 Live from Houston, Texas, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Frick. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here at Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing in Houston, Texas. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal of noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles, on my coast, Jeff Frick, general manager of theCUBE. And our next guest is Wei Lin. She's the senior director of engineering of e-business at Symantec, long time veteran of the Grace Hopper celebration. Welcome to theCUBE, great to see you. Hi, great to see you too. I'm very honored to be here. We love that you've been here as a veteran now. Explosion growth. So first, before we get started, I want you to hold your badge up and to show us all your pelts that you've acquired over the years. Gold sponsor, I mean, it gets a lot of colors there. Essentially, you've been around the block here with Grace Hopper. Yes, yes. What are you doing? What's up with you? What are you working on? So, for the Grace Hopper, I have been involved in various committees for seven years. Up to last year, I was the general co-chair of Grace Hopper 2014. This is a great venue and a forum for women in computing to come together to discuss our problem, to get inspired. So every time I come here, I got totally recharged. I'm totally inspired by all the women coming here. And I want to give back. That's why I keep coming back to Grace Hopper. And this year, I will speak at one panel. And I'm also the co-founder of Chinese Women in Computing Community. And I made the booth myself. So that's where I feel that's a place that I belong. It's very energizing and inspirational, but also you're working. You're getting your hands dirty. You're rolling up your sleeves. Yes. Everyone's working. It's a real community feel here this year. Every year it gets bigger and bigger. Last year was our first year. It just seems to be exploding. Like there's a lot of gravity right now around Grace Hopper. I believe women, more they see the gathering like that, more they understand the force of the group and community. That's why they come keep back. And they pass the word, right? That's why we become bigger and bigger, because really truly we can push the envelope together to solve the problem. I wonder if you could just give us some perspective. You said you've been coming for seven years. How many people were here seven years ago? What was the feel there? Like banging against the glass ceiling back then? Had things kind of broken through? What's your perspective as you've kind of been on this journey for the last seven years? Yes, so the first time I came here was 2007, five. At that time there was 1,500 attendees. That's nine years. Nine years, yes. But I had been involved on committee for seven years. Okay, okay, so there was 1,500 people. Yes, at that time the focus was more on younger generation, on students, less on career women. So I was a career woman in middle of my career and then we think we need to also focus on career women at a different level. Beginners, entry level, mid level, senior level, executive. That's why I saw the conference has evolved from focusing solely on mainly on students to covering all spectrum. That's why I think we get more and more executives coming to help us. What's interesting is that this event has spawned many conversations and we've heard some of them on theCUBE here. Obviously the one is the paying gap. That's national news, international news, pay scale, that's different conversation. But here in the hallways there's conversations of opportunity and community. And also someone said it feels like a job fair. There's so much opportunity. It's like a recruiting event at the same time but it's not just the job fair. This is an industry event. Talk about the difference. And share that little nuance of perspective. Yes, of course job fairs always play an important role in all these conferences. I saw the job fair from a very small cluster of small booths to this huge gigantic booth. But moreover is we talk about problem. We openly talk about problem yesterday. Go Daddy, see you talk about pay inequality, right? Down to the management level. So that's one aspect that we never talk about it. So that's a great breakthrough to me. But also we talk about technology, right? It's not about problem. We also women contribute tremendously to the technology. We look forward. Every year we have a new track of the latest technology. That's why it's not only solely for problem. We are contributing. We are also the inventors. We have been so great in many of these advanced technology. That's the difference, that's the nuance. The big growth here is new blood, if you will. That's the term. A lot of young women coming in and growing, a lot of programming, a lot of developers. I was hearing in the hallways a conversation about DevOps, which is our wheelhouse, about cloud-based technology. It's interesting. So across the board, opportunities. But for the folks that are our age that are in their prime of their career, women, we've had Eileen Fagan on earlier, talk about how lonely it is at the top and that the nurturing of the top of the leadership of the prime ladies in their career or women who are being mentors, it can be an added pressure. In addition to the normal pressures of career advancement and as you get to the top of the leadership, what is the dynamic at that level? Because those folks have had a journey. Yes. Yourself included. And now the younger generation coming in fresh, kind of unconsciously competent, not knowing what has happened, just thriving. We had Ashley on earlier. Amazing young woman. It's amazing opportunity for these young women, but the flywheel of mentoring is a big part of that. Yes. How are we nurturing that group of people? Yes. So I think here there are several falls we need to really focus, right? One is the senior women, executives, senior management, right? They need to continue to shoulder the heavy weight. At the same time, we also neutral, we grow our next generation, the next level, to make them to also being taken on the charge so we share the weight. It's not only the senior person. And another fold is about the leadership accountability. That means we need our counterpart, male counterpart to support us. We need C-suite support the whole cause. With their support, the force is much bigger than being done only by women. That's what happens in cement. We put on leadership accountability as a one of top priority for them to support this cause. And the trend is your friend too. If you look back to nine years ago, 2005, when you first started coming to Grace Hopper, a lot of innovations have happened. iPhone, YouTube kind of was launched kind of earlier. This whole social media network effect revolution. Yes. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, the iPhone. Now the communities are talking to each other. Yes. Frictionless communication, peer to peer. Has that been a big part of the solidarity within Grace Hopper? And just the fact that computing technologies, touching more women, making it more interesting, more fun? Yes. I believe that this new technology and social media have helped a lot in the women cause, right? I believe the younger generation, they are smarter. They know how to fight. I have two daughters. They both graduated. I saw them going through the college, high school college, very competitive environment. They know much better than I was at that age. They know how to fight. They know how to get what they want. So I believe they are already in a better starting point than us, 20, 30, 40 years ago. So I'm less concerned. And Jeff and I are what we call DODs, dads of daughters. We have daughters out there, I have two, he's got two. So we want them to be not afraid. I mean, I think that's the big theme we're hearing. Yes. Take a chance. Yes. Be uncomfortable and don't have preconceived notions of what computer science is. Totally not. Be passionate, follow your dreams. That's why I believe social media has helped a lot because they talk among themselves. They can learn from their peers, with the mentoring from their parents, with their mentor at school, at work. They just grow so fast. They can face the world. They can smell what's going on pretty quickly. Yes. They can sense it. It's your DOD, right? You're probably no better. We're DODs, yes. I'm still waiting to get on my daughter's Snapchat storyline, but that's still work in progress. Okay. Which may not ever happen. My daughter taught me how to use Snapchat. Right, so they're even more advanced than me in many of these aspects. I have no friends on Snapchat. Friend me on Snapchat, I need friends. I have no friends. Oh, they're all too old. We, how's the perspective of semantic change over these last nine years? Yes. You've been there for longer than you've been coming to Grace Hopper. Yes. The support of this effort, they're embracing of what you're doing. How has that evolved over the last seven years? So I see a huge change also in semantic. Early on, right, when I first joined semantic in 2000, nobody really talked about we vaguely know there's a DNI, but we really didn't know what it was about. In 2005, Semantic started one initiative called Women, Semantic Women Action Network. It's a forum to provide semantic women, especially in technology, for them to talk, exchange their ideas, discuss the problem, and learn and get mentored. They started that in 2005. Yes. So we came a long way, and today we have about 14 different chapters on our added big site. Each site, we have champions. So we have our own program. And at the company-wide, we not only push this our own in-house program, but also we're involved in bigger community. For example, we are now gold sponsor for Grace Hopper Conference. We also involve in NCWIT, STEM, and also Tech Women program. We host these young generation leaders coming from under developing country. We give them an opportunity to see how the US high tech company functions, and we teach them all the best knowledge we have in Dev, QA, program management, IT, product management. So we are really involved at worldwide to really demonstrate we are supportive to the women cause. And how much of a role did your leadership in Grace Hopper play in that evolution? Yes, so I was, I started to involve as Grace Hopper Conference industry advisor board in 2009. So since then every year, I'm involved in various track. I was co-chair of several tracks. Two years ago I was co-chair of career track, biggest track of the conference always. I also became program co-chair then last year I was promoted to general co-chair. And all this journey just taught me that more I get involved, more I know better and understand better, and more I can give back. So this is really two way I get from this conference, I get from community, and I want to pay back. This communal dynamic is now mainstream across all aspects of society and technology industry. You're seeing open source, now a tier one citizen. Back in the days when I was coding, it was like you were radical, like circumvent the license agreements, get around, beat the big guys, now it's all free. Society and communities are communicating social media. It's a community based culture now. Yes, yes, yes. And also we are now pushing toward agile process where it's also team work, right? We are no longer focusing on one individual, we are focusing on this team, theme of team as this community. So at social level, it's community, at work level, it's teamwork. All about is not only one person, it's really a collective effort to make a good cause to happen. So the biggest learnings that you have here at the show this year, what are they? If you can magnify your learnings for this show this year, what is it? Okay, so far what I see is I went to several talk. These are talk given by the young women. I'm very impressed by the advanced technology they are involved. And also the second one is really the career fair. It's how big it is. What I'm learning is there's so many opportunities out there for women, for the young generation, for the early entry level and for mid level and even for executive. So this is really getting more and more inspired, inspiring and more and more encouraging for the women cause. And the diversity of companies here is pretty amazing. Jeff was pointing out the range, Capital One to Goldman Sachs, we had CNBC here earlier, CUBE is here this year. Yes, it's no longer only software industry. It really goes beyond, beyond to the other industry. This is also another exciting aspect that we didn't see 10 years ago. 10 years ago it's all about software. So what's next for you? What Pelt are you going to put on your badge of honor there? What new ribbon is next? What's next, how we conquer the whole event? Yes, the next I will be involved more, giving more of my time into various Grace Harper Conference, organization, committees, but also I want to get involved in more of these women initiative outside of Grace Harper because I really want to contribute and I think I can contribute. So I'm already involved in tech women initiative and I will probably go to a stamp. That's my next one I want to tackle. So the horizon is very wide open to me for me and I just have full hope that I can get into a lot of them. Well congratulations and thank you for sharing your insight with us here on theCUBE and some of the data and anecdotes. We really appreciate the time you took out your day to speak with us. This is theCUBE live here in Houston, Texas and theCUBE is coming to Oracle Open World. Keep watching us. We'll be there with John Fowler all the top and sixth in Oracle. We're in theCUBE all around the world. We're at Pentaho World in Orlando today and we're looking to hire. So if you're a woman out there you want to be a digital analyst, data scientist, co-host on anchor. We need more women on our team and certainly since we're here we're saying we're hiring so we are so call us if you need anything. But we are here live, we'll be right back with more Grace Hopper Celebration after this short break.