Notes

Kathyleen Beveridge

  • Born in Vietnam
  • lived in the Bay Area until 2004
  • Has a finance degree from the San Antonio area
  • Did not have a traditional college degree
  • Goal is to thrive in life
  • Finance major turned investment banker, a common path for finance workers
  • Swapped careers to tech
  • Worked at Qualcomm
  • Company Mission Statements
    • The jobs that she worked at all had a goal of creating tech that would benefit the world.
    • You can see how Beveridge wants to help the world through technology.
  • The jobs she worked at are World Leaders in serving science
    • Said companies have over 100 thousand workers, over 1.5 billion dollars in inventions, and over 40 million in revenue.

Kris Porter

  • Dev ops engineer
  • Livermore High School alum
  • Enrolled at UCLA for Electrical Engineering
  • First computer science class was in UCLA
  • Has a masters degree in Electrical Engineering from Cal State LA
  • Shows that even if something is hard, it could still be for you
  • Timeline
    • Graduated when the stock market was terrible, 2009
    • Worked at as hop where computers were fixed
    • 2010 became a system engineer
    • Worked in NBC streaming media infrastructure in 2012
    • Introduced to Dev Ops in 2014 and started at Qualcomm due to Mr.Mortensen
    • 2021, now works at Twitter.
  • Twitter university which helped him at Twitter
  • Graph QL was a project that he worked on in Twitter.

Q&A Session

  • Different companies have different group sizes
  • Agile is important within projects especially when working with others.
  • Porter is leaving Twitter for Mysten Labs
  • Data Scientists rely on tech workers but tech workers also rely on data scientists.
  • One important skills in the tech industry is continuous learning
  • As long as you keep learning, it is not a waste of time.
  • Best workers are those who listen as well as translate it to how it works.
  • Easier to find a job if you are already employed

What I Have Learned

This was actually very useful for me actually. I am currently a junior and I am not yet sure what major I want, but from listening to Beveridge and Prter today I think that I have a better grasp of the direction that I should head in. I want to do something hands on yet still implementing code so something in engineering with a more electronic side would be perfect for me. Seeing how Beveridge completed a full 180 on how she wants to live her life has helped me to realize that choosing a major in college is not an end all be all for life. Today was interesting.