We have an all-Latina crew this week!! Renata Rocha talks to Adriana and Ana about how she got started in tech and how she fell in love with Cloud. She also talks about how the job that she does now didn’t even exist when she started her tech career, the joys of mentoring young engineers as an engineering manager by drawing on her past experiences, the challenges of being a woman in tech, and some biases experienced from male colleagues.

About the guest:

Originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Renata now calls Toronto, Canada home. Fun fact - she has been working in the tech industry since the last century! Renata started her tech career doing sysadmin work for ISPs in the late 90s. In 2010, she got hooked on Cloud when a co-worker told her about "this new Cloud stuff". She hasn't looked back since.

Renata loves being hands-on, taking any opportunity to get her hands dirty on cool new tech to experience it for herself. She also enjoys working with high-level enterprise customers and on the business side of things, namely understanding constraints and limitations, solving the puzzles that those scenarios represent, and finding smart solutions that make everyone happy.

In her spare time, Renata likes to run, ride her bike, and watch a ridiculous amount of movies. She also loves cats.

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Transcript:

ADRIANA: Hey, everyone. Welcome to On-Call Me Maybe. This is the podcast where we talk about DevOps, SRE, observability principles, on-call, and anything in between. Today we are talking to Renata Rocha. She is a DevOps Manager. And we are here to get her insights on all things DevOps and tech. I am your host, Adriana Villela, with...

ANA: This is Ana Margarita Medina, also joining in today.

ADRIANA: And we have a very Latina contingent today, very exciting. All girls, all Latinos. So woo-hoo, represent, y'all. Renata, why don't you tell us a little bit about your work, how you got into tech. What's your story?

RENATA: Sure. Hi. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. Like Adriana said, I'm Renata. I'm a DevOps manager, and I have been working in tech since last century. And this is quite an interesting story because we are both from Rio, so Adriana probably knows this much better than everyone else. But Rio de Janeiro, back in the day, was not the greatest place for technology. And I worked in very interesting places like ISPs as a sales ops; that's how we called it back then. And that's how I got in touch with Linux, Unix.

And then, I came to Canada about 12 years ago. And I had a co-worker who told me about this cloud thing, his words, not mine, okay? And I was like, "Okay, show me this cloud thing." He showed me AWS, very early days of AWS. And I was like, whoa, mind blown, okay. This was like, wow, how can this be a thing?

And I started playing around running some instances very early days of AWS. Keep in mind it was very, very small, not like 1,000 services like we have today. I was absolutely fascinated; no coming back from that. You can imagine once you see it, there's no way to go back to what you were doing before. And that's how I got into DevOps now, new word, new world for me, not only a new word but a new world for technology. And I started doing it by early 2010.

And I have been doing cloud engineering, DevOps, SRE for 12 years now since I came to Canada. And I love everything about it. I feel like there are endless possibilities. And I also love how fast-paced it is because every day seems like we have a new cool technology showing up, and I have the opportunity to learn it because everything is so open. Everything is available online for me to try, for me to learn. And I love learning. I love challenges.

ANA: That's an amazing introduction. I always love hearing how folks got started in cloud. And it's definitely one of those things that it's this cloud thing. Like, until you decide to take a look and you start understanding, it's like, oh, you're just calling it a data center, a thing on the cloud, got it. Now we can actually still use the same resources, but it takes a lot of less ops work. [laughs]

RENATA: Exactly. It makes things so much easier. That's one thing that I particularly love about this cloud thing. Let's keep the support because I love it, how encompassing the cloud thing can be. Because people think that to work in technology, they need a degree; they need to spend lots of money to go to school when studying computer science, engineering, something like that. And that cloud thing, there is no school that teaches it. It's the school of everyday learning.

You have to go online, and you have to learn for yourself. You have to find the things that you like and just dedicate yourself to that. None of the things that I use every day at my job I learned at school, the university. I did mathematics. Nothing that I use at work was taught to me at university.

So that is the amazing thing about cloud engineering. You learn by yourself every day, and it's an ongoing learning thing. So I find that it embraces this culture of open knowledge, and it's very diverse. The workplace can be very diverse and can be very welcoming to all people of all backgrounds.

ADRIANA: I love the fact that where we started our careers, and I think it's probably true for all three of us, where we started our careers is not at all where we have ended up. I mean, this stuff didn't exist in school. I don't even know if they teach cloud stuff in school, to be honest. And it's okay because it's one of those things that you pick up.

The other thing I wanted to mention, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, like, I was so intimidated when I first heard about the cloud. And [laughs] I started...my first cloud was GCP. And I'm like, oh, that's it? Really? [laughter] Just some cool commands to bring up some resources that I don't see but exist out there somewhere.

RENATA: That's a very interesting thought. Because when my co-worker told me about it, it took me a while to wrap my head around the abstraction of what the cloud was, especially having so many years of experience with on-premises only. I couldn't really understand how such a thing was possible, feasible and above all things, have a vision of how that thing was not going to be only a fad.

And my co-worker told me, "No, no, no, this is the real deal. This is where we are going in the future." And he insisted with me, "No, no, you have to learn this. Keep your eyes open." I'm very thankful that he insisted that I learn that because that was going to be the future. And I was like, okay, I have to regroup my thoughts here and go back home, create an account on this thing. And I was like, Amazon? But aren't they a store? Nothing made sense.

And this is an interesting tale for people listening to this who are new and who feel a little bit confused about cloud. So it's normal. If you feel confused, if you feel like this is wrong, that this is not for you, it's normal. I felt like this for the first time, and here I am today. So it's a journey, man. It doesn't happen from one day to the other. You don't start today doing this, and then the other day, you're going to be the master of the cloud.

And then I was like, oh my God, it's not like my Amazon account; it's another thing. But it's also Amazon, so many thoughts. Everything is happening at the same time. And then, I created the account, and I started clicking buttons. I'm like, so I don't write a code for this; I click buttons, whoa, okay. It was very confusing. It was very crazy.

But like I said, when I finally understood, it was like, whoa, my God, I understood what he was saying about this is going to be the big thing because it was so much simpler, and it was very powerful. And yeah, of course, I can see how easy it is and what I said before about endless possibilities. Once you do one, and then you do it again, and you see yeah, okay, I don't have any limitations on how...because you are a sysadmin. You need to add more memory to a server.

And it's a whole process, and you have to go to the data center. You have to buy more RAM, and then you have to stop the server to add more RAM. And to do that on the cloud, it's a click of a button. Or you just spin up another instance, and you group things. Like, of course, it just makes sense. And that's how I saw that was going to change my life.

And that's why I try to tell kids who are in school...to your point, I don't think schools are teaching that because I interview a lot of kids who are just fresh out of university for computer engineering or for science and their understanding of cloud engineering, SRE, DevOps is very, very bare bones. They are very good at programming. They're very good at algorithms, AI. But cloud engineering is still very, very lacking.

I don't know how it is in the U.S., but Toronto universities they're not there yet, which is a pity. So many companies here in Toronto have bridging programs. They teach a bootcamp for students that are just getting out of university. So they hire these students. It's not like an internship, so the students get paid to work, but they learn for, let's say, a couple of months.

I'm not going to name names, but I know big companies that are doing this. So you do a bootcamp for like six weeks, and you learn things. You learn how to work with cloud engineering, and then you are bound by a contract that you have to work for this company for about a year or so. But a number of companies are doing this because the universities are not teaching the students the skills that are required in our market right now.

ANA: I actually really liked that flow. I'm assuming this is different than the co-op flow that a lot of the Canada universities have, like, the bootcamp program. That's actually really awesome because as we're talking about this, I also have the same thoughts like; coming into Cloud, DevOps, SRE, extremely hard unless you have the right people in the room to ask questions and to be in a place that's inclusive, and you're not going to get dinged for asking, quote, unquote, "questions that make no sense," aka stupid questions. [laughs]

It's very much of like, I think, when we think about the DevOps movement, it is very people-oriented. SRE is very much around empathy and working with others, that when I think about actually putting this in a class course, it's just going to be theory once again. And there's a lot of stuff in cloud engineering that doesn't make sense unless you start running environments when you're working in dev with 5 to 100 engineers. And when it comes to SRE, if you ain't got customers, [laughs] does reliability really matter?

RENATA: Big-time customers, right? One engineer in my team had a lot of theory experience, and he had great grades that he had in his resume. And I was like, "Yeah, cool stuff, bro. Let me just tell you something; it is okay if you feel your first project is not the same as your school experience. It's okay for you to tell me that you're struggling because it happens to everyone." And he said, "No, no, I was a great student in school. I had the best grades. My GPA was great." "But feel comfortable to come to me if things are hard."

Of course, in the third week of the project, he came back to me and said, "Hey, remember what you told me? Things are hard. I'm so lost. I don't know what I'm doing." And I said, "Yeah, thank you for coming to me because let's try to debrief what is hard, what is difficult here. So let's have a one-on-one call here and try to understand what's going on. And thank you for sharing with me that you were struggling."

So yeah, and I think this is what is great about being an engineering manager. You can share your past experiences because it's happened to me. And now I'm talking to the younger generation and seeing a little bit of myself in younger folks.

ADRIANA: That's so cool. You know what? I love the point that you made about the student saying, "Hey, I was a great student, got great grades, so this shouldn't be a problem for me," because it makes me think of when I came out of school. And I soon came to the realization that I was excellent academically but made a terrible, terrible worker. And it wasn't until I came to terms with that that I was able to really grow into myself as a person in technology.

And I think Ana and I have talked about psychological safety before. And I love the fact that you offered help to this person who worked for you, saying, "Ask me questions." You gave them a safe space where he could come to you for help. That's another thing, a lot of people coming out of school they have this impression that we, as more senior people, expect them to know all the things and therefore, they can't ask questions, or they can't look dumb.

And we have to make it clear. We have to foster this culture of, like, no; it's okay to ask questions. It's okay to not know everything. And if you don't ask questions, then how the hell are you going to do your job effectively?

RENATA: Yeah, exactly. What I try to do as a manager...like, I was not born a manager. One becomes a manager from learning from your own mistakes. And what I try to do as an engineering manager is to foster an environment that is safe for people to ask questions. And I tell people that there are no wrong questions. The only thing that I don't like is for people to not ask questions.

Ask questions always, and it's okay to not know the answer. If I don't know the answer, I'll say, "You know what? I don't know the answer for that. But I will try to find the answer for you." Or maybe we can try to find the answer together. And I will try to redirect the person to someone that I think knows better than I do because I'm not a person who knows everything. And I'm not an expert in all subjects, which is also okay. I know a lot about certain things, but I don't know everything about everything.

It's also okay to make mistakes, and making mistakes is how we learn stuff. Falling and getting up again is how you get better at things. One thing that I like to tell people is that I have danced all my life. I did ballet all my life. Ballet is beautiful. But the thing about ballet is that it's incredibly hard, and there is no such thing as a perfect ballerina. If you do ballet a lot, you can point at the mistakes that people were making in every single video that you watch.

And ballet is a journey. It is a journey of trying to perfect yourself. Very basic example is watching the video of the Swan Lake. And the thing with that is that the ballerina is trying to mimic the movements of a swan dancing; the Swan Arms is like the classic movement. But, of course, you are not a swan. You are a dancer doing Swan Arms. That is incredibly hard. And you are not able to do the same movement over and over again. And you have, like, for the ballet, doing those movements.

And that is a journey. You are not going to be able to do that every single time the same way again. And the thing that you have to see is that you have to enjoy doing that. And you have to learn every single time that you do that movement over and over and over again. It's a journey. It's enjoying the journey. It's learning with every mistake that you do. And it's the pleasure that you have with learning things. Okay, if you don't enjoy learning, then why are you doing this?

And you have to ask questions because if you don't ask, "What am I doing wrong here?" "Oh, maybe you should move your arm a little bit differently. Maybe we should move your hand a little bit more softer." "Oh, good point." Take feedback. It's okay to take feedback from different people. So that's a little bit that I try to learn every day. I don't know everything, and I will never know everything.

ANA: I think one of the most interesting parts for me to break into DevOps and SRE was to go against the natural path that I came from when I was in school, which was the ability to ask questions, like, be comfortable with failure and take feedback. I remember being in a toxic org and being really lost when it came to sys and ops. People would tell me, "You can ask questions," but it didn't feel like a place where I had someone that I could ask questions. It took me a few months to break that habit.

And then it's like, as I think about my SRE journey, if you're not able to ask questions, you're not really being the best contributor. You have to know why things are happening. And when we look at incidents, going through those questions of like, what, who, what, why really puts concepts together, and it really does expand upon those mental models.

RENATA: Yeah. And also, things are dynamic. So what is good today may not be good tomorrow. So maybe you hit the mark today, but that is not the standard for tomorrow, especially DevOps. The perfect tool you wrote, the perfect code for something today...but when you reveal the whole story a couple of days or maybe a month, that is not the right version, and you have to update your code.

And you have to be okay with looking at it and saying, wow, that standard of code that I wrote maybe a few months ago it's not up to my standards anymore, or it's not perfect. And I have to review that. So that kind of personal feedback or accepting feedback from others, from things that you did in the past, is such an important part of personal growth in technology.

ADRIANA: Your comment about being okay with the fact that what you wrote before was okay for then but is not okay for now, I think, is such an important thing. I think as software engineers...I have a personal philosophy of, like, don't fall in love with your code because if you do, you're never going to want to update it, and you're never going to be open to suggestions. And I think being curious, being open-minded are so important for our line of work. I mean, it's always evolving. The DevOps of today is so different from the DevOps of 10 years ago.

ANA: That actually is the perfect point for my question that I was thinking about earlier. For you, what was the big whoa moment when you started hearing about SRE, especially as you coming with someone that's very much an expert manager for their DevOps teams? Once you start hearing about the SRE movement where it's like, we're taking principles of DevOps, what was the biggest thing that you had to take some moments to put your mind around it, the concept?

RENATA: Infrastructure as code was very life-changing for me; that I could write code that would design infrastructure. And I was like, wow, I write some code. I can deploy things like servers on the cloud; now I have one. And now if I write 15 here and I redeploy this, now I'll have 15. On the version control, I can remember that I had one.

So if I make a mistake, I can just roll back, and I'll have one again because I like power, and I like having control, and SRE is a lot about having power and having control over your infrastructure, over your things. So if I make mistakes, I can roll back, and if I want to change again, I can just fix it. And it takes me minutes. That was so empowering for me. I like feeling empowered.

[laughter]

ANA: That's definitely actually a really good reason why those principles do help, like, going back to staying curious and trying new things, being able to be like, oh, I just deployed this Terraform change. The bill is going to go up $2,000. Maybe let's roll back before that bill increases.

There are better tools for GitOps nowadays that will estimate your cost before you deploy, which thank you [laughs] for those developers because those were big things early in my career. I mean, actually, I still continue spinning M5 larges on AWS. And I'm like, why did I do that? [laughs]

RENATA: Be careful deploying a cluster, a Kubernetes cluster, on Oracle Cloud, okay? [laughs]

ADRIANA: I've had moments with some personal cloud builds where I'm like, oh God, I forgot to tear down my Kubernetes cluster after not having used it for five days.

RENATA: I did and experienced deploying a Kubernetes cluster on Oracle Cloud, and it was like $100 a day or something.

ADRIANA: Oh my God.

ANA: So I will say it could be more expensive. I've been paying like $300 for a Kubernetes cluster sometimes where I'm like, that was really dumb. Why do I have such a big cluster for my damn demo app? [laughs]

RENATA: Oh, yikes.

ANA: Which actually, going back to the point around teaching concepts around cloud, I've always had issues with the way that cloud is taught online. I learned online, but I didn't really learn what things were. They would teach you a lot of paste this command but wouldn't say in the background what this is spinning up.

And I think as an industry, we've gotten better about that. But there are times that tutorials are using the largest resource available in a cloud, but it's not really telling you, hey, you're doing a Hello World app. Let's start using t2.micros. Let's start at the bare minimum.

RENATA: That's a great point. I once attended a SageMaker tutorial, and I forgot that running. And I ended up with an interesting bill on AWS. So yeah, sometimes I find that tutorials are not very clear on the expense that they incur. And if you want the cloud to be inclusive, and if you want to teach younger folks to get into the cloud, people should be a little bit more mindful of the costs and the bills that are going to result from those tutorials. Absolutely, you're totally right.

ANA: I've been a big fan of folks that have been putting like how to tear down your infrastructure at the bottom of the tutorial where it's like, oh, let me just copy and paste this. Like, please stop my bill. But I've seen some that leave like VPCs running in the back. And I get really angry because I'm like, why do I have five VPCs in different regions? [laughs] What did I do?

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, those are the most annoying ones where you're like, oh, I thought I tore down my whole infrastructure. And then there's --

RENATA: And you forget a number of VPCs in different regions. And then you have to go hunting for what is left.

ADRIANA: Look at your bill line item. Okay, what am I being charged for? And I thought this should be zero this month. So then it's like detective work.

ANA: This is back to infrastructure as code. The reason [laughs] why Terraform and Pulumi exist is for us to stop having these conversations. [laughs]

ADRIANA: Yes. Yes. Automagical.

RENATA: Automagical deployment. Absolutely.

ANA: Thinking about learning and curiosity, if you had five more hours in your day every single week, what tech would you be digging into right now?

RENATA: Honestly, these days, I'm very, very interested in learning how to teach tech to younger people.

ANA: Nice, nice.

RENATA: If people ask me, "I want to learn a new programming language..." One of my engineers told me that they want to learn such and such language. I'll do my research on how to teach this engineer that programming language. So my focus has been to help the younger folks to become better at what they want to learn.

ADRIANA: That's cool because it's a bonus for you because --

RENATA: It's a bonus for me. I grow by helping people grow.

ADRIANA: That's awesome. That's awesome. I'm a big fan of that. That's how I learned about observability, and even Hashi Stack last year was like, okay, I'm leading these two teams that are experts in these technologies. I better know what I'm talking about.

RENATA: Yeah, I get into very interesting things. That's how I learned about Oracle Cloud because we had to do some interesting architecture on Oracle Cloud. And I was like, okay, let's see what I can do here. And then, I got into Oracle Cloud. And people started making jokes of me because, "You are the only person I know who knows about Oracle Cloud." Yeah, okay, they have like a 2% market share. They are the least popular cloud. But anyway, I learned about Oracle Cloud and Kubernetes on Oracle Cloud. Hooray.

ADRIANA: I love actually being able to compare how to stand up Kubernetes clusters across different clouds. And it's like, there are always these little nuances. So I think knowing these things is so cool. Like you said, so what? Smaller market share, but it's still you're learning something.

RENATA: Hey, maybe next, I'll learn about Alibaba Cloud, right?

[laughter]

ANA: That's also been one that's always been like, this would be interesting to learn. But I'm also not likely to support customers on Alibaba. But sometimes you hear about it when you go to conferences and big players using their clouds. And I'm always like, I want to learn more. Can I follow you for a week? [laughs]

RENATA: I have no pressure, just to have a very open mind. And whenever someone asks me, like, "Can you help me with that?" "Sure. Let's learn this together."

ADRIANA: That's so cool. So do you have a favorite cloud that you've played with?

RENATA: Ah, usually AWS. It's been my first, and I always come back to it. And yeah, and also a bazillion new services, a new service every weekend. The service does whatever the service is better at. Yeah, so AWS.

ANA: I can't keep up with the feature launches that AWS does. Sometimes they start rolling out stuff on beta before re:Invent, not everything, of course. But then you start seeing stuff. I follow their blog and their developer advocates, and I'm like, that's cool. How do I have time to play around with that? And then you get to re:Invent, and it's the most overwhelming week.

RENATA: Oh yeah, I have been there. Yeah, it's so overwhelming.

ANA: It's overwhelming in person due to the amount of people, the amount of things you're learning about, and social activities. But then, if you actually were there for learning and content, it's an overwhelming amount of opportunities to dive into vendors, technologies, and partnerships, or go to workshops, or go to sessions.

And it's like, it becomes a conversation of what are you going to the conference for? Are you going for the hallway track? Or are you really trying to meet with speakers and ask questions about your favorite technologies and contribute to projects? But it's always one of those, like, AWS weeks I'm like, I'm taking the next week as a 50% time where I'm going to be digesting a lot of what I just learned and recuperating.

RENATA: Absolutely. Yeah, I felt the same way. I was able to attend; I don't know, five or six sessions. And then I spent the rest just walking around and being overwhelmed by how big it was. I was not expecting it to be that amount of people and also, oh my God, Vegas. I have never been to Vegas before. Vegas baby.

ANA: That's a whole other conversation [laughs] of doing tech conferences in Vegas and the amount of male toxicity that ends up finding themselves in Vegas and ruining everything.

RENATA: Yeah. And people asking you, "So, do you work in marketing? Do you work in human resources?"

ADRIANA: I've gotten that before. It's like, seriously, dude? Actually, that happened to me at a talk. I was giving a talk, and I was in the beginning mingling before the talk started. And this guy comes up to me, and he's like, "So, are you in marketing?" I'm like, "No, I'm giving a talk." "Oh, is it going..." And it didn't click in his brain that it was going to be a tech talk. And the more he talked, the more he stuck his foot in his mouth. And I'm like, dude, just stop. [laughs] You're embarrassing yourself.

RENATA: Okay, I have an amazing story about that. This was some time ago. I was interviewing for a position here in Toronto. After the said interviews, the guys told me, "Yeah, I'm sorry. You didn't make it because you don't have enough Kubernetes experience." So I was like, "Oh, okay, cool. Thanks."

And then, sometime later, I met the same guy attending DevOpsDays Toronto. And he was like, "Oh, hello, you again." "Yeah. Hi, how are you?" And then he looks at my badge and says, "Oh, are you speaking today?" And I said, "Yeah, I'm speaking today." "Oh, that's cool. What's your talk about?" "It's about Kubernetes."

ADRIANA: Nice. [laughs]

RENATA: I'll never forget his face.

ADRIANA: That's awesome.

RENATA: Yeah, he didn't say anything. It was just a face. He was just silent, and then I said, "Okay, see you later." But he was just completely silent.

ADRIANA: Wow, burn.

RENATA: That's amazing.

ANA: It always sucks to have those experiences. I feel like now that I'm a little bit more public profile and a lot more outspoken, it's easier to have those occurrences not happen as much. But at the same time, it opens you more to more occurrences of this happening virtually. It has a lot of pros and cons. [laughs] And at the same time, it really does make me remember how amazing my small communities have been when this stuff happens.

I could start a group text and be like, "WTF?" Or like backchannels and being like, "This dude at this company did this." And it's like, people coming together and being like, "I'm so sorry you experienced this. Make sure to reach out to code of conduct." Because a lot of it is we never feel safe to report to code of conduct because we feel like we're going get reprimanded and like --

RENATA: And it's not going to do anything, right?

ANA: Oh yeah, for sure. [laughs] But it at least gives me the hope that they're being written up and that they would not be allowed to that community event again. And that's putting a lot of hope in the tech space, as we all know. But it's the only way I feel like sometimes I can process what's going on of, like, check this off, and community be there for me. I think a lot of me trying to belong in tech has been finding my space and being like, hey, this sucks. Can we be in this together?

RENATA: I feel like things are very, very slowly, but they're actually changing. I used to be terrified of public speaking because I did a little bit of public speaking very early in my days in technology in Brazil. And it was absolutely awful, and it made me traumatized of public speaking for many years.

And then, I was convinced to talk here in Toronto in 2019. And it was so much different, of course, because Canada versus Brazil, two different entities. But also, the many years of difference made me feel like the community has evolved a lot. I got much more respect. I was seen as an actual expert and a professional on the subject.

So it feels like as much as it's not as fast as I would expect it to be, as it was supposed to be, but it's indeed happening. So younger people who are joining the industry are making it happen. The problem is the older people who are still struggling to let go of that toxic masculinity. That's still lingering. So it's older people.

ADRIANA: One thing I would say along those lines is, for me personally, it has been so nice to connect with other women in tech in the last few years because I was always the lone girl in the room. But then it was just like, no, this is not cool anymore.

But the other thing I wanted to mention, and I want to get both of your thoughts on this, like, one thing that I've started doing, especially when I was a manager, was really trying to mentor not just women. And I think it's important for women to support women in technology but also men because I think if men have a woman mentor who's in a position of seniority in the sense that they see what a successful woman in technology looks like, it normalizes things. And I think that's --

RENATA: Yes, yeah, yeah. A lot of men expect a woman manager to be a non-technical person. And if they have a woman who is a manager who comes from a background of engineering, it changes their perspective a lot. So I was working with this engineer, and I happened to not be their first female lead. And he was like, "Yeah, it's not the first time that I have a woman as a manager. And actually, I enjoyed very much working with my last manager. So yeah, it's not a big deal for me."

ANA: That's awesome.

RENATA: He was a great engineer. He was a very humble guy. He was moving from a position where he was not a DevOps to a more DevOps-y position. He was like, "Yeah, I just want to learn this because I think this will be better for my career." Great guy. I loved working with him. I miss working with him, and I would hire him again.

ADRIANA: That's awesome.

ANA: That's always the best recommendation. I've yet to hold a manager role, so I can't speak to how folks change their perception when they start working with you. But I think for me, I've felt a lot of that as I get more years of expertise in this space, and my bio starts just showing that where people hold you with more respect.

There have been times that I've been on stage that people don't respect me, and it's gotten better. [laughs] I think it kind of has. But I think sometimes being a highly profiled person that does public speaking has come to my benefit of people being like, oh, if an entire program committee is letting you be on stage to talk about a technology, they will be willing to come talk to me afterwards without making it seem like I'm a marketing person or recruiting person.

But at the same time, it also makes them want to fight. So like I've told Adriana, like, sometimes I tell conferences I'm not accepting questions. Because if I know the type of personas and folks that come to a conference and they're that archetype that's going to prove you're wrong, I don't want to have a dialogue with you.

And I've said this, I think onstage, [laughs] so I can be quoted on it. But I feel bad because it closes the door for learning and discussion. But sometimes it's like, I got to protect my energy. If I have to make it four days at this event, I'm going to block the haters. [laughs]

ADRIANA: Yeah, totally. And I think that's really important to protect your own psychological safety. I mean, that's really what it boils down to.

Cool. Well, we're coming up on time. But as we wrap up, some final thoughts, final words, final pieces of advice for our listeners.

RENATA: For people wanting to go into management, I have interesting advice because I've talked a lot about how to work directly with other engineers. Another challenge that I have is working with clients because the focus from working as an engineer is that you focus a lot on your code. And then, at the point you have to work with clients, you have to make accommodations.

And clients have a set environment. Things are strict. You have some restrictions. You have requirements. And you have to see both how your engineers work and how your clients work. And the challenge that you have is to make that puzzle pieces connect together as a manager. You have to make both your clients happy and you have to make your engineers happy. I do a lot of that every day.

Often, the people on the client side are not very technical. So we have to translate engineer talk into client talk. You cannot go to a client and describe a block of code to the client. You have to explain in more business language what has been written in code language. And that client business speak is what has been very challenging for me given my background.

And reading management books may sound very boring, but it's something that you have to do. And you have to dedicate a lot of your time to reading management books and reading management blogs to learn how to communicate with business people. And trust me, that is very important for your career growth. I have grown a lot as a manager by doing that.

So empathy with your engineers but also empathy with your clients because building that bridge is what is going to make you grow as a manager and also as a leader, as a person who leads the business. The business is what you're wanting to build here for the future of your career, and the company that you work for right now, and the companies that you might work for in the future.

ANA: That's an amazing piece of advice to leave us with. I think this is the conversation that doesn't really happen often.

ADRIANA: Yeah, this was awesome. This is great advice. Well, thank you, Renata, for joining us today. Signing off for On-Call Me Maybe I am Adriana Villela with my awesome co-host...

ANA: Ana Margarita Medina. And we're signing off with peace, love, and code.

RENATA: Peace, love, and code.

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