Kathyleen Beveridge:

  • Her career & Journey

    • Wells Fargo, Nikko Securities, 1995 - 1996, investment advisor

      • Stock broker

      • Went back to school and switched careers

    • First high tech job at HP

      • Loved to surf there

    • Qualcomm - Senior Manager Sales Operations and Director of Global Sales

    • ThermoFischer - senior director of marketing

      • Biotech

  • Education

    • MBA, University of South California

    • BS Finance, Santa Clara University

    • Studied abroad in Spain

  • Quote she lives by: Maya angelou: “my mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with passion, some compassion, some humor, and style”

  • Words to live by:

    • SURFING DOESN’T PAY THE BILLS

    • Investment banking is only one to one impact

    • Grateful that she works for company which makes a big impact on people

Company Mission Statements:

  • HP: Create technology that makes life better for everyone, everywhere

  • Qualcomm: Inventing the tech everyone loves

  • Thermo Fisher Scientific: Enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner, and safer

    • Similarities: Using tech for the good of the people, main idea is to help people, doing something that people want

Every tech company that she worked in, it had a macro, global impact on the people of the world

  • The product or service is life changing or generation changing

  • Qualcomm chips were in 99% of cell phones in the world

    • Everyday a billion peoples lives are impacted by Qualcomm technology!

Thermo Fisher:

  • > 100,000 colleagues

  • 7,000 R\&D scientists/engineers

  • 1.5 Billion invested in R\&D

  • > 40B in revenue

  • Note: R\&D = Research and development

She:

  • senior director of marketing and commercial sales

  • Voice of sales, voice of customers

  • People work really closely with scrum master to commercialize the product

  • No matter what you are doing, she enjoys working with all the folks. She can’t do what others do. You can take a concept and build it and make it happen

She has data scientist in her team

  • Join massive fragment data bases outside the company to predict customer demand and where the sales will be

  • They sell freezers okay (very important, remember this)

    • Databases predicted where the demand will be BEFORE customers place orders

Kris Porter:

Him:

  • Software developer - SRE, DevOPs engineer, Infrastructure engineer

  • There were no CS classes when he started -

  • First cs class was second quarter of some year in college

  • Graduated in 2008

Bachelors and Masters degree

  • UCLA

    • Failed his first CS class; stopped after failure (thats pretty bad )

Words to live by:

It doesn’t matter what you like at this age, you can have a tech career later on

  • Marketable skill

    • Research project: internet of things

    • Robot that deployed somewhere in world

      • Costa rica: swings in the trees and gives biological readings (THATS SO COOL)

Career:

  • NBC Universal, Streaming media infrastructure

  • Twitter (does he know elon musk?) you should ask

  • NOT a security engineer

  • Now works at Twitter (HE GOT FIRED)

    • Very interesting, most of his team was laid off (thanks elon musty)

    • Requirement to go work in the office in SF

    • Remote workers got kicked out

      • When you see companies shuffle, you have to go (don’t wait)

  • Mysten labs??

Learning Highlights

  • Continuous learning

  • CCNA training

  • Machine learning and Deep Learning

  • Python

  • Data Structures, Algorithms, Systems

  • Rest APIs in his job at twitter

  • Slowly movies to graph UL

Agile Methodology

  • Technical perspective, different companies have their own version of agile, they use it depending on what they need

    • Qualcomm, - 150 engineers, interacted with each other, planned all of the work for the quarter in a big meeting that last 2 day (good way to coordinate)

  • Agile is important

Business landscape can change: Use Sprints

  • Gone are the days where projects take 6 months

  • What can we do in shorter time periods?

  • That skillset is highly regarding

Machine Learning

  • Learn how to use python libraries

  • Use information on when to archive and delete repositories

  • To cut costs

Questions:

Most important skill to have in the tech industry:

  • Continuous learning

    • Not just learning a particular programming language, but to learn everything

    • Different companies have different stacks, everytime he moved companies he had to learn new programming languages

    • Everyone has different ways of doing things

  • Don’t be super concerned about things you read on the news

    • In learning the skill to work with computers, that is self fulfilling

    • Start ups are a risk

      • Only risk is not learning (thats deep)

  • Be adaptive

    • Career path is zigzaggy

    • Dated herself for 35 years

    • Never thought she’d be doing what she’s doing

    • Best technical people

      • Listen to requirements

      • Translate it in terms of how the technology can solve the requirements

      • Help speak it to her

Biggest Challenges faced in the tech industry:

  • She spent 14 years in qualcomm (semiconductor industry)

    • Acquisitions?? Buy other companies

    • The big fish in the pond (acquiring companies)

    • Serial killers (but not quite)

  • Interviews are ridiculous

    • Interviews are a series of timed, random tests

      • Could be a problem to solve in 30-45 minutes

      • Code has to compile with no errors

How is your work-life balance:

  • When you talk to a company, you’re in a position to negotiate

    • You’re the one with the skill

    • Some good companies, some bad

  • You have to learn how to use services that are specific to certain companies

How does coding help in the business industry?

  • Plenty of people were software developers academically, but moved into non-tech senior roles

  • Coding is a way of thinking

    • A way of looking at a problem and dissecting it

    • Critical thinking, problem solving

    • Think methodically

  • She interviews people on their ability to be a problem solver, and their ability to walk her through what you did what you did

One of her questions:

  • You are in a room, not electronics, just whiteboard, pen, pencil

  • How many cars were sold in the United States last year?

    • She wants to know your assumptions, how she derived her answer

What are you interested in exploring or learning right now?

  • He is interested in learning about block chain technology

    • AWS and google cloud stuff at large companies

How would coding help with investment and finance?

  • Understanding algorithms, patterns, and analytics