S23:E2 - Having a Growth Mindset (Tanya Reilly)

This week we talk to Tanya Reilly, Senior Principal Engineer at Squarespace, about having a growth mindset. Having a growth mindset includes recognizing our limitations and challenging ourselves to learn at any stage of our coding journey. We also talked about interviewing and advocating for ourselves. Show Links Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor) The Staff Engineer's Path Growth Mindset and Code System Design Linux Memoization Graph Traversal Project Euler Stanford Computer Science Platform Engineering

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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 having a growth mindset with Tanya Reilly, Senior Principal Engineer at Squarespace.

[00:00:19] TR: Pick a role where the people are growth people. You’re interviewing the team as much as they’re interviewing you. You’re interviewing the manager as much as they’re interviewing you. Look for a role where you will learn something kind of by default. Don’t pick a job you’re good at. Pick a job you want to be good at.

[00:00:35] SY: Tanya talks about her journey into code, recognizing limitations and challenging ourselves to learn at any stage of our coding journey after this.

[MUSIC BREAK]

[00:00:51] SY: Thank you so much for being here.

[00:00:52] TR: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:00:53] SY: So what got you into learning to code?

[00:00:55] TR: So this is a ridiculous story, but when I was a teenager, I read this thriller by Michael Crichton called Disclosure and it’s about corporate nonsense and harassment in the workplace and so on. But there was one character in that book who was a programmer. And I read about this one character, probably not even a main character, but they had written something that at the time was super futuristic. Like it was a virtual reality file system. It was very metaverse.

[00:01:20] SY: Okay.

[00:01:21] TR: And it was the coolest thing I had ever read in my entire life. This one character because he had these Easter eggs in it where if someone said his name it would say he was cool or something. And I was like, “That’s what I want to do, virtual reality file systems.” [00:01:36] SY: Interesting.

[00:01:37] TR: Whatever that is. I just thought it would be cool. And I didn’t know anything about programming, but I just knew that, “Oh yeah, that’s what I want to do.” Well, my high school didn’t really… like there was one semester of BASIC you could take near the end of high school. And so I took that and didn’t look back.

[00:01:54] SY: Okay. So you took that in high school and then you went on to study it in college. Or what happened after that?

[00:02:00] TR: Yeah, that’s right. When I filled in my college applications, I put down not entirely CS classes, but largely. I put in a few other things like electrical engineering in there as well. I studied computer applications, which is kind of, I guess looking back, applied computer science a little more towards industry and a little less towards sort of the math. I don’t think we ever did a lot of proofs, for example, that I think a lot of CS people would spend more time on. And then, yeah. I studied that for four years.

[00:02:29] SY: Very interesting. So tell me a little bit more about your college experience. What was that like setting computer science in that context, in that environment?

[00:02:37] TR: It was pretty bad actually.

[00:02:38] SY: Yeah? Oh no. What happened?

[00:02:41] TR: So I arrived with my one semester of BASIC programming, no computer in the house. I’m not sure I had ever used a mouse. It was the era of MS DOS Windows 3.11. I thought everybody else who was coming into the class would also be new. So I thought we’re all going to learn together. And so I’m showing up like, “Oh, computer.” Okay. I see.” I move the mouse. Got it. And I click on icons. “Oh, double click. Interesting.” But everyone else, or maybe not everybody else, but it sure seemed like it. They all knew what they were doing. So there I am in these classes and they’re teaching us, “Well, this is a compiled language.” I feel like I was starting five years behind a lot of people in my class. And I probably wasn’t. There were probably a ton of other new people there as well. Do you know this feeling where we compare ourselves against the people who are really confident? We don’t look around for the other people who are scared.

[00:03:34] SY: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:03:35] TR: So I was just like kind of after 10 minutes, like, “Oh, wait, maybe I don’t belong here.” Like, “Maybe this isn’t for me.” It was kind of weird. I was passing my exams. I kind of did fine. I completed all the projects I would get for a little while like, “Maybe I do understand something.” And then one of my friends would say, “Oh, I installed Linux on the second hard drive on the Solaris boxes in the lab.” And I would be like, “What’s Linux? What’s Solaris? What’s a hard drive?” [00:04:01] SY: Yeah. What do these words mean? Yeah. Yeah.

[00:04:02] TR: Yeah. Does boxes mean computers? I don’t know what I’m doing here. It was a four-year chorus. I graduated in four years, but by the end I was like, “Oh, I don’t belong here.” When I got to my internship, I think I didn’t even apply for programming jobs, which is wild because I was like, “I’m not a good programmer, so I shouldn’t apply for programming jobs.” That’s upside down, right?

[00:04:26] SY: Yeah.

[00:04:26] TR: It should have been, “Oh, I don’t feel like a good programmer, so I should apply for programming jobs.”

[00:04:31] SY: Let me get some practice. Yeah.

[00:04:32] TR: But I applied for technical writing and for things I felt confident in. And by then I had spent a lot of time on the college, Linux servers. By then, I knew what that meant. And so I applied for kind of IT systems administration because I felt confident doing that and I loved it. I mean, it was really fun, but I steered away from programming because I thought I couldn’t do it.

[00:04:53] SY: Interesting. So that feeling really got to you, that feeling really impacted the decisions you made after the program was over.

[00:05:00] TR: Yeah, completely. And it was actually maybe the next seven or eight years of my career, I steered away from programming. And if you had asked me, I would’ve said, “I’m not really good at it.” But with no real evidence, like this job I took in IT, there was a programming interview as part of it, and the folks that interviewed me, they said afterwards, “Oh, you got a really great score on this programming test or in programming interview. You got the best of the candidates we’d interviewed.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s so funny. It must not be a good test.” [00:05:33] SY: Oh my goodness!

[00:05:34] TR: Like now we would call that imposter syndrome, right? But I think even back then, if I had known imposter syndrome existed, I would’ve been like, “Oh, yeah, that must really suck for those people.” [00:05:44] SY: So tell me about what needed to happen for you to not feel that way because I’ve heard similar stories from other people who did not have a good college experience for different reasons. Sometimes it’s a gender balance reason. Sometimes it’s just a self-confidence issue. It’s an experience issue. In a situation like yours where it seems like it stemmed from the fact that you just didn’t have exposure the way that other kids had that exposure, what could have happened that would’ve given you some self-confidence or at least made you not feel so othered in that situation?

[00:06:21] TR: Partly, I wish I had been a little more self-aware and mature and able to look around and find people in the same situation and try to solve my own problems, say, “Oh, actually what’s happening here is that I’m insecure. What can I do about that?” I wish I had had a mentor or literally anybody in my family who had ever used a computer before.

[00:06:45] SY: Right, literally anybody. Yeah.

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