Software Misadventures - Julie Amundson - Career breaks, job search amidst hiring freezes, positioning yourself and much more - #20

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

Julie Amundson is a Sr Staff Software Engineer at Google working on Machine Learning Infrastructure. Prior to Google, she was the Director of Machine Learning Infrastructure at Netflix. Julie decided to take a career break last year when she was affected by mass layoffs. In this conversation, we talk to her about what it was like to find a job during hiring freezes, what it was like to position herself in this market, whether the interviewers cared about the career break she took and how the career break changed her perspective towards work and life.

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the Software Misadventures podcast. This is your host, Rana Gnathani. If you've been with us before, you might have noticed that we took a short break from the podcast. Our personal lives kept us a little occupied over the last few months. Guang has been traveling the world and is now in Malaysia, and I moved from the Bay Area to Toronto. Now that things have settled a little, we are ready to bring you conversations with engineers in Malaysia, and I moved from the Bay Area to Toronto. Now that things have settled a little, we are ready to bring you conversations with engineers, founders, and investors about their path, the lessons they have learned, and of course, the misadventures along

the way. Our guest in this episode is Julie Amundsen. Julie is a senior staff software engineer at Google, working on machine learning infrastructure. Prior to Google, she was the director of machine learning infrastructure at Netflix, leading the team that developed Metaflow, a framework to develop machine learning projects. Prior to that, her experience ranges from working in the public sector on large scientific programs to the first generation of streaming service at Netflix and various flavors of startups. Julie decided to take a career break last year when she was affected by mass layoffs. In this conversation, we talked to her about what it was like to take a career break last year when she was affected by mass layoffs. In this conversation, we talked to her about what it was like to find a job as a senior engineer

while most companies weren't hiring, what it was like to position herself in the market, what interviews were like for a senior role, and whether the interviewers cared about a career break she took. We also talk about how taking a career break changed her perspective towards work and life. Please enjoy this conversation with Julie Emerson. Thank you so much for taking the time, Julie. So happy to have you on the show. I'm glad to be here.

Thanks for inviting me. We've been connected on LinkedIn for like two or three years. Originally, I asked you were interested in joining your team. Didn't quite make the cut, but I was super impressed by how you run the interview process, how you wrote your job requirements. One thing that stuck out to me was the fact that you had sort of all, it was very long, right? It was like five or six pages, if I remember correctly. This is for machine learning infrastructure. And then I love that you had basically, you know, most job recs,

it's like, oh, you know, this would be a great fit if you want to do this, if you want to do this. And yours was really cool because it was like, oh, if this is what you wanted to do, then this is not a good fit. And then you had like sort of all the please do not join my team, right? Like if this is what you want, which felt super refreshing and just had a lot of clarity in terms of what you were looking for. But anyways, so then very recently we came across this post that you wrote about going through your own journey of getting a new job. And then you had these stats, right? About taking like a month from start to finish, you know, have all these chats with like 60 people in your, your

network. And then you also had a huge amount of people reaching out to you, right, like after the post. So maybe just to get started, what made the journey so difficult? That's a good place to start. And before we get into that, I just want to go back to you made some mention of this very long job post. And now you've like, my memory has kicked into gear. So when I joined that team, my predecessor had this document that was like, here's more about the team. And it was a separate Google Doc. And I love that idea. And so I carried that forward. And I really wanted to give people a sense of really like, what are the challenges that this team's facing? What is the impact to the business and what a team member could expect to do? It's something I hadn't really seen. And I'm glad to get feedback on it, because I very rarely

get to talk to somebody who, you know, read it and it resonated with them. So thank you for that. Now the tables have turned in 2022, where I was the job seeker instead of the person hiring. And, you know, when I think about what was most difficult about this eight month journey, was the context. The context was, I had been through a couple years of hard things prior to that. 2020, we see the onset of the pandemic. And, you know, during that year, in my job. And so there were many things going on. And I also at one point, you know, the stress got to the point where I did take a medical leave. And so all of those things combined, I was already in a depleted state. So having to take on, okay, I need to look for a job was really hard in that context. Along the way, there was maybe another hard thing that probably a lot of the listeners are experiencing, which is expectations not matching the reality. When I first began, I had these expectations that I would get an equivalent title or an equivalent level to what I had in my previous job.

And I found out time and again, that when I was interviewing at other companies, they wanted me to take one level down and in one case, two levels down from what I had in the previous job. So I think what I would say for folks who are experiencing this, it is definitely not personal. And it definitely doesn't reflect on you know your skill level your impact and your value it is definitely an artifact of this job climate it's something that I've heard from a lot of people on that's really interesting so they asked you to take one level down like is that even if you're applying for the same, like not like changing between management or IC, like it just happens across the board? Yes.

And I don't know that that's going to happen for everyone, but I'll just say it's actually fairly common. And what I would say in this climate is it would be very hard to take one level up from your current title, you know, by switching companies. So definitely challenges here, considering much of the personal context, as well as the macro job climate. In this case, with respect to making peace with the fact that you're not getting the same job title, initially, how did you come to make peace with it? That, okay, this is not personal.

This is something that just the job climate has to offer at this point, and you just have to bite the bullet and move forward. Right. And I think it was allowing myself the brief pity party of what, you know, why is this happening? And then really kind of readjusting to, wait a minute, the fact that I'm getting interviews actually is a very strong signal that I do have value, right? This is actually something to be really grateful for. So turning towards, you know, gratitude for the opportunities that I have is really kind of the way to see my way through it. And now I'm very happy with where I've landed. By the way, congratulations on the new job. We didn't say that before we

started. And you're a senior staff software engineer at Google. Is that right? Yes. Thank you. Awesome. So I did make the switch to the IC route for probably the second or third time in my career with this jobs change. That is something we would love to explore a little more, but we'll put a pin in that for now. Talking about this titles that you mentioned, in this case, how did you think about the jobs that you're applying for? You did apply to a lot of companies, but there are two aspects. One, the job market isn't that good. Two, you have a ton of experience in the industry and you are a known engineering leader through working at Netflix and other places in the past. So as you were going forward,

how did you figure out the right opportunities you wanted to apply for? That's a good question. And I will say I'm a generalist. I've worked in the public sector on large scientific programs. I've worked on products, the first generation streaming service at Netflix, I've done startups, various flavors of startups, product and infrastructure. And so I don't have really a super narrow lens that I look at for opportunities. What I want to see is, am I going to be in an environment where I feel challenged, and where I have that growth, and the growth usually comes about when a there's a subject that I'm really interested in, and I can see somebody around me who's really good at it that I'm aspiring to. And then B, I'm put in an uncomfortable situation that kind of requires

me to do the thing. So, those are the, you know, across all roles, those are really the ingredients that I look for. Now, that being said, I had spent the last four and a half almost, yeah, four and a half years in machine learning infrastructure. And I knew that that was a fairly hot space still, despite the downturn. And so I really wanted to leverage that experience. So I did focus on ML infrastructure and data infrastructure roles. And I also knew that I was really open to pursuing an IC role again. And I really wanted to get back to a little bit more focus than what I can achieve with a people leadership. However, I wanted to hedge a bit because could I get hired as an IC? So I applied to both people leadership and IC roles. And I think I could have been happy in a people leadership role as well. So I think it's having a flexible mindset,

rather than having a super rigid view on what the role must be. That's really cool. And I think it's quite common, right? Like I was talking to some friends who are looking for, and then sometimes it's kind of adjacent, not quite the same, but maybe one is more like product versus like, you're sitting with a product team versus the other one is with the engineering team practically how does that work like do you kind of approach right if it's a smaller company maybe just being kind of pretty upfront about oh yeah i'm open to whether i see or management like i feel like the team is small or do you literally it's like a two different search? How does that work? It depends on the company. So because I reached a senior level, I was uncomfortable applying for,

let's say a company that didn't have an official senior IC track. So for those companies, I really did focus more on the people leadership roles. And then for bigger companies like Google, that really do have that ecosystem for the senior ICs, I just doubled down and said, this is the direction that I want to go. And I would say also the job of people leadership does change, depending on the stage of the company that you're at. You know, in the past, when I've been at startups, or the earlier days of Netflix, it was much more focused on execution and strategy than it was on, let's say, the process side of things. At a more mature company, you're going to have processes around compensation and promotion and things that, you know,

while they're very important and critical to the business, those aren't the types of challenges that get me out of bed in the morning. Makes sense. In this case, you mentioned that in this climate, just getting an interview was a positive thing, which is true considering everything that's happening in the larger tech space. So for folks who might be in a similar boat, what is a good way for them to think about positioning themselves? So that's one part, just the climate part. The other part is also like going from, let's say, a people leader to NIC. How do you position yourself? And now in this case, you were kind of doing both. So we'd

love to get your thoughts on that. Yeah, I would say it's hard. And, you know, I've been having these weekly conversations, there's a small group of us that formed on LinkedIn, and we're a group of women in tech. And there was a member of this group that was really thinking about changing to a different role. Because that role really matched what she had been doing in her previous role, but her title was different, right? So you have title A, and you're doing job B, and can I get job B at my next company? And what I told her was, you really need to think about what have you done? Because in this climate, hiring on potential is less of a thing than it was in a boom time.

And so you have to really think about what have I done? And what does this organization need and really try to find how you can sell what you've done as value add to that team. So for example, in my case, you know, I joined a team that does not have a background in ML infrastructure for the most part. And because I had worked with the team at Netflix that built Metaflow, and we saw it go from a 1.0 offering to the entire company, and beyond to open source, that was something that I could say, hey, I have done this. And they really wanted to hire me for that experience, even though I don't have a background in the core technology that they're working on, which is Kubernetes. So they were willing to say, well, we have a lot of Kubernetes experts, we don't need you to be a Kubernetes expert. So we need your expertise in ML

infrastructure. So in this case, it was more about finding where that specific team needs a skill set that you can help provide. And I would imagine this conversation would be different with every company you were talking to, because they would have different needs, and it's a different org and would have different expertise in-house. Yeah, I mean, it's very much a matter of finding out what it is they need, what is their ideal candidate, and really trying to think about,

okay, where do I fit in? Where does my past experience shine in this? So in this case, like in an interview process, we think about it like a funnel almost. You apply it to X, you get invited to interview at some percent of X, and then you end up getting a job at some percent of the ones you got the interview from. At this point, are there specific things that people could do right now when thinking about a job search to even get that foot in the door where they can actually get an interview call before they even know more about the team itself? Yeah, this is a difficult one. Right now,

recruiting teams are stretched thin because they have been really impacted by recent rounds of layoffs. And so they may not be the fastest route to getting an interview. And this is really where getting creative can help. In my case, I really leveraged my professional network. And I would say I do have the advantage where I've been in the position of hiring, which has allowed me to meet hundreds and hundreds of people, you know, in these one-on-one calls over the years. And this is actually why I'm on this podcast, because, you know, that's how Gwangi went.

Touche, touche. So having that network helps a lot. And so I really thought about, who do I feel most comfortable with just having a raw conversation with the people that I've worked the closest with and let me start going, okay, where have they landed? Like so many people, for example, that I knew from Netflix landed at a variety of other companies. And I didn't necessarily have it in me yet to have like those interviews where you're being grilled. So I just started with the people that I knew. And some of them had recently been through a job search. So part of it was, can I get referrals into these companies that I want to work for? Part of it was, well, what exactly do I need to do? And how do I position myself? And so in my case, each of the companies that I ended up doing

an onsite with was because I knew somebody in that company, either an engineer or a leader, who could get me in front of the right people to really have that initial manager conversation. So I took a different route typically than going through the recruiter. It's really cool to see that on your post, right? It was like zero applications, 100% referrals. So more just on the logistics, once you reach out to your network, do you first chat with them one-on-one, like how things are going, and then ask them to put you in touch with someone that might be relevant, right? Maybe it's a different team, maybe it's a different work.

And in that case, do you research what job applications are out there? Like, how do you decide who you should ask to be put in touch with and such? Yeah, I think you have to both look at the job postings and ask the people that you know internally, because some job openings are not posted. And so it really helps to have somebody who's internal who can actually find out what those openings are. So I definitely was heavily guided by that internal signal, but it also helps to come to that person and say, these two or three different jobs I'm really interested in, do you

happen to know who's hiring for them nice and the other thing is how do you get over the fear of feeling like overburdening people because for me the only thing that what worked was thinking about referral bonus before so then I don't feel as bad for asking them to help me right because if it actually works out like there's some benefit but then is there any other way that you've psychologically helped yourself to ease the the feeling that way I would say that it's a mindset where you you're trying to build a community, like a loosely knit community, where, for me, I've made investments over the years in these connections in my professional network.

And so it may be like, oh, yes, let's meet for coffee every every now and then we don't necessarily have an agenda, or it could just be through the work that we've done together. And I get asked to do referrals or to introduce people to other people all the time. And so it's kind of a practice that I do. And I feel okay, asking others, because this is really how you build the network and how you leverage it. So I see it as a two-way street. Ronak, if you get a Christmas card this Christmas with a very nice present, that's not because I'm trying to get a referral from you next year, was it?

Sorry, sorry, bad joke. So from the other side, having done referrals for your connections as well, what were the instances where someone came to you to ask for referrals and you're like, wow, you really did your homework and you were very happy to do it versus, you know, it's kind of like, ah, maybe this is not the right fit. It's usually when somebody says, hey, I am looking at this company. Do you know this person? Or even better, I saw that you are a first degree connection to somebody at this company. And can I talk to them? Another route

would be, well, I have this particular job posting at your company, and do you know more information about it? And I'll say, if you're asking, don't be offended if you don't get a response or don't get a response immediately. It's easy to end a conversation. Let's say, oh, we had a one on one. Oh, yeah, yeah, I'll connect you to this or that person. And I believe I've made some of those promises as well. And then I forget, oh, yeah, I need to connect these people. So don't hesitate to follow up because if you do that, it's actually doing them a favor because you're reminding them and they might've forgotten. So you mentioned developing a community, like at Netflix, you were working on Metaflow,

which was open-sourced eventually. And then you also gave many conference talks. That was a way for people to get to know you and people would reach out to you, I imagine, asking questions or you were involved in the Metaflop community overall. And as a leader, you mentioned you were part of recruiting too. So you got a chance to connect with a lot of people in a way more organically as part of the job itself and in the position that you were in. But then there is some amount of investment needed to groom that community going forward so you mentioned like meeting for a casual coffee chat for instance what are some of

the other ways that people can go about doing this where they're not necessarily thinking about like oh today i need a job so i should do this but rather just developing certain practices that they kind of follow as more of a thing that they invest in their career and community overall and some point down the line it might pay off but that's not necessarily the goal so what are some of the things that people can do or think about at least yeah one thing that i have done in the last year or two is make connections with with people who you know maybe are it's a little closer to a friendship where we exchange phone numbers and we text each other.

And it might be like, well, I haven't texted you in three months or six months, but it's like, oh, well, I saw this happened and how are you doing with that? Like, you know, did that affect you? Or, oh yeah, I saw this in the news. What do you think of this? It can be a very light touch. So I

do have a good number of people that I that I keep up with in that way. I will say I'm a very systematic and detailed person. And I do have a tendency to kind of go overboard with trying to organize these things. And I've decided, I'm just not going to, I'm going to allow what's top of mind for me to kind of be the guide on who I connect with and when so I don't have like a CRM system, you know, touch points in workflows or anything like that is more like, oh, this person, I believe knows about about this topic and i'm interested in this topic and wonder if they want to want to chat so i try to try to make it as organic as i can i've definitely seen that popping up on hacker news about having a crm system for your friends

to organize the i was like that's actually a lot more relatable than when I first saw that. To me, I felt like the difficulty was, because I actually used to have a spritch, and I give that up. But how do you sound authentic, right? Or like be authentic in how you reach out. But at the same time, I have people that I really admire different aspects of how they do things or whatever. So I really want to be their friends. But then at the same time, I feel like you have to make conscious effort if you guys don't work together anymore and then there's a lot of distance and such yeah i think you just reach out so

there's somebody that i've worked with in the past who i really admire but don't have like social interactions very often i just said hey do you want to do a virtual lunch? And it took a couple weeks, but we're going to have a virtual lunch today. And I'm really excited that I get to meet with this person who I admire very much. That's cool. That is awesome. That is awesome. Like one thing that I am personally terrible at is keeping in touch with people. But since we're talking today, I'm going to create a personal goal for myself to reach out to someone who I haven't connected with in a while. There you go. Just start with one person. And I would say don't overthink it. My personal opinion is we just have so much stress in our lives. And I don't think we need CRMs.

Yes, overthink. That's a personal struggle I need to get over with. Okay, so moving on from the topic we're talking about, like getting the interviews itself. So at this point, you have a lot of experience in your career and you were interviewing at these positions. Now the interviews are different, I would imagine, for someone who is interviewing for a senior role versus someone who is like entry or mid-level in the career. What differences did you see this time around as you were going through this process? Did some patterns turn out? Well, it's interesting because we've had some pretty good time. Like I first started my career during the dot com burst. I was interviewing for jobs in late 2001. And I think I was sheltered from a bit of it because

I was working at Lawrence Livermore lab, I had made a connection at a career fair. And that just worked out in my favor. And I felt very lucky. And then now 2008, 2009, we had another bubble burst. And at that point, I was at Netflix. And Netflix did very well during those times. I managed to either be at a company that happened to be doing well during those times, I managed to either be at a company that happened to be doing well during bad times, the past two iterations of this, or I was looking for jobs during good times where it was very easy for like your past co workers to go, Oh, my gosh, we're starting this thing,

come work for us. Here's the big thing. So it was very fluid and natural. So despite my being two decades in, this is the first time I've really systematically done a job search. And so I count that as as a privilege. And so what was really different was the level of preparation, the time investment, the amount of stress, the handling so many rejections. That was really what was different. Yeah. And it's interesting that this third time around when you're also making a career switch it's not the best time in the tech ecosystem so that there's a pattern and when you have been switching jobs and hopefully this one is as successful as the last ones have been okay so one of the other aspects is like when you join a new company especially in a senior position at least i believe that it's harder to

succeed or rather odds aren't necessarily in your favor you definitely have a lot of experience but then as we grow we're kind of set in our own ways and expectations are super high when you join and at this point it's it's not always about the potential or the capabilities that you have. It's a lot more about, is this a fit? Whether the way you do things, what you want to do, does it fit with the place you're at? So how do you think about just, let's say, the first 100 days or the first 90 days of the new job, thinking about, okay, how do you go about succeeding? And any thoughts on that line? Well, I'm actually in the first 90 days of just across the two-month mark. So, that's a very good question. I mean, as far as expectations at a senior level and sort of going in and, you know, what's challenging is really kind of understanding

what does this company and this team value? And how are my past experiences biasing my expectations in a way that doesn't match what is being valued. So I think really trying to set aside, okay, what are my assumptions about the way things should work, the way planning is done, the execution, the metrics being used, how decisions are made, you know, I really try to cultivate a beginner's mindset. As far as trying to succeed. And what's the 90 day plan. I'm fortunate to be in a position where my manager is extremely supportive of really build yourself a foundation go deep first, because my job will not necessarily be writing large amounts of code, even though

that's really, really fun. But he's encouraging me will actually go make some contributions to the production code. And that's, that's been really fun. And so I can read all day long. I love reading. I love reading blog posts and how does this all fit together? But there's nothing like having an outcome you're trying to achieve. You're trying to deliver something to accelerate your learnings. So really being hands on as much as possible, that's definitely helped. And I also, this time around, I'm really being more patient. Like I like knowing everything, but I'm just not gonna know everything.

And so I can tend to go down these rabbit holes of, I wanna understand every intimate detail of this thing and sort of having early stopping criteria. Okay, you need to stop that, switch to something else. That has really served me. And then now in the in the current times, having a conversation with your large language model to accelerate your learnings, you know, ask clarifying questions, go to the next level, that's really been kind of a game changer as well. The other thing I'll say is when it comes to accomplishing something as a how you can help them really is a good way to

build trust. Having, you know, one-on-one conversations is also a good way, but there's nothing like succeeding together. And as you interact with your teammates more and more, one thing I was curious about is how do you decide when to ask questions? Because having worked with like senior people that just recently joined, a very tricky balance, I feel, is figuring out like when do you ask, right? Because there's a lot of context you don't know. But then at the same time, I feel like there's a risk of looking like, oh, that's such a basic question.

Is there something that like rules that you use to kind of determine when to ask questions versus like when to try to figure it out yourself? I mean, I just tell people I'm new and I don't know Kubernetes and I'm just going to ask, shamelessly ask whatever question. For like general open source projects,

I might ask the, again, I might ask the large language model to explain it. But for internal things, I'm just like, hey, I tried to read the docs. I'm still not making heads or tails of this. Can you help me out? I do think that what I found is asking questions is kind of like a secret weapon in a way to really level up, you know, not only in skills and knowledge, but also in leadership. I don't really always have visibility into the impact that the questions that I ask can have, you know, like, why is it this way? And then I hear, well, we don't know why it's this way. Maybe we should find out, right? So really, I would say exploit I'm new as sort of the way that you can just ask whatever question you want. And I think it's never served me to pretend like I'm really familiar

with something or know something really well that I just don't. And I think it's just, it's, we're in a fast moving industry. There's too many things to know. The skill of formulating questions is actually the thing that stays around versus do you know this stack or this technology or this language? It also requires some amount of self-awareness. Like recently we had a few people join on the team and I see being self-aware when they don't know something and just asking that with using the, I'm new and I don't know.

The other part is also getting comfortable with coming from a place where they had influence, they were trusted voice in the room. So when they said something, people took it seriously. And in a new place, when you say something, people would want to listen to what you're saying, but if it's not something that they like, or it's not something that aligns with their opinion, they would think twice before saying, oh, yes, you're right. So I would imagine that's an adjustment in a new position, especially in a senior role as you go in?

Yeah, proving yourself. It can be a little exhausting to go, okay, I got to prove myself again. But then I have to remind myself, well, why did I get hired? Well, I got hired because I have knowledge and experience that this team needs and wants. And if they hired me to not ask or care about my opinion, then something else is going on. So I have to remind myself that. Now, when I'm new, I will say, especially in a one-on-one setting, I'll say, well, this is my opinion, like very plainly, this is what I think. And then I'll say, well, I'm not really sure how to how do I get the point across in a way that will land with the team, right? Sometimes I'll ask people for advice, because it can be the way that you're communicating something that may or may not resonate with the team.

And then the other way that's great, again, when you're new, is framing it as a question. Hey, I had this thought, have we tried X? Or what is the intended outcome of this effort, this project? How could we achieve this intended outcome? So questions are a good way to start when you're not really sure how your opinion will be received. And it invites discussion rather than inviting, you know, adversarial debate. that's a really good advice we also mentioned like asking good questions and that being a skill that continues not necessarily knowing a specific technology as you as you go through your career have you thought about this actively in terms of developing the skill set to ask better questions yeah how do I coach somebody else? Asking questions. That's a really good one.

It's, I mean, the thing that I've found that's that's hard about this is, I don't know a way to teach curiosity. I can demonstrate curiosity, but I don't know if I can teach somebody to be curious. I can give somebody feedback on, hey, when you ask this question, what were you trying to get at, and then try to help them reformulate the question. But if somebody is not curious, it can be hard. Now that said, there's a lot of curious people who maybe have been discouraged. They've been discouraged to bring up new ideas and new questions, because they're in a position of, well, you need to execute, you need to get these things done. And I have to kind of bring up to them, well, I've had times where I've asked a question. And then somebody will say, Oh, yeah, you asked that question five years ago. And that really got me thinking. And

then we kicked off this project, there was there was this the first time I left Netflix, there were two teams that were separate. And the way that Netflix was operating with how it was experimenting on the device, you know, that you're streaming on, was changing where I thought these teams needed to be together. And so I wrote like a one page memo as I left, and it was kind of bringing up some of these questions of, you know, how could we be more effective? And not to say that I should claim credit, you know, that this happened, maybe it would have happened anyway. But, but, you know, that reorg did in fact happen, and the teams became more effective. So you never know what kind of value the question can bring. It's not, I think the hard thing is, it's not something

that's easy to put on a resume. Like I asked these great questions. We got, you know, this is my OKR of question asking or the revenue generation of question asking, but it's just a really important general skill. Yeah. I think it's also very hard to filter out in a conversation as well. Perhaps interview is a one, is a way to do that when you're just going through like, here's an architectural problem, solve this and asking insightful questions when you're just trying to problem solve or change how things work. I mean, that's important in an interview too, though. I practiced asking questions in system design interviews, where you're given a vague statement like design a mobile app to do some e commerce thing. And I'm like, Okay, so my first question is, you know, are we going to offer it on Android or

iPhone or both? Where are the customers in the world? You know, are they in a one country? Are they global? You know, what kind of are we deploying it to a cloud? So just asking those questions is demonstrating your own thinking, right? How your mind works and speaking those out loud to the interviewer is a really great way to show what your thought process is. And they, that's what they want to know. They want to know your thought process speaking of interviews so ronick and i had a bet in terms of did anyone ask you any leet code questions during your search but sorry that's kind of a dumb joke but how does that change as you know you become a lot more senior and then do right because when i think about a very standard software engineer interview kind of

you know after the phone screen right you have like three algorithms questions and one system design right like one chat with the manager and maybe extra one talking about culture and such what's that composition look like for like a senior IEC role yeah so the level I was interviewing at I was quite surprised that I was not asked to write code. So there was a lot of system design interviews. And there was a lot of how would you handle this project? How would you get people on board? How would you handle this kind of snag or misalignment? How would you inspire people? How would you help people grow? So there's a lot of sort of leadership questions. And then there's the technical questions. And for me, I'm a preparer, I like to prepare. So I read a book called the system design interview. I can't remember the author's name at the moment. There's part one and a part two, but I did the part one. And I read every single one. And some of them, I would start reading the problem statement, and then I'd start sketching out,

okay, how would I think about it? And when I got to the actual interviews, they were a lot less formal, rigorous and structured than what was in the book. So that was a good thing for me, right? Because I was really nervous about, oh my gosh, am I going to have to like do some weird whiteboarding tool that I don't know? Turns out at this level, they wanted to have a conversation and they just wanted to know how I think and what things come up. So the preparation was probably a lot more stressful. I, one of my colleagues advised me to get on this Slack group. There's a Slack group called RANS Leadership. And yeah, so you may be on there. And there's a channel, a system design interview channel where you can sign up to do pair interviews. And so practicing. So I got paired up actually with a former colleague of mine. So we each interviewed each other. That was great. And then I also asked another colleague who I've worked with at several companies, who I highly respect, to do a system design interview.

And I will say that was the most nerve wracking interview I did because I'm like, oh my gosh, like what if I don't do well? And then his opinion of me is lowered because I don't do well. So because I did that first, it did make the actual real interviews a little bit more approachable. That's funny. In addition to the system design prep, like you're also going from a people leader's role to an IC role in this case. What sort of other preparation did you go through since you mentioned that you like to be prepared when going in?

Yeah, I would normally look at, okay, who's interviewing? What does they know about on their LinkedIn profile? What is the role? And like, try to get a sense of like, what topics they were likely to ask. And so at a minimum, I go like, okay, if that's a topic, like, some of the roles I interviewed were just like, I really have no background in this, like I definitely didn't never wanted to come across as inauthentic, but I could go, hey, here's a concept I just learned about in this space, but I can see how it relates to this other concept that I have worked with. And so make some sort of like analogy or a linkage between those things, so that I could have some kind of intuition about it and, and then formulate more questions

sort of as the interviewer posed the problem to me. So I definitely did that. And another thing is I definitely made a practice of the preparation. So I would treat it like not a full work day. I did not do this eight hours a day because it was too much. But I would have some hours set aside every morning to kind of go over this. And the way that our brains work is if we're trying to learn something new,

spaced repetition is good. You repeat something, you take a break for a day or two, you come back to it, and that strengthens and solidifies those connections in your brain. So I had the luxury of having that time to prepare. Another thing is while you're doing the job search, because just now I'm thinking about it, it feels like startup investing because you're kind of just hoping one will pan out, but then you want to cast your net wide. How do you balance like doing research?

Because like you said, right, you're preparing by looking up who it is or what the team is doing or the role. How do you balance between like doing too much research into something without knowing whether it's going to pan out or not? Is there like framework that you kind of think about like managing that?

Not a framework per se. I actually spent the most time oddly enough doing research on myself because my memory is not great. I don't remember everything I've done. And I there was a period of time where I pulled a handful of colleagues and go, Hey, what have I done? Like, what's what stood out at you? And that also it was an excuse to go, wait, what do other people think I'm good at? And like, how does that match with what I think I'm good at? And so I actually had to spend some time kind of recreating some there was like a some stories, there was a story

about leading this there was I was on the the streaming services team at Netflix, we were working on the services behind the play button. This was very early on when we were doing international launch. And I led this project where we had to surface multiple languages and subtitles and dubbing and different audio qualities for the first time in Netflix. And I completely forgot about this project that I was involved. And I forgot about the details, but I found not only somebody else that worked on it, but some old notes that I had written. So I had to remember like, oh, yeah, I did that. And here was the complexity. And here's why it was hard. I did spend some time researching the interviewers, but not very much. Honestly, it would be maybe a max of, you know, 15 or 20 minutes, either the morning of or the day before

the interview. I didn't go spend an hour watching their talk or anything like that. I would get enough where I could make some comment or some kind of reference to, oh, you worked on this, and here's an interesting connection with that, but not like I'm going to know everything about their background. So you mentioned that at this time you had the luxury of time to prepare and the spaced repetition that helped. We'll go in this direction, by the way, but feel free to skip any question and we can move on. What I wanted to ask was, so at some point while you were at netflix you decided you want to take a career break or at least take a break of sorts how did you go about

planning this because many people did this over the last couple years for a lot of reasons covid definitely was a big context and how it impacted people's personal lives but what sort of preparation would one go through when trying to think about this? Or did you go through if you don't mind sharing? Yeah, this is a really good question. I mentioned at the top about just the previous two years being dreadful and full of hard things. And I was really, really depleted. And it got to the point where I didn't have a choice anymore, in terms of not just mental health, but then I could see physical health effects. And even then, I was terrified. I was really terrified to say, I need a break.

And at that moment, I needed my friends, I needed them to tell me like they were professionals in tech, I needed them to tell me this was okay to do. And, you know, through that, I was able to take that next step to take the break. I do not recommend waiting until you get to that point. You have one precious life to live. And, you know, use it wisely. So I guess the lesson here is, it can work out. okay, like, it'll be okay. If you take that break. For me, while I was on the break, I started to wonder, well, can I even do the job again? Can I even go back to it? Am I capable of this? Do I even have enough energy? And now looking two months into the new job, I'm like, oh, well, of course I do. I'm as energized and engaged and feeling positive as I've been in years, professionally speaking. So it's absolutely possible.

There is something I do want to call out here, which is the privilege that I have. Most of us who are in tech do have privilege in that we can afford to take breaks. And because I've been in tech for so long, I've had this attitude around, I'm going to live below my means. And so that's something that I've had the luxury of doing and because I live below my means it means that I can take a break without worrying oh my gosh can I you know put food on the table so that is a huge component of stress that I don't have that I think a lot of other folks do have. So I don't want to say that what worked for me is going to work for everybody. That is really well said. And thanks for sharing the personal

side of your story. I know this is not an easy thing to talk about, especially in a public forum. So we really appreciate you sharing that. Did this ever come up in a conversation with interviews at companies? Like, did they ask about the break? Does it matter? my resume, the interviewers. Because oftentimes, like, even though it said, you know, Netflix ending, you know, what was it, technically, it ended in August 2022. Because I actually was impacted by layoffs. And so because of that, although I stopped working in June, technically, I was considered employed through August. So the interviewers would see the end date. But they would then in their head, assume that I was currently at Netflix, but you know, I made sure to make it clear that I wasn't there. Nobody seemed to really care that I wasn't currently employed. That's what I noticed too. So I took a gap year to go travel. And then when I came back, like in the maybe 10 something interviews,

it like rarely came up and then one time i think it was that facebook was like chatting with the manager and i was like oh trying to explain oh by the way i took a gap year and then he was like wait what like i'm usually very good about like asking about these things and then yeah apparently just skipped right over it so yeah yeah yeah it's it's very surprising and last question on this like during the break it definitely helped you get the energy back feeling like you wanted to get back into working in tech again did it change your perspective on any aspect from just work perspective? Absolutely. And I think this is a shift that's been happening for me over the number of years, right? Because early in the career, it was like, I need to get

established. I need to advance. I need to grow. And those were the years when my son was very young. And I'm never going to get those years back. And so looking forward, I want to live a full life. And one thing that I was extremely grateful for was most of my adult life, to be honest, I have not had really strong friendships. But the past several years, I've really invested intentionally in those friendships, those meaningful relationships, that while some of while many of them, I will say, have developed because of where I was working, those friendships transcended the workplace. What that meant for me was I felt like my social circle and my social life did not depend on my employer. And I also have things that I love to do. I love to write and I love music.

I play the guitar. Things that matter to me outside of work that, again, I've cultivated. So I felt like losing employment was not tantamount to losing my identity, whereas early in my career, that would have been the case. That is great insight. And so we're almost close to time. And I think that is a really good place to close on. I can't think of a better place to end this on. But before we do end, I would love to ask, is there something else really you would like to share with our listeners? Yeah, I would say really at the end of the day, identify what is your purpose? What in the end matters? At the end of your life, what are you going to look back on? And really craft your own vision around that. Have your North Star that's uniquely yours. and use that to guide your decisions. If you have that, you're much able to take setbacks into perspective.

You can say, Hey, this decision I'm making is in service of my purpose. So that's what I would suggest to anyone, whether they're in tech or not to do. That is beautiful. Thank you so much, Julie. Thank you so much for sharing your journey with us. This was super insightful for us, and I'm sure for our audience too. Thank you so much for taking the time. Absolutely. It's been great. Thank you. Hey, thank you so much for taking the time. Absolutely. It's been great. Thank you. Hey, thank you so much for listening to the show. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about us at softwaremisadventures.com. You can also write to us at hello at softwaremisadventures.com.

We would love to hear from you. Until next time, take care.