Episode Details

Key takeaways:

• It's important for junior folks to have a breadth of experience early in their careers to understand what they like and don't like, and to help shape what they want to do in their tech careers.
• Developers can't work in isolation and not care about the "big picture" of the product or service that they're working on. That's like moving to a new country and not caring about the cultural differences.
• Being invisible is a superpower, because it allows you to quietly learn, observe, and take things in.
• Being a quiet listener shouldn't be confounded with not speaking up due to shyness.
• It's important to use your voice to speak up and provide a safe place for others to speak up
• We get into tech through different ways, have different skills, and different experiences, and these differences are what make for a successful team.
• There's not one way to succeed and make an impact in tech (and other professions), whether you're in upper management, an engineer, or anything in-between.
• As a senior person, you can also learn a lot from junior engineers and mid-level engineers, bringing in a different point of view
• Mentoring is about helping your mentees find their own strengths, and also learning from your mentees, as they always have something interesting to bring to the table.
• If you're going to be a manager, you've got to be really understanding of what your organization's strategic direction is, what its vision is, what its values truly are, and decide are you aligned enough to be able to represent that as a manager?
• University is a humbling experience of suddenly being surrounded by way smarter people than you
• There are different skills to being a student vs being an employee
• There is a distinction between FinOps for the Cloud and "traditional" FinOps!
• Someone who works in FinOps (within the context of Cloud) has an understanding of how cloud vendors work and how things like workload, retention policies, autoscaling thresholds, etc. affect your cloud spend.

About our guest:

Deana Solis is the youngest daughter of Filipino immigrants and the mom of a biracial son. She credits her decades long career in tech for teaching her how to unplug from the grid in meaningful ways, connect with her ancestors, build community where she lives, and leave places better than she found them.

She is a FinOps Foundation ambassador and mentor, known for her contributions in workgroups, certification curriculum, and humanizing FinOps talks.

Find our guest on:

• LinkedIn
• Bluesky

Find us on:

• All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingout
• All of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillela

Show notes:

• Carmen Huidobro on Geeking Out, talking about reframing nervousness
• Ixchel Ruiz on Geeking Out, talking about the importance of seeing people like us being represented
• Aicha Laafia on Geeking Out (she was directly inspired by Ixchel Ruiz's talks)
• Charity Majors on Geeking Out
• Kelsey Hightower on Geeking Out
• Liz Fong-Jones on Geeking Out
• What is FinOps?
• FP&A
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