Hanover AB 2:15
Women speak: Alternate tech career paths.
Companies represented:
Intuit
"DoYch-bank" (spelling?) Melody
Goldman-Sachs (originally from Dublin)
Hannah Darry from Black Rock, based in NY, manage about 3trillion total. ~20% of firm is in tech. Other banks use their internal-use software. "I manage software teams in 20 countries around the world." (did I really just hear that? Zomg.)
Christie Claude from Thompson-Reuters. 50,000 employees. 15,000 of those employees are "technologists" (Yayyy, new buzzword. :p) been there from 22 yr, started as a programmer ("developer") and now in charge of stuff. "I have ~engineers in my department, and we develop the products that the legal department uses."
About ~1/2 the people here are students. Zomg.
Question to panelists: How does your company make the world a better place?
Intuit: saving time for small businesses, increasing tax returns (talking about Quickbooks), making more profit margin. Also: 1st carbon calculator footprint for small businesses.
Women speak: Alternate tech career paths.
Companies represented:
Intuit
"DoYch-bank" (spelling?) Melody
Goldman-Sachs (originally from Dublin)
Hannah Darry from Black Rock, based in NY, manage about 3trillion total. ~20% of firm is in tech. Other banks use their internal-use software. "I manage software teams in 20 countries around the world." (did I really just hear that? Zomg.)
Christie Claude from Thompson-Reuters. 50,000 employees. 15,000 of those employees are "technologists" (Yayyy, new buzzword. :p) been there from 22 yr, started as a programmer ("developer") and now in charge of stuff. "I have ~engineers in my department, and we develop the products that the legal department uses."
About ~1/2 the people here are students. Zomg.
Question to panelists: How does your company make the world a better place?
Intuit: saving time for small businesses, increasing tax returns (talking about Quickbooks), making more profit margin. Also: 1st carbon calculator footprint for small businesses.
Goldman: program "10,000 women" 5-yr investment by the firm to teach biz management and entrepreneurial skills to women who don't otherwise have access to all that. Also "Community Bridge Program" to 2-yr universities to get them to get a 4-yr degree in CS - they get a 6wk internship in Goldman. Also, "Community Team Works" program: "engage with local orgs to do some sponsorship activities..." people at each office take a day off to...
Thompson-Reuters: likes this question. "This is why I've been in the online information industry for 22 years." "We make a product for law enforcement officials and government agencies." Can know when a person has lived at the same address with another person for a month- so there might be a connection... (this is creeeeepy from a personal security point of view) Used this product to track down and rescue a kidnapped girl. Cool!
Question: (I think it's "What keeps you in industry?" or perhaps "How did you get into industry?")
Black Rock: The fact that what I do applies to real life. Also, the technology is interesting. Retirement accounts, etc.
Doychbank: Haven't written a single line of code in 30 yrs in the industry. Left uni in a terrible downturn. Commerce degree, accounting minor. (From Australia!) Got her CPA, eventually decided didn't wanna. Got a job with Leiman Bros. Worked on tech. implementations. Went to Sydney, got job at current company. Bigger and better. Moved to NY, lots of travel.
Q: How is the indutry changing over time and how does it affect future jobs?
Intuit: Not only desktop software now. 1995, 2% of Intuit customers were internetish. "My biggest challenge was getting people connected to the internet." Data mining is a huge challenge. We have lots of data. We can get wonderful insights. There are tough technical challenges. 18 mobile applications.
Black Rock: Securities lending. Building algorithms for automated trading. making sure that there's no funny business going on.
Thompson-Reuters: Legal industry- two years ago, our lawyer customers would charge by the hour. They didn't want us to make it faster and better. Those days are gone. I think that lawyers are still adjusting to that. It's fixed bids on tasks. SO we need ot make products that can help lawyuers find what they need quicker.
Q: What cool, cutting-edge tech is happening at your place?
Doy: Building desktop app for global markets- trading sales priducts debt equities (this is a foreign language to me) "This is a great app; it's a pity he won't use it, because he never sits at his desk. His assistant prints stuff out and carries it around with him all day." So I told [some important guy] about this, and we had been talking about the Kindle (which hadn't come out yet). iPad wasn't even announced yet. But they built something based on the rumor of the iPad, using the iPhone devkit, and assume that it will be portable to the iPad. As soon as they released the OS, we ported it. Bought the first ones. In the first week after iPad release, we had a prototype and the guy could have connectivity to all his data. "It was pretty exciting to be so far ahead of the curve."
Goldman: "My whole world is about speed, performance, low latency." 100s of thousands of transactions every day. I recruit a lot of people form very tech backgrounds with no financial interest. but they do what needs to get done! Also, the fin industry "works back with" the different software firms because they consume and use so much tech.
Q: Security- what risks have been introduced?
Intuit: Gotta be up all the time, even under max load on Apr 15. LOTS of people wait until then. Cloud computing is a security risk as well as a scaling solution. "Unstructured time" to help solve unknown problems. There is a thing called snaptax- it's for the iPhone- you can take a pic of your W2. http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/04/snaptax-iphone-turbotax/
She mentioned Ruby on Rails!!!!!!!!!!
I'm notcing that she's trying to avoid specifics about "security risks" ...
Thompson-Reuters: We screen all of our customers. We only sell to law enforcement, CIAs (plural??). They don't sell to stalkers or most civilians. They monitor the usage logs- if there appears to be a batch going in, then we investigate and shut that off.
Q: Mistakes you've made
Doy: Doing a migration from one trading system to another. Practiced a million times. it was loading slowly, so hit the button again. Which ended up loading all the trades twice. It's the middle of the night. All of these ops people in London are waiting for me. What shall I do? Had to cancel a couple thousand trades that night. Worked through the night. Afterwards, they had respect for her (and it was fixed by morning!) Didn't set back her career.
Let the horse out the barn? Go get the horse, put it back. Be a problem-solver. Take responsibility. And, well... no one's going to die.
Let the horse out the barn? Go get the horse, put it back. Be a problem-solver. Take responsibility. And, well... no one's going to die.
The other thing: spent a lot of time in the career trying to fix things that I wasn't very good at. Now I'm like "Why did I do that? Should've just worked out what my strengths are and made that my skillset."
We had an astronaut come into the office last week- he helped fix the Hubble. At the end of his speech, he said "just do what you're good at."
Moderator: Women point the finger towards ourselves more often than towards others. "We fall on teh sword sometimes excessively. ...Be honest but don't be self-flagellating."
Intel: Should have taken more opportunities earlier in the career. Learn more (about yourself.)
(Linda's thought: do men worry about learning about themselves this much?? I think not... or at least not out loud. How come?)
(Linda's thought: do men worry about learning about themselves this much?? I think not... or at least not out loud. How come?)
Thompson-Reuters: I wish that, earlier in my career, I would have asked for more things.
Goldman-Sachs: Encouraging women to stay technical for longer in their careers. Don't take your fingers off the keyboard. Women too often go into management.
Questions from the audience:
Q: What mentors did you get? How?
A:
Doy This guy- was new in from other company- told it like it is a lot.
Intel: Ask for help, even if it's hard. Go into the situations. Ask for feedback- how did I show in that meeting? How did the presentation go? Be open and ask.
Q: Are you programming for Android? Where do you think that that market is going?
A:
All new apps. Mobile first (Intel) "There's a lot more cellphones in use than desktops." including text-based.
Q from Moderator again: can you map what you learned in school onto business?
"Did we learn in school? I thought we just drank beer" (from onstage! heheh. fun times.)
A: "Well, I can talk about how it was different..." Impact on more people. "Well, you only get half your paycheck." Workforce: so much work, no semester break, all self-scheduled. No "class twice a day" anymore. "I've learned how to learn." At Intuit we have tech forums, learning development stuff... "It's going to be different in three months anyway." Eeeeevery day.
Audience Q: My background in in math. Only a little CS.
A:
Thompson-Reuters may hire you.
Also: (from Doy) How do you get the gold out of the mine?
Oop, call time.