I’m from Colorado. I grew up in Colorado Springs.

My mom is a doctor and a single mom. How do I describe my upbringing? Colorado Springs is famous for like “Focus on the Family” and super conservative Christians. But I wasn’t exposed to any of that, I just had my mom, her medical practice, and all her doctor friends. The problem with this question is that I got poisoned as a child, so I don’t remember anything from before probably thirteen. I have forgotten most of my life actually, I found out recently my husband and I had a wedding that I don’t remember. There are pictures and everything.

Holy shit.

So my whole childhood is basically gone. My mom remembers, you can ask her if you want [laugh]. The primary answer to that question is I don’t know, because it’s gone, all that stuff is just gone. I know I have two brothers and a sister, but I don’t have a lot of anecdotal things from childhood, or even more recently, because it’s just not in my brain anymore. My memory, if you can call it that, is stored entirely in a combination of other people and various kinds of recordings.

“I got poisoned as a child, so I don’t remember anything from before probably thirteen. I have forgotten most of my life actually, I found out recently my husband and I had a wedding that I don’t remember. There are pictures and everything.”

So, if you feel comfortable, what happened?

On my tenth birthday, my family­­ so my mom and my little brother, me and then I think two friends, I don’t know, some small group of people went to a hotel that had a pool to do ten-year-old birthday things.

And the hotel was negligent on their maintenance or something, I don’t remember. There was a lawsuit, I never read the findings, I was too young. So they were negligent and carbon monoxide and chlorine gas and some other gases leaked into the pool area, and my mom and my little brother and me and both my friends were poisoned. But my mom and I got the worst effects, we were poisoned the most. So, my mom and I went from being totally normal to having traumatic brain injuries, but by poison instead of war or football or whatever.

How did those injuries manifest in the early years, and how is it continuing to?

It has changed over the years. Gotten better and worse. I get attacks of uncontrollable shaking. My body is usually in pain. I get a ton of migraines, a fuck ton actually. My proprioception, which is like, the accurate sensation of where your body is in space, and the position you’re in is 80 percent gone which means my balance and walking have good and bad days. I am basically a grab bag of neurological issues: Alice in Wonderland Syndrome to Post-­traumatic Stress Disorder. It’s hard.

I seemed to improve slowly until I was in college, but then when my brain was under stress I got a bad relapse. So I guess my junior year in college I was all way back at the bottom. I couldn’t walk, I was having migraines everyday, I shook constantly. After that I was really bad for several years and I’ve been inching my way back out of that hole ever since.

What about your mom?

My mom, you would describe her as like a stroke victim. Even though that’s not what happened, that’s a thing people understand. She basically got a migraine for 8 years straight. She is doing much better now. Still dealing but better.

Wow. So you probably don’t remember but, as a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up­­?

My mom says I wanted to be a surgeon, which I am now like, “That is the most ridiculous thing I could have ever thought of.” But, of course that’s what I wanted to do. My mom was a doctor and her medical practice was very integrated into our lives so of course I wanted to do medicine. I think my initial “I’m going to college” was pre­-med, until I figured out about chemistry. I was like, “ugh, this is horrible.” Chemistry is the worst. Or at least that’s what I like to tell myself. That I had a choice, that I opted out instead of what really happened which is that I was forced out by my disability.

Did you have any idea at that time that you’d end up in Silicon Valley tech?

No. My BFA is in Theater, Film, and Television Production, so I thought I was going to go into Theater. But I got so sick at the end of school that all of my best laid plans were totally ruined. I was supposed to go work as an assistant stage manager in Tokyo. But I was too sick, there was no way I could take that job, or any job.

So walk me through the winding road that took you to VR.

So after college I was essentially on bed­rest for four years. I shouldn’t say bed­rest. I was home­bound for four years. Walking to the bathroom made me dizzy so I crawled kinda thing. So in that time, I started watching Art21, which is this contemporary art show made by PBS. It’s so fucking good. It’s a collection of artists talking about their work and their lives and their families and it changed my life.

I was laying there on the couch at 20 thinking that this painful bullshit was what the rest of my life was going to be like, and I decided, “Fuck it I’m gonna steal ideas from these people.” So I starting copying their work. Andrea Zittel and Ann Hamilton and Vija Celmins and Kara Walker. These women became my pantheon. Oh and Janine Antoni, Janine Antoni! She’s amazing! She’s from the Bahamas and she would place a tightrope right at the horizon and then she would walk across the tightrope on video and every time she took a step the line would just touch the horizon. So good. She also hand spun this huge rope with all these video tapes and clothes and just any material donated from her friends and family. Antoni made a rope so I made a rope. Zittel crocheted so I crocheted. Hamilton talked about social concepts in cloth so I talked about computational concepts in cloth.

I copied lots of work from Art21 because there was nothing else to do. It was just not what you want to happen right after you get out of college. Like, “I’m going to get an internship, and I’ll be out every night and­­—No. You’re going to lay in bed for four years and be bored.” That was basically the start of like, “I am an artist now.” The art was my entire life at that point, I guess it still is.

When I finally made my own work it was these brightly­-colored abstract crocheted sculptures the size of, ironically, the couch I’d been stuck on. I guess the first time I really showed anything was in 2009, with the Armory Show in New York.

“I was told my thesis work wasn’t art because I made a video game. It wasn’t even a game it was an interactive environment that addressed the contemporary way that we go about knowledge formation. They couldn’t see it. It was weird because I was interested in technology. The work that I was making before, the crochet, was about reenacting computational systems. But they had never seen that either, those works were talked about as “heroic women’s work”. It drove me crazy. The professors never could see crochet as data, as captured information in the shape of a linear thread. But I still graduated, so fuck them.”

*Just* the Armory? [laughter]

Yeah me and galleries have never been much of a thing. Then I used that work, and the credential of that show to apply to grad school. I went to the California College of the Arts over on Potrero Hill. That was the first time I was really out of the house everyday by myself in years. I was 24.

Some of it was great. I found a couple professors that were awesome.

It should come as no surprise that I did not fit in well at school. I had just spent 4 years alone with the exception of my boyfriend. I didn’t know how to human and I was learning to be disabled not just at home in a bubble of my own control but at the school, in classes, on the train etc. Once again I have very few anecdotes of grad school, what with my memory but I know it was both great and really stupid. I got really tough and focused because of school. I am a much better artist now, and I found one professor who I am friends with today who is brilliant and funny and really important to me. But because I wasn’t great at interacting with the other students, so they started calling me The Borg. They were like, “But it’s endearing because we like you,” and I’m like, “No, it’s socially separating and bullying.” But they never stopped.

I was told my thesis work wasn’t art because I made a video game. It wasn’t even a game it was an interactive environment that addressed the contemporary way that we go about knowledge formation. They couldn’t see it. It was weird because I was interested in technology. The work that I was making before, the crochet, was about reenacting computational systems. But they had never seen that either, those works were talked about as “heroic women’s work”. It drove me crazy. The professors never could see crochet as data, as captured information in the shape of a linear thread. But I still graduated, so fuck them.

So what happened after that? I got my first job. I was so proud of myself. I worked as an architectural assistant making drawings and writing their blog. I worked there until she couldn’t afford to pay me anymore. Then I started working for Axis dance company and they’re in Oakland and they’re physically integrated dance company and I worked there for almost two years, man, what I thought at the time was going to be a dream job turned out to be awful. Anyway I also wrote for KQED in there, writing about net art, the internet, and video games mostly, and I was doing a lot of both digital drawing and ink on paper which both turned into making gifs and prints and comic books. It was around that time, in 2013, I started making YouTube videos too. Again copying existing work I liked from Mike Rugnetta and PBS Idea Channel. Huh, twice now PBS has been foundational to my art.

The videos started as talking head style technology and cultural criticism pieces plastered with wild editing. It was a great way to restart with video. I had experience editing short films and features from college but the show, self-titled BlinkPopShift, also leaned hard on the writing and research skills I forged at grad school and KQED. It became a way to think across tech and culture and art and science the same way I had been exploring in my masters thesis, but now everyone, not just the limited pov’s of my professors, could see the result. Simultaneously I built a whole body of work exclusively on my phone, the Still Lives series, using a combination of photogrammetry and various gif making apps.

I became super immersed in Youtube so I went to Vidcon and met Mike Rugnetta and Vi Hart and Malia Moss who all turned out to amazing friends and collaborators. A few months later I got a call from Vi asking “Hey, do you think you could build a VR camera?” And I was like, “Yeah sure, I don’t see why not. That doesn’t seem that hard.” And I was right, I mean it took months of work and cameras melting and trial and error and math but I did it.

“A few months later I got a call from Vi asking “Hey, do you think you could build a VR camera?” And I was like, “Yeah sure, I don’t see why not. That doesn’t seem that hard.” And I was right, I mean it took months of work and cameras melting and trial and error and math but I did it.”

So you just… made a VR camera?

I mean, yeah. We, along with Andrea Hawksley, the three horsemen of eleVR, have been working on various projects in VR, AR, and mixed reality every since. Vi’d hired me to work at the then Communications Design Group, Alan Kay’s Research Lab at SAP. Working for an open lab is great because with no pressure to publish traditional papers, we can write up everything on our blog for anyone to read.

I have to say I was so happy when fully spherical, auto-stitching cameras came on the market and I didn’t have to actually build them by hand with a fucking hot glue gun anymore, which was fun but also so tedious. I focus on studying how immersion works and how aesthetic techniques communicate to viewers. Recently I’ve been building the foundation of spherical cinematography so I can use that knowledge when designing immersive web systems.

What excites you about that space?

Making hybrid reality projects where linkages are no longer limited to computers and screens. When I write or make art, I like to put stuff everywhere but computers in their current conception don’t allow for creative messes. Sure, you can barf icons all over your desktop, but that’s not a creative mess. It feels heavy and in need of “organization.” Good messes feed my creativity through serendipity and flexibility. But my physical messes don’t have search for when I know exactly which bit of red paper has to go on the collage next. That divide between the physical and the digital will close, ‘cause me and my vice grip say so.

But that also means taking seriously the considerations of what the body wants. Because like, we are not fingers with eyes and ear holes. The way we do knowledge creation has a lot to do with this flappy meat thing. We completely disregard its wants and needs and its ideas about the world for what, a touch screen? This is the most embodied form of computational media that we have? Pinch and zoom and swipe and tap? Gross. There’s so much touch you can’t get in the little rectangles we carry around everywhere, it drives me crazy.

“When I write or make art, I like to put stuff everywhere but computers in their current conception don’t allow for creative messes. Sure, you can barf icons all over your desktop, but that’s not a creative mess. It feels heavy and in need of “organization.” Good messes feed my creativity through serendipity and flexibility. But my physical messes don’t have search for when I know exactly which bit of red paper has to go on the collage next. That divide between the physical and the digital will close, ‘cause me and my vice grip say so.”

What is it like straddling two worlds—art and tech—that often feel at odds with each other?

At work, I don’t feel at odds because like they specifically set up the lab for that kind of cross disciplinary flexibility. I am the most traditionally “visual art” person there, which I find funny since in grad school I was the most “tech” person, but being a weird inbetweener is kinda our thing at the lab. But when I’m out of my bubble it’s really hard because my work, and probably my personality too, is hard to parse as either or, as art or tech, as artist or researcher. A good example is that I don’t go to VR meetups any more. Everyone was too newness focused. There was no bubbling curiosity, no juicy conversation. It was just, sorry to say it but, a bunch of white dudes being boring. Ugh, tech Industry problems.

What are the biggest motivators behind your work?

I make art for two people, which people do not like to hear, but it’s true. I make sculpture for Steve Sedlmayr, my husband, who is such a fucking treasure, we’re 12 years this summer, and I make video for Vi Hart, who is one of my best friends and my boss. That’s it. The sculptural work is for him and the video work is for her. When I can make either of them tilt their head or think “What is that?” or smile or laugh or say “Yes. More please,” that’s winning.

There is definitely a subtle pressure from social media to care about a bigger audience and I do have a small audience online. Some people watch the videos online, and some people read the stuff that I publish, and that’s great but I don’t crave their opinions. For me, seeing Vi watch a video and afterward be like, “Damn!” That’s my chocolate sundae.

“I am the most traditionally “visual art” person there, which I find funny since in grad school I was the most “tech” person, but being a weird inbetweener is kinda our thing at the lab. But when I’m out of my bubble it’s really hard because my work, and probably my personality too, is hard to parse as either or, as art or tech, as artist or researcher. A good example is that I don’t go to VR meetups any more. Everyone was too newness focused. There was no bubbling curiosity, no juicy conversation. It was just, sorry to say it but, a bunch of white dudes being boring.”

I think it’s like you’ve miraculously managed to achieve something that I’m just starting to achieve—the “art of giving no fucks.”

I think it’s absolutely pivotal—or giving exactly the right fucks. You’re going to give a fuck about someone’s opinion, but just give it to exactly the right ones. My husband, he is also an artist. He makes games now but he knows a lot about sculpture and is really interested in sculpture. Making a sculpture for him is so powerful and awesome and his feedback really pushes me. Don’t give no fucks, just give the right ones.

I love it. What are your thoughts on the state of tech in 2016, both the tech that you considered tech and the tech that a lot of people consider tech?

Tech is so confusing. What even is the technology industry? Are search engines and camera manufacturers and Crispr therapies and video games really in the same industry? I feel like we use “the tech industry” the same way people used to “big business.” What is that thing I hear over and over about Uber? “Uber is a taxi company, not a tech company.” Bakers with online delivery are still bakers. Podcasters with an app are still in the business of podcasting. Tech is just a lazy over simplification of the Bay Area’s $785.5 billion economy that makes it all the more frustrating for people like me to take my work out into the world. I’m not an academic and I don’t make a product… I make art to do research.

Condensing all these different companies into a thing we call the tech industry does gives us something to blame for the city’s problems. The industry is refusing to act as proactive stewards of the place where their employees live. It seems like a lot of money’s being made and not very many taxes are ending up in city coffers. There is clear evidence that private corporate bus lines do increase evictions near their bus stops. Rents are increasing along with poverty.

“Tech is so confusing. What even is the technology industry? Are search engines and camera manufacturers and Crispr therapies and video games really in the same industry? I feel like we use “the tech industry” the same way people used to “big business.” What is that thing I hear over and over about Uber? “Uber is a taxi company, not a tech company.” Bakers with online delivery are still bakers. Podcasters with an app are still in the business of podcasting. Tech is just a lazy over simplification of the Bay Area’s $785.5 billion economy that makes it all the more frustrating for people like me to take my work out into the world.”

Homelessness is intensifying as more people are flooding into the Bay Area chasing after those sweet, sweet jobs. Did you know 70% of the homeless population in San Francisco was housed in the last year? Along with all these changes fear mongering about the collapse of San Francisco’s weirdo based culture. Most people would say that I’m being naive, that corporations have no obligation to nurture the community in which they exist, but if you don’t do that—if you don’t support the community—then all you’re doing is going to Southeast Asia and cutting down the mangrove forests and planting palm trees so that you can get palm oil. There it looks like environmental destruction, here it looks like community destruction. We have to grow out of the self centered capitalism that disregards the larger systematic effects until disaster strikes. We have to take responsibility for that because we’re not heartless idiots who just stomp around the world with our big dumb America boots. I don’t want to be that kind of America.

Man. It is kind of wild to think that big tech is actually necessary for new innovation to survive long term.

Oh yeah, I totally agree but also like big tech is completely dependent on Chinese money, right? Like a lot of VC money comes from China and that’s fine. I’m not saying it shouldn’t come from China but if that’s going to be true, then you also need to take into consideration the health of the system of products and money and labor is there too. The whole system should be healthy, not just any individual part of it. Why is making as much money as possible still a thing? Who in their right mind is motivated by I want to make as much money as humanly possible. Why? It’s boring. Come on. Look I was raised by a woman who taught me that holistic world views were the only path to true equality, whether that’s in a body or a society, and I hold that as a core value to this day.

“We have to grow out of the self centered capitalism that disregards the larger systematic effects until disaster strikes. We have to take responsibility for that because we’re not heartless idiots who just stomp around the world with our big dumb America boots. I don’t want to be that kind of America.”

Total side note, but maybe possibly related, I remember reading that you have received death threats for speaking your mind.

Oh yeah [chuckles] yeah, that was a problem. My team and I went to the first Oculus Connect, and there was an open panel, and it was being live streamed on the internet. And they were like, ”Anyone could come up and ask a question.” And there was 1% women at this conference and very few people of color and there were no female speakers and I was mad. So I went up and asked how they planned to prevent the clear race and gender biases of their conference and the industry as a whole from doing to VR what sexism and racism has done to video games.

And they answered it really poorly. It was so lame. But since I am female and it was live streamed that question turned into doxing, and death threats on 4chan and Reddit. We had to get our corporate security officer to intervene. It was scary. I hadn’t expected such an infantile response. I felt so naive. I’m still super naive, because I still assume that everyone wants everyone to be equal. Also, people who do death threats are so uncreative. I felt like they were just copy and pasting from Anita Sarkeesian‘s death threats.

I’m curious, are you able to give no fucks about that or­­…?

I don’t care.

That’s good.

Yeah but I have the ability not to care because of my privilege. 1. I’m white and cisgender and 2. I work for a place that can provide corporate security. Privilege means the death threats are less meaningful to me.

“The whole system should be healthy, not just any individual part of it. Why is making as much money as possible still a thing? Who in their right mind is motivated by I want to make as much money as humanly possible. Why? It’s boring. Come on.”

How do you think tech could be more accommodating right now to a more diverse set of people?

I mean hire them? I love Ta­-Nehisi Coates’s phrase “People who believe themselves to be white…” so I would say people who believe themselves to be white should maybe consider people who do not believe themselves to be white. People always complain the lack of diversity is a pipeline issue which is such blame shifting horse shit. If you think of people like crude oil who can only reach your factory via a standardized and maintained pipeline then maybe you shouldn’t be a company. Or hire people who you perceive to be less qualified. Because your perceptions of someone’s lower qualifications are based on your own biases. Go around saying that you’re biased. Be like, ”Hello. I’m white, and I have white people bias.” No one is going to think that you’re a horrible, evil person by acknowledging the fact that you’re biased. Everybody is biased, just acknowledge it, and then build systems to make sure that it doesn’t affect the population of your company. Super simple things. When you have a varied population of employees, go to them and be like, ”Hi. How are we not helping you to do your best work? Please tell me? We are trying to do better.” Be a person with feelings and failings for fuck sake.

What advice would you have for someone who wants to do meaningful work in tech, but doesn’t know where to start?

Pretend like you can accomplish the thing that you want, and write about it as though it were an inevitability. Write about how the meaningful tech that you want to make is the most important thing in your whole life. Read those writings into a camera. Publishing all of it online. Repeat. Thinking publicly and meaningfully about what it means to use a computer, what it means to use your phone, what it means to use stuff that you want to exist in the future will not only hone your ideas but attract interested bees. Write up design documents for your fake thing. Make drawing of it. Research. Don’t make a product. Go to the library. Because that’s what I do. I don’t make a product. I don’t make technology, really. I make art. I think deeply about the stuff I make and I write about it in clear ways people can connect with.

“People always complain the lack of diversity is a pipeline issue which is such blame shifting horse shit. If you think of people like crude oil who can only reach your factory via a standardized and maintained pipeline then maybe you shouldn’t be a company. Or hire people who you perceive to be less qualified. Because your perceptions of someone’s lower qualifications are based on your own biases. Go around saying that you’re biased. Be like, ‘Hello. I’m white, and I have white people bias.’ No one is going to think that you’re a horrible, evil person by acknowledging the fact that you’re biased. Everybody is biased, just acknowledge it, and then build systems to make sure that it doesn’t affect the population of your company. Super simple things. When you have a varied population of employees, go to them and be like, ‘Hi. How are we not helping you to do your best work? Please tell me? We are trying to do better.’ Be a person with feelings and failings for fuck sake.”

I come from Sacramento, California. I come from a mixed-race, mixed-identity household, and that set me up for a really open view [chuckles] growing up. I’ve always been into creative things, but never really honed in on it or went to any kinds of young art schools or anything like that. It was only through being diagnosed with cancer that I even discovered design or anything that I’m doing now.

“It was only through being diagnosed with cancer that I even discovered design or anything that I’m doing now.”

That is wild. How old were you?

I was 14.

Walk me through that: getting diagnosed and discovering design at the same time, how does that even work?

I went to the doctor after having some discomfort in my neck for a few months, and then carried on about my business like nothing was wrong. Initially, I was diagnosed with a lymph node infection, so I just went to school. After a couple more days though, they retested the sample and it turned out that I had cancer—so they abruptly pulled me out of school out of nowhere. My mom was like, “We need to go to the hospital right now. Don’t worry about class. Don’t worry about any of that.” And I go there and they sit me down and say, “Hey, you have stage three Burkitt’s lymphoma. We need to start chemotherapy immediately.”

How does a 14 year old even know what that means?

I don’t know. I was on my way to lunch and then took the detour. So then I started chemo the next day, and it was pretty intense. I had to shave my head, I lost the rest of my hair, couldn’t keep food down—I was throwing up pretty much every day. And then one day, I was laying in the ICU—isolated because I had zero white blood cells due to treatment—and I saw the little icons to adjust the bed angle up and down. They stood out to me because I could understand them but they didn’t have any words. Maybe it was just because I wasn’t really talking to people—I was in my head a lot and I started asking myself, “What’s the thing that lets me understand what this does? Like why can I read this symbol? It’s not a hieroglyph, it’s not a word, but why do I know what it’s doing. Like what’s that magic or that secret sauce behind understanding symbols?” And then I started researching things like ISOTYPE and iconography, and then that led me down the rabbit hole of digital design and now here I am.

“After a couple more days though, they retested the sample and it turned out that I had cancer—so they abruptly pulled me out of school out of nowhere. My mom was like, ‘We need to go to the hospital right now. Don’t worry about class. Don’t worry about any of that.’ And I go there and they sit me down and say, ‘Hey, you have stage three Burkitt’s lymphoma. We need to start chemotherapy immediately.'”

Wow. In a similar vein, did you know that you’d end up in tech, or when did you first get intrigued by that?

Working in tech kind of came as a really big surprise. The only reason I’m even working in tech is because a friend of mine who I knew, back from when I used to do graffiti in college, told me about some event that Google was holding and he said, “You should throw your hat in the ring and see if they pick you for it.” I was like, “Eh, I’m not going to get picked. I don’t have any art background or I don’t really even know how to use Photoshop, but I’ll do it.” So I applied for a thing called Google +20 at the recommendation of a graffiti artist in Australia. +20 was Google’s search for a top-20 selection of emerging creatives around the world, which teamed up for a hackathon, as part of Semi-Permanent LA. I pitched them a moonshot, and I was picked for it. From that, I met a lot of great designers at Google, Maud, and from Wieden+Kennedy. That introduced me to my first set of mentors and I decided to take it seriously, and that’s how I got my start in tech.

Since then, what are your proudest projects and what have been the highlights of your career?

I guess I’d consider my ‘career’ as starting before my first actual job in tech. There was one big challenge that I took a leap in, that was coming out of the +20 event with Google. I wanted to hold my own similar thing. I had just been introduced to the idea of moonshot thinking, and I was riding this high of like, “Nothing is impossible.” So I held a design sprint with Google on civic innovation when I was 22. Most of the mentors from the previous Google event came out to Sacramento to help me run the event. That kind of gave me the spark that I still kind of hold on to—that with enough planning and focus and determination… so far I’ve encountered nothing that’s impossible.

“It is a pretty big daily struggle. I’m still going through scares about, “Oh, my God. What is this bump?” Or, “This fever’s lasted too long.” I was at a gastroenterologist yesterday getting an ultrasound and a biopsy just because it’s such an ongoing concern.”

One of the mentors that came to the event—her name was Krista Sanders, and she was the design director at a company called Whistle. They make a GPS tracker for dogs. That’s where I still work now as the Sr. Visual Designer. Just getting to build that kind of trial by fire has just been one long, very drawn-out accomplishment, in my eyes.

What have you felt are your biggest struggles?

I think one of my biggest struggles is—and I talk pretty openly about how cancer has been the catalyst to why and how I became a designer—but it is a pretty big daily struggle. I’m still going through scares about, “Oh, my God. What is this bump?” Or, “This fever’s lasted too long.” I was at a gastroenterologist yesterday getting an ultrasound and a biopsy just because it’s such an ongoing concern.

Also coming from a self-taught background proved to be a huge challenge. I studied communication and mass media in college, and I took one design class once and decided to switch my major because I didn’t like how it was taught. But I found that I have to learn a lot of things really quickly when I found out I don’t know them because it wasn’t included in the self-taught curriculum of just learning Photoshop and Illustrator. There’s so much that I realize I don’t know that I have to be really agile in learning. It’s kind of an ongoing challenge, I kind of like it, but it is kind of tough at times.

Yeah. You had a freelance time in your career, right?

Going through college, one of the ways I made a living was doing commissioned artwork and freelance design. I met some interesting characters throughout the freelancing [laughter].

Would you want to go back to that or do you prefer what you’re doing now?

In freelancing?

Yeah.

I mean, I’ve always  I’ve had this idea of one day, just owning a studio and doing strictly client work on a more structured basis. I just don’t want to go back to how I was doing it previously [laughter].

“There’s no class to learn how to do graffiti. You just had to figure it out, and take your knocks, and your critiques. And people will cover your stuff with expletives, which is more in your face than a design critique, but in the same way that’s kind of really helped me be able to kill my darlings and focus on bettering my craft. I don’t get attached to things. Everything I’ve created since day one has been temporary, from graffiti to iterating in designs, so if we’re going to kill it and make something better, I’m all for it. I think it’s a strength [chuckles].”

Yeah, for sure. So, your background’s in graffiti, which I think is really cool. And how do you feel like that informs your work?

It showed me the underbelly of society—the good and the bad of it. It helps humanize the strangers out on the street, and it absolutely helped me empathize in things like user testing or doing emotional design. It’s also helped me really cut my teeth to some hard challenges. There’s no class to learn how to do graffiti. You just had to figure it out, and take your knocks, and your critiques. And people will cover your stuff with expletives, which is more in your face than a design critique, but in the same way that’s kind of really helped me be able to kill my darlings and focus on bettering my craft. I don’t get attached to things. Everything I’ve created since day one has been temporary, from graffiti to iterating in designs, so if we’re going to kill it and make something better, I’m all for it. I think it’s a strength [chuckles].

Have you had mentors or folks that you looked up to for inspiration on the way?

Yes, I think the core group of mentors that—that during Google+ came out to my little event that I held—I really looked up to them in such a serious way. They’ve made me the designer I am today. Among them are Mike Buzzard, Brynne Evans, Chris Messina, Christa Sanders and Chikezie Ejiasi. In each of their own ways, they each taught me so much about design and tech, building my soft skills and design chops. They helped to demystify my preconceptions about what I saw, at the time, as the ivory tower of tech.

“I was worried it would be a bunch of privileged, rich, Harvard-dropout types. While the stereotypical person in tech certainly exists, it’s not by any means the norm that I’ve experienced. From what I’ve seen, it’s people who are drowning in debt and struggling to make it by, and people who lost their previous jobs when the economy tanked, and who have real worries.”

What were your preconceptions? What were you worried about going into it?

I was worried it would be a bunch of privileged, rich, Harvard-dropout types. While the stereotypical person in tech certainly exists, it’s not by any means the norm that I’ve experienced. From what I’ve seen, it’s people who are drowning in debt and struggling to make it by, and people who lost their previous jobs when the economy tanked, and who have real worries.

How has being different—like coming from a graffiti community, having a diverse racial composition—how have those things been both an asset and a hindrance to you?

I’ve met a lot of people, between previous clients and other designers I’ve met, that have been pretty vocal with judgmental concepts about race. I’m Persian, and I have a lot of family from the Middle East. I went to a design meet-up, and I heard a couple designers right in front of me talking pretty offensively about people from the Middle East. Because perhaps they looked around and didn’t see anyone wearing a turban, they thought it was okay to talk like this. People say what they want to say when they think it’s okay. They’ll do a quick racial check around themselves, and then they can take the filters off. It’s made me a little bit more distrustful, or maybe a bit more cynical, of the design and tech community. For every bit that is the optimism I have, there’s a part that’s wanting to cautiously question who I’m talking to, or the people around me.

“I’m Persian, and I have a lot of family from the Middle East. I went to a design meet-up, and I heard a couple designers right in front of me talking pretty offensively about people from the Middle East. Because perhaps they looked around and didn’t see anyone wearing a turban, they thought it was okay to talk like this. People say what they want to say when they think it’s okay. They’ll do a quick racial check around themselves, and then they can take the filters off. It’s made me a little bit more distrustful, or maybe a bit more cynical, of the design and tech community. For every bit that is the optimism I have, there’s a part that’s wanting to cautiously question who I’m talking to, or the people around me.”

I talked to someone earlier today that spoke of the concept of “white enough.” Someone white enough that he passes for certain things, but also hears racial aggressions that probably wouldn’t be said in front of him otherwise.

It’s kind of turned into not so much a daily thing, but at least two or three times a week and that’s just in talking to the extended design community.

“One time I had a client very blatantly ask me, ‘Where’s your name from? Like ethnically?’ I’ve always dreaded any ethnic-related questions in interviews, and I’ve had a couple of times people break what’s acceptable to talk about in interviews and ask me what my ethnicity was in tech, just generally.”

That’s wild.

It sounds made up for so many reasons. I want to not believe it, despite having witnessed it.

It gets a little depressing after a while. One time I had a client very blatantly ask me, “Where’s your name from? Like ethnically?” I’ve always dreaded any ethnic-related questions in interviews, and I’ve had a couple of times people break what’s acceptable to talk about in interviews and ask me what my ethnicity was in tech, just generally.

Wow.  On the flip side of that, where do you find your support networks?

I find my support networks with designers who’ve been around the block a little bit more. Thinking back—it seems like everyone who’s been saying such extreme and inappropriate things has been earlier in their career—no more than 4 or 5 years into their career. Despite falling within that range, I find myself identifying and just appreciating more with how people who are closer to a decade or two into their career. Maybe it’s because all of them who chose not to clean up how they act, didn’t make it that far [chuckles].

“Thinking back—it seems like everyone who’s been saying such extreme and inappropriate things has been earlier in their career—no more than 4 or 5 years into their career. Despite falling within that range, I find myself identifying and just appreciating more with how people who are closer to a decade or two into their career. Maybe it’s because all of them who chose not to clean up how they act, didn’t make it that far [chuckles].”

Yeah, I hope so.

Yeah, same [chuckles].

Let’s see. Have we talked about motivators? We talked about mentors. I don’t know if we talked about motivators.

I don’t think we talked about motivators.

Kind of similar, but different. What motivates you, and what are the motivations behind your work?

To me, finding design inspired me with something to really fight through chemo for. I was so depressed and just mugging through everyday. It gave me something to really purpose myself towards. Ever since then, I’ve always had this greater idea – or greater purpose, or need – to just do massive amounts of good. And I’m really trying to refrain from saying the stereotypical, “Make the world a better place.” [laughter] That’s kind of become a trademarked term in Silicon Valley.

“Finding design inspired me with something to really fight through chemo for. I was so depressed and just mugging through everyday. It gave me something to really purpose myself towards. Ever since then, I’ve always had this greater idea – or greater purpose, or need – to just do massive amounts of good.”

There’s some genuine good work being done out there. I’d rather use design to solve problems that people can’t afford to not have solved. To me it’s not necessarily about calling a ride faster, but maybe how to get clean water. Or how to get food. Or the basic necessities to life. I think that kind of design, for me, is my greatest inspiration.

Do you think your background and life experience—do you think that feeds into that desire to affect greater the world than just here in Silicon Valley?

Absolutely. Even as a kid, I had a pretty broad world view just like having family in the Middle East but also being Native American. I think that’s really humanized a lot for me.

How do your friends and family feel about the work that you’ve done?

They love it. My current work at Whistle is a common point for a lot of friends and family. We all have rescued dogs, so it’s a huge motivator to design with those pups in mind.

“There’s some genuine good work being done out there. I’d rather use design to solve problems that people can’t afford to not have solved.”

It’s nice that you are designing something your family can use.

Yeah [laughter]. It was part of the reason why I was so excited to work at Whistle. It’s just really cool to build something for something that’s so close to my heart, and the hearts of my friends and family.

It’s cool to hand them a tech device and say, “Hey, I helped make this thing. Open your phone and I’ll show you how to use it.” It’s really nice.

That’s awesome.

It feels very tangible.

What do you think about the state of tech in general in 2016? What excites you about it, what frustrates you about it?

Whoa. [laughter]

Loaded question.

Yeah, a lot excites me. I think that there’s a very democratic change happening to how companies are founded, and how they are threatened by one another that lets the users ultimately win. I work with IOT devices—the Internet of Things—and the space is really starting to really feel validated. I see a lot of huge opportunity in connecting various devices, and letting them all interact with one another – especially in the medical field. Biometric sensors have a long way to go and I can think of personal times in a hospital bed being covered and tangled up in IV lines—could have been relieved by having everything be wireless and connected. [chuckle] It’s a pretty graphic image to think of, but imagine being lined up with IVs in your arms and then falling is the worst thing ever. IOT could make that fear never exist again. [chuckles]

“I can think of personal times in a hospital bed being covered and tangled up in IV lines—could have been relieved by having everything be wireless and connected.

Quite literally my worst fear.

One day, thanks to technology, no one will ever have to experience that fear come to life.

But I am curious, because when I—recently I had my first major surgery. When your appendix bursts you could die, and that moment was kind of getting struck by lightning for me. And my priorities have completely—they haven’t changed necessarily—but all this other little shit that used to take up mindspace doesn’t matter anymore.  And I’m curious how becoming so sick so early and almost losing your life—how do you feel like your perspective and your priorities are different than other young designers around you?

I feel like my priorities are definitely different than my peers. It’s going to sound like a super old dusty thing to say, but “fun” isn’t exactly what excites me about life or what I, in any way, feel the need to focus my time on. I’d much rather spend 36 hours a day building something that’s going to outlive me, because at any moment—very literally—bad news could come in. And your present self is the culmination of all your choices in the past. I want to make sure that whenever that ultimate day comes along, I’ve got a lot of shit that stays around after I’m gone.

Where do you see yourself in five or ten years? Do you think you’ll be in tech?

I think I’ll definitely still be in tech in five or ten years. Specifically in product design. Not entirely sure about still being in San Francisco. Nothing against the city—but I’ve traveled a lot my whole life—and I just love the idea of one day designing in Brooklyn or something, and one day designing somewhere in Colorado, or Portland, or Zimbabwe. Or Vietnam. [chuckles]

“I feel like my priorities are definitely different than my peers. It’s going to sound like a super old dusty thing to say, but “fun” isn’t exactly what excites me about life or what I, in any way, feel the need to focus my time on. I’d much rather spend 36 hours a day building something that’s going to outlive me, because at any moment—very literally—bad news could come in. And your present self is the culmination of all your choices in the past. I want to make sure that whenever that ultimate day comes along, I’ve got a lot of shit that stays around after I’m gone.”

I’m curious what advice you would give to folks from similar backgrounds—or folks that have been through similar struggles—that are in tech or hoping to get in.

“Don’t give up.” I don’t want to soapbox, but I’ve been through some pretty shitty experiences—I’ve gone through cancer, being robbed, debt, etc. But at the same time it’s been just as motivating because I firmly believe—and maybe this is just the optimist in me speaking—but I firmly believe people and life are intrinsically good. There’s such a bright light at the end of this tunnel. At the end of this career I want to look back and see so much cool stuff I’ve built. And that’s not going to happen if I let everything get to me, or if I get bummed out by material things. So I guess just focus on what’s really important if you’re looking back from the end of your life and let that guide you.

]]> /arman-nobari/feed/ 0 /hava-kagle/ /hava-kagle/#respond Mon, 28 Mar 2016 02:07:31 +0000 http://techies.wpengine.com/?p=152 Let’s start with the early years and where you come from.

So I am actually a native Californian. [chuckles] I’m from Sacramento so I didn’t go that far. My parents have lived in the same house in the suburbs since before I was born. They’re still there.

My early life wasn’t bad—it was just incredibly boring. Every day was the same. We didn’t travel, we didn’t do a lot of cultural events, we didn’t have guests, we didn’t eat out. I spent a lot of time by myself daydreaming. I knew there was something out there that was interesting – that there was an entire world of things that were interesting. My driving force was to have a life that was interesting.

How did you first get interested in tech?

One day my mom brought home a TI-99 that someone had at work. I spent hours typing in the exact code from the manual. If I got everything right, it would say, “Hello Hava.” It was just so amazing to me that it would do that. That’s probably the first time that I had an interest in technology just because it entertained me and allowed me to entertain myself. But really, my interest came about more in college. I wanted to be a heart surgeon, and then I entered college and I couldn’t really do that. I started chemistry and I was not good at chemistry. I tried very hard but I just couldn’t understand the lessons. I even recorded the lectures and played them back in the evenings. I talked to the professor. I had tutors but I just couldn’t grasp whatever it was, and my professor pulled me aside and said, “Hey, why are you doing this to yourself?” So I ended up majoring in history which is pretty big step from my path to being a heart surgeon.

Yeah, it definitely is.

I had spent so much time dreaming about my future as a heart surgeon. I didn’t know what to do with my new major so I took some internships, I did one in law and one in history, and they were just really boring. I wanted something that was more exciting, more futuristic. I was hoping for something that would be an interesting career choice.

I took a year off between my bachelor’s and my master’s. I worked at a medical billing company as a temp. My goal was to match missing checks – checks that would come in the mail – with patients. So checks that had no name or had the wrong name or had too many names. In order to do that I needed to search different databases using old style phone modems and command line interfaces. That was really cool. It was a large medical billing company, so it had maybe three different systems that they were working with. I would dial into each database and search using Unix and DOS. I would try to find the people and match them with the information that was available on the check. It sounds pretty boring but I actually loved it. I loved every minute of it. It felt like I was in – what’s the movie? – War Games, or Sneakers, where you’re [chuckles] hacking into the systems and finding information that you shouldn’t have a hold of. It was fun! Oddly fun.

Pretty quickly, when I realized how much I enjoyed that, I decided to get a master’s degree in information science, or library and information science. I even found a job that matched these new interests – I was going to be an intelligence research specialist for the FBI. [laughter]

So that is really what I wanted to do, and it’s still kind of back in the depths of my soul, what I want to do. It’s not what I’m doing. [laughter] But being an intelligence research specialist just speaks to me. And so I went to graduate school thinking that I was going to go in and learn about database research and how to find information, and then, probably one class into my degree, I found HTML.

HTML fit some unmet need I had to combine creativity and logic. So once again I changed course and I started a full time web design job six months before graduating, and I stayed at that job for eight years. And I just kept learning, and taking technology classes. Learned how to code in Perl, and JavaScript, and XML, and then about eight years in, when I left, mobile technology was coming in, and that’s the most exciting thing. I mean the ability to have a computer in your pocket and have access to the world’s information is really exciting. So I started working for Motorola. I worked on mobile devices there, and then I left for Dell to work on a mobile device for a short period of time, and then I came back to Motorola for a few more years before heading over to Skype, where I am now.

Walk me through some of the most exciting parts of your work—what you’re proud to work on, what activates you.

I think what activates me is dreaming of the future. Well, connecting people is pretty amazing. That’s what’s kept me at Skype, the idea that people are being able to talk to each other in situations where they normally wouldn’t be able to. That people can use Skype when they’re apart. People who are in relationships actually use it to sleep together and have an arrangement where they turn it on, and they feel like they’re together even though they’re not together. That’s pretty exciting for me. Of the projects I’ve worked on, sadly, the first three years at Skype were all secret projects that never made it out. And they were amazing. [chuckles] We’re seeing some of them appear in Facebook and other places now, but they never made the light of day here just because organizational changes and people switching around. What I’ve actually done that’s been released is less exciting. [laughter]

I think the exciting thing about being in tech is that you’re a part of the future and you get to know things first. You pay attention and you find– self-driving cars, that’s just amazing. I love the idea of a home that’s connected. I don’t work on any of these things. [laughter] At the point in which self-driving cars become a reality, I can just have a car that, it knows that I go to work every day at the same time, so it can drive up and pick me up or take my kids to school. The idea that I don’t have to own a car anymore, that I don’t have to take care of something anymore, that it’s safer and more functional and it knows what radio station or what music I like when I get in. Just all of this that this smart technology is what thrills me. I mean the Nest is pretty cool, that it controls your home, but there’s so much more. The lights, everything we do could in theory be controlled through technology and make our lives easier, which excites me.

What have been some of the toughest parts about working in tech for you, some of the biggest struggles and roadblocks?

I think just being a woman in tech—there aren’t that many of us, which is a little bit of a struggle in its own. I applaud Sheryl Sandberg for empowering women but I think that Lean In fails in certain aspects, such as espousing the belief that women can have it all, which I’m sure makes some women feel like complete failures when it doesn’t work out. I’m a fairly affluent, well educated, well connected woman with extended family and a stay at home husband and it is challenging to be a parent and to work. I’m incredibly lucky and I’m still exhausted by it – every day. Just imagine all the women who are less lucky, who have less help and work longer hours for less money. How must they feel? I bet they don’t even consider their role as a woman in the work force, they’re just doing what they have to do to get through the day and keep their families running. Yes, women can have it all, but let’s be honest, women can’t have it all at the same time. At least not without the support of family or a well paid group of nannies which most women can’t afford. I think women often spread themselves too thin with the expectation that they can do everything or they should be doing everything. I see it all the time. I do it all the time.

Being a parent, especially a mother in tech is all about prioritization, if you’re on top of the things you’ve prioritized where you spend time and how you spend time becomes a choice. That’s something that I feel has been easier as I’ve gotten older. Mothers are experts at multitasking, but they also have to know when to turn that off and focus. That’s a challenge that earlier in my career I wasn’t able to figure out quite as well. Would I like a larger role? Sure, I would honestly love to do something more – and I know that I can do something more but I think that that next level in my career means that I need to spend more time away from my family. I love to travel but my kids need me and, even better, want me to be around. For now, it is important for me to be home in time for dinner and homework. When they no longer need me, I’m sure I’ll spend less time focusing on them and more time focusing on my career. But it is a challenge that – for whatever reason – I don’t think men feel quite as much.

You’ve had a particularly unique experience as a mother, having a child with a serious medical condition. You mentioned at one point in your life you were cooking everything from scratch to keep your child alive. Tell me more about that experience, of providing full-time care for a sick child while having a full-time career.

Yes, we’ve had a raw deal these past couple of years since his diagnosis and, after all the suffering and all the medications and all the hospitalizations, we discovered that the key to keeping him stable and healthy is making sure he stays on something called the Specific Carbohydrate Diet. For me this means I’m home in the evening and cook everything he consumes from scratch starting with raw ingredients. We can’t eat out. We can’t buy prepared food from the store. I spend at least an hour or two a day on weekdays cooking and much more than that on weekends. The challenge is making food so good that he wants to eat this way and doesn’t feel that he is missing out.

Learning how to cook and finding something that keeps him healthy has been empowering. The diet gave me control over this awful situation. And, as a result, cooking has become another interest and passion of mine, as well as trying to understand nutrition. I desperately want to understand why this diet works when everything else failed and I want to help other parents give it a try even though it is hard. Kids in America don’t naturally want to eat healthy foods [chuckles]. No ten-year-old says, “Oh, give me that eggplant, I’d really love to have that eggplant tonight, or some broccoli on the side.” But, there are ways to make vegetables appetizing and compelling. I spend a lot of time making vegetables and nuts compelling so that he doesn’t feel let down.

But having a sick child has also helped me gain perspective on what is and what isn’t important and the confidence to speak up when faced with the ridiculous. I’m certain that confidence has made me a better employee. My child is in the hospital being fed through his arm while getting a blood transfusion, and you’ve scheduled an emergency meeting to change a color that already went through three levels of approval so you can assert control. Really? [chuckles] Those discussions have taken on a new dynamic for me. I’ve never had a high tolerance politics but in the past I probably wouldn’t have said anything. Now it makes me a bit angry [chuckles] and more willing to fight against it. I see the bigger picture.

How has what you look for in a job now changed from when you were first getting your career started?

These days the most important element of looking for a new job is fit. I want to work with people who are excited about their work and are dedicated to what they do, but ultimately I want to work with people who are genuinely nice and fun to be with. I value authenticity much more than other things now. Our small design group in Palo Alto has that. We’re about sharing and openness and nobody is territorial. We build upon each other’s work. Some companies interview you and put you into a pool of designers and pick you out when they need you but, in that model you can’t get a sense for if you are a good fit, and I think that’s really important, even more than exact skillset. Sure, the basic skills should match the role, but if there isn’t a good fit, and it isn’t a good environment, then everyone is miserable. It is easier to teach someone how to use Sketch than it is to teach someone to play nice with others. [chuckles]

In your experience, did your life and perception in the workplace change after you had kids?

Oh sure. I had my first child when I was at a non-profit and, in a lot of ways that was wonderful. Everyone was very supportive about helping me balance being a new parent and getting my work done. It was a different experience with my second child. I had him when I was working at a large corporation and no one really cared that I had just had a baby. I had to remain competitive while pumping five times a day. I had frequent manager changes so it was hard to build enough trust to express to a new male manager what I needed without sounding like I expected special treatment.

Have you had mentors or people that you looked up to for inspiration, or even people that were pivotal in changing your career along the way?

I have had people that I admire. Not so much, a mentor. I would love to have had a mentor. When I first started at Skype, we had the best leadership team at Skype. That’s why I came here. I had worked with them at Motorola. We called them the golden triad. These three men were great designers and amazing leaders but they were also genuinely nice people and easy to work with. The head of design was famous for asking people in an interview, “Are you nice?” It was really interesting that people would get tripped up on this, thinking that he would want them to answer, “No I’m not that nice. I won’t let people push me around.” But he genuinely meant, “Are you nice? Can you work with others?” He hired the nicest people. That’s why we’ve all stayed because, even though he is gone, he created an environment that persists. We come in every day and enjoy each others company. That’s what makes work fun, and it should be fun. Even if the project isn’t fun, work can be fun.

What are your biggest motivators? What drives your work?

I want to design a product that people think is amazing, that they want to use and that they choose over other similar products because they like it so much. Or, better yet, design a product that doesn’t currently exist that changes the way people live and work for the better. That’s the ultimate goal.

How do you feel about the state of tech in 2016? What is really exciting to you? What is frustrating to you?

What’s exciting for me is to see technology come together. Car interfaces, mobile phones and tablets, TVs and smart home systems… medical technology. There’s this AI layer that’s potentially scary, yes, but, when they work together and share data, there’s so much potential to create something amazing. I feel like we’re almost there, that if we can get these things to work together smartly, technology will make another leap forward. We haven’t quite reached that yet. There are a lot of one hit wonders out there. Little tiny tech places that are doing pieces that are really valuable, but they aren’t able to integrate into a larger system because they aren’t Google or Microsoft. Medical technology feels like that’s the next big boom. Doctors need to be able to have the tools to work smarter.

What would you like to see change, either technologically or culturally?

I was in a diversity class last week at Microsoft run by this amazing company in New York. They had improvisers – actors – that would play the roles of different people in a company setting.  The actors kept to a script throughout the class to show us the challenges that their character would experience in different situations. There were hundreds of people in the class from Microsoft but only two African Americans in the room, one was leading the session and the other was an actor. The leader pointed out that there was not a single African American in the audience. Not a single one. There were a handful of women. That needs to change. That’s frustrating. I think that is a big problem. I mean it’s wonderful that the women’s bathroom is always empty, but it’s a little bit sad too. It’s sad that a lot of women leave because they’re frustrated. I’ve never been a man but I would bet that being a woman or any minority in high tech is far more challenging than being a white man. So much energy is spent on trying to behave in a certain way that doesn’t feel natural. I want to fit in. I want to get ahead but it’s draining and I only have so much energy to spend.

Historically has your support network been your family or have you been able to find support networks at all in the industry or in your work?

I think my friends are my support network. By friends, I mean, the people that I have worked with. We have actually quite a bit of diversity in our little group.  I have been lucky enough to work with some of the same people at multiple companies. We find each other and we work together again because we have found something that works, and I think there’s a lot of value in that. I don’t feel that you can get a better situation than when you find two people who have the same work ethic, who have the same goals, similar attitudes and they work really well together because you can build something so fast. For example, the pairing of an interaction designer and a visual designer that work really well together. I don’t have to spend time explaining what I mean to my partner because he just understands. We work so well together that we don’t need to physically be together anymore. I can send him a file and, with little explanation, he’ll know exactly what I want changed. I don’t have to write it all down, and he’ll change it and send it back to me or vice versa. And I know exactly what he hasn’t finished and what pieces he’s looking for me to fix. It’s a really great pairing when you have it, and that’s the ideal situation that companies should be looking for, honestly. It’s a pairing and not necessarily an individual.

Where do you see yourself in five or ten years? Do you think you’ll still be in the tech world?

Sure. I hope to eventually branch out to something slightly different. Just something with a little bit of newness for me – medical technology or smart homes or self driving cars – something that’s tech driven but that I would still need to learn. I aspire to have a larger role. That would good for me. I don’t feel like I’m quite ready emotionally, but I’m getting there. [laughter] As long as I’m not the person who makes executive power point decks attractive, I’ll be fine. [laughter] We’ve all been there. I think that’s the worst thing you can do to a product designer, put them in charge of powerpoint deck attractiveness.

How would you like to see tech be more accommodating to women over time in their career and retain them, especially as they start growing families?

I think companies just have to hire more women, honestly. I don’t feel like there’s one thing that a company can do to make it better, except to have more women around who understand the situation we’re in. My colleague just had a baby and she’s having struggles so she’s taking time off and working from home and everyone’s been very accommodating but I am sure she doesn’t feel as good as if say 50 percent of the people that she worked with really understood what she is going through. She shouldn’t have to feel guilty for that. I don’t feel like any policies are going to change that unless the policy is just to hire more women, period. Find them, hire them, reward them for being individuals and not for behaving like men. Promote them because they make an impact even if it isn’t the same type of impact you’ve been measuring against and, for crying out loud, find out how to keep them.

My last question for you would be, what advice would you give to folks from similar backgrounds or similar life experiences, who are hoping to get into tech or stay in tech full-time? What do you wish you had known in the beginning?

I wish that I had learned to be more assertive early on. I am learning to be more assertive and direct, because that’s what’s expected when you’re in a male dominated environment. I don’t normally talk [laughter] very much. Here I’m talking, but I’m not the talker. I sit in the meeting and I listen and synthesize the information, and then when I have something valuable to contribute I’ll contribute that, but I don’t just talk for the sake of talking. I’ve noticed that talking for the sake of talking works really well for men. [laughter] Learn how to talk, even when you have nothing valuable to say [laughter]. Speaking up when you do have something to add is absolutely necessary. Knowing how and when to interject is important. Feel empowered to say something even when you’re the lowest ranking person in the room so that somebody notices you. It seems like the number one most important thing, is just speaking up.

It’s complicated… I am an American citizen. I was born in New Orleans, but we started moving around when I was two years old. In 1967, when I was 5, my dad went as a civilian to Vietnam, doing international development, which means they had this strange idea that, if you “developed” Vietnam economically, they wouldn’t want to be communists and the war would be over. We can see how that worked out. Meanwhile, my mother and I lived in Bangkok. So that’s really what I remember first in my life. After two years, my dad was posted to Bangkok. My little brother was born there.

When I was 9, my parents divorced. My brother stayed with my mother in Bangkok and I came back to the States with my dad. He eventually remarried, and he, my stepmother, and I lived in Pittsburgh, and then Connecticut. Then he started his overseas career again, and we went to Bangladesh. I had just started eighth grade, and when we got to Bangladesh, there wasn’t an American school I could go to. I did eighth grade all by myself via correspondence.

After a year of that, I was happy to go Woodstock School (nothing to do with the concert!), an international boarding school in the Indian Himalayas. I stayed there for all of high school. By that time I had already attended 14 different schools, so Woodstock provided stability and a community that saved my life in a lot of ways. Today it’s my point of reference: the people I went to school with are essentially my family. This year we’re celebrating the 35th anniversary of our graduation; a bunch of us will be meeting in India for that.

I visited the US once in those years, but I’d never felt particularly at home in the US even when I lived there. It wasn’t until years later that I learned to define myself as a third culture kid. This is what happens when you’re born in one culture and you’re raised in one or more other cultures:  you become something else entirely. I’m certainly not Indian, I’m not Thai – but I’m not really American either. Now that I live in the US again, I’m a “hidden immigrant,” which has sometimes caused me problems, both personally and professionally.

I came back to the US for college in 1981. I did my first year at UC Santa Cruz, then my dad realized he couldn’t afford out of state tuition in California. I was an out-of-state student no matter where I went – we didn’t have residency [for tuition purposes] in any state. That made me feel even more alienated: I could be generically “American,” but no state would treat me as a native! And I wanted so much to fit in and feel at home in my supposed native country.

I transferred to the University of Texas, which in those days was very cheap, even for out-of-state. I ended up doing a degree in Asian studies and languages, with all my tuition paid by the US government because I was studying exotic Indian languages. They hoped that I would go work for the CIA or something. [chuckles] I spent my final college year back in India on a study abroad program.

I had just returned from that, had been back in the US for less than a week. I was visiting a friend in Connecticut and she said: “Well, we have to go on this picnic with this Italian guy because I told him I would, and I think he likes me, but I don’t like him, at least not that way.”

I basically took one look at him and thought: “You don’t want him? I’ll take him!”

We ended up a few years later married, with a kid.

He was doing his PhD in Mathematics at Yale, but, when you marry an Italian, it’s pretty much a given that you’re going live in Italy. And we did.

Italy is a lovely country and there’s a lot to like about it. I lived there for seventeen years – way longer than I’ve lived anywhere else in my life.

Meanwhile, I had accidentally started a career in tech before I even knew such a thing was possible. Here’s how it happened:

When I left college, I had no idea what I was going to do with myself. I had had various part-time jobs during college just to help support myself, and those always seemed to end up being around early electronic technology. It all started from the fact that I was a fast typist: I’d taken typing class in high school, and I preferred typing because my handwriting was so bad. So I’d get hired for anything involving a keyboard.

Around 1983 I took a job doing electronic typesetting, which at that time meant learning a markup language, although I didn’t know to call it that. I also did word processing on a Philips word processor. In a later job, I worked on a Wang word processing system. I simply thought of myself as a secretary who knew how to use equipment.

So, out of college, I ended up working as a secretary for a lobbying firm in Washington, which was just completely random. I had moved to DC because I didn’t know where else to be. It was sort of close to Enrico, whom I’d just met, and my dad had a friend near DC that I could go stay with for a while.

This was in the days of WordPerfect, and because I was always curious and willing to learn, and I wasn’t intimidated by technology, I became the person in the office who knew how to handle WordPerfect and make it do stuff. I still didn’t think of this as being a particular skill.

Then a friend of my dad’s decided that he wanted to get into being a small systems integrator. This was just at the end of the time you could still make money doing that. He wanted to offer desktop publishing as a service, along with teaching people how to do desktop publishing. This was a brand new thing then – we’re talking 1987 or ‘88. This is so long ago that Windows 1.something or 2.something was the sexy new operating system!

At that time, just knowing what a font was – was unusual. With the experience I had from my previous jobs, I figured out desktop publishing and I started A) doing it as a service and B) training other people. I was designing the courses and writing the training materials myself. I didn’t have any background in training, but people liked the courses, and they definitely learned. My approach was to have them bring in work they actually needed to get done, and apply what they were learning to something they would naturally do in their jobs.

My boss had also been in international development – that’s how my dad knew him – so all of his contacts were in international development organizations. So, weirdly, I ended up doing two jobs for the World Bank in Africa. I went to Cameroon with 12 boxes of equipment, installed it, and taught people how to use it. Which was really fun.

As part of training for that trip, I took a class in how to take apart and put back together desktop PCs. I was the only woman in the class, and all the other trainees were very surprised, like, “Oh, you actually know how to take out a motherboard?” I was like, “Yeah, it’s not that hard.” [chuckles]

I ended up giving up that job in 1989 because I married Enrico and moved to New Haven, and then I was home with a baby. So when we moved to Italy I had been out of work for over a year taking care of my daughter, and I didn’t know how to go about looking for a job in Italy.  I just did the American thing of mailing out resumés to anything that looked promising, but I didn’t hear back from anybody. I had people literally laugh at me when I walked into their offices and said, “I’m looking for work.” That is just not how it’s done in Italy.

But eventually this guy called me and said, “Hey, I got your resumé a while back and you’ve got some interesting skills. I have a software company, we’re doing an OCR software. Do you think you could write a manual about it?”

“Well, I’ve never done that before, but I could probably manage.” Having written my own training materials for the desktop publishing courses, I didn’t think a software manual could be all that hard.

And so, I ended up doing this project for him and, after that was over, he said, “Well, I really like the way you work but I don’t have any more work for you right now.”

I’d also started to write articles for Italian computer magazines (in Italian!), so I was thinking, “Well, maybe I should try to write a book.” And about that time, Fabrizio called me back and said, “Hey, do you want to write a book?”

He was working on one of the first Windows software packages for recording CDs. This was back when CD recording was just becoming something that consumers would be able to do. The first desktop CD recorders had just been announced – before that, a CD recorder was a $100,000 piece of equipment the size of a mini-fridge, with really awful command-line driven software. Blank CDs cost $25 or $50 – screwing them up was expensive!

Fabrizio was producing CDs as a service for other people, and he saw the need for consumer software that would be easy for anybody to use, to go with the new low-priced recorders that were coming. I’m amused to see that Easy CD, the software we created, is still available – it’s in version 12 or something now. Even at the time, almost nobody knew that it was originally an Italian product.

Fabrizio was a Silicon Valley style entrepreneur, but in Italy, which is a really hard thing to be. So we wrote the book, published in 1993, called “Publish Yourself on CD-ROM,” partly as  marketing for the software. By the time we finished that, he hired me full time to do documentation, translation, marketing, and a bunch of other stuff.

There’s a piece on my website about how I had been communicating online since 1982, when I got into Compuserve. So in ’93 when the book was published, we were using Compuserve to hear from people who were reading the book. Then Compuserve invited me to actually run a forum about CD recording. That was the beginning of my experience in communicating with customers and supporting a product online.

Fabrizio took his company to Silicon Valley, moved all the Italian engineers here, and hired American marketing and so on. I started travelling back and forth a lot because I was working closely with the engineers. And after eighteen months, he sold it for 48 million dollars, which was a lot of money in 1995. The company that bought us was Adaptec, and I ended up working as a contractor for them for six years. They wouldn’t hire me as permanent staff because, “Well, that’s weird, you’re sitting in Italy, we can’t hire you there.” But it was fine, they paid me a lot of money.

That went on through the dot com boom. By late 2000, I was making a second attempt to move my family to the Bay Area. I’d been trying for years to persuade my husband to move to the US with me so I could pursue my career. I said, “Let me get to VP level and we will never have to worry again.” Because even back then I recognized that executives are a protected class.

I felt increasingly vulnerable as a remote employee – it was a very unusual thing to be in those days, people just didn’t know or care how to work with me at a distance. Some seemed to think that I was pampered, working from Italy, and that my job was just a hobby to me. I started an MBA to try to prove that I was serious about my career!

A few years after acquiring us, Adaptec spun us off again as an independent software company. I again asked my family to move to California with me while I pursued this great opportunity in a brand-new company with a big job. At first my husband agreed to try it for a year or two, “but not this year.” I was traveling back and forth like crazy between California and Italy, overseeing the launch of a new website for the new company, and starting to organize moving my husband and child to the US, trying find a place to live and a school and so on.

I was working 14 hours a day, and I thought that doing great work would be enough to get me recognition and advancement. I was wrong about that, and I was really bad at company politics. Someone else, who spent her time schmoozing the executives, and (as I later learned) taking credit for my work, was promoted over me – she got my job and became my boss. It was utterly disheartening. And I was coming “home” to a hotel room every night and arguing with my husband over the phone about whether he would move to the US to join me. I finally said: “I can’t fight on both fronts anymore.” I told the company I was not going to move to the US after all, and I went back to Italy with my tail between my legs.

This was in March 2001. I kind of saw the dot com crash coming. I certainly knew I was in a vulnerable position with the company, because the woman who had been promoted over me was threatened by me. When cuts began to happen, I would be one of the first to go.

Then that July my mother-in-law got breast cancer, so I said, “Well, I cannot deal with major family stress and hating my job every day,” so I quit. My husband never got over that. From the Italian point of view, walking away from a salary – no matter how much you hate the job – makes no sense. But I’d have been laid off a few months later, so I really didn’t give up much.

After that I was decreasingly employed. For a while I got contract work from former colleagues. But Italy also entered a slump that it has never really come out of. There are just no jobs, especially not jobs in tech for a middle-aged foreign woman with opinions.

By 2007 I was getting desperate, I was running out my of dot-com savings. I had put away what seemed like a lot of money to me at the time, but I hadn’t made it big on any stock or anything, it was just savings from six years of good earnings. But from 2001 I earned less and less every year, and was increasingly dependent on my husband (again), which I hated. I really don’t like being dependent on anyone. I worked for Fabrizio again in his new startup, but he was paying me exploitative wages (less that I might have earned as a supermarket cashier!), and the commute to Milan from where we now lived on Lake Como was two hours each way – it was terrible and exhausting, but I couldn’t see any alternative.

In 2007, I got in touch with Dan Maslowski, an old friend from Adaptec days, who had ended up working at Sun Microsystems. He created a contract job for me to work on content and community at Sun. I started traveling to the US for that. It paid well, and it was exciting work, with great colleagues.

In the meantime, my daughter had gotten fed up with the Italian school system and had gone off to Woodstock School in India for her senior year. We knew that leaving the Italian education system probably meant that she would not be able to attend university in Italy and would have to do that in the US. She had effectively left home for good, which is very unusual for an 18-year-old Italian.

And all of a sudden, it was like somebody had flipped a switch in my head. I just woke up one day in Italy and thought: “What am I doing here? I’m not happy.”

In March of 2008, Sun Microsystems offered me a “permanent” job, but they said, “We can’t hire you in Italy, so pick a US office.” I didn’t even ask my husband that time. I just said, “Yes, I’m going.” I came back to the US, to Colorado initially. I figured I would eventually end up in the Bay Area because this is where everything is happening, but I didn’t want to deal right away with the expense and traffic.

Almost immediately after I moved to the US, acquisition rumors started about Sun. A couple of months later, we knew we were going to be acquired by Oracle, and everything was frozen: no promotions, no transfers. There went my chance to be transferred to California. If I’d done that with Sun, I would have gotten a cost of living raise and everything would have been easier, but now I was stuck in Colorado long past when I was ready to leave there.

My job was working with the OpenSolaris community. I was still doing a lot of content — some writing, blog management, and I had started to do a lot of video. I had very strong ideas about using video.

Even before the acquisition was completed, Oracle said: “You people who work on community, we don’t do community that way, so now you’re in marketing.” And the marketing director was like, “Well, your little videos are nice, but go write white papers.” I had been saying for years that white papers were just not popular anymore. And then the first white paper I wrote pissed off a VP, which in retrospect is amusing – I need to have words with him about that, now that we have both moved on to other things.

I could go on for hours about the Oracle acquisition (I’ve written about it), but basically it was not a good place to be. By summer of 2010 I was looking for a new job but I was also very sick with sinus infections. After two sinus surgeries and some medical leave, I quit Oracle the Monday after Thanksgiving.  And as it turned out, my boss’ boss – that same marketing director — quit the same day. I was trying to message my boss that morning. I’m IM’ing saying “I need to talk to you, I need to talk to you.” She’s like, “Yes, I know, but Dan just quit.” I ended up driving down to Santa Clara to be in a meeting at which Dan’s resignation was announced, and eventually mine, and his boss actually spoke to me — for the first time ever — to thank me for my work. And I was thinking, “Gee, if you’d ever bothered to say a kind word to me before, I might have felt differently about this job.”

So then I started at Joyent, which had been one of the pioneering cloud computing companies. I followed some Sun engineering friends into it, and I was hired by one of the founders, Jason Hoffman. I ended up working there for 4 years, in a bunch of different roles, as is typical for startups and small companies. I was the Director of Training, and then I was the Community Architect for the new SmartOS open source community, and then they gave training back to me again as well – and I turned that into a money-making business for the company. Things were starting to look really interesting and good there. In 2013 I was reporting directly to Jason, the cofounder and CTO — and then he left the company. And, you know, when your executive ally leaves, all his projects tend to get canned, so I was, all of a sudden, in a very bad position. And that’s another whole realm of stories, but basically it was clear that I should move on as quickly as I could. In the event, it took a while.

One of the things I would mention, if people were asking me for career advice, is the need for a sponsor. I’ve never really had a mentor in my life but Jason stepped up for me as a sponsor and he got me into Ericsson. And apparently he really had to fight for me because I was being seen as a training person, and some of the Ericsson people who were supposed to make this decision were saying, “Well we don’t need any more training people.” But, I later heard, he really argued for me and got me the job, and even got me a hefty raise. Since then I’ve proved myself and my value to the company, but that first step really took some effort on his part. And I’ll always be grateful for that.

I’m so curious to hear what it was like pioneering some of those earliest concepts of community.

When I started, nobody knew to call it “community.” On the Internet Archive you can find the website I did for Roxio, the spin-off company, when it launched in 2001. I actually use the term “community” there to refer to our users – I was surprised to be reminded of that, years later.

I was a pioneer, but I didn’t realize it at the time – it all seemed to happen organically. First I was on the CompuServe forums, answering questions and interacting with people. An interesting side note is I did get harassed there, but only once [laughter].

Then people started saying, “You should be checking out the Usenet because people are talking about your products there.” I wasn’t even sure what it was, but I needed to be wherever people were talking about us, so I went and learned about the Usenet. It used to be possible to search all those old Usenet groups on Google, and you could find my name there going back many years.

Unfortunately, some of the most prominent posts were from this serial harasser who tried to bug me for years, calling me a liar and so on (none of which was true). In those days ISPs had terms of service that you weren’t allowed to use their services to harass people. I never did or said anything to the guy, but other people in the groups would get pissed off at the way he treated me and report him to his ISP. He kept getting thrown off his ISPs [laughter]. Which of course made him madder and he blamed me.

So I had started interacting with people on the Usenet and then some people said, ‘We don’t like dealing with the atmosphere of the Usenet [which was starting to become toxic with trolls], so why don’t you start a mailing list?”  

So I started a discussion list for users of our software. I moderated it only to the extent necessary to keep people polite to each other. I didn’t care if they said negative things about the product or the company – I mean, I cared, but I allowed it, and tried to answer criticism rather than pretend it didn’t exist. If anything, the other users would have liked heavier moderation than I was doing.

So that was our foundational community, and people cared a lot about it as a community as well as a source of information about CD recording. At some point the company needed beta testers, so I chose the 10 or 12 most active and useful members of the discussion list to be beta testers. It was a very varied little elite group – we had everything from a literal rocket scientist to a pioneer in audio technology to a monk who lived next door to the Vatican – but was also a huge Star Trek fan and had been a DJ! [I was the only woman in it, come to think of it – and I created that group!]

Some people said, “Well, this discussion list is too active – I can’t handle this much email. Can we just have something in a newsletter form?” So I started newsletters as well. By the time I left the company, we had something like 160,000 subscribers. If I can get those numbers in my current job [chuckles], I’ll be doing really well.

I really enjoyed interacting with people – and to me everybody had an interesting story. Like what you said earlier, I just find people fascinating.

The marketing side of the company and the CEO wanted to market to the cool, hip crowd. To get photos to use on the new website, they went out in the street in San Francisco and hired six random attractive young people to be the faces of our website. I kept saying, “Yeah, but the customers who are actually buying our software, as opposed to pirating it, are grandmas who want to burn photos of their grandkids onto CD to save them.” The CEO did not want to hear that. But, sure enough, the first email I ever got to the webmaster at Roxio address was somebody saying, “Your site is very appealing and looks great, but I’m a 65-year-old grandma. What do you have for me [chuckles]?” Damn it. I knew it [chuckles]. I solved that by interviewing active community members [of all ages] and featuring them on the site – that’s where I explicitly identified them as members of a community. It may have been a first for a company website.

Over the course of your career what has been the most exciting parts of your work for you? What really activates you?

In much of my career I have worked remotely, without much day-to-day interaction with my peers. But I was always part of a team, and that’s what I really enjoy: not just doing cool stuff, but doing it together with great people. During the dot com boom I had the opportunity to build and run a team, then really haven’t had that again until now. And I’m loving it. I really enjoy finding the right people, putting them together, smoothing the path for us all to get things done together. Managing people is hard work, but I’m finding it very rewarding.

What I’m doing for Ericsson now seems to be pulling together of lot different threads in my life. Next Monday [Feb 22nd] we’re about to launch a new website — I’m the project lead on this. Part of what I bring to the project is knowing enough about the technical content (cloud) to be able to say something useful as a managing editor. But I also bring knowing how websites work, the basics of SEO, and all of the other components to go into making a big site work. All the experience I’ve gained over the years is coming together.

It’s also an opportunity to apply the philosophies I’ve developed over years of communicating with people online – things that were radical when I started doing them, like sounding human instead of corporate, and being aware that what happens online is a conversation, not a broadcast. It’s interesting to finally get a chance to bring all that to fruition.

What have been some of your biggest struggles throughout your time in tech?

When I was young I didn’t realize this stuff was happening to me. Keep in mind that I started my working life as a secretary at a K Street lobbying firm in Washington in 1986 – in those days an executive would pat you on the ass and no one thought anything of it!

Now when I look back on things, I go, “Holy shit! That was pretty damn sexist.” I was just young and naive and I also do have my share of geeky obliviousness, so there are things I just don’t notice or don’t think about. I never consciously tried to “be one of the boys,” but I have a salty sense of humor. I don’t mind dirty jokes, so that kind of thing never bothered me and I never thought of it as sexist (maybe sometimes I should have).

The most egregious sexism I ever experienced (I’ve written a long piece about this on my website) was when my Italian boss, Fabrizio, moved his startup to Silicon Valley. He took all the engineers (who were men) with him, so what was left of the company in Milan was mostly women.

Fabrizio felt like he had to leave someone in charge in Milan. And he went and chose the sales guy because he was the only guy left, which was just a joke. He was a good salesman, but he literally had only a fifth grade education and was just not very smart or experienced in anything except sales. Not surprisingly, he didn’t do well at managing the company. Fabrizio then hired a consultant to buck him up and make a man of him. That man was the most flaming, overt chauvinist I have ever met. The story on my blog is actually pretty funny because we ran rings around him, but all that happened because Fabrizio would not trust any of us women to run the company.

So, stuff like that happened. I did notice early on that I’d go to conferences where I was essentially the booth babe, and people would be astonished that I actually knew anything…the kind of stuff that happens to most women in tech, and has been happening for a long time.

You mentioned in your pre-interview that you wish you had been better at self-marketing in the beginning, because you’ve pioneered a lot of these very early concepts, and that narrative got taken away from you.

It’s a classic, “If I’d known then what I know now.” Because, years later, I would see people like Seth Godin talking about these things that seemed very obvious to me. It was like, “Yeah I’ve been doing that for years.”  For our new website we’re implementing an inbound marketing tool. Our boss said, “Everybody has to do the certification.” I was really resenting having to take the six hours to do it, and then was irritated by a lot of the content of the training. I realized that this  was because almost every piece of this “inbound methodology” they describe I’ve been doing for 20 years, and it may be fair to say that I invented some of these ideas. I just didn’t know what to call it at the time. (Ironically but not surprisingly, I made 95% on the certification exam.)

I wonder now: maybe if years ago I had had a better sense of marketing myself and my skills as a business, or had a mentor to advise me, I would have done what some of these “web gurus” were doing. There are people who’ve made a lot of money being “experts” with far less hands-on experience than I had. But – oh, well.

I’m curious to know how you’ve seen tech change culturally through different tech cycles, different booms and busts.

I don’t think it really has. A lot of the same people or same kinds of people are in power as before. As I was saying earlier, I figured out a long time ago that if you get to executive level, you’re in a protected class and you’ll never have to worry again. There’s not that many people who get there, and they mostly started out pretty privileged.

I wish I could say tech culture has improved in the 30 years I’ve been working in it, but I’m not seeing it. You still get half-naked women as “entertainment” at tech conferences, and that’s just one of the overt signs of how the industry generally thinks of women. People of color are hardly visible at all. Perhaps now there is hope for improvement because at least some people are beginning to agree that diversity is needed.

What do you look for in a job now, versus when you started?

I have very rarely really looked for a job, which sounds exactly opposite of the way I mean it. I mean I have rarely had the luxury of choice. My life has been buffeted along by other people’s decisions. I ended up in Italy because I married an Italian, and I was constrained by whatever I could find to do there. It wasn’t really until I decided to leave Oracle in 2010 that I had some choices. I didn’t really evaluate choices then, though, because I decided to follow my friends and went to Joyent, where I already knew people. Had I done a real job hunt then, I don’t know how it might have gone.

The first time in my life I’ve done interviewing in any serious way was January of 2013, when I started trying to leave Joyent. It was an interesting process, but didn’t work very well for me, I think partly because my resume is just all over the place and it’s hard to define who I am and what I do. Standard titles and job descriptions never quite fit, and many hiring managers are just not interested in someone where they have to think about “How do I fit her in?”

I did ask for help on that. Steve O’Grady of RedMonk knew me a bit, especially since I had spoken at Monktoberfest the year before on Marketing Your Tech Talent. I asked him for advice and he said, “Well, it seems to me that what you’re doing is developer community management.” He and his business partner, James Governor, helped me get some interviews and were very supportive. It meant a lot to know that they thought well enough of me to want to help.

But some weird things happened during that job search, a few things that made me think, “No, I don’t think I want to work for that company after all.”

Like what?

At one company I had a pleasant in-person interview where they asked me “What would you need to do in the first three months of the job to build up our community?” I said, “I need to look at this information that you have about your customers and people who are already signed up,” and so on —  basically outlining how the job needed to be done.

So I left with a good feeling and was waiting for a call back. A week or two later I wrote to the person who had set up the appointment, and she said, “Well, as part of the interview process, can you do all this?” — and it was basically what I had told them would be the first three months of the job! It would have been at least three weeks of solid work just to draft a project, and it wasn’t even really possible to do without access to all their internal information. Why would I do this for no pay?

I said, “This seems like a lot to ask for as part of an interview process — this is part of the actual job.” She wrote me back and said, “Oh, well, it’s just as well you didn’t put any time into this because we found somebody else for the position.” Really? The whole thing left a very bad taste in my mouth in regards to this company.

I’ve heard from others that this idea that people should work for free as part of the interview process seems to be a growing problem. I’ve got a friend who’s a really talented UI designer and she’s had the same thing happen, it’s like people basically asking her to do work for free, and claiming it’s part of the interview process. No.

How do you feel about the state of tech in 2016? Like what really excites you? What frustrates you?

There’s always a lot that’s exciting. I love tech — I always have, that’s why I stuck so hard with it even when it would have been easier to go do something else, or at least take my technical skills to some other industry. But in tech there’s always new and exciting things happening, and I really do believe that we can solve the world’s problems by good use of technology. But I don’t think that solving the problems of the person sitting next to us at a coffee shop in San Francisco is going to help. I wish people would get out more and get more experience of the world.

I’ve heard one fairly young person speak, someone who is quite wealthy because of previous jobs he’s had (deservedly so – he’s also brilliant and kind) and can do pretty much what he likes. He gave a talk in which he seemed to be groping towards these concepts that, I realized, have always been part of my vocabulary and thought process because I grew up with my dad working in international development. I grew up thinking about how do you help people help themselves, and with the core value that we should all be trying to help others.

People who have only experienced the US and the tech industry, even when their hearts are in the right place, they just may not have the experience or the vocabulary to express what they’re trying to do.

One of the things I like about working for Ericsson is that it’s got a very different perspective from any other company that I’ve seen. At some point I may have the chance to bring together even more threads of my life, not just my working life, but the way I was raised and things that I think are important in the context of the world.

Walk me through when health became a focus in your life and how that changed everything for you.

This is the first time I’m going to put this out there plainly: Even before cancer, my health has rarely been great. If I had been born in Victorian times, I would have been called “sickly.” My dad was actually told this about himself as a child – the family doctor said to his mother, “He’ll never be healthy.”  I’ve had respiratory problems and sinus infections all my life, and about five years ago I was finally diagnosed as having IgA deficiency. This is a very common inherited immune deficiency – about 1 in 500 Caucasian people have it – which means that the immune defenses of your mucous membranes are weak. Lots of people with this deficiency never even know they have it. In my case, it has meant I’ve gotten respiratory infections, sinus infections, ear infections all my life.

My dad probably had the same thing (and it probably contributed to his death), but it was not never diagnosed and, even when you know, there’s not anything you can really do about it. All I could do was say: “Okay, I just have to deal with the fact that I get sinus infections and what have you.” A lot of the time people don’t even know I’m sick. I just keep going. I may be feeling like absolute shit but I don’t want to let it dominate my life, so I just do stuff. I probably overdo sometimes [chuckles].

The IgA deficiency means that I can’t just hope that infections will go away. “Just use the neti pot” doesn’t work for me – it has to be antibiotics, sometimes over and over again. I’ve become very attuned to my body and I have a good sense of when something’s wrong.

In 2010, after the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems, I really needed to leave that job and the stress was very unhealthy for me. I had a series of sinus infections that nothing was working on, and ended up having two sinus surgeries and a lot of other horrific things done to me before it was finally cleared out.

I should have taken medical leave at the first surgery, but my manager was confused about our status – the acquisition was so recent that I didn’t have six months as an Oracle employee, and she said, “You’re not eligible to take paid leave.”

I couldn’t afford to take unpaid leave, and I was afraid I would lose my job and my health insurance, so I had to power on and pretend I was okay while I was really sick and taking an antibiotic that had horrible side effects.

When it came to the second surgery in October, I was that much sicker from stress and having tried to keep working. The doctor said, “Normally I would say, ‘Take a couple weeks and you’ll be fine.’ But you are in such bad shape at this point that you need to take six weeks off.” By then I had been an Oracle employee for 8 months, so I was definitely eligible for partially paid leave. I ended up taking five weeks.

After that surgery, the sinus situation was under control for a while, and now recurring sinus infections are just something I live with. But in the spring of 2014, when I was looking for a new job and the situation I was stuck in was (again) extremely stressful, I could feel that it was starting to hurt my body. I remember feeling one day like my body was burning, and thinking: “I’m going to get really sick if I don’t get out of this.”

I finally got to where I was waiting for the new job to come through and I was doing this juggling act of “Well, If I resign now, then I have to pay for COBRA, how much is COBRA going to cost?” Previously, when I had been in that situation, COBRA was going to be $800 a month. “How long can I afford that?” I finally managed to work it so that I resigned, I then had the remainder of a month of coverage and was okay until the new job began. I knew that as long as I kept hanging on at the old job, it was taking its toll on me physically.

I’ve done a little bit of research since then. As far as I can tell, there’s no evidence that stress quote-unquote “causes cancer.” There may be some evidence that being under stress can cause tumors to grow more quickly. You have to wonder, because I had a clean mammogram in April of 2014, and by the end of October I had a two and a half centimeter tumor in my breast. Something happened there. I’d been working for Ericsson since June. I had the stress of going into a new job and new situation, you’re the new kid on the block and so forth. That’s a good kind of stress, relatively, and I was happy. Maybe it was the earlier bad stress that caused it. There’s no genetic factor and little history of cancer in my family, so… just bad luck?

I had started to travel a lot (which I love doing) for Ericsson. I had been to Sweden three times, then I went to Paris for the OpenStack Summit in early November and I had just had the biopsy October 31st. I was thinking, I’m doing this conference. I’m seeing a lot of people I know. I’m attending sessions, working the booth, talking to people. And all the time I’ve got these biopsy wounds that are hurting and reminding me that I’ve got something I should maybe be worried about. It was very weird, you know? Here we are in Paris and it’s so beautiful and I’m having a good time with my colleagues. An old friend came to visit me, so I had some support –  I told her what was going on. Then she had to leave the night before I did. So that final night I’m in the hotel room alone, looking out over the lights of Paris, and I finally get hold of the doctor who got the biopsy results. She goes, “Yeah, you have a little tumor,” [chuckles]. “But don’t worry. It’s small. We’ll take care of it. Here’s the name of the surgeon.”

Of course, you’re in shock when you hear something like that. I was meeting some colleagues for dinner and they were late. I’m standing outside the restaurant talking to this surgeon in California, making an appointment to get the initial pre-surgery stuff done, and it was just weird. They were still running late so I’m sitting in this restaurant. I started– “Give me something to drink, right now.” So finally these three colleagues turned up. Two of them are people I work closely with and knew well and the other one was someone completely new to me and I was like, “Hey, I have cancer!” [chuckles]. They were great about it. It was just very strange.

I had scheduled my trip such that I was going back through London to visit my stepmother. I took the train from Paris to London, spent the weekend with her, then I came back to California and just started dealing with having cancer. I’ve written a lot about it on my blog. The synopsis is: it’s no fun.

I’d had one or two scares before. My doctors made me start mammograms at age 35 because I have very dense breast tissue. I didn’t understand this at the time, partly because I didn’t get the nuances of what the Italian doctor said to me, but now I know that having really dense breast tissue makes you more likely to get cancer. So, with all those mammograms, of course a couple of times they had said, “Oh, there’s something here we don’t like, we need to do more tests.” So I’d been through scares before, and I’d always thought, “Anything but chemo. I don’t want to do chemo.”

I had the surgery [a lumpectomy] on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I chose to have it then because I didn’t have plans for Thanksgiving – I could use  that time to recover.

They took out the tumor and a couple of lymph nodes, and there was no evidence of any spread. Which was the best possible news considering how big the tumor was. Then they sent the tumor off for genetic analysis and that took a few weeks. By the time the analysis finally came through, we were on vacation in Australia (I had started arranging that at the end of October, before all of this stuff started happening). When we arrived in Sydney, I was still waiting to hear the results of this test. So while driving out of Sydney airport I called the doctor, and the doctor’s assistant said, “Oh, I have the results, was about to fax them over to the oncologist and yeah, you need chemo.”

So, we had the month in Australia, and we figured we should have as much fun as possible because the next year was going to be hell. We went to Uluru  (Ayers Rock), the big monolith in the middle of Australia. That was just amazing and magical. Went snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef, and things like that. Had a really good time.

Then came back in mid-January and had to have a port put into my chest because, of the three chemo drugs they were giving me, one of them, if it gets on your skin, it burns you, so they have to administer the drug directly into a vein. The port sits under your skin and there’s a little catheter that runs into one of the big veins that goes from the heart. So that was another piece of surgery.

So, I went through all of that. I’ve written a blog post for the Ericsson Careers blog about this because the company was really good about it. I later learned that, in a way, they don’t have a choice. I think it’s part of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Companies that have federal contracts have to have a certain percentage of– their employees have to be people with disabilities. Just about the time I was starting to think, “Okay. I’m going to need to actually take a leave because I’m just feeling too horrible,” by coincidence, this email came around from Ericsson HR saying, “Voluntarily, please fill in this form about disabilities.”

I found an article in The Wall Street Journal from the year before saying Americans are suspicious about filling out forms like this, and it’s true – because you always fear that information about a disability or health condition might be used against you. We’ve all heard horror stories about companies finding excuses to get rid of people who have health problems and so on. This article said, “Here’s why that form exists and here’s why it’s a good thing to fill it out.” Then I actually went and looked at the form, and was amused that the very first thing listed [as a disability] was cancer.  I was like, “Oh, okay, I’m officially disabled. They can’t fire me!”

Wow.

So, it was partly that they couldn’t. But also, just the way everybody [at Ericsson] was being about it, I didn’t think they would’ve anyway. It’s a different kind of company with a different kind of attitude. While I was under treatment all the stories were coming out about [a certain big company] and how awful it was to work there. There was one story from a woman who’s like, “I got pregnant, I got cancer, I got fired.”

It took me a while to reach the point that I felt enough trust in the company that I thought they were going to do the right thing, and, when I did, it was a huge relief. I was definitely not at that point right away, because I’d only been with the company for a few months when I got the diagnosis. Jason [Hoffman] had gotten me hired, but he was only one person, no matter how well positioned. So, it was just a huge relief and, as other people have said since, it says a lot about the company that they did the right thing.

I was in chemo from the end of January until mid-June, and I only officially went on leave about a week before chemo ended, then I took off only five weeks. Because that was all I wanted to take off.

People [at work] were being very accommodating, letting me stay involved — I wanted to because I would have been incredibly depressed, bored, and lonely if I had just been sitting here at home with nothing to do. Feeling engaged and useful was so important to my mental health.

After chemo I had a month break from treatment, then radiation every weekday for six weeks. I was scared about radiation, too, because reactions are extremely unpredictable. They told me that I would probably have a worse time because I’m fair-skinned and I’d just done chemo – I could end up having blistering wounds, and this does happen, but fortunately, none of it happened to me. It was mostly just the hassle of having to drive there every day while I was still tired from the chemo.

I was just about finished with that in late August, when Ericsson was participating in a big way in the IDF conference in San Francisco. All of my teammates were coming in from all over the world for it, and I went to San Francisco for that. That was my reemergence into tech society. I had actually just completed a project to amp up some of the web content around our cloud, in record time for Ericsson — while recovering from chemo while everybody else was on vacation! I had hired as a contractor an old friend from Sun to help out with this. That went so well, that’s part of the reason that we were able to do this big web project that we just launched last week [Feb 22nd]. Not only did Ericsson not fire me — they gave me more responsibilities, and that just keeps growing.

When I was in Stockholm this January, we had a big meeting with the extended team of about 30 people and my boss showed a slide about “how are we going to organize around this big project.” And at the top was a box that said “Leadership,” and mine was one of four names in it. I almost cried, because it’s taken so damn long to be there.

So that’s where we are. Trying to keep everything together and do all these big new things and hire people. I’m just drafting a series of tweets about interns I need to hire.

How has that whole experience affected what you look for in a job or in your work?

Ericsson is very different from any other company that I’ve worked for. They really invest in employees, seem to expect that you are going to be with the company for the rest of your life – the company is about the people, which is really amazing. You can do all different kinds of roles and you could possibly live in different countries. Once people get in there they tend not to want to leave. There’s a good chance I will be with Ericsson for the rest of my career. I won’t always be doing [exactly what I’m doing now]. They’ve given me opportunities and responsibilities that I’m not sure I would have gotten anywhere else.

That’s really amazing and ties in really well to the next thing I want to talk to you about because so many folks in tech feel that their career is in danger after they hit approximately 35. Ageism is strong in tech right now. I’m curious from your perspective, in what ways has that affected you or people you know.

I became aware of ageism in tech in my first tech job. We were hiring. We brought in this guy who was maybe fifty, fifty-five, who mentioned that it was hard to get tech jobs because he was older. And I remember, even at my own young age, thinking, “That seems really stupid. He’s got experience, why wouldn’t we want him?”

So, ageism in tech goes back quite a ways, which is interesting and sad. All the evidence is that it’s a very real thing. I don’t know, in my own job search in 2014, how much my age was a factor. Probably it was. I only actually face-to-face interviewed with three or four companies. The one where I mostly had that impression was [big famous company]. I just had a general feeling when I walked on the campus, it felt like a slightly over-age college campus, a bunch of 30 year olds. They don’t really seem to have a place for somebody who’s 50 (unless, of course, you’re an executive). I’ve talked with friends in their 40s and 50s who have also felt that way when interviewing at some companies, especially startups. They may not blatantly say that you’re unwelcome, but the whole atmosphere can feel like there’s no place for you.

So ageism is definitely there and one way especially you see it come out is if you deal with social media. People just assume that “digital natives” are the only people who can do social media. No, actually experience helps there, too. If you didn’t keep hiring 20 year old interns to do your social media, you wouldn’t have these social media disasters that we always hear about in the press!

We’ve been interviewing people lately for our team at Ericsson, and I’ve actually been really pleased that our recruiter has brought in people who have not been afraid to say on their resume “20 years of experience.” It’s like—“Yes, experience! I like experience. This is good.” I’m happy to bring on young people and work with them and train them, but it’s also nice to have people I don’t have to train.

Yeah. It never occurred to me until this moment that someone would be afraid to put 20 years of experience on a resume here.

The received wisdom when you’re doing a resume is, “Don’t put your experience too far back, because that dates you. Don’t say what year you got your college degree, because if it’s pre-2000, you’re too old.” People are trying to find ways to fudge how old they actually are. I gave up trying to hide my age a while ago, because it’s pretty clear. I had things on my website about turning 50, so anybody who does a minimum of research is going to figure that one out.

I did draw the line at getting bifocals. My optometrist said, “You would be much better off for seeing and reading if you got bifocals.” I’m like, “I’m in tech. I cannot be walking around with bifocals.” Or gray hair.

I’m also curious about forms of sexism that you mentioned you’ve experienced in the workplace.

I’ve got that geeky oblivious thing, there’s probably been a lot of stuff over the years that I just haven’t noticed, or haven’t picked up on.

There have been times that I’ve worn makeup and skirts and heels. Lately I’ve had to give up makeup, partly because I have such bad seasonal allergies that my eyes get irritated really easily, plus one of the fun side effects of chemo is it makes your eyes really sensitive. Even now, every time I go outside my eyes start watering. There is just no makeup that’s going to survive that. But people don’t know that, and no doubt there are some who think that I’m making some sort of statement by refusing to wear makeup.

Clothing is always a huge problem. As Deborah Tannen says, there is no “unmarked” look for women. It’s very hard to know how to dress for work. For a while I was wearing low-cut tops and showing cleavage, until I realized that it was just distracting for people. I think it’s just biological. It’s like, if there’s breasts out there, we all look at them (women, too). Maybe it’s a survival thing: as babies, we had to be focused on the breast.

I was having a conversation once with a colleague. We’re having a perfectly sane, rational conversation and right in the middle of it, he stops and he’s doing this [staring at my chest]. I’m like, “Okay, I just can’t do this to these guys. It’s not fair [chuckles].” Since then I’m not exposing so much. [laughter]

Let’s go into another kind of form of isolation that we talked about earlier in your interview, about not being technical.

Being technical? As in, having a technical degree?

Yep, and the importance given to that and how it has affected your career.

My college degree was in Asian Studies and Languages partly because, back in the 80s when Reagan was cutting education funding, the US government paid me to study “exotic” languages, in hopes that I would go work for the CIA (I didn’t).

The things I do now for my job didn’t even exist when I was in college, so I could not have studied them. But many of the skills I use now I learned in the jobs I did then to earn pocket money. I was always interested in technology and I’m a fast learner. I have been a writer since childhood, and that helps in any job.

I took one programming course, my freshman year, but it went very badly. I’m now not sure if that was because I sucked at it, or the course or the professor just weren’t that good. I never considered any further technical courses. No one ever suggested it to me, either.

I never learned to code (unless you count HTML), but I am good at figuring out and using and explaining technology. Whether for jobs or for myself, I am constantly learning. In 2001, I paid for lynda dot com to learn how to use Dreamweaver, the best website production software available at the time. I started my own website to have a place to put my writing, but I also used it to learn about how to build a site, how to analyze and improve web traffic, etc.

There are lots of people out there who code without having computer science degrees. Should we really emphasize the CS degree that much? Yeah, there’s a lot basic engineering that you can learn in a CS degree, but it’s also a field that changes rapidly. Ironically, I have known engineers who insist on the value of a CS degree, while despising people who are academic computer scientists: “They don’t have real world experience.”

CS degrees are valuable, but they’re not the only things that are valuable. I particularly find it distressing that companies looking to hire new grads keep talking to the same universities. This tends to reinforce biases: the majority of people who are coming out of most CS programs at the moment are white men. So we just keep that cycle going where somebody who’s graduated from Brown says: ” I really want to talk to candidates from Brown,” and he hires candidates from Brown, and they’re going to be more white men. And so it goes on.

So I think it would help diversity if we thought harder about diversity of qualifications. A lot of companies are putting money into building the STEM pipeline. “Let’s get girls into STEM careers starting from middle school, and let’s help fund women to do CS degrees at university level.” That’s nice (and great PR), but it’s something a company will never be able to measure. There is almost never going to be somebody that you can say, “We paid for this program at some middle school, and this person ended up working for us.”

The emphasis on building the pipeline also takes away attention from the very real problems for the people who are already in the job market and in the jobs. What’s making it hard to retain them? We as minorities and disadvantaged people keep telling companies [what’s wrong] – or we try to. And yet the problems keep happening.

How did all this affect your personal life?

It’s hard to talk about this without getting into stuff that is too personal and potentially hurtful for others for me to be very specific right now. So I’ll try to distill it down.

It’s very, very hard to be a two-career couple, especially when you have kids. It’s rare that you can both be doing exactly what you want, where you want, when you want, and still maintain a life together. There have to be compromises. For most heterosexual couples, given the cultural assumptions about family roles and work, it’s the woman who does the compromising. I do know a few couples where the woman’s career has taken precedence, and the man’s career takes a backseat or he even becomes a stay-at-home father. It works fine for them, but we notice it precisely because it’s rare.

Even with couples who say they believe in sharing housework and childcare equally, women end up doing the lion’s share of it – we know this from research as well as personal experience. All the assumptions and habits we all grew up with are stacked against us. Maybe women just care more about having clean houses.

The only solution I ever found to arguments and resentments over housework was to pay someone else to do it! I came to that conclusion 20 years ago when I was working as a consultant and my hourly rate was far higher than the hourly cost of paying someone to clean my home – it made no economic sense for me spend those hours cleaning.

The best piece of wisdom I could give anyone about any relationship is: be with someone who values the same things in you that you value in yourself.

If your career is important to you, you need to be with someone who values that, who respects your right and need to do something in the world and supports you in that. Again, this usually requires compromise. And historically it’s been very hard for a woman to find a man who would even temporarily bend his own career trajectory to suit hers.

Many men (and women) of my generation grew up with stay-at-home moms, or moms whose careers were secondary to their husbands’. I grew up with feminism and being told that women’s needs and careers were equally important, but I didn’t see this demonstrated in my daily life. So for a long time I accepted that my husband’s career was more important than mine. When I began to really want to pursue my career, that caused tremendous friction in our relationship.

It eventually came to the point that no further compromise was possible: his job was in Italy, but I could no longer find work there commensurate with my experience, skills, and interests (nor can most Italians!). I accepted a job back in the US in 2008, and we finally broke up 18 months later.

I have some hope that there is a generational change going on. Many younger men and women have now grown up with mothers (increasingly, single mothers) who have important jobs. They understand instinctively that, yes, Mom works, and her career matters at least as much as Dad’s does. There’s still a lot of cultural pressure about how a woman is supposed to put her relationships and family first, but maybe younger men will be more supportive of their women’s careers. Maybe!

My last question for you if you have the time would be, what is some of the advice that you could share to folks, a woman just starting out. What do you wish you’d known in the beginning in your career?

There’s a bunch of standard advice people give that is absolutely true, for example: learning to negotiate for yourself is vitally important. My failures to negotiate salary earlier in life have scary consequences for my future retirement funds.

You need a sponsor as well as mentors. As a wise person has said: “Mentors help you skill up, whereas sponsors help you move up.” I haven’t had mentors, but I have had sponsors at two critical points in my career who have been almost literally lifesavers.

“Networking” sounds like a cynical term, but there’s nothing wrong with knowing a lot of people and using those connections – as long as you also pay it back, pay it forward, and help others wherever you can. We do need to help each other. Most people deserve it and it’s a good thing to do, but especially we need to help each other as women and as other under-represented people. Because it’s so hard for us to get into tech and stay without that support and help.

Anything you say ends up sounding sort of cliché, but believing in yourself and standing up for yourself… those are important, too. If I could go back, I would probably be less inclined to let some things go that I let go before, such as other people taking credit for my work. Of course, there were times when I stood up for myself and it did absolutely no good!

But, if you don’t try, you’ll definitely get nowhere.

I was born in San Bernardino, but I grew up in Colton, a train town right next to it.
My grandfather was a farmer in Mexico. He came to the US to work for the Santa Fe Railroad Company, and that’s how we ended up where we did. The train yard was maybe four or five blocks from where we grew up. My father was also born in Mexico but grew up mostly in the US. My mother was born is San Diego. Her father was in the Navy, and he was stationed down in San Diego for a while. She moved back to San Bernardino at one point because of an illness with one of her siblings. So she grew up mainly in San Bernardino and my dad grew up mainly in Colton. They had four children. I’m the youngest. We’re all four years apart, so it’s pretty easy to tell our ages apart.

At a very young age I experienced a pretty significant trauma. I have a burn on my arm.

Oh yeah. I didn’t notice until now.

Most people don’t notice it. The story of the burn on my arm from what I was told (because I don’t remember any of it) is they used to have bottle warmers with super long cords back in the 80s. I was wearing some pajamas crawling around, and I pulled the cord down and the scalding water landed on my arm and soaked into the pajamas. You have this super hot heated water—not boiling—but hot enough that when pressed against my skin for so long— it basically melted my skin. I think what they said was they ran cold water over it and then took me to hospital and when the doctors went to cut the pajamas off, my skin had stuck to the pajamas.

Oh my god.

They bandaged it, and they sent me back home and I was just crying constantly in pain for a couple of days. We had a family friend was a doctor and he said, “No, this is wrong. They totally messed this up.” And so he sent me to a burn center where they undressed the burn and then they put my arm in a bath – like some kind of medicinal bath – and they went and they scrubbed the dead skin off; this is something they had to do several times. Basically, every time the burn would scab over, I’d have to go back to the hospital, put it in the bath, and have it scrubbed off, have my skin scrubbed off. I mean, if this had been taken care of properly, I probably wouldn’t have any visible scarring at all. This is a symptom of not having the burn properly taken care of.

“I got hurt a lot when I was little.”

I think that whole experience shaped me, shaped my personality. It’s something that I didn’t know until the last couple years. I knew about the burn experience, but I didn’t know a lot of the details. One of the things I talked with my therapist was about was the burn experience. She thinks it had a pretty significant effect on my personality. I tend to be a little more introverted, very protective, and defensive of myself. That plays into a part of my personality, and how it became a part of who I am. Maybe if that hadn’t of happened, I could have been a much more outgoing person. I don’t know.

So that was like a very early trauma experience for me. There’s lots of other stuff that’s happened in my life. I don’t think we’ll have enough time to talk about all of it, but that was one of the significant things.

Yeah, totally. I’m all ears. I’ve actually been reading for myself a lot last year. I read a lot about things that were relevant to me and my growth, but I read a particular book that affected me in a lot of ways. About how childhood traumas—whether or not you remember them—you tend to cope, depending on when they happened, you tend to cope in one way or the opposite way. And, you may not even remember it, but it ends up just completely defining your personality profile, people you gravitate toward, etc. I have no idea what happened to me, because I don’t remember. I can make assumptions based on how I grew up. But it’s really fascinating, and horrible, and heartbreaking to hear so many stories of people having—based on very, very early things that they may not even remember—can completely shape them as a human being and how they cope.

I think it’s interesting. I don’t know why this happened, but it may have been one of those things where it’s like, “Oh, we don’t want you to feel different, so let’s not make a big deal about this. You’re no different. Nothing different has happened.” And, so I thought, “Well, this hasn’t had any effect on me. I am just the way I am, because, I’m no different than anyone else.” But, it took some additional processing as an adult to be like, “Yeah, I am different, and that’s not a bad thing.”

When I was a child, I guess there was a common theme of being different is bad, so “let’s not imply that someone’s different.” Instead of an attitude of“being different is great.” You’re adding this different spice to the recipe, and that’s valuable. I think because of that, when I was growing up, I thought, “Well, this is not a factor.” As an adult and re-processing things, I’m like, “I think this is a pretty big factor.” And, there are other people who struggle with this kind of stuff, too, I know. My sister—her husband’s a firefighter—and she invited me this year to go to a burn survivors retreat in Southern California; she invited me to talk about my experience. I’m really looking forward to doing that.

I’m in my 30s and I’m just barely starting to explore this part of my life. It’s like I don’t know what my story is because I haven’t really started to explore it until, like at this point. But yeah that was one experience.

I got hurt a lot when I was little. My brothers and I always used to get into trouble. We had off-road vehicles—ATCs, three-wheelers—we used to ride all the time. We grew up in a part of Colton—the south of the freeway part—which is the not good part of the city. Partly because the Projects were across the street and it was mixed in with industrial. You had the train yards, you had factories, there is a cement manufacturing plant nearby. We lived in probably one of the worst places you could grow up as far as health, safety, things like that. We couldn’t play at the local park because my parents said, “It’s too dangerous.” I remember going there one time and finding hypodermic needles in the jungle gym thing and being like, “Oh yeah, this probably not a good.” As a kid I thought, “Oh, okay, that’s gross. But I’ll still keep playing,” But, yeah we didn’t get to really go to the park to play because my parents said it was too dangerous, instead we played on this train bridge that we used to call the Black Bridge. It was safer than the park, but it still wasn’t very safe because it was an active railroad bridge.

The end of our street got this reputation as being an illegal dump. What that meant is you had large construction equipment—I remember an old school bus—just all this stuff would just get dumped at the end of our street. It was just a mass of stuff. As kids, we were like, “This is awesome! It’s like giant Tonka toys in our back yard.” They had like a crane—it was this old demolished crane, just falling apart decrepit thing—but, it still had the levers you could pull the switches, and we would jump in that thing, and we’d pretend that we were driving this truck. I remember the school bus had all the windows busted in. Glass all along the floor, and we were in there playing in it. Sit in the bus driver’s seat; pretend you’re driving the bus. Usually my oldest brother would be left in charge, and so, he would take us out there with his friends, and we’d all just mess around. That wasn’t very safe. My brother had to go to the hospital because he got glass in his eye from playing in the bus.

One time, I had to go to the hospital because we were playing the good old game of “The Floor is Lava!” And we were jumping from one thing to the next. There was a toilet bowl – yes, someone just came and dumped a toilet bowl at the end of our street – and I jumped to the toilet bowl and suddenly, it shattered and slashed my leg. And so—I just think this is such a funny story because this is a toilet bowl in a dump that I’m getting cut with. [laughter] And as an adult I realize how unaware of the consequences I used to be.

Oh my God.

And I freaked out and I remember going, “Oh, I’m gonna to die, I’m gonna die, I gonna die!” because I’m bleeding out and I crawled my way home. I’m crying, and I’m freaking out, and finally I get to my front door and no one is answering! So I’m screaming and crying and eventually my brother came from around the house and he’s like, “What’s wrong?” and I guess they’d locked the front door cause I was crying and screaming. They didn’t want to deal with me. They didn’t realize I was injured. So, once they eventually saw what happened, they took me to the hospital where the wound got cleaned and stitched up.

Nothing terrible ended up happening to me, but I just think it’s kind of like a funny story about how little I knew of how abnormal this stuff was. I think—I think that’s an element of growing up in poverty, like growing up in this environment of not having safety. It’s just something you accept. You kind of just think of it as the norm. You think everyone lives this way. I thought everyone lived this way. I thought everyone dealt with this kind of danger.

“I think that’s an element of growing up in poverty, like growing up in this environment of not having safety. It’s just something you accept. You kind of just think of it as the norm. You think everyone lives this way. I thought everyone lived this way. I thought everyone dealt with this kind of danger.”

This wasn’t something I typically share with co-workers when I was in San Diego. Instead we would talk about the newest tech gadget that’s coming out, what skills we should be training in, what cool projects we were working on. But people didn’t talk about the personal too often. But at the same time, I got a sense there have been people among us who have had rough lives.

Then I moved up to the Bay Area, and I feel like it’s been really hard to find people who had that kind of life. I share with co-workers about my arm burn. I talk about the experience and about what happened to me as a way to introduce myself. It was actually in the context of in the beginning of our stand-ups.

I started a tradition of beginning stand-up with a brief improv game, and one day the game was to say something about yourself that no one else knows. So I told this story of my arm. Then I also shared over lunch with one co-worker my story about the toilet bowl and the dump at the end of our street, and he just didn’t know what to say. Maybe he’d never really known anyone that had gone through that kind of experience or grew up in that kind of environment.

You mentioned in your pre-interview that as a kid, you got into tech and computers as a distraction from real life.

Computers made me really happy. I think it made me special. It enabled me to stand out from the rest of my family and get attention that I was desperately wanting. When I was born, my mom was a stay-at-home mom, but when I old enough for daycare, she returned to college to become a teacher. So by the time I started elementary school, I went to the school my mom taught at. Back then, every classroom had like an Apple II computer—my first ever exposure to a computer was an Apple II.

“The computer wouldn’t yell at me. The computer wouldn’t put me down. The computer wouldn’t bully me. The computer wouldn’t make me feel bad about myself. The computer was safe, right? I think for me that was a big draw, that computers were safe. They were a safe space for me to spend time to express myself.”

My mom would stay after school, grading papers, and I had nothing else to do, so I started reading books about BASIC and I started programming little things in BASIC on the computer. Usually it was like, “What’s your name?” and you enter your name. Then it would say, “Hello ‘name’.” Because I had all this free time, I started creating these longer and longer scripts. I didn’t really make anything significant in the Apple II. I think it was because of lack of resources. All I had was this BASIC consumer retail book from Apple. I didn’t think, “Oh, I could go to a library and find a book and learn how to do this better.” And I didn’t have a mentor or someone who’d say, “You can do this, this, and this.” I was limited to what I could visually observe by putting stuff in the computer and seeing what comes out. That early exposure to computers made me feel special: something that I can input and get something out and get some creative expression too. I totally believe software engineering has an element of creativity in it.

But yeah, the computer wouldn’t yell at me. The computer wouldn’t put me down. The computer wouldn’t bully me. The computer wouldn’t make me feel bad about myself. The computer was safe, right? I think for me that was a big draw, that computers were safe. They were a safe space for me to spend time to express myself. I think that was a big part of my draw to computers with those early experiences.

Walk me through early computer use to deciding to pursue it as a career and going to college for it. Did you have pressure from friends and family to go to college? What were their expectations?

I did, so, this is funny. So my mother was a teacher, and actually I didn’t want to go into computer science as my first job. I wanted to be a teacher. My mother at one point let me teach lessons in her second grade class while I was still in elementary school. The lesson I remember teaching was on how to do origami, and she gave me a bulletin board, and I thought that was the awesomest thing in the world. Again my own bulletin board space, I get to put the little wavy cardboard things around the edges, and then I’m gonna teach these kids how to create something, and then we’re gonna take all of their creations and we’re gonna put them on the bulletin board, and it’s gonna be awesome. I think this is a pivotal moment in my love of learning teaching. Kind of the concept of continuous learning.

“We didn’t afford a home computer for a long time, but I had an uncle who put computers together. He put together a computer for my parents. Kind of a little Frankenstein computer. Nothing name brand at all, it was totally pieced together from a bunch of cheap parts. It ran Windows 3.11. First time seeing a GUI interface, first time seeing control panels and settings and software programs all this stuff. I spent a lot of time fiddling with it.”

I remember another teacher, my math teacher in sixth grade let me teach a lesson on radius, diameter, circles, things like that. So I had several of these experiences where I was experimenting with leading as a teacher, leading students, helping people learn. At one point, I was talking to my parents about how I wanted to be a teacher, and I remember my mom saying, “You know, I don’t think you should be a teacher.” She said, “I think you should do something greater than that.” I’m not exactly sure why she said that to me. It may have been seeing how I interacted with the computer. That’s another thing, that throughout my life, my family regarded me as the computer whiz. To them, computers were like foreign entities. To me it was like something that naturally fit. Although my mom saw me having passion being a teacher, she also saw me having a passion for computers, and I think that’s why she told me, “Why don’t you try this other thing. Why don’t you focus on this other thing, because I think it’d be really great for you to get into something like that.”

We didn’t afford a home computer for a long time, but I had an uncle who put computers together. He put together a computer for my parents. Kind of a little Frankenstein computer. Nothing name brand at all, it was totally pieced together from a bunch of cheap parts. It ran Windows 3.11. First time seeing a GUI interface, first time seeing control panels and settings and software programs all this stuff. I spent a lot of time fiddling with it.

My brother used to work at Software, Etc. One year, he bought me this amazing Christmas gift. We didn’t always get along really well, so I was like, “This is really expensive, it’s huge.” It was a sound card. Back then, at least from my point of view, these things were like gold. Again, another piece to put into our Frankinstein computer. I remember putting the sound card in, and hooking up some speakers. I remember putting the sound card in and it didn’t work. This was before the days of plug and play. I had to go into the .ini file and look at the settings there. I had to call the tech support line at like six in the morning because the company was in Eastern Time Zone. My dad was like, “Long distance is too expensive during the day.” It wasn’t even an 800 number, so I had to wake up super early so I wouldn’t waste long distance minutes being on hold. Anyway, tech support walked me through putting things into the .ini file. It was like magic; suddenly I was getting sound out of my computer. It was amazing. All my games had sound. It took our computer to a whole other level. Taking just the visual and adding audio to it, that, I think, furthered this passion I had for fiddling with computers. To have a computer at home where I can take it apart and open it up and play SimCity with sound took it to a whole other level.

Again, this is all me almost bonding with the computer, getting to know it better, realizing the tricks it can do. I didn’t do a lot of programming though, just configuring and stuff. We got dialup and AOL when I was in high school. I remember people running all of these software programs that would stream stuff into the chat window automatically, and I really wanted to learn how to do that. Back then, the Internet wasn’t full of tutorials, forums, and websites, as it is now. Every time I’ve ever gone into one of those bulletin boards I’ve found it to be a rats nest of people saying things and doing things. It was hard for me figure out how to take step one.

They had this thing in AOL called the Community Leaders, and they let underage kids get free AOL in exchange for monitoring their bulletin boards, the junior bulletin boards. And so I did that for a while and was able to get the Internet access that way, and I thought that was really cool being connected with everyone. Eventually the Internet, AOL, chat rooms, and stuff like that became a huge part of my social life. To a point where my parents were worried about me spending too much time with computers. I think they were worried because I was in junior high, and I didn’t have a whole lot of local friends. I had a friend from Ohio. I had a friend from Los Angeles. I had a friend from Texas – all across the country. I would spend hours at a time on the internet chatting with these people, playing games, and stuff like that. My parents were worried to the point where my mom one time took the whole computer and put it in the trunk of her car and drove to work. Like pulling the needle out of a heroin addict, right?

It was really painful for me, having that taken away. Especially because I was confused as to why it was a bad thing for me to have that kind of social life. Again, I think it really fit my introverted personality, to be able to socialize on the Internet. I was also learning lots of things. It’s when I started learning about how to make web pages. I had my own webpage as a freshman in high school, and I started making webpages for friends.

I used to do online role-playing. So I would write out the roles or the characters or whatever, kind of D & D style. That’s when I also started getting interested in how to make dynamic webpages, not just static ones. And I was trying to learn Perl. And I did some Perl programming back then which was really difficult. I asked my uncle, “I want to learn how to do this. Are there any resources? What should I do?” and he connected me a student who was a computer science major who would basically just say, “Go get this book,” or “Go look at this website.” And I would just have more questions and it was kind of like I could have used, I guess, a little bit more hand holding at that point.

“And so, ironically, recognizing it as something that’s not normal actually helps me. It puts my efforts into perspective. I shouldn’t feel bad because I wasn’t writing complete pieces of software at age 16. I had adversity I needed to overcome before I could get to the point of being able to learn how to write software. Acknowledging adversity, that what I went through is not something a lot of people in software probably went through, makes it easier for me. I put less pressure on myself. I feel more motivated. I feel more successful. I feel more accomplished. And, that enables me to continue to do the things that I love doing in my career.”

There was no computer science at Colton High, so I took a class on programming at the community college when I was still in high school. I learned Pascal. Later I went to UC Riverside and took some more classes on programming. And I loved doing it. I also wanted to go to computer camps and stuff we couldn’t afford, so we were really dependent on the public education system. I wish I had access to more resources, and especially a little more mentorship. My parents did their best to get me the resources that would help me learn how to do this stuff because they knew I was excited about it. I think I had a lot more potential that I wasn’t tapping into. And there were a lot of battles that were almost impossible for me to overcome. Again, I didn’t even understand that the environment I was growing up in wasn’t normal.

And so, ironically, recognizing it as something that’s not normal actually helps me. It puts my efforts into perspective. I shouldn’t feel bad because I wasn’t writing complete pieces of software at age 16. I had adversity I needed to overcome before I could get to the point of being able to learn how to write software. Acknowledging adversity, that what I went through is not something a lot of people in software probably went through, makes it easier for me. I put less pressure on myself. I feel more motivated. I feel more successful. I feel more accomplished. And, that enables me to continue to do the things that I love doing in my career. Helping people learn, learning more myself, mastering the craft that is software engineering, and trying to make things better for people who came from backgrounds similar to mine. We haven’t even talked about what it’s like dealing with also being gay.

Let’s go into that. Did you want to come out prior to college?

I wasn’t even out to myself. I grew up in a Mexican-American household. Machismo’s a big thing. My family—nice things were not always said about gay people. And so, here I am hearing those things said, there’s no way that I am going to come out. There’s no way I’m even going to come out to myself. I told myself, “This is just a phase. You’ll get over it.”

I’ve known people, also Latino, who came out to themselves but didn’t come out their families. But there was no way I could do that. I believed that it was just a phase. I thought that eventually I’d like girls; eventually I’d feel that same drive. Or I thought, this is what all guys feel—I’m just not as motivated as them.

I remember I came out to my parents—I think it was my freshman year of college. Like, Christmas or spring break or something like that. I came back from school and I told them—initially I identified as bisexual, so I first accepted at least that I was attracted to men, but didn’t want to let go of that other part that I may be attracted to women. So I came out to them as bisexual initially, and they didn’t have a terrible reaction. I remember my mother saying something like, “We love you and we care about you, and we’ll always accept you. What we’re worried about is how other people are going to treat you. How hard your life’s going to be now given like the discrimination and the downright hatred some people have towards those kind of people.” I was expecting the worst when I came out to them, and I was relieved to have them accept me.

What was it like suddenly being out in your freshman year of college?

It was really exciting. I was like 1600 miles away in Iowa, three days drive from home. So I’m in a completely new environment; it was liberating. It was also the first time I had the opportunity to shape my identity without restrictions, and I discovered some of that social awkwardness that is still in me. Like even though I was outgoing, the introverted part of myself, at times, got the best of me. On one hand, I felt more extroverted because of that feeling of excitement, of feeling free, of feeling liberated, being able to shape my identity. But I also didn’t—still didn’t feel completely safe. Still worried about people judging me. There’s kind of this to-and-fro of getting excited about doing something new. And then, almost an emotional backlash later of, “Oh wow, did I fuck up? Did I make a mistake? Are these people not going to like me anymore because maybe I was being too gay?”Like maybe I was taking it over the top? I did stuff like dye my hair a different color. I tried wearing different clothes. I watched a lot of gay cinema. In the late 90s, early 2000s, I think there was almost a Renaissance of all these gay movies that came out. I was watching one and after another, especially since I think Netflix came out.

“I wasn’t even out to myself. I grew up in a Mexican-American household. Machismo’s a big thing. My family—nice things were not always said about gay people. And so, here I am hearing those things said, there’s no way that I am going to come out. There’s no way I’m even going to come out to myself. I told myself, ‘This is just a phase. You’ll get over it.’”

The extroverted part of me kind of took it really far and then we’d dial it down a bit. I had friends who I thought we were really good friends, and we hung out a lot. And then the next year they wanted to room with different people. I think it was maybe a little too much. And so that maybe strained those friendships, being a little too different. I don’t know. I just noticed like a distance after freshman year. It’s Iowa, right? It’s a small college town in Iowa. I’m this kid from California. The roommate I had my freshman year, He said to me, “I was expecting this blond-haired, blue-eyed surfer dude.” And here he got this kind of chubby, gay Latino as his roommate. So maybe that’s an element of the culture shock I’m talking about, like I didn’t know what to expect with Iowa, and at the same time Iowa didn’t know what to expect from me. It took time.

The period of first and second year socially was a little rough. It was more like my junior, senior year that I met people that I really meshed with and got along with. And also, I think I toned down the gay thing. I found a balance with my identity. I found the things that I really thought were me, and not just all this new stuff that I’m learning about and experiencing. And I still had the parts of me that loved to play video games, loved to watch movies. My sense of humor—that it’s a little obscene, a little twisted, but not just too gratuitously obscene. Things like that.

I met people who I could make laugh. I met people with shared interests and people I could geek out with too. That’s the other thing. I think my freshman year—It was a large group of people who weren’t really nerds. They weren’t really geeks. It wasn’t computer/video gamey people. They were into sports. They were into athletics, and it’s hard to stay connected to those kinds of people unless you can find some kind of commonality. I was doing things that they weren’t necessarily interested in.

How do you feel like that culmination of those life experiences—like growing up in poverty, coming out as gay, tough family situation, childhood traumas, all of that—how do you feel like that affects you today in both a personal and professional way?

I think that it makes having a space very important. It’s one of the consequences of those traumatic experiences is there’s just too many things that can go wrong. There’s almost like this embedded belief of there’s too many things to go wrong.

I think you mentioned before, risk aversion. Like, risk aversion was a huge thing for me. I did not like taking risks, and that’s been one of the pieces of the adversity I’ve had to deal with and I’ve had to try to overcome. If you’re risk averse, it holds back your potential. If you’re risk averse, it holds back the opportunities you can potentially take. Moving up here to the Bay Area from San Diego was a gigantic risk. A lot of this was attributed to the successes I had in therapy. That enabled me to take that risk. But here I am having to spend years in therapy working on lots of little things that have created this nest of triggers or behavior patterns that make it so hard for me to overcome or to take a risk. Had I not had to deal with any of that stuff, I probably would’ve moved up to the bay area as soon as I was out of college. I probably would have taken a risk.

“It makes having a space very important. It’s one of the consequences of those traumatic experiences is there’s just too many things that can go wrong. There’s almost like this embedded belief of there’s too many things to go wrong.”

Moving to the Bay Area wasn’t an option I considered after I graduated from college. I thought “There’s no way I could make it up there there’s no way I could be successful.”I remember looking for work in Southern California, and it took me like three months to find my first entry-level job as a software engineer. I was already giving up hope. I was already like, “Wow, I’m never going to be able to make this work. I have this degree and I’m never going to be able to find anyone that I can help, really.” And I think that’s something that was a consequence of all that adversity. And it’s something that I’ve been slowly getting over, being willing to take risks. When I do take risks, seeing the rewards that come of it, and that like, “If I take this risk, I’m not going to be abandoned by everyone. I’m not going to be physically hurt. I’m not going to get hit. I’m not going to be in a lot of pain, right?”

Like kind of anticipating pain, and anticipating trauma is one of the big things that holds me back from taking risks. And every time I take a risk, and I see that it’s not resulting in pain, and it’s not resulting in trauma– and in fact, usually it results in very positive experiences. And it results in making really wonderful relationships that also add to that positivity. It just reinforces kind of—It’s like a changing of your reality of from the world is a dangerous place to the world is mostly safe. The world is mostly positive.

“I was nervous coming here for this interview. Those things are running through my mind simply because it’s part of my behavior patterns, my mental make-up. Kind of like someone who has a permanent injury where maybe they have a limp on their leg. You can’t really do anything about it, it’s there, but you learn to still walk, you can still do your job, you can still do all these other things. But you have to be aware of it. It’s also something that with work can get better.”

I have run into situations even since coming up here where I see everything is positive, everything is great, and then, something comes along that just is a huge unexpected threat. It’s funny because it’s from like the least likely of places like maybe other minorities, maybe people who you’d think would identify with you, maybe they share the same experience and yet like they’re not making safety a priority. And I’ve had to stand up for myself and set boundaries not just for myself but for all the other people who may not have the strength. Maybe they’re not far along enough in that process to stand up and say, “This is wrong.” And that’s something I’m still going through, too.

Admittedly I was nervous coming here for this interview. Those things are running through my mind simply because it’s part of my behavior patterns, my mental make-up. Kind of like someone who has a permanent injury where maybe they have a limp on their leg. You can’t really do anything about it, it’s there, but you learn to still walk, you can still do your job, you can still do all these other things. But you have to be aware of it. It’s also something that with work can get better. Kind of like physical therapy. So yeah. It’s hard to talk about.

I really focused on my career, and I think also the other part was my relationship with my husband in my 20s. It was my career and my relationship. Now I’m getting to this point after being in therapy so long I’m actually calling it my story, taking a magnifying glass to my history and talking to friends and family about my experiences and saying, “Hey, wow this did probably affect me. And this maybe explains some of the reasons why I’m this way and that way, and I also don’t think I’m the only person who’s had these types of experiences.” I’m willing to say things that aren’t popular, or may have consequences. That’s kind of a weird thing about me I guess. Even though I’m terrified of pain, I have experiences where the only solution I had was to invite it. The only solution was to stand up and get ready to face the consequences. But in cases where it doesn’t go so well, it is really hard for me. It is very painful. It just activates, it just runs through all of those old wounds that I’m still working on and still processing.

“Even though I’m terrified of pain, I have experiences where the only solution I had was to invite it. The only solution was to stand up and get ready to face the consequences. But in cases where it doesn’t go so well, it is really hard for me. It is very painful. It just activates, it just runs through all of those old wounds that I’m still working on and still processing.”

That’s why I have a support network. I have friends, and family, and my therapist, and other people that I’ve explicitly called and said, “Hey, if I need someone to talk to. Are you willing to listen to me? And can I trust your confidence, your confidentiality?”My husband, of course, a big part of my support network, a big core. And that’s how I’m rolling right now. It’s a long story, both exciting and scary to tell at the same time.

Well, I thank you for being so open. And if I’ve learned anything from just starting this project and being terrified to do it, it has been received so well, that I can only hope that it’s gonna be hugely positive for everyone involved.

I think this is a wonderful conversation to have. I think it’s a wonderful conversation to have about understanding where people start from. Because how can we measure someone’s accomplishments without recognizing that not everyone starts in the same place on the race track. Some people start a mile or two back, and then when they don’t finish in first place, we say, “Well, you didn’t do very good.” When the reality is they ran faster, and they ran longer than any of those other people. The person who ran first place, they just started at a different location. And I think that’s an important part of this conversation, about what is that mile or two back, what makes up that distance. It’s going to change people’s mind. It’s going to change people’s perspectives. And I really think it’s going to help us get better solutions, as far as diversity in tech. Some of the solutions don’t make any sense, and I think it’s just because we’re solving it without looking at what the actual problem is, or where the actual—I don’t want to call them shortfalls, it’s more like why there are differences, and how can we value those differences. I think that’s really about valuing differences.

What advice would you have for folks that come from a similar place, or have been through similar struggles to you, and are hoping to make it in this industry, or just make it work? What do you wish you could have told yourself in the beginning?

There’s a common thing about imposter syndrome, and having confidence in yourself and stuff like that. I think that’s all true. Working with a therapist really helped me, so I would say if you’re struggling, seriously consider meeting with a mental health professional. There’s nothing shameful or bad about it, in fact I think it’s a great way for people to take care of themselves. I think we should all get mental health check-ups regularly, totally embrace that. Therapists are helpful. You choose your therapist; you don’t just accept whichever one you get. Find a good fit and then you work with that person. You are building a support network. I think it’s very important in this industry especially for people who face the kind of adversity that I faced.

I wish when I was younger I had met someone who was like me now. Someone who did struggle growing up, but eventually got to the point where I’m at. If they told me,“You know, it’s gonna be hard. It’s gonna be scary—you’re gonna feel scared, but you need to know your potential. You need to know that you have lots of potential and you can tap into it, and you are going to blow everyone else away. You are gonna do amazing things.” I wouldn’t tell myself that it’s an easy place to get to. I would say, “What do you want to learn? Let me hook you up. Let me connect you. Let me call people.” We really need more mentors like that. We need more people who are inviting others to the table who have similar backgrounds, saying, “Okay, what are you struggling with? Let’s help each other solve this problem. You’re having problems in interviews, doing white-boarding, or whatever. Let’s practice white-boarding together. Let’s get you up to that level. Let’s get you some additional help where you can get the jobs and get hired, and get into the industry. And then start doing the same thing where you start helping other people get up and reach the same bar, and help other people learn.”Not exclusively people who maybe didn’t have adversity or whose adversity is different. Invite everyone to the table, but don’t ignore the adversity.

“I wish when I was younger I had met someone who was like me now. Someone who did struggle growing up, but eventually got to the point where I’m at. If they told me,’You know, it’s gonna be hard. It’s gonna be scary—you’re gonna feel scared, but you need to know your potential. You need to know that you have lots of potential and you can tap into it, and you are going to blow everyone else away. You are gonna do amazing things.’ I wouldn’t tell myself that it’s an easy place to get to. I would say, ‘What do you want to learn? Let me hook you up. Let me connect you. Let me call people.’ We really need more mentors like that.”

One of the things I started at Solar City was a continuous learning group I call Knowledge is Power. Our first book was the Solar Energy Handbook. We’re now reading a book on Raspberry Pi, and we’re programming on Raspberry Pi as a group. I think there’s about 30 people right now in it. One of the first things I said when we started was, “I want everyone to know that this is a safe space, and that includes level of ability. Let’s not make fun of anyone if they don’t know about something. Let’s not laugh at anyone’s questions. There’s no such thing as a stupid question here. Every question is great because no matter what level it may be at, it gives not only the person asking it an opportunity to learn, it gives the person answering it opportunity to teach. This is a safe space for all levels. And this is also a safe space for all other groups that maybe face adversity in other places.” I wasn’t sure what kind of reaction I would get – but I had people thanking me in private messages and stuff, “Thank you for saying that.” And I was like, “Yeah, it’s kind of where we start, it’s where we begin.”

One of the goals is not just to learn, but also to create a safe space. How do we do that? How do we start that? I wish that I could have found someone when I was starting out who was doing the same thing. It would have helped me in multiple ways, not just with technology. I probably would have told this person, “Hey, I’m gay. I trust you more because you’re establishing this as a safe space to work together, and to get to know each other.” Also at Solar City we just started an employee resource group for gender and sexual minorities. It’s another way hopefully, of making the people who want to help visible, and giving people the opportunity to help just by connecting.

“I think it’s a wonderful conversation to have about understanding where people start from. Because how can we measure someone’s accomplishments without recognizing that not everyone starts in the same place on the race track. Some people start a mile or two back, and then when they don’t finish in first place, we say, “Well, you didn’t do very good.” When the reality is they ran faster, and they ran longer than any of those other people. The person who ran first place, they just started at a different location. And I think that’s an important part of this conversation, about what is that mile or two back, what makes up that distance.”

I’m from Monterrey, Mexico. About three hours away from the border of Texas, and I basically grew up on the internet. That’s mostly where I come from. The internet has been part of my life and education since about age eleven.

I knew that I wanted to be a designer when I was thirteen, but I didn’t know how to make that happen. However, I was subconsciously an early adopter of services like DeviantArt, MySpace, Flickr, then later Tumblr, Reddit…I think these were the major turning points in my life, because during all my teen years I was inspired by the work of others, and it made it clear to me that I wanted to be part of this online awesome community. So I started drawing.

I tried two career paths before graphic design. Industrial Design and Visual Arts. I didn’t like either, so I decided to give graphic design a try. I fell in love as soon as I worked in Adobe Illustrator for the first time.

While I was in college I was also working on my illustration and stationery brand, sharing my work online, and taking on freelance projects. That really helped me find my career path. I was not only looking, I was sharing my own work and making money from it.

In 2013 I attended my first SxSW and that helped me understand tech much better and made me realize that I wanted to work in this industry and learn as much as I could from it. I started saving money to move to San Francisco. I thought I’d give it a try for a few months, and so I moved in September 2013. I was still blogging and sharing my work a lot, basically “self-publishing”, and I was really lucky to be featured on Badass Lady Creatives. They’re an amazing blog for upcoming female creatives, and that’s how the team at Sidecar found me.  They called me for an interview, and that became my first job in SF.

I love it. What were your preconceptions or expectations about Silicon Valley and what was it like getting here? Was it what you expected? What was different than you expected?

I didn’t have as many expectations as I had fears. It wasn’t until I got here that it hit me that “this is San Francisco!” where, like, the internet lives. It was really challenging at first, from doing an interview in English, to negotiating salary etc.. I was also really scared of being rejected, as a freelancer you get to choose your clients most of the time. It was also my first “real world job” as a designer, and the fact that I didn’t go to a Stanford-like college and didn’t have connections definitely made the whole process of getting a job really challenging. But in the end, I realized that everyone comes from a very different background. Maybe it’s just my personal experience but I see more diversity than when I first moved here, both in the city and at events that I attend.

As a designer I don’t think I have less attractive salary offers than my male peers, but all the women I’ve known do work extra hard in order to gain credibility. It’s hard to stand up for ourselves, maybe more so than getting paid equally.

I can totally relate in my experience when I was in tech. What else have you noticed either in your own experience or around you being both a female and an immigrant working in tech?

As an immigrant, I used to feel this pressure that my English had to be as perfect as any American. Especially coming from Monterrey and the kind of society that they are, everyone’s expected to speak perfect English. It’s really intimidating to think of that as the expectation, but when I moved here I realized that people come here from all over the world and everyone speaks their own version of English.

I think it’s really valuable for companies to be as diverse as possible on their teams because we all understand different cultures and come from different backgrounds. I know a lot of places that appreciate that enormously. I also think that California is a really warm and friendly place to work. No one has ever made me feel like I’m less for being Mexican. If anything, people really like that, they’re really curious about knowing different places to travel to, different cultures, and I think some startups here have really embraced that about the local culture.

Yeah, I love that. Tell me more about getting a cancer diagnosis while getting a job offer from Uber and how that’s changed your life, and how that impacts your priorities now?

Well, it was terrifying, and I definitely had to rearrange my life. It made me realize that as a young society we tend to overlook our own health. I had a rare form of breast cancer when I was 19, so I didn’t link the back pain that I was having to cancer at all. I’d comment on it for months, and everyone seemed to think it was normal: my fiance’s back hurt, my friends’ back hurt, my therapist’s back hurt…it seemed like everyone was experiencing something similar, but it wasn’t until I went to get an MRI done that we realized it was the same cancer but in a different area. Thankfully it didn’t spread anywhere else and it’s only on my hipbone area.

This chaos happened exactly when my life and career were just changing. I was traveling to Mexico and dealing with a bunch of different doctors, while also negotiating and signing this job offer that I ultimately had to reject when I got the diagnosis. I was really excited about what was coming for me, my career, and my partner. We were both getting new exciting jobs, had plans to move out of our studio apartment, and we just had to pause those plans for a while. It was so surreal, and blurry, and heartbreaking.

However, I’m a little glad that I had the opportunity to pause everything because I hadn’t stopped working basically since I got my first job in 2008. The closest to a vacation had been when I first moved here in 2013… to get a job, haha. My priority right now is myself, my family, and then my career, which was hard to accept because I love my career more than anything, but sometimes you just need to stop and appreciate everything else. That’s how I’m looking at it now because I really needed a break.

What have been your biggest struggles?

When I was younger, my biggest struggle was to recognize myself as a designer and be able to talk to people about my work or their work. I’ve always been a little too socially anxious. When I moved here, I had to do the same in a different language, which was extra hard because I felt like I’d lose some credibility if I didn’t speak perfectly, which is not true in most cases.

Lately, it’s been to accept that I’m not going to be as productive as I was a year ago, which is stressful because my head is never not working. However it’s enabled me to go back to old habits that I lost when I moved here, like reading, sketching, or as simple as watching TV shows.

Have you had mentors or people you’ve looked up to for inspiration along the way?

Always. I try to go as far as possible for inspiration: distance, time, or discipline. Bruno Munari is my favorite for design insights. Vignelli has a mind blowing design legacy. I don’t think I’ve ever had mentors, but I feel like everyone that inspires me has mentored me in a way.

What are your biggest motivators?

Constantly learning and growing.

How do your friends and family feel about the work you’ve done?

I don’t think most of my friends, let alone family, fully understand what I do at work. They know that I’m an illustrator and I try to make it simple for them, so most of them think I just draw for a living, which would be awesome, but I don’t. It wasn’t until Uber and GM started happening that they were like “look at you with your real job!”

What do you think about the state of tech in 2016?

Like any industry, tech is hard to understand, and as tech workers we’re constantly figuring things out. Tech is so unpredictable, you could spend weeks doing research on a project that at the end will be shut down, or you could spend just a week solving one problem and it will have a huge impact. It’s hard because everyone wants to be in their own world, but we also need human interaction, but that means you’re slightly less productive. I think we’re still trying to get to that balance.

Projects like Google Brain are so mind-blowing and so positive, it really gives me hope and makes me excited for future generations. I always wonder things like “what is Google Brain, or VR, going to look like in 20 years?”, “How are we going to utilize these resources in 100 years from now?” or “How’s the health industry going to be impacted by this?”. People are working on amazing things, and I can go on with at least 10 other super interesting tech projects. I guess my point here is that tech doesn’t always mean apps and business and sucking people’s lives into feedback loops for money. When my friends are interested I always tell them about projects they’re less likely to hear about on traditional media. I think everyone should be informed about this stuff because tech is changing people’s lives in positive ways more than negative.

What do you love the most about working in tech?

I love that I get to create a universal form of communication that works on every platform, and for most people in the world. I love creating systems that will lead to a functional visual experience that people enjoy. As a designer, the biggest concern 50 years ago was how to make your visual system work in different mediums. Now it’s how to make it work in different screens, cultures, languages, and mediums. I think it’s awesome that we’re moving so fast that we’re constantly learning as we go.

What would you like to see change?

The perception most people have about “techies”. We are definitely not millionaire magicians with big egos who believe we’re all changing the world. Things are constantly changing. As tech workers we’re just using technology as a resource to make small improvements to our work and our lives. It’s very much a culture of change, where nothing is sacred and someone is always going to come along and try to improve what already exists. Most of my friends and coworkers live in small spaces, work on small projects, and have a relatively small budget. The real magic of tech is that we’re a culture of constant self-improvement.

How do you think your background and life experiences impact the way you approach your work?

Growing up online has given me the opportunity to learn from a friendly, and disciplined design culture that I got very much into, even before I got to work in tech, so work feels like an extension of the online world I already knew.

So what are you working on right now, either for work or for yourself?

Sidecar was acquired this year and I’m currently a product designer at General Motors. I think it’s exciting that GM is expanding the way that they are, and I’m happy to be part of their technology team. I’m also doing a collaboration with a Mexican fashion brand. It’s the first time I’ve done anything in fashion, so it’s really exciting!

Where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years? Do you think you’ll stay in tech?

I don’t know where I’ll be, but tech is part of our lives. This industry is also constantly changing and never ending, and so are our lives, so I’d love to stay in tech but I’d like to explore other fields like education or health, and how they can be improved with technology.

For my last question—I know you have lots share because you have written posts on this—but what advice would you give folks to similar backgrounds to you who are hoping to get into tech?

Don’t be afraid to showcase your work. Be part of the online community, I think that’s really important, or at least it has been for me. I was at Barnes and Noble last weekend and we were reading this programming book from 2015 and my fiance’s like “this is already outdated”. I love magazines, I love analog mediums, but they’re never going to move as fast as the ones online.

Lastly, take advantage of all the IRL events that happen in a lot of cities for free…because sometimes we just don’t have a thousand dollars to spend on that cool Design Week, and that’s why events like CreativeMornings, Behance Portfolio Reviews, all the different “meetups” that are happening are so important. They truly are an amazing way to network and meet peers without having to spend so much money and time.