S22:E8 - From Opera to Code (Anna McDougall)

In this episode, Saron talks to Anna McDougall, Director of Product and Engineering for the tech subsidiary of Europe's largest media publisher, Axel Springer National Media & Tech. Anna grew up in Sydney, Australia, and moved to Germany to pursue a career as an opera singer. At 32 she rediscovered her love for code and technology and made the switch to software engineering. She quickly discovered her mix of software and social skills made her perfect for leadership and technical speaking. Today, Saron and Anna discuss her experience in tech and navigating the career transition from entertainment to code. She is also the author of "You Belong in Tech: How to Go from Zero Programming Knowledge to Hired", and is passionate about getting historically excluded individuals into tech.
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[00:00:05] SY: Welcome to the CodeNewbie Podcast where we talk to people on their coding journey in hopes of helping you on yours. I’m your host, Saron, and today we’re talking about going from opera to code with Anna McDougall, Director of Product and Engineering at Axel Springer National Media & Tech.

[00:00:21] AM: I had been part of this tech community on Twitter for almost a year by this point and I had always been engaging with people. I’d been talking to people about what I was learning and what they were learning. And I never really asked for anything in return. So when I did this tweet and I said, “I never do this, but can you please retweet?” I feel like that personal approach that I had taken for so long, this is where it paid off because people suddenly were like, “Yeah, we can support Anna now like she supported us.”-[00:00:48] SY: Anna talks about how she got to where she is today, which includes both her coding and her opera journey after this.

[MUSIC BREAK]

[00:01:05] SY: Thank you so much for being here.

[00:01:06] AM: Thank you so much for having me, Saron. I’m so excited to be here.

[00:01:09] SY: Yeah. I’m so excited to have you. So before we get into your coding journey, I know that you were in a slightly different time zone than the one that I’m in. Where are you currently living?

[00:01:20] AM: I’m living in Leipzig, Germany. So my company, as you mentioned, Axel Springer, the, the big company is like Europe’s biggest media publishing house and they’re based out of Berlin. So I work out of Leipzig mostly remotely. But as you can tell from my accent, I am not German. I’m originally from Australia. So an even more different time zone.

[00:01:39] SY: Very cool. So you initially were exposed to coding when you were very young, when you were eight years old.

[00:01:45] AM: Yeah.

[00:01:45] SY: What first got you interested in code at that age?

[00:01:48] AM: To be honest, I have no idea. I was always into computers. My mom loves to tell this story how one time she was driving me in the car. I was three years old, and I was in the backseat, and I said to her, “Mommy, I want daddy’s computer.” And she was like, “You want daddy’s what?” And I was like, “His computer. I want his computer.” And she was like, “Oh my gosh! What is going on? What is she asking about?” And of course, she eventually worked out like, “Oh, no, she wants his computer.” So yeah, I’ve always been drawn to, yeah, puter, puter. But when I was eight, yeah, we were just in this bookshop, and I don’t know why I saw this book about Create Your Own Websites with HTML or something. This is ’95 by the way. So this is like weird thing to be interested in for a kid. And so I insisted that my dad like buy this instead of Animorphs and the rest is history, I guess. Yeah.

[00:02:43] SY: Very cool. So you then studied software design and development in high school. Tell me more about that. Were you able to pick a specific focus in high school? How did that work?

[00:02:53] AM: No. So as I mentioned, like by the time I was in high school and doing software design and development, this was early 2000s. So the internet was kind of just starting to take off as like a really common thing. iPhones weren’t out yet. This was all kind of still new. So it was a very, let’s say, not particularly well-structured course, and I was very interested in it. I was very good at it. I won a school award for it. But certainly there weren’t a lot of different options for like what you study. And my teacher was also not particularly, well, let’s say, attuned to what was going on. So much so that actually by that point I taught the class the HTML section because like…-[00:03:38] SY: Oh wow!

[00:03:39] AM: Yeah, I actually like just got up and kind of taught everyone because I had mentioned to my teacher that I’d done it before as a kid. And so he offered that to me. But it didn’t work out for me. I didn’t actually continue with it. So like for those who are listening, they might think, “Oh, yeah, she coded as like this little weird eight-year-old and then she did software design and development and then she started her tech career.”-[00:04:01] SY: Right.

[00:04:01] AM: But that’s not really how it happened. I ended up dropping the subject after that year. And part of that was pretty much purely because I was the only girl in the class and who don’t want to say like, I wasn’t discriminated against, I wasn’t like ostracized or made fun of or anything like that. They were lovely. I was very lucky to have very nice classmates, but I also wasn’t part of their group. Do you know what I mean?

[00:04:21] SY: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:04:22] AM: You know, I work a lot nowadays with diversity and inclusion and the inclusion part is something that I think a lot of people miss. It’s not just about being there, it’s also about being included. And that’s something that as a teen girl in a room full of teen boys maybe doesn’t happen not only because we’re not in each other’s social groups, but also because they’re worried about like coming off wrong or something like that. So there was a lot there that kind of just made me feel uncomfortable. I had lots of subjects that I really loved and was good at. And so in the end I decided to drop software design and development at that stage.

[00:04:58] SY: And that’s what’s so interesting because you have this really early start and you’re like teaching HTML and CSS, which is pretty cool. But then when you get to college, you kind of totally switch gears and now you’re studying and majoring media communications. Why media communications? Why the switch?

[00:05:12] AM: Well, I said I had lots of subjects I was good at. I’ve kind of I want to say suffered, but I’ve suffered my whole life from being what I call a Jill of all trades. I’ve always been someone who’s kind of good at lots of different stuff, but never like amazing at any one thing. So for me, I was good at English, I was good at languages. As you can probably tell, I’m quite an extrovert. So I like talking to people and presenting, and I did lots of drama at high school as well. And so for me, it kind of made sense to go into the direction of journalism, media presentation. So I did like radio presenting, radio editing, but also video editing, and yeah, standard kind of traditional journalism with like newspaper articles and that kind of stuff, too. So yeah, it just kind of made sense to that point to combine those things that I was at the time good at and passionate about and pursue that. But yes, didn’t end up going in that direction, long term.

[00:06:09] SY: Yeah. And after the MediaCom’s track, that led you to work in project management, then in digital marketing at Opera Australia, and then you went back to school to get your master’s in opera performance.

[00:06:24] AM: That’s right.

[00:06:25] SY: Tell us about that.

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