 spotlight. So for those of you who are interested in technical careers it's a chance for us to see what is it to be a software engineer or what does it take what do I need to do to become a product manager and we have awesome companies like Onisby, Carousel being represented here. I'd love to invite Amber on the stage and she'll be leading our first session with product managers. So please welcome them. Hello everyone so this is a career spotlight which means that we'll give an overview for each of you that well what's the product manager it looks like and also there are some common questions you may have. So we have Meredith from SC Powers and also yeah also we have Hui from Carousel. So the first question I think that maybe just you can introduce yourself like what you are doing now and what's your role in the company? Sure and I think a lot of people be kind of curious why would SP so SP stands for Singapore Power if you don't know you know we're the ones that provide the lights and the water and the gas here. So you'd be kind of curious why would they be hiring digital product managers. The company is going through a phase of digital transformation right now so my role is to help set up the product practice on the business side and to figure out how we can engage with our customers a little bit better with our brand. So currently I'm a product manager at Carousel so the team that I'm working with we help new users who just joined Carousel become first-time successful sellers because eventually the goal of Carousel which is a mobile marketplace is to help everyone to start selling the things that they have at home left unused so basically that's currently what I do. Because I know your YouTube's background needs a lot of feedback from IT background so I can't know why you choose product manager this role because people think that actually product manager is actually should be from IT background so yeah I well I'm a graduate of sociology and geography I actually wanted to be a teacher badly and then somehow I stumbled into the corporate world and found myself managing projects and pilot rollouts for a payment company called American Express and but I realized that not being able to code or at least I appreciate code helps me give a different light to product management and I think product managers all are generalists that you have to be good to manage you know stakeholders the business you need to know how to bring a product to market you need to know how to manage the product development cycle so you not necessarily need to code but just the process of bringing a product from inception to production and going to market is an important part of the whole product managers role. So for myself I graduated from NUS business school and I don't think getting to being a product manager is kind of like a linear journey so I've been with Carousel for about three plus years and I started out doing customer support so when I started doing customer support you know people write in to complain and things so I kind of understood the users pain points and through that I also worked with the Carousel team then which was quite small about less than 10 people and seeing them work really hard on solving problems for our users really made me really inspired and then after that I went to Silicon Valley for a year to kind of do a bit of like user research and also marketing internship there and it was then I really got like kind of into product and technology and I really saw what other companies were doing there with with technology to solve problems and just coming back I just started to put myself in a product role here at Carousel so I don't think you necessarily have to be technical it's a bonus but just being technically curious so for example like if your team is saying that they need like one week to do this thing you don't necessarily have to know how they are going to do it but as long as you ask questions why can we why are we doing it like this can we consider other alternatives just being curious about how it works would really help yourself become a better product manager yeah and I'll actually add on to that the part on solving problems you need to have a passion to find the solution and to be really curious of how to solve a problem so being customer focused would be a major part of being a product manager as well I found that there are many different paths for you to so the first one is that Meredith is come go to the company as a product related role while Hui is different is coming from like community manager so what's the difference between these two paths the thing which way is better I all I can't say that all roads lead to product managers because I'm sure the engineers in the room also part of the solution but we're all kind of solving the same thing for me project management and delivery it's also part of solving the problem right and I imagine customer support as well yeah I wouldn't say there's a better role but personally I do prefer product management because you get to kind of play a part in making that decision to help roll out solutions that helps solve users problems so that's the part where I feel it's actually more exciting to be in so there's no one prescribed path it's where we found our passions and then it ended up with product so in this case actually you may encourage people to look for the product role directly instead of maybe roll me into the other like to know the products first well I'm sure there a lot of students in the room so you know usually you won't know what you're calling is or you don't know what path is the right path and you would have to test and learn and actually that is a big part of product as well you try something you find what you like about it you learn from it and you evolve in the next role so it's gonna be a ongoing journey and then I mean for me personally it was doing quite a long time of product management I did my own business for a little while and then I went into marketing and then I came back to product because I realized that that is what I wanted to do and that is after quite a few years as well so yeah there is no prescribed I think no prescribed path you try you see what you like about it you tweak and then you move on try again and then you decide you don't have to decide right now I believe a lot of people out there they want to be for the manager so can you just summarize like three members or three trees that you think you want to recruit a product manager you want them to have the treats the characteristics maybe not three words but firstly you must have a passion to solve user problems that's very important to help champion the users needs because ultimately they are the ones using your product so you really have to go out there and understand them well yeah I mean other things like managing stakeholder expectations is also a challenge but if you're up for it is actually quite fun so there's it three plus three six no okay so for me it would be maybe a mindset that would be analytical and data-centric so a lot of decisions that we make as a product manager has to be data informed whether is it data coming from a user study or whether is it data coming from an analytics or results that you've seen so having that mindset is really important because I mean we would prioritize features throughout gut but it is always supported with data so I think that's one and I think what is really hard to find is kind of the persistence to want to get something completed and done because a product journey can be very long in fact when you launch a product that's not the end of the journey that's actually just the beginning you have to grow it you have to engage and you have to see how you want to define kind of fine-tune it and pivot it so maybe persistence is one of them to get things done and then communication skills I think the soft skills for product managers actually really important because you have to work with a big group or you know a small group of engineers and you have to work with them on a daily basis and then you have to work with stakeholders and they all come with very different temperament business thoughts so having a skill set for good communication and managing stakeholder yeah that would be a key as well I think it's really good to pay in yeah so in this case actually we will open questions the ground because the time is really tight so we only have maybe two questions so any of you want to raise questions you can approach the mic maybe only two questions so if you have questions for them if you want to pursue maybe PN or you are curious about this role yeah I have a question actually thank you for sharing about product management I know in some companies they work really closely with engineers have you ever had that in your experience did you ever feel that maybe having a technical fluency might have helped you communicate with a developer team better or any of that by any chance in your experiences so like just now I mentioned on technical knowledge does help but it's not really necessary but I have to say when I first started out in the beginning it was a bit challenging not to understand certain technical limitations but over time you really get better by asking questions and I think I was very fortunate to have my team the team of engineers that I work with they really helped me to understand what they were doing so I would ask questions like why are we using react why are we using this that and they would really explain to me why so that really helped me so it's not that you it's not that it won't be an advantage but then this is something that you would get better over time with yeah I think the technical I like the way you put it technical fluency comes with the experience I having that knowledge which is help us maybe get a better estimate or understand why some things implemented one way or the other but and since we have to work with the engineers on a very close basis I think that us that helps us appreciate their work as well because you know there is actually a lot of complexities implementing code but it's not necessary and for us at least for myself it was more of managing the stakeholders that was a lot of the job yeah any more questions no we really run out of time yeah okay oh yeah that from the coding community how do you see the challenge or how you see the transformation in the last few years that is it easy to find the talent did people locally or is there a shortage because globally it is a ward of talent today for product or for coding from coding perspective from the technical because you are doing digitization so you're looking for technical people but do you find it challenging to find the quality people locally I think in the last two years it was really interesting there has been a boom of talent and the schools have been kind of funding into that as well so from an internship standpoint we see a lot of applicants and and then when we expand a view of hiring coders we don't just hire from Singapore we hire from the region as well and there's tons of talent around the region for the last two years but on the product side that's a whole different thing and it's very interesting to see that the product talent is still quite little I would say and I think the product manager pool of people we keep seeing the same people shuffling around different companies one hypothesis I had was because a lot of product management functions are all centralized in Silicon Valley and very little real product management is that starts from Asia so you know we hope to grow and I hope to grow the product management skill set in our companies and wherever we go to yeah maybe we need to start another group that's for product managers because I know Karasaw is a startup very successful startup so maybe different from SP powers your opinions different from SP powers Jerry is the same so we also hiring engineers and also product managers it's been challenging to find talent so basically I think what other alternatives we could have is that you can find people interested in product management within the team and also groom them to become successful product managers so it's also one of the ways to get talent so sorry we're really out of time so if you have questions you can ask them after I'm in downstage yeah thank you so much this is a very quick panel thank you so next one we'll have our data science panel so we have Emily from Ministry of Defense of Singapore and also Shreya from Uber and Lucy from Uber it's like a kind of Uber panel okay so in this case would you just brief introduce yourself like what you're doing now yeah hi my name is Anna Lynn I work with NINF or Ministry of Defense so I'm a data scientist in the psychology department so means I work with a lot of HR data the questions like I answer include like what makes a good soldier what are the risks of suicide and what are the traits of a good commander I also deal with questions of retention so what makes a person want to stay in the organization are there signs if a person wants to leave other questions I deal with are also like our foreign relations so for example you could analyze data such as weapons trade and then you can see the the health of the relationship between bilateral bilateral relationships from weapons trade data besides that I also had a stand with Disney research and there I also analyze the profiles of movie fans based on their personalities so I think one one good thing about being a data scientist is that you can apply the same skills on different types of data right and I think that keeps the job exciting because you're always working on new problems hi everyone I'm Shreya so I'm from NTU from a computer engineering background after graduation I worked in consulting for two years and I've been at Uber for the last year and a half and at Uber I've worked on a lot of different sort of functional domains so as Aniline mentioned if you're an analyst you actually get a chance to work with different kind of functions like marketing fraud so most recently I've been working with Uber eats so looking at restaurant analytics so which restaurants are doing well on the platform how do we retain the ones that are doing well how do we action on the ones that are potentially like low quality and things like that hi all so I'm a Rishi I'm also an analyst at Uber very similar to Shreya I studied here at NTU Electrical and Electronics Engineer and very shortly into my course I discovered that I was not really inclined to an engineering career path as such I worked as a consultant in IBM for a couple of years where I didn't really do analytics as such but I knew that I really liked data so I started including analytics just by myself into all my projects whether it was like project management or process improvement or like research I just started like building up my skills myself and then there was a timely opening at Uber and I have also been at Uber for about a year and a half being solving problems around the business but more specifically I do safety and fraud analytics which basically means solving problems such as how do we reduce accidents how do we remove bad drivers or bad riders from the platform as well as like how do we make our riders feel more safe and yeah all sorts of questions to make sure that everybody using the platform feels safe and comfortable. I know that actually data analytics is very interesting because I was denied as well so I know that by analyzing the data you can find something that other people take from granted but which it may be not the right idea and not the right opinion could you just share us share with us one interesting finding that people think it's true but it's not I mean through analyzing your data or any interesting project you think you are doing now. Is there any finding? I'm just thinking what I can share but I think you brought up a very interesting point is that people always have preconceptions about certain their own hypothesis and what is true and very often sometimes the data brings up something that is unexpected so our job as data scientists is actually to give the hard evidence to those assumptions that people make and actually there are quite a lot of times that people's assumptions are right and we just give the supporting evidence that yeah you are right just go ahead with this policy other times when people when we have to prove people wrong that's where the uphill battle starts it's like where do you get your data from are you sure your techniques are right and all that so I think it's a lot about communication and visualization as well so you realize that as a data scientist it's not about only crunching numbers it's also about communicating your conclusions to the your audiences so especially for policymakers when you're trying when the future of guys or your brothers or fathers you know that all the men in Singapore go through national service and our policy really affects more than half the country so whatever policy we roll up we want to make sure that is right but sometimes especially when you're working in a male-dominated environment some of the men we have egos is it this is something I've believed in for 10 years until this young girl telling me that oh no my data shows that you're wrong so how do you communicate that conclusion in a respectful yet in a thought in an assertive way yet respectful that helps them say face give them a backdoor to come down so okay actually you may see this way I understand but then you know these are repercussions if you go along if you follow all your own hypotheses are the country's they have to face later on so it's our job to make sure that we let them see two sides of the story yeah so I can't come up with a specific example as well but like so what we do at Uber mostly is when we roll something out if it's a campaign offers a product feature the analysts will always ensure that like there's an experiment that runs behind it and there's data that proves that what we're doing actually makes sense for the users so that's where we come in as the gatekeepers and like we keep the business lines honest in terms of ensuring that data is being tracked and data is correct when things are being reported I think well similar to what they said but one thing that we also do at Uber is that since we're a global company a lot of our things that work in one region may not work in another region like you'll see some problems specific to say the US or India but you try the same kind of product feature in say this region and it won't work out that well so I think a lot of the work we do is like testing those things on our region and seeing like what does this make sense or does this not rather than like all the engineers put in the efforts and they roll it out here and it's not really a useful feature so I'm not really allowed to say a lot about I can't really disclose a lot about it but I think it's like very specific to context and it's not like a open like it's not like a one-size-fits-all hypothesis I think that our audience had to be the analysts to figure out themselves so actually data is so hot nowadays especially for our workshops in the afternoon the data already sold out so in this case I I think the audience may want to know what skills is required to be data scientists because I know I know all of you come from different backgrounds but not CS background so people think that CS is so hot in data well statistics may it's also hot but they also want to know what's a real skill set then industries need and how can they become data analysts yeah so you're right I'm actually a psychology major I major in psychology icons and I stumbled upon stats by accident because I needed to do my thesis they don't analyze my data so I took a stats course and I found that it was really interesting and I was quite fortunate to have a very good machine learning lecturer which caught me interested in the whole field so I would say actually the most important skill is curiosity to when you see something that's interesting say hey you could cluster movie fans that's interesting how do I do that so you can start going online nowadays everything's on stack overflow just Google and then people have codes written up for you already and even provide the sample data set for you to try so as long as you have curiosity I don't think they are yeah it's very easy for you to access this field and as you mentioned like that you organize workshops and they're really popular so there's just so many resources for you nowadays and I'm also part of this group called data science SG that invites data scientists to share their work so if you're wondering about what kind of challenges you may face as a data scientist on the job these people will share like real time their experiences or these are the problems I face for coding these are the problems that I face while trying to communicate my findings etc so in short be curious go online and just Google and go for more meetups so the thing with analytics is that it's a really broad spectrum so analytics can be as simple as descriptive so where you're just telling people what the data tells you and then it goes on to being more predictive like where you tell give specific recommendations based on the data so there are different technical skills that you need across the spectrum but if you're starting out essentially you don't actually need a lot of technical skills like Anilin mentioned it's more about curiosity and asking the right kind of questions from the data yeah basically yeah there's no I don't think there's like one or two golden parts leading it up to being a good data analyst I think like it's a very generic skill set and just what you broadly need is like being comfortable with data knowing how to break down a big ambiguous problem into small digestible problems having a genuine love and understanding of data and numbers and yeah we live in a age where everything is very available online in terms of like courses and books and articles that you can all learn from and if you're super super passionate there's a lot of publicly available data that you can just like use and experiment and start solving solving problems with that already. So is there any hard skills that you want to recommend because some of the languages are Python and also one of my friends she is still in school they have two set of courses one is for neural network and the other one is for big data so she can only choose one so she spent which one she really she needs to choose so any hard skills recommendation or where to start maybe start from Excel start from R or stuff from Pycel. Yeah I think starting from Excel and R is pretty good because those are easier to learn and there's plenty of resources available to teach you that and yeah I myself have never used like neural networks a lot yet so I can't comment on that but I believe R and Excel are good starting point. Just one thing to add on as well like SQL is obviously like the basic data extraction scripting language so I think that's a must-have skill as well yeah I agree and maybe just to add on one more point you should try to focus on the problem you're trying to solve rather than the technique you are using because once you have an interesting problem you'll be very motivated to find whatever technique you need to solve the problem so and different problems require different techniques sometimes Python is better sometimes R is better sometimes you need neural network sometimes Excel will do so my advice is just find a problem that you're interested in and Google. Yes for people who are not from IT background or not from IT related major jobs I have to tell you that the only way I mean the first way the IT people to solve problem is to Google so Google is our best friend yeah so we will open the question to the ground I think there will be a lot of questions from you so can I know we I don't have questions you can raise up your hand so we can pass them back to you. This is a topic near and dear to my heart because I work in this industry but I am going to do a completely shameless plug for something that's free for and almost everyone in this room qualifies for entry because of your genetic makeup I and another company in Singapore we periodically run day-long workshops called data girls so if you and they're specifically designed at people sort of not the people on the panel because you know what you're talking about they're specifically designed for people who have women who have curiosity about well this analytic stuff seems really hot how but I don't know anything about it so if you look up the website data driven dot sg and you will periodically see we run day-long workshops we just run to two weeks ago and you we start from the assumption that you know nothing so we explain what data is we explain what SQL is we explain and then at the end of it you're actually analyzing data and making a mini presentation to a pretend management group so if you're interested have a look and they're completely free yeah I know the questions there's so many hands girl they are like I thanks thank you so much for I'm sharing with all your experiences here so for someone who's interested in an entry-level position at data science what would you recommend should she just start applying for jobs because you said something about like having soft skills but most of the jobs that are online requires technical skills so maybe just a couple like suggestions and where she could start where she could start no not Google but rather a lot of times when I went for interviews I've been asked for my portfolio so projects I've done if you are looking at entry level most likely you wouldn't have any work experience but if let's say I'm the hiring manager and I want to search for someone who's curious because in this field everything moves so fast you know you may be a perfect expert today but if you slack for one year and then you'll be behind already so to me curiosity is very important and to find that I could look at your portfolio and see hey did this person do anything outside of school any other projects do you have a github account so github is like where you keep your code and what kind of problems you try to solve in your own free time so if you are in school right now this is something you can do in a free time say okay let's try solving this problem write a simple code and maybe post it on your blog and do some reflections what kind of challenges you face and how do you resolve them so from blocks and your github account hiring managers can tell a lot about what kind of person you are and how you persevere through these challenges how you solve them yeah and also it depends on your background as well so if you come from a more technical background even if you don't have the specific requirements if you can demonstrate basic programming ability even in other languages and if you can demonstrate critical thinking ability then maybe the hiring manager can overlook specific technical requirements yeah I think we mentioned a lot of like since we mentioned soft skills in general like problem-solving and being comfortable with numbers and data when you're applying for a job it makes sense like in your resume to kind of highlight how you've done that in your previous experiences or like any projects you've done at school or any extra curriculars that you've done at school and as for the technical part I wasn't technical when I joined but I found this website called data camp it's really very useful and has a ton of courses that you can do interactively learn and Python and all sorts of statistical modeling techniques so you can definitely do that in your free time to buff up your technical skills I think they can also join the cargo accommodation right yeah I can also write on your profile also there are a lot of hacks on also data girls so next week we will have an US MIT hack song so you can always join that yeah any last questions sorry we run the time yeah you risk hands first sorry to make sure that you're to make sure that you're very objective when you put a data and not pulling data to back up something you already suspect is true so the question is how do you pull objective data and not end up with a subjective cell data that confirms your existing assumptions right okay how do I make sure that I pull data that's not just backing up my own claims that's a good question so if your data I mean there are there are two things you need for analysis right the data and the technique if your data is lousy no matter how good your technique is your congratulations your conclusions may not be reliable instead of specific context you are thinking about when you ask this question okay okay okay so basically behavioral issues okay so okay for this I can say in that we do a lot of surveys and this is a prime example of how the way you ask certain certain questions can elicit certain responses from your participants so you can if things like pick two vocations you like versus pick at least two or yeah so subtle phasings will affect responses and it is actually a whole new area of work that we go into to try to refine our phasers to make sure that we get the objective responses that we need so at uber when we're analyzing something typically we're not the party who did the activity so for example if you're analyzing a campaign we're not the ones who executed the campaign so we don't really have a bias or like a motive to sort of tweak the data in such a way where it looks good so having an independent analytics function is very important in that sense where it becomes a gatekeeper to different functions in the company so that's one and I think the second thing is what we usually do also is if you're reporting something for example if x goes up y goes up as well what we usually do is really indicate what is the data like what is the x and the y like what is the underlying data said did we exclude some people did we exclude certain timeframes why did we exclude these people why did we exclude these timeframes that's very important as well because if you make certain exclusions like you said it can sort of tweak the message and it's very important to indicate if you have to eat it in certain ways I think in addition to that it's also useful to like benchmark for example if we're like running a campaign and we're seeing like did it have a good impact on the business it's also useful to benchmark it to other campaigns and see like did it do better like was the uplift even more than another campaign is it more than a normal day like benchmark don't see just the number by itself but compare it to a baseline so that also helps as well so I guess it's about replication benchmarking is the same like any academic study right no one study is perfect but if you find the same result multiple times then it's probably right and no set of data is perfectly objective there always be limitations so it's just about identifying what the flaws are and then try to replicate it with maybe a different data set the next time I think overall it's just being thorough and like making sure there's no like confounding variable that could have like affected it in a different way and like testing it for statistical significance so just making sure that your result is as objective as possible sorry this is the last question we can ask so you can communicate with them on the stage as well thank you so much for thank you so our last career spotlight will be as a group sub-engineer and developer group so we have three girls here oh kasha is from Microsoft and Kitab is from honey spay and also move to it from ThoughtWorks so it just the same the same first question what do you do could you just briefly introduced hey everyone it's a Saturday afternoon and I know we're holding you back from lunch but before I tell you what I do I just want to ask how many of you have actually gone on our website and you know say click that small button out there which says chat with us or you know okay and how many of you think that's really a human chatting with you well I'll just let out a secret to you it's in most cases I'm not saying all but in most cases it's actually a bot that's replying to you you say hey and it says hey how may I help you and then you start the dialogue with you it's mostly a bot these days and that's the part of artificial intelligence so why I'm saying that is because I do a thing like that I build bots and then I come here and talk to you people about it so that's my role as a tech evangelist where I go out and evangelize Microsoft's technology to audiences hi everyone I don't have very specific projects to share but I work as a software engineer at Honest Pee and that basically involves working on the problems that the business faces from time to time so some of the things that I've worked on would be like payment solution making sure that our payments go out correctly to the customers managing refunds etc and then also a lot of things related to your fundamentally a logistics company that's doing on-demand logistics in various spaces agnostic of the verticals it could be groceries food etc and so a lot of the play that we have is in the logistics space and because everything if you know when we started to rating with the process some of the things are manual but slowly we find ways to automate it and use technology to make things a lot more optimized and that's where my role comes in and so depending on you know what's going on I mean I get certain projects that I that would typically support the logistics business that we have hi I'm Muthu I work for ThoughtWorks so in ThoughtWorks we help our clients all their business problems by leveraging our tech skills in my current project I do something similar to Utkasha so we're developing a business intelligence application for our clients so what it is like is you can ask it a question like say your insurance agent you want to know in which month you can roll out new policies when are the clients most likely to pick up those so there are two parts to it one is the natural language processing identifying the intent of the question the user is asking and once you identify the intent going to the data and there's some data analytics involved as well to answer to give the user the right answer to the question so that's what I'm doing right now I know that all of you actually from IT background so which is very different from previous two groups so but a lot of people after they graduate they still want to switch to you know the sub engineer or developer you know have you met any people like that before in your career because they can this can be a good model I do I do math some before but I'm not sure about you actually I didn't have a computer science degree when I joined ThoughtWorks I think all you need is interest and curiosity like the previous panels mentioned if you have interest you can learn anything and I recently did a HPR article about how diverse teams are more smarter so I mean if you all learn the same thing or go through the same curriculum then we approach the problem in the same way which means we would not identify certain pitfalls in our solution or maybe we may not be that creative and a way to win what we come up with because we are all trying to think in the same way but we come from a diverse background then we get we all approach the problems in different ways so as a group we will come up with a much better solution than as individuals so I think people from all background should take up software development as a career. To add on to Mutu's point I have met people who have come from non-technical backgrounds and typically what differentiates I mean eventually you have to come in with a mentality that it's just a computer that's built by humans and so it really cannot be smarter than you or could even be doing things that are not you know that don't follow logic in a way right so when you see certain weird messages you know removing that intimidation from your minds and just just trying to logically break down a problem helps but actually what I'd like to mention is that sometimes when I graduated as a computer science graduate one of the things that I felt was that I needed to explore more problems that around me before I apply technical skills to it so I took a slightly a slightly non-conventional route where I actually went into consulting to look at a consulting field which was not technical consulting but it was purely social innovation and business strategy consulting because I felt like some of the problems that interested me most were social innovation related and I knew that technology has a lot of it can actually be applied in very very useful ways in these problems but to understand these problems and to really empathize with them I had to go to that route and then when I joined Honest B I found myself just a lot more aware a lot more curious in terms of asking questions or sometimes even asking my project managers or product managers why are we implementing this feature or like how does this help our customers and I feel like that helps me become a better engineer as well because I rarely find occasions where I haven't done enough research on a particular feature that I'm working that eventually you know after two three weeks of working on it we realized that we should have never built that feature you know so and that happens and that can be frustrating for many engineers and I'm not I feel like that background of coming from a of taking a slight switch and a detour also helps open your eyes so if you are from a technical background you know just be curious about other things around you and then that could surely benefit you even in your engineering careers true I mean with all the motivation and the skills that you need how exactly do you go about switching into a career in say software engineering there are a lot of ways you can do that one yes you will have to you know get hang of some programming languages but the idea is just understand what the motivation is as Ankita was also saying understand where your code fits in the bigger picture and then ramping up on programming languages is not really very difficult you know you have a lot of these courses available online so that's one and a lot of big tech companies actually host events coding challenges where you can go about you know showing showcasing your product or showcasing your code and if at all you stand chance there because there are a lot of techies who come there a lot of these companies who come there and you can actually go about networking with them and exploring possibilities to start up a career in software engineering so I don't think not having a formal education in software engineering should be a barrier it's about the opportunities you want to explore and trust me they are limitless but even so I think majority people still think it's hard because when many people from non-artic backgrounds non-artic related backgrounds the company will always ask why do I have to recruit you because you're from non-artic background so in this case how can they show to the company that they're actually capable to do the job I think it's mostly about the perception in the first place where you think that it's difficult I think programming and software engineering is as easy or as difficult as any other job it's about the intent to learn and trust me there's a huge online community which is always there to help you out you just post a simple question and you do get replies so first thing learning is not a challenge second when you asked why to why you should be recruited yes it's always a good idea to have something as a proof of what you're capable of so you know the github story that you were talking about you build your code you put it up there show the impact that it can have because it's always important to tie back the business value or the impact that your code can have and if it all you can demonstrate that very well I think that shouldn't really be a problem yeah I completely agree with a kasha that a large part of it a large part of it is actually perception because it isn't it isn't difficult but just looking at some of those terminal windows that some of you have looked at and you know looking at that feed in and then code in green and red color makes you think like whoa these guys are just you know I don't know what they're doing but actually when you get into it it's I'm sure Amber has also seen this in the you know in the boot camps that actually it's not really that hard so one is getting into the perception but to add to it initiative really counts so when when you're asked why should we hire you talk about your projects even if they're not technical and then you know show how you have tried to apply like maybe or maybe it's a non-technical project and then you apply it a really small you know a small piece in that which was actually technical like maybe you built a form to collect survey results right and you build the form yourself and building a form is actually a really simple exercise so some of these things can show that you are a fast learner and you're curious so those things would typically convince a lot of employers and then I guess one of the challenges that happens is when you actually get that job and you're in the company and you've come from a non-technical background you see engineers who have experience and this is where basically sometimes it could mean putting in that extra effort and those extra hours but there are always people who like to mentor like if you ask anybody who who has been working in the field and you ask them for the help there they would rarely tell you that they just cannot help so showing certain initiative interest in their work asking them questions and maybe trying to help them out with some of the small pieces that they're doing that can also significantly boost your you know confidence as soon as you join a new company and then from there on I think there's no looking back I agree with what both of them said so two points right programming is hard and recruiters look for computer science degrees when they recruit people for software engineering role I think both of them are just myths programming is not at all hard and recruiters don't look at your degree like they always see what you're capable of whether you have a computer science degree or whether you don't so you're all considered equals irrespective of what degree you have or even if you don't have a degree we have people really senior people at ThoughtWorks who never went to university so and as for me how did I cope with a software engineering job without computer science background I think when ThoughtWorks hired me what they looked for was potential and interest and I had an awesome team my first team was just awesome they were all mentors to me I learned everything from them so one was yes you have to be open to learning and there is that few extra hours that you might have to put in initially so that you have a bigger learning curve than people who come with a computer science background because they always start somewhere you have to reach that gap and then reach there and then it's all the same so and I think in Singapore which with all of these communities like TechLadies and CodingGirls and all of this I think you all have the support system and like online you have numerous courses free courses like Coursera courses all of them are good so I think if you have interest self teaching yourself or even looking for mentors shouldn't be hard yes very good points if you want to learn coding just come to CodingGirls and also TechLadies maybe yeah so in this case we'll open the question to the ground do you have any questions for them thank you for sharing your opinions and views on being an engineer I just have got a question because now you are and UX are booming so just just want to know your perspective on what's the difference between the UX designer and being a software engineer because you guys are pretty much related UX designer is one who designs the user journey like they empathize with the user they do user interviews they find out what the users really want and they suggest these are the features that we could do to product owners and between UX designers and product owners they have a vision for how the product should look like developers are the one who actually make that make that product or implement that idea so the developers have still still have to be convinced of that idea still have to believe in that product that the product owner and the UX designer has come up with but the responsibility of coming up with what how the product should look like is more with UX designer having said that that's completely true UX designers have a vision for the product in mind but in my experience at Honest be one of our UX designers is a computer science graduate and he's highly he's he chose not to go into programming but he's very very good at CSS for example and just you know more of the visual elements and the way that helps when programmers and UX designers work together is that you can actually discuss what's feasible and what's not because oftentimes the vision that you have for your website and certain you know you may want to have a drop down here and you may want to have a slider here sometimes technically those things can be maybe hard to implement and maybe maybe you can run into things like SEO challenges because of your design you had a certain vision but it makes your website very difficult for search engine optimization and that's where you know when when UX designers and engineers work together or if a UX designer has a technical background already not saying that that's a requirement or that's a barrier to being a UX designer that's when you can actually come up with a with a vision which is also it makes sense from an engineering point of view as well and it in general is a much much better design because it's come out of collaboration between the two I think they've pretty much covered it all so in a short line I think the UX designer comes up with the idea and the programmer just adds life to the idea that's pretty much about it one last question only have one minute left no questions okay okay hello as I know there's like a lot of programming language like Java Python Ruby all those so usually because we all know it evolves very fast in this industry so do you guys or as a software engineer do you prefer to like go in depth like deep in one or two verticals or do you prefer to you know go in a varieties of programming language or technical skills or which one is better that's an interesting question I think technology moves fast and it's very important to keep yourself upskilled so say Java and C++ and things like that they've got a pretty similar underlying architecture or similar underlying structure so it's not very difficult to really ramp up on the language as for me I particularly like Java a lot so I advocate for Java but it's not really necessary to know one or or like a lot of languages even if you're well-versed with say two of them it's very easy to switch to others yeah one of the things that I personally believe in is a software engineer is a software engineer and not a Java engineer or a Ruby engineer for example because many of the skills are very transferable the way you learn a language is very very similar you know you learn the syntax you and you pretty much Google like you know you learn Ruby and you're like oh I know how to do this in Java I know I know how functions work in Java how does it work in Ruby and then you know you find an equivalent like it's literally like learning Chinese and English and then you know translating something in Chinese to English and saying it outright and that's how programming languages are as well I personally enjoy it just as a you know everyone likes learning and you know sometimes you just want to challenge yourself with those extra things on the side and that's where I like looking at new languages and what is out there and you know building some side projects in a new language so that's just for my own personal interest and sometimes it comes in use as well professionally but I think it's just out of your own interest but pick up any language whatever it is and start small that's what I would advise I agree with Ankita you're a software engineer you're not a Java engineer or a Ruby engineer ultimately the fundamentals are the same all the languages are the same like they will have different principles based on whether you go for object-oriented language or a functional programming language but if you know one each it should be very easy to switch and same as her like I like exploring new languages I'm polyglot and it works I mean I'm it keeps me motivated as well when I explore a new language it's relatively unknown so that keeps me excited for a while but it also helps in my job that I get to apply whatever I've learned so it it works both ways and yeah once you know one language well it is really simple to learn new languages thank you so much so that's our thank you