Ellen Körbes - My Journey In Tech

hi everyone i'm alan i'm here because natalie asked me to say a few words about my career in tech uh so i wrote down some notes i'm gonna do this in one take no editing uh let's just get some raw enthusiasm out there so let's see what happens i'm gonna try and tell you a little bit about basically the the milestones of my journey in tech and then i'm gonna try and abstract the one key lesson that i would like to convey to you from all of that it's like the one thing that if if i could tell you one thing about your career intact that you can do that's the one thing so i'm gonna try to do that um so i'm gonna start this story i'm gonna start this story with a little uh a little tragedy it's a story i've told a billion times i used to tell it as a joke people would find it funny nowadays i have trouble seeing it as a joke anymore it's to me it's just a sad thing and i'm gonna tell it to you i don't know why really but i'm just gonna tell it to you anyway so the reason i started programming is i moved with my father to a very tiny city in the middle of nowhere there was nothing to do i had no friends no money no nothing and i started tinkering with the computer so i had read a bunch about programming i didn't know how to do it i know kind i knew kind of what it was about uh this was early days of the internet you couldn't just go and download the thing and i didn't speak english very well anyway so it was even harder and my father had this one friend and the guy had a book about the clipper programming language i have no clue what clippers for he actually never learned it but this guy had this one book and i really wanted to borrow that book so i could learn to program because programming so cool i need to get into it um long story short the guy never brought the book i called him i reminded him i asked he would always forget the book he just didn't care eventually he was an alcoholic just like my father eventually he downed the whole bottle whiskey he shot his wife she died the kids had to go live with the grandma blah blah blah but anyway the story is he he got drunk he shot his wife the police showed up he shot at the police uh and then he ran out of bullets and he turned himself in he was arrested and well the end of the story is the poor lady died the kids don't have a mom or dad the grandparent had to take care of the kids blah blah i ended up without my clipper book and that's the story of how i had to right click the browser and going to see the source code and that's how i learned to that's how i got my start basically i don't know why i'm telling you the story um eventually i learned some visual basic six that's how i got my first job when i was like 12. um and that was boring and at some point i made some friends and that was cool and we had a channel called hacker on the local chat thing back then um and it was not hackers plural because hackers plural was a bunch of you know grown-ups doing you know computer things and the hacker singular which is our channel was just a bunch of kids around um so when i met those friends it was really cool because we would share things and we would teach each other and etc and eventually i learned to write c i learned a bunch of stuff about security i you know it was the wild west for hacking especially in brazil where i come from back then i hacked into universities i hacked into universe into internet providers one day i joined the chat and my host name was somethingsomethingbank.com uh and on that day i thought i was the coolest kid in the world and the greatest hacker to have ever lived and that was cool with this group i also started drinking i had my first bit of alcohol when i was 12. by the time i was 14 i was really hooked on it but around this time i started learning php i wrote my own cms then wordpress came out i was pissed because it was better than the thing i had written and long story short when i when i when it was about time for me to become an adult and choose a career i was full of it i was like ah you know what to hell with capitalism um you know i don't want to work for corporation blah blah blah i decided to be an artist so that was a 10 years detour from tech when i well i learned to play the violin i started playing the violin in a professional orchestra i did the whole you know traveling around playing opera for a while then i quit that did other things at some point i was like you know what remember that programming thing that was fun maybe i should go back to it um and so that's what i did i started studying programming on the side um i started studying programming on the side eventually i quit my job you know i did my technical homework i was like okay now people use javascript not c i learned go etc but i was quite lost like i knew how to do things like if you put a computer in front of me and tell me you know write this app i could do it but i was quite lost in terms of okay how do i how do i make a career out of this ability to type things into a keyboard um and someone gave me a really good bit of advice someone said to me well gophercon is is just around the corner maybe you could volunteer to go help them because it's in your home city and then you make some friends and then you can ask your friends for help and that was great and i volunteered and i went there every day and i did the best i could to be helpful and nice to everyone and i ended up making a ton of friends and some of those friends became basically mentors to me at the time it was really great it helped me a lot in my career because of those friends i shot higher for my initial professional experiences than i would have otherwise my first experience was my first paid experience let's say in tech was well i mean my first job when i was 11 doesn't count right but my first real tech job was an internship writing code for kubernetes with a great team from google i did that for three months that was fun um if you don't know kubernetes it's kind of a big deal in the infra world so it was a huge privilege to be able to do that and when that internship was over my first job was at a company in brazil and my first title was systems analyst 3 which is better than you know systems analyst one or two so you know i was off to a great start and the reason i got that great start was because i had enough knowledge from my friends to know how the business works so i basically positioned myself uh where i was demanding a very high salary and title uh and what i had to do to achieve that was to to go work for a company that didn't care about how big my cv was but who was interested in what i could do so i went there and i told the interviewing person i'm amazing i can do anything i just don't have a cv and he was like well show me and then i showed him and i got the job so that was good i would never have done something like that if people had not told me that that's something i could do so that was cool um i gave a talk back then about this subject about how important it is to connect with people um and how me having a good head start in my career back then happened basically yeah i put in the effort but if i hadn't had all that guidance things would not have worked out so my first talk was on that subject and i kind of got hooked on talks after that talk it's just so much fun and i was like well what if giving talks could be a career turns out it can and then i got a job doing exactly that doing developer advocacy uh for a company in berlin that's how i moved here uh eventually i moved from that company to the company i'm at right now that isn't in new york uh and that's cool but then one thing happened uh you know there's this whole thing going on in the news about some virus or something um so that kind of put a wedge in my plans because at that point my whole career was basically built around conferences uh you know do the talks and do the networking and talk to customers and blah blah and everything conferences and at some point i would be like going to three countries in the same week to give three different talks and yeah it was a lot of fun but then it was all over all of a sudden and i was quite lost for some time um after that in the initial shock i started doing more product work so product management uh product strategy that kind of stuff more of a bird's eye view instead of just being in the weeds i really like that but at this point i was a bit lost because i was thinking okay i'm doing all of this managing stuff management product something something is there a future in it i mean my cv is very short like can i have a career in this i don't have an mba can i be a manager um i didn't know what to do maybe i should like is is developer advocacy gonna be a thing now that conferences are over basically it was a confusing time and it was confusing for quite a while and something that happened very shortly uh not too many even months ago or weeks ago is a bunch of friends who used to be very loosely connected suddenly feels like from one day to the next everyone became an extremely tight click and we all started um discussing those things together about well i don't know what to do with my career is the stuff i'm doing the right stuff can i grow this way or that way what kinds of jobs should i be looking at like thinking more like thinking long term and what i want to do and what's possible and how much should i be getting paid and everyone started asking those questions um and it was a very rich experience and out of that group quite a bunch of people have got like new jobs or new titles or promotions or new responsibilities and roles uh since then and it has been such a short amount of time and i'm basically the whole reason i'm i'm doing this talk is because of this group of people really and so i'm gonna reiterate the advice that i gave four years ago on my very first talk and that is the best thing you can do for your tech career is to make a ton of friends and not just a ton of friends like i don't mean half a thousand twitter followers that doesn't matter but have have a small group of friends that you really trust that you can be really genuine with and they with you put your best self there and great things are going to come out of it now um here's one important thing so i gave that talk four years ago and nothing has changed this is not new advice um you know make friends make friends in your career in your in your niche in the area you you want to work on uh gossip between yourselves uh shared advice etc that's not new but one thing that came out of that talk that a lot of people were asking and it's kind of disheartening it's a lot lots of people were wondering well it's easy for you to say you're on stage you have something something followers on twitter your hair looks funny well now it looks boring but i used to have you know i used to have more interesting hair in the past um i got an award even for the hair at some point anyway uh yeah so people would say well you're on stage these are for you to see everyone wants to be friends with you uh what do i got i'm just a newbie how am i gonna make friends so what i'm thinking here is um what do i have and i wanna share my own experience what do i have that entitles me to the benefit of having a bunch of amazing friends and how can you do the same so um i'm not neurotypical uh i think the last thing the doctor said was asperger's so this whole social dynamics thing is quite was quite complicated for me to figure out and i always had trouble with friendships um it was always hard for me because i never knew i mean i come from a very shitty background uh i alluded you know my father's best friend shot his wife you can tell you know you can imagine the rest of the story of the background i grew up in um so i never got the kindness and the warmth let's say uh growing up that usually healthy people have had and i'm not really good with human interaction i'm not good with puns or barter or friendly flirting or being supportive and i mean ask natalie i'm not a very good friend at best i'm a very absent one so i i've been there in that situation of like well what am i gonna bring to the table to make a bunch of really cool friends um and at some point i think i kind of figured it out so i'm gonna tell you how it is for me and then you can figure out your part so um i'm a fighter i'm one hell of a fighter i'm a survivor as long as i'm not physically dead i'm fighting uh that's me and i when i tell people yeah and then something something happened and some someone said this thing and then i replied blah blah blah and then i can see the whole energy change in the room because people are like oh my god you said that so that's inspiring um i know because i'm a fighter because i'm a survivor because i never give up i know that people find things i do impressive and it doesn't matter that they're impressed with me it matters that they can see that they can do things like that themselves and the other thing that i bring uh that i bring to the table when i make friends is because i am this you know quite fierce white and wild animal and i don't think i look like much but i am that crazy creature anyway um when i when i'm looking at someone i don't know that the fact that they look harmless or unimpressive i don't know that that's the case i do not trust that people are unimpressive just because that's what they look like i don't trust that someone who looks completely unremarkable isn't secretly the most awesome person in the whole world i don't know and i don't trust that so whenever i'm looking at someone whenever i'm talking to a friend i'm not talking to however boring they may think they are i'm talking to the wild animal hiding in there and i think people find that uplifting and i think people see the way i'm looking at them and for a second they see what i'm seeing and then they see a version of themselves that they didn't know they had there and i think that's one of those are basically the things i bring i'm just i'm a very wild fighter and people find that inspiring and i always see that element in people and then people find being seen like that even more inspiring so basically that's what i bring to the table i'm not the best person in the world i'm an extremely flawed human being but guess what i have enough good things that i get to be friends with a lot of awesome people and my point is you can do the same because you know i have this group of friends i'm talking about some people are really famous some people are really rich etc it doesn't matter um not no one person in this group is as amazing as all of us combined when we are talking about a situation that this person's facing or some ambition that this other person has and when we get our minds together to look at any one situation we are stronger than any of those individuals would be and i've experienced that myself when my friends have helped me and i have seen that happen from others when the group helped another person achieve what they wanted so to wrap this up uh what i'm saying is the best thing you can do for your career is to find a group of friends who are kind of working on the same industry or something like that be friends be there for each other fight for each other and you fight for someone they're going to fight for you and there is no book to read there is no technique there is no nothing that is going to bring you a best result than that having friends that you fight for and that they fight for you and whatever you have in your head that's telling you that oh i got nothing how why am i ever gonna be friends with a bunch of amazing people just don't listen to that you may not consciously know what it is that you bring to the table and it took me a billion years to find out and that's okay the point is it's there as long as you're present as long as you're as you care whatever your secret superpower is it is going to be there it may take you some time to identify it but it is there as long as you care as long as you're present so to wrap this up find your gang be gay do crimes peace

Channel: Women Techmakers Berlin

Views: 1,600

Keywords: IWD, IWD2021, InternationalWomensDay, WTM, WTMBerlin, WomenTechmakers, WomenTechmakersBerlin

Id: OACvnLsUQBY

Length: 18min 20sec (1100 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021