Life Timelines

Kathyleen Beveridge

  • born in Vietnam
  • undergrad at Santa Clara, studied abroad in Spain, NBA at USC
  • lived in Bay Area
  • has worked for four companies: Investment Banker at Wells Fargo, HP, Qualcomm, and Thermo Fisher Scientific (current)
  • comanies = all have mission to use technology to help people
  • loves helping others and making a global difference
  • current role = senior director if marketing and commercial sales but works with software engineers to produce/advertise products
  • “scrum master” roles and sprints are used

Kris Porter

  • Software engineer (SRE, DevOps, Infrastructure) = not coding all day
  • UCLA for Electrical Engineering
  • failed his first computer science class = DON’T GIVE UP
  • was interested in stem classes in highschool
  • researched networked sensirs (robot swings in forest to obtain information and data about the environment)
  • worked for Qualcomm and Twitter = always learning new things
  • Twitter = switched from rest APIs to GraphQL
  • always learning more = not getting bored, you can follow more than one path!
  • Twitter projects = New DataCenter Deployment and Migrating HomeTimeline to GraphQL

Questions

Most Important skill to have in the tech industry?

KRIS:

  • Continuous Learning
  • Learn multiple programming languages

  • “Learn how to learn” = always be ready to learn more

  • Don’t be super concerned about things you read on the news (resiliance) The only risk is not learning

KATHYLEEN:

  • Be adaptive
  • Career paths won’t always be a straight line
  • Best technicians: listen and solve technical requirements (can explain in non-technical terms)

Something they had to Learn:

  • To be adaptive
  • Be able to pass code tests (code has to work)

Work/life balance:

  • Some companies are great with work hours
  • Some have a lot of hours/deadlines
  • If you have outside hobbies/necessities = set boundaries

Takeaways:

  1. Don’t give up with computer science and programming, it’s difficult and takes time!
  2. Try many different things and fields including exploring the more product side of management (collaborating with coders).
  3. Always be willing to learn more! Especially in the field of tech, technology is always changing. I need to be open to continuous learning and know that I will never know everything.