DevOps Diversity Podcast

Lisa Shissler Smith is an Engineering Manager at Netflix and a Director for Women Who Code. She lives near Raleigh, NC with her husband and their 5 children. She is passionate about inclusion and diversity, and has spoken to groups large and small about recruiting and retention. Outside of work, she enjoys cooking, video games, desk dancing, and all things small.

Lisa shares her non-linear career path, from starting out as a librarian to becoming an Engineering Manager at Netflix, one of the most prominent tech companies in America.

Lisa gives advice to those applying for jobs, as well as those who are hiring for their own teams. As one of the 35 new remote managers at Netflix, Lisa shares some insights into the intentionality and communication needed to lead large, remotely distributed teams.

We also discuss the importance of belonging as the next evolutionary phase of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Links mentioned in this episode:

Lisa Shissler Smith on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/smithwebsmith/

Lisa Shissler Smith on Twitter @lisadsmith

Women Who Code https://www.womenwhocode.com/

Netflix https://www.netflix.com/

Tammy Bryant Butow is a Principal SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) at Gremlin, where she works on chaos engineering—the facilitation of controlled experiments to identify improvements. Gremlin's enterprise Chaos Engineering platform makes it easy to build more reliable applications in order to prevent outages, innovate faster, and earn customer trust. Previously, Tammy led SRE teams at Dropbox responsible for the databases and storage systems used by over 500 million customers and was an IMOC (incident manager on call), where she was responsible for managing and resolving high-severity incidents across the company. She has also worked in infrastructure engineering, security engineering, and product engineering. Tammy is the cofounder of Girl Geek Academy, a global movement to teach one million women technical skills by 2025. Tammy is an Australian and enjoys riding bikes, skateboarding, snowboarding, and surfing. She also loves mosh pits, crowd surfing, metal, and hardcore punk.

During this episode, we discuss Tammy's background starting life in foster care in Australia, where she first found her love for technology at the age of 3! Over time, Tammy's natural curiosity and passion for engineering took her down the route of becoming an SRE and an expert in the field of Chaos Engineering.

Tammy also talks about hiring, interview techniques, career growth and the importance of prioritization.

Links mentioned during the show:

Tammy's LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/tammybutow/

Tammy's Twitter @tambryantbutow

Gremlin https://www.gremlin.com/

Gremlin Certification https://www.gremlin.com/certification/

Girl Geek Academy https://girlgeekacademy.com/

SRE Book by Google https://sre.google/books/

Study Guide for Gremlin Certification https://github.com/gremlin/certificate-study-guide

Dropbox Engineering Career Framework https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/overview.html

Marcques Brownlee https://www.youtube.com/user/marquesbrownlee

Larry Quinlan is a principal at Deloitte—one of the world’s largest professional services organizations, with over 330,000 people in more than 150 countries and territories. He has held a number of roles including Global Chief Information Officer, and was responsible for all facets of technology. Additionally, he serves as dean of the Next Generation CIO Academy, Deloitte’s CIO leadership development program for client executives.

In his own words, Larry asks "how does the skinny Black Boy raised on an island of 35, 000 people in the Caribbean, become the Global Chief Information Officer at the world's largest professional services firm?"

Larry shares his leadership philosophy and his beliefs on how organizations can be more intentional with their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. He makes it clear that mentorship and sponsorship have been critical in his career, and that he now knows it is a responsibility to help others in the same way.