Transcript
Vignos: A couple of years ago, I had the great chance to get to go to the Galapagos Islands. This is a photo of me standing in this very prehistoric setting with dozens of Galapagos Islands tortoises making their way to this watering hole. We were all standing there, and then all of a sudden, this particular guy starts walking very slowly toward me, and we were instructed not to get too close to these tortoises. I was like, what am I supposed to do? The guy said, just stand perfectly still. I stood perfectly still and he just moved past me. It was awesome. It was such a cool experience. These guys can live to be over 100 years old. While I am not 100 years old, sometimes in tech with 27 years of experience and with the rate of change that we’ve had to experience in the last 30 years, sometimes it feels like 100 years.
Looking back, I am amazed and grateful at all of the different opportunities I’ve had to land in the right place at the right time. I’ve caught technology and hiring waves that have carried me to all kinds of new opportunities. Part of that has been all about staying open to change. As just one of many examples, I just pivoted to a brand new before this unknown to me industry, finance, two years ago. Even 25 years into my tech career, I’m still experiencing steep learning curves. I’m here to share some stories about how I’ve stayed relevant in the tech industry through my career, and worked at the edge of innovation for all these years.
The first question I wanted to ask this group is, who thinks there’s going to be more software engineering related jobs with the advent of AI? You think there will be more jobs in the next 10 years? Then, how many of you think there will be fewer software engineering jobs, who are the pessimists, in the next 10 years with the advent of AI? It’s mixed. I think the point is, the future is uncertain. We don’t really know. How are we going to make sure that we continue to evolve for this uncertain future? That’s the heart of this track, sociotechnical resilience.
Career Journey
I started my tech journey after an initial start as a structural engineer designing buildings for earthquakes, but then I pivoted into technology consulting. I did enterprise software implementations. I worked at a startup. I did 10 years of freelance full-stack development. I led the tech department at Wired magazine, and managed several different teams at Twitter. I have been at Capital One for the last two years, leading the architectural transformation of two different business domains. We’re using real-time processing, using ML models, building on serverless principles. It’s a very modern stack, even though it is a bank. It’s been awesome. I feel like every step of this way, I’ve gotten to be close to where the action has been. I wanted to talk about three defining moments for me. The stories I’ve chosen are the ones that through coaching of senior engineers and engineering managers are the ones that have resonated the most.
1. Personal Resilience
On to the first example. First, we’re going to talk about personal resilience. The story I’d like to tell is that I joined a telecommunications B2B startup in 2000. This was in the dot-com boom. The company had rapidly grown to 200 people. I got recruited for that job in an airport because people were throwing jobs around. It was one of those times. Almost a year into the job, my partner and I, feeling really good about our prospects, decided to take all of our money and buy a house in San Francisco. Even then, it felt extraordinarily expensive.
Then, two days before my one-year anniversary, I announced to my team that I was pregnant. We’re going to have our first child. Isn’t it wonderful? Then, two days later on my one-year anniversary, which was a coincidence, and on a Friday, not a coincidence, these things usually happen on Fridays for a reason, I got laid off. I had to take my box, go to my desk, pack up my stuff, tears streaming down my face, and walk out the door. Like, what just happened? We definitely did not see that coming. I’ve got a big mortgage, I got a baby on the way, no job. Back then they were stock options, not RSUs. On your one-year anniversary, everything vested, and I had to pay all the taxes on the stock that would eventually be worthless. Fantastic.
Step one is about dealing with loss or failure. This book by William Bridges is called, “Transitions”, and it’s helpful for all kinds of transitions in your life. I didn’t have this book at the time, but I’ve since read it. There are some nice frameworks that he introduces for dealing with failure. The surprising thing is you have to start by ending. We usually just want to rush to like, ok, I got to get a new job. Of course, I did. I rapidly tried to get job interviews. Then I started showing, and it wasn’t going to happen. This ending period is the loss of the predictable future. It’s a grieving opportunity. You have to disengage. You don’t get to go to work anymore with those people. You have to disidentify yourself with that company, with that job. You have to start to reconcile like, who failed: me, the startup? How do I feel about that? It’s super disorienting and confusing. Once you’ve grappled with all of those emotions and feelings, then you can move into this neutral zone.
Again, it’s a thing we do not enjoy, being in limbo. You’re still stuck in uncertainty. You have unresolved questions. You can be directionless. It usually lasts much longer than we are comfortable with it lasting. Again, you don’t want to rush out of it because you need to let things grow. Eventually, you do get to the beginning and you know you’re at the beginning when your energy returns, your motivation returns. You start to feel creative. You start to be ready to experiment. What happens if you don’t go through this cycle? We’ve all heard about rebound dating. If you’ve just had a huge breakup, do you run out and marry the very next person that you date? No, you do not. You are in a situation where you’re not likely to make good decisions. If I had rushed through that process, I might never have importantly reconciled with that failure.
For me, it was realizing this startup went from 200 people to 30 people and eventually got pulled apart and sold off. It was the startup that failed. There wasn’t a lot in my control. You have time to think about like, what could I control? What could I not control? How much of this was me? How much was outside of me? By doing that assessment, then I have a good sense of what happened. If I hadn’t done it, I might hold a lot of shame. I might not be able to talk to you about it right now. Like, “I got laid off. That’s a thing I have to hold secret. People might think I’m terrible”. That’s not true. I don’t feel shame about it. Like, that’s a thing that happened. By getting over it, I can take more risks, because I survived this, I can survive another thing. In my case, I had a few months to think about what happened. I had our baby. She’s wonderful. She’s now 23 and working as a product manager at a digital health tech startup. We ate beans and rice. We made those mortgage payments somehow. I was able to move on to the new beginning.
Let’s talk a little bit about, what do you do in the new beginning? For me, it was about play. Again, I’m a big reader. You’re going to get a few different book recommendations through this talk. In this book, “Play”, Dr. Stuart Brown has this great quote, which is where play allows us to develop new skills, adapt to novel environments, and improvise in the face of uncertainty. We’re talking about AI, uncertain future. You’ve seen animals at play. Dogs, dolphins, bears famously play. Why do they play? It’s because when they’re playing at fighting and wrestling, they’re preparing for what might come. They’re getting ready to do it for real.
Also, another important aspect of play is our use of our imagination. When we were children, you might have thought you might be a superhero one day, or you imagined you’d be a doctor, or you imagined you’d be a ballerina, or you imagined you would be a senior software engineer. That same imagination that we use as children is the kind of imagination that we need to think about new routes, new options. What can we do differently? What can we do instead of the thing that got taken away?
How did I play? My daughter was about 6, 9 months old, and I got really itchy, got to use my brain, curious person. I started teaching university classes in SQL for business. I did a freelance graphic design project for a friend, even though I am a total graphic design hack. I took a bootcamp fitness class, and started running. I’ve run 10 marathons since then. I started developing a restaurant menu in the Palm Pilot SDK. Anyone old enough? I taught myself how to build database-driven web applications, because I had taken some web development courses in my technical consulting days. That was really cool. As I built those, I was like, I think I’m onto something. I love this. This was in 2002.
From an e-commerce perspective, less than 5% of what is now e-commerce today in terms of what was sold on the internet, was being sold on the internet in 2002. I did not know that I was going to get on the most incredible journey and have a set of technical skills that would be super-hot for the next two decades. That was definitely a right place at right time decision. The layoff led to this incredible pivot that changed the rest of my life and gave me a new perspective on what happens when things don’t go your way, and was better than the thing that I had planned.
The idea here is, just imagining multiple paths for yourself is very important. Opening up different options. How you deal with failure is your key to resilience. It becomes the foundation for your future successes.
That builds confidence, and it displaces the fear. Again, I failed before, I survived. What have I got to lose? Also, you might notice this has a better system of redundancy. Like in our distributed systems we don’t want single points of failure. Do you have single points of failure in your career? Like, what happens if the path you have planned isn’t going to work out? To me, the core trait here that I was developing was adaptability. I would like to take a little moment for you to locate yourself with respect to adaptability. I would like you to think about how you generally react to surprises, or when things do not go the way you hoped. You planned a big event, and something happened. You’re on vacation, things fall through, the weather is bad, whatever it might be. Just take a second, think about, how do you react to surprises? Now I’m going to have you rate yourself. ChatGPT and I developed the following adaptability scoring system.
First, I want to have you give yourself one star if you’re resistant, if you rarely are comfortable with change. You prefer your routines, and you can get a little overwhelmed or frustrated by unexpected challenges. Give yourself two stars if you’re cautious, and in times of change, you prefer things to go small and gradual, and you need a little extra time to adjust, and unfamiliar situations might make you feel uneasy. Give yourself a three if you’re flexible with guidance. You’re able to adapt to new situations with guidance or support. You’ll adjust your routines and learn new skills if you’re convinced and can see the benefit. Give yourself a four if you’re proactively adaptable. You adjust smoothly to new situations and challenges without much direction. You embrace new ideas and see the opportunities.
Finally, five, you thrive in a dynamic, uncertain environment. You adjust rapidly to change. You seek out new challenges and approaches without prompting. You embrace others to embrace change. Do we have anybody here who loves change, like super high five? Good for you. That’s super awesome. Early in my life and career, I was a one, A-type, A-student, things must go my way, total control freak. I think after all of my experiences and a lot of growth and maturation, I’m probably a four, and that’s been super helpful.
2. Technical Resilience
The next area of resilience we’re going to talk about is technical resilience. In 2012, fast forward, I transitioned from 10 years of full-stack development freelance work on my own, solo, to an in-office job as part of a team as a software engineer on the Wired tech team. I was 15, 20 years older than my male peers. They were in their early 20s. I was in a totally different life stage. I was a mom. I had major imposter syndrome, despite having 15 years of technical experience. Maybe you’ve seen the Dunning-Kruger effect, heard about it. I want to work with this chart a little bit as we discuss learning curves. This describes this idea that at the beginning of the learning curve, first you know nothing, you’re at 0, 0 point on the axis.
Then you start to learn and you get excited because you start to figure things out. You get to this place where you think you really understand things, but you really are only good enough to be dangerous. That’s the peak of Mount Stupid. We’ve met these people who just have this much knowledge and they know it all. They think they know everything. You get to this place and then suddenly you realize like, there’s this whole other part of this thing that I’m learning, and now I realize how incompetent I really am. You fall into the valley of despair. That’s this pink dot. As I had this happen to me, I started on the team. I started closing bugs and working through the backlog. I was like, this is good. I’m doing good.
Then I realized there were a lot of complicated factors and libraries that were involved in our site, and started realizing just exactly how hard this journey was going to be. I fell into the valley of despair. I really had to get myself to lean into the struggle. One of the ways that I did that was, ok, I’m not going to ask my tech lead for the answer before I have tried at least three things. Winston Churchill has a great quote here, “If you’re going through hell, keep going”. That’s a little bit about the valley of despair.
Then there’s a point where if you stick with the learning journey, you can get to the pink dot, which is a level of competence and confidence that’s pretty good. I think at this point you have a couple different options. You can decide to become a guru, which is way over on the right-hand side of competence, or you can decide to go back and pick up a new skill. You’re going to have to go back to the valley of despair and feel stupid again.
It’s right for some people, and perhaps many of you, to pursue the guru path. We have a lot of senior software engineers here, and if you’re on this path, that’s great. I just have a couple pieces of advice. I would just pay attention to the thing that you’re investing in and its demand in the marketplace. What if you invest in the wrong thing and you are clinging to a technology that’s going away? Your chosen tech specialty, where does it land on the wave of innovation? Are you on the leading edge? Are you on the tail end? Are you an early adopter? Have you arrived after everybody else got there first? We’ll talk about that more.
This chart, also generated by ChatGPT, so I can’t be responsible for any of these hallucinations you may encounter. I think it’s directionally true that if you look at languages and their popularity over time, in 2000, C was the most popular language, in 2010 it was JavaScript, and now it’s Python. I’m just using this to illustrate that there’s not very many things that have stayed the same for 30 years, or even 20 years. Can you think of something that’s the same over the last 30 years? Anyone? SQL. That’s a good one. I’m not saying there’s none. SQL, any others? I thought of Unix, because like, command line interface.
At one point, I was learning Unix and I was like, this is so backwards. No one’s going to use this. We’re all going to be using graphical user interfaces to design our software applications. No. There are a couple examples. I’m giving you a laundry list of all the ones that have changed over the last couple decades. I have experienced moving from virtual hosting and managed private servers through ISPs to self-hosting in either a co-located facility or a DC, and then now mostly on cloud. Different OS that was popular with the developers.
First, it was Windows. I did everything Windows. Then, I started at Wired, I was handed a Mac. I had a Mac at home, but developing is different. You have all your shortcut codes, keyboard shortcuts. I had a little code I had to relearn all my keyboard shortcuts in Mac. Market-leading browsers have changed. It was IE, and then it was Firefox, and then it was Chrome, and now it’s whatever. You got to do your browser compatibility checks. Version control. You’ve probably never even heard of Mercurial and Subversion, but we changed those over the years. Now we’ve landed on GitHub. Seems to be sticking. That might be one that lasts. JavaScript, famously. How many JavaScript frameworks did we have to go to, to land on React, Vue? APIs went from SOAP to REST, now GraphQL. You get the idea.
What’s the point? The point is, you might not want to wait around for the laggards to catch up with your chosen focus area on the technology adoption lifecycle. There are still systems running COBOL out there, and yes, you absolutely can find your niche being a COBOL programmer right now. The fact is, there’s not a ton of industry demand, and it’s going to narrow the options that you have available. This talk is all about opening up and expanding options. Over here at the beginning of the curve, GenAI, we’re coming into the maybe early adopter phase of that. I think for my career, I’ve been mostly early majority or sometimes early adopter. I was at the first React conference. Probably, you have some thoughts about this and where you land. QCon as a conference, the attendees are mostly in those early adopter, early majority, so I’m assuming that’s most of you.
Let’s talk a little bit about choosing breadth. The rate of change that we have to deal with in tech is why I personally did not decide to invest in that extra 20% of competence to get me to the guru. I instead have cycled through a million times from knowing nothing to a level of competency. I’ve done years in backend, years in frontend, years in infrastructure, and distributed systems work, ML projects, data and privacy protection, like these different opportunities as they’ve come up. I wouldn’t say that I ever had a plan of the sequence of how those things, because the higher you go, the more you have to take the opportunities that come when they come, and they’re not necessarily in any order. You get them when you get them. That’s given me a chance.
The reward to living through the valley of despair here is you get to start to combine a broad knowledge across multiple areas. You can see patterns across disciplines, and think holistically and apply lessons from one area to another that specialists might miss. This has been my strategy. I became a generalist. Again, here’s another book, the book, “Range”. I really like this quote from David Epstein that illustrates the point, “The more context in which something is learned, the more the learner creates these abstract models”. You’re not just relying on a tutorial or a particular example. Like, I know how to do it just exactly this way. You become better at applying your knowledge to a situation you’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity and certainly something we will need with AI. This is why I can work at Capital One with no prior financial industry experience, because I’ve seen so many different technical challenges and worked across many different industries, so I can recognize the patterns.
Throughout the journey, I’ve really paid attention to my curiosity. That’s what I’m calling the core trait here, to figure out, what’s the next thing? It’s a mix of curiosity and opportunity. When I was working on promoted tweets and tweet translation at Twitter, I really wanted to better understand scaled distributed systems. When the opportunity opened up for me to move to the platform engineering organization and really get down into compute, network, storage, I took it. It was an amazing, very steep learning journey.
Again, we’re going to locate ourselves in terms of curiosity. ChatGPT and I, we have a scoring system for you. I want you to think of one or two recent emerging technologies. It doesn’t have to be AI. That might not be the best example. When new technologies have emerged through your experience, what’s tending to be your response to that? Do you write it off as a fad? Are you, “I can’t think about that. I’m too focused on what I’m doing now”. Or, do you immediately bookmark six articles and four YouTube videos and get excited about going to learn this thing? Give yourself a one if new ideas or concepts can feel like an unnecessary distraction. You don’t have time. You don’t have interest. You’re busy.
Give yourself a two if you’re minimally curious. You occasionally explore and ask questions, but you generally stick to the familiar areas. You feel a little hesitant or uncomfortable with the unfamiliar. You prefer areas where you can be the expert. Feels good to be the expert. Three, you’re moderately curious. You show interest in new topics when presented to you. You ask questions. You seek information, but you need a little external motivation and a clear reason to dive deeper than the surface level. Give yourself a four if you frequently seek out new information without prompting. If you ask insightful questions and dig deeper to really understand. You explore subjects even if they’re not all that relevant to what you’re doing today.
Then, finally, five, you have an insatiable desire to learn. You’re constantly exploring a wide range of new ideas. You ask challenging open-ended questions. Enjoy finding connections between different topics. You don’t need the external motivation. I’m pretty high on your curiosity. I don’t know if I’d give myself a five, but I’m high. The problem with five can be, there’s actually too many things I’m interested in. Then I’ve got to narrow it down, whittle it down. I’ve got the to-read list forever long of all the articles and things, the podcasts I want to listen to, the videos I want to watch. You can do all the things, you just can’t do them all at the same time. You have to choose.
3. Organizational Resilience
Let’s talk about organizational resilience. This is a little bit of my story about what it was like to work at Twitter during 2022, and particularly the day a famous person bought a 9.2% stake in Twitter and everything that followed. This famous person started tweeting about whether Twitter supported free speech, in March of 2022. Many replies said, he should buy Twitter. He became the largest stakeholder in April. Then it was announced that he would be on the board. Meanwhile, some Twitter employees were tweeting their feelings about this, and one of my direct reports got targeted by media and doxxed. That was super fun. Some colleagues started to leave Twitter. Our CEO then tweeted that this famous person would not be on the board.
Then the stock started to fluctuate, going up or down by 30% day-to-day. It was crazy. I’m looking at my portfolio like, ok, what is going on? Then the famous person made an offer to buy Twitter and that was going to be decided by the shareholders. Twitter adopted a poison pill to try to block the sale.
Then, the famous person started criticizing the C-level executives. They also got targeted and doxxed by the media. We had these crazy last-minute all-hands meetings, like it’d show up on your calendar day of, you’re like, “Great. What’s this going to be about?” More colleagues were leaving. People got random magical promotions, like, don’t we have a promotion process? No, this person’s just been promoted to a director. There were sudden executive changes. We had to freeze hiring. I had to rescind offers. That sucked. You get the idea. I left Twitter in August, a couple months before the new CEO started in October, and a few months before the mass layoffs that we all saw in tech, which started happening into November. It’s almost like I had a crystal ball. I did not, but my timing turned out to be good.
Beyond that roller coaster of emotion that I just described to you, it felt like news bombs were just dropping on us every day. Every day I was learning something either in the news or on Twitter, not communicated internally, that had dramatic effects on my everyday work. I was leading several teams in cloud productivity and infrastructure automation. We had an AWS contract and a GCP contract. What’s going to happen to those? Are we doing that? Our roadmap’s blown up. I’m getting those questions as a leader and I’m not getting direction. We talked about doing projects that would keep the tweets flowing, because at the end of the day, no matter who owns this company, the tweets must flow. Anyway, the org chart, you saw it in the news, executives are departing. I described some of the changes. You would reach out to somebody on Slack and they just wouldn’t be there anymore. Like, that’s the person who knows the thing that I need. It was pretty crazy.
What did I personally do during that time? What should you do if you’re dealing with that sort of tumult and drama? First of all, focusing on the basics. I definitely was like, I have to manage all of the stress. I’ve got to make sure I’m sleeping. I’ve got to make sure I’m exercising. I’ve got to make sure I’m eating. I’ve got to have good support at home with my friends and my family. Then, second was perspective, and so another book for you. I felt like I needed an example of a leader who led through a lot of uncertainty. I chose Winston Churchill. Now, I understand we were not actually in dire fear for our lives. I don’t want to minimize what happened in World War II with the Blitz in London. It felt like that to me. To read a book that had a lot of scenarios of a leader leading through a traumatic thing, was super helpful to me.
The thing I took away from that book is that Winston Churchill did not sugarcoat the challenges that the Brits were facing. For me as a leader, I wasn’t going to go to my team and go, everything’s going to be fine. Why are you worried? It was like, yes, this sucks. This is super stressful. Let’s talk about how that feels and see if we can get through it together. Winston Churchill also gave voice to facts, acknowledged how people were suffering, and then offered hope. Ok, here’s how we’re going to get to the other side. Finally, I made sure I had an escape route. That’s the next thing we’re going to talk about too.
My advice to you here is you should be ready before you need to be ready. I did not know any of this was going to happen, but it turns out that I was already just making sure I had open options. Back November of the year before, I was ready for a change. I was ready for different scope. I had been in our platform engineering organization for four years, and I was like, what’s next? I was looking internally. I was looking externally. I don’t want you to take away that you shouldn’t be fully invested in the place you are, and that you should always have a foot out the door. That’s not what I’m saying. You do want to know what the market is, and you do want to know what’s out there.
Job seekers, I want you to know that 70% of people were hired at a company where they had a connection. Your network is important. Keeping alternative roles in mind and maintaining and growing your network is very wise. This conference is a really good time to do that. You never know. I actually met a guy at a conference, and we have helped each other find all kinds of other jobs. We just hit it off at a conference. Here’s your big opportunity to grow that network. The other funny thing, LinkedIn, have a resume. Two of my last three jobs were cold calls from LinkedIn. Wired, I didn’t know anybody there. I’m telling you two stories.
Sometimes it’s the network, and sometimes it’s just putting yourself out there and having your information in a place where people are looking for you. Wired, I got through LinkedIn, and also Capital One. My point here is around resourcefulness. When all your tools and all your network, for me, like the Twitter network of all my friends, they weren’t in a position to help me. We were all going down together. I needed a bigger, broader network. Outside of that, I needed to be very resourceful. What were going to be those resources that I was going to be able to tap into?
Let’s talk about resourcefulness. I’m framing this as how you react when you need to solve a problem alone, all by yourself. Give yourself one star if you’re dependent on others. This is very common at the beginning of your career. Like you don’t know anything, and you need people to train you and teach you and mentor you, fine. This is struggling to solve problems independently, really relying on other people. Getting stuck when the normal tools or resources are not available.
Give yourself two stars, if you’re limited, you can work independently if you have a playbook, and you can follow the playbook. You tend to follow standard procedures and instructions without thinking of workarounds or other options. Give yourself a three if you’re functional, you can solve straightforward problems independently. You can effectively use basic resources. You occasionally explore alternate solutions, but you do prefer familiar methods. You take some initiative. Give yourself four stars if you make the most of available resources. You’re pretty creative. You consider multiple ways to tackle a challenge. You often find unique ways to achieve results.
Finally, this is MacGyver. If you’re old enough to remember MacGyver, he could disable a bomb with a paperclip. These are the people who can repair something with duct tape. You thrive in challenging or ambiguous situations. You frequently find innovative solutions, and you can do that with limited resources. My experience is founding a startup where I was doing a retail startup, and I didn’t know the first thing about retail or wholesale. I had to learn all of that stuff. Also, those 10 years of working freelance web development with no backup, nobody else, just by myself, taught me a lot of resourcefulness and working on my own to solve problems. That built my confidence in my ability to be resourceful and scrappy when I need to be. I probably started as a one like most of us do out of school. I don’t know how to do anything. I need my tech lead to lead the way. Now I’d probably give myself a four.
What does all of this have to do with AI? We’re here at a conference all about trends and about AI especially. There’s lots of talks about that. We know that AI is poised to change most areas of our lives.
This graph is all about 15% to 35% change in education, safety, employment, shopping, transportation, entertainment, cost of living, home, income, environment, food, nutrition, personal relationships. We’ve already changed the nature of personal relationships by swiping left and swiping right. I don’t know what the next one is going to be. Do we believe this? Yes, look at the way the internet changed our lives. Look at the way smartphones changed our lives. How is AI going to change our lives? How are you playing with this in your personal life? Are you using ChatGPT all the time? Are you taking a picture of the ingredients in your refrigerator to figure out what to make for dinner tonight? Are you, like I did, putting together a talk and chatting with ChatGPT about ideas, and like, let’s have a scoring system. Ok, that sounds cool. I’m trying to play with it as much as I can in my everyday life.
Even search today, I was like, now that ChatGPT has a search capability, it’s got more real-time information than it had. Where’s QCon? It’s at the Hyatt Regency. Which Hyatt Regency? Did anybody go to the wrong one? I hope not. I’m playing with it all the time. I hope you are too, because again, we have to adapt in all these ways. What about technical resilience? The number of public generative AI projects on GitHub has gone from about 5,000 in 2020 to almost 150,000 in 2024. 30x increase. How is AI going to impact your current areas of strength? How are you using Copilot or tools that are similar? Are you still doing things manually that you could do with an LLM? Are you playing? Are you experimenting? Are you building an AI wrapper? Are you building an AI clone of yourself? Are you building a bot? Are you figuring out how the APIs work? I’m sure there’s a zillion talks that will tell you how to do that.
Then, finally, what about the org chart, organizational resilience, and what does it mean for our jobs? With the rise of agentic AI, for example, we’re seeing AI agents that are developed with specific skills and personas, and we can orchestrate these agents. We can have a coding agent, a debugging agent, a testing agent, a scanning agent. I just picked those ones. There’s a whole bunch of others. What’s that going to mean for the org chart? What does it mean for the ratio of software engineers to product managers or designers? I’ve got, like I said, one daughter who’s a product manager in her very first job, and my son is a computer science major, he’s a junior. I’m thinking a lot about, what are they poised to do? What is their future? Is there going to be a lot of jobs? Is there not? I don’t know.
Another thing I want to say here, if your job gets automated away, how are you going to pivot? Through a lot of my career, maybe some of you as well, I’ve actually been pretty consciously trying to work myself out of jobs. Does anybody resonate with that idea? All those years of building websites, I would build websites and then hand it off to the client and say, here, now you manage your website. Here’s all the tools. You’ve got a backend and an interface, and you don’t need me anymore.
Then in a leadership position, it’s the same thing. As a leader, I want my leaders to take my job, and that’s all about how I coach them, and then step away and delegate. Then, at some point, you don’t need me anymore. Then, AI will automate a certain number of tasks and things that we do. I believe, and at least so far, it’s been true every single time, that when I’ve worked myself out of a job, there have been no limit to other interesting, creative things that I can do instead. I totally believe that that’s true. I try not to be fearful in holding on and clinging to the thing I have today, because as the Twitter example showed, it can slip right through your fingers, no matter how good you are, no matter what’s going on. There’s a ton of ambiguity in all of this. We can’t predict very far ahead. Instead of worrying about that, I’m confident that my resourcefulness is going to see me through. Hopefully you will feel that as well. That’s how I would hope you would feel, is confident.
Conclusion
The giant tortoise, he’s evolved in ways that have allowed him to live for 100 years. I’ve been evolving for almost 30 years. How are you going to evolve for the next 10, 20, 30 years? The fact that you’re here at a conference to learn suggests that you agree it’s worth investing in your personal, your technical, and your organizational resilience. Consider your scores. Think about where you have some work to do, and then use those skills to outlast your predators so that you can be around in 2044.
My name is Kathleen Vignos.
Questions and Answers
Participant 1: You talk about the learning curve, and the value of this curve, and how after some time we become guru. With the pace of change of AI, do you think we will have gurus in 10 years from now?
Vignos: What do you think? You work a lot in AI. I’d love to hear your point of view. You talked earlier about AI. Do you think we’ll have gurus?
Participant 1: I think, at some point, we will need to be comfortable with living in the value of this curve, and learn to thrive there.
Vignos: Tech’s always been like that. If you don’t like change, why are you in the tech industry? I think that’s becoming intensified with AI.
Participant 2: In terms of your leadership, these experiences and the focus you’ve had on personal resilience within organizations, how does that influence your leadership style building resilient teams, or supporting individuals in being resilient within your teams?
Vignos: We talked about adaptability. It’s a lot around change management, usually is how it shows up. Let’s say you need to make an organizational change. It’s going to change people’s manager, for example. That’s always a really sensitive one, because if you like your manager and you’ve built up a relationship with that person and they’re this close to promoting you, you do not want a new manager. At Capital One, there’s a ton of change. This company has been around about 30 years, and there’s pretty frequent reorgs. Is that true everywhere? It was true at Twitter. It was true at Wired, lots of reorgs. I think about how do we work people through change? How do we communicate early about what we know so that we can develop trust?
Let me give the Twitter example. I think one of the things I was very disappointed about was our leaders just weren’t saying anything. While I understood they couldn’t, there were all kinds of probably SEC reasons why they couldn’t talk to us. They could say, we can’t talk to you and here’s why. I was just longing for those words so that I could at least know, because if you don’t give people any information, they go to the worst possible, most dire imagination. I think as a leader managing through change, I try to imagine the terrible fears that people have and allay those fears. Examples would be, we would like to centralize teams in a certain location. Let’s just take that. Some people are sitting over here and they’re not included, and they see the vision. They’re going to go, what about me? Where am I going to land? Being able to proactively say, we are thinking about you. We want you to be able to continue the work you’re doing. We want you to continue to be part of us, and we’re going to help you make a transition to other teams.
In fact, we have some things in mind about how that could land. That’s how I try to lead as a leader through change, and that’s how I try to coach my leaders to lead people through change. Don’t say, ok, here’s the layout of the reorg, with no communication plan. Who are we telling? When are we telling them? We don’t want people learning through the grapevine. I heard the whisper-whisper, this thing. The earlier you can tell people and you work through a logical plan, the better.
Participant 3: I see some tension between the use of AI and the investment in AI and the learning resilience aspect of it all. How do you see a resolution to the tension of using AI to do things that you don’t necessarily want to go learn deeply, but also needing to be the person who learned something deeply? How does one resolve that tension between those two competing tools and personality traits, or however?
Vignos: I think I’m interpreting your question to be, how do you decide where to invest your time and talents if every single thing is at risk of going away? I think that’s what so many of us are all grappling with, because it is moving so incredibly fast. I don’t know if you’re feeling the overwhelm of AI resources. Even at this conference, how many talks about AI? Everybody’s talking about it and there’s a ton of noise too. You could waste all your time listening to the same old thing over and again in noise, or you could find resources that tap into what’s on the edge. How do you hold the tension between the tools being new?
For me, it’s been about not being dogmatic. I’ve had that experience of working with folks who have a perspective. I have found the tool that rules all the tools. It’s new. It’s awesome. It’s going to solve all of our problems, and an unwillingness when there’s then immediately competing tools, because that’s the pattern. Somebody is the first, but then very quickly competitors emerge. It’s like, no, this is the best. I’m not going to look at those other ones. People were so all about Firefox, for example, or Chrome, and then Firefox came back and there were people I worked with who were like, this is the best browser, it will always be the best browser. That’s just fundamentally not true. Not getting stuck, seeing like, browsers are a thing. There are many tools in the category. How can I be flexible to not be so dogmatic about a tool? I don’t care about the tool. Let’s take ticket management systems. This is a favorite one. It’s not really AI related. You hate Jira, fine. Lots of people hate Jira.
The idea that you would spend a whole bunch of time redoing all of your ticketing and be different than the whole rest of your company might not be a great use of creative time and energy, especially for a developer. Like reinventing that wheel, I’m like, it’s just a tool, it’s a ticketing tool. I don’t really care about it. I just want to use a tool to do the thing I need to do. To wrap up, the tension, yes, I would say not being too dogmatic about dying on the hill of your favorite tool or technology.
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