Anmol Kalia

I think a lot of it is luck. Being born in the right family, being exposed to certain types of opportunities at the right time. So I would say that luck is a huge factor. Other than that, I would say that I have worked pretty hard, and I have been lucky to be surrounded by people that are also fortunate. Like, being a woman in tech specifically. If I was a woman in tech, like, 10 years ago, my path would have been much harder. Because so many people have already done the work of challenging the status quo in tech. I'm definitely reaping the rewards of that. But I do think that I've also worked very hard, and that's also helped shape my professional career.

I think the best career advice that I've ever gotten, which did take me like a while to kind of fully accept, is that while it is useful to plan your career and optimize for career-specific objectives like growth in terms of level or growth in terms of scope, I think the most important thing in a career, especially if you want your career to be long, is to make sure that you're working on things that you truly, truly enjoy. Because the rewards that come in your career come are very sparse. Like, you will get them maybe once a quarter, once in six months, once a year. Whereas the joy that you get from your work is what sustains you every day. For a lot of people, especially like me, who try to think of things in terms of bigger pictures, sometimes you can be hyper-fixated on goals. But I think the most important thing is to do work that you enjoy.

I think at this time in tech specifically, it's changing very, very fast. The advice that I would give to anyone that's entering the field now is to not have very rigid sense of identity in terms of who they are as like pertaining to their job role. I think people need to be agile and people need to be flexible, and they need to think about any problem that they're trying to solve, like own the whole problem, don't just own a piece of the problem. Like, think of problems end-to-end, think of where there are solution gaps that you could help fix. I think that that is the mindset that's needed now, because the industry is going through a very rapid shift. And maybe like a lot of rules are going to change fundamentally, or not even exist in a few years.

I think there are painful challenges like we know that companies are like laying off people, like a lot of the entry-level software work is has been like almost fully automated. So how to leverage the workforce and the talent that people have and have them be productive, I think is the challenge. The opportunity on the flip side is that with AI, you can teach yourself stuff at a very rapid pace. Like things that would take you the course of maybe like a year to learn by yourself with like a human teacher, you can now learn in a matter of a few weeks. So I feel like the world is your oyster. Like you can learn anything you want to very rapidly.

I think I care about care a lot about the people around me. So that could mean mentoring people that are more junior in their careers, or supporting my peers through challenging situations at work. I think I also believe in doing that in my personal life a lot. Basically, I put a lot of emphasis and value in being someone that can support people around me and help them grow as well. And I think I've also admired similar people in my career, like people that have supported me and have helped me grow.