Breaking Barriers in DevOps: Chhaya Gunawat on Resilience, Innovation, and Empowering Women in Tech – Tech.Strong.Women. EP38

Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Techstrong Women, sorry, where we feature amazing women doing amazing thing in tech. I'm Jody Ashley, executive producer here at Techstrong, and I'm here with my co-host, Tracy Reagan, creator, and CEO of Deploy Hub.

And, you know, Linux Foundation enthusiast. I like to call her. Uh, before, before I introduce today's guest, I wanna give you a quick update about Techstrong.

com and see what we have upcoming that might interest you. We're always looking for sponsors and speakers, so be sure and check those out and reach out if you're interested. If, Tracy, what's on your mind today?

Well, I figured we'd pick a, to, I'd pick a topic around DevOps, um, considering our guests for today. Uh, but this came through my feed. So, GitLab, um, you know, everybody is familiar with GitLab.

We're all familiar with GitHub actions, but GitHub, gi GitLab recently a announced something that they call CICD steps. And this is a different, a different way to manage workflows and using inputs from one step, uh, a and our outputs from one step is input to the next step. Now, the reason why I find this interesting is because I have spent the last, it's not always about me, but, uh, I have spent probably the last two years evangelizing CD events.

I know because we have come to a crossroads with the DevOps pipeline, that they are so scripted and so brittle that we're struggling with even even adding any security into the process, like an sbo. And on top of all the security issues we're having now we're having AI introduced into the process, which is gonna need even different types of testing and types of management. So we have to, from a DevOps perspective, we as a community have to fix this.

And I applaud GitLab for creating their CICD steps, which is more of a language than a plugin process to their platform. So, yay, we then that should be our, I really wanna talk more about that, but I'm gonna pass it over to Jody to introduce our guest today. Alright.

All right. I, it wasn't as controversial as usual. No, Tracy always likes to pick fun stuff that's in the news that's making her angry.

So, you know, I was thinking maybe there'd be the word cloud strike in there somewhere or whatever. But anyway, I am excited to, um, introduce our guest today and I'll let her introduce herself. Her name is Chaya Gun, and, uh, tell us about yourself.

Sure. Thanks everyone for having me. Thanks, Judy.

Tracy for introducing me to Techstrong Women. Uh, I've been in this industry for over 17 years. I graduated back in 2007 and I moved to States back in 2012.

And currently I work at Amazon and DevOps is my area of interest, and I'm so lucky and so privileged that I work in the same area. And I do share the excitement on the topic Tracy just mentioned because this is our day-to-day life, and we are trying to juggle how to be in line with what changes in the industry with ai and also keep ourselves up to date with what changes we can bring it to make the things better in the DevOps arena. I've been in Amazon for over, uh, four and a half years.

I work in the cloud division, like just said, to get you the, those words of cloud. And I'm on the optimized storage side. So that's pretty much my background looks like in the industry.

And as all women, we always underestimate and under, under, um, we don't brag about ourselves, but, uh, if anybody wants to look at your LinkedIn profile, they'll see that you've been around and you've done some really interesting, um, things even in infrastructure. So let's talk about, uh, you know, I want our audience, I've talked about this a lot, but I want our audience to understand some of the challenges that we as a DevOps community have with adding new tools to the pipelines. Yeah.

Can you give us an idea in general, we don't have to talk about AWS in particular, but in general, where you've seen pipelines, how many, how many workflows? We're talking about updating, what the challenges from a cost perspective, from a team perspective, and from kind of changing the tires while you're driving down the road perspective. Exactly.

So that's, uh, that's exactly the area that I wanted to focus on. So we need to understand where DevOps coming to. Historically, any time a development of a product or a feature is done, that's when the DevOps comes into picture to deploy it, to release it, and to get into the customer's hand.

And usually those process are like legacy process. They've been here for a while, and then there are changes, like you said, we are changing the tires where the car is moving. But DevOps is such a critical part of the business that it's actually the one ensures that whatever customers are asking for, they're getting it on time.

Having said that, DevOps has evolved over time. Like I have seen the days from ClearCase. There's a tool, a CM tool where we used to one at work at one site at a time to going to gi, which is like a global distributed system.

So the, and one challenge that I see is the business hesitance towards stage because we want to ensure that the ongoing things doesn't get break. Of course there is a scope to improvise things, but there is a risk associated with it. And that's what I see as women in the DevOps area.

We have more risk appetite because the way we evolve in our day-to-day lives, we are multitasking, we are picking up kids and we are taking the meeting. So as long as we can still run the DevOps pipeline and see, can evaluate what we can pick up to make the things better. So yes, I do see the businesses evolving, the challenges around the risk involved and the trust that whether the new incoming things like you mentioned about GitLab, it's, it's a very pleasing initiative from them.

It also would require some more work to come up with the user stories to kind of gain the trust so that the industry would starts to evolve. And one of the topics that I want to introduce, and I think I touched base with Tracy a year ago and she guided me very well, is how do we connect the dots? So AI would DevOps or anything to do with CICD and glad that I have, I followed her advice and I continued my work and I'm presenting at a conference in Korea about my first of the presentation of how we can bring the dots together.

So yeah, I definitely would see the hesitancy of business for the change, but we should evolve it and keep exploring how we can make the things better. One thing, uh, I also want to touch base is we also need to think the legacy work, how we can deprecate and evolve with the new incoming technologies. So, you know, uh, the last, um, state of Cloud B'S report or state of Jenkins, um, report that came out, CloudBees said that they support 90 million workflows a month.

Yeah, 90 million. How many in a, how many workflows would be average for, uh, an enterprise, say the size of an AWS or NetApps, um, that, that you worked with before? Uh, you know, how many, is it five or is it 50 or is it 150, or is it 500?

I would say that less than 10% of the number that you're just thrown it, because most of the stuff are probably the legacy work, which nobody knows where it came from. Nobody knows where it used from, but it just works. So we don't want to touch it.

So that's the reality. We don't want to touch it if it's working, it's generating the revenue for the organization. We don't touch it until somebody breaks and complains about it.

10% other workloads which are being actively used, which are ready to adapt the changes, and which can be the pioneer for the chain that we want to bring in the DevOps arena. So do you think as we evolve from DevOps to DevSecOps or even bringing a AI tooling into the DevOps pipeline, I'm assuming for most of those, the ones that don't, they're just working, don't touch it, we're not gonna ever see SBOs for them. We're never gonna update that security pipe that, that that workflow, uh, to add security tooling.

Would that be a, uh, a correct assumption? So I would say till two months ago, I would've agreed to say that, but with the recent cloud strike, uh, outage that we had, things have changed. Companies have started to open up and the work related to security has, the effort has increased.

I, I cannot even tell how many companies reaches out to me to evaluate their security workflows. So the things that we've been talking about that we don't want to change if it's working fine, but companies are being mindful about the security obligations that we have. Having said that, along with the AI regulations, I mean, I I have bunch of stories.

Oracle advertising does shut down a business because they have a legal lawsuit. And now this cloud strike, uh, event that has just happened, which has shaken up the industry, and that's where Linux Foundation gives into picture because it was a Windows bug, it was not related through for Linux or the other, uh, Unix operating system. So I have seen the shift is happening, the conversation is starting to open up around DevSecOps.

So DevSecOps is going to take over, uh, in the race of AI and security together because we want to ensure as DevOps owners that the services that we own are secure. The security patches that we are deploy creates the least of the hassle for the customers. Yeah.

Can you imagine, um, I brought this up in a Techstar game, can you imagine being one of the Delta DevOps engineers or even developers who have been given all of these gates that they have to go through in order to get something into production? Yeah. And then, and then CrowdStrike comes up and updates something really, really low level without having to do any of those steps.

I was, you know, that that, that story baffled me. Baffled me because, And have you read the, have you read the RCA that they have given it's another point exception. That's, that's One.

I mean, That's big, right? That's Even big. That's huge.

But Why, why, why did, why was CrowdStrike outside and maybe they have their own DevOps and testing process? I don't know. But you would think that there would be some sort of a different process that said, you know, and maybe even Microsoft should have been in the middle of all of that at that time.

You know, where is the culpability for that problem? I don't know. But I do know if I, I was sitting there as a Delta employee or any of the other companies were impacted, knowing that I worked with a company and I'm not allowed to do what they just did, it would be really frustrating and I would be very angry about it.

Right. And I think it divided the industry into two groups windows versus the next, the battle that's been on ongoing for ages. And I think people have started to realize that, you know, with this cloud changes, do we also have to look for alternate for Windows and Linux?

And I mean, it's all together, different conversation, but it did clearly bifurcate the issues, which is more potential to problems. And I think one of the areas, what we've been, we've not been talking in any industry for a while, is whenever something changes, which is not in the control of customers, who is responsible for the damage, right? CrowdStrike is being bumped up with the, uh, with the lawsuits.

Like Delta did a lawsuit of multi-billion. There might be other customers, right? But of course there's a bug that happened, there's no question asked about it.

But historically they were trying to do the right things. They were trying to protect the customers around the security issue, which led to the problems later. But having customers data in secure hands is equally important.

Do we know why Delta was affected for so much longer than everyone else? I mean, everyone else seemed to recover fairly quickly, but Delta, I mean, it was four or five days later and they still were not able to get their flights going and all that kind of stuff. That's a good question.

And I don't know the answer to it. I do know that they had a lot of servers they had to reboot though. Yeah.

Lot. And you know, I don't know what a lot is, but it took 'em, you know Yeah. 40,000, 50,000 servers out there that you'd have to reboot.

It's gonna take some time. And I don't know if it was that many, but it potentially could, right? No, it potentially could.

And I almost feel like that, um, boo boo, we'll just call it the oops, uh, may change the way that companies like Delta and others think about hosted cloud environments. Do you think this will drive them back to having their own environments and not using a hosted environment? Right.

And that is also, uh, a conversation that I've seen in industry happening. So there are two things. What I can see as a trend that is happening.

One is companies are starting to see, does having a distributed complicated environment is giving the benefits that we want? Should we go back to monolithic, monolithic meaning everything running on a single hose? It could be metal, it could be the latest hardware still hosted by the cloud providers, but we have the control.

It's in our campus, it's, it's sold. So that is one conversation that I started to see happening. The second thing is companies are trying to see whether it makes sense to have our own data centers.

Like Bank of America just did it. They did it couple of years ago and they said, we will go to cloud, but we'll have our own private cloud. So I have seen that the shift discussion has started to happen.

Companies want more control about on their infrastructure, but cloud providers are also having a middle solution where they can still have things in their control and they can remotely, we still be managed by the cloud provider. So there are many solutions that, that has been available. Well, I feel like when I heard that story, and I kind of read through what occurred, as much as I could understand, because again, I'm like, how did it, how did anybody allow it to get out?

It made me realize that while we've been talking about DevOps for a long time in application, at the application level, we don't necessarily talk about DevOps at the lower levels. Right. At the, at the, at the, uh, operating system level or where these agents are being added.

Right? Uh, and, and to me, that tells me that maybe DevOps has gotten a little bit pushed, be pushed back, people aren't thinking about it as much. Um, we do have a lot of old DevOps workflows, as you pointed out, that we don't wanna touch.

And we're, it is, it's actually, it's it's gotten, it's forgotten in, in, in many ways. And I feel like there should be a, there should be a new revolution of DevOps tooling that can support more. Exactly.

So I would say it is also on the DevOps people and the team. Historically, we are used to, of taking all the heat and the pressure when it comes to us. So I can say that we need to start speaking up for ourselves.

We, how, how many times, Tracy, have you seen a DevOps engineer in a project initiative meeting? They think we are not required. They will not go in a product launch meeting.

We also have not been asking the right set of questions. For example, I can say that in 2007 when I started my career, like 2000 7, 8, 9, I was just taking, here is a release, please build it and deploy it. I never ask questions like, what's in the release?

What is the purpose of it? Is it really required? Can this be automated?

Right? But I never asked the question at the right time, but here I am at 2024, the question that I asked, the first thing is, first of all, I start the conversation right at the beginning where there even start of the thought. Uh, we need to ask the questions at what about the infrastructure?

What about the security? What about the timelines? What about the automation, the testing integration testing, unit testing.

So it's also about the mindset of DevOps, uh, people resources to get involved right? In the beginning, make sure you're here and make sure the teams take action items and deliver it. And then you get to time to design A-C-I-C-D, which is more involved, less manual effort and less pressure on you and your team at the end.

And you can reduce the customer pain points, which can happen because of release bugs. So I think tooling is evolving. There are a lot of automation available.

Now it's time for people to evolve as the mindset, You know, that it's, that's a really good point because when CICD pipelines first started getting built, and many of them are still running in, you know, running to support production applications, they were built very organically, organic, you know, one and every development team probably developed, you know, created different types of pipelines that did different things because we didn't really define clear standards. And like you said, we're not often, and DevOps teams are not often invited to a production release meeting for an application, right? And now we have decoupled environments.

So we had little tiny pieces being moved all the time without clear impact. And I think that that CrowdStrike, if they had understood possibly the potential impact, maybe they would've controlled it a little tighter. So another i another kind of metrics that I feel like is important as we go into how DevOps and ai, what, you know, what does an AI DevOps system look like?

What should it be doing? And in my world, one of the first things it should be doing is being, it needs to auto remediate vulnerabilities. But to do that, you gotta have an sbo.

I mean, I would, I would say that that statement is more about the action. In my case, what I'm trying to do is identify me where the vulnerability exists. Remediation is more of a step.

Step one is where we, we need to identify where the problem lies and then remediate that. So I think AI can truly help us because we do have tons of data. I mean, any organization for safety reason, they've been backing up data for which has not been used.

Every organization that I've worked with has petabytes, terabytes of data. Data. And we know we have a data, we can train a model.

It requires right investment, right mindset, identify where the problems are. Once you have a list of problems, then we can think about are all the problems worth solving it? They may not be.

You pick top five problems, which where you can see a data is leaking or a security potential, this thing fuzzing is required. And then you make a list and then we can think about the remediation. So I think identifying where the gaps, uh, and DevOps can very well help on that because I cannot imagine any company has been running without DevOps.

It's just that DevOps has not been leveraged outside the area of typical release deployment. Well, Jody, you can see why I was happy to have Chaia come on. Oh, of course.

Geeked out when we first met, uh, at, at a Jenkins world, and hey, did you hear the news? Um, que KK is back at CloudBees. He is launchable company got bought by CloudBees, which which means he is back in the fold.

So maybe even though his launchable is a product around testing and it uses AI to do so, maybe DevOps will get exciting again, because, you know, CloudBees drove a lot of it. And as I always say, Ko K was the heart of CloudBees, and I'm so glad that he's back there. Yeah.

So am I. We are, I already have him. I already have him hooked up for some stuff.

So, you know, that means I have better access to get him on tech strong and, and, um, have him chatting with all of us. So I have a question for you, Tracy. And I love to dig a little deeper beyond just what we're, what we do.

How, what made you wanna be an engineer? What made you, you know, is this, when you started as a kid, did your parents encourage you? Did you figure it out in college?

What got you to this point? Jaya? Oh, it's for me, I thought you said, Oh yeah, I know what Tracy's up to.

So for me, I would say, uh, I, I was a good student, but math was the only area which is slightly better than others. So Slightly math. Yes.

Yes. I will not consider myself as the most brilliant student and think you, So math was slightly better. And I think when I was, um, and I come from a family of very strong working moms, uh, and in India, being a developing country, having moms that are working all the time was kind of like the first generation of working moms.

So it was very hard. There were la uh, less resources. Mm-Hmm.

But there was this passion, uh, about we need to build something out of it. Uh, so my mom kind of pushed me to think about something that I can do better. And engineering that I was a very, uh, non feministic arena.

I mean, I, I do not want to differentiate based on the gender, but that was the history. So that's how I got introduced to engineering. And then we had an entrance exam, and then I got into computer science back in 2003.

And I did, well, I mean, I graduated in four years at the timeline, I would say. So that's the kind of definition of me being a student and how I land up in DevOps is because I'm a kind of person who liked to get involved everywhere. Like, I never know.

I wanna know what is product way, what is the release? I want to know what is the leadership vision look like. I want to know what are the customer.

So development will put me in a shell of just working on one feature and just being care about only that thing. DevOps is that area that kind of gives me the holistic picture where I can be there asking people the question which they don't want to get asked to write. And then where I'll be the first person to get the data, customer issues.

So that's kind of overall, uh, perspective that I wanted. And then, uh, I would say DevOps is something, is it arena, which I can relate it as a women also because we are trying to do multitasking. We are trying to be everywhere.

We are not an expert in an area, but we can handle 10 different things. We are very good at handling pressure. Like you can think about a kid's score gone wrong or your husband get impacted, you still have a household to run and you have a career.

Mm-Hmm. And in, and same is divorced where this AI evolution is happening. Your team is under pressure.

There's a high attrition rate, and then there are product commitments that you have to deliver. So I think I'm very fortunate that I work in an area which such or resonate with my personality and my area of interest. Well, now I know why you and Tracy are like buddies because she's exactly the same way.

Yeah. To hear her say the exact same definition of herself that Yeah. You know, and, and it is true.

I mean, women definitely can multitask, right? Uh, that's one thing we're really, really much better at than our counterparts in the world. And handling pressure and handling pressure.

I have seen, uh, women handle much better under pressure. They can take the right decision with the right mindset. Even when the pressure is really high, they don't lose their temper.

They are more under control, I would say, or the situation. That's why I encourage women to try the areas of like DevOps or deployments or automation where you can deliver much more and then you'll be happy. And then of course, it can be challenging.

It can go beyond the boundaries of work-life balance. And of course, I mean, nine to five is all we wanted. But I don't even imagine Tracy being logging off at five o'clock.

I'd say my day is done. I don't think so. The World has evolved from that.

So I do want to kind of encourage women. So look around those, those mindset and boundaries and explore yourself in the other areas of engineering where you can contribute more. I think, you know, the description that you provided, uh, has to do with a person is very curious.

Yeah. I, I always wanted to understand how all the pieces fit together. Yeah.

You know, when I first got a laptop, when I first got a computer, a desktop, first thing I did was opened up the case and looked at everything and pulled all the parts out. Why? I don't know.

But I wanted to know what it was doing. I wanted to know how it worked, you know? So I was very curious about how things worked, which is how I got into the build space, right?

In, in being writing make files and, and, and scripts. 'cause how did those things get put together? And I'm, I I, I think that a lot of women, um, have that curiosity.

So if you're a woman who watches our show and you're a developer and you have that curiosity, DevOps is a really, really good space. Uh, and there's no matter how quiet DevOps becomes, it's always gonna be there. 'cause it's so critical.

It's so critical to the software factory. We, you can, we can't have a software factory without a DevOps pipeline, even if they're old and they need to be revamped. Right.

And I also want to add it to that, that even though industry is seeing a little stability around hiring, but if you see DevOps is still an area which is still on the hiring mode. Like we are hiring organizations that are hiring. And if in case something goes wrong, you as DevOps person would be in the latest stages of anything, people have to let go.

So you can think about that area itself. It's a high demand, high pressure, but it is also a area where there's still a lot of scope to kind of ramp up in the career. Boy, there is a lot of scope.

We have so much to work to do in this space. We really do. And I, you know, maybe it's gonna evolve to a new name.

It started with configuration management, then it went to application lifecycle management, then it went to continuous integration, and then it went to DevOps. And I'm probably missing an acronym along the way, but it's evolved and it will continue to evolve. Um, but let's get back.

I, this is a question that I'm really, uh, you know, I ask everybody, we talked a little bit about the DevOps and ai. Yes. And you pointed out the amount of data that we have.

I say that all the time. Um, I mean, Bitcoin have founded on the idea that we need to start gathering the deployment data for every release, snapshotting it, and looking at differences, right? When it comes to adding AI to the DevOps pipeline, can you think about the, that that core data and what those metrics, what the metrics and metadata should look like?

What, what's super important? You know, we used to have door metrics, right? And door metrics has those metrics have to evolve.

It's not just frequency of deployment, for example, because we're deploying all the time in, in a, um, a decoupled environment. So what do companies, what are, what are, what are, you know, what's the directors and the, the, the, the c-level folks asking about today when it comes to deployments and DevOps in general? So One, uh, there are two areas to look at it, right?

One is we have this historical data, uh, and then we have the data, which is still incoming, which we are storing it, but storing it in an older format plan. So with ai, we have gone from RDS sql, uh, sorry, structure to non-structured data. So it's not, we, yes, we have the data particularly requires a lot of work to get into the model of AI where AI can understand it.

So I do want to add, we have the data, but it may not be the right data for the AI model. It requires some work like data by cleaning. But we are releasing, uh, every companies, all the organization are releasing very frequently.

So the data that you have in coming, you can start building a small data. For example, let's assume any company releases weekly or biweekly or monthly, whatever release logs that you have, whatever artifacts that you're generating. For example, if I'm a CSUITE exec and ask like, what confidence factor do you have in this lease that it is going to be successful and you'll not get into any surprise issues.

So that confidence factor, we can very well get it from the ongoing release, like just a month data, get the console log, the metadata will look like what was the release, what are the features? How many, uh, success rate that we had in the past, what is the success rate on this new release based on the release content? It's, it's a very straightforward AI pipeline to build based on the logs that you have, probably couple of weeks of an effort.

And then you start to get in to see that, that this is the confidence factor that I have. And then you go back to the C execs and then say that, you know, there is release, I know you want to push it out, but it's a risk. Have your con concerns be shared If there still a decision is being made to continue and deploy, that is a business in usual, but start getting it from that start to build the release confidence.

And as a DevOps engineer makes yourself educated with the AI tools. I don't think a lot of people are starting to understand we are just hiding away in bushes so that companies will hire AI engineers to kind of build the DevOps gap. No, that's not going to happen.

We as DevOps engineers need to learn, get the data, generate the metadata, and just get one metrics up, which is a release confidence, and then we should be good. I like that term, the release confidence. It's a good term to release, you know, the confidence factor.

So there you have it. Everyone, if you're in the DevOps world, there's so much work to do, you know, and we, you know, building policies into this building, you know, risk management and all the security tooling, it's gonna take some work. So, you know, DevOps is definitely not dead.

It's just not the shiny new tool that everybody's chasing because they're all going, oh, security, oh, ai. And who knows what's gonna be next, right? It's, you never know.

Yeah, I, I would say that, you know, Judy would think, like, I'm always contradicting with Tracy, but I have seen the other way around. DevOps has not now become ML ops. So ML ops is the new fancy term.

And every companies that wanting to adopt ai, they need to have infrastructure and they need to know how to manage that infrastructure. So I would say the DevOps, the term is kind of revamping itself. And then we have a lot of work to do.

It's not outdated. It just that the system and the tool and the people need to get up to date with Watson coming. Yeah, a hundred percent.

I don't think we've seen a change. You know, there's been waves of change in software. You know, we went from the mainframe over to, you know, um, screen scraping on PCs was still the mainframe.

And then we went to server, uh, you know, um, farms and real, real, you know, distributed app applications, distributed meaning not on the mainframe. Um, and, you know, then we went, you know, during that time we went from flat files to databases, you know, a SQL databases. But this, this wave with the security problems that we have facing us and the push, push, push daily drip to do ai, do ai, do ai when we don't even really have, I mean, there's AI testing out there, but not everybody understands how to use it yet.

We are under the gun. And I've never seen DevOps and you know, all through covid, I've never seen DevOps engineers so stressed out. You talk about being able to manage stress, they had, you know, regardless of a man or woman, they were try to teach the kids and manage production releases all sitting from home trying to learn to use this new environment that we were gonna be in.

Not at the not at work. Uh, it was a stressful period. And I feel like Covid kept us from evolving in a way we need to, to meet what the demands of today.

So we, the DevOps community in general, I totally believe that we are behind, um, the ball and somehow we have to get caught up. And that's why I brought up the, they get labs, CICD steps and a new language to get away from, uh, you know, plugins and Right. They have workflow scripts because this is not gonna be, this is not gonna serve us in the future.

It just can't. It, it, it, it's impossible, Right? And we need to evolve ourselves.

The world has gone back to normal. Uh, but in going back to normal, we are not going back to the normally the way DevOps used to work our world is this, this new arena that we are around with and we need to ramp up ourselves and be good at being here at and raise concerns at the right time. So we had another guest, she worked for Manpower and she indicated that during Covid, women really took a hit in technology.

Are you seeing women starting to come back? Are you, are you seeing more women? Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of.

No. So I, I think that, you know, there is this thought about, oh, nobody's hiring. I was like, it's not, yes, companies have reduced or maybe slowing down of hiring, but let's, again, there's one position across, and there's like a hundred applicants.

Can you make sure as a candidate that you are there in the list of people who get shortlisted? So women are also kind of taking this heat that, oh, industry is not hiring. And I'm not up to the man, so let me just hold on to the market gets better.

So I do want to kind of challenge people to kind of get your best foot forward to be in the workforce because we are in the middle of technology shift. And if, if you are out of the workplace in this technology shift with the, with the thought that companies are not hiring, then the, there's a different battle that we have to fight after a few years. So womens are not coming back.

The reason for thing is they have this fixed mindset of companies are not hiring. My advice to all of them is, yes, the hiring has slowed down. Put your best forward, learn the new things that are coming up.

Don't be shy away from giving interviews in the area which you have not worked before. Um, you may find some, you know, position adjustment, like from senior engineer to an engineer or from a VP to a manager. But be in the game.

Don't sit on the stands back in the field. Get yourself round up. The kids are back in school.

So summers are opening up again. School season will be back. The things would get back into normal.

The things that will get affected for the longest time is your career and is your mental health, the the thought that we have, that we are not there and we are home. Uh, so that's what worries me the most is the mental health, the confidence of women when they been working but not been working because of various reasons. Found advice, get back in the game.

Don't sit on the sidelines. And, you know, it can be kind of scary and hard sometimes when you're out there and, you know, a hundred resumes go through and there's two or three women. How do those, how do those two or three women even bubble up to the top?

Especially if they took time off during Covid to raise kids and they have gaps in their history. Some of the AI now, uh, technology they're using for resumes will, will just push you out because of that fact. So it makes it super, super difficult, uh, for some women to get back in the game.

And as I always say, discrimination got us into this mess. It's gonna get us out. That's the best way to do it.

I almost feel like, you know, companies need to look for women applicants specifically to get them back into the game. And then, you know, the few women that do get in the game, they're in a room full of men and they don't wanna stay. Right?

So that is where I think the women inside them is kind of putting them back. And then we, how many women Tracy we have seen in the work is, if I got messed up something, give a pat or their shoulder, it's okay girl, you you caught this. It's okay, move on.

We also kill ourselves too much for the mistakes that we do at workplace. We need to let it go. We need to kind of see, uh, I was reading a book from, uh, lean on Sheldon Steinberg and she said that women get progression in this career based on their achievements.

Men get progression on their career based on the potential. So that's a very strong statement that as women, we have to let go the things that has gone bad where we have done the mistakes, let it go and not just focused on the achievements. So pat each other be the cheerleader.

It's okay to celebrate success, but it's equally important to cherish the failures that we have. We beat ourselves too much. Yeah, failing fast is okay.

And you know, we usually ask for a book recommendation. Yeah, I was cracking up because she offered it up before you could ask her. She always asks for a book recommendation Child.

Yes, I know. So I'm not a very good book reader. I'm more a Instagram really What now I'm trying to, you know, share the right suggestion from women.

I also, you know, learning to kind of stay focused on finishing one book at least a month. Uh, well that's awesome. Well, thank you so much.

This time flies as you know, it always does when we do these interviews, and we really appreciate you being here. Um, uh, that was, that was a great discussion. You two are having trace.

Thank you. Try out was great. Thank you so much.

Because this is a, we are, we celebrate women doing, you know, amazing things in technology. That's what Techstar Women is all about. And you are an amazing representation of that.

Absolutely. Thank You so Much for having me and Tracy been a mentor for me for like, more than a decade now. Tracy.

Yeah, she's always been there. And now I've connected to Judy and then I made sure to make this community bigger and introduce more women to this conversation. Although it is just a conversation, having this assurance that it brings so much of confidence and so much of positivity.

I learned so much, I've learned so much in terms of what's happening in the industry, how, what are the challenges. And I'm glad that I was able to be part of it after being going back and forth for so long. We're, we're glad you were here too.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for being here, and thank you all for watching another episode of Techstrong Women. We will keep them coming.

So keep tuning into Techstrong TV five days a week. We are running now. And, uh, all sorts of great new content.

Um, along with Techstrong Women. We also have a daily episode called Techstrong Gang, which Tracy appears in at least once a week. It's a great fun opportunity.

Uh, we talk about what's going on right here, right now, every day. So please keep watching Textron tv and thanks for joining us. Bye.

Thanks. Bye.