#291 Code with Care: Katherine Lewis's Approach to Inclusive Engineering

0:00:01 - Mehmet
Hello and welcome back to any episode of the CTO show with Mehmet. Today, I'm very pleased joining me Katherine. Katherine, the way I love to do it is I keep it to my guests to introduce themselves, because I believe in a theory that no one can introduce someone else better than themselves. So the floor is yours. 

0:00:18 - Katherine
Thank you so much for having me. I am so excited to be here. My name is Katherine Lewis. I am a software engineer at LinkedIn and I also run a non-profit in the evening hours. But the surprising thing about me is I used to be an elementary school teacher and I do not have a computer science degree, so I'm excited to get into my career journey in a little bit. 

0:00:45 - Mehmet
Absolutely fantastic, Katherine. And actually you know this is my first question to you and, by the way, I get excited when I hear these stories and you know, whether with some of the guests that I interviewed them on the show or you know in the real life, so can you share? Like what was that moment that you decided to move from being a teacher to become a software engineer? 

0:01:17 - Katherine
So I grew up with the thought process which was stereotypical for my generation. Maybe it's still around, but the thought process that women are not good at math or science and when I would see that to prove true in my own life in different ways, just, I didn't feel good when I was taking physics or when I was doing algebra I didn't feel like it really sunk in. Then I wrote off all career paths that had to do with that and I felt like software engineering was very math or science heavy I think it used to be in the past, but it's not as much now. For all career paths in that industry. There are some that are very much so, but there are other options. 

I was teaching second and third grade and I had the option over my summer breaks to work with a nonprofit that taught high school girls how to program and I thought well, if they're letting me have this opportunity, I might as well take it. This could be interesting, and so I applied. I got in, we had a weekend boot camp and then I had to figure it out from there, and so I was teaching myself how to program and I ran multiple summer camps. I did the same thing the next year and I thought this is actually really cool and it seems like I can do it. If I'm able to teach other people how to do it, let me see if this can become a full-time thing. 

And so I applied to a software engineering boot camp. I went through it. It was a nine-month boot camp. I had about eight hours a day of classwork and projects, but then of course you had homework to do afterwards, so it really could go on for hours. I was kind of all consuming very deep dive into front-end engineering for myself. They had back-end options as well, but I was very much excited to focus on the front-end piece and see that visual responsiveness and what you're creating and designing. And after that I was able to get a software engineering position at a big tech company and it completely changed my life. I never expected to head in this direction. 

0:03:40 - Mehmet
Fantastic and I love these stories, as I was telling you, Katherine, because this shows more than a career transition. This shows when you have the will and you have this, I would say passion to get into something, so you can do it. And here you go. You are today working at LinkedIn, which is fantastic, but I'm sure the journey was not always easy. What were some of the challenges? Especially, by the way and people underread this so people think that the front-end is something easier than the back-end and, in my opinion, I'm not saying one is more important than the other, but I think it's as important as the other one, because you need to design the interface, you need to think more from the customer perspective, more than the logic. So what were some of the challenges you started to face, especially because you came just again from a different field? 

0:04:54 - Katherine
Yeah, there's definitely a lot of logic involved in the back-end, and so if you're someone who really enjoys that, that could be a good direction to head. On the front-end, there's a lot of consideration you have to have for your user. What is their problem? How are you going to solve it? Does your solution actually match what the user needs? Are you able to accommodate for all users? Sometimes users are coming to your product for different reasons. Sometimes the business wants you to focus on something that may not be what you think users need. So there's all these different conflicts and things that you have to think about and adjust for. 

That can be an exciting but also challenging part of front-end. For me, while I was learning how to be a front-end engineer, I think the most challenging piece is the nuances, the nitpicky pieces, and what I mean by that is you want everything to look just right, so everything is balanced, it's spaced out well, the padding is good when you resize the screen, all of that looks appropriate and everything's in the right place, it's responsive, and that can be for me. I'm very detail-oriented and I can kind of obsess over those things, and so it can take a lot of time to get things just right. And again, that's part of the fun, that's part of the challenge. But when you're first learning, it was also a lot of the frustration oh my goodness, how can I get this the way that I want it to be? But again, that was all part of the fun. This helped me understand a lot more about the nuances of building a UI. 

0:06:42 - Mehmet
That's great again to hear that from you, Katherine. Now I know that you specialize, or like you are, into one area which is you know it's important, which is accessibility, right, and I think we are in an age that people I think they I don't want to say neglect, but maybe they don't pay too much attention to accessibility. So, and again, like I think it's a little bit not very straightforward in a sense, like because you need to think from a different perspective and you know, when I was preparing for today's episode, like I've checked out, like your job is not easy. So so how you know you use this passion that you have for accessibility within your work and tell me more you know about why accessibility actually in general, it's something very important when we design user experiences and UIs. 

0:07:44 - Katherine
Well, I'll share. My interest in accessibility actually came from some personal pain. So while I was going through my boot camp, I had a family member who got very ill, and in their illness, you know, it was more than just a flu or cold, it was a pretty big thing, and they lost some basic functionality. There was a lot of things that they couldn't do, and we were at the end of our boot camp. We had to create this final project, and I decided to create this application that would help them in some of the things that they couldn't do, and it was necessary for us to consider accessibility. They could no longer type on the phone, you know, to send text messages and things like that, and so it was important that we incorporated speech to text, and so that led down this whole rabbit hole of discovering what is accessibility, how do you think about it, how do you build it into applications, and when I got to LinkedIn, it was very much on my mind, and so I was thinking about it, I was looking for it on our team and the things that we were building, and there was an opportunity to apply my knowledge, and it led to me meeting, you know, our whole accessibility team which I wasn't directly working on but I got to directly work with over time and I realized, wow, this is so cool. There's this whole other world of engineering that I wasn't taught about, which, interestingly enough, and now the same boot camp I went to, they do teach and focus on accessibility. Because of this emphasis that I had on it and also the industry has been changing over the last couple of years, which is great. There is much more of a focus on it, but you're right, it has been quite neglected. Engineers often think about it at the end of what they're doing, when it becomes a compliance issue, a legal issue, when they have a little bit of bandwidth, maybe at the end of the project. But the thing is there's research to show that it costs companies, depending on their size, but it can be millions of dollars to go back and deal with these accessibility issues, and companies do it in different ways. Sometimes they just pay the fee, sometimes they'll actually go back and spend engineering hours to fix this. 

But what I've been focusing on is how can we think about accessibility at the very beginning? In that world there's this concept called shifting left, so instead of doing it at the very end, we're going to move it over to the left, we're going to move it to the beginning of the product production process, and we're going to be thinking about accessibility from the very beginning. It's important for engineers to be thinking about it, but also designers and, most importantly, pms, because PMs, if they can introduce it at the beginning, then everybody has got to be thinking about it, and so when we can do that, we create better products. One, because they're accessible, but two, when you're thinking about accessibility, you're also very much thinking about user friendliness, and so they go hand in hand. Your product will be designed better, it will end up being compliant, and you are able to reach a much broader market. 

There are approximately 1.5 billion people in the world who have some form of a disability, and so everyone's doing things online, whether it's dating, banking, your job, whatever it may be, doing virtual calls, and you want everyone to be able to use your product, and so you've got to think about accessibility. It's another part of my career that I was not expecting to get into, but the people are incredible. Everyone's very thoughtful, very forward driven. There's so many that have come before me that have done a ton of work, but, especially through the pandemic. This work picked up quite a bit and got a lot of attention, which we're all excited about because it's an important fundamental piece of engineering. 

0:12:06 - Mehmet
And I think Katherine, maybe you would tell me better but do you feel also it's rewarding when you see someone being able to use the technology because you designed it based on their special needs? Does this really motivate you, from both as a human, of course, first, and second, when you think about what you have achieved as a front end engineer? 

0:12:41 - Katherine
Oh my goodness. Yes, absolutely. It is very exciting. 

I have one story of someone who was unable to do the work that they were hired to do because they were using a very nuanced older tool that wasn't accessible, and so we worked really, really hard to change it, revamp it, made sure that it was accessible, and then, after a couple of months, they were able to do their job no problem. 

And that's always so exciting, especially when people are eager, they're wanting to help. All of a sudden, they're able to use the tools and now they're just excelling. The thing we have to think about is people aren't disabled, like, yes, they may have visual impairments, maybe they've lost a limb, but when it comes to the environment and being able to use the tools, if they're quote unquote disabled, within that context, it's actually the tools or the environment that is disabling them, and so that's why it's important for us to have this universal design, to be thinking about all people in all situations, and yes, we can't cover absolutely everything, but we can cover a broader average. And when you do that and you see people being able to access things that they couldn't before, it is really a good feeling. 

0:14:09 - Mehmet
Absolutely and, by the way, to your point, one of the things I love about the place I live in. So they decided a couple of years back to not use the word disabled or someone with disability, and they decided to call them people with determination. Yeah, because actually, personally, even from literature perspective, we always were reading. Actually, these people, they get some special skills. After losing one of some people, they lose vision. Some people they lose, as you said, maybe part of their bodies, but they become because they are more determined, and I love the way you put it, how you need to. Of course, we cannot put all the scenarios, but this is part actually of being into the software engineering where you need to put all the possibilities that comes to mind at that time. Of course, we're gonna miss a couple of the use cases, but I am always fascinated by people who can think of something they don't live themselves like. God forbid, I need to imagine that I cannot see or I need to imagine that I can't walk, and you need to design this base on the need of these people. So this is really something. Really it's very human, touching and I love people who does work in that space. 

Now continuing, Katherine, with the shift. Before I move to something else, unfortunately and I'm saying that unfortunately here the tech industry, usually it's seen like something where it's like more man dominated, especially when not only this, like as you mentioned in the beginning people think like only if someone comes from a different, you know, maybe engineering background or like science background, they can do this. So, but I'm sure that there was something that let you ignore these voices that came here and there about all these things and to make you a successful woman in tech, actually, because you know, when someone looks at your career path like it's a success story, right. So so, and think about it like a question of advice for fellow, you know, woman who would be inspired to change from a domain which is seen another domain to a domain which is more seen like like male dominated or maybe specific group dominated, so so what you can tell them to to get encouraged. 

0:17:07 - Katherine
Yeah, this. We were just talking about people, of determination, and this requires quite a bit of determination. It is continuing to get better where women are more welcomed in this space. But I would say, just grab some determination and go do it anyways, because at the end of the day, at the end of the day, we're capable of doing it just as well as men are. So we, as in speaking to women here and the like, yes, you'll run into challenges. I've had experiences where I was in a conversation and I was the only female and I was kind of ignored. People were talking across me. 

You speak up and you say something. You say, hey, I was noticing this. Is this true? Is this what the dynamic actually was? And people are usually like they'll come around, they will be humble, they'll say, oh, my goodness, I didn't realize that that's the situation that we were creating, the way the conversation was playing out, and apologize. At the end of the day, most people are very good people and want good things for others. It's a matter of us assuming that we're welcome there, just kind of take that disposition and then, when things happen that feel uncomfortable, speak up. 

Now, if you do speak up and you get a toxic response, then move on to a different place, because the company itself determines the culture. The culture of the company will be passed down and it will determine how people show up, how they communicate, how they care for others. So it won't just be a male thing. On average there are unique situations, but on average it's really about the company culture and so if people are being toxic, they'll probably be toxic regardless and it's important for you to move to a different environment. But women can do it just as well and also bring unique things, just as men bring unique things to a work dynamic, to a particular industry. So if you are interested in pursuing this path, I would say go for it. 

0:19:17 - Mehmet
Absolutely, and I joined my voice to you, Katherine, here to just do it Absolutely. Now let's shift a little bit. Gis, you mentioned in your introduction you are into like nonprofit and I know that you run the Leon Foundation of Excellence. Can you just tell us a little bit more about it and what inspired you to start this nonprofit and how does it complement also what you are doing in your tech career? 

0:19:51 - Katherine
When I was growing up, I dealt with a lot of micro traumas. Microtr traumas is a new term that I discovered by at the host of another show. I had a very good childhood, pretty average life, but there were definitely things that I went through that caused a lot of pain. You question your worth. You question if you're loved. You feel neglected. At least that was my particular experience. I went through this process of reading a lot of books and finding mentors and getting therapeutic help, trying to heal and modify, rewire these beliefs about myself into something more positive. From that place, I started a nonprofit because I thought well, I now have this knowledge and I want other people to learn from me, to learn from each other, to be part of a community. When I was in my senior year, I formed the Leon Foundation of Excellence and we work with high school students to help them heal intergenerational trauma. 

That's a phrase that not everyone's familiar with, but what it means is there are traumas that exist within our families and they appear as behavioral patterns and they get passed down. Let's say, someone's dad came home from work and he always quote unquote lets off steam by yelling and getting upset at the family. Maybe the next generation repeats that pattern. Maybe it's a little bit better, maybe it's a little bit different, maybe it's a little bit worse. But if we're not conscious, we're not developing our emotional intelligence, our awareness of ourselves, then we can tend to repeat these same patterns. It's the environment we grew up in, it's what we know, it's what's familiar and we'll do it again. Just as if your grandpa never said I love you to his kids. Maybe your father or mother doesn't do the same thing. 

There are so many different examples that we could come up with, but the larger point is we want those patterns to be healed. We want people to show up in a different, healthier, more aware manner. We're all gonna make mistakes, we're gonna be imperfect, but we want people to be willing to do something different, to be willing to take feedback, to take moments where they can just reflect on their own behavior and how it impacts people and then make a change. And so we're starting that journey with these high school students and getting them exposed to different tools conflict resolution, nonviolent communication, these different tools that can help them just have a sense of their selves and what's their starting point in their own patterns and belief systems, so that way, as they are growing up, they're determining their careers, their education, their future families. They have these tools in their pocket so that way they can heal these intergenerational patterns. 

0:23:07 - Mehmet
That's great and, again, good cause you are on, Katherine, I know. Also I discovered that you are a podcaster yourself, so tell me a little bit more about your podcast and what is the theme usually you cover over there. 

0:23:25 - Katherine
My show is called Opportunity Made and the concept is that you can create opportunities anywhere at any time. 

And the reason why I love this concept is because growing up, there was this thought process or this belief portrayed that well, you have to be from a certain place and you have to have certain credentials, and I do think at one point there was more emphasis on that and it's slowly changing over time. 

But in general in life, I think this is universally true that you can create an opportunity, no matter who you are or where you come from. It might take you longer, you might need to put in more effort, you might have to utilize your resources a little bit better than others, but it's not about this comparison game. The most important thing is you having that persistence and that confidence to just keep going and to create opportunities for yourself, and we learn best from others. So that's why I love bringing people on the show to talk about their journeys, talk about barriers that they've overcome what are the nuances, how do they do it, what were the emotions and the beliefs behind it? So that way people can hear the nitty gritty and internalize that for themselves and keep going towards whatever they want, whatever their dreams are and learn how to create opportunities along the way. Absolutely. 

0:25:00 - Mehmet
And I can't agree more on the part of not trying to be someone else and keep trying. And recently I hope that the audience are not getting word from me repeating this, but I repeat it with different guests in different contexts about the fact that we are living in a noisy world. And we are living in a noisy world and I'm not sure who you might ask me, who do you mean but we are shown the world in a way that if we copy someone and we just do exactly these three, four steps, we're gonna reach out to our destination, which is not the case. Some people question okay, what does this has to do with the CTO show, because I think this is also part of a career, because when we talk here about a CTO show, I don't only mean the chief technology officer, I mean everyone who could be possibly fan about technology, because technology is part of everyone's life. But there's something more behind this which is, you know, like being a good person in what you do, of course, when we talk about technologists and people in technology, or when we talk about startups, leadership and entrepreneurship. 

And to your point and you know I need to give a listen to your podcast, Katherine, because you know, I'm very much interested to hear these stories about people who they don't necessarily do it the easiest way or, let's say, with the shortest path, and we need to have more podcasts like yours, I believe, to bring these people. And, you know, I congratulate you on having this podcast because we need to tell the world that you can't just copy someone else and have a success overnight. So really, I congratulate you on this. Now, one of the things while preparing to do a which is now a little bit related to leadership and personal development. So and you just mentioned like a little bit, but let's try to deep dive a little bit more about overcoming person, how overcoming personal challenges, you know, can influence leadership style, if you can elaborate more on like this and you know, maybe, if you can share some of your experiences, how this can shape even leading teams and you know the way you work with people, especially for people like us who work in tech. 

0:27:44 - Katherine
Yeah, it's interesting because there are a lot of challenges that I have encountered in many different ways. It could be just trying to learn a new language, it could be trying to do that when I was in the boot camp, while working several jobs, while having a family member who is ill. So those life situational challenges. It can be self doubt, thinking I can't do this you know that imposter syndrome that everyone's talking about but basically that idea of I don't belong here, I can't do this, I'm not going to be able to figure this out, to just having errors in your code. I ran into errors with prettier if anyone's familiar with that that I was working with senior and staff engineers and we couldn't figure it out. And you realize at that moment you know, okay, there are, there's room for improvement. There's room for improvement for everyone. Not everybody knows everything. I'm not the only one who is seemingly clueless here, which the other side of that coin is that I'm not at all. My VP says often if you are here, then you're qualified to be here, we're not going to hire anyone who's not qualified. And so own that and start leaning in more, doing more work, be more courageous, be more convicted in what you're creating, and so when you face challenges, it really is a healthy part of life. They can be scary, they can bring you down. If it really is a strong challenge that that hits you hard. Characteristically, you might fall into depression or whatever. But the bigger piece is knowing that everyone is dealing with the same thing, because then there's hope, then you can pull yourself back out of it and it also develops empathy, and I think that's a huge piece of leadership is having empathy for others, and the way that that translates through my work is trying to communicate often, communicate very clearly. There's a lot of challenges that come from a lack of clear expectations, from a lack of communication. So those are two things that I focus on. Quite a bit is just how can we communicate often and frequently and clearly with others. 

The other piece of leadership that has been inspired by the challenges I've gone through is service. How can you serve others? Often people don't want to ask for help, they don't want to admit that, they don't know what's going on or how to solve it. But when you go the extra mile, when you're proactive about serving others and just reaching out saying, hey, is there anything that you need, is there anything that I can help with. How's your week going? And people trust you. They know that you authentically mean that and you'll listen and it's safe for them to open up to you. Then you are able to help people through their challenges, whereas they might have been stuck and just swimming in it beforehand. But with that, I just want to say again it is okay to not know, it is okay to be going through challenges. Everyone's going through something. So the more that we can be empathetic, we can communicate and we can proactively serve each other, I think that that makes us better leaders. 

0:31:15 - Mehmet
Communication is key indeed, and, I think, being empathetic 100% on this, and this is why we always see these posts about how leadership is not only about the title, it's more about the way, how we let people see you as a leader, trying to help and extend whatever experience you've got to make them successful. Because in my opinion personal opinion a leader is only a leader, and successful, because I don't believe there's, I don't believe that there is a someone who can be called a leader and be failing in leadership, because leadership, I believe, is only and only about success and to be called leader, whether officially or like people would call you. This is when you are able to inspire the rest of the team by the means that you just mentioned, Katherine. So I 100% agree with you on this. Now, as we are close to an end, just like what are like your future goals and visions when it comes to tech and the business. Engineer. 

0:32:31 - Katherine
Well, I think originally I was very much, much focused on progressing forward and trying to get that next promotion. That was a form of affirming that I belonged there and that I'm doing well and, yes, those things are important. But a lot has shifted for me personally to where that's no longer the focus. I don't. It's not that I don't want to do a good job, but I'm not striving and oh, I just got to get to the next level. Let's do it, let's do it. Is it this season? Is it going to be next season? You know, when is that going to happen? When can I be affirmed that I'm doing well and that I belong here? 

And some of that does come from having a non-traditional background, those kinds of things. But really the focus is what I was just describing is I want to lean in more and I want to do an even better job of serving those around me, serving our customers, serving our users, which are our customers, and just making sure that I'm not thinking as much of myself and my own pride, but that I take this humble stance of I'm here to be a servant to those around me. And so how can I lean in? How can I go the extra mile, how can I be extra communicative in doing those things? And, yes, probably some good will come from that. Maybe, you know, moving up and being affirmed comes from that. But personally, within my own character, my own internal environment, that's not what I want to be focusing on. So it's nothing like super exciting, but really just doubling down where I'm at, being present to where I'm at, and giving as much as I can right here. 

0:34:13 - Mehmet
That's great, Katherine, and it's been a long time I didn't do this, but anything you think I should have asked you which I missed. 

0:34:25 - Katherine
I think the one thing I would also share with your listeners. This is circling back to accessibility. Anyone out there whether you're a PM, you're an engineer, you're a leader within a tech company you can get started with accessibility. Right now it seems like a scary thing. It seems like you could say the wrong thing, you could offend someone, you could build something that actually ends up being inaccessible if you're not aware of how to do it. But, honestly, just lean in. The whole community just wants people to lean in and there's some very easy ways to start checking your tech. Microsoft has a program. It's accessibility insights. Google has Lighthouse, dq has AxeCore. 

These are all things that you can use through your DevTools, and DevTools you can access right in your browser. Anyone can access it, whether they're an engineer or not. There are accessibility tests that you can bake into your product so they automatically run. So these are easy things that, if you're not an engineer, just go to your engineering team and say, hey, are we testing for accessibility? Like, let's just start running those tests. There are going to be probably a lot of things to fix, but you can work on it slowly over time. The biggest point here is just get started and make sure that the conversation is one that's being had within your company. It's so important that we are serving people and not just catering for our own experience, but accounting for those of others as well. So, yeah, that would be the final thing I would say is get started with accessibility testing. 

0:36:07 - Mehmet
Let everyone get started for, let's say, call for every PM everyone actually within a team of software development to get onto the accessibility 100% on that, Katherine, where we can find more about you and your podcast and the work you do. 

0:36:25 - Katherine
Opportunity Made is available on every podcasting platform, so you can take a look there. You've got some exciting episodes coming up. They've all been great. I'm also excited for who's coming next, so check it out. You can find me on LinkedIn. It's the LinkedIn URL slash opportunity made and you'll find me there. And if you're interested in checking out our free online leadership program for high school students, you can go to Leonfeorg. That's L-E-O-N-F-Eorg. 

0:36:59 - Mehmet
Okay, people will find these links in the show notes. So if you didn't catch what Katherine just mentioned for this URL, don't worry, you will find them in the show notes. Katherine, I really enjoyed the discussion with you today. I think you added a lot of insights, whether it's your story coming from being a teacher to tech, about disability, which we stress on also at the end of this episode today, and about your podcast and your nonprofit work. So thank you very much for sharing all this with us today and for the audience. This is usually how we end each episode. 

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