Anna Carey joins Sarah Haq to discuss breaking into tech, the problem with the phrase "imposter syndrome," and why asking for help is the most important skill she's developed as an engineer.
Anna Carey joins Sarah Haq to discuss breaking into tech, the problem with the phrase "imposter syndrome," and why asking for help is the most important skill she's developed as an engineer.
Hello, welcome to Artsy Engineering Radio. I'll be your host for the day. And today's episode we're welcoming back via amazing Anna and if you've not heard from is you need to check out any random episode of the Artsy engineering and others. They're just being amazing. Welcome to the show.
Anna Carey:And a warm welcome. Happy to be kind of on this side of things. I guess usually I'm on the other side asking the questions. I feel at one point, we're just gonna shift and I'll just take that back and you'll be turning the tables at some point here
Sarah Haq:so. So before before we start getting into a really deep conversation. I'm just one of the listeners who do not know you. Maybe you can tell us how you your story Artsy how you ended up here. How do you become an engineer here?
Anna Carey:Yeah, totally, I'd love to. And there is a podcast episode out there one of the very first that we ever did. Who are you? And how did you get here. So I go much more in depth on kind of my path. But to give a sort of quick intro, I've been an engineer at Artsy for a little over a year, maybe almost like a year and a half now, which is kind of crazy to think about. It's kind of a long time now. And my path with Artsy is kind of interesting, and maybe a little unusual. I originally started at the company in January of 2016. So literally more than six years ago, out of college, it was my first job out of school. But at that time I was joining the communications team. So have spent a lot of time on the more like communications marketing, more business side of the organization, about four, four and a half years and then Artsy did restructuring, leadership change. Our former longtime CEO and founder stepped down, we got our awesome new CEO, Mike, and I actually ended up getting laid off. Yeah, the fall of 2019, there was a big round of layoffs. And obviously, it was, you know, really challenging, and I talked about it a little bit more in that other episode. But it created this really exciting opportunity for me to make a pretty significant shift. In my career. For some time, I had been interested in sort of moving outside of communications and moving more toward the product side of things. So here, I was no job opportunity to really kind of make a true 180. So I actually went to a coding boot camp in New York, I went to the Flatiron School, which was incredible, and learn how to code a long time kind of dream of mine. And yeah, I've totally fallen in love with it, and then found my way back to Artsy shortly after. So it's kind of cool. I have both the, you know, business marketing side of the company. And now also, obviously, the more technical product side. So yeah, longtime in Artsy, relatively short as an engineer. But yeah, it's been a super exciting a few years for sure.
Sarah Haq:Did you learn a specific language? Or was it centered around a certain topic?
Anna Carey:Yeah. So the bootcamp I did is actually funny, like, there's a lot of really popular boot camps in New York that I could have chosen from and I wanted to do something in person. This was actually like, pre pandemic, are kind of like, right, yeah, literally, right. I graduated from my boot camp, like virtually but only like the last week was virtual because it was like in March of 2020. But yeah, the the one I ended up going with the Flatiron School I literally actually like called up our T's former CTO, Daniel Dubroff, Kanan dB, who I interviewed on the podcast a while back, and was like dB, which bootcamps should I do. And he spoke really highly of that one. And they do react on the front end and Ruby on Rails on the back end, which is pretty convenient, because that happens to be Artsy technology stack. So yeah, I felt pretty well prepared to start my role here, having my only experience at that point was only in the technologies that we actually do use. So that was lucky and helpful. Oh, wow.
Sarah Haq:And what do you like about being an engineer Artsy?
Anna Carey:There's so many different things that I think about all the time about making this career shift and how positively it's impacted my life. I mean, one of the reasons why I even wanted to move into engineering, like before any of this happened, while I was on the communications team was just like working alongside of our product team. And, you know, seeing like, how cool everyone was how friendly everyone is how much everyone likes to teach. They actually the product team, or the engineering team, at some point did this like and they did this, actually, like several times throughout my time at the company. They would run these courses for non engineers. They would do like a course in JavaScript or a course in Swift that was targeted towards people at the company who were Like, not on the engineering team, and like, how cool is that, like, I got to like learn like basic JavaScript from these incredible engineers at the company. And that whole sort of like philosophy of teaching, but also the actual, like, work itself, I thought was really cool. So it was always this like, Okay, I'm doing um, you know, writing a lot of emails writing a lot of press releases, but like, the work that I'm like most into is always the kind of like more technical piece or, or if I'm collaborating with, you know, the product team on announcement or working on, you know, building out the like, database for our press contacts, these projects that like, we're sort of like more technical or more touching the product team was always what I love the most. So definitely, like when I came back as an engineer and getting to like, actually work alongside these awesome, awesome people, that for sure stands out as one of the best things of being Engineer Engineer at Artsy. But more broadly, just as a career path, I love that every single day, you just like learn so much like you are, you know, forced to encounter all different kinds of challenges and problems. And it's a different pace of learning than I experienced in my former career. And if I were to do like one sentence, why to be an engineer, it's like, because you learn so much every single day.
Sarah Haq:If I was an engineer, already, I listen to this podcast, I would be like, this is a job for me. I absolutely love. I've never heard anyone being so enthusiastic about being an engineer before. So thank you for bringing this fresh perspective. To like, something a little a little of, I guess a negative? Would you not like about being an engineer? Oh, interesting.
Anna Carey:What do I not like about being an engineer? I mean, I think that the obviously, like the fact that the way you learn is to like encounter things that are hard. And I'm a firm believer in, you get sort of like pleasure and joy in life by like, going through like hard things. So you kind of like take a dip, and then you kind of like, have a pot like negative experience to have a positive experience almost like, I think like, I'm a runner, and like, if you running is like uncomfortable, but then like you feel great after. So it's like a dip to get a positive. So I do think engineering is like, you know, when you're working through a tough problem that you can't figure out like it actually like is painful and uncomfortable. And then like, you get the positive peace on the other side of that. But I definitely like something that was a big sort of learning was that having that sort of like struggle and stress kind of be a part of you every day, can take getting used to. But like I said, the positive on the other side of that is like also one of my favorite parts. So that's one thing that comes to mind. And then, I mean, I think that's something that like, I've loved your, like interviews around, and I'm sure I know that you have a lot of feelings about this is the, you know, gender gap and like that the sort of problems that come along with, you know, diversity in tech, gender parity, those are things that I think can make it a little bit challenging, and have like, I've gotten I've worked through a lot of this stuff, but like the self doubt along the way, has been can be really, really challenging and I think is exacerbated by lack of gender parity in the industry. So that's also something that comes to mind.
Sarah Haq:Yeah, sorry, I wanted to talk more to you about and the site load from your who are you? You get here a podcast, you spoke about imposter syndrome. And I believe you did this episode quite early on when you just first became an engineer Artsy. But yeah, I'd love to sort of if you're open to share, like talk more about if you feel like you still struggle with imposter syndrome. You mentioned self doubt. Um, why do you feel like that's related to the environment?
Anna Carey:Yeah, totally. Yeah, definitely was a big thing for me like transitioning into the industry you know, working my way up in my other career path, you know, feeling super confident and feeling like able to gain a lot of mastery and communications have happened relatively quickly for me and writing was always something that throughout my whole life I was like getting a lot of positive reinforcement around. I talked about this in the other episode, but I took a little bit of computer science in college and basically I was like, This is too hard like I cannot do this you know did really poorly took all my time was like miserable in the computer lab, like around the clock was just like I'm not smart enough for this. So then when I went back to this bootcamp many years later to kind of like move past the quote unquote I'm not smart enough for this and feel the confidence and security of know I do know how to do this. I you know, am smart enough for this. This is something I'm good at. That took me a lot of time. So when I did that, the original interview that was probably at the company back at the company only for a few months, and still kind of navigating that, you know, navigating, you know, a new codebase. Navigating, you know, a lot of people I, you know, didn't know very well, new team members. So it's actually really awesome to like, get to have this conversation with you kind of on the other side of that, and feel a lot more confident in my skill set. And like what I bring to a team, I recently switched, I spent about a year on the partner experience team. So mostly working on kind of like our b2b products or gallery products. And I recently switched to working on our auctions, products. And it was really cool to like, join a new team you and feel, hey, like, I actually like know how to do it some things and I can like provide value, like pretty quickly. And even though it's you know, files I've never touched part of the codebase I've never looked at. So that felt really, really cool and really satisfying. And obviously, like, you know, the team is super supportive there too. But so it's been cool to kind of come to the other side and feel like, I mean, I still have my moments, of course, but feel a lot more confident than I definitely did back then. And then the other thing that I really like shifted my opinion on and I actually would love to hear your take on this is like I actually think the word imposter syndrome, I'm like against it now. Because it's almost like pathologizing this thing that literally every single person feels. So it's like, wow, like I'm suffering from imposter syndrome, when the big sort of like secret in life is that literally everyone no matter like how confident they seem, how secure they seem, are struggling with this feeling of oh my gosh, like, I'm not good enough, or I'm going to be found out or you know, these these feelings that we associate with, with this like term imposter syndrome. But how can something that literally everyone like experiences and feels be called like a syndrome, to what is your kind of take on that, I don't know, some some emphasis I've read. But I've really started to like very much feel this way as I can get more people to open up of how they're actually also sort of struggling with these feelings.
Sarah Haq:I think this is why I wanted to talk to you about this. Because just like you said, Everyone is struggling with this. I don't think everyone is aware that everyone is struggling at this, I think we look at especially in our industry, we have these, we have these superstars, we have these people, these people, everyone's just looking up to you, and they know everything. And they do know every part of the code base and they know how to fix every problem. And they're, and rightfully so we glorify them. But sometimes, it's not always the case, sometimes just as the passenger talks allowed us gets gets more credit. So you came to this realization that everyone is struggling with this. But I don't think a lot of people realize that. And every time I have like informal conversations with people, you hear about their insecurities, and that makes me really sad, because people don't realize how great they are and what they bring to the table. I think that confidence that you just share, like, Hey, I just started a new team. And if you ever doubt yourself, I was watching you in the background. It's just always incredible. I mean, you add so much value not just your team, but to Artsy and beyond engineering. And I don't know what the company would do without you and that self belief, and I don't know why more engineers don't have that. And that's why I really wanted to wanted to bring this up. And I guess whoever's listening, I just want to remind everyone that you're all amazing, and you all belong it Artsy. And you your uniqueness is what makes you really special. And yes, we are all not perfect. And we all have flaws. But why are we so insecure? Where did where does that come from? And, you know, why don't we all have this self belief that we're great. And I mean, I'm all for modesty. Don't get me wrong, modesty is great. i It's all about balance. But yeah, Gemini makes me sad that a lot of us suffer from imposter syndrome. And, and yeah, why is that?
Anna Carey:Totally. Yeah, no, first of all, thank you so much. That's like amazing what you what you said, and I do feel like I have that I have that set, feeling a lot to where there's all these amazing people that we work with who I hear them, you know, had these moments of doubt. And I'm like, if you only knew what, you know how much I look up to you, and how like amazing the work that you do is and how you know, blown away by you, then like maybe you wouldn't sort of feel that but then it but then yeah, you kind of realize that I think this is something that a lot of people experience. Something that has come up for me a lot recently and I do feel like I sometimes feel can be a little bit like along sort of like gender lines is the willingness to ask for help is something that I think is like so, so critical and creating a culture where people are really comfortable asking for help. And that doesn't mean like you know, every time I hit like a little small roadblock, I'm immediately raising my hand for a pair But the skill, I think that I've, arguably the most valuable skill I've learned this year is sort of like, when and how to ask for help and how to kind of like, push myself a little past the point of like my comfort zone into maybe a little bit of like stretch. And then before I hit sort of uncomfortable to, you know, that's the moment that I'll ask for assistance, and especially being on a new team, there's like, lots of institutional knowledge about, you know, our domain modeling our, you know, the way different systems hook up, there's like, yeah, I can, like, try to figure it out by myself. But there's some, sometimes it's like, actually inefficient for me to do that investigation all alone, versus working with someone who actually like wrote the code. That's something that I think is can really show not only your, like, help yourself, but also show the people around you that, hey, like, I'm a senior engineer, but I need to ask for help, too. And I see a lot of times people really struggling with this, particularly in more senior roles. And I mean, I'm thinking of like, we have a channel at Artsy that we've definitely talked about on the podcast called dev help where sort of anyone can ask, you know, questions that they have, or problems that they're having, when I see, you know, our like, senior two or staff level engineers reaching out about, I don't understand this thing, or I'm having this problem. It makes me feel like, wow, I could be doing this for 10 years, and still need help. So it's okay, that I need help. I think it's so impactful.
Sarah Haq:What do you think this culture then comes from that we don't ask for help? Is this from school? Is it something work related? Why are we ashamed to ask for help? Yeah, I
Anna Carey:mean, I don't know exactly like, where that comes from. But I do think that there's this culture of wanting to be you know, really independent, wanting to be perfect, wanting to be able to do things on your own, when the reality is that that's just not how, you know, human beings, like exists, like, we are sort of like community, Hive minded, like relationship driven species. So I, our history is more as like, around doing things with help. But I do think our culture is like, repeatedly sort of beating us over the head that, you know, you can only truly be successful if like, you did things on your own. And people aren't, you know, there's a lot of people sort of that we would consider, you know, on the top or have achieved a lot of success, who don't necessarily acknowledge, oh, like, Yes, I got here, but I only got here because of like, all this help I had along the way. And I see some people sort of increasingly talking about that, but it's definitely not as like a mainstream part of our culture and our culture around success that I think it could be to start, you know, really changing the the tide here. But yeah, what do you what do you think like, where do you think that comes from?
Sarah Haq:Yeah, I'm not sure. But something I was thinking about. And I would like to sort of, I guess, take ownership for this is, I think, is also do with this concept of perfectionism. And also, so it's not about okay, we like to be lone wolves. We like to prove ourselves, but also, I think we, yeah, we put a lot of high standards on ourselves. And I think that means asking help is a sign of weakness. So we want to be we want to be the best. We think that's what it comes down to. And I've just been recently doing interviews, and I been observing my own behavior. And I realized, like, in these interviews, I put so much pressure on the candidate that every answer that they share has to be perfect. And I don't put that sort of pressure on myself at work. I don't put that pressure on myself on my colleagues like I definitely, I really want us all to embrace our imperfections. I love when people own up to their flaws. And I love when people admit that yeah, I've been doing this for 1015 years, and I'm still looking for help from someone and I want to parent someone. I think that's brilliant. I think yeah, it's wrapped up with our own egos. The cons of perfectionism and just Yes standards and I think it's time to just Yeah, normalize asking for help and embracing it if I think people should be penalized for not asking for help. So we need to Yeah, we definitely need to embrace this more. There's nothing yeah, there's nothing there's nothing wrong with asking for help. And so she I love her Artsy before Artsy. I never even thought about pairing. I was very much a lone wolf and I absolutely love it. It's so much fun when you do repairing session with somebody. Shout out to Dan who spent his Friday feature Friday pairing with me on a project I was working on it, which is so amazing. And I felt so warm and fuzzy inside so I didn't actually no shame whatsoever. I think it's yeah, it's absolutely brilliant.
Anna Carey:Totally. And actually, I think that skill that we should be both, you know, really fostering. And like prioritizing to grow. As I said, the skill of learning how to ask for help is something that, you know, we should sort of be instilling in all engineers of all levels, but especially those starting their, their careers. And then also, like you said, I also do a quite a few interviews, for Artsy. And something I always call out is like, whether they have sort of a humility and self awareness and their ability to say, you know, what, like, I actually didn't know this thing, or I didn't do this thing very well, and sort of the ability to self reflect on that. And their ability to if I can hear, Oh, you know, I didn't know what to do. But I asked my colleague or I, you know, that those are the things that I think we should be looking for. And I'm not sure if like, that's totally like, you know, widespread yet, but definitely something that I think you agree is a big part of our culture at Artsy. So
Sarah Haq:yeah, I love it, though. Because there was like two sides. When I was doing the interviewing one side, I was getting frustrated with people who are just not owning up to the fact and not giving any space to say I might be wrong. And I realized like people have always have this again, perfectionism, you have to say the right thing, because you're going to not get you're not going to pass the interview. Otherwise, I think we just put too much pressure on people at different stages. And then this starts with interviews. seeps through work seep through our day to day lives. And I really want to Yeah, best this bestest, bubbling bumbling, yeah, I want us all to embrace who we are. And like, it goes back to what we bring to the table. And I think each and every one of us bring something so unique to the table. And I guess if it you know, life was a, you know, a banquet, we'd all be sitting around, and it's all enough food for everybody. And we will be sharing each other's lovely. What selection of grapes or whatever we're having on this bank for I'm not sure when grapes. But yeah, I always I always think that's enough to go around. And yeah, I hope I hope I hope people listening to this, you think for a second and ask more questions in depth help, that will be how we will share success?
Anna Carey:Yeah, let's think that it would be cool is if you and I sort of thought of other practical things that people could do to like, sort of like push, like your culture toward this direction of being more sort of like embracing of flaws or embracing of asking for help embracing of helping others. I think one is sort of like asking for help out in the open and particularly for like more senior engineers to do that, that I think is really helpful. Any other sort of like practical ideas that, you know, we could do in our organization, or others could do in there as to sort of encourage this, this shift,
Sarah Haq:I think is a bit of a joke. But we always give people props, because they help out on a pairing session, they help fix something, I think we should reverse it give people props, because they asked the questions. So next time we see someone asking a question on dev help will be like props. Congratulations, you're brilliant. You ask for help. So I think again, it's about just shifting it and just celebrating, asking for help. I think I'm actually I usually do ask for help. I guess I have a different way of doing it. I've never actually used up help, I'm sorry. But usually, I will message someone I will reach out to someone and I like to use my my resources to find people to answer but my rule of thumb is, if you're spending more than 20 minutes trying to debug something, asked for help. And I think this should just be an unofficial rule on Artsy and also another thing, because not this, it's really no harm, asking for help. If anything, you learn more, you become a better engineer in the process. There's no no harm
Anna Carey:whatsoever, you always learn a lot in those moments. I also have seen this before at Artsy, which I really like is something that I always was really scared of, for a long time. It's like breaking stuff, like breaking something in production. And obviously, you know, we want that to not happen and we want to like be really careful and we want to have guardrails in place, but when you hear engineers talking about like stories of, oh my gosh, like one time I like accidentally, like deleted this like production thing and everything broke or I pushed up this like PR to and we merge it in and like it totally broke everything. You know, when you hear engineers talking about these moments of sort of like struggle and mistakes, it helps to like I think create a culture where people are more comfortable with both taking risks and you know, maybe making mistake and of course, like we want to learn from those moments, but minimize sort of like feelings before I got to know our the engineering team was oh my gosh, like if I break something like I'm gonna get like, you know, I'm gonna have to leave you know, like all these like fears and it definitely has helped to like not have those fears when people are open about these sort of like moments that might happen over the course of doing your work.
Sarah Haq:I want to disclaimer and say I do not people breaking production company going down. So I insist We have some sort of QA process. But for example, in the field that I'm in machine learning a lot of time machine learning projects just fail, they fail because the right data wasn't being used if they if they fail, because sometimes the problem space just does not fit for what we're trying to do. And that's something I learned the hard way is that these projects fail. And that's okay. And we should embrace failure. And it, there's a lot of learnings to come from those failures, and then you try again on something else. And yeah, it just comes back to embracing failure. So I'm going to I hope, I hope we, we do this going forward, now we we celebrate failure. We Yeah, we like that we not just celebrate achievements, we also celebrate failure, and people being honest and open about that, because we're all we're all human. We all make mistakes, and we all break production code, I love it. But that's not that's not encouraging.
Anna Carey:Moments are often when, you know, you learn the most, and you learn the quickest. So I think, you know, shifting the feeling of like, okay, like, we have to be so like conservative that we never fail or break anything. But instead a having like guardrails in place that kind of like, help yourself and your colleagues like not break things, but also embrace those moments, not as moments to just like, move really fast and break things, blah, blah, but to actually learn the most and learn, you know, the deepest. So, yeah, I think that that's a really good a good learning.
Sarah Haq:We're gonna go break some stuff after this, let's, let's find a PR and ways to break some stuff. I feel like we already sort of touched on this, but maybe you can just sort of wrap it up. What advice would you have for people to overcome imposter syndrome?
Anna Carey:Well, one of them is definitely sort of moving away from the I personally, I'm not trying to use that word anymore. I think that instead of calling it imposter syndrome, it's more, okay, I'm having this feeling that I am inadequate, or that I'm not good enough, or that I'm gonna get found out. And it's sort of like, okay, this is a feeling that I'm having right now, it will pass. And it's a feeling that, you know, is very common, everyone has this. And something that I have found is that when you're sort of like vulnerable and open with your co workers about feeling this way, oftentimes, you will get them to reflect back on you sort of how they're feeling. And it creates like a space of, you know, more honesty and openness around being vulnerable. So, you know, even though it might be scary to say, like, you know, what, I know that I had this ticket that I'm supposed to be working on, but I have like no idea how to do this, I really need help. That's scary, you know, especially if you're new, especially if you feel like you have to prove yourself for some reason. But first of all, like, asking for help, like really does actually, like make use of resources that you have to make it through a problem. But also, hopefully, you know, creates a safe space, maybe for someone else to say, You know what, I don't know how to do that problem, either. Let's ask someone else. Well, at theirs, I've seen had that moment happen so many times, I'm like, Oh, my gosh, I'm supposed to know this, I'm supposed to know how to do this. And then I ask a senior engineer, and they're like, I also have no idea how to do this. And that, you know, I think that can really help kind of like normalize that feeling and make you realize that, you know, other people experienced this. But with that said, you know, the reason why I'm I shy away from the word is because I do think there's a certain inevitability to having these, these experiences. I mean, really, in any career, but I do think particularly in engineering, and particularly from people with people from underrepresented backgrounds, and that's okay. And like, you're gonna feel that way. And you know, you will feel that way for a particular amount of time. And then maybe tomorrow, you'll feel much better. Maybe, you know, today, you're working on a problem, and you just like, cannot figure it out. But then next week, you are able to breeze through, you know, a different kind of problem. So, just, you know, accepting it as a certain like, sort of part of the process and part of the experience and being as open as possible with other people, both in terms of like getting the help you need, but also, you know, creating this sort of, you know, safe space for other people to share how they're feeling.
Sarah Haq:Oh, thank you very much. Thank you. And I really enjoyed listening to everything you have to say, I completely agree with everything you say, I really loved how you spoke about being open and vulnerable. And not just even the people you work with. This isn't life in general. I think that's a really important skill that I'm currently also working through this as well. So thank you so much. I will lead to another word for this syndrome. There's not even a syndrome like you said, it's just something that we all experience and I let's let's be honest and open about it. So thank you so much. Thank you for having this conversation with me. And let's go break some stuff.
Anna Carey:Yeah, So great to get to catch up with you and yeah, we'll talk to you soon.
Sarah Haq:Bye.
Steve Hicks:Thanks for listening. You can follow us on Twitter at Artsy open source. Keep up with our blog@artsy.github.io This episode was mixed and edited by Alex Higgins and thank you Eve Essex for our FY music. You can find her on all major streaming platforms. Until next time, this is Artsy Engineering Radio