Ann Hoggarth

I attribute my success to God, 150%. When I was asked what I attribute all my success to, I said God without hesitation. Being laid off at my age wasn't a good feeling, and people don't want to hire you when you're older. My business partner and I tried to find jobs for 3 years and couldn't find work. We learned that 94% of technology jobs went to people of color, and we're both white. He was reduced to driving Uber and I'm delivering groceries to make ends meet, but at least I'm not on welfare. Through all of this, God is running me through the ringer right now, but I trust in His plan even when I don't understand it.

The best advice I've ever received is to trust in God and not man. This is biblical wisdom that has guided me throughout my career and personal life, especially during challenging times.

This is going to sound really old school, but it's factual and still the case in technology. For the most part, it is a male-dominated field, and there's nothing wrong with that. If you want to be successful and enjoy your job, learn to act like a man at work. Not in the sense of talking nasty or whatever, but men are very simple people and they don't overthink anything when it comes to relationships in the workplace. If they say 'hey, how's it going?', they aren't playing games with you. You've got to get beyond the thought that maybe they want to sleep with you, because they all do, so just blow it off because they can't help it, it's their nature. I grew up with three brothers and my dad was a lot like Archie Bunker, so I understand how men operate. Working with men has been outstanding because I don't have to deal with office drama. I hear women complain about their jobs and how people did this or that, and there's a lot of catty behavior. When you work with only men, you don't find that. There are things they say that aren't appropriate, but I haven't had to deal with that office nonsense much at all.

The biggest challenges right now are finding customers and getting past the gatekeepers. There's a lot of competition from big companies like PowerSchool and Infinite Campus and all these student information system companies. We've had data breaches beyond anything I've ever seen before in school districts nationwide. PowerSchool just had a massive data breach a year and a half ago and they paid millions, if not billions, in ransomware to get the data back. You don't hear about that stuff in the news, but when you're dealing with Student Information Systems, it's not just the student's information but also the parent's information, the sibling's information, what allergies you have, what size shoe you wear, your blood type, everything. The gatekeepers are very, very hard to get through, and they're still cleaning up the mess from PowerSchool.

The values most important to me are respect and kindness. We used to have that when I was younger. It wasn't perfect, but it was a hell of a lot better than it is now. Could you imagine what a different world we would have if everybody practiced respect and kindness? We're all guilty of losing sight of these values. COVID made us all worse, and society has become petty. I think pride has a lot to do with it too. We've lost the simple courtesy and consideration we used to show each other.