The Paths We Took (and the Ones We Didn’t

24 min

Women in TechCareer PivotImpostor SyndromeMentorshipCareer Advice

Welcome to Her Career Unplugged! In this first episode, Vimala and Joanne introduce themselves and the podcast, a space for real, unfiltered career stories from women across industries. They share the paths they took to get where they are today, the detours and dead ends along the way, and the lessons they wish they’d known at the start of their careers.

Show Notes

Vimla's journey: from India to the dot-com crash, daycare work, to AWS Solutions Architect
Joanne's path: PhD in CS, Director of Engineering, AWS Community Builder, and why the degree didn't guarantee success
Breaking into tech without a degree: build in public, start a GitHub, make small visible projects
Impostor syndrome: does it ever go away? (Spoiler: probably not, but there's a formula)
How the absence of mentorship in Joanne's early career shaped her commitment to community
Vimla's career-changing pivot: saying yes to a chaotic, green-field opportunity that unlocked her DevOps leadership path
Rapid fire: ban whiteboard coding, ICs have it better, and the most overused buzzword is 'agentic AI'