In this blog series, women at Datto will post stories from their interviews of each other. This week, we hear from Adrianne Mora, Technical Writer on the Training Team, and Kim Desorcie, Associate Software Engineer.
As a senior IT major at RIT, Kim Desorcie was ready to enter the working world. Like most things in her life, she did a lot of research to decide on her next steps. For this important decision, she immersed herself in blogs that covered start-up companies. Though she loved the idea of working for a start up, she didn’t like the idea of working in chaos. So, she set her sights on finding a company that was in the late stages of starting up. It would give her the best of both worlds: fresh, innovative technology with the stability of a larger company.
It was inevitable that she’d find Datto. Datto CEO, Austin McChord, is an RIT graduate, and Datto actively recruits on the campus. At an RIT career fair, Kim met up with Charles Lundblad, a longtime Datto engineer, with whom she immediately felt comfortable. Charles started off the interview by asking her to read some code and find the problems with it. “I really liked that his interview included reading code instead of just writing code and talking about it. It got me into the right frame of mind for interviewing and helped me to feel confident about answering the rest of the questions,” she recalls. Two years later, Charles remembers her as being one of the few who found the code’s problems right away.
She started her Datto career in late 2014 as one of the first software engineers at our Rochester office. At the time, the small Franklin St. office housed about a dozen Technical Support Experts and about five software developers. Today, our Rochester workforce numbers in the hundreds across two locations in downtown Rochester.
Despite being a natural at software development, her decision to go into the technology field was not obvious, at least not early on. As a kid, she didn’t know what she wanted to do. “Maybe a zookeeper or an artist?” she guesses. As an older teenager, she hesitated between artist or coder, and eventually settled on technology. (Her sister, on the other hand, became a zookeeper.)
My own journey into technology was undecided as well. As a kid, I loved computers and owned one of the first PCs on the block. However, a tech career did not seem accessible to me, and I pictured it as being lonely. I imagined sitting in front of a computer screen all day. Of course, in the intervening years, while I was changing my major five times, the whole world changed. These days, one of the biggest problems tech companies face is being able to hire enough techies to fill all of the job openings, and I cannot imagine working in any other industry. Like Kim, I immediately felt at home with my colleagues at Datto. It’s wonderful to be in a culture where nerdiness is celebrated, rather than merely tolerated. My, how times have changed!
I shared with Kim that one of my favorite things about being a tech writer is that I can be as introverted or extraverted as I feel like being. Some days, I am solitary and churn out Knowledge Base articles. Other days, I walk out onto the tech support floor at our Norwalk, Connecticut location and pick the brains of our super-knowledgeable Tech Support Experts. When I shared this habit with Kim, she said “oh yeah, I love talking to them. I walk around and ask them ‘what bug is horrible this week?’ and I try to help them with workarounds and getting things fixed. I love refactoring code to make it better.”
It makes me wonder what I would have done differently if the tech field had been so accessible when I was a kid. Then again, I never have a lack of learning opportunities at Datto.
The Women in Technology blog series is coordinated by Customer Experience Innovations project coordinator, Rachel Powers.