 I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE. On the ground at Google for the sixth annual Cloud Now Top Women in Cloud award event. And we're very excited to be joined by one of the award winners, Neha Jane, engineering manager at LinkedIn. Welcome to theCUBE. Hi, thank you, Lisa. And second of all, congratulations on the award. We'll talk about that in a second. But one of the things that I found very inspiring when I was doing some research about you is how you describe yourself on LinkedIn. A lot of us use LinkedIn, of course. I love that you said that you love to work on technology that empowers users and uplifts the society. What a beautiful statement. Tell me a little bit more about what you mean about that. So growing up, I always wanted to be in a space where I was doing something for the community. A little bit about myself is I'm an only child and my father passed away when I was barely a year old. So my mom, who's also disabled, raised me literally single-handedly and we had a lot of help on the way. So the thing that always kept me going and inspired is if I could do it, then anyone can and I have to make that happen. And that is an obligation or a responsibility that I have toward the world. So that's basically what I did. Initially, I wanted to become a doctor and help the patients get the best of their health, but I couldn't deal with blood. That's kind of a key. That's a good decision. Yeah, so I was really interested in math as a child. So I was like, yeah, let's try this engineering thing. It also sounds pretty fun. And then that's how I started in the engineering field and initially I joined a company directly from college but the work didn't inspire me as much. And then I found out about Slideshare. It was a company in the user-generated space, a user-generated content space and they had a female CEO and I was like, oh my God, this is just perfect and I have to get there. So I joined Slideshare and six months later it got acquired by LinkedIn, like interesting tone of events. And then now at LinkedIn, we are in the process of creating economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce and that's a mission I can live for. That's something that inspires me every single day and gets me up in the morning, gets me to work where we are trying to get the right talent matched with the right job. Get the company is the right hire and that's a very inspiring work to do. As a, and I would say inspiring female and technology, what are some of the things that once you finished your education, you said your first job, you realized this isn't quite what I want but you had the drive, it sounds like, probably innately for you that I want something else. You kind of knew what you were looking for or maybe you knew, I know when I'll get there. Yeah, yeah, you could say that. Like it's something that what I was doing was interesting work but in terms of impact it wasn't very clear. So I'm sort of a person who's driven more by results, by metrics or something like that. There should be something tangible that's coming out of it that I can measure. Right, yeah. So then I was like, at that time internet was taking off and it was all very, people were all over the place and there were so many things getting shared and then Facebook came around and then there was Arab Spring and so many other things that were happening and people were taking ownership of their own lives and their own values. So I thought that something in the internet space would be an interesting place to be where you could make the change and empower people, empower your users. So, and I wasn't willing to move out of India at that point. So it's like, let's just join SlideShare. I'd been using SlideShare when I was in college doing researches and working for Google Summer of Code. So then I saw that they had a banner that they were hiring and I'm like, okay, yeah, let's just interview for them and here you are. Yeah, so in the last couple of minutes here I want to talk about the top women in cloud award that you're being honored with tonight and also kind of something that I thought was really, really honest that you wrote on LinkedIn was your experience with imposter syndrome, which I've had for many years and didn't even know what it was until I read about it. And I think that's so, it's such a strong message. So knowing that you've had that but also seeing how accomplished you are, what does this cloud now top women in cloud award mean to you? That's a very good question. That's something that I had been asking myself as well when I first got nominated for it. So my friend who's the co-founder of Hall Burton School, he nominated me for the award. I got the email and I was very excited that, okay, this is really interesting. Like, how could I become this person? And then I read the application form, there were five questions and I'm like, hmm, I'm not good enough. I'll not clarify, I'll not be selected and it would just, like, I'll just spend a lot of time filling out this application form. It will all be futile. So I thought that let's just not do it. But then Silva, he just didn't nominate me for the award. He pushed me to apply for, to fill out the application. Because he knew how accomplished you were. And I'm so grateful to him for that. He started a Google doc where he copied all the questions and he started listing all the things that I had done. That's fantastic, Neha. Yeah, like he is the kind of mentor or the kind of friend, the kind of force that you, I guess if all the females and all the people had, the world would be a different place. So that's the kind of inspiration, the kind of support that you want from people. Absolutely. Yeah, and then I was talking to my husband and my husband was like, he's a very logical person. He wouldn't give you direct prescriptions that, okay, no, you should do it, you should do that or this or that. He would ask you questions and then make you decide what you want to do. But then those questions will steer you in the direction, which is very clever of him and very few people have the kind of smartness to do that. Where you don't even realize that you're being pushed into some of the direction. Right, but it sounds like he helped you think through and you realized, I have accomplished a lot. Yeah. I am deserving of this award and here you are being honored tonight. Yeah, so it's like, maybe that's not what I thought. But I thought is that there are things and I should probably apply for it and not give up because of the result. So that's something that I've also learned in my life. Like my mom always tells me that don't bind yourself to the result. Like just give your best shot. Like that's all which is in your control, so just do that. And that's basically what my husband also ended up pointing out to me so then I was like, okay, fine, I'll apply. And it was basically like just three days before the application deadline. So I filled out the application form and I sent it out to the LinkedIn's Com Steam for review. My manager reviewed the entire work related stuff and I'm so grateful that they were able to do the review process in time so that I could apply right before the deadline. I don't know what the Cloud Now award will mean for me and I hope that we are able to drive real change in the tech field and bring more women and more diversity and inclusion and belonging in the community. So today, when surf was the keynote speaker and he was saying that when he joined the tech industry, there were 50% women and there were women who were programming. And like if you've seen the movie Hidden Figures, like there were women who figured out how to program very long time ago. Yeah, a very long time ago. And like we've had people like Grace Hopper and like all these other women leaders and now like just 20 years later, you would think the situation would get better but it has actually gotten worse. So why is it like the thing that falls on us as a responsibility is to figure out like why would we change direction for the worse and why like people have gotten smarter, not lesser intelligent, right? So like why would women not opt into computer science and like give up? There is something that we are not doing right. And I think a lot of companies have started asking the right question. Like in LinkedIn, we have the diversity inclusion and belonging initiative and we try to make these differences like in real time. Like when I joined LinkedIn for, when I moved to the United States, I couldn't recognize people because of the variety of facial structures and I had a lot of difficulty. I had always grown up seeing Indian faces and I could easily tell that okay, you are from Calcutta or you're from Bangalore and I could tell it from their faces but that wasn't something here and I would always confuse people and that bothered me a lot. But at LinkedIn, like all the things that we had all the initiatives that we had, the culture and the values, they helped me feel belonged and I've like not a single day has passed where I don't feel that am I not the right person for this job? You're making a contribution. Yeah. Well congratulations, Nia on the award. Thank you so much for stopping by and I think you're quite inspirational. Thank you so much. And we want to thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin on the ground with theCUBE at Google. Thanks for watching.