Five weeks ago I joined Brandwatch as their first-ever VP of Global Community and Belonging. The night before my first day I had the first-day jitters and tossed and turned in bed. The following thoughts ran circles around my mind, “What if my performance doesn’t live up to the expectations set in the recruitment process? What if important stakeholders are directly opposed to my views and approach?” And of course that age-old anxiety inducer: “What if I got it all wrong in the interviews and I just don’t vibe with
Latinx founder numbers are growing at a faster rate than any other group and we’re expected to yield $1.4 Trillion in US GDP. A couple of years ago, I started my journey in supporting Latinx founders as an investor at Backstage Capital through the Accelerator and with this post. And I believe what I wrote then even more now! TL;DR Latinx entrepreneurs are a strong force to be reckoned with! With capital and support, we can grow our businesses to produce in the trillions — trillions that can better the lives of our
Subscribe to the Techish Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, And Other Platforms. This episode of Techish is a career special: Abadesi and Michael discuss: Should I have a side hustle? I want to become a product designer but do I need to know how to code? My boss is bothering me now that we are remote! Extras: Techish on Patreon: Advertise with Techish: Please rate and review the Techish podcast
Today was a not so good day at work. I’ve had better days. The issue itself isn’t even regarding my day-to-day work with clients or my immediate team. The issue is regarding how one of the largest technology companies in the world fails to understand and account for my personal living situation, during COVID-19. But that’s a whole different story, for another time. Regardless, it’s moments like this that remind me why it’s so important — more now than ever — to share our stories and our experiences with the
In the decade I’ve worked in the tech industry I’ve come to learn how common lay-offs are. In 2012 when I was a manager at Groupon, I had to lay off teammates I had hired after the share price slumped post-IPO. When I was a manager at HotelTonight in 2015, I watched as some of my fave teammates were laid off to cut costs after the founders tried and failed to raise another round of funding. Just last week I joined the millions of professionals affected by the COVID-19 pandemic
Last summer I gathered over a dozen womxn of color startup founders and small business owners to connect in Seattle, Washington. We shared our backgrounds, experiences, expertise, challenges and successes as a collective given the historical and systematic exclusion in the business ecosystem. We bonded on our common experience of being ‘the only’, steadily pioneering our own industries. We would have never thought that six months later the world would be facing a global health crisis and we’d be scrambling to secure funding to survive. On average, womxn of color
Two years ago, I decided to radically change my career from nonprofit STEM education to software engineering. I had no background in coding, outside of a single programming class in 7th grade and a little HTML when I was a teenager. I entered a coding bootcamp, Ada Developers Academy, in January 2018 and had full-time software engineering offers from two of Seattle’s tech giants in December of the same year. Being a nontraditional Black female software engineer, preparing for the interview process began as a terrifying and mysterious endeavor. Through much
TL;DR — This isn’t a self-promotional post about landing a job. It’s about embracing failure and hard lessons as a necessary part of the process in making a lofty dream become a reality. These days when people ask me how I’m doing, I would often ask if they’ve seen “The Pursuit of Happyness” because life for me is like the movie (mainly the ending). Through the pursuit of my own “happiness” — I learned valuable lessons in making a dream become a reality. Imagine celebrating your birthday with family and
After about 9 months teaching myself how to code, I have accepted an offer with the Guardian Newspaper to join their Digital Fellowship programme as an Associate Software Engineer. In this article, I want to support readers who are already teaching themselves how to code or are considering it. For others, I hope this article sheds some light on how we can support those trying to become engineers without bootcamps or formal education. What does self-taught mean? To me being a self taught engineer means that you haven’t completed any formal
Posted in Open Design by Sara Zhang “Product Designer.” When I first moved to San Francisco and was looking for a job in the design world, this title appeared in listing after listing, and I had no idea what it meant. I wondered, What is product design? What is product? And what on earth is Sketch? The year was 2013, and I was fresh out of Florida State University with a shiny new art degree. I’d been creative since I was young and began taking art classes in middle school.
