Career or Family? The Eternal Question for Every Parent!

Authors: Monica Agarwal with commentary by hiring manager Loren Verheyden.

I had worked in the software industry for twenty years. Four years ago, I made the tormenting decision to quit my job and support my daughter’s dream of becoming a world class tennis player. Fast forward three years — tennis did not work out. She moved to the US for undergraduate studies at Caltech, and we as a family moved with her from India.

I was ready for a new beginning to my career. I had spent my entire career working on enterprise-grade software, but was excitedly looking forward to cloud-native software development. Having been away from work for over 3 years, I was filled with anxiety, self-doubt, and job hunting in a new field was daunting. A friend suggested I look for Returnships. — Monica

Returnship

“A fascinating concept — a mid-career internship to on-ramp caregivers who take a career break. Exploring it further, it became more and more appealing to me.”, Monica says.

For Employees

• The job requirements have more flexibility, taking some pressure off of the job seeker
• Returnships are typically paid, full-time employment opportunities
• Most Returnships offer a great deal of mentorship and support to the employee while allowing them extra time to realize their full potential
• Often leads to full-time employment
• Gives opportunity to network with other professionals

For Employers

• Access to a hidden pool of highly qualified talent
• Extended time period to know and evaluate the employee
• Returners bring a vast, diverse experience with unique perspectives
• Returners often learn non-technical skills that greatly enhance their contribution to the company
• Promotes a people-oriented culture in the company along with enhancing the culture of curiosity and learning

The Hiring Process

After a few weeks of brushing up on cloud-native architectures, I applied to a few returnship positions through Path Forward’s website, LinkedIn, and other sources. SailPoint replied the very next day. I had my recruiter interview the same week, and in less than a month, I started the returnship at SailPoint through the Path Forward Program. Some of the key reasons for me choosing SailPoint over other options were:

• I was impressed by the speed, openness, and transparency of the company.
• My recruiter, frankly, told me that this was their first time offering returnships and this was a learn-as-we-go process for them as well. No set position or title, simply based on my performance. It already felt like a company that laid a lot of emphasis on people over processes.
• As I went through the interview process, every person talked about how great the culture and people were in the company.
• The work was awesome and exactly what I was looking for.

My Experience as A Returner

For me, the whole technology stack was new. Java to Golang, relational databases to DynamoDB, JMS to Kafka, enterprise software to SaaS — learning about these technologies and working on them on a world class SaaS product are two very different things!

I was also in a different country, having spent my last 15 years in India. There was a nagging worry about cultural differences and fitting in. Not to mention my biggest worry of all — will I make a fool of myself? None came to pass! I joined the workflows team at a time when they were frantically working towards their first release. Workflows help automate business processes and were a high visibility feature for IdentityNow.

The team was amazingly supportive, even when in a time crunch! I was immediately paired with an engineering mentor to help me get setup up. I started by immersing myself into many Confluence documents, Miro diagrams, Zoom recordings and most importantly, several one-on-one’s with my team. I built up my understanding of the overall IdentityNow architecture, deployments on a public cloud, the CI-CD pipelines, my team’s microservices in GoLang including unit tests and integration tests and many, many more. I was starting to feel that I was able to make meaningful contributions!

The up skilling did not come easy, though, and I would often spend post-dinner time and weekends to further understand technologies that I had not worked with before. The team was always there to help, answering questions and sharing useful resources. No question was ever deemed silly, each was painstakingly answered, and slowly my fear of making a fool of myself abated. I started making contributions to the code base, adding feature sets. I also brought in my experience of working with multiple stakeholders and leading a team that built enterprise class products.

My experience has helped me build intuition in the software development life cycle. I started asking deeper functional and architectural questions, directing attention to pitfalls and suggesting solutions. I also started lending my experience in execution. Workflows was being built by cross functional teams with many interdependencies. Before long, I started helping transform opinions and ambiguities into decisions, setting the right priorities, and enhancing communication.

A great thing about the culture at SailPoint and my team was that, while I was only an intern (4 months duration), I was never told I was stepping on other people’s toes while helping in planning and execution. No one told me, “it is not your job”. On the contrary, my inputs were welcomed and encouraged! I understood how much I was appreciated when I won the Rookie award, which is a peer-voted award to a new hire showing promise and making an impact.

Something else about people culture at SailPoint was that, within 2 weeks of my joining, they invited me for a weeklong onsite in Austin. For the first time since Covid, the complete Platform Engineering team was getting together in person and I was very impressed that SailPoint was investing in a returner like me! I think this culture of the company, a culture of treating its employees well, whether temporary or permanent, stems from the fact that Individuals is one of SailPoint’s core value, as exemplified by none other than the CEO, Mark McClain, who meets ever new employee individually on the very first day of joining the company and emphasizes treating people well.

My manager also exemplifies individuals first culture. She was extremely supportive and guided me every step of the way. Not only did she give me enough time to ramp up technically, she also helped me prioritize my learning. She was generous and profuse with her compliments, helping bolster my self-confidence. She also offered great insights into my areas of improvement. My manager knew my desire to become a people leader. She, along with her manager, provided opportunities for me to show my leadership skills and helped me succeed in those tasks. After just two months, SailPoint offered me a full-time position as Senior Software Engineer with a well-defined growth path to becoming a people manager. I was to build a new team of four people and given a meaningful charter within workflows. Within five months of my joining SailPoint, I was an Associate Manager!

SailPoint not only started the returnship program, but embraced it fully. They did not box me into a set role for which they hired me, but looked at what I wanted to do, what I brought to the table, and charted a growth path for me. This has truly been remarkable!

A Manager’s Experience With Path Forward

I was excited when I learned about the Path Forward program and that SailPoint wanted to support and help these people who are likely overlooked when get back into the workforce. I must admit I had no idea what to expect, but knowing that Path Forward had a Returnship program with clear expectations and a timeline helped me, as a manager, understand how to approach and manage these candidates. I remember interviewing Monica and learning that she had over 20 years of experience in the industry! She was going to have some things to ramp up on, but I had no doubt that she’d encounter some great opportunities here at SailPoint, and I was excited to have her on the team.

Once Monica joined she immediately jumped at every opportunity to learn, lead, take on a new piece of work, present, and collaborate with other teams. Her observations about the team and where we needed to improve were almost always spot-on. I could tell early on that she had the leadership skills we looked for and needed at SailPoint. Luckily, SailPoint is growing very quickly, which means there are a great deal of opportunities for people to step in and lead. Once Monica shared that she was interested in being a manager, we talked quite a bit about how we might be able to make that happen. Since the Returnship program position we had was for an engineering position, we had to hire Monica as an engineer first, then make the transition to an Associate Manager. Monica took on several complex technical tasks and succeeded at those, was hired as an engineer, then we worked on a plan for her to transition to an Associate Manager position, and she’s been excelling at that as well! — Loren

If you are interested in Path Forward, please check out pathforward.org to get started.