Kathleen Beveridge

Journey into High tech and its influence on life:

  • Finance bachelor’s degree
  • Not traditional degree, waited a while before getting MBA

“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.” ― Maya Angelou

  • Worked at several high tech companies, major three HP, Qualcomm, and Thermo Fisher Scientific (current)
  • Started at HP
    • Felt very burnt out and took a 6 month break
  • Switched to Qualcomm after the break
  • Swithced to Thermo Fisher Scientific (current)

Mission Statements

  • HP: Create technobolgy that makes life better for everyone, every,where
  • Qualcomm: Inventing the tech the world loves
  • Thermo Fisher Scientific: Enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer

    All of these mission statements revolve around the consumers and the products they are interacting with.

What does she do?

  • Senior Director in Marketing and Economics
    • Supervise marketing operations of the company
    • Commertialize products
    • Communicate with others

Kris Porter

Engineering Career

  • Software Engineer - SRE, DevOps, Infrastrucutre
  • Engineering field that doesn’t write code all day

Journey

  • UCLA Electrical Engineering - Master’s and Bachelor’s degree
  • Failed CS class second quarter at UCLA
    • Retook and got a C
  • Stopped programming for 8 years, then became a programmer
  • Researched at the center for Embedded Networked Sensors

Jobs

  • Shops that fixed mac computers
  • Data center that dealt with routers
  • Job at start up in 2010
    • Email marketing automation
      • Secure networks, database, passwords, etc
    • DevOps
  • NBC Universal
    • Streaming media infrastructure
  • Switched to a startup at Qualcomm
    • DevOps
    • Working with servers
    • Data collection
    • Automation
  • Twitter

Continous Learning

  • Constantly learning new things
  • Computer networking, maching learning, deep learning, data strucutre and algorithsm, system design for interactions, etc

Q and A

Experience with Agile Methodology

  • Different companies have different defintions of Agile
  • Qualcomm focuses on communication
  • One month intervals
  • Skillset in agile methodology is highly regarded, can get certification

Machine learning at Qualcomm

  • Learn how to use exposed Python libraries
  • Run epxeriences
  • Tensorflow

Data Analysis

  • Predict patterns in the data
  • Use data bases and data science

Most important skill to have in the tech industry (Takeaways)

  • Do what you like, don’t be afraid to change
  • Continuous learning, be open to new ways of learning
  • Don’t be too concerned about the things you read on the news, much is misleading, just focus on yourself and learn the skills you want
  • Take risks, the only risk is to not try to learn
  • Adaptive, your journey, especially your career path will have many highs and lows
  • Listen to the requirements and translate it to how technology will solve/meet those requirements

How to overcome challenges in the tech indsutry

  • Going through changes at Qualcomm, be adaptive
  • Being able to pass tests, tests where you have to make code in a certain time and have it work

Takeaways

This panel discussed a lot of ideas that I had previously not thought about. Much of it revovled around change. A takeaway I had is how important it is to be able to overcome and utilize change. This society is really competitive and always changing as it is developing very quickly. There will be many ups and downs in your career path, so you need to be adaptive and be able to take risks so you can overcome this change. Something specific I noticed that is important regarding change is continuous learning, where you constantly learn new skills and knowledge on an ongoing basis.

Another takeaway I had is how you should focus on your own learning, goals, and skill set. It’s important to focus on yourself and what is best for you. I really admire how Kathleen Beveridge quit her job and took a break when she was feeling burnt out, because this way you can focus on yourself and refocus your goals and leanring targets. Also, you shouldn’t let the media distract or scare you too much, especially since most of the information is exaggerated or misleading.

Overall, I found this panel really interesting and it had a lot of good ideas.