Each month, the Anita Borg Institute profiles Senior Technical Women. We have selected 7 questions and asked each of these amazing women to share their answers. This month, Carol Thompson Eidt discusses her lessons learned for success.
1. How did you decide to pursue a career in technology?
I was always interested in math and science, from the time I was in 1st grade and wrote in my daily journal that I preferred math to recess (yes, a nerd from the outset). Until college, I always assumed that I would be a medical doctor but found that I was more interested in abstractions and concepts than in sciences that involved more mastery of details (such as biology and chemistry). I discovered that Physics was really fascinating, got my BS, and eventually that led to the discovery that programming was really fun. So I went to graduate school to study Computer Science (with a detour here and there along the way). The things I really love about technology are:
- There are always new problems to solve
- The solutions to those problems require not just technical expertise, but creativity as well
- The fast pace and virtuous cycle of innovation make the possibilities seem limitless
2. Based on your own experience, what skill(s) or characteristic(s) do you think are most important for technical women to succeed?
First and foremost, you must have strong technical skills, and become an expert in your field.
Second, you must be passionate about your technology, so that you are genuinely excited by the work that you do.
Third, you must create solutions to problems that matter – to you, to your company, to the industry, and to the market.
Finally, you must have the confidence to promote and defend your ideas.
3. What was the greatest challenge that you overcame in your career?
My greatest challenge has always been confidence, and it’s an ongoing struggle. I have to work at trusting my own competence (rather than assuming that if someone disagrees with me, they’re probably right). I have to pump myself up in preparation for presentations or controversial discussions.
4. How do you deal with work/life balance?
When my first child was born, I consciously made the decision to give my family priority over my work. From being a bit of a workaholic, I became a pretty strict 8-to-5-er. I fully anticipated that this would result in a decrease in career mobility, but instead, my greatest career growth came after that point. This was due to many factors, including some luck, but also:
- Working for a company that supports work/life balance
- The realization that I had to really focus on doing the work that mattered
- Increased organization and discipline arising from having limited hours for work
As my children have grown, I haven’t had the strict time schedule that was needed when they were small – but I haven’t (totally) lost the valuable lessons about prioritization, organization and discipline.
5. What advice would you give to women in high tech who want to advance on the individual contributor technical track specifically?
The most important thing is to find the intersection between what you’re really good at and what gets you excited.
Then, be on the lookout for important problems that haven’t been solved, and challenge yourself to think about these problems in new ways, carefully examine assumptions and constraints, and think outside the box. Your job scope may be limited, but if your work environment provides no challenges that inspire you, then stay on the lookout for one that does.
6. How do you stay current in your technical field?
I find that I never manage to keep up as well as I’d like, but what I find works pretty well for me is:
- I follow a small number of technical conferences in my field, and either attend or browse the proceedings.
- I try each year to participate on the program committee for one conference in my field. This requires a level of critical thinking that I don’t necessarily apply to a paper that I’m reading purely for my own interest or edification.
- I am fortunate to work for a company with an active research organization that holds regular lectures by both internal and external researchers, and I take advantage of these
- When something sparks my interest, I use the ACM and IEEE digital libraries to browse through related publications, in addition to searching the broader web.
7. In your opinion, what (if any) are the remaining barriers faced by women in technology?
While the business and academic environment has grown more open to diversity in gender, race and culture, the fundamentals of diversity are, I believe, not well understood or appreciated. Embracing diversity of race, gender and culture while expecting conformance of personality and work styles fails to capitalize on the very value of that diversity. Embracing different styles of thinking, working and interacting leads to increased diversity of ideas and solutions.
Women whose personality traits are more stereotypically female often find that they have to role-play (acting the part of the stereotypical, i.e. male, technologist) in order to be effective. It is my belief that this not only presents another barrier to success, but also diminishes the contribution that these women could make to the workplace. Characteristics such as consensus-building, sharing success and humility are under-appreciated. And the stereotypical nurturing strength of women, whether real or projected, often leads women toward management rather than a pure technical role.
Biography
Carol Thompson Eidt is an architect on the Common Language Runtime (CLR) in Microsoft, working primarily on code generation and standards. She joined Microsoft in November 2005 and has worked on a range of technologies involving code analysis and transformation. Prior to joining Microsoft she spent 22 years at HP where she was the only female Fellow in the company. At the time she left HP she was the Chief Architect for Management of the Adaptive Enterprise in the Software Global Business Unit. Prior to that, her career has encompassed compiler optimization, code generation, instruction set architecture and dynamic translation. She was on the design team for both the PA-RISC and Itanium architectures, designed and developed compiler optimization for both processor families, and has participated in the standardization of both C# and CLI. Carol is married with two grown children and lives in Campbell, California. She enjoys singing, and in a previous life (that is, between undergrad and grad school) she sang lead in a band, and she continues to sing with a couple of local amateur vocal groups.