One sunny day in 2007, I started as engineer #6 at a scrappy little startup that I knew to be as Google for jobs. Ten amazing years flew by, working with some of the smartest people I will ever know in life. Some highlights of work I did, that I feel really good about.
Most of the work I did had very measurable impact on the company.
I saw Indeed go from a little startup through to a successful acquisition in 2012. It grew even more after that, becoming a global presence in hiring around the world, with engineering offices in five different cities around the world. I helped hire many engineers, data scientists and engineering managers into the organization. My title may not have always reflected what I did, but to me I was the "Jill of all trades" within software engineering.
While all this was going on, I faced many personal challenges including my daughter's autism diagnosis, supporting my sister when we lost lost my 13 month old nephew to a rare liver disease, and supporting my sister-in-law through a messy divorce with an abusive spouse. There were many days when I wanted to give up.
In the early days of working at Indeed, I simply couldn't stop working because we needed both our incomes. Also, getting work authorization for immigrants via H1B is a long drawn out process, that doesn't allow for a lot of flexibility in terms of taking breaks between jobs. Eventually, I switched to a part time role at Indeed for a couple of years, till we found the right fit for my daughter in a school we really liked. I was lucky to get the support from the leadership at the company to make part-time work for me. In the later years, I worked full time because I loved it and enjoyed it, and felt that I could juggle work-life balance effectively. There was so much to do, and I was having so much fun learning new things everyday that time flew by!
Things on the personal front improved over the years too. We stopped comparing my daughter to other typically developing kids and crying about it. We are always working on helping her navigate her unique challenges, and measure progress relative to her, rather than other kids. My sister and brother in law went through a long period of grief, tried again and now have a healthy little baby boy. My sister in law's divorce came through. She moved and switched to a job she loves, and travels around the world for work.
It is easy to not rock the boat, and to keep enjoying stability, and I did that for a while. But the time has come for me to look outside of Indeed's walls to the world at large. Over the last year, I learned a lot about the infrastructure and devops space. I found myself wanting to learn about it more and play a more direct part in it. I want to understand how other organizations are transforming how they build, provision and run their applications.
I also started yearning to be the newbie again, to learn how to execute and excel in a new domain. I want to write code for the open source world. Many developers seem to have so much time and energy outside their work hours, that they work on their personal projects during their free time. I am not like that. As a mom, I have no time outside work to be able to explore OSS during my own time. I'd rather get paid for it. I talked to a few different places that met my criteria before deciding. I am joining Hashicorp, as a software engineer working on consul.
It is so hard to say goodbye to a place I helped create. I have so many supportive co-workers that I learned a ton from. It was a very tough decision to make. When I emailed one of the co-founders, Rony, after I resigned, he said "Thanks for everything you did for indeed. You were so very critical to its success. I don't think people realize how critical. ". That was so amazing to hear, and hard to walk away from.
There are a lot of exciting things about my new job, but there are a lot of unknowns too. I have to figure out how to execute well as a remote employee, and work in a very different domain. Building products for enterprises is very different from consumer facing start-ups, and I am excited to jump into it. I find myself ready to take this plunge and see where life leads me next.
- Tokenization and search quality improvements to Indeed's international search (China/Japan/Korea/Germany)
- Performance improvements to indexing and search back-end systems, that improved performance and lowered bandwidth costs.
- A complex re-architecture to horizontally shard Indeed's index of resumes
- Helped grow the jobs recommendation engine through performance and ranking improvements, introducing geohash clustering and other architectural changes.
- Implemented TLS support for Indeed's service framework
- Built wrappers around Hystrix, to ease adoption within Indeed.
- Built systems for monitoring and visibility of microservices, mongo and mysql.
- Gave four public tech talks in conferences
- Led a group of women to submit proposals to the Grace Hopper conference, twice.
Most of the work I did had very measurable impact on the company.
I saw Indeed go from a little startup through to a successful acquisition in 2012. It grew even more after that, becoming a global presence in hiring around the world, with engineering offices in five different cities around the world. I helped hire many engineers, data scientists and engineering managers into the organization. My title may not have always reflected what I did, but to me I was the "Jill of all trades" within software engineering.
While all this was going on, I faced many personal challenges including my daughter's autism diagnosis, supporting my sister when we lost lost my 13 month old nephew to a rare liver disease, and supporting my sister-in-law through a messy divorce with an abusive spouse. There were many days when I wanted to give up.
In the early days of working at Indeed, I simply couldn't stop working because we needed both our incomes. Also, getting work authorization for immigrants via H1B is a long drawn out process, that doesn't allow for a lot of flexibility in terms of taking breaks between jobs. Eventually, I switched to a part time role at Indeed for a couple of years, till we found the right fit for my daughter in a school we really liked. I was lucky to get the support from the leadership at the company to make part-time work for me. In the later years, I worked full time because I loved it and enjoyed it, and felt that I could juggle work-life balance effectively. There was so much to do, and I was having so much fun learning new things everyday that time flew by!
Things on the personal front improved over the years too. We stopped comparing my daughter to other typically developing kids and crying about it. We are always working on helping her navigate her unique challenges, and measure progress relative to her, rather than other kids. My sister and brother in law went through a long period of grief, tried again and now have a healthy little baby boy. My sister in law's divorce came through. She moved and switched to a job she loves, and travels around the world for work.
It is easy to not rock the boat, and to keep enjoying stability, and I did that for a while. But the time has come for me to look outside of Indeed's walls to the world at large. Over the last year, I learned a lot about the infrastructure and devops space. I found myself wanting to learn about it more and play a more direct part in it. I want to understand how other organizations are transforming how they build, provision and run their applications.
I also started yearning to be the newbie again, to learn how to execute and excel in a new domain. I want to write code for the open source world. Many developers seem to have so much time and energy outside their work hours, that they work on their personal projects during their free time. I am not like that. As a mom, I have no time outside work to be able to explore OSS during my own time. I'd rather get paid for it. I talked to a few different places that met my criteria before deciding. I am joining Hashicorp, as a software engineer working on consul.
It is so hard to say goodbye to a place I helped create. I have so many supportive co-workers that I learned a ton from. It was a very tough decision to make. When I emailed one of the co-founders, Rony, after I resigned, he said "Thanks for everything you did for indeed. You were so very critical to its success. I don't think people realize how critical. ". That was so amazing to hear, and hard to walk away from.
There are a lot of exciting things about my new job, but there are a lot of unknowns too. I have to figure out how to execute well as a remote employee, and work in a very different domain. Building products for enterprises is very different from consumer facing start-ups, and I am excited to jump into it. I find myself ready to take this plunge and see where life leads me next.
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