I've been here for 16 and a half years. I’ve had a lot of fun, working in four different groups, and on six or seven different teams. I’ve worked on client-facing products for the Bloomberg Terminal, as well as internal products.
I started out in the training class, graduated, and joined my first team based on the excitement of the person that was presenting to us. That was the only information I had! The person’s energy and enthusiasm really spoke to me. So, I joined his team. We had a lot of exposure to the business, a lot of exposure to clients. Building our electronic trading products and seeing how people used them was really cool.
That's where I first became a Team Leader and it's where I started the Engineering Champions program. The “Champs” program was adjacent to my main responsibilities as an electronic trading engineer or Engineering Team Leader. My aim was to bring our technical community together by getting folks talking about our technical challenges and improving the communication flow between users and developers of our tools.
After talking to my manager about taking a new role, I moved to the UK, where I joined the team responsible for NOTE, a customer-facing collaboration tool on the Terminal. It was here that I built upon the success of the Champs program and started the Guild program, which provides a pathway for developing deep technical expertise in domains important to Bloomberg’s success.
I’ve recently become an Engineering Manager, which includes leading multiple teams focused on the deployment of the software that powers the Bloomberg system.
A few years ago, I moved into our internal tools team - we call it Developer Experience (DevX). I’m now responsible for our deployment orchestration system. We are looking to bring more automation into this space in order to achieve a goal where most teams are doing continuous delivery.
Describe a typical day of work.
I’m a manager of five teams spread between London and New York. I start off my day in London, catching up with what's going on, and then I typically get involved in conversations directly with the team leaders about our strategy and where we're going as a product space. I might have conversations with individuals about projects they're working on, review demos of something that was just finished up, or maybe even talk to my team’s customers – other engineers at Bloomberg – to discuss their ideas or issues that they're having.
Glue work is organizing social events, running meetings, documenting the agreements, sending follow ups – basically all of the “getting people to talk to each other.”
These are all things that aren't considered part of the technical challenge of the project. They aren’t the kind of ‘gold star’ moments in the project that would earn somebody recognition or visibility. It's all of the work that makes sure the project happens and is successful. It’s critical to ensure everything goes off without a hitch.
There's been research done that has found that women do more glue work than men. It’s another contributing factor to why women are left behind in terms of the promotion cycle. Glue work is crucial, and people shouldn’t shy away from it. As a manager, I've been shaped by having my own experience, so I bring that up in career conversations. People doing glue work know I'm keeping an eye on it to ensure this work is divided up equitably.
