Kathyleen Beveridge:

  • Born in Vietnam
  • Came to California in 1980
  • Finance degree from Santa Clara University
  • Started off as a stock broker working for Wells Fargo - didn’t enjoy her life
  • Felt like working in investing had more of a “one to one” impact, less of a “one to many” impact
  • Switched her path to work at tech companies, originally at HP, and then Qualcomm, now at ThermoFisher Scientific
  • Works closely with engineering/R&D department to determine if new products fit into a certain market
  • Mainly works at companies that use cs to serve the world
  • With cs people can make macro-impacts on the world
  • Thermo fisher is a biotech company that blends science and cs

Agile Methodology:

  • Always working in short “Sprints”
  • Being familiar with agile is highly regarded in the workforce

Kris Porter

  • Software Engineer
  • Went to UCLA for electrical engineering
  • Masters in electrical engineering from Cal State Long Beach
  • Finished grad school when the stock market crashed, couldn’t find jobs
  • Found a job at a startup doing DevOps work
  • Moved to NBC setting up streaming infrastructure for the Olympics
  • Worked for Qualcomm for 6 years
  • Latest position working for Twitter
  • Going into high tech involved continuous learning which is very important

Agile Methodology:

  • Different companies have their own version of Agile
  • Interacted together with 150 engineers in large meetings
  • Created roadmaps for all projects no matter the size
  • Helped build teamwork and coordinate everything

Machine Learning:

  • Develop algorithms to try and predict trends and consumer trends
  • This can save the company money

Most Important Skill in tech industry: continuous improvement and learning of new knowledge.

  • Don’t be super concerned about the things that you read on the news
  • The best people are people that listen and translate it to technology that can solve your requirements
  • Learning how to code is a way of thinking, thinking about it critically, and you can apply it to all your real word skills and experiences