Julie Russell Stays In Balance

Head of IT, an optimistic realist who tells you to breathe

Julie Russell, Head of IT at Medium, can answer that nagging question that we all have about IT people: Why does our technical problem vanish the moment they appear and put their magical hands on our computer?

“My colleagues,” says Russell, “wonder why things suddenly work when I show up, and it’s because I’m trained to remain calm, to maintain a sense of balance. I often tell people to close their eyes, inhale to the count of five, and then exhale. Some days hit you with chaos, and you have to remember to breathe through all of it.”

If Russell sounds unflappable, it’s because she’s been building startups for fifteen years, since the first dot com boom. IT and network engineering are not, however, what she started out doing. “Hotel accounting,” she groans. “I was so bored. It was the same thing over and over again. I have a tendency to jump into things and see what happens, so I just decided that accounting wasn’t for me, and I was going to do IT instead.”

Abandoning accounting for the startup world might have opened up career possibilities, but it didn’t mean leaving money talk behind:

With startups, there’s always a reluctance to spend money on IT, but a lot of my job is basically telling people to do just that. If I’m performing well, the stuff that I do is invisible, in the background—but it’s invisible because I’ve advised people to spend money on building the network. Spending cash up front just makes things work. Finding people who will listen to that is hard. Sometimes you have to talk really loudly and be prepared for conflict.

“Conflict” is not the term that comes to mind when you’re with Russell, who has a calming presence but is also gregarious and laughs easily. The breathing techniques that she brings to IT crises might be attributed to the fact that she’s a certified yoga instructor with a preference for restorative yoga. She’s also a writer who published a quarterly online magazine, Be Real, for four years in the early 2000s.

“Be Real was a labor of love,” Russell explains. “I was building so many other people’s companies that it made me want to build something of my own. I edited the pieces and designed the site. I’m not a designer, so the site wasn’t that awesome, but we had readers from every English-speaking country and writers posting from everywhere.”

Throughout her career, Russell has sought a balance of stability and flexibility by moving between consulting and in-house positions. With an Internet consulting company, she worked on the original web presence for Sephora and MLB.com (Major League Baseball’s official site), “plus a bunch of companies that failed.” She was the infrastructure architect on Hotwire, building up their backend “in the days before Amazon, when we actually had data centers and ordered servers.”

Of the tumultuous tech industry, Russell notes, “I’m a big startup person—my niche is small companies—but I’m also realistic, having lived through the first boom and bust. The bonus of being a consultant for so long is that you learn to have faith that there will always be something else. I like to think I’m an optimistic realist—my attitude is, ‘Let’s see what happens.’ It’s given me a good sense for companies that are doing things well.”

Photo by Misty Xicum

Perhaps it’s the yoga talking, but Russell takes a “holistic view of IT”: “When the work experience is stressful, people lose the capacity to think about things calmly and rationally, and they have more IT problems,” she observes. “I have this completely unproven theory that has to do with electricity. People’s systems and computers are electrical, so when people are stressed and bouncing all over the place, that creates problems with their computers, like interference.”

Currently at work on a book, “a crossover YA/adult novel about a mother and daughter, told from both perspectives,” Russell has the benefit of both a technical and a writerly perspective on Medium. “Writing is confronting. Some days you have words and some days you don’t have words. As a writer and a reader, I find Medium clean and lovely. It’s like a feng shui dream, bringing together people who love to read and people who love to write.”

The platform, she notes, is calming in the face of the often arduous task of putting words on a screen:

“You don’t end up with that UI by accident—a lot of somebodys have spent a lot of time paying attention to every detail, and it shows. It’s the absence of clutter that’s hard to notice, but when you come to the page, you can relax on it, even when you’re writing.”

Medium, however, is not always relaxing if you’re the Head of IT. “At some point,” says Russell matter-of-factly, “something’s going to break. It’s like trying to balance in half moon or tree pose or warrior three, with all of your weight on one leg: some days you’re just solid and other days you’re crazy wobbly.” Yet if this optimistic realist achieves one perpetual balance, it’s that between enthusiasm and pragmatism: “To be part of a team creating something you believe in? That’s what I love about working at Medium. That’s so cool.”