In Search of Lost Dreams
To be perfectly honest, I did not WANT any of this. I did not grow up with a dream to become a tech leader at the largest software company in the world. In fact, my dreams did not include software or engineering or tech or people management.
As a young girl, I dreamed of winning the Nobel prize in medicine.
I have always wanted to touch people’s lives with my work, and medicine was an obvious choice. As a 11-year old, when I first became acquainted with cancer, I wanted to invent a cure for it. As a 16-year old, when I learned about AIDS, I wanted to vanquish the disease.
I wanted to become a physician that cured people of what ailed them. I wanted to be a magician, but with real impact.
But alas, my dream did not come true. I failed getting into medical college. I still remember the day when my high school grades came out. My heart almost stopped when I realized I did not score enough marks to get into medicine.
Little did I know that was to be my first valuable lesson in life. Failure can fuel success.
After several hours of intense moping, I sat down with a pen and paper. There was a choice before me. I could:
- Redo my final year of high school and retake the tests, or
- Pivot to a different field
I reasoned over these choices. First off, why did I want to become a doctor? Of course, my heart longed to help people. Solve their problems for them. Make them better. What other field could help me problem solve and touch MANY people’s lives?
I started looking. It was the 1990s and tech had just started changing the way humans lived. The Internet was shrinking the world. Websites and Win32 applications were beginning to enrich people’s lives. Empowering them to do things they had never dreamed of before. Problem solving was core to technology – my mentors told me – and I love to solve problems.
So I decided to become a programmer.
There is a life-lesson-turned-startup-advice we give the entrepreneurs we work with today: be open to evolving. I evolved. I applied myself to learning programming. For one who had luxuriated in anatomical diagrams of internal organs and bisections of amphibians, coding a tree in C++ was abstract. What are these bits and bytes my teacher was talking about? What do they look like inside a computer? And pointers? Do they have shape or texture?
Clearly, I had a steep learning curve. But I persevered. I learned that some challenges need grit to overcome and I should NOT give up. Some day – I knew - once I had mastered walking a tree depth-first, coding the Towers of Hanoi, and memorized the COBOL coding sheet, I would solve real problems for real people.
However, after 4 years of Bachelors’ and 2 more years of Masters’ in Computer Science, I still had not mastered programming. My entire career would become one of learning constantly, which leads me to my fourth lesson of my journey: always be learning.
First I learned how to be a good developer. I learned it from great developers like Chris Large, Kevin Howard , Gregory Vandenbrouk and many others. My first code review at Microsoft received at least 30 comments on code that was less than 100 lines long. It was hard to see my work torn apart by my colleagues, but these soul-crushing code reviews made me a better dev.
One of my first projects at Microsoft failed. We took too long to rewrite a service that many customers depended on. After 2 years of adding no customer value, we shelved the project because the customer had moved on. I learned how NOT to build (or rewrite) software.
I learned how to be a good manager from great managers like Cornel Lupu , Laura Butler . I learned how to be a good speaker from authentic storytellers like Dona Sarkar.
Along the way, many people said many things that were intended to hurt me. Question my right to aspire, be in software, or make me doubt myself. I remember still when someone proclaimed that I would not get past the first meeting in a company, that I was not good enough. My lesson from these episodes was to never let them stop me. Never let someone's opinion of you be an obstacle in your way .
I have been at Microsoft now for over a decade. My day job is to manage an engineering team that builds software products like #WindowsAnalytics and #ReadyForWindows. My team helps a billion+ people around the globe live productive and happy lives. People run their bakeries and dentist offices and hardware stores and tax firms on Windows. People talk to their grandchildren and nephews and friends on Windows. Every line of code my team writes touches these lives. Our scale of impact is breathtaking.
On the side, I help social entrepreneurs build their businesses as part of #Insiders4Good . The entrepreneurs we work with, like Damilola Samuel , Ange Uwambajimana , Dr. Moses Enokela , and Caleb Ndaka are changing the world.
Yes, my childhood dream of becoming a doctor did not come true. But I am fortunate to be touching lives with my work, empowering humans to achieve more , every single day. I did not envision myself an engineer, a programmer or a tech manager when I was 10, but I am glad I ended up as all of those! #MakeADifference #EveryoneCodes