Oracle Hosts Bay Area Girl Geeks And Asks: What's Your Superpower?

As an Oracle executive, Vivian Wong has achieved a lot, but she does not consider it anything compared to her mother's trip. With gentle authority and a charming Chinese-Australian accent, Wong explains that when he was 11, his mother moved the family to Australia on a tourist visa, sacrificing his own engineering career in China. "We were illegal immigrants, so my mother washed the dishes," said Wong, a computer scientist and vice president of the group for the development of higher education at Oracle.

His mother, who had been an experienced railway engineer, returned to university in Australia at the end of his 40 years. It took him almost 10 years to return to work as a draftsman and engineer. "Ten years after that, he directed the design of the railway for the 2000 Sydney Olympics." If my single mother could do that, everything I do is a piece of cake, "Wong told more than 400 women who had gathered at Oracle's headquarters for the company's first Girl Geek dinner.

Founded in 2008 by Angie Chang, Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners are the Silicon Valley version of the networking events for women that Chang had announced in Europe in 2007. I met Chang in 2011 while covering a much smaller Girl Geek dinner, and I was impressed by how popular Chang's events have become: Oracle was on an 18-month waiting list for the December 2017 date.

What has changed in the last decade? "Women are more ambitious now, they come with a purpose," Chang said. She believes that the effect of the network is powerful, and the proof is in the women who return to the dinners as they advance in their careers: "The person who came a few years ago as an entrepreneur has now returned and is funded by capital The engineer returns and she is vice president. "

But newcomers are always welcome, and Chang's business partner, Sukrutha Bhadouria, has the mission to keep it that way: "I want to make sure that Girl Geek Dinners attracts the person I was when I was looking for a network for the first time." She is now the senior director of engineering at Salesforce, but she still remembers the feeling of being a new graduate with a master's degree in electrical engineering from USC. He liked Girl Geek Dinners a lot, joined as CEO in 2011, doubling the size of Chang's team to two.

The next generation of girl geeks

Every Girl Geek Dinner highlights the work of the host company. In the Oracle event, the demos showed emerging technologies such as a robotic arm controlled by IoT gestures and toys, as well as innovations in Oracle Database, its new Oracle Student Cloud and the basic power of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The Oracle Education Foundation also had an important message of inclusion.

"People assume that when you work in computer science, that means that you write code, but what we know here at Oracle is that there is a lot that supports code writing," says Teryll Hopper, Oracle Volunteers global program manager. "If you create a product, you have to market that product, sell that product, and there's also a project that manages everything, so you know how and when it's going to be done, there are many ways to participate."

Hopper is part of a major effort to help develop the next generation of talent: Oracle is the first technology company to build a public high school in its headquarters. Design Tech High School (d.tech) is a pioneer public high school in California that combines technology and design thinking to help students succeed in college and in future careers. Oracle Volunteers make a great contribution to the effort by training d.tech students in the classes offered by the Oracle Education Foundation during the four annual d.tech sessions.

"D.tech students participate in two-week classes provided by Oracle Education Foundation with the support of Oracle Volunteer technologists and entrepreneurs In our classes, students work on design challenges in domains such as IoT, wearables, 3D modeling and At the end of each two-week class, they make a presentation about their prototypes and how they have solved a problem for the user.The Oracle Volunteers who help train students through these classes are an integral part of the program. the foundation, without them, we could not do it, "Hopper said.

A panel of female executives, moderated by Maria Kaval, vice president of IU technologies at Oracle, shared her selected wisdom on corporate culture, superpowers, mentoring and the rise to management.

Integration of Startups and Corporate Cultures

Oracle Data Cloud was developed mainly through acquisitions, but the merging of new companies into a productive business unit is a challenge. "It's been really important to keep those parts of the culture of all these startups, and it's not easy to do, it's something we do when we look at merger and acquisition opportunities," said Michelle Hulst, vice president of strategic partnerships and business development. Oracle "We're not even on the road, even if it's the best commercial fit possible, if that team does not fit well from a cultural point of view."

Hulst supervises a culture committee, whose "job is to attract those organizations and unify them under Oracle Data Cloud, but maintain the culture of innovation that made them special, so we do not lose sight of it as an organization."

In superpowers

Kaval asked Oracle executives what each of their "superpowers" is.

"I have the power to" make it happen. "Some people are good with strategic ideas, and others are good at creating the execution plan, my superpower combines both," said Rashim Mogha, senior director of product management at Oracle Cloud. Infrastructure. A male executive was the first to point this out to him: "Some time ago I realized that I was constantly being given ambiguous projects that needed to go deeper into the problem to create a solution, and that my team depended on me to translate that strategy into a plan that they could execute. "

Wong had a different answer. "My superpower is collaboration, I gather the troops: 'Let's design!' 'Let's make a baby shower!' "He joked, causing a wave of laughter in the audience. "A lot of what we are building is too complex for a person to create, it requires an army to design and develop it from end to end."

Mentoring and management

"When I was an individual collaborator, I always ended up in charge," said Gretchen Alarcón, vice president of the Oracle group for the human capital management strategy. Even so, "the role of VP was a very big change", and he took the trouble to meet with his team of former colleagues to make sure they accepted his leadership. But the biggest surprise, he said, came when he was asked to be a mentor: "I was impressed, I was like, really?" But after being a mentor, the important thing is to remember that when that relationship comes to an end, that connection I still recommend them for jobs, think of them as someone you are investing in. "

In fact, a woman engineer from another technology company with a master's degree in IT (who did not want to be named) told me that she wanted to make the transition to product management and that she had attended the event with the hope of meeting a mentor. She had her chance after the panel to talk face to face with Mogha.

"I want to create a relationship with a product manager that tells me the personality traits that I need, or that I just stay in engineering." It is very difficult to do this in a corporation where female leaders are not promoted. he will know who could help him, or if they will give him the right advice, what Rashim did, that was incredible, "she said, enthused by how Mogha had mentioned heading her own project and obtaining the PMP certification (actions that this engineer had already taken) and He offered to review his resume after the event.

You do not know what you need until you need it

The words that most impressed me at the end of the night came from Wong, who described how his team sought to build the Oracle Student Cloud product: "We have a mantra that my development team uses, and it is: Anticipate the need, illuminate the way and empower students to be successful. "If recent research on how talent flourishes demonstrates something, it is that we need to see more women like Wong and his classmates in order to expand our vision of what is possible.

Events for women in technology are a bit like women's colleges: you do not realize how much you need them until you're there. There were small details that calmed me down, like a woman's shirt. And then there were great: an executive panel composed exclusively of frightening women, many of whom are also mothers.

Finally, there was something too subtle to comment on, but I realized later that I had never heard before at a technology conference: the sound of 400 women laughing, in a room of their own.