Category: tech leadership

Innovation and Impact: U.S. Digital Service through the Lens of Women Technologists | Jennifer Kramer, Digital Services Expert 

Find mentors, and put in the time to be a good mentee. Their job isn’t to tell you what you need to know, your job is to figure out the right question they can answer or the right favor they can give. Treat them more like a doctor than a coach. Figure out what you have a passion for, or if you don’t have a passion for any of it and just want a good career. Tech is huge, you don’t have to chase the thing that everyone else is running after (*cough* AI *cough*). If you love organizing things and creating perfect little boxes for them, maybe you should look at infrastructure or compliance. If you want to build web applications, learn about the thing under what you already understand, like how HTTP works, how networking functions, or how multicast works. Forcing yourself to study what you think you should can be an exercise in frustration, but following your curiosity into a place you didn’t know existed can be a delight. Be pragmatic but avoid cynicism, especially if you find it growing in yourself. Life is too short to sit around doing work you hate.

Innovation and Impact: U.S. Digital Service through the Lens of Women Technologists | Kate Green, Software Engineer Leader 

As for my budding civic technologists, the first thing to remember about anything you’re passionate about is that you care a lot. And that’s good, but you must also remember to take care of yourself. Set your boundaries, and if you feel yourself hustling to prove yourself to people, examine the situation and see if it’s healthy. Anytime you combine a precise art like writing code with caring deeply about the work, you will get close to burnout at some point. Understand what helps you to avoid burnout. We need you here, but we also need you to be healthy and capable.

Celebrating Women’s History Month: 5 Minutes with a Tech Exec | Crystal Tabassi, Executive Director

Crystal shared insights into overcoming self-doubt, stating, “Everybody that I know, regardless of their gender, how they identify, may experience self-doubt and imposter syndrome as they work through their career.” She highlighted the significance of supportive relationships, stating, “I focus a lot on how you look at business analytics to solve problems. How do you look at that and combine it with people’s behavior from a machine learning type of view to say, how do we use this information, the availability of data to help organizations make data-driven insights to help inform how they wanna pursue and how they want to move forward their objectives from both the short-term and a long-term perspective.”

Innovation and Impact: U.S. Digital Service through the Lens of Women Technologists | Pooja Shaw

Early in my career, I did a crash course in the (very different) worlds of non-profits and management consulting and then found myself at business school. After earning my MBA, I had a general goal: to use “tech for good” to support underserved populations and move into the health technology industry. Fast forward to late 2020, between the pandemic and the change in the presidential administration, I was interested in exploring public service. I was fortunate to get an intro through a friend to a U.S. Digital Service alumna (shout out to Marina Nitze if you’re reading this!) who explained this whole world of civic technology to me. It immediately clicked that this work is the best way to deliver on my ambitions to use “tech for good.” My mind was kind of blown that there was this whole world that, somehow, I had not known about until then. 

Celebrating Women’s History Month: 5 Minutes with a Tech Exec | Natalie Kaminski, Founder & CEO

midst her journey, Natalie was fortunate to be surrounded by remarkable women who served as colleagues, team members, and managers, offering guidance and support along the way. Recalling a pivotal moment in her career, Natalie recounted she had a manager who would remind her to be confident and trust her voice. Reflecting on her experiences, Natalie acknowledged the prevalent impostor syndrome that often plagues individuals, especially in leadership positions. She shared, “As time goes on and as I go up and I become more prominent within my industry, I still feel that impostor syndrome often creeps up. And I remind myself of that advice.”