text stringlengths 0 1.49k |
|---|
**Erik St. Martin:** What about you, Carlisia? |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Same, my CS degree is a graduate degree. |
**Erik St. Martin:** So I'd like to hear the other side of it, because this is interesting. As somebody holding a degree, do you get similar feelings of insecurity when you're around somebody that appears to be - at least from an outside perspective - to have more knowledge than you, that did not go that route? |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I don't even have to be necessarily around somebody like that... Just being around myself. \[laughter\] Literally, every once in a while my confidence goes down to a level -- this happens once in a while, not all the time... Once in a while, my confidence just dips and I have to go on LinkedIn an... |
I have to go and look at my resume multiple times a day for a few days to bring my confidence back... \[laughter\] Has anybody done that? |
**Erik St. Martin:** Look at your resume? |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah, to pump yourself up! |
**Erik St. Martin:** You're just like, "I wish I could be that person... If I was just as smart as that person..." |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** "I'm not a failure, I'm not a failure, I'm not a failure!" |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Exactly! I've done stuff, I'm not a failure, I can do things like these! |
**Erik St. Martin:** I don't know, I think for me -- especially when we're talking about the validation, I feel like sometimes getting the validation makes me feel worse. I feel like almost like the whole impostor side of it, it's like "Oh, crap, it's gonna be worse when it's discovered I'm not as smart as that." |
But speaking to the whole constantly reminding yourself aspect, I'll constantly fight stupid issues, just environment issues on my own development workstation; I'll be like, "Why am I a programmer? Why did anybody give me a job doing this?" It's just funny. |
**Bill Kennedy:** I only have an undergraduate degree, but when I meet people that have PhD's almost in any field, I just respect that so much. I know how much work goes into it, and that can be intimidating for me. But I feel like the undergraduate degree I have, which I got almost 30 years ago, isn't even relevant to... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** But it certainly helped though, right? You have to admit that it provides a foundation. |
**Bill Kennedy:** I think what it helped is not the tech that I worked on 30 years ago, but the problem-solving aspects of it more than anything else. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** \[27:51\] That aspect is very relative, because for me it helped tremendously. I had to go to school and get that degree to be able to be a programmer. Because I'm a woman, I wasn't into gaming -- like I said before, I got into gaming and then got out quickly because I could be addicted to it... ... |
Now, some people have friends or they are on IRC or whatever, they found their niche and they get it from that environment. I think it is good to have a degree in general, because when you go to school it teaches you how to learn, more than anything. It also teaches you to handle a lot of demand in a tight timeline, be... |
**Erik St. Martin:** That's kind of where I go with it too, because I constantly go back to the "Should I go back to school" thing, even if it's not for computer science. Everybody's like, "Well, why would you do that? You've got a pretty good career going for you now. You wouldn't make any more money, or anything", an... |
There's a lot more to be gained from college than just your major, and Marcus kind of brought it up here in the Slack channel, too... A lot of the stuff with algebra and physics, and things... I've lasted most of my career without more advanced math knowledge, but now I'm getting into -- you wanna change and you wanna ... |
You kind of get trapped in these things, but there's also the other side, like interviews. Big O notation - that's asked so much, so... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** There's one dimension I'd like to sort of throw in there, if I may. For a lot of us - and I think Carlisia touched on this a little bit - a degree helps to legitimize our knowledge. As Carlisia says, being a woman, having that degree helps in a way, because it helps her sort of stand out in the e... |
Speaking as a black man, I know that I didn't need a degree -- actually, I got my degree way late into my career, but I noticed certain things, certain subtleties... Until I got that computer science degree, it's almost like I wasn't legitimate in the eyes of some. I saw I needed to do that. So for some of us, it's not... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** That's a very good point, that Johnny brought up. I actually wasn't even thinking about that... When I mentioned that for me as a woman it was good to go and get a degree, what I had in mind was, "Where else would I learn it?" |
\[31:51\] My friends weren't doing it, they weren't even interested in computers; I didn't have that environment around me, so for me to get that, I needed to go somewhere "official". But now that you said that, I just wanna add... Pretty much the same thing you said - if I didn't have a degree and if I had learned on ... |
I remember two or three years ago I was interviewing with a company that pinged me, I thought they were interesting, so I went and talked with them. One of the programmers there, he looked at my resume, he looked at me and he said, "Why are you interested in programming?" So at this point, I've been programming for ten... |
For people who interview me, don't ask me this question, please! \[laughter\] I mean, seriously! I'm going for a programming interview, I have been programming... It's one thing, "Why do you like programming and wanna get into it?", but you got into it, you kept doing it for years... You could get out, right? But no, t... |
The point is, the degree really helps people look at my resume and say, "Okay, she really is into programming." People wanna hire people who like what they do... So it's a big deal. |
**Erik St. Martin:** It's actually interesting that in the era that we're in now it still carries a lot of weight in job descriptions and hiring. I spent five years or so as a senior engineer at Disney, working on really high profile stuff, and one of the managers who became my manager partway in -- it's funny, we had ... |
But I think it also carries weight for us internally, too. You use it as your own internal gauge, right? Like, "When do I know enough? When do I feel qualified?" If you're self-taught, you don't have that gauge. Nobody gave you a certificate and was like, "Yup, you know everything you're supposed to know." |
**Bill Kennedy:** Out of all of the talks that I have right now scheduled for this year, the one that is freaking me out is the one that I got invited back to my college to give a couple of talks to the students in the faculty. That one is freaking me out. Freaking me out. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** You have to inspire, Bill. |
**Bill Kennedy:** I know, but I really don't feel like I should be standing up in front of the faculty, telling them anything. I think it ties back into the fact that they're PhDs, faculty there... I don't know. I know it sounds crazy, but impostor syndrome x 1,000 right there. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** It's real. |
**Erik St. Martin:** It's interesting though, because when you go to a talk -- let's play the other role of it, right? When you go to a conference and you attend a talk, are you looking for that entire talk to be nothing but new information that you did not know? Or does it have value if you just walk away learning one... |
\[35:48\] I'm willing to bet for most of us it's the latter; there are some people who have much more stricter scales, but for the most part we just wanna learn something. It's probably unlikely that you're gonna get up in front of people and everybody in the room is gonna know everything that you're about to say to th... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Let me say this - when I want to learn a subject, or want to learn a subject better, I get two or three books, at least, because I wanna have different takes on the subject. If I'm listening to a conference talk and that conference talk has material that was talked about at another conference, I ... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Judd White in the GoTime FM channel brought up a good point, too... He said that he thinks the audience is often a lot more forgiving than you think. I think I would go out on a limb here and say that they're always more forgiving than you think. We like to put in our head that somehow our lives ar... |
But everybody - and we've talked to the speakers at GopherCon, too... Everybody here wants to see you do well. There's nobody in the audience hoping you fail. And even so, even if you mess up, most people don't even notice. They're too busy in their own minds and worlds, and if they're that engaged in your talk, then t... |
I think that's the great aspect of it, just to consider it in that terms - even if you did extremely bad, it's not gonna affect your career and life, it's not over. The next day, nobody even remembers. Everybody's leaving the conference or the meeting excited about something. Nobody's leaving all pumped up like, "Oh my... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** For me, when I look back at some of the most inspiring talks I've seen at conferences, I don't remember the highly technical ones. There might be one or two that might have basically opened my eyes to a whole new different way of doing things, but it's nothing that I couldn't have found out of ev... |
Going back to what Carlisia's saying, "What is their take on it? Tell me something, walk me through a journey... In the 20-30 minutes that you have on stage, walk me through something, give me a perspective that I perhaps have not had, that more than likely I've not had because I don't have your context, I'm not in you... |
Learn to tell stories. If you get anything from this whole podcast, as far as I'm concerned, is if you learn to tell stories, you find your voice in there, because then it becomes yours, you own it. You're telling your story, not just regurgitating a bunch of technical facts; try to make somebody feel like they were th... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, share your passion with the world. It's like a smile, it's infectious. Some of my favorite parts about going to conferences aren't the learning. Like you said, you can watch that video later, there'll be a blog post. Going to the conference for me is about the exhilaration; everybody around y... |
\[39:57\] You come out of it with a fresh mind, and that's what I love the most about it. Anybody who can engage and tell a story and share their passion with me, I can connect with that. |
It is time for our second sponsored break. |
**Break:** \[40:18\] |
**Erik St. Martin:** So we are back, and just before the break we were talking about giving presentations and engaging the crowd and sharing your passion. Bill, you were about to say something... |
**Bill Kennedy:** Yeah, I think I would like to see more conferences get rid of the Q&A after a talk. If I've ever had a bad experience, it's during the Q&A. That gives somebody an opportunity to just not be everything we've just talked about, right? About you being up there, and -- oh, questions kill me, man... And I ... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Matt just said he'd be in favor of not having questions, so we actually have no questions at GopherCon this year, at all. We did panels last year, but we've been slowly cutting them out. We're trying to find a way to make it work, because I think people want to try to ask questions, but to Bill's p... |
I remember when Adam and Jerod from the Changelog first interviewed Brian and I for the Changelog about GopherCon 2015 - I remember being paranoid for like a week beforehand because I didn't know what they were gonna ask. Nobody likes to feel like they are unprepared; especially in those situations, being in front of s... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.