We Belong Here: Lessons from Unconventional Paths to Tech

42. Lucy Suddenly: There's Room at the Table for Everyone

Mar 11 '21

Lucy Suddenly is a white, able-bodied trans woman from the greater Seattle area. She got a BA in psychology and spent a decade in box office management before realizing that programming was her destiny. She switched careers after attending Flatiron School and now works as a Builds and Deployment Engineer at Outreach.io in Seattle.

We chat about the box office industry, how small it is, and the lack of roles it has as a result. She had dabbled with code quite a bit as a kid and returned to it after a major life event and was searching for a new career path. She attended Flatiron School as a part of Seattle’s first in-person cohort and even went on to teach there afterward.

Today at Outreach.io, Lucy is building CI-CD services and accompanying tooling to abstract away the complexity of deployments for her new favorite customers: product engineers. Her free time is spent playing video games, bringing a chaotic evil DnD character to life, baby talking to her cat, and cramming as many new units of programming wisdom into her brain as possible.

In our conversation today, Lucy shares how the lessons she learned while in the box office industry translate to her current role in tech. Knowing how to remain calm and level-headed during a moment of crisis or facing bugs in the code while everyone else is losing their cool has proved to be wildly helpful and powerful now on an engineering team.

She recommends keeping data on your day-to-day learnings of both your challenges and successes so that you can champion and advocate for yourself and authentically speak to the growth you've made.

At Outreach.io, she founded a Trans Employee Resource Group and created a 101 course for folks to take action and educate themselves. She's a proud squeaky wheel there and advocates for change and they welcome her with open arms.

Resources:

Lucy’s LinkedIn

Outreach.io

Flatiron School

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