CodePath EES2024 HACKERRANK - Building a Tech Career in an Unpredictable Time

Hi everyone welcome back to our breakout session building a tech career in an unpredictable time hosted by hacker rink we are so excited to have you join us today I will be introducing our speaker shortly but first just wanted to share a few reminders please utilize the chat to have conversations focused on the topic today please keep your messages relevant to the session there are opportunities for you to connect in the booths if you want to share your LinkedIn and have other conversations following the session we’ll be sharing our breakout session survey we appreciate you all filling that out and providing your feedback on the session I’d like to introduce our speaker today trelle Williams from HackerRank he’s a product manager at HackerRank he prioritizes connections between the platform and applications across the internet with experience across product and Engineering he focuses on creating values and solving real problems he is currently based in Houston Texas the birthplace of Beyonce I just had to put that out there and and with his partner he enjoys roller skating learning about solar technology and working out travel is back for the second time he was at EES last year we’re thrilled to have you join us again travel I am going to turn it over to you welcome thank you thank you thank you yes Beyonce’s Hometown like oh is travel the Beyonce of hack rank someone says in the chat thank you one day one day not not today all right let’s jump in all right so I don’t want to make this about me but I do want there to be a bit of context on who I am I’m an accidental product manager I grew into a product manager from being the software engineer at PayPal and I fell in love with product management while building developer tools I also don’t have a computer science background I studied English Lit in Black studies in University I also went on the pread track thinking I would go into PhD that never happened and I’m really happy about that and finally shout out to all of my gryffindors I’m a huge Harry Potter fan I’m not a Gryffindor by default of Harry and Hermione and Ron being a Gryffindor I’m a real life Gryffindor I love the other houses as well huffle Puffs represent I love it all right so this is an overview of HackerRank in our mission we want to change the world to Value skills over pedigree and we don’t believe that you’re your ZIP code your resume or your degree what we do is exercise our mission in two ways one we have a developer Community where all of you all are welcome for free to skill up in a number of skills whether it be python react any kind of sort of software engineering Technologies in addition we also offer a skills-based technical interviewing platform for large companies to assess their developer Talent in a way where they aren’t so heavily dependent on resumés to make a decision on candidates when you think about us as a company and our reach we touch 2.3 million candidates a year we have 2500 customers that are all kind of big names that you’ve probably heard of and we have 24 million developers right now on our platform who are Skilling up connecting searching for jobs and just showing the best of themselves so let’s jump in I try to form this talk around where most of you all probably are and I watch the news I know that there’s like a lot going on with tech companies and advancing technology I know that there’s a lot of confusion about what should I study job hunting is on on a lot of folks Minds getting a recruiter to respond back to you is a lot figuring out what technology you should be Skilling up and learning is a huge kind of aspect that people are trying to figure out and finally just keeping up with all of the things happening in Tech is crazy on top of everything else so what I’ve decided to form this talk around is is the notion that we can’t really control the future but we can influence it with our actions today and so what I hope to leave you with and provide you with is a framework of sorts to help you navigate these unpredictable times uncertainty in your career and also walk away with some sort of value or success coming back to you this is also the flow of this presentation and I want to step away from calling it like I don’t want to call it a presentation I want it to be more of a workshop my goal is to be in service of you all so if there’s ever something I present or talk about or a activity that we jump into that Sparks interest call me out on it I want to bring attention to it and I want to make sure we all walk away with something super valuable so let’s jump in I don’t want to bore you all with data so I promise I’ll breath through this but there are some important things I want to talk about so first I think anytime you’re in a situation where there’s uncertainty or you don’t know how to move forward you should root yourself in data and what hacker rang does every single year is we produce a developer skills report where we interview developers from all sorts of walks of life and we use that report to inform and communicate where developers are in their career careers what skills you should focus on how employers are perceiving those developers so much comes out of this and so typically this developer skills report from our end is something we talk about with our customers I kind of want to reshape it because our customers are the places you all are applying to so I want to reshape this to be in service of how you should probably interact so one of the key insights that we see is a sign of a stabilizing market and what this means is many of you have probably experienced being in flux I remember I think last summer and the summer before that there were folks who were going after their internships and new roles and because there was such change in Tech they weren’t able to move forward at all at certain companies I remember there were layoffs happening in some areas of the re of the market but what we do see from our report and reaching out is that there is an increase in new test Creations on the hacker in side and what that means is that every every time a role opens up a new test is created so we’re seeing this behavior among our customer base and the way that supports and influences you kind of as a candidate who may be in flux or maybe concerned about where things are headed in Tech I think this is a strong signal that we’re moving towards stabilization the other thing that I think is important is most developers aren’t aware of learning opportunities at their Company online all of these places and I think this is kind of oh I apologize can you hear me now thumbs up thumbs down am I still cutting out okay cool cool all right I’ll I’ll also scoot up if that helps and again I don’t want to present the whole time I’m gonna try to speed through this because I want to hear from y’all but most developers aren’t aware of learning opportunities and I think what needs to happen is twofold I think those of us who are developers and seasoned Professionals in the Tech Community need to surround new talent and support folks but I also think that employers and we do see this should do work on their end to make opportunities to learn at work more accessible for their developers and again it may not feel clear or apparent to you in this particular moment but from what I’m saying there’s a lot of energy being put in by our customers to figure this problem out all right third Insight the perceived value of college is being questioned I think this is important because a lot of folks I talked to want to give their degrees back if they took out kind of loans from fasta they want to like exchange that so they like it’s this whole crazy thing going on right now with college and whether you should have a degree and it’s if it’s valuable and what it means for our society this is up in the air but what I have seen more than anything is that whether whether you’re on the college side or non- col side the focus still heavily remains on whether or not you have the skills so we still see a future that people are Marching towards where skills are key and then four is employers believe they have an accurate understanding of employee skills this is such an interesting Insight as I was sort of talking to people at our booth folks were saying hey I’m not sure what skills I should focus on I’m not sure what I should learn I don’t know why recruiters aren’t getting back to me what skills should I put on my resume to go to the top and these are all great concerns and great questions to to bring up but there there seems to be a disconnect between employers and candidates where employers believe they have an accurate understanding of employee skills but often times there’s a lot that that employee or that developer still has have in in them to express there are tons of skills that they haven’t shown their employers and so I think as candidates often times our work is to figure out how to present and share our skills in new and fun interesting ways so that there isn’t this disconnect and then the last one is 76% of developers are using an AI assistant to do their work this number is increasing I’m getting the feeling that a lot of people in the chat probably use AI I use AI assistance all over the place and this is important because if you went to our keynote or the keynote that VC our CEO gave the future is human and AI for us so we believe ultimately that how we build software today will change so instead of having the previous life cycle for building software you’ll have a agent helping you at every single stage of the software development life cycle and so there’s these questions that come up after going through this report which is should I become an expert on AI and my response is no but you should know how to use these tools responsibly and effectively will there be jobs in Tech are companies hiring yes but over time what it means to work in Tech will transform and we do see this happening as a product manager I’m looking forward to a world where I’ll be able to prototype without having to go to my engineering team to build things out and the engineering team will be able to get context on all sorts of features with without ever having to talk to me at all we’ll have agents that can do tons of work for us and that means that we have to rethink what it means to work in Tech and it helps to prepare for that next this is also something that came up should I get an MBA go to grad school or take a certification course and that’s between you and your parents I’m joking though you should always be learning I think that continuously seeking opportunities to skill up and grow is going to be a part of everybody’s career Journey whether you’re a CEO or someone working in support you’re going to consistently have to think about what new skills do I have to get how my old skills probably are defun or need to be reformatted as well all right the last question that I think a lot of people have and this is scary to ask and I think it gets to a level of vulnerability is is there a space for me and Tech and my answer to that is we will all be developers in this new world the pace and rate of innovation at this point will allow us to enter into a era of abundance in my opinion tons of folks who never would have been able to code before will be able to build things on the internet and that’s exciting so okay I want to step away from the data and I want to step into beginning to be a bit more workshopy and us working together to begin to set goals manage time all of those cool things so how many people have heard of smart goals could I just get like a response in the chat who’s heard of yeah this framework I remember I remember my like high school English teacher like Drew this on the board and was like yo y’all gotta get into these smart goals and if you’re not familiar with smart goals this is typically what they look like you’re setting a goal you want it to be specific you want it to be measurable you want it to be achievable you want it to be relevant to what you’re trying to do and you want to put some kind of deadline on it that first one I will complete an online python course and build three projects over the next three months to improve my coding skills and Advance my career I mean this is a common way to format a goal and it does feel like you’re moving somewhere but I want to think of goals and goal setting as like turning strategy into results I don’t know about y’all but I’m the kind of person where how do I say this a sentence doesn’t work for me when it comes to goal setting every time I sit and say I’m gonna wake up at 400 am go to the gym and for like four days a week and try to do that for six months it always collapses and I do this thing where I like stack goals it’s really it’s it it doesn’t I don’t think a sentence is what most people need to be able to have long-term impact so I’ve been trying to repurpose this thing and I want to put y’all on to it and I think it’ll help which is creating a creating a framework a system for your goals so they connect and so you’re meaningfully attached to them what we’re looking at is sales forces strategy for trying to align everybody in the company and the way they go about doing it is they have every single employee write what’s called a V2 mom document and this document really really gives everybody Clarity on what we’re all working on what we value and what we’re working towards and when smart goals failed for me and I was not waking up and getting to the gym on time I was not doing my like python drills or or Skilling up or focused on what I should have been I began to look for Frameworks and this is one I found and so I I’ll break it down quickly and then we’re gonna do something with this so first you set a vision which is what do you want to achieve and the way I set Visions today is not how I set Visions when I was working with smart goals what I do today is I think deeply about what I like to happen next I want a promotion to happen next I want to move into another role or make more money or learn this language or skill up in AI I try to get super crisp about what I want to occur in the world and then I think about my values what is important to me is it time with my family is it being able to lift boxes while moving is it being support to my colleagues what is I I really dig deep and ask myself what is important to me and then method how do I get there I think deeply about three to five things I need to do to support this new vision that I’m trying to bring into a reality and then I think about what obstacles may be preventing me from being successful with all of my methods and then finally I come up with a way of how I’m going to even measure movement towards these goals all together all right so these are the components of what a V2 mom document is these are the descriptions and I want to kind of craft a V2 mom together with one or two people in the audience what do y’all think about that yes no cool cool I’m seeing some reactions yep yep and don’t worry I prepared ahead of time I have something to share with everybody all right so I just shared a link to a template of a V2 mom Doc it’s a Google template feel free to copy it and it has each of these elements broken down and the goal is for one or two people to come up and for us to go through this document together so let’s see d e e April hi April thanks for hopping up you’re like what am I doing we’re bringing travel back in just one second but if you don’t mind do you mind sharing where you’re calling from and where you go to if you’re in school or what you’re doing I’m calling from Columbus Ohio I’m a bachelor’s in computer science student at Oregon State University and I think I forgot the third thing you mentioned Oh no you’re you’re studying CS yep okay excellent we are waiting for travel to hop back on but I really appreciate you I’ve seen you active in the chat what’s been your favorite thing about EES so far hey hey really oh hey oh he’s back sorry I’m not sure what happened okay good I can stop I can stop vamping but we got April’s intro okay cool cool so I’ll turn it back over to you guys all right April so you have the V2s mom dog yep oh okay cool cool can you still hear me I apologize I wanted to bring back up the slides there we go all right so April it’s all on you let’s start with vision what are you trying to achieve I don’t know where you trying to go on this but one thing that I’m currently trying to do is level up my technical experience or skills with learning Java a new language okay cool cool so is the vision to do those things toward some sort of career move or yeah so I’ve been looking yeah I’ve been looking at a lot of job descriptions and one thing that I’ve been seeing over and over is Java which is something that like my coursework hasn’t delv into so I knew that was something I needed to kind of get on on my own okay and I think it’ll be helpful too if I instead just have like the V2s mom dock itself up so you could see it all right so big picture goals we have moving into either a development or engineering role learning Java learning python boom that’s our vision are there any other elements of how you want to move forward and what you want to achieve I guess a more like smart goal would be like developing a program or a tool using Java or like reimplementing one of my old projects in Java okay cool cool don’t think about like how right now I just want you to think about the vision I think one of the things with smart gos that I didn’t really like is that it always put me in this mode of trying to figure out the H before I was super crisp and clear on what I wanted to happen does that resonate with you yeah and then like you can get stuck in like the implementation details or like get stuck in the weeds yeah so let’s avoid that we’ll talk about the method soon but we have Java python new roll what sort of things do you value in moving towards this that’s a really general question because I could just say like learning new skills like that’s just kind of the Perpetual path right yeah but I don’t think that’s a value I think that’s more of like a desire that’s more of either what I want to happen a value is something like something that’s deeply rooted in how we’re motivated to perform or Embrace something so for example something I value deeply is my alone time I really need time time to like be chilled be to myself focus on my work I really need Solace and time to myself it’s slightly different and this might be a little bit like oh everyone says this but one of my deep values core values is like excellence and so it’s like doing something that makes me proud of what I’m doing like being proud of what I’m doing I think it’s probably the best way to put it got it got it got it all right so we have being proud of what I’m doing and is that sort of like validation too being validated not really because I’m like someone who self- validates so it’s not necessarily about the external validation it’s like am I proud of what I’m doing not because is like the best thing ever but like did I achieve my goals which might have been like improving like just improving would be like a thing of Excellence for me got it so continuous growth yeah and then let’s move into the how this is when you began to take those first two sections we got your vision Java python moving into a new career with either one of those Tech languages being used we got what you value I’m getting the sense that in a deep way you value continuous learning but also validation from putting the time in to learn those things and Achieve them and then there’s also the how you will achieve them that we want to step into you began to mention some of these house but let me let me know a bit more about what what they are and what they they may be so how I researched different Java resources and learning tools so I started the Moc Java course on my own which has been super awesome and then I also have a huge backlog of Java books such as I think it’s called Effective Java and one of the other speakers gave like six books for Java so that was that’s was instantly added to my reading list and then hopefully projects okay can I ask a real question yeah and also I want to apologize to the audience I want to have a moment of vulnerability I don’t know what happened there with like the electric doing what it did or the internet doing what it did but I feel like it made the vi off a little bit I’m going to try to reenter but I probably won’t reenter on the presentation because I really want to make sure with the remaining time that I provide something of value to y’all it’s it’s not about me there’s this thing I want to tell you about April called tutorial hell and I was in it and I feel like that’s where you’re going with collecting these books with like your goal setting and all of this kind of stuff and tutorial hell is not a good place because like you’re seeing these job descriptions go up and they’re saying Java and Python and you have like 30 books on this stuff but you don’t feel ready to jump into actually applying or going to through the technical interview I’ve been there my suggestion and it’s written there is that you come you become super specific with three to these three to five actions that you’re gonna commit to so because you’re in tutorial hell don’t do four don’t do five I think three is a Max my recommendation would be to do one or two kind of goals or methods to get you towards that Vision one of the things that helped me was centering on kind of a SAT line learning path of materials that I was going to use even making those things with one teacher and being able to really go through that course in such a way where I was able to end it with something that I could use throughout the interview process or that meant something to me so that would be my first suggestion when thinking about the how to this let go of all the books and collecting all the YouTube links and pick like one or two that you want to Center on so we have a meth I’m GNA just like make that a meth let’s make that a pretend method is it okay if I do that yeah okay cool cool so we have this pretend method that is well it’s a real method but you know we’ll have that one and then we’ll make the second one because if you’re interested in applying for jobs I’m pretty sure you’re thinking about projects and I’m pretty sure you’re thinking about practical kind of things you need to add to your portfolio to get there I think that possibly another method could be completing a project do you have you completed any projects already or is it like in the tutorial hell phase where you’re just like I’m still trying to get out of that before I even figure out a project it’s more like learning learning the syntax of java and how it’s different and like relearning like I’ve done this before in other languages and like what’s the wording in Java that’s just the biggest thing right now okay well why not make that like a goal take one of your projects and write them in the other language yeah that’s much more smarter and I it’s okay honestly I think it’s cooler when I was going from Ruby to python that’s exactly what I did I took one of my projects that I had up and I rewrote it in Python until like every function came fluid to me and that’s something I found a lot of people doing over time to be able to go between the languages because they also when you think of programming languages they don’t change terms of syntax or how they operate is just a different way to say something so saying something over time in a different language be begins to be a habit so I think I mean those will be my recommendations for like methods yeah makes sense thanks cool cool okay next one is obstacle what what would prevent you from like cuz Okay do you know like on the internet when they say you only have one job so you have two jobs get out of tutorial hell and focus on one learning path write one of your projects in another language you have two jobs what do you think will be the obstacle to accomplishing those those jobs or completing them getting distracted by new resources or new shiny things or sometimes well-meaning advice from other people who are like trying to tell me oh it’s more optimal or it’s like shinier to do it this other way those are probably the most biggest obstacles okay cool cool that’s the first one someone said stop watching every single video in the tutorial that’s the only way you escape I agree the only way so don’t get dist raed that’s well you’ve identified that as an obstacle but someone in the chat said like hey this is how you do it and then what is what are some other obstacles or is that the only way that you we see this one obstacle that I’ve run into in previous projects is not reaching out for help from my mentors or my classmates before I’ve reached the point of like being so frustrated that I just feel completely demoralized and just want to give up on the project being vulnerable being honest yes yes yes no that happens to me it’s the I don’t want to ask for help syndrome type of thing it’s like oh maybe like the next next link will have the answer for me oh maybe like the next stack overflow will have the answer or like oh maybe the next tutorial or like this next resources will be like the magic key when like sometimes the people around you five minutes can like save you hours or days yeah I definitely appreciate you like opening up I think do have you heard of peir programming I have the slight issue is that most of my mentors or friends are neurod Divergent and so it can be very difficult to follow each other’s thought proc processes because the way that they work is very optimized for them and it’s not very easy to learn as a newbie when they’ve like yeah built their own Masterpiece of working methods yeah yeah okay let’s hold on to that so the obstacle is you want to reach out for help but then there’s also like this I can’t reach out for help because there’s this disconnect I don’t want people I don’t want people telling me how to do things the way they would do it in ways that don’t work for me yeah really real really real okay so then maybe have you attempted to kind of like explore other networks or other other avenues okay I just had this brain thought what about kind of like a live either programming group or or like a live course for example that you will be able to be a part of and that way you will be able to be in a cohort of people that are also at the same kind of level and moving in the same direction as you are but having the safety of you know a class for example yeah a lot of these online classes do have discords so it’s like a live community that you can just pop in but also one way I’ve kind of hijacked my friends is I don’t ask them I don’t tell them necessarily the problem I’m like hey do you guys have any resources on blank so I kind of short circuit them a little bit the same same same same okay I do that all right I think what we just did kind of going through these different obstacles and like CH like challenging our own capacity to overcome the obstacles is what should happen in this section like really thinking deeply about what resources I have at my disposal what are my friends like and in this section I typically book add a bullet point under each obstacle saying like hey this is how I’m GNA overcome it or this is how I’m gonna fight back that would be my recommendation and then the measure how would you know if you were successful on like moving forward with this Vision probably getting that first Java program whatever to compile and run and work thatd probably be like the number one measurable goal yes I like that and then the ultimate goal though the one that comes after that you got the program going then it’s what is the path to job at that point well it kind of sucks right because a lot of that is out of your control right a lot of that is up to luck or opportunities or other people taking the chance on you so it’s like kind of hard to have like getting a Java job as a goal because that’s like so out of your control I think it’s out of your control I also think that there are steps you can take to be able to mitigate some of this so and there’s a whole slide that I did on this but I’ll break this down really quickly one of the things I found out is that I didn’t need to have a bunch of connections and relationships to be able to get the things I need or to be able to ask for help I sat one evening and I mapped out all of my friendships both professional and personal I thought about what similar skills do they have what areas are they working on that I’m not what other networks that they are a part of that I’m not and I found out that the among just five friends five relationships I was able to get access to other people other jobs other opportunities all sorts of things I think here’s what I think is going to happen I think social media is making it difficult for people to actually connect and what’s going to end up happening is we’re all going to lean on our networks that we’re comfortable with and that’s going to force us into a position where we’re going to have to rely on those networks and their networks that they bring to be able to find Opportunities and to navigate my suggestion for navigating this and I also want to speak to everybody else about this because I know how recruiters can be when it comes to like not being responsive or you’re looking at so many jobs that you apply to and not hearing responses back or you’re doing tons of technical interviews and not getting the score really lean on your network in a in an intimate way though not in a way where you need to reach out to 20 people but there I’m pretty sure if you have friends that know Java or python they have connections to other places and they may not be good for you to pair program with or like ask for help from they may be the best people to sort of connect you with this hiring manager or this engineering manager over here that’s kind of how I perceive and think about it yeah asking for help for non-technical stuff too asking for help for the career stuff too yeah oh man we have to figure this out but yeah what that was the like that’s goal setting with this kind of framework and how does that feel versus going through kind of a smart goal type of situation it’s way less overwhelming it’s way less like knowing what you have to do while before you set the goal in the first place and it seems a little bit more flexible or dynamic where you can pivot more a little bit more easily yep I think I think we found it I think we found it thank you April what I’ll do from here because I know we have like 15 minutes and a lot of time has like passed if people have questions that they want to just throw at me come on stage and I don’t mind chatting through this stuff because again thank you again this is all about y’all oh there’s a question in the chat as a 2024 new grat who didn’t have an internship during college I’m trying to reposition myself to find a path forward do you have any advice for building a career from this perspective good practices motivation all sorts of stuff okay so this is a really really great question I think I think what has kind of happened is like internships have become seen as the staple of how you get into Tech or how you get a position at this different company and I kind of want to just abandon that as being kind of the so driver for folks in the soul way to think about it so for me I didn’t start in Tech when I graduated from college I had a English degree and what I did was I ended up working in banking for a year got a little experience and I moved on to actually joining a company a tech company in the support kind of role or support function so you could imagine this English major no Tech experience in a que kind of responding to people about questions they had about this digital product and it was there where I was able to figure out hey this queue is filled with all sorts of problems that the company is trying to solve and if I can get really good at solving these problems who knows where that will take me and so once I began kind of digging in and like really really understanding where these problems were originating and how to move on that’s how other opportunities opened up to me I think what you kind of have to do if you didn’t have an internship but you have a college degree and you have the passion and desire to move into Tech is you have to reframe kind of your expectations of what your first role will look like the first role doesn’t have to be a software engineer I’m a product manager now at wasn’t my first role it was something I took time and built up to so I think yeah I think if you look for other opportunities besides software engineer or even just kind of get another internship that’s something that could definitely definitely help out okay oh there’s more let’s see let’s see let’s see next question oh so this there’s a question that came up which is one thing you mentioned was to have a deep understanding of why you’re building what you’re building all right so this came from somebody who attended the booth and they had a question on hey should I go from software engineering to product management how do I do that and one of the things I told them was they need to have a deep understanding of why they’re building what they’re building I think what ends up happening to a lot of people who want to move into product management is they obsess over kind of the role and the shiny stuff and think about getting an NBA or being able to work with different kinds of teams and what you really need is to just understand the why start with the why of why is my company making this particular decision why are we working with this particular technology why are we building this sort of thing the better you get at understanding the why over time and responding to it and when I say respond to it let that why inform decisions you make in your code there are ways to Delight your customers there are ways to Delight your users that product managers often this and you could take that up as a software engineer as a data analyst as anybody on a team and so yeah understanding why you’re building what you’re building I think is the best way to begin a move into a product management role and last question what’s one Trend or technology that I believe is currently overhyped and one that’s underappreciated okay this is I’m not going to say AI I really think that application programming interfaces AP I are underhyped kind of Technology what a API is U for folks who may not know is it is a kind of interface that systems have on the Internet or just in general that allows you to control them or share data or get data from them apis are the badrock of how all of this is wired together and if you I mean I’m kind of upset that about the state of apis as a technology because if you took AP Computer Science they barely talk about it in all four years of computer science degree programs API has barely come up as a technology that people are building and actively thinking about and they are so important to the modern modern world I do think on some level AI is a bit overhyped but not for the not for the I think is overhyped around all of these use cases that don’t really make life better for people I would like to see it like I would like to see AI hyped or overhyped when it comes to not I shouldn’t even say hyped I would like to see AI kind of be talked about with genomics and the genetic work that’s happening with how like models are able to process our DNA and and help us like I think we’re thinking about AI in a way where folks really want automation but they don’t know how to say that and that’s the frustrating part of of a lot of it for me yeah all right so I think okay so I have one last question for you and for everybody who saw me on my walking pad I’m not walking now so I’m stable I was tring so I would love to know like I you know it’s so evident how much you take take a really thoughtful consideration to like you know it’s a crazy time out there for our students trying to get jobs in Tech if you could give like one piece of advice for somebody embarking on this journey of like getting a competitive role in Tech what would you like what’s most important for them to either remember or like an approach or some kind of method that you think would be really helpful for people embarking on that part of their Journey it’s gonna be Che easy but I’m going to say this don’t give up at all what people I I think when things get hard people begin to give up and like leave all together I had a lot of challenges people told me I couldn’t be a product manager I was told that I needed a NBA I was told that I needed to go through all of these weird courses to to do that and get these certifications I didn’t listen to any of that stuff I believed in myself and I wasn’t going to let anybody tell me otherwise I went through the same thing when when I was trying to be a software engineer people told me I didn’t have a traditional background I needed to go get a computer science degree and ultimately the faith that I had in myself was just that I knew I wasn’t gonna quit and I knew if I didn’t quit that the the opportunity that was meant for me was going to be aligned and I was going to get that role so I know things are hard right now and my heart goes out and I’m I want to help whoever I can connect with me if I can be a resource of any time oh no he froze right at the end he was giving Gems we’ll see if he pops back up oh I know travelle had a few Tech issues but we so appreciate his time today right at the end we’ll make sure to share his information with you all but please drop your appreciation in the chat for travel we will make sure to share it with him he’s a fantastic presenter you can tell just the Deep care he has for all of you for the topic so thank you so much for coming today please drop your appreciation again in the chat we encourage you to go visit the booth connect with each other in the lounges fill out the feedback survey that is dropped and to close us out we will go to a brief video from our host Bobby Doris thanks all see you in a session soon thank you for joining us in this session I got some information before you leave it says please take a moment to complete a brief survey to share your feedback remember how valuable feedback is I’m trying to come back three years in a row and it’s all based on feedback right to see what comes up next I want you to head back to the main stage and check out the schedule see you soon in the next set of sessions