Interested in a career as a Developer? You’ll want to tune in to this session as we delve into everything you need to know about the role, skills and tips on getting ahead.
To help us explore this further, we’re joined by Ellora Praharaj, Director of Reliability Engineering, Stack Overflow
Ellora is a technologist with over a decade of experience and tonnes of in-depth knowledge and expertise to share.
SheCanCode is a collaborative community of women in tech working together to tackle the tech gender gap.
Join our community to find a supportive network, opportunities, guidance and jobs, so you can excel in your tech career.
hello everyone thank you for tuning in as always I am Katie batesman the content director at she came code and
today we’re diving into the topic of becoming a developer it’s a role that we hear thrown around a lot in the tech
space but do you know exactly what it is and where to get it started thankfully I’m joined today by the amazing Laura
praharaj director of reliability engineering at stack Overflow to share
everything you need to know about what it’s like to be a developer and how to start your career as one welcome Melora
hi Keeley thank you for having me thank you so much for agreeing to join us today it’s it’s going to be such a
popular topic I know a lot of our ladies do ask us about it how to become a developer and what it actually involves
um so thank you so much for coming on and suggesting such a great topic and before we get started though can we hear
a little bit about you and your background please yeah absolutely
um my background I kind of grew up all over the place all over the country of India my dad was in the military so we
used to move around every few years I’d been interested in math and sciences from a very young age I was that kid
that would not play any sports I would be usually in a corner with a book um I ended up going into Computer
Engineering and my undergraduate and then I got an opportunity to come over
to the United States and do my masters over here I was very lucky and privileged that
they offered me a filtration which really helped because education is pretty expensive over here
um well and that was at SUNY Buffalo so that’s the State University of New York at Buffalo
um just a couple of months in we had a career fair and uh someone had actually
um encouraged me to go attend the career fair I went up to this booth called Bloomberg
which I’d never heard of before and just kind of had an informal chat they called
me back for an interview and I ended up getting picked for the internship the following year
that was a really good experience um yeah for three months the what I
really liked is that they didn’t just treat you as you know um like
um it wasn’t a superficial role when you were an intern you were doing actual coding you were actually putting stuff
into production um and you got the chance to work with real people Hands-On so it was a really
good experience overall and they gave me the op and um towards the end of the internship I interviewed again and they
offered me a full-time position at the company which is great because I did not look
anywhere else and I was like cool I’m just gonna go back to Bloomberg um yeah it was amazing to hear though
that they let you actually get involved in in the job and put things into production I don’t even think that on an
internship would you but they must be quite trusting of new talent and I suppose that that really just encouraged
you to well to stay as it sounds you you wanted to apply for a role absolutely
yeah the um I mean I subsequently worked there for 11 and a half years and the
pattern had always been we wanted to make sure that our interns got a real world experience and we weren’t just
going to give them frivolous projects but selfishly it made sense for the business as well because it’s like hey
we have all these great uh you know young folks coming in who are very eager to learn and they want to like do stuff
so let’s harness that energy the right way so he would put in the appropriate guard rails have them you know buddy up
with a mentor someone who was watching over their work we weren’t just letting folks you know YOLO stuff into
production um but uh yeah the the fact that it was
a real experience like for example the code that I wrote was still in news a few years even after I think maybe some
of it is still in use actually even though it’s been so long uh parts of it
so it’s it’s cool it’s just like all right that’s that’s kind of like the stuff you work on and it just it stays
on yeah yeah and you said so you got to work with young people as well once once
you were in you were working with young people coming through internships so you probably were thinking you know that I
had such value uh for myself when I went through this internship doing you know all of this great work that you then got
to structure what that would look like yep absolutely it’s a very rewarding
experience as well just having to work with folks and the best thing is you know when you have when you talk to uh
folks who are just like still in school or just freshly getting out of school or have done other courses you get such a
diverse array of viewpoints um because it’s very easy to get like heads down insular in a your specific
job but then you hear like all of this stuff that’s happening outside it’s like oh this is what we’re teaching in
universities now oh this is what I learned in this cool boot camps like ah yeah that’s interesting all right Tech
is a huge huge world yes yeah and I suppose and that’s some
of our discussion today as well that you know that that aha moment I suppose that when you get into a job and you think
yeah I didn’t know it was going to be like that or I didn’t know I was going to be you know learning this way or um
learning all the new things and once once you get in and internship is a great bridge for that I had a lady on
him recently who told me about her internship um and she did exactly the same thing right after the internship she applied
for the position at the company um because we were discussing actually it’s not just the qualifications is it
that you learn when you go for an internship it’s just the world of work you know getting the politics of work
and how to work with a team and how to get on with people and an internship is a great way to just learn soft skills as
just you know not just the technical coding side of things but just the soft skills of working with people isn’t it
absolutely because uh in you know in a university or like a boot camp or other
things it’s yeah sure they’re group projects but they are at the end of it
they’re basically College projects you don’t have to think about like all of the other aspects of oh what is going to happen if this stuff breaks or oh this
is actually going to go into production how is it going to be used in this different base because you’re focused on solving very narrow set of problems when
you’re you know in school or you’re working on like hobby projects um real world experiences like oh it’s
not just the coding is just one part of it there are all of these other things that you have to consider as well and
then the fact is um you know being an intern I think is like really awesome because uh it’s it’s very Rosy like for
example when I was an intern they took us to the FED Reserve in New York so I got to see all to see like
huge amounts of gold bricks we went to the New York Stock Exchange we saw like I forget the company unfortunately but
we saw like the company ring the bell so these are the cool places like we want to make sure that they’re the insurance
like and it’s not just through Bloomberg I think across the company even here at stack uh it’s the same things like we
want to make sure interns have a really rich fulfilling experience because we want to give expose them to like all the
things that can happen at work and the big thing is that real world experience of like Yep this is how you
operate within a team here is you’re going to have like structure because we need structure in a company period there
has to be a way of working so what does that look like here are the guardrails within which you operate and then
um the other thing is as an intern the advantage is no one really expects you to know everything so I played the noob
card it’s like oh what is this what does that do and everyone was super helpful like you know when you’re an intern it’s
like it’s almost like everyone views you as this place oh I really want to help this person develop in their career
um yeah I mean I I think overall in tech companies in general like the internship
position is taken seriously you know it’s not something considered oh go get coffee for me or I I’ve heard of the
stories I’ve seen on sitcoms and stuff like that that is not the case of tech companies yes uh yeah how many times have we had
yeah just doing you know somebody sitting at the shredder or I don’t even know if companies still have
photocopiers but that used to be the job of just you know the intern as you said getting coffee
um but yeah it’s a great way just to figure out you know who’s a really good talent
um uh and and to bring in great talent and and to keep them as you said you stayed for 11 and a half years so um they
didn’t must have done something right and on that note then what is your day-to-day life like now can you give us
an insight into what your role is like so my my title is director of
reliability engineering that means that all of the site reliability engineers and the database reliability engineers
at stack report up into me um SRE is something that was coined by
Google in the late 2000s and uh it essentially focuses on applying a
software approach to devops the focus is not just on making sure
that your application works or the features are complete it’s really focused on making sure that the
applications are reliable that they’re scalable if stuff happens in the background you’re still able to service
your clients we think about you know SRE mindset is a little different we really think about performance numbers uptime
privacy security we want to make sure that everything is as secure as possible and then applying automation to every
part of the of the workflow uh the the SRE
um well one of the things that we’re very fond of saying is how can we automate ourselves out of our current
jobs it’s not because it’s well we’re lazy sure but it’s also because we want to
find other code stuff to do not just working on manual coil yes making room to do other things yes and I’ve had that
so many times in Tech when people get really panicked about certain jobs that are
um moving out there’s always stories don’t know headlines about you know ctOS are angry because something’s come in
and it’s made their job easier and it’s going to take over um AI for instance is all the headlines
always say that you’re absolutely right it’s just finding the time to do other things
yep and SRE the SRE the devops mindset has a very heavy focus on that it’s like
how do we use the right tools to solve this how do we make sure that we get the computers to do our work for us the
automation part let let’s you know it’s a it’s a very um there’s an acronym that uh we’re very
fond of seeing as well dry don’t repeat yourself
you have to do the same thing again manually twice no no no just figure out how to automate it
right so basically what my teams are responsible for are the underlying
infrastructure that’s across all of stack Overflow we do have physical data centers as well as a significant
presence in uh Cloud we leverage Microsoft Azure and at the end of the
day whether it’s a physical machine or it’s like a container that you’re deploying an application into there’s
still the notion of compute infrastructure and how to do that management layer so that’s what my teams are responsible for
uh my team is also responsible for the um the business offering that we have
there’s stack Overflow for teams there’s multiple different tiers there and um you know the more you pay us the the
better service you get and the more features uh you get as is common with the most SAS products my teams are
responsible for making sure that the public websites stay up and running stopoverflow.com
um very surprisingly but I guess it really shouldn’t surprise me given the
current geopolitical and economic climate people love ddosing a free
community site it’s like if I ever find one of them you know I’m going to Tar and feather them seriously but it’s been
an arms race for us and we’ve had to like do a huge amount of work on our
side and again that’s that’s one of the things that my team’s being responsible for making sure that the site stays up because anytime stack Overflow goes down
uh yeah we get a bunch of like memes and tweets on Twitter and everyone’s like well it’s time to go home it’s like come
on all right we get it we’re working on fire responsibility
so that’s like that’s the public side aspect of it it’s like making sure that the site stays up it’s stable because
the volume of traffic we deal with is pretty high um the customer the SAS offering that we
have for um you know like business and Enterprise customers is a little different because the notion there is
like oh it has to be something that’s an isolated thing for um folks that are we’re managing and yeah the load isn’t
anywhere near what our public sites are but there are other concerns that we have to be worried about like for example okay how do we manage to make
sure that the uptime requirements are met that you know if all of their Integrations and stuff work and each
instance is slightly different so depending on who are you know who the
Target customer is whether it’s like an Enterprise client versus a public site user
the reliability scalability aspects can differ but those are all something that
my team manages so my day-to-day I know this is a very long-winded way of coming to my day-to-day but my day-to-day now
this is exactly what what and then the listeners are going to want to hear yeah my day-to-day these days is like
spending a lot of time essentially focused on how do I enable and Empower my teams
to do the things that they’re trying to do a big part of my job is essentially studying the strategy and the vision
um and ever since I joined my I think my team members are tired of me saying this but I’ve been harping on and on about
automation I’ve been harping on and on about self-service like look we don’t want to continue doing all of these
things manually how do we enable our partners on the application teams to be able to do the things that we are
currently doing for them because they don’t have the necessary tooling how do we bridge that Gap um it might be easier to give an example
actually so so for example like you know application teams generally are in the business of like all right I’ll write a quote I’ll write some code I’ll make
sure that it works locally and then someone else is going to deploy it that someone else usually falls on the
devops or the SRE teams what I want us to do and what we’re starting to do as well is all right how do we bridge that
Gap okay how do we provide enough infrastructure and tooling to the application team so that they are able
to build their applications themselves they’re able to do the deployment themselves to you know stage
environments like all right let’s start with development make sure we have automated testing oh all that looks good
move it to u80 then move it to production cool now that we’re in production let’s
make sure we have the right visibility into what the systems are doing do we have the right metrics we have the right traces do we have the right logging and
all of those things in place and all of that requires you know a platform so my
teams have a focus more on providing that platform so that we can essentially enable and Empower our application team
counterparts to be able to self-service their needs like they don’t need to reach out to us and say hey can you tell
me what is going on on this machine these laws like ah here’s a dashboard go you can configure stuff yourself and
look things up yourself and that just reduces the friction and enables overall everybody to go faster because no one
wants to wait and hear back from someone’s like can you give me a list of this stuff which I don’t have access to
it’s just it’s it’s it’s ridiculous yes um so yeah a big part of my day is spent
also focused on like okay how do we make sure that the things that we’re doing are pushing Us in that direction
um I don’t think a lot of listeners uh joining us today would would know that
when you want to become a developer that there are so many skills involved in that I think a lot there is that
stereotype that you’re just you you know you need the um the techie qualifications and and I
wanted to ask you a bit uh you know about the types of skills and qualifications that you think are important but actually it’s not just
that from what you’re saying it’s you know being able to communicate with lots of different teams and you know being
able to feed back to to each other that’s that’s far more than just technical skills isn’t it
absolutely something of fun of saying here uh is also the coding is just a
small part of the job yeah and it doesn’t really like the the way it works I’m I’m drawing on
my own personal experience because when I started in my career I started as an individual contributor I was coding very
heads down um you know I was given like specific projects like here this is the narrow
problem you’re trying to solve go coded and there’s some interaction that I have with other folks because it’s like all
right am I doing this the right way can you review my code can you help me test this stuff out and make sure that
everything looks fine so in those cases you tend to be very heads down but if you want to grow and if you want to like
learn more and it’s stand your knowledge you have to start looking Beyond and
that cannot be achieved by just being heads down on a specific piece of code that involves a lot of discussions
um okay I’m fond of things software software and Engineering is more of an art than a science because there’s many
different ways of solving the same problem and you’re trying to always find this is going to sound so silly but
you’re trying to always find the least worst way of solving certain problems because it’s a lot of negotiations like
what are the trade-offs there there’s constantly things because um and then there’s another famous thing
in software engineering there’s a speed quality and time so if you want high
quality well you have to either sacrifice time it’s going to take longer or you throw a lot of money at the
problem so you basically it’s like that triangle you have to pick too and that means a lot of trade-offs it’s
like okay where is the largest Roi and stuff like that no sorry I’m rambling I’m getting back
to the point is when you start growing in your career you start realizing that if you want to work on like cool
projects or you want to do something that’s out of your comfort zone or you want to like learn a different language or do or understand an unfamiliar system
you can’t just be heads down on the coding you really have to be able to communicate that and work effectively
with people um another fact she called it an art as well that you know it’s not just that
heads down that that you you really um it is an art form it’s not just you know a string of code and that’s it I think a
lot of us we don’t we don’t tend to think as Tech as creative or as an art form um but you absolutely right those
that work in it um I’ve heard that before people refer to it as an art uh yeah no you have to
be very creative when solving problems in Tech it doesn’t look like it on the face of it but um there’s there’s always
those underlying trade-offs and that that that’s something that also comes with like experience and maturity like as you you know as you’re going out of
like just solving those narrow problems and trying to learn more we realize oh there’s all of these other things to
consider as well um one thing I really look for like when I’m hiring uh people I’ve done I don’t
know like hundreds of interviews at this point um at all different levels and um I’ve
been on the side of interviewing when I was an individual contributor interviewing my peers I’ve interviewed
as a hiring manager I’ve interviewed as a manager that’s helping out other teams stuff like that for me the big thing I
look for is do the does the person have the right attitude because if someone is coming in with a
very oh this is the only thing I like and this is the only thing I’m going to work on that’s a huge red flag for me
it’s like okay maybe we can figure out like a very narrow place for that person
but they’re not gonna grow yeah a person comes in they’re like oh I really want to like you know these are
the things that I’m interested in I want to continue working these but I’m open to learning these other kinds of things and you just kind of like get that sense
again this is something that I’ve learned from experience like having done so many interviews but you get a sense for like when you know that that person
really is eager to learn and do more stuff and understand and like really
help collaborate with the teams and make sure that the overall projects are a success and those are the folks that are
the most successful in my experience yeah and I might not necessarily have um all the qualifications that the job
is asking for but but they’ll get there um as I said at least they’ve got the attitude to learn in terms of
qualifications though are there any um that you think are important to have
is it is it just having that computer science degree or do you look for for other things along the way suppose
because everybody takes different career paths don’t they uh it I mean it really depends on the
specific role but in terms of like a pure coding role I’ve hired people that have had like a math background or
physics background I’ve even hired folks that have had a non-stem background but they took essentially coding classes on
the side and I’ve worked with a couple of folks who’ve been they’ve been fantastic again the right attitude and
that willingness to learn really um help them in the career
um rooms of like specific skills and qualification I came from a very traditional you know Computer
Engineering background did a lot of data structures algorithms fundamentals and stuff like that
I still believe that anyone that’s trying to do a career in Tech should have a strong grasp of what those
fundamentals are um you know and this isn’t something you necessarily need to go to university there’s a lot of online resources and
things like that that can help you learn those things but there has to be a basic understanding of like well you know how
do computers work how does memory management work oh what is this thing that we call the compiler how does the
OS work they have to be like a base understanding of this fundamentals because once you have a strong understanding of the fundamentals you
can really figure out how to build the layers uncomplified um in terms of programming languages
like languages are literally a dime a dozen my first language that I learned was C which is pretty esoteric it’s not
really used much anymore unless people are doing like um embedded systems or like ultra low
latency stuff yeah even so like C is kind of falling out of um
fashion out of favor I would say and there are so many different languages now like the most popular ones python
rust so languages keep evolving but again having that base understanding like learning one language well and
understanding the fundamentals again around like okay how does memory allocation work how does like how if
you’re learning like an object-oriented language or if you’re running a functional language learning that structure really helps because those
will help you translate into other languages as well um most folks I know are polyglot like
you know people know more than one programming language I myself had to learn like Pearl and Fortran when I
first joined Bloomberg and I was like what the hell is this but that was the requirement that the business had but
because I had that background and like you know I’d done C I’ve done C plus plus it was like oh okay I can easily
translate these Concepts that I know in this language over to this language so yeah honestly like I wouldn’t be
super fussed about like oh you have to know this language for example like the people I’ve hired over the years
even if they didn’t necessarily have like the languages that we were working on but they had a working knowledge of
like other languages and they were willing to learn the stuff that we required yeah they
were successful yeah and is there anything that you know they could put on their CV to stand out
to potential employers I suppose that’s as she’s saying that’s not actually just programming languages that could just be
extra projects that you’re working on or extra things that you’re doing and to stand out as somebody that’s got a great
attitude yeah in terms of like CV the the thing that I look for is
um now I’m just going to go off of what like are the certain things that I watch out for if it reads like a list of
buzzwords that’s a giant red flag it’s like 10 pages long that’s a red flag I
can’t tell you how many times I’ve read resumes that just keep on brambling and talking about oh you know involved with
blah blah blah but not really giving me a sense of like well what exactly was your role what did you work on those are
the kinds of things that I look for what makes a CV stand out to me is a very
concise clear and simple explanation of well this was the project this was what
I did on it this was my work and if there were any particular things that you know like for example oh I called
out that XYZ was wrong or I suggested something and this is what got implemented what
I’m looking for is like that again that attitude showing through on the CV it’s like oh I not only had an idea but I was
also able to like successfully advocate for it to get done you know pushing stuff to execution
um yeah so those those really are the things that I look for um like you know if it’s like a bird
salad or just a long list of laundry laundry list of qualifications yeah those are the ones I end up passing over
yes I completely agree you need to see somebody that’s actually done something and and what it actually turned out like
I just had I worked within a team um on that those should aspiring developers should they be creating a
coding portfolio to go with their CV is that something it should always be mindful of throughout your career
so there’s a lot of referring opinions on this personally for me I don’t really
care because like I’m going to look for a relevant experience no if this is
someone who’s fresh out of school and doesn’t have like a lot of Industry experience then by all means yes it
makes sense like work you know have it’s not necessarily that you have to have like an exclusive
coding portfolio but you should be able to talk to me about projects that you’ve done that you’ve worked on whether they’re College projects or your side
projects I’m not you know I yeah you I’m not necessarily going to go
on GitHub and like check out your code and see if stuff works and things like that I would much rather have the person
talk me through you know that thought process the challenges that they faced and how they solve certain problems yes
I surprised as well though that also applies because I wanted to ask you about experience next um you know is it
necessary and like you said if it’s somebody that’s applying as a graduate and they haven’t got a lot of experience then fair enough but we have a lot of
ladies um on our on our podcast and on our live events that are transitioning
later in their career um uh into a career in technology and so
they don’t have that experiences yet and we always get asked you know how but how do you apply for a job if you don’t have
the experience and actually a lot of those ladies it suddenly Dawns on them that they’ve been in work 10 to 15 years
and even though there might be a junior in Tech or whatever it is they’re applying for they’ve got heaps of
experience just in the workplace and be by the sounds of it actually that is far
more relevant than just being able to show that you can code and that and that that code works I’m sure if somebody
come to you and said I’ve worked on you know a project at a different company it might not be a tech project but this is
how we overcome those challenges surely that’s something as well that you’d be really interested in hearing about
yep absolutely I mean that that is the that that’s the real world experience that you know no University or boot camp
can set you up for that’s a learned thing and people who have that experience and are transitioning like
you know mad props to them it’s like you’ve spent 10 15 years in a specific career and then you’ve decided to Pivot
it’s like that is very very impressive and I I yeah I like I said like mad props to
them they’re already they have that wealth of Real World Experience behind them so they can bring different viewpoints to the table and then in
terms of like the coding part again like I said like you know these are technical skills you can learn them you can pick them up you start with like certain
projects and then as you get more comfortable you start gaining more and more experience
um yeah I mean in terms of like coding
experience for someone that’s pivoting I would say don’t fuss too much about it again focus on like what you’ve learned
because I would imagine that folks are either taking courses going to maybe a formal University or a boot camp
whatever and they’re sharpening up their technical skills focus on doing projects within that scope focus on projects that
can showcase your abilities and things that you can talk to um it’s all you know like for example
when I’ve interviewed like a fresh graduate or you know students who are still in college my question to them is
like all right tell me about some of the projects that you’ve worked on explain to me what the problem was what were you
trying to solve give me a thought process behind it and that still translates even for folks who are transitioning later because it’s really
like looking at that thought process and understanding okay do they understand what they’re trying to solve or are they
just like checking off a box on their assignment yes yes exactly and
I suppose so I wanted to ask you a little bit about interviewing I was going to say do do you get that vibe
from some people as well during an interview where you just think you’re just going through the motions you’re just ticking off as you said that you
see on CVS buzzwords probably flying everywhere do you have any tips that for
interviewing any sort of red flags that you see and you think no if I could get off this call Quick I would
um well yeah I’m trying because I’ve done like a bunch of I’ve done a lot of interviews
in real life as well as over um you know video conference the thing that comes across to me is
again it’s just if the person if I’m not first if the person is anxious
like interviewing is hard but if the person is someone who’s coming off as like bro skin doesn’t really want to be
there that’s like obviously a huge red flag right yeah if you’re doing an interview make sure
that you’re actually invested in it and that you know you’re not wasting your time and the interviewer’s time because
I’ve had experiences like that so that’s like the extremes like let’s start with that Baseline make sure that you want to
be there um I would say like you know again a lot of people get anxious during the interviews
take a deep breath relax this isn’t like a life or death thing and the other
person on the other end doesn’t really know your liberal experience they don’t know anything about you that’s why they’re having an interview and they
want to like really understand and get to know you better you know interviewers like the the big
part of the job of the interviewer is making sure that we’re setting the interviewee at ease so we’re able to
like understand where they’re coming from if someone like you know and again like
within the hundreds of interviews I’ve done like I have had I’ve sat in some interviews where my co-interviewer was
like rather rude and brisk and it’s like that’s just not a recipe for Success that person’s probably thinking uh I
think I want to work for you or absolutely yeah yeah um yeah for interviewing like really I
would say just be honest you know be be clear like there’s no need to make stuff up because if you’re lying like it will
show unless you’re very very very good at making stuff up it’ll show through I
can’t tell you how many times I’ve had like focus on me oh yeah I’m like a tendency plus plus and then I start asking them like some targeted questions
like so how would you figure out you know this memory allocation how would you deal with this pointer and they just
completely bomb it’s like yeah of course if you’re gonna tell me that you’re an expert I’m gonna ask you
those questions so yeah so don’t don’t make up because uh interviewers
especially season interviewers will see right through you um yeah it’s okay to not know everything
you know I personally um if someone tells me that oh actually you know I’ve never had to deal with
this or I don’t know this instead of trying to make something up yeah I would much prefer again that honest it’s like
you don’t have to know anything that shows me that you’re willing to acknowledge that you don’t necessarily
know everything and that you want to learn so for me like those are the things that
really stand out as a candidate because it’s like okay yeah this person has the right attitude they’re willing to learn and they’re not afraid to acknowledge
that they don’t know everything again an interviewer process can be like you know it’s it can be a little tense and you
want to show your best um you want to put your best foot forward stuff like that but just be
honest acknowledge what you know acknowledge what you don’t know and most interviewers again the good interviewers
right like it’s like we’re not going to keep dragging you over oh you don’t know this like why don’t you know this and
let me keep asking you questions about that no we always pivot to asking you stuff that you’re familiar with because
look at the end of the day we’re trying to figure out what your thought process is not whether or not you know some
obscure esoteric syntax hey I can always search for that I can do a Google search
yes I’ve been in those interviews um we just think somebody’s just grilling
me on something you think this is this isn’t going to go well um in terms of career progression what
what does that look like in the industry I I mean it takes it moves incredibly fast I’m assuming you know there’s
there’s a a wide range of of um directions that you could take what
do you think um it looks like for most developers though I it really depends on the individual
and the path that they want to choose um you know I know folks who’ve been in the industry for 40 years
probably maybe actually maybe not 40 30 30 years um who have chosen to remain technical
the entire time and they’ve essentially progressed from you know being well like starting off as a junior early in the
career to being like a senior staff there’s different roles and again depending on the company like you know
whether the company has like a principal role or an architect role whatever but there is that technical path so if folks
want to stay just yeah you know all I want to do is I want to focus on coding I want to like make sure that I’m
building out the best systems that I can that is an option
um doesn’t mean that you’re not going to talk to any people no collaboration and communication is still key like all the
soft skills still remain but it allows someone to essentially spend like you know a majority of their time focused on
coding and building stuff up um if folks want to go into management
that is another career path that’s the path I ended up on kind of a little
unwillingly um actually been a few years into my career at Bloomberg
um we had like a reorg of my group and my manager approached me and said oh I
want you to take over this team that I want to focus on infrastructure across the multiple teams because we were
duplicating stuff and I just freaked out and I was like no I don’t think I can be a team lead
then he said okay fine how about this so sneaky it’s like uh why don’t you
help you know with the vision and focus on the infrastructure and like Mentor other people but you don’t have to
officially be like a team lead I was like cool yeah that sounds easier that sounds nicer a
year later I realized I was doing all of the things so I took the title um and then you you were just meant for
it and suddenly thought actually I hadn’t even thought of myself as a team lead maybe that’s what I was doing
yeah it ended up working out um and then like a few years later I found out that I like yeah I was still
very Hands-On because it was a very small um it was a small group like it was just like five of us um I was focused on like doing a lot of
Hands-On coding and stuff like that but then as I started growing the career I
realized that and I made the classic mistake of like and this is this is a complete segue but I made the classic
mistake of like oh new manager I I have to be responsible for everything so I tried to do everything yeah and well
that’s really bad for me personally and it’s even worse for my team because I’m taking opportunities away from them and
not spending enough time focused on them and their career growth so I learned that lesson the hard way about a lot how
to delegate you said nobody expects you to know
everything and I’ve been told by lots of ladies on this podcast that as soon as you step into a leadership a leadership
position they have this sport you know what everybody expects me to know everything and I need to know everything
and you’re absolutely right you’re not you have a whole team there um but yeah I’ve heard it so often that
it takes a little while to settle into your leadership style and to find your way
yep it took me a couple of years to understand that um yeah you you can’t you just cannot
know everything and there’s an entire team behind you that is what you have to rely on um but yes so the manager path is
available as well like you can still be technical like I still read code I’m I’m a director now I don’t really quote
anymore but I can read PRS I can point out issues I can like if my teams are
like making infrastructure decisions I will step in and like you know ask them no I’m not like trying to be
prescriptive or say this is how you must do it because this is how I know I would do it but it’s like really asking them
leading questions like what are the problems you’re trying to solve why don’t you give me the different scenarios
um and as Engineers we love bike shedding like we will argue and argue
and argue if needed to time in Memorial on like the specifics of certain
Solutions and a big part of my role there is like stepping in having the technical knowledge of like okay yeah
you know what we need to end this discussion because we’re not moving anywhere let’s pick this approach and go with it yeah
um but yeah in terms of period progression sorry I just said that was a segue um but uh coming back yeah you can stay
completely technical if you want you can move into people management if you want there’s also all sorts of other roles
like you know if you want to be more focused on agile for example there is definitely
um so some companies have like the roles where they’re like cool you
can help out as a scrum lead while also being someone who’s technical so that allows people to use like the
collaborative skills but still as an individual contributor level if folks want to move more into like architecture
and systems design those are also there um I know of some folks and this is this is
totally a plug I know of some folks who started off as application developers and then they moved into the SRE role
and I I was one of them because I my I mean my background had been a lot of
application development and sure it was focused on infrastructure but it wasn’t really SRE I ended up like I ended up
making and creating the first SRE team for my group uh back in 2015 and that
that was a great experience and you know right now platform SRE all of these
things are like very very much in demand because companies are looking to figure out like okay how do we do automation
how do we become more efficient in these are skill sets that are very much in
demand so it definitely depends on the individual person and like the particular opportunities that they have
at the place that they’re in but don’t let that be a ceiling because there’s
other companies out there too yes I completely agree and for those um
who are thinking about you know a career as a developer and then they’re not quite sure where to get started or what
to do do you have any final advice for those listeners or anything that you wish you had been told when you got
started well I wish someone had told me that I
needed to improve my communication skills when I started um when I first started like you know
early in my career I was very hedged down and I would just be stuck trying to solve problems on my own
and you don’t have to suffer through that you can ask for help it’s perfectly okay
um in terms of folks who are thinking about well but this is I’ve already alluded to this before but just make
sure that you have a firm understanding of the fundamentals like as long as you have an understanding of you know yeah
this is so like this is going to sound very very simplified but it’s like how
do computers work like what goes into it how do these applications work that’s important
um other big piece of advice that I would say is make sure to keep up like do a lot of reading there is a lot of
online resources out there there’s some fantastic authors there’s a lot of blog posts make sure that you read so you
don’t end up becoming insular in in your particular role you want to be
able to hear other viewpoints you don’t want to be in an Eco chamber because Tech is constantly evolving and there’s
a lot of changes happening it doesn’t mean that you have to follow the other articles and all like you don’t have to
necessarily keep up with all the buzzwords and stuff like that okay you know there’s that layer of filtering out
but keep up with what the rest of the industry is up to especially in terms of
Standards industry best practices because those are the things that are overall pushing the needle on Tech
yeah and so that’s not just trying to get your first role that’s actually throughout your entire career to always
keep keep learning and to be of that mindset absolutely thank you to Laura so
much for for joining us today it’s been an absolute pleasure um having you with us and for sharing your insights thank
you so much really this was a lot of fun good thank you it’s flown by and we
could talk all afternoon about it um and everybody listening as always thank you for joining us and we hope to
see you again next time
