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#04 | Finding Growth and Balance in Tech Careers - Natalie Godec
17 Plays1 year ago
In this episode of Nelly Talks, Nelya sits down with the brilliant Natalie Godec, a cloud architect whose path from network engineering to cloud innovation is anything but ordinary. Whether you’re looking to break into DevOps, tackle the challenges of a male-dominated industry, or balance a tech career with your personal passions (cats included!), Natalie shares plenty of inspiring insights and practical advice that you won’t want to miss.
Timestamps:
00:00 Nelly Talks Intro
01:08 Meet Natalie Godec
02:23 CAT!!!
03:07 How did you get into Cloud Architecture?
12:52 What joys and challenges do you face in your role?
17:39 Do you feel that your role allows you to have a good work-life balance?
21:13 Have you ever considered a changing or pivoting your career?
25:19 How has AI impacted your role?
28:12 Do you feel like there has been improvement to diversity in tech?
32:22 What advice would you give someone starting out in tech?
34:03 Nelly Talks Outro
Key Points:
Choose a career path that you truly enjoy, as this will help you excel and stay motivated long-term. Natalie emphasises that working on something you love makes you more successful.
Tech evolves rapidly, and remaining open to learning is essential for career growth. Natalie emphasises curiosity as a key driver for staying relevant in the industry.
Seek out mentors, participate in discussions with colleagues, and offer your expertise when possible to grow professionally and contribute to your team’s success.
Be willing to change course if a particular area in tech doesn’t resonate with you. Focus on discovering the roles that match your skills and interests.
Set boundaries at work, use your vacation days, and prioritise personal time to avoid burnout.
Let us know what guests you'd like us to interview in future episodes!
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:05
Speaker
Everyone can have the same ability and capacity and what's important is to follow your heart and
00:00:19
Speaker
Hey everyone, I'm Nellia from Nelly Wax. Welcome to my podcast, Nelly Talks, a careers-focused show for those who are are considering careers in tech industry, or maybe looking for a change of direction in this space. We will be interviewing different speakers in this field to understand their journeys, their hurdles to face, how they overcame those, and any tips and hints that they would like to share on the way.
Guest Introduction: Natalie Godic
00:00:54
Speaker
Hello, so today we have Natalie Godic with us today. um Hi, Natalie. Thank you for joining us. ah We obviously know each other as we work together, but it'd be lovely if you could introduce yourself to our audience.
00:01:08
Speaker
Hi, Nella. Thanks for having me. Hi, everyone. Really lovely to be here. I'm Natalie Godic. I'm a systems slash DevOps slash platform slash cloud engineer, currently architecting clouds at Zancore. I deal with everything related to infrastructure. I love building data platforms. I love dealing with cloud security and kind of security engineering specifically. So anything that is related to like encryption and access rights and how do you protect data in the cloud, that's really up my alley. I'm Ukrainian, same as you, Neda. I live in London, have been living here since 2017, I think. Before that I lived in Switzerland. I love travelling, I love photography, I do that a lot. I volunteer as a photographer for the Ukrainian Institute in London. um I also paint and um drink tequila and collect designer handbags.
00:02:03
Speaker
And you also have lovely, ah yeah you have a cat, about two cats in the fags. You're also a cat mum, so I think it's very important to manage your mum. Are they going to be featuring today? I just saw a fluffy red tail walk past me, but I don't know if they will be willing to come. You never know with cats, but you know, they've got the mind of their own, right? Yes, we had to get the cat on the podcast. Why not? Of course. This is Diego.
00:02:32
Speaker
He's our baby, the older baby, but look at her, look how gorgeous he is.
Natalie's Career Journey into Tech
00:02:37
Speaker
Yes, Diego is the star of the podcast today and our honorary guest, of course. ah I would ah try and bring my cat, but she looks very unimpressed. So I am not going to dare because, you know, that can end up badly. um Diego is lovely. Hello, Diego.
00:02:55
Speaker
And ah Natalie, thank you for that intro. And in terms of your kind of, I guess, um journey into this world of platform infrastructure, cloud architecture and engineering, how did you get into this space? Did you always know that that's the kind of the space you want to work with, kind of grown up, studying? Is there something like that was always on a agenda? Or is this just kind of something you fell into? What was your path? ah into the world of cloud engineering? It was kind of both of those.
00:03:28
Speaker
i um um When I was 14 or 15 my parents asked me what I wanted to study um at uni because at the time in Ukraine you would finish high school around 16 or 17. I finished at 16 because I started it slightly earlier because my, by Diego, because my birthday is in October. So I started like slightly earlier. um And my mom was as a bad ass Sisadman. She always joked that if she had access to a computer earlier in her age, she would end up either a worldwide known hacker or in prison.
00:04:08
Speaker
So she was really, really technical and kind of into everything that is like Linux and networks and systems and cyber, all of those things. um I remember her explaining me how the world internet relies on these 12 core DNS servers. They started with 12.
00:04:28
Speaker
Basically, there is a limited number of core DNS servers, which if they are taken down, everything is down. That was kind of scary. So there she was like that level of technical. And my dad is a physicist and and an engineer, but not a computer engineer, but engineer in a more regular sense. So I thought, okay, I'll go into tech.
00:04:47
Speaker
And my parents were like, well, that is very broad. What exactly do you want? And without knowing anything better, I said graphic design because I am quite artsy. I paint, I take photos, all of those things. And my parents put me into sort of a weekend academy thing where on Saturdays and Sundays I would have courses and it was meant to be lasting for three semesters.
00:05:11
Speaker
um I was not supposed to go into that one because I was too young I started at 16 I think 15 or 16 but you're supposed to go there only when you're at uni or like older professional but somehow I got in they were like You're too young, but meh, you're too old for the youngsters' academy, so meh, okay, go. you know And the first semester was an introductory semester, so that academy had three kind of programs, software engineering, graphic design, and systems systems engineering. And the introductory semester had all three.
00:05:50
Speaker
And I kind of figured, like A, I detested programming. Still do. and so that's That's a very kind of linear thing in my life and career. And B, that I really enjoyed everything that was related to networks and systems.
00:06:06
Speaker
And I thought, okay, that might be another path. So when i when it came time to apply for universities, I applied for systems engineering and graphic design, did not get into graphic design to the university that I wanted to, ah but did get into systems engineering. And then as I was studying, there were like, you study so many different things and you eventually figure out, oh, I still don't like programming. And oh my God, algorithms and high maths is not for me at all.
00:06:36
Speaker
But security, that's interesting. Database design, oh, that kind of kicks something in me. Ooh, networks is definitely, definitely my thing. So I kind of like figured that out and followed that. And then I did a Masters in Switzerland, also in systems engineering and like communication systems, not quite systems engineering, communication systems. And that was all about networks and satellites and mobile networks and a lot of courses about InfoSec as well. So basically I spent seven years studying to be a network engineer.
00:07:12
Speaker
And then I was supposed to go and do a my master thesis in the in an internship with the United Nations, one of the agencies of the United Nations in Geneva, because I did a summer internship there and I vibed a lot with the network guy person.
00:07:28
Speaker
um And we kind of had an agreement that they would open an internship for me and I would come and do it my master thesis there. They did not do it in time. So I panically started applying EPFL, the university I was in in Switzerland, had a database of open internships that are accessible for students. And so I panically applied to everything that was related to systems.
00:07:52
Speaker
Because in the industry and in universities, it's a bit weird where most internships are about programming. So it's almost like students come out of uni. They see that most jobs and internships are about programming, software engineering. So they go into software engineering, even if they studied infosec or networks or anything else. And then like workplaces see that people come out of universities and want to do software engineering. And they open more positions for software engineering.
00:08:19
Speaker
rather than systems or networks or security or databases. And it's like a vicious circle. so made me very annoyed, but I did apply it to everything I could. And I kind of accidentally got into this internship about DevOps and configuration management. That was this private bank in Switzerland that wanted to to convert their data center management into um like all automated, all program-based, all code-based. And that's how I fell into DevOps.
00:08:50
Speaker
And it followed that path now. Like, well, the dopamine is there now. I'm going to follow that. And since then, I've been doing various versions of DevOps and platform engineering. Eventually figured out that I really like creating things. Hello, Floof. We have another feature. worry She doesn't want to show her face, but it's just soothing. Sorry to interrupt. Obviously, they always like to show up at the moments that suit them. I love them, girls.
00:09:17
Speaker
They're so beautiful. Me too. Too much. I'd have 10 if I could, but I already have too many. 10 bandwidth would probably be a lot, because they're quite territorial. So you just never know and that would end. But yeah, sorry, back to you and um the internship that you did in the private bank. I was listening up from, it's not totally sidetracked. and Of course.
00:09:41
Speaker
No, no. um Like I did that and after that I moved to London and did full-time dancing and full-time working for Morgan Stanley at the same time. I used to be a dancer in the commercial world, commercial space.
00:09:57
Speaker
And um yeah, it worked if for Morgan Stanley as like core infrastructure engineer, again, configuration as code, loads of automation, loads of data center management. um ah I kind of ended up owning the Dockerization initiative, so like containers and everything.
00:10:14
Speaker
um And we tried to do Kubernetes, started trying to do Kubernetes on-prem, which is very hardcore. And then I
Current Role and Project Diversity at Zancore
00:10:22
Speaker
left because I got bored and ah went into like a startup scale-up health tech unicorn, like officially recognized as a unicorn, not existing anymore, very sadly.
00:10:34
Speaker
um Babylon, which was health tech, which was double cloud, AWS, and GCP. And I ended up doing data platforms there. And there's little bit obviously a lot of security in it because you're dealing with health data and patient data. And that's super sensitive, almost the most sensitive you can imagine. and So how do you protect that? How do you deal with that in the cloud? you know It's all public space. It's all public APIs. How do you secure all of those? All the while.
00:11:04
Speaker
enabling innovation and enabling cutting edge and enabling data science on all of that. that was That was super interesting. And I figured out that I like creating things more than I like maintaining things. So when it was time to look for a new job, I thought, OK, what I was doing and enjoying a lot at Babylon was when other teams were coming to me And asking for help for advice like oh we need to expose a web app but expose it internally and have authentication on it and we don't want to manage infrastructure. Like we were thinking to do it on a VM, and we would sit down together and talk about this, like how to architect that thing.
00:11:48
Speaker
and how to integrate it into the existing infrastructure and existing platforms and how to automate it and how to make sure that the team can manage it on their own. That's A, architecture and B, consulting internally. And so when I was looking forward for new jobs, I was looking for either kind of staff principle level data platform engineer or cloud architect.
00:12:10
Speaker
in potentially professional services and ended up in Zencore and I've been loving it ever since. It's been a year and eight months and I absolutely love it. It's creative, it's technical, it's complicated, you deal with loads of people, you deal with loads of technical challenges um and it's just never-ending learning. every Every project is something that I have never done before and it's seems to be really good for me. I was glad I mean I know you're doing well and it's it's kind of it's really nice to hear kind of how you got here and giving your current role obviously you work in a consultancy so you deal with different companies and different industries I'm sure there is a big kind of amount of variety and
00:12:55
Speaker
opportunities and challenges that come with that. What do you enjoy the most about your current role? Also, on the other side, what are like the biggest challenges in this setup? Yeah, what I enjoy the most is probably, well, A, the team, our team, Zankor team. Everyone is amazing. I went from being the resident expert in Babylon to being like the least experienced at Zankor. That was really cool. But at the same time, there is a lot of trust and everyone comes from the engineering background. So that's really nice to like have everyone on the same page and have the same vibe.
00:13:29
Speaker
but In terms of the role and the um the projects that I work on, the diversity of them is probably what I enjoy the most. The scale of impact, because i being an architect I can work on different projects and we get different sized projects all the time. so my current two projects are one is like five weeks and the other one is like six months, seven months. So really different scales, really different lengths and you get to work with these huge companies or small companies or startups and you get to have real impact and real influence on them really quickly and that is kind of very gratifying when you go to these people and they're like oh we have this idea we want to do this
00:14:15
Speaker
or like oh we want to like migrate, but also improve things, and oh we don't have automation, and you're like, I have automation for you. I'm going to give you you everything. I'm going to give you Terraform. I'm going to give you pipelines. I'm going to show you how to do it. And don't worry, you're going to be able to reuse what we give you with everything else that you do in your company. It's going to be great. And at the end, it is great. And it's just it's just such a good feeling. I think like technically, obviously, I spoke about how every project has something that I haven't worked with before that can be very challenging very tiring as well because there is a lot of pressure on you to know things um you're supposed to be be the expert but also there is ah the acceptance that okay maybe like you can't possibly know everything in the world and also okay we're architects but we're not oracles we can't foresee something that will turn up in two weeks from now and we will have to redo something unfortunately i wish we could but it's not always possible and in terms of like what i like less
00:15:20
Speaker
Hmm. It's very situational. There are situations where you have engineers on the customer side who you don't live with. And it just, it just happens. But even that, because it's a project and it has a timeline, I will get out of it at some point. Yeah, you can live with it for that time sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I try, obviously, like I've, I've had loads of experience for working with teams that are like,
00:15:47
Speaker
very stubborn or someone who has their own ideas or someone who doesn't want to do something that is like what do you think is better. So I always try to find the common language. One of the kind of disadvantages of being in professional services engineering wise, you don't have the time to take the time to build a trust and build the common language with every single person so when you are working with a big enterprise and there is a call with people from five different teams and you can feel that you don't speak the same version of english but you could
00:16:23
Speaker
If you put the time and effort to find this common language with each of the teams, you could eventually work really well with everyone and also create this connection between the teams, which is super important because sometimes they join and you can see that they don't talk to each other.
00:16:39
Speaker
But you don't have the time. And we're there to implement the platform. We're there to give every piece of engineering knowledge that we have, all of the best practices, all of the security, all of the things. And i sometimes maybe I wish I could help also the different teams build the trust between themselves and build that communication between themselves.
European Work-Life Balance Philosophy
00:17:01
Speaker
But that's beyond the scope of of what I can do in the timelines of the project.
00:17:06
Speaker
Yeah, no, I guess that's the difference. You embed it for X amount of time and then you have to move on to another thing. You can't fix everything, you know, every talent that the client has. But yeah, that's really interesting. I never thought of it that way because you kind of, you know, I guess in my role, you focus on the positives naturally, but it's really, it's really interesting to hear your insides.
00:17:25
Speaker
And in terms of this role, I mean, it obviously comes across, I did not know your dancing talent that's new to me. So there you go. But I know obviously you mentioned things like photography, drawing, and know you love to travel, you've got cats, etc.
00:17:41
Speaker
Do you feel this type of role allows you to have a good work-life balance? Do you think for anyone considering Korean space, do you think that's something that you're managing to achieve? kind of what What's your take on that? I think there there are two parts to that. First is that I'm in Europe. The attitude to work and work-life balance here is very different from the US.
00:18:05
Speaker
or like other parts in the world. like China has the 995 culture, which you work from 9 AM m to 9 PM, six days a week. No. I'm very European in that sense. Very, very European. You give me 25 days of vacation a year, I will be sure to take them. But I work hard when I work. you know um I think especially with like for DevOps and for like platform engineering and for cloud architects, system architects,
00:18:33
Speaker
There is obviously a lot of pressure on you to create and maintain a platform that is stable because that's what the business is running on and like we are now, like I'm a consultant, um ah I do professional services so there is no platform that relies on me 24-7 but I always worked in platform but product companies before. So I know what that means. And so the platforms that I do build for customers, I make sure that they yeah are proper, good platforms that can be stable, that can be maintained, and that are easy to to be maintained. I think we're fortunate in 2024 to understand that especially engineers and architects don't need to constantly produce outcome because a lot of the work
00:19:19
Speaker
It happens here and then you produce an outcome, um an output and you code something and you create something and you set something up. So I think, like I personally think that I have a really good work life balance plus added to that, I can travel and work while I'm traveling. And I also do conferences. Public speaking is like a huge and content creation in general is a huge part of, of my like professional.
00:19:45
Speaker
self um and i'm very fortunate that zancore allows and encourages me to do that so i can also like share my knowledge and have that experience i don't think everyone in tech has the same experience and the same work-life balance if you stay truthful to yourself and you follow like your passions but also your work passions a you will be a better professional So there will be less kind of demand from you to like stay overtime or work on weekends. And hopefully you can find a team that is also of the same mentality, especially if you work for a product team in a product company. If you need to work on weekends, you are essentially letting down the rest of the team because now the expectation is that everyone can produce the same amount of output.
00:20:29
Speaker
but you haven't worked 40 hours in a week, you've worked much more. So there's there's this thing, but I think it's a very European kind of point of view on it. like We have work, and I love my job, but I also have life.
00:20:42
Speaker
And I want to live that life. Yeah, I think it's about um working to earn a living, not living to work, perhaps. And I know it's very culturally different, in different countries. That's there's awesome. no Thanks for sharing that. stuff I think I share a lot of those ideas. um And I do think it's so easy to inflate like the productivity but longer term like people just burn themselves out if you've been working for long enough you you see it you know from colleagues friends it never ends like that well and then people just end up leaving the industry and just looking for something else have you yourself ever considered like any career pivot or career change have you ever been in like on a stage where you've thought you know
00:21:23
Speaker
had enough of tag, I want to do something else. Have you ever explored other ventures? I know you mentioned dancing. Obviously, something is done ah earlier on, ah which which is amazing. I don't know how you combine the two. It doesn't seem like enough hours in a day. Has there been anything like that that you've ever considered or done in your career? Well, dancing was one. um The thing with tech, like i I haven't ever thought seriously about leaving tech because somehow DevOps and cloud and like this kind of platform engineering architecture space continues to inspire me constantly, which is ah quite a unique thing. I spark with ideas often and then I do them for some time and then I forget about them.
Balancing Tech Career with Personal Passions
00:22:09
Speaker
Like I've done pottery passionately for about six months.
00:22:13
Speaker
haven't been haven't been back since want to be back at some point but like when the sparkle comes back you know so i've done loads of different things in my life but tech and my specific domain has somehow like kept inspiring me so i don't think it's like i hope it's now never gonna end but as as long as it lasts i'm gonna stay in tech But there was this moment where I ah moved from Switzerland to London and I thought that I would put my career on pause and dance full time. I think the my the main reason for that was that I was 25 when that happened. So it's kind of like at the end of the age where you can do dancing professionally.
00:22:51
Speaker
And in Switzerland, there was so little dance, in terms of the intensity and the level that I wanted to do, that I kind of craved that a lot. I danced when I lived in Ukraine. I was in a dance crew. And we toured the country, and we gained, like gained guinea French. I spent a week with my French in law, so my brain is a little bit French. It would be multicultural that we could pick up some French. Talking about competitions in Ukraine and explain it in French. We had won lots of competitions and we were quite well known. So there was like this level and this passion. In Switzerland, it wasn't there. So I think I just wanted that back. So then I moved to London and I very quickly realized how expensive life here is. Not as expensive as in Switzerland.
00:23:38
Speaker
Still is not despite all of the inflation that we've seen in the last couple of years A friend of mine comes back comes to visit from Switzerland and she's like, oh my god, everything is so cheap I'm gonna buy everything and I'm like ah Inflation has touched everyone, not just London. We need to keep that in mind. And I changed my location on LinkedIn to London. Don't know why, since I wasn't like looking for jobs. But I was immediately bombarded by recruiters. And I thought, okay, why not? And that's how I discovered London functions on recruiters. You don't look for jobs yourself. You just send your CV to recruiters and your wish list and they just figure it out. um And that's how I ended up dancing and working and at Morgan Stanley. And it worked pretty well because
00:24:21
Speaker
like It's a big, big bank. So there's a big time zone differences between teams. So sometimes you wait for them, something to happen. We didn't have on-call because there's an ops team who deals with on-call. There's a follow the sun thing with teams around the globe.
00:24:36
Speaker
So it was a pretty stress less job, lots of fun projects to do lots of interesting like development within the data centers.
Impact of AI on Cloud Architecture
00:24:45
Speaker
But it also allowed me enough energy and time to also do dancing. That's awesome. um And in terms of I know you've kind of mentioned to go back to consulting, with one of the things you have to do is like you have to pick up different technologists sometimes because you just never know what kind of environment you walk into. And you have to be this subject matter expert that's good at everything. um There has obviously been a big ah rise in innovation with AI, especially generative AI. 2023 has been huge. It's still happening, right? It's still happening to us now. and
00:25:20
Speaker
with us. How have you found kind of that this kind of AI movement type, whatever whatever you want to call it, has impacted your role? Yeah, I think AI is obviously everywhere and everyone is talking about it and everyone is kind of like tapping into it and trying things out. Gen AI is a pretty rubbish cloud architect though. ah If you ask it questions that go beyond the basics, no. So it's I'm not worried about my role. No, my main capacity is in finding solutions to complex problems. So regardless of technology, that is my main skill. that my'm Seeing the big picture, seeing the big system, putting things together, piecing piece pieces of technology together, finding ways to make everything work nicely and smoothly, that's my main skill. So AI is not going to replace that.
00:26:12
Speaker
But on the other hand, um it does make it easier when you need like some basic code or some example of something. If you're completely not familiar with something, you can ask it to like bootstrap your project or bootstrap you like a pipeline or something like that. So in that sense, GenAI is helpful. um There is obviously a lot of development in terms of the cloud space. In Google Cloud, there is the GenAI built in to the console as the cloud assist.
00:26:39
Speaker
I think Cloud Console Assist, it had changed names a couple of times. um But it it basically can help you navigate Google Cloud, navigate technologies and products within it. um There are jumpstart solutions, which can be also powered by GenAI. If you're trying to build a data platform, for example, and you need some pipelines, GenAI can help you with that. BigQuery now has um built-in stream processing, which is mind-blowing and huge. And I cannot possibly imagine how they did it. ah But it's there now. You can do stream processing of data with the query and integrate GenAI into it within the SQL query. like that's The possibilities are are just awesome, especially in like the the fields of data and the fields of programming.
00:27:30
Speaker
But for me, it's like helping and assisting.
Diversity in Tech and Future Advice
00:27:33
Speaker
um It's like a tool that can be like an addition to my own skills and can make me work faster if I am willing to spend time to learn how to use it properly. but With Google space, it was just things changing at kind of speed of light and just keeping up with that is another skill I've been in today. That's what I think I use AI to help me like navigate, you know, it's like, it's almost like following people on LinkedIn that kind of help you guide the content. This is like AI, can you summarize and actually see what's the latest article in X?
00:28:06
Speaker
That's awesome. And slightly different topic now, obviously we work an in tech industry kind of as a a wider sector. In terms of ah diverse inclusion, do you see kind of now, do you feel like there is a more representation now, like a more diverse workforce in this space now versus to maybe when you were starting up in your career? And depending on your response, how do you think we can get better in that?
00:28:31
Speaker
and What's your take on this, kind of any ideas around the subject? I think Covid threw us back a lot and in this sense. I think before Covid though we were seeing a lot of progress and a lot of like improvement in the space. Not always good.
00:28:49
Speaker
I have my my own thoughts about forced diversification of work workforce. That's not always good. um I have my thoughts about focusing on the issues and the problems in the discourse rather than leading by example. like I like leading by example. In other sectors like data science and infosec actually, and like DevSecOps, SecOps in general, yeah that there the diversity is actually pretty good.
00:29:18
Speaker
like solid in systems engineering and platform engineering and DevOps. I i am a unicorn unicorn is my spirit any animal and I assume that role. I think I've in my entire career I met maybe five other women women in systems, maybe six. One of them, we are very lucky, works for Zencore. We're two cloud engineers, architects, women in the same company of 50 people. that's That's huge. And i think maybe I think I interviewed another one in Europe.
00:29:54
Speaker
yeah yeah the the other the week and that's awesome as well. um I think it might be getting better as the generations change a little bit and the hiring managers change a bit because we can we can do a lot of effort and put a lot of effort in ah training people in like inclusive thinking and like changing attitudes and changing like behaviors and and have policies around it and all of that and maybe it's working on the global scale and we will hopefully start seeing and like a more natural change because I think new generation and even my generation
00:30:32
Speaker
There is no more discrimination, at least I don't see, within kind of like my generation and younger because we just grew up with this discourse happening and everyone is aware of what used to happen in the workplace and how absolutely horrid it was. The ideal scenario of the future in terms of diversity diversity and inclusion is that we just naturally as humanity accept each other.
00:30:56
Speaker
And hopefully, that's going to be the case more and more. When I speak to my husband's nieces and nephews, who are between 17 and 21, none of that is in their heads. They accept everyone. They know that people are different. They know that people come from different backgrounds. They know that everyone can have the same skills, regardless of their gender or visual representation or feeling.
00:31:21
Speaker
or sexual orientation or age. Everyone can have the same ability and capacity and what's important is to follow your heart and be true to yourself. So they give me hope. As as a mum to boys and girls, like I do also hope that they'll eventually there won't be in need for like inclusive hiring training, what to say and what not to say.
00:31:41
Speaker
at the end too because it will become a common like a common sense behavior that just embedded in people. but I think you're you are right. There's like perhaps a generational change. um probably still some time off it, um given kind of the demographic that we work with sometimes, but is changing, you know, I think it kind of, it's a cultural shift. And then I think we will see that hopefully filtering down. ah But no, awesome. That's great. And I know we get this question a lot in podcasts, etc. I'm sure you get it with talks. But for people who are watching this, who perhaps considering this career, of really want to get into cloud or maybe looking to make that shift from um
00:32:20
Speaker
into architecting or into professional services, what advice would you give to them? kind of What have been things that really helped you with the general themes in your career, that really helped you progress and get to where you are at now, which is clearly um successful career, good work-life balance, just a lovely human to to talk with and work with. I can share that from a personal experience. What has helped you so far? Two main things, and I always say it to everyone who asks, and especially to students, one is follow your heart. If you're watching this, you probably are in the rather privileged position to choose your path and to choose what you do. I always think about
00:33:04
Speaker
Well, before the war in Ukraine, the full-scale war in Ukraine started, I always thought about maybe like the caste system in India, and someone who is born into a lower caste doesn't always have the chance and the opportunity to choose what they want to do in life. And now with the war with the war in my own country, not everyone has that choice either in there. And I have. And how un unfair would it be to those people if I stuck to something that I didn't like, while I have all of the choices in the world?
Closing Remarks
00:33:34
Speaker
that also has another benefit to it that you don't expect is that when you choose what you love doing, you will get really good at it. So you will be successful. And another one which is very tech specific is stay curious. You always need that. You always find new things to do. And if you stay curious and you stay open-minded, there will always be opportunities.
00:33:58
Speaker
That's awesome. Thank you so much. It's been amazing. Thank you for sharing your journey, sharing tips and hints. I think the audience will find it really useful. It's been lovely to have you on the podcast today, Natalie, and no doubt we'll see each other very soon. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you to all our lovely listeners for sticking with us. I hope you found this useful and please do share, like, et cetera. Check out our next episode that comes out in two weeks time.