Kathyleen Beveridge

  • BS in Finance from Santa Clara University
  • Masters in Business Administration from USC
  • First started career as a stock broker at Wells Fargo but pivoted and joined tech at HP
  • All of her companies has one common mission, which is to push technology in the way of living and life
  • She is now the Senior Director of Marketing at ThermoFisher
  • She isn’t very invested into the technology side but works very close with software engineers and data scientists
  • Emphasizes the use of scrum master in the workplace

Kris Porter

  • Software Developer, DevOps Engineer, and Infrastructure Engineer
  • Did schooling similar to us, such as many AP classes but no CS classes were offered at his school
  • First CS class did not go as well and had to retake
  • UnderGrad in EE from UCLA and Masters in EE from CSU LA
  • Graduated college right when the 2008 recession happened so not many jobs were available
  • Worked at companies like NBC Universal, Qualcomm, and Twitter.
  • Now is working Mysten Labs, which is a Web 3 company that is researching blockchain technolgy and Crypto with decentralized systems

Reflection

Overall, I enjoyed the panel today and was able to learn a lot about marketing/management and also software development. It was very helpful and cool to learn two different careers and perspectives in the tech industry. It is reassuring that you don’t have to go to college for CS and you can always pivot yourself into the tech industry. I was very interested in Kathyleen Beverridge’s work because she talked about how she doesn’t exactly code but helps manage and market products. This is something I would like to do in the future as I like to code but I also would like to lead a project and help launch a product onto the market. She also talked a lot about communication and how communication is skill that needs to be learned and can be very helpful in the workplace. Kris Porter talked a lot about the technical skills he picked up over the years and also focused on the idea of constantly learning. He emphasized the point that you need to constantly learn new things in the tech industry because technology is changing everyday. I really liked the different fields he worked on and how he was able to take skills from each company and use it in his next company. He also touched on the topic but knowing when to leave and pivot. I liked his new job in Web 3 as it is something that I am interested in and would like to try and learn more about it as it is a new field that is getting a lot of new breakthroughs.