Success is based on our choices | Interview with Tamara

The Tech Industry is growing fast. What used to be an almost exclusively male industry is becoming more and more female. But, the study showed that companies with the greatest gender diversity (those in which 8 out of every 20 managers were female) generated about 34% of their revenues from innovative products and services in the most recent three-year period.

Today, we spoke with Tamara, Solutions Engineer at OrangeCloud and part of the SE team responsible for supporting the pre-sales process to find out what does it actually means to be a ‘woman in tech’?

What have you learned while working in sales?

Tamara: I could easily start with quotes like “The customer is always right” or “The best way to sell something: don’t sell anything, just try to help” but besides these, I think that one thing describes the modern sales model and my understanding of it perfectly, and that would be the ability to listen and truly understand customer’s needs.

That’s exactly what I brought with me to another role. I’m happy to say that I’m pretty confident in my ability to understand what customer exactly needs. When you put yourself in a customer’s shoes, that’s the moment you realize how important something is to them and why. That helps a lot during the sales process.

What was the factor that attracted you to move to more technical role?

Tamara: I’m really into details. So, somehow in this scenario, my obsession with details wasn’t directed to digging deeper into sales processes, it actually brought eagerness to learn much more about the product itself. It became really exciting when the offer started to grow so instead of having one service to figure out, a couple of new ones were added to the list. The challenge of keeping up with new trends and releases is what motivated me to move to the technical side of the story.

What helped you the most in this transition?

Tamara: I think that the better question is WHO? We have a great team of support engineers here and the culture of the company offers equal opportunities for everyone – each team member can participate in training and knowledge transfers. So I had my very personal tutor for a couple of months, Aleksandar Ilicic, who is still helping me with some more difficult tasks as these are the topics that I’m still learning about. And now since I started with listing the names, I need to mention two more: Filip Aleksic and Vukasin Vujadinovic. All of them are sharing knowledge generously and this is one of the things that helped me move to the SE role a lot easier than I expected.

How do you feel about the difference in mindset between sales and SE role?

Tamara: It’s not that different if I’m comparing social contact in both roles – SE role requires constant contact with customers as well, along with video calls with team members for providing training sessions. However, there is definitely much more time for focusing on technical aspects of the job and self improvement in this area.

Do you think it is getting easier for women to get into Tech?

Tamara: I’m not sure if it was hard for women in tech, ever. What I know for sure is that all my female friends who are educated and technology-driven have been successful in their roles from the moment they got off college and started their careers. I think that success in Tech and any other industry is based mostly on our choices and effort, regardless of gender. I think that there weren’t many women in the tech industry in the past because they were more interested in social sciences.

You can say that home education, social occasions, and history all played important roles, or just think about it as a trend in a specific time-frame in history. Luckily, that’s rapidly changing as women and men are sharing the same interests in every aspect of life more than ever and that’s why we see more and more women deciding to embrace tech roles.

I do believe that there are cases of women being underestimated in some companies, however, based on my experience and people I’ve met so far, every hard-working person succeeded to get what they came for.

What do you think is the best part of being a woman in the Tech industry?

Tamara: Could be the feeling that you are standing out from the others as the tech industry is still a male-dominated field. But, besides the significantly higher number of shoes and bags, I can’t find any notable difference between me and my male colleagues that could be defined as a benefit.

How you keep yourself updated with the current technology?

I need to be honest and admit that I don’t read as much as I would like to, and that is something I’m working on and certainly one of my goals for 2021. Medium publishes the most relevant articles in various industries so I subscribed to their newsletters a few years ago – and it never let me down. 🙂

I’m also subscribed to Feedspot which is searching for predefined topics you’re interested in, making you feel like you have your own personal magazine. And the third “tool” for keeping up with new things in the tech world would be Google Alerts. I set up alerts for specific topics I’m currently interested in and I’m getting emails with the latest news from multiple sources whenever that topic is mentioned.

What skills do you think Solutions Engineers need to be successful?

Tamara: I think that as a Solutions Engineer you need to love being around people as much as constantly studying and enhancing your tech knowledge. That’s why it could be tricky for the introverts who embraced similar roles thinking that it could be the perfect life path as it’s much more technology-driven. Solutions Engineer needs to be social – it’s a social engineer! XD

Can you recommend some of your favorite books and courses? Or a movie?

With an MA in Serbian and world literature, I have to say that books are both my biggest weakness and passion, and novels and poetry are something I generally love to recommend. My top three must-read books include Milos Crnjanski: Lyrics of Ithaka, The Journal of Čarnojević; Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov; Ana Ristovic: Circling Zero; and so many others.

As for courses – I’m currently interested in beginner courses for Docker and Kubernetes, so I’m taking them on Udemy and Linux academy.

The movie that improves my mood would be Adams abler(2005), and in the last couple of months, the only movie that grabbed my attention was Bad Lieutenant(1992) – Harvey Keitel is simply brilliant in this role and the movie even made me cry (which last time happened when I was 8 and Jack sunk into the depth of Atlantic while Rose was watching everything and freezing to death – so Harvey Keitel is something! XD).

What’s the world made of? 😊

Tamara: Of tomorrows. Of every single living being’s desire to live. Of our collective desire to make the next day, next year or a decade better – that’s what creates and destroys the world we know and makes it fluctuate.

Conclusion

The more visibility real women in technology get in the world, the higher the chance is that a young girl will come across it and find life-altering inspiration.