I loved math, I loved science, I love tech. And I even really liked girls. So everything I wasn’t supposed to be doing, I was in it. I check a lot of boxes basically, like a dream for a tech company, right? For their diversity survey, I can give them all the good stats.

Odette Nemes: I was born in Puerto Rico, I moved to the States when I was five. I’m an immigrant. I’m an English language learner, I’m a single mom, I’m a lesbian. And I took all of that and I took it to Duke University. I applied to the engineering school and got in and I just, I didn’t feel connected, you know. We hear the story a lot, you know, as far as I could tell. In the room, I was always only Latina. I always, the only lesbian that I could tell that was out at Duke, right? And sometimes the only cis woman in this space.

Odette Nemes: I felt incredibly isolated, disconnected and I couldn’t understand how was engineering relevant in my life and my experiences. I didn’t have any mentors. I didn’t have any community. I ended up transferring out of the engineering school, and I graduated with a degree in psych.

Odette Nemes: That led me to start working with girls of color a couple years outta graduation at Girls, Inc, really working to expose girls of color to careers where they were underrepresented, specifically in STEM and in finance. I just didn’t want anybody else to feel like I did, right, to change majors, to not continue on a path cuz they felt like they didn’t belong. It was just an incredible waste of potential. It was almost 20 years ago now, man.

Odette Nemes: I worked with a team to develop curriculum to teach middle school girls of color, HTML to teach them design thinking to teach them game design and object oriented programming. It was all very cutting edge 20 years ago. And we scaled that across the country and now, you know, happy to see all the programming out there for girls in getting them into tech. I was there for 12 years and then I left to stay home with my daughter, Camila, she’s there in the picture. And then I had my second child, Lucas. And I was very over the stay home life at that point, and that unpaid work is terrible. They’re really, really difficult.

Odette Nemes: I started looking for work for paid work that is. And then the pandemic hit. I had my kids at home with, cause this, all the preschools and everything was closed and nobody was hiring. I dug in to stay home and my marriage started falling apart, and I ended up getting a divorce. Here I was, I was at home unemployed with two little kids and out of work for three years. And I needed to find a job where I could pay my mortgage in Oakland, in the Bay Area. We know how expensive it is and to support my family on my own. It was just incredibly, incredibly stressful.

Odette Nemes: And the only way that I thought I could make this happen was to get into tech. So I got a lot of no’s. As I started applying for jobs, people were not taking my experience seriously. There’s a lot of bias from folks for people transitioning into tech, you know, non-profit work not being real work. And you know, there’s just so much talent out there outside of tech that needs to be leveraged. But I’ll get into that later. Lucky for me, my network pulled through, right?

Odette Nemes: But the hiring process shouldn’t work like this, right? It puts us women, it puts queer folks, it puts of color at a tremendous disadvantage. It’s just another example of how the talent system is broken with companies only reviewing applications cuz of referrals. Let’s be real – people who look like us, we’re not in-house to be making any kind of referrals. My former coworker of mine, you see on the slide there, Jennifer Tae from Girls, Inc, she told me about this place, Onramp, and I was like, what the heck is Onramp?

Odette Nemes: The first thing I saw was that the founder and the CEO was a black woman. And I was like, okay, Leticia Thomas, what’s going on here? And then I saw that the entire team was underrepresented from top to bottom. And you know, there were folks that had transitioned into tech.

Odette Nemes: They worked at boot camps, they worked at Google, at Amazon and DEIand startups. And they were trying to solve for the issue of why so many folks were graduating from boot camps or were self-taught and they weren’t getting hired. And at the same time, there were so many companies saying they wanted diverse talent, folks from different walks of life, and that they couldn’t find qualified folks. They were working with 75% Bipoc folks, 67% women, 25% LGBTQ. And I thought, all right, this place just looks for real, right? They’re practicing what they preach and the people that are in charge are represent the people that they’re serving. And you rarely ever see that.

Odette Nemes: I interviewed, I got the job, the universe aligned for me the week before my first day, my kids’ daycare opened up one week before I started my job after being closed for a year. Thank you. Still thanking the universe on that one. That’s where I am now, at Onramp.

Odette Nemes: We set up apprenticeship programs at companies like Twitch and Blend and Vanguard and Coinbase and Amazon and Pandora and working with companies to figure out what are the job skills the applicants really need?

Odette Nemes: How can we upskill them and train them these career changers to make sure to fill that gap and support the companies with their systems, right? How are we supporting their sourcing, their screening, their training to set up career transitioners for success?

Odette Nemes: I’m super thrilled, you know, to be able to do this mission-aligned work and life-changing work as 95% of our apprentices convert to full-time employees and they’re tripling their salaries. Feel free to drop in the chat. I’m gonna try to follow it if I can, you know, if anything of my story resonated with you and if there’s anything you wanna share about your path that you’re proud of, right?

Odette Nemes: I know that we’re virtual but I’d like to bring, you know, as many folks into the room as possible into this space. And I think it’s critical, right? That we tell our stories, we build connections and to remember, right, that when, when life gets really hard, you know, and we’re facing these difficult obstacles we can accomplish our goals, right? Still, and that it’s really hard to do it by yourself.

Odette Nemes: Let’s get out there, let’s get connected and let’s build our network and let’s remember how resilient and powerful we are, right? It’s amazing and it’s no small feat that we are where we are. Everybody in this room, in this space together considering all the obstacles, you know, that you all have overcome. Take a moment now to be proud of yourself. It’s Women’s History Month, and we’re all making history, right?

Odette Nemes: This story’s a dime a dozen, people being the only in spaces being the first. Y’all are leading teams, you’re leading companies, you’re changing cultures, you’re starting companies, you’re being bold. So pat yourself on the back. But let’s also remember that it doesn’t have to be this way, right? It should not be this hard at all. This system should not be built this way. It should not be this hard. Thank you to the powerful and amazing women that are here.

Odette Nemes: Let’s dig into what we can do about creating change. We all know that talent system is broken, okay? It’s amazing that we’re all here and especially when it comes to the positions that you’re in, in tech. So throw in there, think about your experience. I’m not trying to give anybody PTSD right now, or you know, anything really difficult to think about, but think about when you were going through application process, applying for jobs, promotions, anything.

Odette Nemes: How is the talent system broken? You know, share some examples if you want. And if you don’t wanna go that route, you know, going back down memory lane, what would you like to see changed in the talent system? So let’s dive in and get all levels set here on how the talent system is broken.

Odette Nemes: First I wanna say that we don’t have a talent pipeline problem, right? We have a systemic oppression problem, all right? There’s not a talent pipeline problem. I’m sorry. A a minor example of this – at Onramp, we have 60,000 people on our platform trying to get into tech. Just a tiny, tiny example right there. There’s not a pipeline problem. People, there are systems in place, you know, that are keeping us out of these roles and we need to change it.

Odette Nemes: First and foremost, when we’re talking about sourcing screening, yes, recruiting for only university. I see it there in the chat. I see you Angie. Then we’re hiring folks. Degrees being required. We can’t do this, okay? We can’t keep going to the top colleges and looking for the CS majors. The stats are out there.

Odette Nemes: 83% of Latino folks and 76% of black folks do not have college degrees, okay? Do not have college degrees. So if you’re recruiting at universities, you’re gonna eliminate automatically 80% of black and brown folks approximately. All right? Not a good tool for you.

Odette Nemes: The next piece is referrals, right? I got my job from a referral. I imagine most of the people in this space got a job that a referral, right? 85% of jobs are hired by referral. 85% are hired by referral. But get this, this is the killer. 91% of white people’s friends are white. Okay? Sit with that for one second, please.

Odette Nemes: The 91% of white people’s friends are white, okay? So we’re talking about 85% of jobs are filled by referral. 91% of white people’s friends are white. How in the world are black and brown women getting into these spaces? We’re not in the room to be referred. We’re not connected on LinkedIn. We’re not Facebook friends, we’re not texting, we’re not on Instagram. We’re just not connected, okay?

Odette Nemes: We cannot keep using referrals as the only system. I know that talent folks are strapped and it’s so hard and it’s easier to just look at the folks who are flagged. But we can’t, we can’t keep doing that, and expect different results. So the same deal. We’re looking in the same places, we’re looking in the same communities. We can’t do that when 95% of white people’s friends are white. We need to be in different spaces.

Odette Nemes: Another piece is poaching. And you all know the recruiters are coming after you. But the majority of the folks that are being poached are cis white men. Cuz there aren’t enough of us in positions to even be poached yet. The other piece we’re looking at is bias and interviews. We just listen to that talk on bias, man, that was some kind of sta there. So looking at bias, just your names on your resume, your experience. How about the whiteboard interview, huh? That some of you have struggled through. Yeah, that’s not assessing anybody’s skills. You can share in the chat how you feel about all that, but interviews are, the process is not done well. And I saw in the chat there at three to five interviews, it’s just, it’s not okay. The other piece is there’s no investment in upskilling, right?

Odette Nemes: Okay. Not none, but much less. Now, the research shows that upskilling retains employees. We’re looking at 98% of tech workers consider strong training and upskilling and important feature of prospective employers and companies use to invest millions of dollars in upskilling, but they don’t anymore, right? They pass the buck to the applicant now. That’s not helping our cause. And the last two things really are reviews, promotions, and mentoring. Read the research, go ahead, check out the lean-in studies.

Odette Nemes: There’s a lot of research out there about women of color. We’re not being reviewed in the same way. We’re not even giving feedback the same way, right? And then we don’t have the mentors or the sponsors we’re overlooked for promotions. The cycle is endless. And I’m not even gonna go here. We could have 18 different workshops on toxic work environments and how they’re not supportive for underrepresented folks.

Odette Nemes: I’ll leave that there. Here we go. The solve for this. Stay with me. In my mind, a great solve is the apprenticeship. Okay? It’s addressing the issues that I just highlighted. All of those issues talked about in with our barriers in, in our talent system here and apprenticeship can address.

Odette Nemes: First of all, let’s level set. There are some folks in the room that know what an apprenticeship is or has had experience with it. Please start in the chat, throw in there anything you know about apprenticeships, your experience with it, any companies that have them. The kinds of positions. Let’s just get everybody here on the same page. We’ll run through this quickly that apprenticeships are earn and learn programs. They’re combining formal learning with on-the-job training experiences. The candidates are getting training and mentorship and they need to develop the proficiency in targeted areas, and they’re also developing soft skills. They’re guided and supported by an advanced expert in the work.

Odette Nemes: And most important, I’m gonna say it again. You earn a wage during the program and then you have the opportunity to convert to full-time employment different than an internship, right? We have the apprenticeship and then you can convert immediately after. You don’t have to be in college. You don’t have to wait two years to come back. It’s immediate. It’s a full-time conversion. It’s a full-time employment. I’m sorry. They’re also from four months to two years. And I’m only talking about the US here. I’m sorry.

Odette Nemes: If you’re looking abroad, the federal governments and other countries invest in apprenticeships way better for many, many years. And their programs can be four years. They can be looped in with college degrees, but not so much here in the us. These programs target folks with zero experience, so never have coded a day in their life. Never had any experience in the position of life to some that have experience like WeWork with folks who have graduated from boot camps. Onramp. That’s why you can book at apprenticeships from four months up to two years.

Odette Nemes: And what kinds of apprenticeships are out there, right? We have registered apprenticeships. They, you have to register ’em through the Department of Labor or through individual states, and then you have to complete a certain number of hours, training components, and then really document what the on the job training looks like. And they’re meeting different competencies and at the end you get a certification or credits. And then some companies, they don’t register them and they just do them on their own. Different skill sets and positions from software engineering to developers, IT to marketing to data analysts, scientists, TPM, cybersecurity.

Odette Nemes: And you can do an apprenticeship <inaudible> and set it up. Then the specific populations, are you gonna be working with caregivers for returnships, justice involved folks, veterans, folks of color, women, it looks all different ways. And then the federal government here, they’re starting now, right? To invest, not starting, but made a new investment of billions of dollars to the Department of Labor and Department of Commerce in the infrastructure.

Odette Nemes: The state of California in itself has invested 231 million in its state budget for this year. What is the landscape? Feel free to screenshot this cuz I’m not gonna read for you. Everybody here knows how to read. But apprenticeships.me is a nice place to just get the lay of the land on software engineering apprenticeships. A lot of individual companies do them at Onramp. We set them up for other companies.

Odette Nemes: Then they’re various positions. You can look at the Department of Labor website to find them on an Accenture or great leaders in this space. And then we’re looking at different demographics looking at veterans or caregivers or previously incarcerated folks. And then third-party intermediaries. Everybody’s not on here, okay? It’s just a start for you all to reference. There’s so much work out there that you can dig into.

Odette Nemes: What are the benefits? Why are we talking about this today? First and foremost on the DEI side, obviously we’ve hit this over the head. We need different systems. The other part is with an apprenticeship, you bring in a cohort model, so they’re not gonna go in as an only, right? This really impacts inclusion and belonging and you’re building your ecosystem. When we said 91% of white people’s friends are white, well now you have people of color and then they’re gonna bring in their friends, right?

Odette Nemes: If we’re hiring 85% by referral, well let’s get the referrals in for the underrepresented folks then career changers. Man, I’m imagine there are plenty of career changers in this space. We’ve heard so many different paths from so many different leaders today. But you acquire many, many skills in the different jobs you have. Career changers are more productive, they’re curious, they’re agile.

Odette Nemes: Think about it, somebody who’s doing a bootcamp on the side while they’re juggling a full-time job or they’re taking care of their family while they’re learning to code at night. These are folks that are agile, they’re curious, they love learning. They’re gonna learn new technologies, which is what you have to do to be successful. Anyway, these are all the traits that you’re looking for in folks.

Odette Nemes: What our partners say is the Onramp apprentices are promoting faster than university grads, and we really think that’s cuz of the soft skills that these career changes are bringing. The other part why you wanna do this is, is impacting the DNA of the company. Start early if possible, right? Some companies here have 10 employees, 50 employees, a hundred employees, starting, get some apprentices in play. You’re creating a culture that values your employees, you’re mentoring your diversity, you’re upskilling.

Odette Nemes:It’s a little bit more difficult to move the needle later, you know, to have that huge of an impact on your DNA, but it definitely still impacts your teams no matter the size of the company. Then it’s a strategic investment, right? You’re getting, you’re investing in your future leadership and employees are feeling invested. They’re staying in their positions longer. The apprentices are trained so they have a different kind of commitment to you, and these are your future leaders. All of you who are looking for, we need mid-level talent, we need senior talent, it’s diverse. Well, your apprentices are eventually gonna be that.

Odette Nemes: How does this help you quickly? It helps you retain the employees that you have in place now. It’s giving them mentoring and leadership opportunities. It’s changing your culture. Forget this diversity theater. This is a real change here right now cuz the layoffs and the pandemic fatigue, the morale can be a little low. You’re gonna be bringing in energetic and engaged teammates. You’re doing a lot of cross-functional work and building up your cohesiveness and mission aligned work. People are tripling their salaries, you’re changing lives. They’re buying their first homes, cars, paying off loans. This impacts generational wealth, right? This is impacting lives, families, communities, and people are staying in their roles.

Odette Nemes: They’re feeling less burnout and you have more balanced employees. Why now you might be like, oh, they, why are you talking about this now? The economy’s so bad, folks are getting laid off. I think that there’s not a better time than now to be putting this in place, right? You’re hiring, you’re gonna commit to hiring in an equitable way. Right now is a time when talent teams are not overwhelmed with filling headcount.

Odette Nemes: Get your systems in place now, right? Get these intentional systems, these equitable systems in place. Now build the infrastructure and then scale it. You know that the economy’s gonna turn, we know these companies are gonna start hiring again. Once they’re ready, you have all your systems in place, then you scale and you can bring in even more apprentices and change your culture.

Odette Nemes: There’s also a lot of partners out there that can support lean teams at this point. We know a lot of diverse folks getting cut right now. How are we gonna find diverse folks? Let’s do this through apprenticeship and digging into values for sure. And people are looking for jobs now, right? They’re looking for signals. Well, companies are really committed to DEI. This is a great way to send that signal.

Odette Nemes: You’re bringing in folks at a lower wage, right? Because they’re entry level, but you’re also retaining them longer and there’s lower churn. Of course it’s that’s good for business and you can get federal and state funds to support your work. What now? How do you make this happen? Hopefully you’re thinking that, right? Oh, this sounds great on it. Think about how are other ways that you’ve changed, made change happen in your company. What were the keys, right? This is similar to setting up an apprenticeship program. You need to enlist others, you need to be that evangelist.

Odette Nemes: You don’t need your entire company, you just need one major champion, right? And then you need somebody to be able to sign off. Maybe that’s you also in this room for sure and sign off on things. And you need your advocates around you. And then you need to think about your mission and your needs. So what are the goals of your company? What’s going on with your headcount? Do you need, what are your needs, right? Do you want entry level folks? Do you want higher skilled folks? Are you looking for future leadership? What’s the mission alignment with the population that you would wanna target in your apprenticeship? Or are you just looking for top diverse entry level talent? Well, take it. Then you need direct supervisors and mentors, right? Because the apprentices need to be supervised and and mentored by the right people.

Odette Nemes: You need those champions that are really gonna do a great job with your pilot. Of course, you need your headcount to convert folks at the end and then your pilot has to be con successful. You need great conversion rates. Then people are gonna be like, oh, it’s what those apprentices, I want them on my team too. And the budget of course can come from eng and L&D and HR and DEI, as you need to find the right talent.

Odette Nemes: Make sure you’re recruiting, you’re sourcing, and you’re interviewing for potential. Okay, no whiteboard interviews, please. And that you’re training is on point. So last things before we go, I just wanna share a quick story about Jomarie, she’s a Dominican woman who went to a private high school on scholarship and took one computer science class in high school.

Odette Nemes: Nobody looked like her. She thought she didn’t belong. She went to college, she got her BS in nutrition sciences. And then after college she became a sales manager at anthropology in Urban Outfitters. And after that, she moved into recruiting. She was there for five months, the pandemic hit. She lost her job and she went to a bootcamp.

Odette Nemes: When she completed the bootcamp, she heard about Onramp through Twitter, and saw that we had a position, an apprenticeship with Twitch. She got the apprenticeship and now she’s been done with her apprenticeship. She’s been a software engineer for a year and a half, and she’s been promoted twice in a year and a half. You can see her on the stage here. She was presenting with the Secretary of Labor, Marty Walsh, sharing her story and spreading the good word about apprenticeships.

Odette Nemes: She’s able to help out her family now and live in San Francisco, rent and afford her rent, live her life. And she’s giving back. Now she’s mentoring apprentices, delivering workshops on self-confidence and communication and how to ask questions. Jomarie could be your next teammate out there.

Odette Nemes: The moral of the story people is that we need you, right? Like, yes, this is personal for me. I need to pay my bills, put food on the table. But no, the reason why I really work on ramp is I want a better world, you know, for my kids, for future generations and for underrepresented folks that are out there now. We wanna see as many apprenticeship opportunities out there as possible.

Odette Nemes: And really it only takes one person, right? It only takes one person’s idea in a company mobilizing folks internally to create these life-changing opportunities. It’s time to step up, it’s time for us to change the world and get these opportunities out there for folks. Let’s do this. That’s all I’ve got for you all. Thank you for the time. And if you have any questions or wanna reach out, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or through email.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much, Odette. This was very, very insightful and so many people have written positive comments and you know, their own experience and their own insight through their own diversity efforts. Thank you so much. Thank you to everybody who has been attending the session so far. We’ll see you soon. Bye.

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Angie Chang: We have with us today Spandana Govindgari who is a staff payments engineering lead at Meta in New York. She has helped build and scale payment experiences to support social commerce across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook shops and marketplace, helping process billions of dollars at TPV, which I looked up, means total payment volume. Before, she worked at Apple and Snapchat. And think she’s gonna talk about that during her talk, so I should hand it over and say, welcome Spandana!

Spandana Govindgari: Thank you Angie. Thank you for the wonderful introduction and also for having me. This is an awesome opportunity. Welcome everyone to Elevate! Hope all of you are connecting with each other. Just getting a lot of talks in great learnings. I’m here to talk about specifically stepping out of your comfort zone. I’ll be talking about why, when, where to transition to when you are feeling stuck, what comfort zone really means, and how to leave it, and how all of this can truly help you grow your career. But before we start just a little bit more about me.

Spandana Govindgari: My name is Spandana. I am currently a tech lead at Facebook working on payments. I graduated from Cornell in 2015 and ever since tried to really diversify my work experiences. I’ve been in the industry for now six to seven years, but have worked in my own startup. I worked at a pre-IPO company called Snap, which was really small back then, and also at really large companies like Apple and now Meta. So most of this talk will be oriented towards career growth for a software engineer. And I’d like to like just get a sense of like who’s in the room. How many of you here have just started working with less than one year of working experience? Awesome. And how many of you have been a software engineer for over a year? Feel free to like, use emojis or however you want to or comment here on the feed as a lot more people here have worked, looks like over here. And we also have some you know, new folks here.

Spandana Govindgari: This talk will be useful normally for like people entering the software engineering industry right now, but also for folks who have been over a year and are at a point where they’re feeling like they’re in a comfort zone and like, don’t quite, okay, what do I do next? Or how to leave it. And if there are like three takeaways I would want you guys to take from the talk, here they are.

Spandana Govindgari: It’s important to transition from corporate to startups specifically for growth as the main factor. Every day you have to continue to develop your skills as a software engineer. If you’ve been in this field, you know, every single day things are changing, new things are coming up – upskilling – it sort of becomes your core – learning new languages, so frameworks, libraries, and becoming familiar with them.

Spandana Govindgari: And the third important point is, it’s not required to really transition to management to grow. And of course, like I’ll go through each one of them and how I really arrived at all of this advice or insights from my own, like personal work experience. If you look at like, my own career journey, I’ve transitioned almost every two years. The longest I’ve worked at actually one single company is right now at Meta and reaching my fourth year. And I did this transition very early on in my career when I was feeling like I am entering comfort zone or I am in this comfort zone. I think like when you guys go back to like, when you’re starting your career, most of us are really just desperate to get a job offer.

Spandana Govindgari: Some of you may have chosen to work at a startup, or some of you may have wanted to work at a big company, and that’s that’s one of the like hardest crossroads you’ll find yourself where you have to make a decision. I was in a similar crossroads when I started. I had two offers, one from Uber and one from Apple. At that time, Uber was a really small startup, and Apple was a giant and still is today. Both of them are really good companies. I had good team, lots of learning and at the very beginning of my career – how do you choose which company to start off or kickstart your career with?

Spandana Govindgari:  I’d say like, the most important thing I focused on was really like mentorship and where I could find a solid mentor who would have the time to help me grow. And I got exactly that at Apple. This laid a strong foundation for me to leave my comfort zone. Later on in my career journey, I thought I’m just, you know, going to continue to work, work up the ladder in one company.

Spandana Govindgari: But as I was hitting my one year mark, I started realizing I’m already feeling kind of stagnant. I was feeling like, you know, I’m not learning anything new or I’m growing. Basically I felt like my learning curve has reached to peak and everyone’s learning curve is different. I’ve listed here some signs that you should really watch out for when you should transition.

Spandana Govindgari: And I’ve spoken to a lot of other software engineers as well, fellow female engineers about some of these signs where they felt like either stuck or kind of fi trying to find new opportunities for transitioning. And some of the signs are really like, you know, not learning anything new, important sign, getting stagnant, having conflicts in your team that are beyond resolution.

Spandana Govindgari: Not getting rewarded, not getting enough visibility, which is a very big one for women overall. You’re feeling dissatisfied, going to work. When you see all these signs, that’s a great way to know that it is time to transition and why should you transition, right? If you look at the bubble here, the bubble is where your comfort zone lies. But outside is where the magic happens. In your comfort zone, you feel safe, you feel like you’re in control, you know all your teammates, you know your, the company, you know how it works. You have a cushion, right?

Spandana Govindgari: But you are still finding yourself walking into it every day feeling dissatisfied, disinterested. That is why you leave your comfort zone in order for you to grow and really achieve that fulfillment and satisfaction. And in order to leave your comfort zone, really like three things should happen. First of all, you need to conquer your fears. You should be open to learning and thereby you are going to grow. And that’s the reason you should transition. You know, as soon as you are feeling like you are in your comfort zone, but you know, how do you get out of it really? There are fears on the other side, uncertainties. There’s just new challenges that you may not be familiar with, right?

Spandana Govindgari: In order to really get out of your comfort zone, start with your own workspace and try and find opportunities that are kind of out of your own role or out of your own team first. Take the baby steps and then take the big steps. If you’re not able to really find opportunities within your own team or within your own company, then look for opportunities outside.

Spandana Govindgari: You should consistently be on the lookout for these opportunities because they will not just walk to you if you are not specifically looking for them. And how do these opportunities really look like? They come in the form of helping your recruiting team hire or interview candidates. They come in the form of mentoring other women engineers. These are all that go above and beyond your role, but in some way, extending your comfort zone so you can con your fears, find mentors, right? Remove those excuses that is stopping you from leaving your comfort zone.

Spandana Govindgari: And then you will find this crossroads. Really, you have two choices in the tech industry in order to grow. First of all, you know, if you’re at a big company, work at a startup. If you’re in a startup, work at a big company.

Spandana Govindgari: It’s important to diversify these experiences earlier on in your career because once you’ve worked at, I guess, like both sides you’ll really understand the industry as a whole, how it works, and kind of be ready to take on anything that comes your way.

Spandana Govindgari: Startups offer various different things than corporates. Obviously. They offer accelerated growth. You get to take on a lead role you know, more responsibilities, more I guess like roles you can play within a startup and more learning. Big corporates, they come with their own advantage, right? Like, there is slow and growth, maybe lesser responsibilities. Your work is defined, but it’s a stable environment for you to really grow, experiment, conquer those fears slowly.

Spandana Govindgari: And no one’s really like pushing you to sort of fill this gap. They offer really two different kind of experiences. And it is important that you have experience of both. You can in the future delve into something deeper. And however, regardless where you work in a startup or big corporate, every software engineer comes across another crossroad.

Spandana Govindgari: This is a crossroad. You have to choose between going to management and continuing down the IC ladder. And this path is something that is laid out and is standardized across the industry, and many think management is easy, I’m gonna get wider visibility. However, it’s not always straightforward within management as well. There are some skills that are super different if you’re becoming a manager versus like an IC.

Spandana Govindgari: And today I’ll talk more about what it means to really continue down the IC path because it is a road less traveled. And something I have traveled as as well when I was at, at these crossroads and decided to choose the IC path. Most people think I’m just gonna go pick management. It’s sort of a promotion. Right? But that is the perception. Reality is, it is not, doesn’t matter, you’re a manager, an IC.

Spandana Govindgari: It’s the impact that you’re making that really versus like all the reward, the visibility that you get within a company. If you look here, I’ve listed basically some of some of the essential roles and responsibilities as you are climbing up the ladder. Let’s say you’re at that principal IC level, or that director or manager, senior manager level, the kind of words or that stand out in the IC role is collaboration, avoiding duplicate work, understanding the domain, executing, mentoring, building relationships, and giving back in a manager’s role. Or as you are climbing of the management ladder. Or really the standout words are coaching, building culture, planning, roadmap, determining what each teammate does.

Spandana Govindgari: Giving feedback now, you can see is like stark difference between what you wanna do versus like the reality in terms of what actually an IC does as they climb up the ladder versus like a manager. Based on this, you can decide through the, through that important crossroad of yours, whether you wanna continue down the IC path or the management path.

Spandana Govindgari: In industry, it is fairly common to switch between both. You’re an IC go to, you are like, I wanna try management, go ahead, do it. If you’re a manager, you are no longer interested in doing management, you can switch back and continue doing IC work. And none of that means like you’re promoting, you’re getting promoted or you’re getting demoted. Both of them are separate tracks and both of them you know, do work that definitely impact the org.

Spandana Govindgari: That is why we have wonderful, great ICs still in a company and not everyone’s a manager. And we also have managers and directors helping kind of grow the org. But they are just focused on very, very different things. I decided to actually choose the IC route and not go through management yet in my career because, I wanted to deeply focus and execute within my domain and develop a deep understanding of payments over. And, you know, like you may be seeing mostly in your own company, and it’s very common to like see you know, maybe like your role model or some I see just transition to management and that those sort of examples I guess are very common within the industry overall.

Spandana Govindgari: Where do you, I guess, like to look for when at least I was, I was starting out as like, who are those strong IC women engineers? I can look for who are these role models? And surprisingly, like, you know, Marissa Mayer – she was the first female engineer at Google. She was an IC, her IC work you know, eventually contributed great deal to Google led her to the path. She did eventually, you know, she became the CEO, which is like a management path, but it is important to shine light on the fact that she was, she started out as an IC, Ruchi. Ruchi Sanghvi is the first female engineer at Facebook, eventually went down this VC route, which entirely different. But she was an IC as well. Both of them built great products. They were significant in the company’s growth.

Spandana Govindgari: The work that ICs do is really, really important. You can choose to take the re road less traveled, or the one that is often, but it is important to leave your comfort zone in order for you to really see what’s on the other end where the magic really happens. With that, thank you everyone. I hope you’ve learned something from this session specifically about identifying science for when you are in your comfort zone, and then how to leave it confidently in order for you to really grow your career. Thank you.

Spandana Govindgari: I’m happy to take some questions because I know we ended a little early, I will also post my LinkedIn if you guys want to connect with me post session. Always looking to connect with more women. Oh, Angie. Hi, you’re back. No, do you wanna answer questions? Yeah, sure, so I see the first question.

Spandana Govindgari: How can you recognize when you’re out of your comfort zone versus truly out of your depth for your current level? This is a great question. When you’re out of your depth for your current level that may not mean you, you’re out of your comfort zone. And what that means is there’s just more room for learning versus com comfort zone really means, you know, that learning has peaked.

Spandana Govindgari: I feel like you can always address the depth and you can almost go deeper, but there is some point where you may want to explore that depth at a different company with different challenges. I started at Snap within payments and then I decided I’m going to explore payments more deeply at Facebook. Snap was small company. I wanted to work on payments at scale which is a different problem. You really can go deep at a company like Facebook that’s handling billions of, you know TPV.

Spandana Govindgari: Transitioning and leaving your comfort zone ultimately also improves the depth at your current level. I hope that answers your question. Any other questions?

Angie Chang: Is there another question or is that,

Spandana Govindgari: Yeah, there is one more. I hear so much about coaching, giving feedback, and building culture for managers. However, I’ve seen only one manager do that so far. What does the ground reality of what managers do? The, that is terrible <laugh> The ground reality is that managers are supposed to be coaching, giving feedback, and building culture every single day exclusively if they are, if you, you are seeing only one manager do that so far in your career or I guess your company is important to also like, have a conversation with your HR about what manager role means at your company and what the roles and responsibilities look like and how you could become right a, a manager yourself. If the responsibilities are different, it’s important to like, take the slide as an example and ask your HR team to really lay out, you know what, I’m an IC, please, you know, these are my responsibilities, this is the level I’m at. How is it different from what a manager is doing? Can I please, you know, get a rundown? And having that clear distinction helps you really understand the, the differences in roles and responsibilities. I would advise you to definitely be in touch – feel free to talk to your HR team on your career growth team that’s laying out what these roles and responsibilities look like.

Angie Chang: Great. Is that the last question? Okay. Thank you so much Spandana for joining us today on International Women’s Day. I think we’re gonna be jumping into a final speed networking round. A little bit of housekeeping before we go to do that. All of these talks are recorded in Airmeet right after the session ends. You can replay it by going to your schedule on replaying. If you have a meeting and you miss out, it’s okay – come back. This event’s still going on tomorrow. It’s free. Tell your friends there’s a career fair people are hiring. And there’ll be also really great talks and workshops on how to get your resume together, how to, and how to negotiate, offer, understand a company culture, et cetera. I encourage you to tell your friends, come back tomorrow and we’ll see you then. Okay

Spandana Govindgari: Bye. Thank you everyone. Thank you Angie.

Angie Chang: Thank you.

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

• Check out open jobs at our trusted partner companies.
• Watch all ELEVATE 2023 conference video replays!
• Does your company want to sponsor a Girl Geek Dinner? Talk to us!

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

• Check out open jobs at our trusted partner companies.
• Watch all ELEVATE 2023 conference video replays!
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Angie Chang: My name is Angie Chang and I’m the founder, co-founder of Girl Geek X. I’ve been organizing events in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 15 years, and this is our first virtual career fair. I wanna take a little bit of time, one minute away, from our keynote speaker to talk a little about the sponsors that are supporting us today, cuz they are hiring and as you know in the headlines, there are layoffs and your friends are probably looking for jobs. Please tell them about this free event that’s happening right now today!

Angie Chang: There are recruiters from Autodesk, Cadence, United States Digital Service in Washington D.C., CodeSee and Dematic. And I’m gonna tell you a little bit about their booths. If you wanna go check them out at 12:00 to 1:00 PM today, there’ll be recruiters there. A quick rundown of those booths, I walked around this morning and they look amazing. You should go look at them and meet the people at these companies. They’re very friendly and they love answering your questions about the industry, their jobs, what it’s like to work there, how to get your resume into tiptop shape.

Angie Chang: I hope you’re going to a lot of the sessions today are very, very useful toward getting your resume and interview to be in a place where you can be successful. So Autodesk’s Booth has round tables with recruiters from Tech, Sales, and G & A. They also have a women’s group network that is gonna be there. So please go talk to them at noon to 1 Pacific time. There’s also Cadence and they have round tables for Cadence Careers and to learn about Cadence, culture or life at Cadence. So please go check out Cadence Booth at 12 PM to 1 PM today.

Angie Chang: United States Digital Service in DC has posted round table times in Eastern Times, so I’m going to just tell you them Pacific Time cuz that’s where I am and I had to do this math this morning. The design table is currently, I think occupied and there’s someone there in the USDS booth. They have a Talent roundtable at 10:00 AM Pacific. They have a Product roundtable at 11:30 AM Pacific. And their Engineering roundtable, if I’m doing the math correctly, is 12:30 PM Pacific Time. Go check out the USDS booth for their tables at those times. And CodeSee’S Booth has posted a sign that they’re in the lounge and that their CEO is going to be giving a developer workshop at 11:30 AM Pacific time today if you wanna learn about how to stand out in this job market, for developers who are current and aspiring.

Angie Chang: And last but not least, Dematic’s booth has a round tables about Culture and Dematic Careers. Please go check out their booth and talk to their recruiters and staff today in their booth. I saw the lounge table, they had lots of people there, so go talk to them when you have a chance. They’re really great and nice people.

Angie Chang: And now it’s time to our keynote speaker. So without further do, I am going to introduce you to Judith Syau. She is a senior software engineer at Stripe. She works on internal tooling and prior to Stripe she worked at startups in IoT and Consumer Marketplace and she’ll be talking to us about understanding company’s culture before accepting a job offer. So welcome our keynote speaker, Judith!

Judith Syau: Thank you so much Angie. Thank you all for joining and hope you’re having a great time at the Girl Geek X Elevate Conference so far. My name is Judith and I’ll be talking about how to understand company culture before accepting the job offer, so hopefully you can come out of this session with some useful tips and tricks that you can use throughout the rest of this conference and beyond.

Judith Syau: My name is Judith, I use she her pronouns, and I’m a software engineer at Stripe based out of San Francisco. Stripe is a payments processing platform for the internet and I’ve been working at Stripe for the last two and a half years as a full stack product engineer and currently on a team building internal collaboration tooling. Prior to Stripe, I worked at a couple other startups. I’ve actually worked at three different companies in the first three years of my career.

Judith Syau: The thing about startups and smaller companies is that it’s really hard to get a good sense of what working at a company is like unless you personally know someone there, which is why I’m here today, to share strategies you can use to research company culture so it’s less daunting to go out of your comfort zone and consider you’re working at a company that you don’t know much about.

Judith Syau: In today’s session, I’ll be covering ways to research company culture throughout the entire interview process, starting from networking strategies before you apply all the way until receiving and negotiating the job offer. And if there is any time left at the end, I’ll also be answering questions in the chat. Definitely keep interacting in the chats and let me know your thoughts throughout the talk. Cool.

Judith Syau: Let’s start off with some networking strategies. Why is networking important? Networking is important for referrals, which get your foot into the door when a cold application doesn’t work. How do you build a network at events such as career fairs, conferences like this one? You can get contact information of not only recruiters at the career fair, but also your peers at networking sessions and follow up afterwards via email or connecting on LinkedIn.

Judith Syau: You never know how valuable a connection is and it could be the key to getting your next job if there are specific places you want to work at. You can search for employees on that you share experiences with, such as people who went to the same college or worked at a previous company together or are part of the same community and use that as a starting point for connecting.

Judith Syau: Often that shared connection is what gets people to respond. So like if you have a mentor at school or work or know someone a little bit more senior than you in their career, you can also leverage their network and ask them to introduce you to people. And there are also several tech communities and groups out there that have job boards, networking and mentorship events. Even if you don’t have an existing community, there are plenty of them online that you can find. If you have a favorite networking strategy that I didn’t mention yet, feel free to share it with others in the chat. Cool.

Judith Syau: After building up a network and scoring the interview, let’s go over some useful questions to ask. First of all, make sure to tailor your question to the who you’re interacting with so that you can get the most useful information. For example, you might be interacting with the recruiter or an interviewer for the same role such as engineer or a potential future manager or a hiring manager. And let’s go over some examples of these questions.

Judith Syau: Questions about the day-to-day job are good to ask someone who shares the same role that you are interviewing for such as an engineer. You could ask what are your favorite or least favorite parts about the job? What is the most stressful part about your job? Or what is the on-call rotation like? For example, if you’re working on a team or product that’s supporting multiple regions across the the globe, different countries, different time zones, you might be getting paged at odd hours and that’s something that you might want to think about before you accept the job offer.

Judith Syau: And then you should also ask people how they would describe their work-life balance. For example, right now I can tell you that I can make time for it to take a brush painting class at 3:00 PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This means I can shift my schedule to work East Coast hours on parts of the week. I also block out some time in my schedule to volunteer to teach a high school computer science class on Friday mornings. A couple years ago when I began my career, my answer to that question would be very different. I would say that I often stay late at the office for free dinner at 7:00 PM and then play board games with my coworkers afterwards. So, work-life balance goals might be very different at different stages of your life.

Judith Syau: Questions about diversity, equity, and inclusion are good to ask recruiters. They often have the most up to date data about this. So for example, you could ask what ERGs or employee resource groups are at the company. For example, this could be like like women or parents or for example my company has like an east and southeast Asian employee resource groups and we do we celebrate like lunar New Year and we have like book clubs and, and things like that.

Judith Syau: Another good question to ask is what is the ratio of underrepresented minorities in leadership? Companies often will like brag about their diversity statistics being, you know, better than average, but the more you go up the career ladder, the more like the more senior and more leadership positions, the more the numbers dwindle. And lastly you can ask what has your company done to support current event? For example, during the Roe versus Wade Supreme Court decision, several companies made public statements about covering abortion related travel expenses. If there’s a current event that might be applicable to you or that you care a lot about you should definitely ask about what the company’s stance is and how, what they’re doing to support employees. Cool

Judith Syau: Next we have career development questions and these are good to ask a hiring manager. A good question to ask is what does it take for someone to be successful in this role? Maybe the manager already has some expectations that they can share with you. This could also be reworded as what would success look like six months down the line? And what advice would you give to someone who just joined?

Judith Syau: And what is the performance review process like? If you are trying to get promoted soon, you you could ask this question to see if the expectations align with what you’re aiming for. And then lastly, an interesting question to ask might be, why is this position open? Maybe the team is trying to backfill someone who left either by choice or not by choice. Or maybe the company is growing really quickly, like they want to double their headcount by the end of the year. And all of this could have implications on the company culture. I know I talked about a lot of interview questions, but there are probably plenty more that would be useful to ask. Share your favorite interview question in the chat if you have one <affirmative>. Cool. Other than asking questions during the interview process, you can also do some research about what public thinks about the company.

Judith Syau: First, let’s start off with company trajectory. Public companies will publish their quarterly earnings call, which shows how their financials perform against expectations. You can also look at how their stock is doing.

Judith Syau: For startups, it’s a bit more complicated because company financials are private and Crunchbase is an online resource that shows the series of a startup startups fundings and valuations, which is how much investors think the startup is worth. Down rounds are when a company raises money at a lower valuation than they did previously, which might indicate that they are not doing so well.

Judith Syau: However, keep in mind about the macroeconomic situation as well. For example, it’s possible that all tech companies are not doing well at a certain point in time, or certain spaces might be having a particularly hot moment like AI is right now. And not too long ago there was web3, so there are always trends in tech, some are successful long term and others might have up and downs. And you should keep all of this in mind

Judith Syau: For a public image, you can look at news articles about the industry including peer companies and competitors. For example, I work in the FinTech space, so I’m always keeping up with news about other FinTech companies. Also, company policies and reactions towards global events such as return to office policies or layoffs can be pretty indicative of the culture as well. For example, like their messaging towards departing employees or even just how they are, they treat their departing employees. Many founders and leaders are super active on social media and some of them even write blog posts and those are pretty telling of how they run their business. This could be from their like Twitter accounts to like each company’s blog section. And lastly, some companies will list their values on their website and that often defines their culture as well.

Judith Syau: Now that we know what the public thinks, how do employees themselves feel about the company? There are several online resources that reveal employee sentiment and I’ll share a few here. Blind is an anonymous forum where people can chat about their tech companies and it requires your company email to sign up. Glassdoor is very similar and has anonymous employee reviews. Comparably is a report card that rates company culture based on several employee reported factors. And lastly, we have social media where influencers post content about their role in tech.

Judith Syau: It’s important to look at multiple resources and remember to take them with a grain of salt. Someone who posts anonymously will have a very different agenda than someone who’s posting on their personal social media for their image. But one thing you can look at is current trends. Maybe if a bunch of employees are feeling a certain way about a policy that was implemented in like the last six months, that might be super relevant to you, but something that was had that happened like five years ago is probably not as relevant. Always remember that culture can change as a company grows or goes through formative events or goes through leadership changes.

Judith Syau: Let’s say you’ve done all your research and have an offer in hand. How do you make sure that you are getting paid what you’re worth? The first thing about offer compensation is to always negotiate. Every component can be negotiated including salary, stock and bonus. And you don’t know unless you try you might be even able to negotiate other benefits or maybe working hours or even your level at the company.

Judith Syau: And even if you don’t have competing offers, you can still look at data and use that to negotiate and see if you are getting a fair deal. Let’s so there are several crowdsource databases on available online. The first one that I really like is levels.fyi and I like this because not only does it show the different components of compensation such as salary, stock and bonus, it also shows people’s levels as well as their years of experience.

Judith Syau: I’ve personally, I’ve successfully negotiated my level when I accepted an offer before. That is something you could look at like to see if your years of experience line up to the offer that you’re getting. Glassdoor also has has a lot of anonymously reported salary information as well as LinkedIn and candor. Someone in the chat asked a question – are these tips more geared towards large or established companies? For a lot of these resources, obviously there will be more data on large companies, but personally I’ve used these to interview at small startups and surprised like what information you can find out there. I think the tech community is very big and a lot of people will be interviewing or talking to the same companies even if they are very small.

Judith Syau: For governments jobs, they publish all of their salaries online, it’s public information and if the company sponsors H-1B visas, the H-1B visa salaries are also all available online. And if you live in a state that has salary transparency laws, for example, California now requires all companies to publish like a salary range for the role. That’s super important information that you can leverage. Some other states might have be required to reveal the salary ranges if you ask them or if you pass the interview a certain interview stage. Definitely look up the applicable laws for your state that you live in and use that to your advantage. And for startups it’s a little bit more complicated because a big component of the compensation is equity. And for this, there’s a super useful guide online called Holloway’s Guide to Equity Compensation that shares like what is reasonable percentage of equity to expect at different stages of a company.

Judith Syau: And definitely share any other information you might have in the chats that I haven’t listed above. Hopefully you’ve learned something valuable in this session and are able to apply a combination of these strategies to understand company culture a little bit better and maybe even use that during the career fair later on today. Thank you all for joining. I’ll be answering questions in the chat for the remainder of the time. I think we might be at time. Feel free to stick around or use or contact me on LinkedIn or via my email. And hope you’ll enjoy the rest of the summit.

Angie Chang: Thank you Judith. That was really a great talk on company culture and how to evaluate. I like the part about networking to get your foot in the door, especially if you don’t have a referrals or an in in the industry. It’s a great way to get that in. There’s plenty of people here who will like to refer somebody, so I’m gonna say thank you so much for joining us and we’re gonna be hopping over to our next session soon. Thank you, Judith.

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

• Check out open jobs at our trusted partner companies.
• Watch all ELEVATE 2023 conference video replays!
• Does your company want to sponsor a Girl Geek Dinner? Talk to us!

Sukrutha Bhadouria: All right. Hi everyone. Welcome. We have an amazing speaker here, Korene Stuart is the Director of Programming at G{Code}. She volunteered for Black Girls Code Miami, then became Tech Lead, hoping to increase the number of underrepresented women enter into tech careers. That’s so amazing. She has facilitated career and scholarship workshops at Girl Develop It.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: We’re so excited to welcome Korene, who will lead a workshop on building a technical resume. This is so important. All of us struggle with it, especially when we’ve been in the workforce for a certain amount of time, or even when we just graduated. So Korene, your session’s going to be super important for all of us.

Korene Stuart: Hopefully, hopefully I can give a lot of gems and people can walk away knowing exactly how to start their resume. So, <laugh>, thank you so much, Sukrutha. I really appreciate the welcome. Thank you. Thank you. I’m gonna start sharing my screen. So welcome everyone.

Korene Stuart: Welcome to building your technical resume. My name is Korene Stuart, and I am a director of programming at G{Code}. A little bit about me. I taught myself coding at first through freeCodeCamp and then went on to a nonprofit bootcamp and then became a programmer eventually getting into project and program management.

Korene Stuart: It was a contrasting journey for me through and through, as I did not know anyone in tech. When I decided to begin prepping for a career in tech, I only wish that I had received this information when I was starting out. It would’ve been a easier transition for me. I have spent a significant time around career preparation and have worked hand in hand with recruiters.

Korene Stuart: This presentation is the culmination of information I’ve acquired over the 10 years, and this has helped my mentees tremendously. Before we go on, I just want to say you are here because you want to invest in yourself and it requires time and effort and introspection to become your best self. So please take a moment to give yourself a hug for the great job that you’re doing. Let’s just get into it.

Korene Stuart: What is a technical resume? A resume is a snapshot of a person’s professional background, education, certifications, and work experience. But a technical resume has to specifically emphasize technical skills. It should include your technical expertise and knowledge in various areas such as programming languages, databases, software development methodologies, networking, and other technical domains.

Korene Stuart: It should include details about your specific projects, certifications that you hold, and other relevant technical accomplishments. This resume should be a succinct story about your past work life and a hint at what you desire for your future work life. And we’ll get into that a little bit later.

Korene Stuart: All right, so these are the three types of resumes that you can use. There’s a whole host of different resume templates that you can use, but these are the three that recruiters are used to seeing. You have reverse chronological resume, functional resume and combination resume, and I’ll be giving a brief explanation of what they are and show you what they look like.

Korene Stuart: This is the reverse chronological resume. These resumes are the most frequently used. Most recruiters expect to see these. They’re easier to read. These resumes start by listing each of your past jobs and reverse order your recent position being first. And then for each job title you would provide the employer employment year, and the basic requirements or accomplishments of each job. You would also provide performance figures wherever possible.

Korene Stuart: This is a functional resume. This resume focuses on a person’s skills and abilities rather than their chronological work history. It’s used when there are gaps in employment history, or when a person is changing careers and wants to highlight transferrable skills.

Korene Stuart: It helps a person stand out from other candidates by emphasizing their unique skills and experiences rather than just your work history. And it starts by listing your core competencies or areas of expertise and talent. It will then follow up with a short summary of past job titles.

Korene Stuart: Here we have the combination formatted resume, which showcases both skills and experience equally, downplays employment gaps shows career progression by providing a chronological work history and can target specific job postings through tailoring to specific job postings by emphasizing skills and experiences that are most relevant to the job.

Korene Stuart: With this resume, you demonstrate that you have the right industry transferrable skills, even if you haven’t actually had the title. As you can see, the format allows more for space for skills and the description for those skills more so than the chronological resume. All right.

Korene Stuart: Now for today’s session, we’re just gonna be focusing on the standard reverse chronological resume, the one that everyone’s used to seeing, and all that entails. Even if you were to start with this reverse chronological resume, you find that maybe you just don’t have enough to really tell your story through it. You can always kind of funnel that into a different resume.

Korene Stuart: Let’s pretend we are building our resume and I suggest you start with a blank document instead of a template, and I’ll tell you why in a bit and why that’s important. First, most likely when applying for technical positions, your resume will be going into an ATS, and ATS stands for applicant tracking system. It sorts through resumes, scans for keywords, and generates a score based on the number of hits.

Korene Stuart: It’s best to create your resume from scratch and use the enter and tab keys to set your spacing resume. Templates often contain columns, headers, footers, and text boxes. And the ATS has a hard time reading fancy formatting. If you’ve never created a resume before and have no clue where to start, you would simply just search online for simple resume examples.

Korene Stuart: I am going to give you or provide to you a supplement that will give you a link to some of the documents that I have in my bank so that you can use them in case you can’t find a very simple resume to kind of mimic after. And you can mimic the simple rresumes organization with basic spacing and alignment tweaks on your word processing program, whether that’s Word or through another program.

Korene Stuart: If you absolutely must use a template, then go to one without columns, rows, text boxes, and other complicated features or colors. The easiest and cheapest way to build a resume is to use a free template from a popular document processor or job search engine such as Google Docs, LinkedIn, or Indeed,.

Korene Stuart: Whether you use a template or start from scratch you would save your document as Word or PDF. Okay. So for resumes that won’t be scanned by software, you don’t have to be as careful about making it ATS-friendly. However, your resume’s format should still be simple. A complicated layout that’s hard to follow will turn off hiring managers – I have seen it myself.

Korene Stuart: Now if you’re pursuing a more creative role, I always suggest that you have two resumes, one that you can send through the ATS and one you can send to the hiring manager. And if you’ve never really applied for jobs, I can tell you that usually, you can send your resume through the ATS or any other system that they have, but then usually the recruiter or someone who’s talking to you preliminarily, they will ask for you to send them your resume again, ok?

Korene Stuart: All right. And be sure to choose a clean, current, and easy-to-read font. I would say choose sans-serif fonts that are easy to read, like Arial and Helvetica. For font size, go with 11 to 12 points. Depending on how much you are attempting to fit on one page, the lowest you should go is 10 points. For emphasis, make section headings by setting them just one point bigger than your general content. And now what do we do at the beginning, right?

Korene Stuart: Because it’s already overwhelming thinking about all the stuff that you have to put together. I always say put your name first, <laugh> email address, and phone number at the top. When starting your resume, it may seem intimidating. The first thing I would start with is putting your name at the top. That’s it. For some reason, it just seems to ease things a little bit. From there, type your name and contact information at the top.

Korene Stuart: Center it in a large font size, such as 14 or 16 points. Skip your address. You can include just your city and state, your email and phone number. And depending on your role, you might want to put the link to your portfolio. Put your margins at one inch on each side for more space. You can then reduce them, but not smaller than half an inch, and that would only be for the top and bottom.

Korene Stuart: Keeping the margin rules will lessen the chance of your information being cut off due to incompatibility. You won’t really have that problem though if you do it in a PDF so I always save mine as PDFs. I suggest everyone does the same. Please make sure that your email address is professional, such as a combination of name, initials and numbers.

Korene Stuart: I always say that remember that you are a walking brand. The best way for a recruiter to remember your name is to see it. My email has always included my name. The last time I had an email without my name, it was, and you would never guess, okay, in high school I had hotsuga@yahoo.com. Okay, but I no longer have that. It’s not available, so don’t email me there. And please don’t use your current work email or work number on your resume for obvious reasons. And if you are a student, do not use your university email because you may eventually lose access to it. Okay? All right.

Korene Stuart: Now you’re gonna organize your content in order of importance. After starting with your name and contact information, we’re gonna go on to the rest of the content. You will prioritize your key skills and knowledge and experience, your strongest projects. Strongest projects. Most resumes are in reverse chronological order, but don’t use that if your prior experience is more irrelevant than your current position. You can use another method like a combination or functional resume that I’ve shown you previously and that you can get that template from the document that I’m gonna provide to you.

Korene Stuart: Towards the top, under your contact information, you should write a heading, which could be summary or objective. You don’t have to actually write summary objective – you can just write it. It is up to you. But this is where you would write your professional statement, and I think that it’s really great to have a professional statement.

Korene Stuart: I think that when recruiters see professional statements, their eyes go right to it because if you’re able to really kick out a really great professional statement, it summarizes your whole resume. It just makes things easier for recruiters. Okay. You’ll use an objective in your resume if you’re straight out of a college or want to bring attention to the fact that you wanna transition to a new role. For example, you’re moving from a position of teaching to front end web development.

Korene Stuart: After professional statement, we’re gonna move on to your work history. You can name it “professional experience”, “relevant experience”, or “work history”. After experiences, you would then have a heading title “education” or “education and training” or “education certifications”, whichever is more relevant to your resume.

Korene Stuart: It’s important for you to use spacing, bold, italics, underlining and adding capitalization consistently. To add for your headings, select a slightly bigger font size than your general content and set them to bold. Capitalizing them can also make your content stand out. As for your subheadings, such as company names and positions held, use bold and italics to set these apart from general content.

Korene Stuart: You can come up with your own ways to emphasize sections and headings, but make sure you are consistent. If you bold a name of a company name, all other organizations must appear in bold. If you italicize a position, all other positions held must be italicized. Okay?

Korene Stuart: Now we’re gonna begin to kind of destruct the headings. Highlight your strengths in the summary or objective. It’s good to include key words that will generate hits on the tracking software, and make sure that your keywords are coming straight from the job description. It should be one or two sentences that highlight your experiences, key skills, and traits.

Korene Stuart: If you have issues coming up with a summary, write your experience section first. It will help you come up with ideas. For instance, you could write systems administrator with over two years experience in network security database management, IT infrastructure, provide specifics, but it must be concise and avoid using excessive adjectives. For instance, experience, hardworking, detail oriented, it’s just too wordy. Avoid vague objectives such as looking for an opportunity to grow.

Korene Stuart: They will list your technical abilities in a skills bank. I also provide that for you in my supplemental documents that I’ll be be providing for you. People often struggle with trying to come up with skills bank, but if you keep that record throughout the time that you’re working, you’ll find that it’s so much easier.

Korene Stuart: On a technical resume, a key skills section is vital. List your skills in a bank for quick, quick reference and to generate ATS hits, then detail how you’ve put them to use in your experience section. Organize your skill bank and subcategories if possible, such as operating systems, software, and programming languages. Look at the job description and use the keywords from there. Be careful to only include abilities you actually have and use. If you have basics, then say that. But if you haven’t used Java for a while, please do not include it. Only include your most relevant experience instead of your entire work history.

Korene Stuart: Use strong action words and measurable quantities to describe how you’ve utilized your skills. In technical fields, using jargon is sometimes unavoidable, but you should not use it unnecessarily. Include key facts in each experience, subheading, the title of your position, the name of the company, the city and state of your office, the start and end month and year.

Korene Stuart: Use bullet points under each position. If you can, quantify and list the most relevant job responsibilities. Let me go back up to the bullet points. Please use bullet points. It makes it easier to read, instead of everything just looking like a paragraph pushed together. White space is very important on the resume, and I know that if you have a lot of experience or education, it’s tempting to put it all on there, but just be careful that it doesn’t look like a cluttered mess – it can be very overwhelming to read.

Korene Stuart: Using bullet points helps the reader to keep track of what they’ve read, even when scanning the application. Use strong verbs such as “designed” or “implemented” instead of “writing”, “responsible for” or “duties include”. Write verbs in present tense for current jobs. Use past tense for prior experience.

Korene Stuart: Make sure to emphasize measurable accomplishments instead of just listing duties. Focus your content on actions results and how you made a difference in past positions. It can be really hard to think of all your accomplishments off the top of your head, so get in the habit of keeping what I refer to as a brag book. This is just an achievement journal where you would write an entry anytime you are assigned to one-off projects, you accomplish writing a new program, solve an issue that’s been frustrating your employer or client, implement waste reducing or improvement of processes, or spearhead a campaign.

Korene Stuart: Back to the resume. Be sure to include awards and specify business value when known. Please, when you are introducing something new or you’re spearheading a campaign, try to get what the business value is. We miss out on a lot of that because we just don’t ask. Please make sure if there’s business value that you know it. Add your contributions to building a team or project or product. Avoid leaving gaps in your employment history. While you should include the most relevant information, do your best to avoid showing gaps of six months or more. Even if the job you’ve held for the past two years is unrelated to the one that you’re applying for, included, it is just better to include it instead of someone asking you about the gaps.

Korene Stuart: I find that most people still learn during their gaps, so if you weren’t exactly working during the gap, then include the learning experiences or the volunteer work during that time. All right. And if you don’t have much experience or you’re a recent graduate, start with the skills bank, then the education section followed by any internships, academic projects, freelance work, or other related experience. If you’ve held at least two or three relevant positions, put your experience section before education.

Korene Stuart: Make sure to include your college or university degree and any accolades that you’ve received. Do not include your GPA or year of graduation unless you are a recent graduate. Just leave it off if you have a lot of certifications. There’s no need to put your bachelor’s unless it is relevant to the position. These are for the people who are transitioning. If you have a lot of education experience already, there’s really no need for you to put your bachelor’s. It depends, okay, if you’re still enrolled in school, include the year you expect to graduate. And that goes for certifications too.

Korene Stuart: List the degrees in descending order of relevance and advancement. And again, do not list multiple degrees or certifications if it’s not relevant. You can add a section for training and certifications if necessary. And if you have the room, because when you’re thinking about a resume, it is like a treasure landscape – it should only be put on your resume if it’s relevant to the job that you’re applying for. All right?

Korene Stuart: Now if you have one or two more than one or two certifications, you can put them in a separate section, title, training and certification. Mention the title, certifying authority, and date of the certification. Make sure to tailor your resume to specific job postings and as tedious as it sounds, you need to customize your resume for each job application.

Korene Stuart: The best hack I have strategically figured out is find out the three job roles that you want to do the most and only apply to those positions, instead of being all over the place and applying to 30 different job roles. I find that people who are strategic about their job search get less stressed even though they have less interviews and they get less frustrated. You are being laser focused on those three jobs, allowing you more space and time to genuinely connect and network for the roles that you are actually desiring. All right.

Korene Stuart: Make sure you read the job posting carefully. Identify the skills it lists and edit your so it targets that specific position. Say for instance, if a job description lists project management skills and your resume is thin in that area, you’ll need to include details that are true about executing a project through from start to finish.

Korene Stuart: Keep a master copy of your resume that includes all your past positions and technical skills and from there, when you apply for a job, customize that master copy, then save it as a new document with a title you’re applying for and the date.

Korene Stuart: The general rule for resumes is to try and fit it into one page, onto one page. If you have more than seven years, it is okay for you to have two pages. Name your resume, your name, job role… don’t name it “resume”. Please do not name it “resume”. Please, please, please, please for everyone out there who are looking at resumes and right now they’re celebrating because please do not name it resume. Cuz when we go back to look for your resume, we have to kind of dig through a database of resume.pdf or resume.dox and it can be a very painful effort. Okay?

Korene Stuart: Try to submit your resume in PDF formats, and I am going to include and provide the link for you. That’s about it. If anyone has any questions, I am open to that. I am going to include the… I know that’s a lot for a resume, right? <Laugh>. Oh, but I see people saying thank you for the transitioning advice. Yes. And that, that link that I just provided for you actually has a resume for a teacher transitioning into tech. And although you may not be a teacher, you would find it helpful if you’re transitioning into tech. All right?

Korene Stuart: Let me give you my contact information as well. Let me see if we have any questions. Okay. I always encourage students to include the links to their LinkedIn and GitHub profiles on the resume. Do recruiters and or hiring managers actually look, actually, look at these? I am glad that you asked that because they look at it, okay. Even when I look at resumes, if someone includes their LinkedIn, I go straight to it. I don’t even know if I spend six seconds on the resume, I go straight to the LinkedIn.

Korene Stuart: Now I do look at both, but it’s just something about having that that LinkedIn profile on there that makes you want to look at that. And the GitHub profiles, if you have a technical position they do look at GitHub profiles. Now, I can’t promise you how long they look at them, but they do look at them, okay?

Korene Stuart: Yes, if you have a LinkedIn profile, and I shouldn’t be saying if you, you should have a LinkedIn profile. If you don’t have a LinkedIn profile, I need you to create one today, okay? Let’s see. I was already asked on the feed, but I joined the question, what about resumes length? And I think I answered that. What should be on the LinkedIn profile if this is more important than resume?

Korene Stuart: I’m not saying that it’s more important than the resume. I’m just saying in combination with your resume, you should have a LinkedIn profile. Number one, it makes things so much easier for networking, okay? When you can put everything on your LinkedIn profile, you can just network with your LinkedIn profile. I give out my LinkedIn profile to almost everyone that I meet. So it’s just such an easy tool to use.

Korene Stuart: It’s not, you know, I just wanna reiterate, it’s not more important than your resume, okay? You gotta, you have to take time to work on your resume. But you should have a LinkedIn profile and try to get some connections. You don’t have to be on it every day, but try to get some connections. If you are a job seeker and you are not on LinkedIn, you are missing out. Just the information alone that I get on LinkedIn from the recruiters and I have so many recruiters on my LinkedIn feed, the information that they give out for free is crazy. You should be on LinkedIn. Should you put every single job you’ve had on your LinkedIn? Absolutely not, treat your LinkedIn like you would your resume. Everything should be geared towards what you’re looking for on your LinkedIn and your resume.

Korene Stuart: Remember I said the resume is a hint at what your future work, what you want for your future work life. You should be putting titles on your resume and I don’t know if I said that or if I emphasized it enough. You should be putting titles if you are going for software engineer, that’s what you should have on your resume. That’s what you should have on your LinkedIn profile. Some people have told me not to put it in my part-time work when I was a student. It depends on what your part-time work was. Is it relevant to what you’re seeking? Jennifer asked that Eunice act, how many bullet points are too much in the resume? Under each job description, do not put a whole bunch of bullet points if it’s not needed. Try to summarize what you did, what you did.

 Korene Stuart: For instance, if you held two projects, you were you were in charge of two projects, try to see if you can put that on one bullet point. If you have had a lot of responsibilities, try to see how you can summarize that as much as possible, but you shouldn’t have two or three. All right? I’ve seen resumes like that, you know, don’t have two or three bullet points cuz that, that’s crazy. <Laugh> let’s see.

Korene Stuart: Does relevant projects play a role in a technical resume if you are a career changer or early career? It depends on what the relevant projects are. If you have a relevant project that’s not relevant to what you are trying to apply for, then don’t put it on there. And I don’t know if I answered that correctly, if that’s what you were trying to say. Greta put, you may have addressed this already, how to address gaps in time taking care of sick family member. I would say that if you, cause a lot of times I noticed that my mentees, some of my students, they are always learning. I am a learner. There’s never been a time when I wasn’t learning something. If you are learning something, even though you’re taking care of a family member, then make sure that you’re including that in your resume.

 Korene Stuart: If it’s just a gap where you’ve done nothing during that time at all, that’s relevant to what you’re seeking, then that’s something that you would just have to explain. There’s really no way of getting around that. Do you provide resume advice for designers? Well, all resumes are basically, they have some similarities, commonalities if you’re a designer, your resume depend and see, it also depends on what kind of company you’re applying to. Because I’ve seen, and I mentioned that in my presentation, that if you’re a designer and you’re trying to really stand out from the pack, you have one resume for the ATS that goes through the ATS if you’re applying to a large company, but then you also have another resume that you present to the hiring manager and you don’t even have to wait for them to request it from you.

Korene Stuart: You can have another resume cuz I’ve seen it where a digital marketer made their resume look like a Facebook profile. You can send that to them by email by just requesting the hiring manager’s email and sending it to them directly. This is another reason why I say you must, you need to have a LinkedIn profile. You need to figure out what companies you wanna work for, what kind of culture you wanna work for you know, get those people’s names and just contact them. Not saying, well, I wanna work for your company. That’s it. Like, no, make genuine connections saying, I wanna know what you do. I wanna know how I can help your company. You know?

Korene Stuart: If you’re a designer, there’s a lot of things that you can do to bolster your resume to make sure that it stands out. Especially if you’re going to go to a company that really loves innovation and creativeness, I would definitely have two resumes for that position. All right. I see that people are talking about resumes getting passed along.

Korene Stuart: Any tips on managing career change from one industry to another when you’re already an established professional in one industry and trying to transition to a new one? Katie, I’m glad you asked that question. People have the tendency that when they’re transitioning from a company, they’re like, oh, I’m going to start entry level. I’m gonna start from the bottom. I say hogwash, okay, you don’t need to start at the bottom. Okay? I’ve done it and I’ve mentored people through it.

Korene Stuart: You have many transferrable skills, you may not even recognize it. And that’s why LinkedIn is very important to identify people who are within those companies, have conversations with them, see where the see where the similarities are in the positions that you’re trying to attain. And just start kind of you know, doing projects or maybe even volunteering to get any skills that maybe you lack, but use the skills that you have.

Korene Stuart: If you’re a manager in one industry, you can certainly be in a manager in another industry, right? Yes. It helps for the manager to have some technical know-how or knowledge that they’re able to guide their people you know, correctly or appropriately, but you’re still a manager. You still have those skills and, and, and, and, and you are able to contribute to your company. Please don’t start at the bottom, right? That’s advice. See what skills are transferable and see where you can fit in in that company.

Korene Stuart: Someone put, how do I prevent age bias if I have over 30 years of experience? Don’t put it <laugh>, don’t put it. If you had a job for, I don’t know, you know, if you had different positions in, you know, that culminated into 30 years of experience, it’s really not necessary for you to put all of that on your resume. And, and trust me, I get that. There is age bias, so I wouldn’t put it and I don’t know what your resume looks like, but try just putting the last two positions that you had. All right.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: This was wonderful. I see all the comments in the questions, so engaging and, you know, a really insightful workshop. Thank you so much.

Korene Stuart: Oh, no, thank you. It’s a pleasure. Thank you,

Sukrutha Bhadouria: <Laugh> Bye everyone.

Korene Stuart: Bye.

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Angie Chang: A talk from Ginger Holt. She’s a senior staff data scientist at Databricks. She develops forecasting and predictive models for revenue, sales, et cetera, and has worked at Meta, Walmart Labs, HP, and BP, and she’ll be sharing with us advice for how to take control of your career. Welcome, Ginger.

Ginger Holt: Thanks, Angie. Thanks to the organizers and thanks for attending my talk on taking control of your career. This is a joint talk with my husband, Haitham Hindi, for this talk we’ve combined our collective knowledge on this topic, which is the result of over 30 combined years of a technical experience in the tech industry. In November of 2019, my husband Haitham was offered a job at Amazon as a principal researcher. We were pretty shocked he didn’t even wanna apply since we didn’t wanna leave the Bay Area, but I encouraged him to do it. I said, it’s really good practice for the job you want. As it turns out through those interviews and conversations that he discovered that it was actually his dream job. I was torn on one hand, it was a really great opportunity for his career. But what was it?

 Ginger Holt: What would it mean for my career? Would this mean I would have to compromise my current trajectory and management? We had two small children, so does this make sense to uproot them from our community and our environment? A few days later, I talked to my manager at Facebook about this decision. I wanted to explore if I could do a transfer to another role in the Seattle office. Mind you, this was pre Covid, so it never even occurred to me that I could do my job remotely from, from another location. But to my surprise, the leader of the organization offered an even better solution for me, which was a geographical change with the same role. And he said that we could make it work because of the team that we had built and the foundation and tooling that we had built, which set us up for success in the near term.

Ginger Holt: And it really hit me in that moment. The work that I had put into growing my career allowed me to navigate unexpected changes that were happening. The reason I share this story with all of you, because you will have, or you have already faced some unexpected changes to your personal or professional life. And if we face that change with a mindset that we can actually have some control and use these lessons, and I’m gonna share to navigate those unexpected situations, both me and my husband have learned some of these lessons the hard way. If I can help anybody navigate those changes, and that’s, that’s my goal.

Ginger Holt: And more specifically, there are five lessons which can help you take control of your career. A little disclaimer there about the opinions being just of me and my husband, not necessarily the companies we work for. Alright, so the first lesson here is to create clarity consensus and inclusion. I thought this cartoon was pretty funny. Let’s solve this problem by using the big data. None of us have the slightest idea what to do do with I’m a data scientist. I find a lot of these big data cartoons and data science looks pretty funny, I wanted to share that one. I’m gonna talk through this kind of lesson in with an example which is some of the work that we’re doing at Databricks.

Ginger Holt: We’re building some data science tooling to unify forecasting across the company. I’ve got a lot of my experience in the forecasting field and building something that’s very generalizable like generalizable across the company or to our customers. It really requires a clear problem statement, which is agreed upon by all the data scientists who’s who are doing the forecasting and all the stakeholders that are using those forecast and converting a bunch of standalone forecasts and processes and models into one unified framework. It requires simplification. For example, building a, a data structure, which can work with lots of different models. You load your data once, and then you can try a bunch of different different models. It also requires unified and notation and visualization so a lot of people who are using this tool can more easily onboard and work more efficiently with each other.

Ginger Holt: And finally, people need to see the value, so they want to be involved in the project. This unified forecasting framework also helps speed up what I call death by iteration, right? You solve a problem and then something changes, so you can quickly update things with new data or new use cases because of your, your clarity and your simplification. It also allows other people to quickly copy other people’s homework. Instead of reinventing the wheel and having many authors and developers involved increases both the quality and the accountability of each person involved. A little bit more on this invent and simplify concept.

Ginger Holt: As systems grow, you know, complexity naturally grows with it. And when you’re simplifying is going against entropy. It’s definitely harder work to simplify. And it’s often essential to simplify in order to scale. If you wanna do a generalize to lots of different use cases, right? You need to simplify first.

Ginger Holt: Another concept around this is to synchronize your tech code, your tech, your technical documentation with the code you’re writing. It represents best practices and notation. You can catch bugs as people understand the intent of the code, right? Looking at those side by side, it preserves knowledge in the team. With turnover, churn it opens up the system quickly to innovation from non-coders ideas, from PMs, whoever, and then it helps ramp people up quickly.

Ginger Holt: Another example. I’ve got a bullet here. Always try the simple approach first. An example of this in forecasting is, with forecasting models you always wanna compare your accuracy to a very basic or a naive model. You know how much value the complexity you’re adding adds to the problem. All right?

Ginger Holt: Lesson number two is to apologize for and fix your mistakes. Fixing mistakes demonstrates humility, honesty compassion, courage, and trust. And not fixing mistakes either demonstrates a bad leadership or a bad team culture. It can result in increased technical debt recurring problems with your code or your system, and it reduces time that you have to do truly innovative work. It can also damage our relationships and, and careers, some of these mistakes that I’ve made and, and others you know, inappropriate comments or remarks a wrong math or algorithmic step being too harsh with your criticism, right?

Ginger Holt: A lot of times this happens in chat. You know, when it’s, when it’s strictly non-verbal communication, you go back, you read it, and the tone sounds bad or not as you intended. It it’s always good to apologize for those scenarios. And another example is in making a bad investment decision. Like either you invested in a project that was too risky or something.

Ginger Holt: Another example is think about a trading situation – Have you ever held on to a stock for too long after losing a lot just to then lose more? When you make a bad investment, change it, close it out, move on mindset around these mistakes and apologies. I used to have a very, very unhealthy mindset about making mistakes, you know, feelings of shame, fear of looking weak really often held me back from making apologies.

Ginger Holt: Other times I was just too proud of the situation didn’t really seem fair. To the benefit of my career, and even mo more so my marriage, my mindset around mistakes and apologies has shifted to a more, more healthy state. Through past experiences, mistakes not doing, not giving those apologies, right?

Ginger Holt: I’ve learned that being generous with apologies it really rebuilds trust demonstrates humility, courage. And now I try to think of mistakes more as learning opportunities, right? There are also opportunities to express empathy or regret if you’ve hurt somebody’s feelings, whether or not it was your fault.

Ginger Holt: Lesson number three is to actively manage your career, and actively manage and plan your career. And I’ve got a diagram here of a model, predictive control framework, so you don’t have to really know much about optimization, but in this framework you have a plan of what, what happens in the future, right?

Ginger Holt: In this case, you have a plan of what you wanna become in 5 to 10 years, and then you work backward from that, and you figure out a plan in the more near term you execute the first step of that plan, and then you step back and you, you evaluate feedback from yourself and also people around you. With that feedback, you then iteratively replant. It’s a very iterative process. You can also do scenario planning in this framework. Different scenarios, A, B, and C, you know, some of the unknown conditions that you could use in this, this scenario. Modeling is different economic conditions, right? Technology shifts industry changes, things like that. And by doing this model predictive control, using this framework, what you end up doing is you, you minimize later regret that you may have, right?

Ginger Holt: You thought through uncertainties and you planned the best way you could with, with what you knew at the time. And once you have that plan, right, share your plan, share it with your manager, your public plan with your manager and you can use it, use that plan to push back on projects that you don’t wanna do or that you don’t think are, are creating additional value for your portfolio or you know, it’s not aligned with what you, what you wanna do long term. And through this process, right? You come, you come to know yourself better, right? What makes you happy? What do you love to do? A lot of times we just don’t spend the time to check in with ourselves and think about these questions, right? Do you like theory or implementation journey or goal oriented, abstract or detail oriented, things like that.

Ginger Holt: I’ve done this in the past is to just at the end of the week, kind of assess how you spent your time that week and kind of rate the different tasks that you had and different jobs and projects that you’re working on to see kind of how your fulfillment is working on different things.

Ginger Holt: Lesson number four is to be an effective self-advocate. And I would say in general women struggle with this more than men. There’s data showing that women minimize their contributions compared to men when they’re doing self-assessments for performance reviews. And as you grow in your career, more of your work will entail advising others or helping junior colleagues. People have a strong natural bias to believe things in their own favor, right? They may think that they came up with an idea when you were the one who was steering them in that direction, or giving them giving them those ideas.

Ginger Holt: Make sure you document those ideas and direction that you’re giving to others. This is a big part of your your value that you’re adding and your years of experience can save others. A lot of wasted effort, and you should get credit for that.

Ginger Holt: Another thing is to increase your visibility by presenting and sharing your work as much as possible. Get face time with the execs. You can sign up for office hours or ask questions and meetings and don’t think of it as, you know, you have to make a big presentation and show them what you’re working on. Just ask them questions, you know, what keeps ’em up at night. Get their have a ability to communicate at a very high level what you’re working on, and get their feedback, feedback on that.

Ginger Holt: Mentorships and sponsorships have helped me become a better self-advocate by learning about what other other people have done. And the person that you’re advocating for yourself should have high standards. You can follow – if you’re in research, if you’re a researcher – follow your research heroes on Google Scholar.

Ginger Holt: Keep tabs of new research problems and ideas that can inspire you and think about your current projects as items in your portfolio that will help you get the next better role or opportunity on high value projects. Do a really beautiful job that that makes you proud of your work. And then on lower value projects, do solid work, but finish fast so you can get to those high value projects.

Ginger Holt: It’s also good to know your market worth. You can, you know, passively job hunt and collect data for that. Lesson number five. The final lesson here is to not do not passively tolerate problems. People probably know what happens to the frog in the boiling water. Many of you may not know about what happens to the red kangaroo. Even though it’s a much stronger and larger than the dingo, which is basically a a 30 pound dog, the dingo can defeat it by nipping at it many, many, many times over a long period of time and eventually tire the kangaroo out. That’s how the dingo is successful.

Ginger Holt: There are many things in life that can nip at you and, and break you eventually. Some examples. Office gossip, right? Office politics, bad managers colleagues that have no integrity, anything toxic to your mental health. Being in a company culture that doesn’t align with your own values. Having leadership that’s not transparent or having a path to career progression that’s not clear or it’s not aligned with your skillset. Instead of waiting around to get nipped to death with any of these things, leave, leave the situation, whether it be leave the project, your team, your company whatever. It’s not a good thing. And thank you.

Ginger Holt: I’d like to say thank you to the organizers. Thank to thank you to the participants. Thank you for listening. I’d also like to thank my company. This is a picture of my team here Databricks, our data science team. Thank you for their support and allowing me to participate in this conference. If you found any of this interesting, you wanna look, look into some of the references, I’ll post these slides on my LinkedIn page.

Ginger Holt: I also dedicate a portion of my time to mentoring and, and helping other people’s other people grow. Please feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn or email. Also Shout out to Databricks. We’re hiring data scientists, software engineers machine learning engineers. Please out reach out to me if you’re interested, and I can share more information about job opportunities at Databricks. Let me check here the references here. Let me check this, the chat here. If there are any questions. I think we have one minute left.

Angie Chang: Thank you so much, Ginger, for that talk. Yes, it was excellent. There’s lots of great and people cheering you on. And thank you for sharing your, your content on LinkedIn. Yes. All right, we’re gonna hop to our next session now. See you on the other side everyone. Thank you. Thank you.

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Angie Chang: Erica Pisani is a senior software engineer at Netlify. She’s on the frameworks team helping build tools, and she will be telling us about career brag sheets. I’m gonna hand the mic over to her. Welcome, Erica.

Erica Pisani: Hi. Thank you. Hello, everyone. I’m just gonna get this started. So yeah, welcome to increasing your odds of career success with a brag sheet. To give an overview of what we’re gonna be talking about over the next 20 minutes, we’re first gonna start off with what is a brag sheet. Some of you might never have heard of what a brag sheet is before. Maybe, maybe you’ve heard the term thrown around, but not quite sure what it is. So we’re just gonna start from square one

Erica Pisani: We’re gonna look at some of the elements that make up your brag sheet, how they can help you in your career and increase your odds of success in reaching your career goals, whatever they may be. I have a demo of a couple templates that I put together. At the end of the session, I’m gonna have a link to those templates, so you can use them to get started with your own break sheets if you don’t have any already. You can use them to kind of enhance existing ones that you have. And then at the end, we’ll likely have a couple minutes for folks to ask any questions if anyone has any.

Erica Pisani: Let’s get started. Before hopping into the, the brag sheet part though, a little bit about me. As mentioned at the top, my name is Erica. I am a senior software engineer at Netlify. I’ve since switched from the frameworks to team, to the integrations team. That’s quite a recent move actually.

Erica Pisani: I’m based in Toronto, Canada, so if you ever hear me say the word sorry, and it sounds a little bit weird, that would be why. Previously, I worked out a few other startups like Lever, which was a US based startup, and BenchSci, and Wave Financial, which are based in Canada. And the reason I mentioned the jobs, is because the advice I’m gonna be giving today is shaped by my experience working in startups, and more specifically in small to medium size startups.

Erica Pisani: It’s been a very long time since I’ve worked at a company larger than 300 people, so take the advice with, with that context in mind. But a lot of this can be repurposed to whatever context you’re working in, whether it’s a very small 10 person shop or you’re working at like the Microsoft or Amazons of the world. And last but not least, if you’re a little bit shy asking me questions at the end of the session, or you run out of time or you you’d like to gimme feedback on how this went, feel free to reach out to me at my website, EricaPisani.dev. I have my email and all my social media handles there.

Erica Pisani: Let’s get right into things. What is a brag sheet? It’s a resume of sorts. You picture a resume. You’ve got your the past companies that you’ve worked at, the various things that you’ve worked at those companies and in the roles that you held there.

Erica Pisani: And a brag sheet is much like that except rather than all the different companies that you’ve worked at. It’s focusing specifically on your role at your current company. Some of the things that you might list on a brag sheet are the products and features that you’ve delivered and worked on. Maybe you are a a member of an employee resource group or a technical working group which shows your investment and participation in shaping company culture or rolling out best practices across the engineering organization. Interviewing.

Erica Pisani: Interviewing is a huge thing in startups. It kind of goes through waves, but when it’s on the upswing, you are probably spending about half your time interviewing because they’re trying to hire so many people in such a short amount of time. But you’re having really like a huge impact with that because you’re not only bringing in people with the skills that the company needs to grow, you’re also bringing in people that help shape and evolve the company’s culture.

Erica Pisani: Mentoring teammates and colleagues across the company is another big one. If you are an intermediate engineer looking to move into a senior role being able to demonstrate that you are leveling up the people around you through maybe a formal mentorship program or mentoring within the team itself can help you in in that transition.

Erica Pisani: And then last but not least, and this is where I think a brag sheet really shines, is highlighting the important glue work that you might be doing in your day-to-day. For those who aren’t familiar with the term glue work, it’s the work that tend to be a bit on the smaller end, but they really add up and they help ensure the smooth running of a project or a team. So think if you have to do a manual deploy every Monday at 10 AM for your product area, doing that without being asked is one of those things.

Erica Pisani: Or keeping meeting notes or helping facilitate and coordinate across various teams in the project that you’re leading to ensure that people aren’t stepping on each other’s toes or to ensure that everyone’s unblocked at the right time so no one’s waiting on another team. The elements of a spreadsheet are really, it’s really quite lighted. It boils down to what you did and the impact of what you did. And if this sounds like what you’d be doing in the context of an interview, it’s because it is particularly when you’re going for that promotion that you’ve been eyeing for a little while. You need to talk about yourself and your accomplishments as if you’re interviewing for the next level without it being a formal interview.

Erica Pisani: And personally, as I was transitioning into a senior engineer role, I found that writing out these points on a somewhat regular basis as part of maintaining my break sheet to also help me build my skills in evaluating of certain pieces of work were really the most impactful thing that my team and I could be doing at that point, or if there was other work that I should be doing instead that might be more valuable.

Erica Pisani: Let’s look at a couple of examples of what you might see on a brag sheet. The first one is more focused on, let’s say, like your classic product and feature being shipped. The ” “what you did” it doesn’t need to be too detailed, but just enough to paint a a picture for the reader. In this example, I worked on adding a new set of impact contract. So a lot of moula for the company, really important. And then one customer had a renewal worth about 400,000 that was coming up the month after these endpoints were released, and they were actually at risk for, for a competitor if it wasn’t released on time. Beyond the kind of like, obviously media monetary impacts that that project had for the company talking about things like this shows that you’re thinking about the bigger picture, whether that’s your team’s general mandate from the company you might like hear it termed as the north star or company-wide goals for the fiscal quarter a year.

Erica Pisani: Let’s take a look at a second example. And this one’s more focused on enabling other teams to do their best work. The ” “what you did here”, I wrote several runbooks for the support team related to the new API endpoints. And for those who haven’t heard the term runbook before, they’re, they’re generally guides. Sometimes they’re for like troubleshooting common issues. Other ones could be, here’s how to deploy this product manually.

Erica Pisani: The impact of this is that support members are able to diagnose common issues in minutes and resolve support tickets in under three average under three hours on average compared to an average of maybe eight hours across the rest of the, the product areas. You’re saving the support team a lot of time, which means they can do more things. And then also as a result of that, your team was able to start a project sooner ahead of schedule because there were less bugs than expected.

Erica Pisani: I don’t know about you all, but I have yet to meet a product manager that does not love to hear the words that things launch smoothly, smoothly, and ahead of schedule. If you have this happen a few times in projects that you lead or play a major role in, it looks really good on you as you’re, you’re pushing to go maybe further in your career and get a promotion because you’re helping give the time the team more time to do things. And that could be career development, and or that could be something like experimenting in your product area to maybe improve some things.

Erica Pisani: Generally, how brag sheets can help help you with your career and increase your odds of success is it can help you map what you’re doing to maybe levels on a career ladder or matrix. At the shops I’ve been at, they tend to be pretty easy to find. But if you’re not sure of where you can find one, be sure to reach out to maybe your manager or the HR folks.

Erica Pisani: But especially when you’re earlier in your career as a junior engineer, and I know I I speak from experience in this, it was really hard to get a sense of where I stood in the company relative to kind of the metrics they had from more senior engineers like transitioning to into intermediate and then from intermediate to senior. Related to that, it can help your manager advocate for you during performance review cycles.

Erica Pisani: If you’re looking at the things on your brag sheet and you’re looking at like the the things that make an intermediate engineer at your at your current company, your manager’s likely gonna be doing something similar. If you have like a one page brag sheet that shows all the things you’ve done in the past cycle, whether that’s four months, six months, a year, it can help them argue for you more effectively. It can bring awareness to the type of work that you may be doing more of at the expense of growth opportunities.

Erica Pisani: Going back to my earlier example of how startups sometimes go, like really hard into interviewing over short periods of time, you can sometimes end up spending if you’re heavily involved in that, maybe half your work week just doing interviews, whether it’s prepping for them, the actual interview, and then leaving the feedback after.

Erica Pisani: And if for whatever reason you maybe got passed over for a promotion because you weren’t able to demonstrate maybe technical leadership, maybe because you had to sacrifice some time with the working group at your company in favor of interviewing, you can have that constructive conversation with your manager about maybe reducing the amount of time you’re spending interviewing in favor of more technical leadership stuff so that you can push for that if that’s what you’d like to do in the short to medium term they can help minimize the impact of manager turnover.

Erica Pisani: I don’t know about you all, but the great resignation is real. In my last role I had, I think it was three different managers in the span of a year and a half. And then my colleague Lori Voss, he released these he did a survey with the Jamstack community and the, there’s, like, you can find the details online, but he presented it at the Jamstack conference in November, and I think it was some like really high number, like 50% of people had changed jobs in the past year.

Erica Pisani: There’s a lot of turnover happening, and managers are no exception, and there is nothing worse than maybe being so close to maybe getting that promotion that you’ve been really working hard for. And then that manager, with all that context, suddenly leaves and brag sheets can really help mitigate that impact because the new manager, while they’re still getting settled into their role, having that brag sheet gives them the chance to kind of get a really good sense of what you’ve been up to during the past review cycle. And going back to 0.2 can help a, like, can advocate for you way more effectively than they otherwise could have, just, just because they just don’t have the conference excuse me, the context that your previous manager had. And last but not least, it can make, it can make it easier when job searching in the future.

Erica Pisani: If you have a brag sheet that you’ve been keeping track of what you’ve been doing, it’s more of a matter of copying, pasting what you have there into your resume. And then when you’re going into interviews where you’re talking about the projects that you’ve done, the impact that you had on it, the challenges that you had, the brag sheet helps refresh your memory on those finer details. You can more confidently go into those types of interviews.

Erica Pisani: Demo time! Let’s look at a couple of examples here. And as I said, I’ll be sharing a link to these at the end for you all to use.

Erica Pisani:The first one here is very, very lightweight. This one you just kind of, let’s say you have your highlight. It could be the project that you’re working on. It could be you were part of a formal mentorship program. Anything that you wanna highlight listed there the company that you did this in.

Erica Pisani: I like to keep a long running brag sheet across my various roles, so this helps me keep things organized in that way. The dates that the project ran for. If you are beyond the obvious, like maybe you have a yearly performance review cycle, and I don’t know about you all, but my, I have a terrible memory. I can barely remember what did last week at work, let alone what I did a year ago, and be able to speak to it in like a high degree of detail. If you keep the dates, it’s easy to just kind of go back, get all the different projects that you’d worked on and put it in the break to give to your manager for that review cycle.

Erica Pisani: But if you’re a more junior engineer and you’re trying to demonstrate increased like technical leadership and competency, one of the things that I was told earlier, earlier in my career was that I had to show that I was able to take on complex technical tasks and complete them in a faster pace. And so the dates are actually really useful for demonstrating that for that kind of metric the, what you did, the things that you accomplished with the project.

Erica Pisani: So whether it’s a runbook for the support team, a new source of revenue, you kept a valuable customer list, everything there, and then the impact of what you did. Anything that anything that maybe provided business value, maybe you helped your team members onboard faster. Improved efficiency or developer experience, all that stuff listed there for the second example that I have here. It’s similar to the one at the beginning, the very basic one, which is this top section here, but there’s a retrospective component to it, which this is actually the spreadsheet I use for myself because I like to revisit everything that I had done over the course of a project or maybe it’s not a project that maybe participating in a mentorship program at my company.

Erica Pisani: I like to try and see what I could do better next time. The what went well could be, it could even be it was my first project that I had shipped ever or the first at the company or it was ahead of schedule or I was really good with testing and there there was no bugs. It’s like amazing, honestly, huge. Like anything that makes you proud listed there, the what didn’t go so well section, it’s not meant to be a blame game kind of section.

Erica Pisani: It’s meant to more note the things that you maybe didn’t expect that maybe had an impact on what you’re highlighting here. If it’s a project that you were working on, maybe there were unforeseen requirements because you just didn’t know about this hidden dependency and it put you back a little bit. If it’s something like a formal mentorship program, maybe you and your mentor or your mentee weren’t able to meet up as often as you would’ve liked and just kind of noting that. And maybe you’ll, you’ll understand and maybe mitigate the reasons for the next time you participate in the, in the program.

Erica Pisani: And then lessons learned, it could be like one to three things that you just want to carry forward with you the next time you’re working on a similar project or participating in a mentorship program or what have you. And if you’re in a company culture that really values this or you have a really good relationship with your manager, I would really encourage you to maybe have a conversation with them about this section because there might be things that you would list as what didn’t go so well that your manager would actually say, Hey, this was actually a great thing.

Erica Pisani: And then you can talk about that and learn from that experience. Those are the two examples. Again, I’ll give a link at the end, but just to hop back, oh, and my handy note here.

Erica Pisani: If you’re keeping a long running brag sheet, be sure not to, to have any sort of identifying or proprietary information. When you’re sharing this with other managers, we don’t wanna end up in that kind of hot water. This is all to say that at the end of the day, I know a lot of us feel like especially when we’re starting out, if I just do good work and I just focus on getting the job done, the stuff will just naturally get recognized, but realistically, you are your best advocate. Even the best managers out there can’t keep detailed tabs on all of the work the reports have done.

Erica Pisani: Maintaining this brag sheet is your tool to make sure you can advocate effectively for yourself without too much work overall. And like, it’s, it’s honestly a great way to advocate for yourself, especially if you’re a bit shy, like I know, I definitely am. To wrap up brag sheets, they help capture all of the work you do, not just the shiny products and features that maybe the marketing team at your company will shout from the rooftops, but the stuff that you do in your day-to-day that keeps things running really smoothly and helps shape the technical direction of the engineering organization that you’re a part of, or the company culture it can make it easier for your managers to advocate for you, whether they’ve been around for a while or whether they’re brand new to their role on, on your team.

Erica Pisani: They can give you awareness of the level you’re performing at, which I think is particularly valuable, especially when you’re a more junior engineer and you’re still trying to get a sense of what is the difference between a junior and an intermediate engineer and an intermediate engineer to a senior. It can help facilitate conversations around your career and where you wanna go.

Erica Pisani: Maybe you wanna be going more into a managerial track and you wanna be spending more time developing those skills, but you just can’t find the time because you’re doing all this other stuff. And you can have that conversation with your manager to see what you can do less of and more of what you wanna be doing. And then at the end, it can help you in your future job searches by making it really easy for you to update your resume when you’re ready to do that, and then to go into interviews with a lot of confidence over the pro like remembering all the details of the projects that you were a part of the mentorship programs that maybe you helped lead and be able to speak in detail about that sort of thing.

Erica Pisani: Thank you all so much for listening. That is the URL for the brag sheets, if you would like to use them as the basis for your first brag sheet or to enhance your your existing ones. Yeah, I think we, we still have a couple minutes for questions. I’m gonna look at the chat here. Yeah, I’m not sure how many folks have yeah, heard of a brag sheet before. I know for me it was like later in my career when I heard about them, but honestly it has been a lifesaver.

Erica Pisani: Thanks Jennifer. Could I elaborate on what not to include? When I say like maybe no names, like maybe company names, cuz that could be pretty sensitive information. Possibly like numbers around like concrete numbers… Anyway about what contracts are worth might not be a great thing to share outside of the company. It might be okay within while you’re at that current company, but if you’re sharing with another manager at a different role, you might not wanna get into the nitty gritty details, especially if they might, if the two companies that you’ve worked at are somewhat in the same field. Just be a little cautious there. Anything that you could imagine might get you into some murky waters there. Just maybe be a little bit careful and be more vague than you otherwise would have if if you were in your at that previous role.

Erica Pisani: Do I use people names or initials? I haven’t had to yet. Actually, I tend to be very, very like even broader than that sometimes. Unless it’s in like let’s say within my current role and I’m mentoring someone, then I might say like, I’ve helped these people. But then once I’ve moved on, I tend to make it more abstract and say like a person that was at a like L1 or junior engineer level and then refer to them that way. Oh sorry. Go ahead, Angie.

Angie Chang: Thank you Erica for this excellent talk on brag sheets I know is very popular in the bookmarks area. People definitely bookmark this and they can replay this talk right after it ends, which will end in like 20 seconds cuz we have our next session starting very soon. So thank you so much Erica again, and we’ll see you on the other side everyone.

Erica Pisani: No worries. Thank you so much everyone.

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Sukrutha Bhadouria: Up next, we have Jenée Smith from Microsoft. Jenée is a software engineer at Microsoft. She transitioned to engineering from marketing after graduating from Stanford with a biology degree. Wow. The journey.

Jenée Smith: <Laugh>.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: We’ll be speaking today about developing your professional brand with GitHub, a really important topic that everyone needs to know about. Thank you, Jenée.

Jenée Smith: Hey guys. I’m really excited to present today. I just wanna give a brief overview that this is a presentation that no matter where you are in your development journey, assuming that you have a little bit of exposure to programming, this will have something for you, whether you’re very senior or just beginning your journey.

Jenée Smith: A bit about me. I am on the team that handles Microsoft 365 subscriptions, so if you’ve ever used PowerPoint or Word, maybe you’ve seen something I’ve helped with. In my free time, I love photography. I spend way too much time on TikTok and I’m a really big fan of salsa dancing.

Jenée Smith: Let’s go ahead and get started. Some of the videos might be a little bit quiet, so I may talk over them during the session, but by the end of this, I’m hoping that you’ll understand a little bit more about what GitHub is if you don’t already know what it is, and maybe have a deeper understanding at the end of this if you already sort of do.

Jenée Smith: We’ll be talking about how you can make this easier for you to get recruited, how you can connect with other developers, and how you can have some fun using GitHub. If you didn’t know this already, GitHub is a code hosting platform. It is a place you can put your portfolio, you can put a small project and a lot of companies host their entire applications on it. It’s something that you would use in your day-to-day as a developer. And it’s also something that you can use kind of like the “LinkedIn for developers.” This video I may have to talk over, so bear with me.

Jenée Smith: This video is meant to be a quick introduction to what GitHub is. This is what the home feed looks like when you first log in. There is a feed which we will be talking about later on, or you can follow topics and things that you’re interested in. There is another spot where you keep your projects, this is called a repository, it’s just another name for project. You can go into them. When you click into one of your repositories, you’ll see a little bit of information about it. You’ll see some files and information, and this is what other people will see if they are looking at your profile

Jenée Smith: Instructions, what it’s, how do you tip and then go into your files. And obviously you’ll wanna make your files clear and easy for people to understand. The other part of GitHub is your profile. It’s a little bit like a social media platform. You’ll see you can have a customized profile with a little intro, which we’ll be talking about how to customize later on in the presentation. There’s also a little bit of a bio about you. There’s an image, and this is kind of what people will see when they first see your GitHub profile.

Jenée Smith: All right, so we’re gonna talk really briefly about some GitHub best practices. If you are not already aware or if you’re not necessarily thinking about this when you’re making your GitHub projects, the first one, this is pretty self-explanatory, but if you wanna be a good developer, you should have clean code. And if you are uploading a project that you want a recruiter to see on your GitHub profile, you might wanna consider the fact that somebody should be able to look at what you have and be able to sort of understand what you’re working on.

Jenée Smith: Having clean variable names, having some comments and notes that someone who is a developer but maybe isn’t well-versed in your project can get a pretty good idea of what it is you’re working on. As you can see this, you can get a kind of an understanding that this is related to the people who are in a class. You may not know what program it is, but you can make some guesses based on what this code says.

Jenée Smith: The second thing to consider is having a clean repo structure, so that’s the project you’re working on. The folder structure that you have should either use reserved names that are conventions within your discipline, or should at least be clear enough that someone could understand what they are. If you’ll notice, there’s the folder name and then there is the commit message.

Jenée Smith: When you are making a commit message, you may just be going really fast and you might just write, “commit” or “message”. But having something that’s clear and indicates what you’ve worked on will be really helpful if someone is looking at your GitHub profile.

Jenée Smith: The second, and this is kind of the most important in my personal opinion, is making sure you have a clean README in all of your projects, the read me is called the README cuz it’s the first thing you should read.

Jenée Smith:  And most people know what this is, but you may not have necessarily taken a look at some of your own projects. If you’re not telling people what your project is and what it does in a clear and obvious way, they may not give your project that much consideration. You also wanna give people the ability to install and run your project if they wanted to contribute to it.

Jenée Smith: Don’t forget to give credit to any of your collaborators and provide whatever other relevant information someone might need to know. If you take a look at this, if anyone wants to give their comments in chat, a quick comment about what they think this project is about, it’s not a trick question. <Laugh>, I am seeing detecting spam, filter spam, your email. Exactly!This is super clear. You can tell that this person did this as part of a university project. You can see that they are using Python to filter spam in your email. And that’s something that you see right away. And they’re using images to make that point really, really visually obvious. This is a great example of a README.

Jenée Smith:Now let’s play another fun game, which is, which one of these is better? It’s not a trick question. If anyone wants to put in chat why they think one of these is better, please go for it. Yep, I’m seeing the top one.

Jenée Smith: If anyone wants to include why detailed README file, it’s clear, concise, we know what it’s about, tells us what, and it’s an example exactly. And this is something that people don’t necessarily always think about when they’re building a little project that they wanna put on their GitHub profile, which is – you might have the best project in the world, but if you’ve named your README “Vim text editor tutorial”, people might be able to guess what you’ve created, but they may not give your project a lot of consideration because of it. And this is a part of people’s projects that people often forget about or don’t remember to update, so pay attention to it.

Jenée Smith: Now let’s talk about ways you can make your GitHub profile stand out, which is when people are looking at your profile or the overview, can they figure out who you are and is it a way that rough reflects who you are? We’re gonna watch another video. Sounds like there’s not gonna be any audio based on the comments, so I will be talking over it again.

Jenée Smith: Let’s talk a little bit about how to customize. This is a relatively new feature that we’re gonna talk about, which is called “Customizing Your GitHub profile”. GitHub now gives you the ability to create sort of customized page so that when people are looking at your profile for the first time, they’ll see something that’s unique and customized to you. The way that you would get there is when you were on your homepage, there should be a place that says, you know, create your custom profile.

Jenée Smith: Mine doesn’t have that cuz I’ve already made one. But when you go into it, and it should usually have the same name as your username, you’ll be able to type things whatever you want. It’s in the language markdown. If you need resources on that, there are a lot that it’s a relatively easy language to learn. Yyou can type something like this. Mine says, hi, my name is Jenée. You can add images, you can add links, you can add emojis if you want to. And it’s really easy to test and preview your changes in line and publish really quickly. All of those are pretty possible and that’s really all you have to do once you’re done a commit message. And yeah, we will be talking a little bit more about how to customize, we’ll talk a little bit about good examples later on in the presentation.

Jenée Smith: All right, so before we talk a little bit about customizing, making a custom repository, we’ll talk a little bit about making sure that your profile is fully filled out. This seems like this is not revolutionary information, but it might be something that you’ve overlooked or maybe haven’t considered, and that is on your profile when you’re editing it, having all your information filled out, someone should be able to look at your profile and be able to contact you.

Jenée Smith: The people here have really good examples of fully fleshed out profiles because this person includes some keywords that are important to her, so you understand that she’s passionate about Python. She gives you a link to her lead code so that you can get a better sense of who she is as a developer, and it gives a little bit more information about her – and has a clear picture.

Jenée Smith: Jake Wharton’s profile has a “Sponsor” button. This is something that not a lot of people know about. It’s a relatively new feature, which is GitHub allows people to sponsor projects that you make. If you are an open source contributor or if you have projects, you can monetize that now, which is an awesome new thing. I just wanna make sure people know that that’s an option for you. His is awesome because it gives you his email, it gives you a link to his website, and it gives you his Twitter handle so that if you wanted to contact him, it’s very easy to find him.

Jenée Smith: We’ll also be talking in a second about ways that you can make your GitHub profile shine. You wanna be making something that showcases your own personality, something that is meaningful to you, and that someone can connect with you about – so think about sort of, who am I, how do I wanna be remembered, and what makes me stand out is kind of the foundation for making your profile.

Jenée Smith: This is an example of a really well-customized profile. There’s a couple of things that stand out. He does have his name listed. He has a link to his profile. He has his email so you can contact him. And he also has a really visual representation of all of his projects. He customized that that repository and has really big images, so that you can click directly into each of his projects.

Jenée Smith: And this is a great example of a really simple profile that’s really well customized. Oh, oh <laugh>. Now let’s take a look at two profiles. Again, this is not a trick question, but let’s talk a little bit about why one of these is better than the other. Okay, I’m seeing left, which is right, but let’s talk a little bit about why one of them is better. Yep. So I’m seeing more information, I’m seeing visually appealing. You can tell exactly what, who this person, who this person is, something about them.

Jenée Smith: I wanna really point out – on the profile on the bottom, which is the one that is not as good, they don’t have any way to contact them, so even if they have a really interesting project listed, there’s no way to follow up with them. And that’s a big detail. There’s also no descriptions on what their projects are. So when you’re looking at it, you see one dash portfolio site that could be the best portfolio you’ve ever looked at, but it doesn’t really invite you to learn more. And that’s an important detail when someone is looking at your profile.

Jenée Smith: The person on the top obviously has a link to their Twitter, so you do have a way to get in touch with them. It has some images, which you know, are very beautiful and it’s visually appealing, and it talks about things that they’re interested in so you can quickly understand things that you might want to reach out to them about.

Jenée Smith: The next idea is that you can pin key projects. When you’re working on your GitHub projects, by default, GitHub will display what you’ve worked on most recently. But if you want to have your best project, or if there’s a certain project that you want people to see at the top, you can pin those projects. And when you’re pinning a project it’s just relatively easy to do. There’s the little pin icon. Do you pay attention to making sure that if your project name isn’t obvious for people, that you have a pretty well fleshed out description of what it does? Here on all of these, there is a description you can understand at least a little bit of what each of these do.

Jenée Smith: This is a profile that doesn’t have a customer repository, but because he’s using pinned projects in a really visually engaging way, this is still a really good profile. There is a link to his Twitter. There is a link to his portfolio, so you can reach out to him if you want to. And each of his projects are very clear and easy to understand. So this is also a great example of a profile if you aren’t necessarily that interested in creating a customized repo.

Jenée Smith: This section is about contributing to community. There are a lot of social features to GitHub that not everyone necessarily knows about. These can be really helpful if you are a junior developer who maybe is still breaking into tech or having a little bit more trouble getting your first role. Making sure that you really take advantage of some of these community elements can be really helpful if you, even if you are a more experienced dev, you can also make use of these as well.

 Jenée Smith: It sounds like there is audio – itt’s just gonna be low. I guess I’ll have to talk on top of it <Laugh>. This is the GitHub Explorer tab. So when you go on your profile, you’ll see Explore first. You can follow other developers. You can follow topics that are interesting to you and you can follow specific projects or companies.

 Jenée Smith: When you go onto Explore, it will show things that it thinks you might be interested in and you can follow them. You can also search under topics or trending. And that way if there’s a developer you are really excited about learning more about, you can see updates from them. If there’s a company that you’re excited about that you think you might wanna work for, you can see updates from them here as well.

Jenée Smith: There are collections that people can make so that if you wanna filter by something that you are passionate about, like maybe there’s a, you’re really interested in crypto trading, you can follow projects or topics like that. I’d really recommend that you star projects that are interesting to use, that you can see them in your main feed. If you want to contribute to the community, you can create collections of repos that you think are interesting. And this, this will be shared in this in this area.

Jenée Smith: You can also follow collections that you think are interesting to get more information about something you’re passionate about. This is a great way to do research for your next project. And it’s also a great way just to give back. This is what my feed looks like. You can see I’m following some people that I think are interesting and I’m also following some projects that I am passionate about.

Jenée Smith: All right. We’ve already talked a little bit briefly about starring topics, but you just see that the star icon and that’s how you follow topics that are interesting to you.

Jenée Smith: The next thing we’re gonna talk about is the discussions tab. This is also a relatively new feature. Organizations can choose to enable this. If you work in a company that is developer focused, you can opt to include this feature so that people can engage with you and create issues, ask questions or just engage with you.

 Jenée Smith: And if there is an open source company that you want to be a part of or that you are excited to use, you can be active in discussions. It’s a forum very similar to Stack Overflow or Reddit where you can open an issue, talk about things that you think are awesome, and give back. If you want to be a part of that company or you’d like to work on an open source project, this can be a really good way to get your name out there to people who work at that organization.

 Jenée Smith: The other part of this is contributing to open source projects. A lot of people do know about this feature, which is you can fork repositories, which is making a copy of a project you are interested in and you can kind of build on top of it and you can also merge it back into the main project. Just look for the fork, the fork icon up at the top of projects that you think are cool. You can then create what’s called a poll request, which is your contribution back. This is a fantastic way to stand out if you are looking for your next project. This is a great way to give back no matter where you kind of are in your development journey.

Jenée Smith: This is also something you may not know about. If you are a student. GitHub has a bunch of resources for you to help you on your journey. They have discounts and in some cases free access to partner companies that can help you in your projects. There are also resources and conferences and events, and you can become a campus ambassador if that’s something that you’re excited about. You can go to education.github.com. If you’re not a student, you cannot participate in some of those things, but you look and find events in your area no matter where you are in your development journey.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much, Jenée. I think we’ll have to take questions offline. This was wonderful.

Jenée Smith: All right. Thank you so much.

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

• Check out open jobs at our trusted partner companies.
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Angie Chang: We have Aliza Carpio, who is a director of product and tech evangelist at Autodesk. Prior to Autodesk, she was a tech evangelist at Intuit. She’ll be talking to us, to us today about negotiating your job offer beyond the base. Welcome, Aliza.

Aliza Carpio: Thank you Angie. Hello everyone. I’m Aliza and I am from Autodesk and in case you don’t know who Autodesk is… Autodesk is a leader in design and make software. Today, I’m gonna be talking about “beyond the base” – and here’s what we’ll cover, and I’m just gonna flash this up here, but this is really where I wanna start. This is huge.

Aliza Carpio: I’m gonna let y’all know a bit of secret, or maybe it’s not, but the reason why I feel passionate about this topic is because I will say that I’m someone in the very beginning of my career, and even not so beginning of my career, I did not negotiate because I really wanted that role, and I really didn’t want to be passed for it or, or like pushed aside for that role. And this percentage, 32%-60%, depending on where you are reading or you know what podcast you’re listening to, 32%-60% of women today will not negotiate anything in terms of their offer that they get from a company. And the reasons span from just like me, I didn’t, where women say, I don’t wanna get passed over for this job. I really want this job, or I really need this job.

Aliza Carpio: But what I found interesting also in this percentage is that 30%-60% of women who don’t negotiate anything in their package in their compensation package, would prefer to leave the company after two years being in the company. So when do you actually start thinking about this? When you’re thinking about, you know, hey, I’m gonna, you know, try out for this role and I’m submitting my resume and I’m about to get a phone call from a recruiter, you should really be thinking about your compensation package prior to that first encounter.

Aliza Carpio: You really wanna think about, how do I think about this? And it really starts with understanding you. And so, what does that mean? You’re like, oh god, that’s like such a big term. It really comes down to what’s important to you. And these are two questions that I’ve learned through the years from others who have guided me through negotiation.

Aliza Carpio: I used to make pros and cons lists when I’m trying out for a new role, and I realized, I started seeing that the cons list was long – everything from, “I don’t know if I should leave because I really know my manager. We get along” – all the way to like, “I really know my team and the tech stack in my group, I feel like really comfortable and I’m really impactful there”. But let’s switch the question. Instead of doing pros and cons, ask yourself two questions.

Aliza Carpio: Make a list under each. What are your non-negotiables? Your must haves? And then what are your nice-to-haves? Which are icing on the cake? They’re not deal breakers, but man, that would sweeten the deal. And an option that you can consider once you actually create the list is to narrow or not, but then share this list with someone that you trust that can give you honest feedback.

Aliza Carpio: I’m gonna actually share a recent story with a friend last year. She talked to me, she’s a single mom, and she was planning to leave her company for another company. She created a pros and cons list and she’s like, can you help me figure out what’s right for me? And what I did with her on Zoom was I asked her what were her non-negotiables? She was a single mom. She unfortunately has an ex that wasn’t contributing to the income in the family. And so she has a son that she wanted to start planning for for college.

Aliza Carpio: And when I asked her what was her most important, she said one was a role that was gonna be elevated to that next level that would then have higher pay. And then two, you know, being able to just learn something new. And for her, that next role actually was – those two things were non-negotiable. And so it became clear to her that going to that other company was actually the right call. After you understand what’s important to you, take that moment, right? Hey, you know, I know my want or two or even three things that are my must-haves and a couple things in my nice to haves?

Aliza Carpio: Take this moment to own your competence and really know that you are worth it. And I’m taking this quote from Dr. Deepika Chopra, if you haven’t heard of her, she is doctor of optimism and I love that. I got a chance to recently learn from her. This is also going to be the time when I’m gonna ask you, like, again, taking a page from the book “Brave, Not Perfect” to have a a bit of courage to really own the moment, really understand what it is that you really wanna see for yourself or have for yourself, and really, what we learned in various studies or even in the book “Brave, Not Perfect” is that we regret what we don’t do. And so I hope that you don’t regret what you don’t do. And then, lastly, is to shift your mindset to really thinking about the total package.

Aliza Carpio: This is where my title comes in of “beyond the base”. Normally whether you are talking to someone in a startup or enterprise or mid-to-large size company, you are normally presented in tech with something that looks like this – your base salary, there might be a bonus structure, and then you may or may not get restricted stock units or performance stocks.

Aliza Carpio: Many times when you are thinking about where do I negotiate, a lot of us just focus on base salary and traditionally we focus on that and we stop there. What we should really think about is breaking it down and taking those same elements of base salary, bonus, RSUs, and PSUs – and then I also added the extra incentive. Let’s break it down.

Aliza Carpio: Your base salary and your bonus tends to be the least flexible. I’m not saying that they are a hundred percent not negotiable, I’m just saying it’s the least flexible base. Salaries many times are constrained by the current budget of that company. Bonuses many times are set by the job band, so whatever your job is, there’s a band for it, and there’s usually like a specific percentage, although I have heard of people like negotiate that as well so definitely something to consider here. Again, I’m not saying that you cannot negotiate, I’m just saying that that’s your least flexible.

Aliza Carpio: Your restricted stock units and performance stock units – this is actually future facing. It is where the company believes, let’s invest in this person, we believe that this person can really make an impact today and tomorrow. This is actually where I would say the greatest flexibility is cuz this is about future dollars and future investment in you and in the company.

Aliza Carpio: And then the last is extra incentive incentives. Now this is a mixed bag. Some are gonna have some flexibility while others are gonna be fixed. Some things to consider here – some companies do provide a sign-on bonus which can be paid over the course of a year or as one time. Sometimes they are paid as part of your first paycheck, it all depends on the company. And in the last thing that I put in here, and again, there’s many types of incentives, is your relocation package, for some companies this is a set amount like you get $3,000 or you can negotiate because you’ve got a family or ou’ve just maybe have more stuff than they, than they had allocated in terms of those fees. I’m just gonna just pause here for a sec.

Aliza Carpio: Again, this, this is all negotiable. The left shows you’re least flexible because they’re constrained by budget or they’re set by job band. The middle part tends to have the most flexibility, and then your extra incentives is just a mixed bag. But in thinking about all that, there’s also some of these, and these I learned from many colleagues and others who’ve guided me through the process of negotiation.

Aliza Carpio: The first is, many companies are doing this today, but not everyone is asks for is your birthday, or a significant day ,off. Maybe there’s something that is really significant to you, your family, or your beliefs. And ask for that without that impacting your paid time.

Aliza Carpio: On balance, modified schedule is something that is so negotiable. You might be going to school part-time caring for an aging parent, or you might have young kids or what have you – asking for ma that modified schedule. I do know quite a few people that tend to end their day around 2:00 PM or 3:00 PM because they’re either going to school or what have you or, caring for their kids and then they pick things back up in the evening or early the following day.

Aliza Carpio: I do know of folks – the next bullet – is where they actually ask for mental health time off day or some sort of a health rejuvenation day that doesn’t impact their sick leave. If you are someone that is always in front of the audience or camera, like if you’re in PR or have a comms role, I do know of people who have gotten this and continuously ask for a clothing budget.

Aliza Carpio: There are many instances when people can bring their therapy pet to work. It is something that you can definitely consider.

Aliza Carpio: The next two are stipends and there are many companies that provide this already, but if your company does not, ask for getting your home office set up like a stipend for that, and then a monthly stipend for mobile and Internet fees.

Aliza Carpio: And then finally, if you know this role and you’re coming in with subject matter expertise in that role and you have a good rapport with the hiring manager, you might wanna consider modifying aspects of the job description or really having conversations about, hey, we might be able to really think about this in this way. Again, it’s open for conversation. So I’m gonna just flash this up for a sec just to give you all some ideas of what other folks that I know of have negotiated.

Aliza Carpio: And finally something that I just wanna make sure that y’all know, whether you’re looking at, I’m gonna negotiate, you know, in the least flexible potential incentives or requests, all of this is really good for your soul. I recently gave feedback to someone that was like,” I’m really happy with everything, Aliza, I’m just gonna take it.” And I’m like, “You know what? Just ask for $5,000 more. Even if you don’t care about anything else, just ask for $5,000 more on your base or ask for a few more. You know, RSUs. Just do it because it’s really just good for your soul and owning that competence”.

Aliza Carpio: And before I actually end and share my “let’s connect” slide. I leave you with this. I’m actually gonna be checking out Miss Jude cause I can’t say her name. Miss Jude’s book, but I love this quote – “to remind yourself of your worth until it settles so deep in your soul it cannot be unearthed” and really owning your competence as I had said, and owning your worth. That’s really what negotiation is about. And I will, lemme just get to my last slide. I’d love for us to connect. I recently have not been going into Twitter much, so you’ll see that I do have a master on account through hack D. I just started that. Please do connect with me there or on LinkedIn and would love for you to check out Autodesk careers. We do also have a virtual career booth, so please do check us out. My website is creativelybrave.me and I believe we put the link to the slides also on on the chat.

Aliza Carpio: And with that said, let me go ahead and escape cause I can’t see you all if I am on full thing and see if anyone has any questions on chat. Thank you all for like, I just love like girl geek because y’all like are always so so supportive of a community. Let’s see. So encouraging. Any questions out there… and the base annual bonuses set. Yes, thank you Lisa for that. And thanks folks for sharing some tips here. I really oh and thanks Nick for for those shoes in my pick. They are from, in case y’all are shoe buffs. I am a big fan of <laugh> of the office of Angela Scott. I absolutely love her. If y’all like, check out my LinkedIn, something that I do on the side is I am a supporter of women-led small businesses.

Aliza Carpio: I do provide pro bono help for micro businesses led by women or owned by women so please do reach out if you would like some help. And let’s see, is there anything else? What do you, what to do when you’re told the offer is not negotiable? I think it’s about so thank you for asking that, Stephanie.

Aliza Carpio: I think when you say the offer is not negotiable, ask a clarifying question and say, “Hey, could you break down for me? Could you unpack for me what is actually not negotiable?” And so because of what I’ve found is, sometimes when folks say, that the thing that is not negotiable is the salary and bonus, but there’s other things that could be negotiable. Just ask that clarifying question. I have not been in a situation <laugh> when when I’ve been told that, but at the same time, I’m sure there are those opportunities, but I would say ask that clarifying question.

Aliza Carpio: Oh, and Alexandra said, how do you negotiate the job description? Yes, I actually recently did that when I joined Autodesk, there was a line in there about helping with the InnerSource movement at Autodesk, and what I negotiated was it was on the same kind of hierarchy as the evangelism work, and so I actually asked my hiring manager in terms of the hierarchy of how this is written, it all looks like it’s all at the same level, but yet I know one is its own full-time job, and I negotiated it to be the secondary thing versus the primary thing. I’m sure there’s others that have done something similar.

Aliza Carpio: “How to negotiate with your manager when you don’t want to jeopardize your working relationship? How to phrase it when it can be uncomfortable?”

Aliza Carpio: Oh my gosh, I feel like I need Lisa Debo who’s actually on here from Autodesk to, to share that. You know I have not negotiated anything internally. I’ve only negotiated when I join a company as an external candidate. But if folks, if there’s other things that you, that others can answer, that would be great. Some other questions here is what to do when you’re told the off. .. Okay.

Aliza Carpio: So can you share the typical rhythm of back and forth of a typical negotiation? Yes. To be honest now, what I love about California or maybe others states is that you will see what the base salary range is, so that already gives you you know, some, some information around, you know, what the base salary is, but normally this is from my experience, and please don’t take it as this is everyone’s experience, but what I normally get is a conversation with the recruiter across all of this stuff.

Aliza Carpio: They usually say, take your time. They normally, at least, I’ve had anywhere from three days to over a week to really come back to them. That’s usually that, and I did that at Autodesk more recently cuz I’ve been there, it’ll be a year and six months soon for me, but I went, came back and really, to be honest, I negotiated on the future facing stuff and they came back to me the following day and it was like, basically it was two times. It was pretty good.

Aliza Carpio: Another one from Sarita is, do you think employees that have been laid off are taken as desperate, likely to get low-balled? No, I do not. I actually have quite a few colleagues and my heart goes out to them from both Meta and and Twitter, and one, they’ve all landed on better roles with higher paying roles than where they were.

Aliza Carpio: So please try to like put that in the back of your mind. You are not seen as desperate. In fact, I would say you are gonna be seen as wow, look at all that you again, it’s about owning the competence. Look at all the things you’ve, you’ve done.

Aliza Carpio: What’s your advice for people transitioning into tech? People don’t get low-balled. You know what? Nothing that you do, and I got this from one of the other speakers -Nothing that you’ve done in the past, by the way, including the amazing talk by the Autodesk, one of the Autodesk speakers yesterday. Dr. Tonya Custis, nothing that you’ve done in the past should go against not having tech experience. It all connects. So please own that. I think I’m at time. Am I at time?

Angie Chang: Yes. Thank you Alisa. That was excellent. And thank you so much for sharing your slides in advance. I know I’ve already bookmarked them and shared them in the chat and people will be tweeting it and posting on Linkedin. Thank you so much for sharing transparently on how to go beyond the base!

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Sukrutha Bhadouria: Up next we have Xinran, who’s a senior software engineer at Netflix. She’s on the personalization data engineering team, building data applications to power ML algorithms and product innovation. Before Netflix, she worked at Confluent and Target as a data engineer. She founded a publication dedicated to data engineering called “Data Engineering Things” and writes regularly. Welcome.

Xinran Waibel: Yes, thank you for the introduction. Hi everyone. My name is Xinran Waibel and I’m a senior data engineer at Netflix. And today I’ll talk to you about how to engineer data for better data quality. And I personally love emojis, so if you see anything in my presentation you love, bring out all the emojis, <laugh>, I love them.

Xinran Waibel: Let’s get started. And so here’s agenda for today. I’ll first tell you a little bit about myself, and for those of you who sound familiar with data engineering, I’ll give you a summary of what the engineering is.

Xinran Waibel: And since we’re gonna spend the whole time talking about data quality, I’ll talk about why the quality should be the bottom line of any data engineering system, how to define data quality, how to monitor data quality as part of your data system. And at the end, I prepare a sweet summary of the best practice that you can use to ensure high data quality in your data system.

Xinran Waibel: First of all, little bit about myself. My name is Xinran. I know this, the name is kind of hard pronounce, but the trick is that the X is pronounced like “sh” and I have been working this engineering for about six years now, and then I’m still having a lot of fun loving it, and I always tell other people that being an engineer, like I get to solve Data Apollos every day and it’s very rewarding. And right now, so I’m a member of personalization data engineering team at Netflix and my team build various different data system that feed data into our personalization data algorithms.

Xinran Waibel: I also personally really like writing about data engineering too. I created this publication called “Data Engineer Things”, some Mediums, and then I write blogs every once in a while to share my learnings of what I learn at work. And I hope you check it out later after the presentation. And in my personal life, I’m a dog mom. Here’s a picture of me and Foxy. We spend a lot of time together and and also I love pottery. I just learned to do ceramic last year and then absolutely loving it. Actually this year I just set up a small pottery studio in my garage and I’m very excited to do most pottery at home. So get to the technical topic.

Xinran Waibel: What is data engineering? And if you search about data engineering online, you might see so many different keywords that you see here is about building data pipelines, data plumbers, data cleaning, and the ETL, ELT, and you might learn about batch and streaming and frameworks like Kafka and Spark. But what is data engineering like?

Xinran Waibel: From my perspective, like all of this is all part of data engineering. However, it is only describing data engineering from a specific angle. And here’s what data engineering is in my own eyes.

Xinran Waibel: For me, data engineering is all about making data accessible in optimized formats. When I say optimized formats, the data is enriched with business logic and metadata, so it can be easily used to solve business problems. And data is also stored in efficient data schema and storage system, so if your downstream user are going to process this data further, they can get great performance in their data processing too. And last but not least, data should be available within the desirable latency because there’s some data you would get more value when you build up a significant amount of history, but also their datas would lose its value as the delay goes up.

Xinran Waibel: You might need to build a data system that’s runs daily or hourly or you streaming system that process the event as it comes in. And most importantly, all the data engineering system should provide data in high quality. And I believe that is the bottom line of any data engineering system.

Xinran Waibel: So why is data quality so important? The main reason is because the outcome of data engineering system is used to derive data insights. Whether it is used to generate some metrics dashboard for executives, or it is used to directly power some product feature, or it is used as input data to your machine learning algorithms, and any data insights can only be as good as the source data. As you can imagine, if your data engineering system is producing incorrect data, any of the decision made based on those data will be at risk as well.

Xinran Waibel: This stock meme here, I love it, and it perfectly summarized that why I want to give a 20 minutes presentation today on data quality itself because I’ve seen so many data systems in the past, including the one I built myself that don’t have data quality check, and the data engineers don’t even know when the data systems are not running correctly or producing incorrect data. And at the same time, important decisions are being made based on those data, and that is a very dangerous situation that you don’t want to be in.

Xinran Waibel: Now that we’re all on the same page about why data quality is important, let’s talk about how to define and measure data quality. Defining data quality is not an easy task at all. The first and also the most important step before you define the data quality is that you have to know your data.

Xinran Waibel: Ask yourself these three questions, what does my data represent? How is my data being used by downstream users, and what could possibly go wrong? And for any data engineer to answer those questions, I believe business context is really critical because you have to understand the business problem first before you build your data system, and of course, before your design data quality for a few reasons. The business model determines the nature of the data and for example, how your business works is directly associated with the data that’s getting produced. For example, what is the relation of account and the profile that is directed, that was directly impacted by how user can create account in the profile when they use your product.

Xinran Waibel: And another example is that, business model also determines the traffic pattern that you might observe in your data. Let’s take Netflix for example. If you work for a company who’s based on it is about entertainment like Netflix, then you might have more traffic during holiday and weekend, versus on weekend or on weekdays. However, if you work for a software company who builds software for business users, then you might have more traffic during weekdays versus on holiday. And also, business contacts help you spot the potential edge cases too. Let’s say, if you work with playback data on Netflix and you will think about, hey, how will my data surface edge cases like where the user tried to start a playback but then didn’t start, how would you spot / identify those cases in your data and how do you want to deal with it as part of your system?

Xinran Waibel: And because any data engineering system is built at the beginning to solve specific data business problem, in a way, the downstream use cases actually define the expectation of your data. And also that means that the definition of your data quality is only valid for the use cases in mind. And those sounds might sound kind of conceptual but let me give you an example because the data quality itself is a very subjective matter, it’s really depending on how you expect the data to be used and who’s using it. Let’s take Netflix for example. Let’s say you are building a dimension table that represents a Netflix movie, and then you have a category field. For when you talk about category, and it might mean different things. When we talk to different departments, it could mean the category that we surface on to our product for user to select, to explore movies, or if you’re talking about category on the content side, it’s a different category when it comes to content production.

Xinran Waibel: Let’s say if you build this data set for product use cases, then your data quality will be at risk if you start surfacing the production category in your data set. So that is an example how data quality is relative to the use cases. For this, engineers, my recommendation is always that if you ever feels like you don’t understand your data well, I recommend you always talk to other teams, your business partners, so that you get more business context and understand how the business is associated with your data.

Xinran Waibel: Assuming that you have a good understanding of a comprehensive understanding of your data, now it’s important to establish some clear expectation for your data first, and also tolerance, because no data is perfect. For example, the column should only have values and meeting certain criteria. And you know, for example, the membership tab should only be basic or premium, and data should somewhat align with historical value. For example, the number of accounts that you see today should be very close to yesterday.

Xinran Waibel: Another thing you could also set is that the data should be somewhat aligned with another data set. Let’s say you have a data system that process input data and then does approximate one to one mapping, then you can expect the output is relatively aligned with the input as well. And from <inaudible> perspective, we can expect data to be you know, available within certain latency. Let’s say if you have a daily workflow, then you can, you know, have the expectation that daily job should finish before Pacific AM every day. This is some of the very basic expectation we would have on data set, but also depending on the data and the data system, you might want to add more to the list that’s more complicated.

Xinran Waibel: Now that you have a clear set expectation of your data, the next step is to compute data quality metrics that help you qualify the deviation of the extra data from your expectation, and then you can compare the deviation with your tolerance, to see whether the data quality is up to your bar. Here are some of the examples. You can compute the percentage of playback events when the membership ID is invalid, or you can check the the number playback today, assuming today is Thursday, and compare to previous Thursday average.

Xinran Waibel: I really love this example here because it gives you the idea of that how you can kind of incorporate the traffic pattern that you are aware of, data to your audit so that you can audit on your data quality more effectively. And another example is that you can calculate the percentage playback events, but only those with membership tabs basic and compare it to the seven day average. This is also a great example that how you can add more dimension and breakdown to your database, based on your best understanding of data to ensure that data quality is is high. And another, from a SLA perspective, you can measure the end-to-end runtime of your job and making sure that it meets the SLA of your downstream user. There are so many possible data quality checks you can have in place and you might be wondering, oh my god, what, how much, how many is enough?

Xinran Waibel: I mean, honestly there’s no right answer. However, my personal rule of some is that, you know, with this list of data quality check I have in place, if they all passed, I can confidently say for sure that I know my data is all good. That is the principle I really use when I designed data quality checks.

Xinran Waibel: Next section: monitoring data quality. This section is important because data quality check isn’t a one time task. You know, beyond all the unit task and integration, task integration task you’ll have as part of the development process, you also want to monitor your data quality continuously as part of your data system, so you can keep track of your data quality as your business and data evolve. And this, this section, I’ll talk a little bit more about how exactly we do that.

Xinran Waibel: The methodology of integrating data quality checks in your system is a little bit different for batch and streaming system. In the batch world, we typically use this pattern called Write-Audit-Publish. The first step is that you run your batch shop red output to a temporary location, then you run your data audit check against those output if it passed, then you publish your data to the permanent location. And as you can see from the screenshot here that when the data audit didn’t pass then it will send, actually send the pager to our on-call and on-call will intervene and investigate If everything’s good, then they will manually unblock it, but if it doesn’t, they’ll reach out to other teams to investigate further. That is the Write-Audit-Publish pattern that we typically use for batch pipeline.

Xinran Waibel: In the streaming world it’s a little bit different. In for event streaming job, we would typically alert based on some of the realtime metrics we collect from application. It would include some of the job health metrics, for example, the number of jobs that’s running of the consumer like watermark, making sure that the the job is making progress / is not left in behind, and also we also have a lot of custom per event metrics we capture as part of the data processing logic as well. Like for example, the number of events are filtered in or out, the number of parts fit we’re getting, the number records with in invalid fields, and also the output volume. Those are just the, some of the simple examples you could do.

Xinran Waibel: And another thing I want to mention here is that because this stage is actually really common to write the output of your event streaming job to a table, you can also use the right audit published pattern on your streaming output as well. The only difference is that it is the delay that introduced because you are running your audit at theoretical manner as part of a scheduled batch shop.

Xinran Waibel: Assuming that you are responsible data engineer, you know your data well, you also set up all this great data quality check as part of your system, what could possibly go wrong from here? And this is another scenario you could be in that you have so many data audits, that’s firing alerts all the time, and some of them may not be reflecting your real issue. You don’t even know which fire is real, which fire isn’t. And that puts your team in a lot of on-call burden and also just operational cost as well. And that leads to the next section – the common challenges of maintaining data qualities in production.

Xinran Waibel: One of the common challenges as I showed in the previous stock meme is that you might have a lot of data audit that’s very noisy and the noisy one might distract you from the real data quality issue. For example, it might be because that you have too low a threshold and or because that you totally ignored the organic traffic pattern as your data quality so you’re basically alerting based on the organic traffic pattern that’s expected. The recommendation here is always revisit your data theoretically to see which one need to be tuned so that it can be more accurate and not producing unnecessary noise.

Xinran Waibel: Another challenge here that sometimes data orders don’t get updated as you update the business logic as part of your job. You know, like we talk about before, data quality is relative to the business problem you are solving so that whenever you update the business logic as part of your system, you should also revisit your data alerts so that your data quality check is up to date as well.

Xinran Waibel: Next one. You know, that one is also really painful that because you don’t log enough information as part of your system and also your logging, it’s very difficult to troubleshoot failures. This will actually apply to both batch and the streaming world because a lot of times, we might see a realtime metric saying, oh hey, like we have a spike of passing failures. However, it doesn’t log enough information about the event the identifier of the event. It’s really hard to go back to troubleshoot what event get jobs for what reason, and similarly for the batch world, a good example is that if you have a Spark job that have 20 filter on the source data and the the data, all the data might get dropped because that one filter, but it could be really hard for you to figure out which is that filter that is causing the problem.

Xinran Waibel: And that is all because of like logging or intermediate data you are producing, so just be mindful about what data you should log or intermediate data you should pro produce so that’s easier for your oncall and yourself to troubleshoot the issue when it comes.

Xinran Waibel: Another common challenge, which is actually problem that my team deal with a lot is that a lot of times your data, all this fire ,not because something went wrong with your data system, actually, it has to do with upstream data changes. It’s very common that in some of the data systems that you build your data system based on some assumption of your source data ,and therefore there’s certain type of data contract there between you and your source system. However, because when those data contract is not enforced through some programmatic matters such as like, integration test, then it could be broken all the time and then you catch those issues in your data system instead and then you have to go back and forth with the upstream team to fix them.

Xinran Waibel: in this case, it is really important that you enforce the data contract with your upstream through some programmatic mess methods so that it’s less likely you know, for upstream to introduce unexpected data updates.

Xinran Waibel: Another problem that’s probably applies everywhere is that, people come and goes and they might not have enough documentation on the data quality check and you might not know why data quality, certain data quality checks there, and when it fails you don’t know what to do. It’s always the best practice to add enough documentation for data quality, and the why that that exists, and what to do when that fail.

Xinran Waibel: Another one but this is very interesting one because we don’t run into this very often, but it’s also quite interesting problem, is that when we build data all this, a lot of times we would explore the data based on the historical data already available and then that can help us understand the data a little bit better and set some tolerance. However, if you are building a data system for a completely new product, you will have no historical data to refer to, so it could be very difficult to set data quality check and the tolerance you have. In this case honestly I don’t have any really good ideas, but I think the best thing you can do is just keep a close eye on your new data pipeline and this data get getting produced because as part of the new service and then revisit the data audit maybe after a week or months after it’s released, so that you should just have to keep an eye on it.

Xinran Waibel: Another really important thing I wanna cover at the end is about data recovery. Because no data is perfect, so you are going to eventually have a lot of fail data, all this that is gonna tell you, hey, like there’s some serious issues, system is producing incorrect data and what could you do? And sometimes, you might be able to fix it very easily, however you, if the data is already produced and you have to have some backup method to re backfill the data, to mitigate downstream impact. And then the methodology for data recovery is actually different for batch versus event streaming system.

Xinran Waibel: In a batch world, it’s pretty much guaranteed that all of your system will be back fillable because you know, you are, you are reading from data from a location where the data have really long retention and then you could just simulate / rerun your batch job and then also ask your downstream to rerun, and then you just basically do this over right, the partition and the data could be fixed.

Xinran Waibel: However, in the streaming world, not all system is by default backfillable. That is mainly because the source of the data you already have very limited retention. In most cases, that is a Kafka Topic and it’s very expensive to have very long retention for your Kafka data if your data size is really huge.

Xinran Waibel: There’s some options for backfeeding streaming job here. I’ll just like give you guys a quick summary, but <inaudible> talk about this for an hour if I want to. Yeah.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Can we Xinran, can we, can we wrap this up now? We have people in the next session ready?

Xinran Waibel: Yeah. Can we, yeah, definitely. You know there’s also options for backfilling, but then my recommendation that you should always have you know, some backfilling options in mind when the data outage happens.

Xinran Waibel: Just a quick summary of the best practice I have in mind for data quality. First of all, you want to design every data engineering system with data quality in mind. You must know your data and business problem well, and then you want to integrate your data quality metrics and alerts as part of the system. That means that when they pass, you can reassure that knowing that now is good, but also in fail you should have clear action item to follow up with. Last but not least, you should always have a backup plan for data recovery so that when the outage happens, you have a way to mitigate downstream impact.

Xinran Waibel: Sorry for running out of time. That’s everything I wanna cover for today. Feel free to find me on LinkedIn to connect with me. And if you want to learn more about data engineering, check out the “Data Engineering Things” Medium.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you, Xinran, this was wonderful. See you in the next session.

Xinran Waibel: Right.

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