Yesterday I spoke with some Singaporean students at UCLA about my career.

Adrianna Tan

I talked about how I felt absolutely no pressure to study a specific thing. That even though I have a political science degree, no one ever said I can’t work in tech. But I also acknowledged that was a different time. The professionalization, and barriers to entry to tech now are different, especially for minorities of any kind.

Adrianna Tan

I said that this is the first point in my career where I feel like what I studied and what I do comes together. I moonlight in the AI ethics research field because I want to document the issues in the space. And the impact of AI on society. My mentor in this has not only 1, but like 3 degrees in political science. She also ran machine learning teams at large orgs.

The students were surprised by this.

Megan Lynch (she/her)

@skinnylatte This is something I have heard about when it comes to dyslexics - many comedians, actors, other performers who are doing "dream jobs" talk about getting there because it became clear early that school was not going to work out for them and a lot of doors would be closed.

So while that sucks, it also "freed" them up to pursue what most people see as riskier career choices. And their parents usually gave them no guff.

Adrianna Tan

Someone asked me how technical one had to be. I said it’s like cooking for yourself vs cooking professionally vs owning a restaurant.

I like food: I know how to make amazing food. When I go to restaurants coz I know food so well, I know when it’s stellar and when it isn’t. I may not cook at the same level. Knowing how to code and knowing how things work is a bit like that.

I’m not making the sausage but I know how it’s made. Etc.

Adrianna Tan

I also cautioned that many ‘minorities’: women or queer people or racial minorities are going to be held to a higher ‘technical’ standard because people will write us off if you’re not actively creating the narrative and reminding them that you know things.

So it does help to portray yourself as ‘technical’ because you don’t want to lose opportunities just to ‘perception’.

Adrianna Tan

I spoke about the turning point in my career. That up till 2014ish I was generally optimistic about the tech industry ‘changing the world’. I spent that year in Myanmar and seeing the Meta-accelerated genocide really made me question it all.

Ever since then I’ve been working on the periphery of tech, interested in some spaces but really avoiding anything with a direct link to consumer mental health and violence. That’s given me a wider berth to be more critical, and also to build a diff career

Adrianna Tan

@meganL yes!

Adrianna Tan

I think what we’ll see is that tech has changed so completely. It doesn’t have that ‘suspend your values for a bit and maybe make FU money’ promise anymore. Maybe in the next bubble. It kind of now feels as icky as big finance but with a less clear moral place (at least finance is very clear on where they stand). I feel bad feeling so pessimistic about the industry, but I think being able to talk about my less conventional tech career helped them see some possibilities.

Adrianna Tan

Sometimes I worry people get confused when I talk about how my work in product management has spanned: making it easier to get vaccines, building things that can break AI models and see where they really mess up (especially on bias), and now, tech for like, fish, at the aquarium!

But I think there’s a clear line across all of that to me: computers AND society, never separately. It’s taken me 15 years to be able to do things like this. I hope they’ll find their thing too.

Adrianna Tan

Early on in my career I was the person that super early stage startups went to to kick off their biz in my part of the world. Swimming in chaos and ambiguity and making it work was my superpower.

Now that I’m no longer wedded to that worldview, I’ve started doing that for myself.

I’ve found I truly excel at jobs that I get to create for myself, that isn’t a jobby-job. That’s where I’m happiest. It’s a pain to get the stars to align, but it’s magic when it works (like now).

Dave Plummer :TheCDN4: :mfv:

@skinnylatte Thank you for this thread.

I also have a PoliSci degree and a long career in tech. When someone asks about that, I tell them that if I had studied CompSci when I was an undergraduate, I would have been using punch cards, and all of the specifics of what I learned would have been useless a few years later. As a Social Sciences student, I learned how to research, communicate, problem solve, collaborate and assess needs. Those skills remain relevant decades later.

Adrianna Tan

I feel icky to be talking about jobs so much but I actually spent a whole half year looking for one, and now I’ve got two, that I really really love.

The whole experience has reminded me that only when I lean hard into sticking to my core values, do jobs make sense for me. But also, doing that costs money and time. I could just about barely afford it this time around; and noticing the state of the world right now, I’m hoping those will be a raft for me and my family in these weird times.

Adrianna Tan

@Plumbert good points! so many of the greats in the field do have liberal arts education (or no formal education), but I wonder if that’s now getting harder to do because everything is so formal now

Adrianna Tan

This is the fundamental problem for many #ActuallyAutistic people. How to work in a world where so much feels fraught and full of injustice? When so many workplaces feel designed for people who are not us?

For me I had to leave my country and move 8000 miles and do a set of things in precisely the right order. Can’t say I knew what I was doing at any point. I learned to ask for help. That helped me most. I feel stable now, but not having clear paths was often scary.

Alexandra Magin 🏳️‍🌈

@skinnylatte I wish I'd understood sooner in life that the default paths weren't going to work for me, it all started to make more sense after I understood that