2025 EES Apple: Leading an Engineering Team: AMA

Hello everyone. Everyone, I am Emmanuela Stanislaws and I’m part of the CodePath team. Welcome to our next breakout session.

This is an AMA session. And before I introduce this session, I want to provide you with a few reminders. Please utilize the chat.

I know all of you have been adding your comments and all of the other sessions. So, let’s keep going. Please make sure that your comments are relevant to the session.

And also at the end of the event, please take some time to fill out the survey so that you can provide us with feedback so that we can you know improve our sessions for the future. With those reminders out of the way, I’m super excited to introduce this session which is leading an engineering team and ask me anything session with Mala Ay from Apple. So before I bring Mala to the stage, I wanted to read her bio.

And it goes like this. Mala is a seasoned engineering leader with over two decades of experience in the tech industry building and managing mobile teams to create innovative and impactful products. As a senior engineering manager at Apple, Mala leads a team of media experts who build innovative home solutions for Apple TV OS focusing on immersive user experiences.

Prior to Apple, Mala was a engineering manager at Amazon where she was instrumental in bringing streaming audio to millions of Alexa powered devices and third-party speakers, earning a reputation for driving operational success and customer delight. Mer’s expertise is rooted in embedded systems c consumer and enterprise storage and networking with a proven ability to report to executive management and drive product roadmaps. Beyond her technical leadership, Mala is a a passionate mentor, actively mentoring at CodePath and previously as a core team member of Amazon Women in Tech and ladder programs dedicated to fostering the next generation of talent.

Her work has been recognized with multiple awards including the Rockstar Award for Excellence in Leadership. Okay, now isn’t that a bio for you? Please show Molly some love as she makes her way to the main stage.

Hello everyone. Welcome. Well, thank you first of all for having me here.

I would like to thank CodePath, CodePath support team, Emmanuela, all the backstage folks as well as all of you for being here this afternoon and having you know giving me this opportunity to speak here today. I wanted to start off by saying I all of you may be wondering you just graduated why are you here in this session learning about leading engineering teams? Isn’t that too early?

Here’s one thing. Every senior engineer or manager I’ve ever hired in my career started exactly where you are today. And the ones who became exceptional leaders, they started thinking about leadership from day one.

Most times unknowingly. I’m Mala Ayar and I lead a team of passionate engineers here at Apple. But it all started as a new grad just like you.

First day on the job wondering if I had accidentally stepped into the wrong meeting room. It was a room full of makers, innovators, thinkers who were passionately discussing the design of the first teraflop supercomputer. I recall thinking leadership was something that happened later after I became a C engine engineer after I became really technical in my role.

I was wrong. Leadership isn’t a title. It’s how you show up every single day.

It’s when you are you it’s you who are there to help a teammate learn something new. It’s in you. When you speak up in a meeting, when you see a better solution, it’s the person people want to come to when they’re stuck.

I have been fortunate to be mentored by some of the best in the industry and they have also been my toughest critics. So, here we are to answer some of your questions and the real ones that you may be too nervous to ask in formal settings. So, let’s get real and you know, let’s kick it off.

Thank you, Emanuela. Yay. I appreciate that, Mala.

And I hope you all appreciate that, too. Mala’s here hyping you up, so you need to hype her up. So, drop some clap emojis for Mala to get to get her started here.

Yay. I love that. Isn’t that nice, Mala?

Getting us started. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so just so everyone knows, we have some prepared questions, but there are ways for you to ask questions.

Use the Q&A feature here so that we can recognize your question as we get to that point. And don’t forget to upvote if you see a question that you really like. So Mala, first question for you is we’d like to start with you sharing a little bit about your career journey and what led you to being a senior engineer as at Apple.

What got you interested in working in the tech field and all of the things? That’s a good story and that’s a good question and I have a cute story. My journey in tech actually began with a simple colorful fascination, a rainbow lit up keyboard.

As a kid my you know if you’ve seen one of those mechanical keyboards that lit up a as a kid my dad would take me to his friend’s office where I would let to work on some of my projects on his powerful desktop. Seeing that keyboard lit up with all these vibrant colors, I think I knew what I wanted to do exactly. I wanted to write software that powers hardware.

That’s my journey and that’s my initial spark that led to this incredible journey that started from writing device drivers to storage technologies, networking technologies and most recently media technologies. I’ve had the privilege of leading teams both globally at large enterprises and dynamic startups. Today I’m a senior engineering manager at Apple leading a bunch of passionate engineers who build innovative Apple TV product experiences.

Nice, nice, nice. Thank you for sharing that and thank you for the lit up keyboard. It makes me want to get one of those too.

I see some folks saying that. Those are cool as well. So I know you mentioned you know working at you know Apple currently working at Amazon but then you’ve also worked at some smaller organizations in addition to big tech what core traits have remained essential for success across you know these very different contextes and which ones had you know to evolve over time.

Actually the core traits of a great leader rarely change no matter where your career takes you. For me it has always been passion, dedication, persistence and most importantly having fun even when the things are tough. Working in a large organizations actually taught me the importance of collaboration, spacious and navigating diverse personalities.

On the other hand, the startups definitely instilled the grit and willpower to never give up. So those I think are traits as a leader that I carried in both kinds of spaces whether they were large enterprises or small groups. I think they just taught you little different things but ultimately all those things come together when you’re passionate about something.

Got it. But the hardest lesson I would say was as I grew from an engineer to being a leader was to embrace criticism. You know it’s it’s it’s tough when people critique you.

But really you know the people who have your back really critique you for the best in you. So you should you you need to learn how to embrace that. In addition to that becoming a leader definitely taught me to master empathy and least but not least least but not you know the least important best but not the least important was to lead by example.

Amazing. I know you talked a little bit like as a followup about like handling criticism. I know that has come up with some of our students.

Just curious to know if you have any like suggestions for how you’ve been able to roll with the punches over the years with criticism that you know probably knocked you to your knees a couple of times. Yeah, I think first and foremost to remember is that whenever the criticism given it’s not personal. I I think you you have to take the person out of it and think about the subject matter in question and understand what they’re really trying to get at.

Right? If somebody said what the document you wrote didn’t really, you know, was bad. It didn’t have any good pointers.

It didn’t say how it was how a certain thing was done or why the design sucked. I think it’s very important to understand that it’s not a direct criticism of your document of of who you are or reflection of who you are as a person. It is a it is a criticism to say how things can be done better.

Take the good points that people bring forth and you know roll with it. Now, you may be confronted with people who may not always have your back or may not always give you the best advice, but you need to learn to filter the the good from the bad and really roll with the good criticism you get. Love that.

Yay. It’s not personal and it’s helping you. Yeah.

Helping you to be a better engineer as well. Yeah. Love that.

Thank you. So based on your mentoring experience, you said you enjoy mentoring as we talked about this in your bio. When you’re mentoring new grads and early career engineers, what are the two to three most critical skills or mindsets that separate engineers who thrive from those who struggle?

Another good one and I think very appropriate for this crew. Engineers who thrive, I think, never stop learning from their experiences. And I think that’s number one.

They actually strive to make the next thing better than the what they did today. They don’t stop because, you know, they were given a project and they had to do some tasks and the deadlines were met and, you know, it’s all dusted and wrapped up and they move on. Actually, they sit back and reflect on what what happened over there.

Did I actually produce the best solution? Did I actually put the best design out there? Did I cut corners?

You know, can I go back there and fix something? Can I make it better? I think they’re always looking for opportunities to make things better.

And they also look at the project, the design and architectures as a whole, not just concentrate on the pieces that they were assigned to. In the end, they’re looking for something that is a more holistic full solution as opposed to the pieces they held. On the other hand, people who get very stagnant early on are often people who are complacent.

They do just enough to keep things going and then fail to take full ownership or true ownership of their work. I think this is some of the most critical skills I would say that have distinguished people that I’ve seen go far beyond in their careers versus people who got stagnant early on. Love that.

All right. Make sure y’all are repeating any of these gems that y’all are hearing. Especially the going above and beyond, not doing things that are just expected of you.

Because those going over and beyond are going to be the things that you know make you stand out. So appreciate that along with the other things that you’ve shared as well. Now Mala you you’ve been successful in working across hardware, software, QA and support teams throughout your whole career.

For early career engineers, how do you recommend that they build influence and credibility with teams outside their immediate technical domain? I would say this is a continuation of the previous question in some ways and it often says that your core strengths often you know goes to say that your core strengths often apply to areas across ownerships whether they’re software hardware QA or whatever because this is how you would want to look at it. A project is never a single piece of work that is successful on its own.

It stands alongside the support of various partner teams. You know this summit cannot be successful on its own. It has to be standing on its legs with all the pe all the people that are here in the room with us today.

Yeah. Otherwise it wouldn’t be successful. That’s the same for any kind of engineering project as well.

So the advice to the new grads here is to stay informed and curious about how it all works together end to end. Offer your insights and help beyond your immediate areas responsibilities to ensure a successful product. As you do this enough times, you will start to build trust and influence with your partner teams who now not only see you as a person who was assigned a task a and got a task a completed but somebody who is interested in you know what happens after I do a you know how does it you know how does it blend into the whole product how does it you know get it out there in the field and I think the success of the product somebody who’s invested in the success of a product is as a whole.

I I think that helps them really build their trust and credibility with other people. Love that staying curious, informed, sharing your insights because you all do have insights, right? We’re all consumers of some type of product.

You also have a point of view as an engineer. So, definitely share that. Thank you for sharing that, Mala.

Another thing I wanted to talk about was like transitions. So you’ve transitioned from different organizations and and some of our engineers will be doing the very same, right? What changes or adjustments did you have to make when switching from startup to a large company you know in your your background to help some of these emerging engineers here in the audience?

This is a good question and I actually encountered it a couple times in my life. So it’s a good question. I would say the biggest mindset shift I had to make was to get used to the fact that I not everything is in my control and that is I would say a big key of this.

You can’t solve all the pieces or problems to ship a product out the door. At the startup we were like a small large team who did everything and we knew everyone responsible to ship the product. If there were last minute change of plans we had to change how it looked.

We had to change the design. Everything happened within the same roof. If anything, the only outofc control factor I would say the startup usually was not knowing if the product would be successful once we put it out there, whether we would have the funds to keep our startup going.

But on the other hand, when I transitioned from a startup to this multi-billion dollar company, you know, you had to learn that not everything was in my control. You have to work with partners that span continents, different time zones, varying and conflicting priorities for the different teams. I’m saying this again, not everything is in my control.

Honestly, actually, very little was in my control. So, what you could do is do your best to deliver the little pieces that are in your control and trust the process for all of it to come together to ship a successful product. So in my view, this was one of the biggest mind shifts I had to do.

Great. And I think it gives some insight too into what some of these emerging engineers might want to consider when they’re thinking about an organization as well, right? You talked about with a startup, you knew all of the different pieces.

You had to wear many hats, right? And then when you’re in a large organization like Apple, you don’t. It’s like you have one piece of the puzzle that you’re you’re creating.

And so, I think that’s interesting to know like if if you want to be someone who has a lot of, different, influence in in different parts of the process, you might want to be looking at a startup or a small, you know, organization versus a large organization. Certainly. Yeah.

And, you know, you the other thing a big organization teaches you is to trust their process. Meaning, you need to trust your partners. You need you need to trust everybody will be doing their parts to come for this to come together, right?

And there’s a different different type of trust versus a trust in a startup where you know you’re you are more in tune with each other and everybody’s striving to get a successful product out there. Amazing. Yeah.

So before I go into these last couple of questions, just wanted to remind everyone that you can add your questions to the Q&A function and we will be looking at those in a few moments. So my next question is, what strategies have you used to go from being a strong individual contributor to someone who can drive crossf functional initiatives and represent engineering at the executive level? Making the leap from a good engineer to a leader often comes down to one thing which is seeing the bigger picture.

I think even early in my career I was always curious about the whole product. When I worked on a feature I would ask how would this feature be tested? What fe what what part does my feature play in the product as a whole?

What is the launch criteria for this product? And eventually if the product got out into the user’s hands, you would also I would be very curious to know what the user reviews were telling me. So it was always being curious and trying to understand where my little piece fell in this big puzzle.

And it’s also having the courage to speak up and offer your thoughts for improvement even when it’s tough. And I say that in real because when you start as a new grad, it might seem very tough to you. You won’t always be heard and your ideas may not always be accepted, but you have to keep pushing for what you believe is best for the product.

Eventually, you’ll get to a point where you start earning the trust and goodwill of, you know, your leaders and in the end, you know, you’ll start making small strides, but they will be impactful. And I think that was kind of the transitions that you had to make from being an individual contributor to a leader. The the level of the way the different areas you build trust just changes over time but ultimately that that stays your curiosity and trust building kind of stays.

Do you have like any any like strategies for building trust? Like I’m I’m trying to think of some of the students. Actually I think I would say that as an engineer for example you know when you you’re you’re working on something and you know now this is going to be tested by say a QA team you know be curious to go have a maybe even informal chats right you don’t have to make everything very formalized even informal chat with say the QA engineer who’s going to work on it and say hey this is my feature kind of tell me how you plan to test it or you know or let me expl explain to you how it’s supposed to work and then tell me what are you know what am I missing and how they plan to do things and you know when they come up with results ask questions you know ask like how did this feature do what were the things you ran into you know like kind of build trust so build trust both at an engineering level with say individuals but then also build trust with other managers and things like that if there’s a particular area that interests you right if a particular area interests you we’re like okay I want to know more about this like you what can I do?

Can I read more docs? Can I read more things? And one thing that I have seen that I do very often and I hope that all of you will be doing it as well is if you’re in a meeting where a large project is being discussed and you only contributed a tiny piece of it, but different parts of the project are being discussed.

Don’t shy away from asking questions about something that you haven’t directly contributed to. If you have a good thought, share it. If you have a doubt, ask it.

You know, but basically put yourself out there. There’s lots of tools these days. I know some people are shy of asking questions, but there are tools like, you know, chat boxes like we have here, Q&As’s and raise your hands and stuff like that.

Use all these tools to kind of make yourself heard. Got it. Love it.

I think the the basic theme here for everyone is being curious, asking questions, seeing how you can help others with their job as well. Like with the example you shared with the QA, it’s like, oh, okay, this engineer is really interested in making my job easier, you know, at the end of the day, which is nice. Okay, so Mala, are you ready for some of these questions that are coming through?

Absolutely. Let’s do this. Okay, let’s see.

All right, question. All right, some of y’all are upvoting some of these things. Okay, what what is the best way to find and connect with teams that someone would be interested in if they’re interested in working at Apple?

I know that’s a broad question, but okay. I am going to be truthful here in answering this and I hope you know most a lot of the graduates can understand where I’m coming from. Large companies like Apple or Amazon actually for new grads and students strictly follow the student hiring process and this has become very generic in this era which means that you’re not necessarily hired for a particular team.

It’s a more general profile. Even if you look at the Rex, they’re posted as software engineer new grad. It doesn’t say what team.

It doesn’t say it’s very generic in its profile. And then once you come in and you actually join, that’s when people try to match you with the right teams and things like that. So, this is a tough one unless you’ve already worked for a couple of years somewhere else and you know exactly what you’re going to do and you’re directly applying to a position there.

It’s a tough one if you’re right out of school and directly want to go to a team in Apple that you know works in your area of interest. I would say that’s becoming much more rarer these days. Okay.

I appreciate you sharing and I’m sure the audience do does as well like the real talk like we talked about. And so that means apply apply to the general roles. Do your research so that you can find the different teams that are there but know that there’s no guarantee that you will you know get to a specific team and there is no route to get into a specific team.

Yeah. Thank you for that. All right, next question is, how do how does someone build the technical and soft skills needed to be a great engineering team leader?

What books should they read? If you have some recommendations and what what text should they learn, what mistakes should they avoid? It’s a lot of questions.

That’s a huge question. Okay I think the first part was to what kind of soft skills as well as you know technical skills. So I think wherever you are in a team I’m assuming you’re trying to become a leader of that team.

So if you’re trying to become a leader of that team, I would say be very thorough in what the team’s technical space is and you know really learn things end to end right the best leaders that I have worked with and I told you I worked actually with worked and mentored by some of the best in the industry they’re actually highly technical leaders as well. So technical leadership isn’t going away anytime soon. So I would say be very thorough and deep in your technical knowledge of the space or the team you’re in to understand the workings.

Again, we go back to thinking of the product as a whole. Thinking of the product holistically. So you really need to know all the pieces, even if it’s little bit of the other pieces and there’s one piece you specialize in, that’s fine.

But you do need to know how all of it work together in order to be a good leader. Soft skills. Mentioned some of that earlier on.

I think basically treat everybody with respect and you know also you know learn how to be helpful provide helpful criticism don’t you know make people feel smart not small and definitely don’t be afraid to learn from others. I think the biggest thing I learned as a leader was be ready to accept that you will not be the brightest person in the room and that’s okay. I think the idea is to not be the brightest person in the room.

It is to be able to learn from others in our team. A successful leader is one who actually builds their team in such a manner that they have the best of everything on their team. They’re not the best of everything in themselves, but they have the best of everybody around them in order to be a very successful team.

So, think about it like that. Think about, you know, using all the, you know, using utilizing all the people in your team, you know, to be able to build something good, right? What books should I read?

I mean, there’s tons of book these days on leadership and stuff like that. I I don’t particularly recommend a one particular book because I don’t do it myself either. I take the goods from a lot of different books.

So, I think attending a lot of these kind of leadership talks or reading some of the books like of course the things like the 10 best habits of a manager the great leadership t like those things don’t go away. All of those kind of things always stay. And you know how to have I think that one of the one one of the ones I read recently was how to have tough conversations is very important for being an engineering leader as well.

I think those are all criticals to you know reading soft reading about soft skills to me is good. It gives you perspective but practicing soft skills is a whole different thing. So to be a great leader, I would say you have to practice soft skills.

Amazing. Random question for you, Mala. Do you because I’m finding more and more that leaders have coaches?

And have you found that to be the case in your success like having having a coach? Absolutely. I I think I would I would say that I don’t have one I have multiple and it has been my my you have operated for many years now I don’t believe that there is any one person who will be able to fully support or coach me in the different aspects of I am we are all people built with different personalities we all bring different things to the table and each of those coaches are people with unique personalities who all bring different things to the table.

So there’s something for you to learn from everybody. And so I I do have used mentors and coaches throughout my career. I continue to use them even where I am today.

And I definitely feel just brainstorming with them. Learning the learning all the cool things they have to share, things sometimes you may agree with, things sometimes you may not agree with, but you need to know what is right and what is not right for you. But al but you will be learning in the process.

So absolutely love that. Thank you for sharing that was insightful so that folks can know that you know you should be getting a mentor and then also having a coach and you know little plug the career center at CodePath does have career coaches that you should be taking advantage of. And I know one of my teammates will probably drop the link to have that conversation with the careerbot to get connected with a career coach in the chat while I’m handling this whole moderation thing.

So, all righty. So, next question. How do you go about task delegation and decision making when it comes towards making or managing large projects?

Okay. U so this one you know you have a large project you’re going to have various pieces about of the project and as you break these down you would know what those different things needs to be done and you would look at your team and say you’re given a team of five or whatever and you know certain people’s core strengths. So the first inclination for any manager is to go towards a person’s core strength.

Meaning as a manager, you know that this person’s really good in UI, this person’s really good in doing more of the low-level or back-end stuff and you will be like naturally deviate towards those kind of task delegation. That just happens, you know, organically just kind of that’s how it, you know, goes about. That every so often when it comes to a large project especially year on year as a manager I would sit back and think that if any of these people in my team five people in my team during their one-on- ones or whatever have ever experienced an interest to do something else.

So he the person may be very interested in UI or may have been very good at UI but maybe the person you know they want to learn backend development now and they may have mentioned that to me and you know something like a large project is a great opportunity where you may have a certain wiggle room to kind of pick some people who may have in the past expressed interest and you know put them in a position where they will be learning something new of course with their consent and you know we also being able to support the project as a whole. It’s much harder to do when you’re talking about time crunch projects are much smaller. As a manager, you would deviate to people of their you know people with their subject matter expertise.

Amazing. Thank you for that. We have a question about your role as a senior engineering manager.

What does your daytoday look like? Lots of Slacks, lots of emails now. Well, that that too, but yeah, it involves a little of everything we just spoke about.

It definitely involves task delegation, managing projects. A lot of my day-to-day looks like working with my partner teams. Actually, a lot of my calendar is filled with engaging with partner teams because when we work on projects, we discussed this earlier, project is never done by a person alone, by a team alone.

It involves a number of partner teams, a number of you know organizations throughout Apple that I work with. So at one part of the day would be spent probably integrating with my partner teams discussing you know the stages of this project where we are with this where our results what are blockers you know things like that. Another part of the day would definitely be more kind of innovative things kind of brainstorming with my team on what maybe be what we may be doing for the future or even in the current project if they’re stuck on something we may be discussing designs and architectures and things like that.

A good part of my time is also spent on quality. This is Apple and I I know I think everybody knows quality doesn’t is not taken lightly at Apple. So quality is a big part of this whole effort as well to make sure that different pieces are being tested.

I educate testing is in place and and then not to mention that we would also have u my time a good part of my time is also set aside for one-on- ones. And by that I mean one-on- ones with my own team but also my own one-on- ones with others. We also talked about coaches and mentors.

So there’s, you know, so it’s like, yeah, basically a lot of it would be like a 30 3030 split around a lot of these things. Got it. Great insight.

So influencing others doesn’t end. Communication, lots of communication, lots of planning, ideiation. I would say ideiation, planning, communication, and just chatting with people.

A lot of chatting with people. Love it. All righty.

Next question. From a manager’s perspective, what quality and specifically they’re looking at soft skills would you tend to seek when hiring candidates, especially for those who are entry level? For entry level.

I Oh, soft skills. That’s an interesting question. I would say that we’re, you know, most people tend to tend to lean towards culture fit and that’s a very interesting term.

I know some people don’t like that term either, but I would say that what what people really mean by that is when the person comes in, is the person going to be a part of our team? Meaning, is the person happy to sit there with the rest of the team, you know, discuss ideas, be able to offer their ideas and be able to take feedback and work with the rest of the team? Or are they going to be somebody who is just you know telling the manager give me my work please go away come back see me in two weeks and I’ll get it done right those are you know th those are the kind of skills that may be suited for certain projects or certain teams or certain companies but you know those not for everything right so we’ll definitely be looking for those kind of skills about collaboration working with your team members and another important factor I look at would also be reporting up and reporting down.

By that I mean how does the person communicate and how do they share you know what they did or what they plan to do with both their managers as well as their peers. You know they need so again ultimately we are saying communication skills is the top of it. Collaboration is next and other thing I would say is sharing.

I’m definitely looking at sharing skills as well. Meaning people don’t say that this is my idea. I’m not going to tell anybody about it and you know I’m just going to keep it a secret.

No, I don’t think at at a at a very company and you know collaborative where you’re collaborating to build products, you’re always sharing ideas. You’re always sharing ideas unless it’s under some kind of strict disclosure. You’re always sharing ideas and being able to support each other you know do better.

Amazing. All righty. I think I don’t know if we have enough time for this but I’ll this is our last question.

So we have a question that says as a fellow woman of color my question is how did you overcome bias in the industry? I know that’s not a quick question but I will say this that it is continues to be a hard problem. It’s not just being a woman of color.

I would say just being a woman is a hard is a hard thing still. I started my career the story I said about walking into a room where people were talking about the design of the supercomputer I was the only woman in the room and I will say this today that in my current staff I am the only women manager in the team as well. So I don’t think over the years a lot has changed in in in in that perspective.

You know women are a lot more in the workforce and I’m being represented a lot more and I appreciate the entire community everybody out there right not just the women everybody out there for supporting other women in the workforce but I I think it’s something that you actually should take out of your mind when you join the workforce that’s how I think I cope with it when I enter a room I do not think that I’m the only woman in the room I am there with a purpose. I’m there with you know either to learn the technical skill to share my technical knowledge to be part of the product and that’s what you do. I I think you always try and remove you know the picture of a woman from front of you and I think that will keep you going and that will not stop you from standing up for your ideas or sharing what you need to share.

Awesome. Thank you so much Mala. I appreciate being so generous with your time.

I want to encourage everyone to show some love for Mala in the chat or send some emojis. Oh, thank you. I think I saw a lot of those flying by earlier, too.

I know you you did definitely get some love and you shared a lot of gems from your background, your experience and also you know what you’re doing now with giving back to others and so really appreciate that and I’m sure the audience does as well. We have reached the end of our session today. I do want to thank you Mala for you know just an engaging conversation.

And I want to make sure that everyone knows to fill out the survey that we have for you to wrap up this session. And I think that’s everything for now. I don’t know if you have anything any closing words, Mala.

Absolutely. I can close. I am a talker so I can close.

I my closing words or piece of advice for this for this crew is actually a very famous saying. And I think the saying means a lot to me. Your smile is your logo.

Your personality is your business card. And how you leave others feeling after an experience with you becomes your trademark. So you may be wondering why this applies.

Especially for new grads. I would say you can start building your trademark from now on. You don’t need to have seniority to be someone others want to work with because the best engineers are the ones who don’t make code reviews feel you know dreadful but rather learning opportunities not criticism.

They turn intense debugging sessions into collaborative problem solving. You make others feel smart not small. Your technical skills will certainly get you into the door, but how you leave people feeling after they work with you, that’s your trademark, will determine how far you’ll go.

So, good luck team, and good luck with all your future and thanks for this opportunity again. And remember to build your trademark. I love that.

In the words of Justin Harper, that was a mic drop moment. So, thank you so much, Mala. Thank you everyone for attending and yeah leave your trademark.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you all.