Shepherding Others Through Revolutionary Change: Part 1 of our interview with Cornelia Davis, Director of Platform Engineering at Pivotal

This month our Co-Founder, Kédar Iyer, spoke to Cornelia Davis, Director of Platform Engineering at Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Cornelia is one of our advisors at GapJumpers and is recognized for her leadership in cloud and transformative technologies. Cornelia is a CloudNow 2015 Top Ten Women in Cloud honoree.

At GapJumpers we like to move beyond talking about issues to driving strategic action that moves the needle on diversity in tech. For that reason we have broken the interview above into sections in order to start a discussion around the topics that Kédar covered with Cornelia. These topics are relevant to both experienced and emerging leaders in tech and we would love for all to benefit from the wisdom that Cornelia has shared.

Below, in part one, Cornelia shares her thoughts on what keeps her awake at night as she navigates the revolutionary change that is the cloud and shepherds others through it. She also shares her insight on the importance that staying true to yourself plays when it comes to designing a fulfilling career.

As an engineering leader and director at Pivotal what is it that keeps you up at night?

Without question the thing that keeps me up is crossing the chasm. Let me explain that:

The cloud is really transformative. It’s truly as transformative as it was when we moved from mainframes over to client server three-tier architectures. So, in order to really be able to achieve the benefits that we can [achieve] from going into a cloud based solution it’s a mind shift. It’s almost like moving from imperative programming to functional programming.

What keeps me up at night is whether people really see that opportunity for [the] revolutionary change [that is possible]. So crossing the chasm is what keeps me up at night. Not only helping the industry cross a chasm but that we, ourselves as a whole organization, still need to shepherd ourselves across that chasm. We don’t know what all the answers are and I think that’s the biggest struggle.

I’m a field facing engineer and I work with a lot of our field facing engineers and helping shepherd them across the chasm so that they can do the same for our customers. I think that is the thing that wakes me up at night the most.

What are some of the ups and downs that you’ve faced in your career that you would like to share?

In terms of career ups and downs, there were a couple of times in my career where I tried to do something that wasn’t my true self.

I’ll give you some examples:

I did my bachelor’s degree in computer science and started my career in Aerospace. I was encouraged for my master’s to move into electrical engineering. I started the program in electrical engineering and I was doing fine, and they were interesting topics, but it just didn’t really capture my heart. So I took a semester off after that because I just wasn’t happy. When I went back I continued my master’s degree in Computer Science [and not electrical engineering].

It was like night and day; “Ah, okay this is my true self.” Rather than being influenced by other folks and listening more to them than I was listening to myself, I think that those were the downs.

Later on [the downs involved] feeling like I needed to move up the management chain because that’s what you do for your career. So taking on a management role that really didn’t suit me was another mistake that I made and I wasn’t happy.

Stepping away from that and saying “You know what? I really love technology and I can have a successful career without moving up the management chain.” That was another kind of awakening for me.

I think that’s my advice, to really listen to yourself first before listening to other influences.

We would love to hear your thoughts and key takeaways after hearing from Cornelia. What keeps you awake at night? What would the difference be if you were more true to yourself at this stage in your career? What has the difference been when you have been true to yourself versus times when you didn’t heed those internal voices? We’d love to hear from you and for others to learn from your experiences as well.

Next week, in part two Cornelia shares her thoughts on impostor syndrome and just what exactly will be different when diversity in tech is achieved.