 I am welcoming everybody here to the session called A Linguist in the Sea Suite with Andrea Lesick. I'm Nancy Frischberg. I'm one of the organizers of the Linguistics Career Launch this summer. And that today we're gonna have Rachel as our Zoom producer today to provide helpful resources in the chat and also to monitor for questions and comments. So I'm delighted, Andrea, that you and I to have this conversation in front of an audience and welcome to the Linguistics Career Launch. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to do this. And I think our audience doesn't necessarily know yet, but we should definitely tell them that Salesforce, your employer, has joined us as a sponsor at the guerrilla level. So congratulations. Thank you to Salesforce for supporting our activities. That's very exciting. I think we have a number of speakers. Don't we? Yes, there are several people who are gonna be participating. Among them, one person who I saw here this morning, hey, Kate. Kate DeHair is going to be doing a workshop next week on Wednesday called Write Great Error Messages. And then she's gonna join a panel immediately after that about technical documentation and technical writing. We also have Raffaella. And I can read her name, but I can never remember her name from the translation department. And so she's gonna handle issues related to translation project management and localization. And I bet people are not yet even familiar with localization as a field. And of course, Greg Bennett, who's a familiar to many of these people because he graduated from the program that Alex Johnson now runs. I don't think she was there when he was a student. But anyway, so he is gonna talk with us on a panel about voice user interfaces, which has been his main thing since he's been at Salesforce. As long as we're talking about, and we didn't even tap into the people that you have, who might be linguists in the natural language processing and AI sections of the company and probably several other areas, perhaps even naming and branding, I don't know. How big is Salesforce these days? Roughly. So we roughly, we are about 20 billion in revenue and about 55,000 employees and growing. So we are one of the fastest growing enterprise software companies. And it just gets bigger and bigger all the time. So because so many companies use Salesforce. So maybe you should explain a little bit about that because I expect that our audience and we've got like 180 people who are enrolled in the summer program. I think few of them actually realize what Salesforce does. And I know SAS is the big word associated with Salesforce but you're gonna probably have to explain that too. Well, Salesforce was started in 1999 with the simple premise of what if enterprise software was as easy to use as buying a book from Amazon. At the time Amazon was a book vendor and online. And enterprise software was not online at the time. So Salesforce was the first to bring software for businesses to the web. And the very first thing that Salesforce came out with was a way for salespeople to manage their contacts and their sales, hence our name Salesforce. We have grown way beyond just serving salespeople but we've kept the name because we developed some brand recognition in the business community. So when you think about a business every aspect of what they do requires software whether it's doing customer support or selling things or managing all of their employee experience doing reporting on their business, doing the marketing and sending emails and campaigns out to consumers. All of that is Salesforce. So if you go and buy shoes from an Adidas flash sale that's Salesforce. If you get emails during Black Friday with all the sales that is coming from Salesforce. If you do a chat support with your airline that is Salesforce on the backend. If you log a ticket with Dell about something wrong with your new computer that is Salesforce software. So all those things that a business does to serve their customers, that all runs on Salesforce. Super, and I bet people will be surprised as they start listening to other presenters from Salesforce to realize, oh, all of those things are managed by one company and developed by one company, very cool. So now what I know and what's been previewed for people is that you are trained in linguistics. But Andrea Lessick currently is known as the Chief Operations Officer for Technology at Salesforce. So give us a few hints about that path from how did you study linguistics? How did you choose that? And then how did you leave linguistics and find your way to something else? Yeah, so I wanted to be an engineer and I went to MIT and I chose chemical engineering as my major and had a good time in that. But you have to take electives. And along the way, my dorm was near the cognitive science department. So I took a cognitive science course and there I met a professor who was doing research on language acquisition, which prompted me to then become aware of the linguistics department. And of course, MIT is very famous for having Noam Chomsky and Morris Halley and many other very prominent linguists. So I then took a course in syntax and I just fell in love with it. I loved every part of it. I loved the research. I loved digging in and finding patterns and things. So it was very focused on syntax, phenology, things like that. So I did switch my major kind of mid college to the linguistics department. And as an undergraduate, I was able to get a research opportunity with that professor from the cognitive science department who was doing research on language acquisition. And so I spent my summer with children doing different experiments on prepositions and what the kids native language capabilities were around syntax, which then led me to apply for a PhD program at MIT. And it was one of the first years they were offering a PhD program that was joint between linguistics and the cognitive science department. So that's where then I went next. Luckily, I was accepted and I was having a great time. I was really enjoying it. And I ended up not getting my PhD, which we could maybe go into that why, but as I ended up getting my master's at MIT and then went into the software world into high tech as a technical writer. And then from there kind of grew my career from there. Well, I wanna come back to how you agree your career, but I think I wanna focus for a minute still on that transition, because that's where our audience is now. There is that, am I gonna finish the master's? Am I gonna complete the PhD once I do those completions? If I choose to do that, can I afford to stay in that long? And then what am I gonna do? So how did you find your way? I remember you telling me a story when we were first talking about being at graduation for that master's program and the other linguistic students talking to one another about future careers. Yeah. Well, I'll get there and I'll tell you that story in a minute, okay? The interesting thing is as I was going through my graduate program, I would start to each year the graduating class of PhDs and I would see them, I would hear them talk about their job opportunities. And some of them would get really great postdoc, some of them would not. And so at the time this was the mid-90s, the job prospects for a PhD in linguistics did not really seem that plentiful, you know? And it was really unclear kind of what the path was with a PhD. And so I realized I really didn't want the PhD, I didn't wanna go into academia. So I worked with my advisors to do a master's and so I wouldn't have wasted all that time. And nothing to show for it. And nothing to show for it. A fun fact, Noam Chomsky was one of my master's thesis advisors. So that was really, really special to have his input on that. And so yes, so I was there at graduation and they line up the folks and someone in front of me was like, I don't know what I'm gonna do after graduation. And other people were like, I don't know what I'm gonna do. And one woman was like, well, I'm gonna go to law school because I don't know what else to do. And I remember it occurring to me. I'm like, hmm, maybe I should go to law school because I didn't know what I was gonna do with this master's in linguistics. But what ended up happening was sort of took a year off to do random things. And then I moved to San Francisco. I had a lot of friends who were doing startups in software and online, different things. And my dad said, hey, you're really good with language. You're a really good writer. You're great with technology. Have you considered this thing called technical writing? And I said, well, I don't know what that is. He gave me a book and I learned about it. And I was able to get a job at a small company sort of without any experience, they were willing to take a chance on me based on my background in linguistics and technology. So that's how it all started. And the MIT degrees didn't hurt? Well, I mean, I would say that it definitely opens doors, but it's not like it gave me any credentials to get into technical writing. Right. It didn't give you a pass, but it certainly got you in the door. Yeah. Good, good. Okay, so now you're in technical writing and it took you a little while to get there. And so how long did you stay in tech docs or technical writing and what kinds of projects were emblematic of that period? Yeah. So, I mean, initially I was working on, you know, writing user manuals for software. And I was also working on some more technical documentation for developers who were, you know, building on top of the software at the company I was at. Then sort of taught myself how to do some programming and was able to create a little web application that helped our users with some implementation that they normally would have done manually. And then I moved to Salesforce. And that's where I got, you know, much deeper into this because Salesforce was a growing company. And I was the first technical writer that they hired. Wow. And so as Salesforce started to grow, I was able to build a team. And, you know, I had to start hiring people. I became a manager. I had to build out like the processes and tools of how we did technical documentation, the user manuals. Our team writes all of the text in the UI. All of the software, any text you see is written by our team. And I sort of grew that team to, you know, a great, a really good size. And my, my boss said, you know, hey, I think you can do some of these other things. And so I added on communications to my team. I added on a marketing function to my team. So it's just kind of internal marketing mostly internal, quiet marketing. Okay. Well, yeah, it was marketing to kind of the tech industry about Salesforce engineering. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think along the way, I was able to expand my scope and expand the charter of my team. And by just proving that I could adapt. That I could handle a team that I could, you know, apply my skills to, you know, new challenges and. So it just kind of grew from there. And then I've added other, other functions as well. I have a team that focuses on learning for. Our organization for the whole technology organization. I have a team that does agile coaching for the organization. For a while I ran our site reliability and production engineering team. So it just kind of expanded along the way. Wow. And so now your COO of technology. And as far as I know, but I'm sure I could be wrong. You're the first linguist in the C suite that I'm aware of. In the big companies. So do you know, I don't know either. All right. The challenge to our audiences. See if you can find another linguist in the C suite at a company. That's not exactly as huge as Salesforce. Nonetheless, at a big and growing company. And so for those of us that are new to corporate. And so if you're new to corporate, you're new to corporate terminology. The cease, I'll, I'll give my version of the definition, then you can correct me. Okay. So the C suite includes people who have jobs that start with the letter C. As in chief. So chief marketing officer, chief information officer, chief chief operations officer. Chief financial officer. And that's probably on that same team. And all of you would be part of the executive committee that reports up to the CEO. Is that fair? That is definitely, that is definitely a fair assessment. I don't report, I don't report to the CEO. Okay. Because Salesforce is so big. Each department. Has kind of their own. Chief operating officer to focus on the operations and. Supporting functions of that. That whole business unit. So. Okay. There's about. 15,000 people in the, the business unit of technology and products that, that I am the COO for. Gotcha. Okay. But there may be two or three other COOs for other. Yeah. Yeah. Other parts of the business. Right. Right. Very exciting. Okay. And what a huge scope and thank you for taking time with us. So it, it sounds like you just kind of organically became a manager and decided that you were good enough at it and liked it enough that you were going to continue. Did they offer you a formal training or have you undertaken other kinds of formal training? I have definitely undertaken training. I've done various kinds, both internal at Salesforce, as well as external programs. Like Berkeley Haas has a program programs that you can do. There's lots of other places where you can do, you know, management leadership training. There's tons of books, you know. But when I first started managing people, the Salesforce was small enough that, you know, I just kind of fell into it and learned on the job. And I think that's, you know, one of the things that is, is a great skill that, you know, maybe you can bring from linguistics is, is, you know, being flexible, being able to figure things out along the way. You're always, you know, looking at new problems, right? In linguistics and figuring them out. So that's kind of one of the skills that I brought to help my career as, as I've grown here at Salesforce. I like how you're working in how your linguistics has helped you with the management parts. Can you, can you think of some other ways that your linguistics training has added to your skill set that you're using on the daily basis? I think one of the things that is a strength of mine and I, I definitely used it as a linguist was kind of like pattern matching. You know, you're looking for patterns and things to derive a, you know, an analysis or derive a truth. A generalization. A generalization, right? And so I think that that is very applicable to a, a role like what I have and what I've been able to build here at Salesforce, or, you know, lots of different roles in the corporate world where there's a lot of data to analyze. There's different, you know, lots of different things happening and you need to figure out like how do I make sense of this chaos. And so I think that like that pattern matching and being able to analyze and create generalizations has been one of those skills. Cool. Thank you. Yeah. So now I assume you've got the challenge of worldwide leadership. This is a committed workforce. And so how have you, how have you approached that or have you met those challenges? Well, I mean, that's a great question. You know, being able to communicate in different ways to reach the global audience, whether it's written to communication or doing, you know, sessions like this with, with the teams in different parts of the world at different times of the day. Pre-pandemic, I would also travel to, to the different teams around the world on, you know, an occasional basis to create that, you know, that really, those relationships, which really help once you have those relationships, you can then do a, it's much easier to collaborate online. Great. Yeah. No, I, I remember the first time I was in an organization where we had to think about where it wasn't just the US time zones, it was everybody around the world. And there was a lot of tricky stuff about handing a project off across three time zones or five time zones. So that everybody could keep on working on stuff. I'm sure you encountered that too. Yeah. I mean, we usually try to keep projects in one time zone so that each, each team has their own project to work on and they're not like handing off from time zone to time zone. Yeah. Different approach. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I want to pull up a question from the chat, which you may have glanced at. And one of the participants asks, we're not in the dot com boom, but there still are lots of startups that seem like they're in linguistics adjacent spaces. Is it possible that we might encounter a startup that took a chance on me or is it, is it too tough now? That's a great question. And I always get, you know, a similar version of that question of like, well, you were so lucky that you were joined a company, you know, in 1999 at the dot com boom. But the reality is that, you know, there's always lots of startups that would take a chance on you. There's also big companies that would take a chance on you. And right now is a really hot job market. You know, we are, you know, you know, companies are growing because the economy is taking off again. And companies can literally just not find enough employees. So, you know, if you have your degree, your skills, and you're able to kind of translate that into like, what can you bring to the company and the role that you're applying for? There's definitely lots of opportunities out there. And I think if I could add on to that, I think linguistics is more relevant than ever. I think the time that I got out of linguistics was, was kind of the wrong time to get out of it. And I'll tell you, I'll tell you why, because I was, between my undergrad and my grad, I was, I actually had a job offer at a company in Japan to do voice recognition. They were doing voice recognition software. And at the time that was very new, right? And this was probably, you know, 92, 93. And I didn't recognize it as the opportunity it was. And then I was like, I don't really know if I want to go to Japan and work. So I went to grad school instead. Now, of course, you know, we all know that voice recognition and that type of AI, you know, machine translation, like that is, you know, a core part of, of all of the technologies and software that we use. So those companies need linguists and there's, there's lots of opportunities there in industry. You know, the other thing that took off right after I left my PhD program is they, the technologies around brain imaging became much more common and they were able to, you know, much do a lot more brain imaging around, you know, what's going on in your brain with language. So I just feel like the technology has advanced. The applications of linguistics are, are much broader than, than they were in those early 90s where I felt like my choice is academia or nothing, right? Right, right, right. And so it seems like all those things that we were imagining were going to come true. Many of them have come true where there's automatic speech recognition and we're getting the captions immediately here, which are relatively accurate, you know, I mean, given what we used to see, but domain agnostic captions can keep up and that's application of linguistics among other skills there. Absolutely. So it has a pandemic affected you, your staff, your company. And what, what are you changing? That's not going to be the same as before. And what do you think is going to go, you know, catch up and be the same as before. So pre pandemic. Yeah, I'll speak right now about the, you know, the technical communication team. Okay. We call it content experience because user experience is all about how software works, you know, the user interface, whereas the content that is in that software is as much part of the experience of you using it. So that's why we call it content experience, whether it's, you know, the learning journey that you might go through when you join a new soft, you know, piece of software that shows you how to use it or just the UI text that's in the software or even like the help, if you're using the help docs, that's all part of the content experience. So even before the pandemic, you know, we had a decent percentage of our team who worked from home, whether on a kind of permanent basis or on a, you know, occasional basis, because it's very much a job that you can do working from anywhere. And what we learned in the pandemic is that we can do all of the jobs in our technology and products team from anywhere. And, you know, some technology companies are asking their employees to come back to the office, kind of forcing them to come back to the office. Salesforce is taking a much more flexible approach. You know, we are focused on what works for the team and what works for the individual. So, you know, we're going to have people who are working 100% from home. We have people who will be kind of flexible. Maybe they come in a couple of days a week or a few days a month and the rest of the time they're working, you know, at home or wherever they happen to be. And then there's some people who love the office and, you know, if people want to come into the office full time, that's fine with us too. So we're really focused on creating that flexibility for employees and teams so that we can work well together and also have a great work-life balance. That sounds good. I wish more software companies had that attitude. I'm looking for any other questions that haven't come up in the chat, but if you want to ask a question, you can raise your hand or put it in the chat either way. What did I not ask you that you wanted to tell us about? You know, I think one of the things that was maybe something I wish I had known back then when I was a student and graduating, I thought I needed to have like the whole thing planned out, you know, like if I thought I knew that I thought I needed to know like I want to get to point A and then I needed to have all of the steps in between mapped out, but you don't. I mean, I think it's really more about like just take a first step, like pick a direction, you know, try something out. If your first job is not, you know, what you love, you can always try something else. You can, you know, use it, you know, let your career build. Don't go without any plan at all, but you can let it build as it happens. You don't have to have the whole thing planned out. Great advice. I love that one. And I think it's very fitting because it goes so much with the agile message too. Right. So if you're going to learn how to work in agile software in an organization that uses those methodologies, then you can't have your heart set on the particular product vision in every detail that you hear at first, so that you start with, because things are going to change. You know, you know, you know, you know, you know, other companies are going to come out with stuff that you have to compete with or companies are going to fall away and you can take on the areas that they used to have and so on, or you may come up in the process with a better way of doing something that's sort of adjacent to what you were working on. And so all those things can happen. And likewise with your own career. Good. I like it. Yeah. And I know that you're going to have Greg Bennett speaking. Is that right? Yep. Yeah. When is that coming up? His talk, I believe, is either Monday or Tuesday of next week. I have to look at the calendar. And so he's going to be on with one or two other people in that panel. And he's going to, I hope he's going to tell us a whole bunch of fun things that he's been doing because I know he posts a lot on LinkedIn when he talks about some of those great encounters with engineers. Yeah. So you and I spoke just at the very beginning before people came in about Salesforce and like other companies, it has a two career ladder. And so maybe you can talk a little bit about that because I'm not sure people are aware of that. Sure. And a lot of companies have what they call it, you know, a dual career ladder where one. One of the things that we call it is the individual contributor. So it's someone. Like Kate here, who is an individual, you know, doing the work. Designing the UI, writing, writing for the UI, being a product manager. All of those things. Individual contributor. Yep. And this is the management track. And this is, you know, folks who are managing other people, they're setting, you know, vision and strategy and goals for the teams. And, and doing people management. All the things that go along with that. And so the highest rank on the individual contributor ladder. And this is called, we have a distinguished engineer, which is our highest for engineer. And then for our content experience team, we call that a content architect. If you're in user experience, I believe they call it a user experience architect or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. And I of course went the management track, but you can move back and forth between them. You know, I know folks who have done that where they're like, they're a manager for a little while. And then they're like, Hey, I want to go back and be an individual contributor and, and, you know, do hands on work. And then they said, okay, I want to go back to being a manager. So. And so that way you partly you can tell what rank somebody is by their job title, but also you can tell by the scope of the projects that they're taking. So, you know, somebody who's more at the systems level is going to be a bigger scope and a higher job title. And, and you just have to practice getting, being able to interpret those because different companies call them slightly different things. Other questions from the audience. So here's my, until we get a question of, of ask us, do you think people who've been trained in the social sciences and the humanities approach management differently from people who've been trained in engineering and science. I, I, I. That's a great question. I, you know, I, I don't know the answer to that. The, I really don't know the answer. I don't either, but I thought I'd ask you, you know, you know, one thing I'll say is, is. As if, as I've been in my career longer. I think the degree you have is becomes less and less important than the experience you gain along the way. So, you know, I'll give you one example, the co-founder of Salesforce, you know, this massive software company. He's an English major. So, you know, I usually like to think of, of that, that degree. You know, if you want to go into the field that your degree is in, that's great. If you want to go into another field, you know, your degree is really about, you know, giving you the tools of, of how to learn how to do pattern matching, how to work with others and, and all of the skills that you need in the, in, in industry or wherever you're going to go. Good. Okay. And, okay. And I know there's also some, some chat here about our internships and, and, you know, Salesforce has summer internships for students and all, you know, major tech companies do as well. Right. And I don't know that much about like non-tech companies, but like summer internships for students is definitely, you know, many companies have programs around these and some of the roles, you know, that, you know, of course, if you're going to be a software engineering intern, we want a software, we want a computer science major for that. But like many of the other roles, whether it's user research or, you know, being on our localization team, content experience, some of those, you know, there's different, you know, people from different backgrounds who fill those types of internships because there's not always like a major in those things. Right. And so even if the internship doesn't mention linguistics or, or natural language, it still might be an appropriate internship for somebody with a linguistics background. Yeah. I like to say that out loud each time because I think that the repeating the message makes it feel more true, but it's always been true. Yeah. That's unfamiliar to our audience. So let me try this last one and say, what keeps you up at night? What keeps me up at night? I think making sure or making sure that my team has what it needs to succeed. My, my team is about 400 people. And so there's, there's people who do many different things. And I want them to be successful. Like if they're successful, I'm successful. So making sure that they have everything that they need to be productive, to have a great experience at work and, and then have some work life balance as well. So those, those things vary from week to week of what those things are, but that's kind of like the synopsis of it. Making sure my team is successful. That sounds great. Jyoti, you want to come off mute and ask your question directly. Thanks, Nancy. So Andrea, this is all just super interesting to hear. Thanks for being here. I wanted to ask about just in terms of these internships and things that seems to be some interest from other people in the chat as well. I'm about to graduate with a PhD. And you know, I'm in my 30s. I don't know if it's weird for somebody like me to apply for internships, which are, which you described as being for students. So I'm kind of trying to learn more about what it means to be in a sense an expert or maybe even over qualified versus, I don't know anything about these fields and I'd like to learn. Yeah, so what I will say is that the, at Salesforce anyway are few, we call it future force. Internships are for current students. So typically once you graduate, you're not eligible for the internships. You would apply as a, you know, to more of an entry level role. I don't know if other companies do it, do it differently. But what I will say is, we have at least in our content experience team, and it's probably true in other, you know, things like user experience as well. We have had a number of career changers. So, you know, you could maybe put yourself in that, in that category of, you know, folks who did one thing, and then maybe in their 30s or 40s, they said, Hey, I want to do something else. And have, you know, started at the entry level in, as a technical writer. And so that's, that's another way to think about it. That, you know, you can start at, you know, the entry level of a job, no matter what age you are, people, people do it all the time. You know, people these days are changing careers and you don't have to do one thing in your life. Right. Great advice. That's very helpful. We did put the link to the evaluation form in our chat as usual. And I want to be respectful of Andrea's time because I know she's got to go to her next meeting. So please join me in thanking her for coming to this session and supporting the linguistics career launch. Thank you for having me. Good luck to all of you. Whether you become linguists or do something else with your linguistic background because, you know, there's lots of opportunities out there. Thanks. Good. Good to hear from you. Yeah.