This episode is sponsored by Tonic.ai – where your data is modeled from your production data to help you tell an identical story in your testing environments.

[00:01 - 05:08 ] Opening Segment 

• Need to generate fake data that looks, acts, and behaves like production data for your test environments? Check out Tonic.ai!
  • Head over to https://www.tonic.ai/ and sign up today for a free two weeks trial sandbox!
• Dagna talks about experiencing a plateau in her career as a software engineer
• Realizing the lack of support networks
  • How this led her to set up her own coaching business

[05:09 - 11:26 ] How Cultural Upbringing Affects Work Performance

• What Dagna is doing to help immigrants like her fit into their American workplace
• Using the Hofstede model to understand the culture
• Cultural differences in the US and other countries
  • Individualism and collectivism
  • Long-term orientation and short-term orientation

[11:27 - 26:14 ] Engineering Mindset for Success

• Coaching clients on career advancement and finding fulfillment
• The importance of mindset
• Common limiting beliefs engineers have and overcoming them
  • Being your own advocate, your work does not speak for itself
  • Creating a safe space for feedback
• The feedback Dagna received from her superior and how it changed how she was writing code
• Knowing when to move on
• The state of the US and European job market

[26:15 - 29:54 ] Closing Segment

• Dagna’s advice: Don’t take code reviews and feedback personally
• Know more about the process Dagna uses to take her clients’ careers to the next level at https://www.themindfuldev.com/podcast
• Final words

Tweetable Quotes

“How you think is how you act.” - Dagna Bieda

“What you really have to do is market yourself. You have to talk about your achievements and accomplishments and not expect everybody in the company to just know what it is that you're doing.” - Dagna Bieda

“It's very important to understand how what you're doing fits into the business as a whole, the business that you're working for, and how to communicate about it.” - Dagna Bieda

Resources Mentioned

• https://www.tonic.ai/ - Sign up now for a two-week free trial!
• The Culture Map by Erin Meyer - https://erinmeyer.com/books/the-culture-map/
• Dagna’s Website

Connect with Dagna by following her on LinkedIn. Go to theMindfuldev.com and theMindfulDev.com/podcast to learn more about her coaching business.

Let’s Connect! You can connect with me, Dr.  McKayla on Instagram, Twitter and Youtube to look into engineering software, and learn from experienced developers and thought leaders from around the world about how they develop software!

LEAVE A REVIEW + help someone who wants to know more about the engineering software world. Your ratings and reviews help get the podcast in front of new listeners. 

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Transcription

[00:00:00 ] Dr. McKayla: Hello, and welcome to the Software Engineering Unlocked podcast. I'm your host, Dr. McKayla. And today I have the pleasure to talk to Dagna Bieda. She's a software engineer turned career coach for software engineers. She's been coding for over 10 years and has been a coach or has been coaching for the past two-plus years.

[00:00:24 ] Dr. McKayla: And today I will learn everything around how to get a job, how to be successful as a software engineer, and how to advance your career. But before I start, let me introduce you to an amazing startup that's sponsoring today's episode, Tonic.ai, the fake data company. So what does Tonic.ai do? I'm sure you know how complex and cumbersome it is to create quality test data.

[00:00:51 ] Dr. McKayla: It's a never-ending chore that eats into valuable engineering resources. Random data doesn't do it and production data is neither safe nor legal for developers to use. What if you could mimic your entire production database to create a realistic dataset with zero sensitive data? That sounds amazing, right? 

[00:01:10 ] Dr. McKayla: Tonic.ai does exactly that. With Tonic.ai, you can generate fake data that looks, acts, and behaves like production data because it's made from production. Yet, Tonic.ai guarantees privacy so your data sets are safe to share with developers, QA, data scientists, heck, even distributed teams around the world. Visit Tonic.ai to sign up today or click the link in the show notes to get a free two weeks trial sandbox.

[00:01:38 ] Dr. McKayla: Well, Dagna, I'm, I'm so excited to learn everything that, you know, you have been through. in your career as a software engineer and how you actually help software engineers get the most out of their career. So can you tell me a little bit, how did you go about to this shift from, you know, being a software engineer, yourself to being a full-time career coach for software engineers? Why did that happen and how?

[00:02:03 ] Dagna Bieda: Absolutely. And first of all, thanks so much for having me on your show, McKayla. Essentially, you know, in my own career, I have seen some incredible accelerated progression in my own career. When I started programming, I went from a junior engineer to a senior engineer fairly quickly.

[00:02:22 ] Dagna Bieda: It happened in less than three years, which, it takes a lot more for a lot of engineers in our industry. And it was all because of the people that were in my corner that supported me, that mentored me. And because I was very relentless about asking them for feedback to tell me how I can improve, how I can do better.

[00:02:44 ] Dagna Bieda: And as I kind of like, went up in my career in my senior engineering role, what happened is I experienced this plateau, you could say. And I recognized, later on, you know, in hindsight that I was just working really hard on the wrong things, but I didn't have that kind of support that I needed that would have showed me like, Hey, Dagna, what you're focusing on is not going to take you to that next level.

[00:03:11 ] Dagna Bieda: So after having that aha moment, I recognized like, okay, I was going super quickly, advancing in my career in the early, in the beginning, because of that support. Later on, I didn't have that support. I had to figure it out by myself. And so , it was so much slower of a process when I was trying to figure it out myself.

[00:03:32 ] Dagna Bieda: So I decided that, you know, this is a great idea for a business because not everybody, being a software engineer, has that support network that they could lean on. So I could step in and become that support network for my clients. And that's exactly what I do today. And it's just amazing. And I've helped so many clients, you know, I've had over the past three years that I've been coaching, I've helped over 50 engineers.

[00:03:59 ] Dagna Bieda: They had various backgrounds. Some of them work at fan companies. Some of them work for like small mom and pop shops, and they had experience ranging anywhere from 2 to 20 years of experience. Some were self-thought. Some had college degrees, some are boot camp graduates. And you know what I do right now as a coach and that lits me on fire and, you know, brings a lot of fulfillment to my life is to help my clients find that in their life and in their career.

[00:04:28 ] Dr. McKayla: Okay. And so, what does it take from a junior to become a senior? And why was there no support for you when you were a senior to get, you know, to the next level? Maybe what was your next level? Was it like a staff engineer that you wanted to become, or is it more in a managerial role that you wanted to develop yourself? So what's the next, the next step?

[00:04:52 ] Dagna Bieda: I wanted to become a team lead and team lead is like a mix of both, right? On one hand, like from an HR perspective, maybe you are not on the org chart on top of like a team, but you are leading your team with your technical expertise. So like it's a mix of the managerial and the engineering responsibilities.

[00:05:09 ] Dagna Bieda: The big reason why I had the plateaued is because I moved from Poland to the United States. And as an immigrant. I didn't realize that, you know, the way I was thinking and going about work, while it made perfect sense back in Poland, it didn't necessarily set me up for success in my American workplace.

[00:05:30 ] Dagna Bieda: And also like right now, a lot of my clients are immigrants moving from one country to another. And what I help them is to understand how their cultural upbringing affects their performance at their workplace. Because for me that was one of the blockers, right? I had to really kind of like understand my new situation, my new culture, how I was fitting in what was stopping me, and for example, there's this one situation that I can, that comes to mind is when, when I posted a joke in slack that I thought was super funny and, and being an Eastern European, we have this dark sense of humor.

[00:06:06 ] Dagna Bieda: And, you know, in this new American company, what happened was I was called to HR and I was told that that was inappropriate. And I was like, what?