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About Lukas Blakk
Website: https://lukasblakk.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukasblakk/
Credits
Opening music - Abstract Fashion Pop by QubeSounds
Closing music - Where the Light Is by lemonmusicstudio
Episode Transcript
[upbeat pop music plays]
Kai Stowers
Hi, I'm Kai Stowers, host of TNG Worklife, a podcast about the worklife experiences of people in the trans, nonbinary, and gender expansive communities. I hope you join our community by signing up at tngworklife.substack. com, which will deliver each episode, including the full transcript right to your inbox.
This week, I meet with Lucas Black, who shares how she moved from despair and poverty into a rich full life made possible by the financial stability she accessed by becoming a tech worker. We talk about her experiences as a butch woman, just trying to use the bathroom. and how to create more access for people with nontraditional backgrounds to get jobs in tech.
Let's get into it.
Hi Lukas. Welcome. I'm really glad to have you on the podcast today.
Lukas Blakk
Hello, Kai. It is nice to be here.
Kai Stowers
I have been thinking of how to introduce you because you have so many things that you do. I know you as a hockey player, someone who works in tech, a parent, an owner of Corgis. You do graphic novels, and I think this is where I'm gonna turn it over to you to fill out the rest of who you are.
Lukas Blakk
I also knit and dabble in woodworking, carpentry type stuff.
Kai Stowers
Oh right. You renovated a house.
Lukas Blakk
I really wish I could be a teacher instead of a tech worker.
I love to teach. I love any opportunity I have to do teaching of hands-on type stuff.
Kai Stowers
For your identities, for people who are listening, like, what are some of the identities that are important to you?
Lukas Blakk
Actually my nickname on some social media is, is Mannish of Center.
It's sort of my response to the fact that like, yeah, I'm mannish, I'm not a man though. I do use she her pronouns mostly because, uh, I like to break people's brains. I'm like, yeah, you have to look at this five foot eleven,
250 pound person with short hair named Lukas voice like this. And then you have to come up with she somewhere in your brain. You have to figure out that. You still have to say, she and that delights me.
[laughter]
Kai Stowers
Yeah.
Lukas Blakk
It's like the reverse of a microaggression. It's like trying to just push people
Kai Stowers
Right. Can you expand how you think of other human beings?
Lukas Blakk
yeah.
Kai Stowers
You've been on quite the journey from when you were a kid to where you are now. So can you tell me a bit about, how you grew up and your path towards where you are now?
Lukas Blakk
Well, I had the privilege of growing up with a lesbian feminist mother in the seventies, which is a fairly unique experience. I'm one of the only people I know at my age who has a queer parent that was gay from the beginning.
My mom came out when she was pregnant with me. I already had this, privilege of a mom who was non-traditional, and it was also the seventies. It was that whole like corduroy, overalls, girls making Lego type generation.
So I had a lot of room to not be feminine and to not be girly and to have that be okay. I did have a message of you can do anything, you can be anything. What I really wanted to be was a toy inventor. I love the movie Big. And the idea that that was a job you could have where you're just like, I think this would be fun.
Or an inventor in general. You know, like, honey, I shrunk the kids' style, like balls dropping, hamster wheels, turning, gadgets and stuff. Um, spoiler alert, I am not an inventor. At one point in high school I thought I should be a lawyer, just cause I like to argue.
And then I did a lot of theater and I wrote plays and directed plays and if anyone had told me that was actually a career you could have, maybe I would've pursued it, but it didn't come up. And I also loved, very early video games and computer games and taught myself some like basic on a computer we had in the house from these books I got from Scholastic.
And so I really liked computers. And again, no one ever said, oh, there's money in them hills, you know, around computers or games. Everyone always said it'll rot your brain, stuff like that. So as a kid I wandered around a bit, lost being like, so you say I can do anything, but what should I do?
I like so much stuff. I like drawing. I like writing, I like playing music. I like being the boss, and there was no clear path. And also At that time, no one had gone to university in my family, so career was not a word in our family.
My grandfather was a fourth grade educated farmer, uh, a later salesman. My grandmother had to drop out after eighth grade to take care of the family as the oldest. My mom had gone to a bit of community college before she got pregnant and dropped out of that and she drove taxi, she had a van with a friend and they did moving, you know, she did a lot of different stuff.
When I left home, she went back to school and became a social worker.
Later I realized like, oh, you went back to school. Your life got better. Maybe I should go back to school.
So then I ended up in technology. So anyway, right as I was turning 30, I was like, Hey, I always liked computers and I used to be able to program VCRs for people without having a manual. Like, I'm just kind of like a problem solver.
What if I tried to figure out what this career business is and turned my attention to software development.
Kai Stowers
Yeah, I like how VCRs were the, uh, light bulb moment for you.
Lukas Blakk
You know, they were really hard to program, like,
Kai Stowers
No shade.
No shade.
[laughter]
Lukas Blakk
They were these massive beasts and you had to hold several buttons and I used to not only figure out how to program VCRs with no internet, no manuals, no help. But I would also then write a manual of how to do it, like for my grandmother,
Kai Stowers
Can you tell me more about what you're doing now?
Lukas Blakk
Yeah, because I went back to school at 30, I went back to school with like a clear purpose. I need a freaking job. In my four years of software development in Toronto, I started engaging with open source communities like Mozilla, primarily through a teacher that had specifically just, about working in open source.
And that led to an internship and that led to a job with Mozilla. I ended up in the building release side of things and was working with just really great smart people. And did that for a couple years and then pivoted, almost completely around to do release management, which is like not the infrastructure side, it's the managing all the engineers and the quality checks and everything you need to be able to get software out the door. Having been a nanny and a line cook and a stage manager, like all of sort of weirdly different jobs had given me a good set of skills to be able to become a professional herder of software.
Kai Stowers
Yeah, and I wish this is something hiring managers understood more often that, you know, if you see something on a resume you don't understand, like ask some questions. Herding is something that comes in many...
Lukas Blakk
herding children, herding actors, herding food down the line. It's all very similar.
And like release just doesn't stop. We release our app weekly, so I'm always trying to build more automation and make it more efficient. If I wanted to find somebody to work in the world I work in, I wish I could make them do an escape room with me. Because that would tell me more about the kind of person they are. Are you able to grab a problem and stay with it until it's solved, is basically what I want to know. And that's a really hard interview question to figure out any other way other than being in a situation with someone and watching how they react to that situation.
They have to be someone who's like, I will ask anybody anything until this is unblocked, until this is moving forward and until this ultimately done,
Kai Stowers
Yeah. And how big of a team are you leading?
Lukas Blakk
We have like five to six.
Kai Stowers
And what do you enjoy most about your job right now?
Lukas Blakk
The thing that has always made me happiest at work is when someone expresses, that used to be hard and now it's not as hard, or now it's not an issue. I really, really love trying to build out a system that people can rely on. So the people we interact the most closely with is like engineers and quality team, like quality engineers.
Anything that helps those two sort of customers, that's the stuff I like the most. And also when we move faster.
Kai Stowers
Yeah.
How do you dream of being known in the world?
Lukas Blakk
Yes. Well, I would love to write a book on mobile release. I would love to share some best practices. They're not teaching this in school, but when you go into the real world, like software has to get to people or it doesn't matter, right? And I could be wrong, but I think I'm operating at a cadence and a consistency and a level of scale that is in probably like the top 10 apps in the world, which is really fun cuz we get to be really innovative and creative.
It's not like saving the world, but I do think that the systems we're developing and the practices we're developing, should be more widely known and understood and would help people.
Then on the sort of like artistic side of things, I am working towards producing a graphic memoir, so I would love to have a book that's a graphic, like at least one.
I also have had on my bucket list for many years, to make a feature film. I used to make a lot of short films, like little experimental super eight films with friends.
I want to be a good parent, so I want my children to think positively about our time together and our lives together through all the different stages of the development.
Among friends and community, I want to be known as someone who left things better than they were when I found them. who brings people together creates experiences and memories like good ones.
I'm on the board at the Frameline Film Festival, which is the Queer Film Festival in San Francisco.
I'm finally sticking my head back out after a pretty significant five year stint as parenting being my main activity. I'm just coming back into being in queer community arts community and getting to feel like I'm helping or trying to do something bigger than I could do alone.
Kai Stowers
Yeah. And as I hear you talk about all these different areas of your life with so much drive and passion, I'm wondering what contributes to that drive you have?
Lukas Blakk
I mean, I don't want this to sound morbid, but like, I didn't think I was gonna be here. For most of my teen years I pretty much wanted to kill myself. For my twenties, I thought my life would end because I did something stupid. You know? I just was not very careful in some ways and then I think that lingers. When I was 25 getting a driver's license renewed, having it say it would expire when I was 30. And that was a moment when I was like, oh, like maybe I'll still be here at 30, you know, and then when I got to 30, I could see 40. And now at 40 I can see 80.
Like it's exponential, but it's still, I think, has given me a sort of, slightly manic drive for like, how much can I pack into a day?
Cuz what if I'm not here tomorrow? I don't really wanna waste any time. And I don't like inefficiency. So that serves me well at work, not liking inefficiency and being a bit like a beaver of like, oh, I better dam this up, you know, and fix these things. And it keeps me really busy and active and engaged.
And then outside of work, I just love learning to do new things. Planning adventures, home projects, trying to, like, do something I've never done before. So I don't get better at any one thing. I just do good enough at a wide variety of things.
I was like, I watched a YouTube video, then I turned it into this thing over here. Yeah, it's good enough, you know, but I'm just always wanting to push myself to do something once?
And then teaching it. So this is also a thing that motivates me is if I've learned how to do something, I'm gonna wanna teach people what I learned, even if I'm not perfect at it. Do you wanna know how to do it? Here are 10 people or whoever will listen. Or here's a post on Facebook, or whatever it is.
So like that cycle motivates me of just being like, oh, I found this thing out. Other people might wanna know this, and where can I blast that out? Or communicate that or share that.
Kai Stowers
Yeah, I'm just kind of delighted by that cycle and not taking life for granted. Like there's the fear side and there's that excitement and joy side, and does that feel accurate?
Lukas Blakk
Yes. And there's also as I've gotten more sort of financial and career privileges and stability and whatever, I'm just like, oh, if guys know how to do stock trading, why can't I figure out how to?
So I dabble a little in these things. I don't know what the heck I'm doing, so I'm gonna try some little things and see what works. And also, this goes back to programming VCRs, just being willing to push buttons and try things and see happens. Not being afraid to do that and like, I mean, what is the worst thing that's gonna happen? When I do that, it usually pays off.
Kai Stowers
Yeah. I like it. Try something. Put yourself out there.
See what happens.
Lukas Blakk
Yeah.
That's like a life mantra right there.
Kai Stowers
All right. I'm gonna switch focus a little bit. Can you tell me about some of your experiences just being out in the world and needing to use restrooms? This is something that all of us need to use a restroom when we leave our houses, right.
Lukas Blakk
Let's talk about bathrooms by myself and now bathrooms with a child, cuz that is a whole other universe that I now have unlocked. As an individual in the world prior I assume that your audience is familiar with the looks, the checking the door, low-key stress, these are not dangerous situations or anything like that.
Kai Stowers
And the audience is mixed. There's gonna be some people who are like, absolutely, I've been there. And there's gonna be other people who are listening to this podcast because they wanna learn something. And this is probably brand new to them.
Lukas Blakk
Oh, here's a good one. My very first tech conference I went to when I first got into tech as a late bloomer, as I mentioned, was the 2009 Python Conference Atlanta. And at that conference, it actually took me a minute to realize like, oh, like everyone's a dude. And you wanna know one of the fun benefits of that is there was nobody in the women's washroom
Kai Stowers
Same. Same for scientific conferences that I used to go to when I was a chemist. I was like, oh yeah,
before I transitioned, no line in the women's room.
Lukas Blakk
Right. I practically wanted to move into the bathrooms, the conference center bathrooms. These are massive, clean, beautiful bathrooms. You know what my anxiety dreams are? Busted ass, Greek Coliseum collapsing bathrooms that are basically holes in the floor I have not been violently attacked in a bathroom. That does not mean I don't spend every interaction telling myself all the worst things that could possibly happen.
Feeling that anxiety, hiding in the stall, watching through the crack for people to leave so I can come out and wash my hands, not washing my hands sometimes so I can hustle the heck outta there. You
Being an individual needing to use in a bathroom looking like I do and having people not want to let me. I also have IBS.
I get a heck of a lot of urgent bathroom needs. So then I have a a kid. You can take a kid and hold him in bathroom, and people are more likely to let you use the bathroom.
So I started by taking him into as much as possible gender neutral bathrooms so we could both be in the same stall. Lots of space for us and we can both take care of our needs. When I have had to take him until recently, I've mostly taken him into women's washrooms cuz that's like societally acceptable. That women can bring their children into women's washrooms.
However, as we've said, I don't look like a woman. So I look like a man bringing their small child into a women's washroom. But having a kid with you probably softens some of the looks. Not all, but some. And nobody has ever said anything to me when he's been with me, oh, like you're in the wrong washroom type of stuff.
However, one time he was with me at REI in Berkeley. This is California. This is the bubble. Right? The woman ahead of us has just walked into the women's washroom. I walk in with him behind her. She gives me the look, so I know now she's concerned that I'm in the bathroom, but she goes into a stall to do her thing.
I take him to the wheelchair accessible stall. So there's more space for two people cuz I'm a big person and then I've got this kid. He was still little. He was like four. And sometimes he likes to fiddle with the lock. I just said, please don't do that. I'm not ready yet. And he goes, why do you need privacy for your penis?
Kai Stowers
no…
Oh no.
Lukas Blakk
And like, we've talked about this before. I don't have a penis, which is between you and me, but I also had to say that really loud because I wanted her to hear it.
Kai Stowers
Right.
I mean, how many parents can relate to this story of their kid just blurting out something that makes them want the earth to swallow them up?
Lukas Blakk
Yeah, yeah. It had those extra layers of just like, oh my God, what's gonna happen when we come out of the stall? Now, interestingly, I go with him into men's restrooms. Partly cuz I don't feel safe with him being in there by himself. He's only eight. I have flipped this into a privilege and superpower that I have, which is that I can go into any goddamn bathroom that I want to.
Kai Stowers
Yes. Everybody needs to be able to use a bathroom and people know which bathroom they belong in We don't need to have these huge conversations
I can remember before I transitioned, the only time I ever saw a man in a changing room. He walked in there, it was super early gym, like six in the morning.
Nobody's awake at that time. He's on his phone. And like guys, they don't make eye contact when they're in those shared spaces. And so he got pretty far in before he looked up. He panicked. He literally ran out of there. I was laughing so hard.
All the other women were laughing so hard.
Lukas Blakk
I have always wondered, how many times have you seen a man walk into a woman's restroom? Like men know where women's restrooms are. If we're worried about safety, they know where to find us. It's got a sign on the door.
Anybody you see walking into a woman's washroom that isn't having the reaction you just described very likely knows they need to be there. Now every time I go into a bathroom, I basically try to have a practice version of I know which bathroom I use ready in my head, just in case anybody says anything.
Kai Stowers
You once sent an email to all the women at your company explaining why you used the women's bathroom. Can you tell me why that email was important to send?
Lukas Blakk
Yeah, I had just started at Pinterest, and Pinterest was like, awesome. It was actually more women in engineering, I think, than any other company at that time. They were at 15% women in engineering which was much better. There were more women in general and also it was a bigger office than I had been used to. I went into the women's washroom one day. And as I was walking in, a woman opened her stall, stepped out, saw me, went and like went back in her stall and slammed the door. And, I was mortified that I had scared her.
It was also very like, shaming for me. I didn't know her. I never met her. So I went in my stall and hid there until she had left. And then I went back to my desk and I just, wrote this email to the women at alias and I said, my name is Lukas. I just started here. I'm a butch woman.
Sometimes people think I'm a man. I prefer to use gender neutral bathrooms when they're available and when they aren't I use the women's washroom. I don't wanna scare anybody. And it was so well received, like so many women wrote back and were like, thanks for sharing this. Hi, welcome, et cetera, et cetera. I would say at that time that email might have reached 400 people, right? And then our company like doubled in size, so it eventually it was like, I couldn't just keep sending that email.
But also things at Pinterest changed. We were opening a new building and our current office took one of the women's washrooms and turned it into a gender neutral washroom. They extended the stall doors and walls, floor to ceiling I actually had a guy at Pinterest say to me, I'm so glad they did that because, the men's washroom, there's actually the super reflective stall wall and a gap through it that if you're in the stall, you can see what's happening at the urinal. He felt uncomfortable using the men's bathroom he used the gender neutral washroom immediately because of the floor ceiling sealed stalls.
Kai Stowers
And when we improve things for trans non-binary, gender expansive people, we improve things for everyone, right? Who doesn't want a better bathroom design that doesn't have those giant gaps? I once had a little kid when I was using the bathroom, like crawl under the stall to see if I was supposed to be there.
I was just like, I don't want kids showing up in the stall with me. I don't think parents want their kids showing up in the stall with a stranger.
Were you involved in the process of advocating for the mixed gender restrooms or how did they come about?
Lukas Blakk
The building was already under construction and I for the first time ever just sort of got informed. I often was in a responsible position in many areas.
You know, starting the first gay group at Mozilla or like trying to start opportunities for non-traditional educational paths to come into technology, things like that. For this bathroom thing, someone just came to me and said, Hey, here's the floor plan for the new building.
Just wanna show you where the gender neutral washrooms are gonna be.
Kai Stowers
Yeah.
Lukas Blakk
Like I didn't have to do anything. I mean, maybe they could have offered me a ribbon cutting or something. They didn't do that, but um, yeah.
Kai Stowers
And it's, it's so nice to have people who are doing these things for you cuz your main job is not in human resources, you're not in diversity, equity, inclusion. You're not really looking at that people side of things. And so it must be so nice that the things you need are happening because those leaders have done their research and understand what's on the forefront of making this company more inclusive for everyone.
Lukas Blakk
Yeah the folks that they worked with really seemed to be advanced at that time.
Kai Stowers
All right. Well, what are some of the things that you've seen in tech that are working well?
Lukas Blakk
I don't want to be a cynic. I want to try to think of something that I genuinely think is working. But I think that the existence of ERGs and the acceptance of those as being necessary for workplace culture, that is probably working well to the degree that as a new hire somewhere you can find your people right at the outset of starting a new job.
Most companies will have those employee resource groups for like the main pillars of identities.
So at Snap we have top level groups for women, for queer and allies, for veterans. Parents now is a group, Snap Noir for Black employees. And we have a Snap Shalom for Jewish employees.
When you start at a company cuz maybe you're only gonna work with two or three people immediately. Maybe those two or three people are just a random assortment of dudes.
You could find yourself some people to talk to, to have lunch with, maybe go to an event. I say it works because I think hopefully it gives you a launching point into your company outside of your day-to-day job.
I've been to conferences where queer and trans kids just coming outta college. People with multiple intersections of identities are sometimes made to choose.
If you go to Grace Hopper, it's like large female, tech conference. And maybe this isn't true anymore, but at least when I used to go, they would have this day where they had lunches and they would be like, well, here's the Black lunch. Here's the scholarship student lunch, here's the queer lunch. I was literally walking along with somebody I just met who was a Black queer scholarship student.
She was like, well, which lunch am I supposed to go to? They're all happening at the same time. On the same day. Right. So, SNAP is doing ERG format in a way that leads to a lot of cross collaboration. So you can sign up for each of those groups to find sort of your core pillars of what you might need for your identities, and those will intersect in various events and opportunities to connect throughout the year.
Kai Stowers
That's such a good practice on encouraging those kind of cross relationships. None of us is one identity walking around. We are all a set of different identities and experiences and there's places where we are part of a community that experiences a lot of obstacles and there's places where we have privilege that hopefully we're using to be allies.
What are some of the things you'd like to see more of in tech?
Lukas Blakk
I still wanna see more improvement in how to get folks into tech work from non-traditional backgrounds. When I was at Pinterest, I had the pleasure of working alongside someone who drafted up an apprentice program that brought in folks that had four year degree, I was part of the committee that helped think up the framework for it. And then also I got to manage one of the people in that program and transition him into full-time employment at the company. So that first round was very successful. We set ourselves up for success intentionally by saying, oh, you have to have a four year degree.
I think that there has to be more room for people who don't have a four year degree. But that aside, bringing in people who have a lot of different life experiences. I have many friends who come to me who see that I went from being like broke ass queer kitchen worker who put a knife through their hand and couldn't work for eight eight weeks and didn't have any sort of career or safety net to being somebody who now has an incredible amount of stability and financial success.
Which then trickles into other parts of success in being able to, I don't know, have therapy and my teeth are fixed and I was able to get top surgery and all these different things. Basically as soon as I started making money, I was like, what are all the things I can get that can't be taken away from me if this goes away tomorrow? Right. To get into that point and then to go beyond that to being like, oh, maybe I'd like to have a fancy bike someday. You know? That's the real privilege right there, but like more people want to have that opportunity to pivot into something and maybe try to stabilize themselves financially.
And there's this huge wall when it comes to getting work in tech. There has to be more ways to get people in the door and I think apprenticeships are the best way right now because I think if you can give someone the benefit of the doubt and let them do the job, you might find you really enjoy working with them.
You might find they bring stuff to the job that you wouldn't even have thought of. You might find unconventional ways to shake up certain parts of the work that goes into running a tech company.
Kai Stowers
Right. And tech products, they're not designed solely for people with a four year degree.
Lukas Blakk
Oh, they're very much not. So you end up with a bunch of people with four year degrees who know how to code, try to figure out, well, how do we get to our next million, billion users or whatever. And it's like, well, what if more diverse groups of people worked here? And so diversity has come to me in those pillars I was talking about earlier, but there is more to diversity than that.
There's also like just a diversity of life experience. And also like a diversity of, for lack of a better word, desperation. Like desperation will push people to work harder. And you know, what that turns into once desperation isn't desperate anymore is loyalty. Loyalty is not very highly regarded or coveted in tech.
Tech is very much a, like, people will work at one big FANG or whatever the latest acronym is.
Kai Stowers
And that's Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google.
Lukas Blakk
I don't know, but there's always some sort of like kerfluffle of alphabet letters of who the top companies to work for are.
And if you go into chat rooms where people from those companies talk to each other, they're always like, I want to go get more money. I want to get leveled up. There's this rat race. And I don't think that's good for companies. I really don't. What if you had somebody who came in who learned how to do the job in your company, therefore learned how to do things your way, which you probably would like, right? And also can have opinions and passion and move the needle on stuff and improvise and innovating, whatever, but the loyalty you will get from somebody who gets that chance.
Could give you five more years of somebody who starts to have historical knowledge within your organization who starts to have domain expertise within your organization that you don't get from these, like basically it's like the equivalent of flipping a house, engineers coming and going,
Kai Stowers
Employee turnover is so expensive, and people always underestimate those costs.
Lukas Blakk
Yeah. And you know, I was at Mozilla for eight years, two years as an intern, and then working as a contractor in my last year of school. And then I worked for them for six years and I went really deep. I knew a lot about Mozilla. I think I was very beneficial to that community.
I've been at Snapchat now over five years. That makes me feel like a senior citizen, but I'm just now starting to feel like, oh, I have cultural capital, I have room within the organization to have more influence. I can do bigger things now.
And those bigger things will benefit you.
Kai Stowers
If you were talking to somebody who is from a non-traditional background, what are some of the characteristics or capacities that you could point out to them?
If you have these things, you could do well in tech.
Lukas Blakk
So that first thing I told you about before, if you know how to grab a problem and say stuck to it like dirt on a shirt until it is resolved, that is just an amazing skill to have. It doesn't mean you know how to fix it. You wanna know the best way of getting something fixed is to do it wrong and then have someone who knows how to do it come in and be like, that's not how you do it. And then they fix it. Haha, you win.
To work in tech, you have to be willing to spend a whole bunch of time being like, argle bargle, this doesn't work. What? And then all of a sudden it works and you're like, Woohoo.
And then you go back for another week or two or two months into like argle bargle you know? So like that ability to like just try stuff. To fail over and over again, but understand why you failed, communicate why you failed to other people and to yourself. Take something that you wanna do differently next time. I guess it's like interested in learning.
You also kind of need to like technology. I've definitely had people approach me be like, well, how do I get what you have? But I also hate computers, I mean, I kind of don't know what to tell you then, because I was always really curious about them, what they could do and how they worked.
If there's something that you think is interesting, and then also I do recommend going into a program of some kind. There's a bunch of predatory coding schools, and I don't necessarily recommend those. The only things I would recommend guarantee some kind of paid internship, because if you can get a paid internship in a company, you put your foot in the door and now you are representing you, it's not your resume anymore.
And that's where you can really make that flip into that first job and that first job leads to that second job and that kind of thing. If people like working with you, they're not gonna care as much about whether you have a BA or not, right? Bring all the skills that you have from whatever you've done and show how they mapped to what you could do in a new place.
Man, all of this is hard to say because I feel like hiring process is really, really gatekeepy. Which is why I recommend internships or anything that gets you in the door so you can blow people out of the water.
Kai Stowers
Yeah. All right. Well, what is one last thought you'd like to leave our listeners with?
Lukas Blakk
I guess the one thing to maybe leave people with is, if you get in somewhere, you can start to build seniority and tenure, you can have influence and impact that's bigger than one person. I recommend meeting and connecting with as many people outside of engineering, for example, which is where I am usually sitting. Make connections, make wide connections.
[optimistic music plays]
Kai Stowers
Yeah, I love that recommendation cuz there are formal positions of authority that come with a title and there are informal kinds of authority and influence. And that comes with having a big network.
Well, thank you so much. It's been great talking to you.
Lukas Blakk
It has been great to talk to you. I really appreciate this time and the work you're doing to spread these kinds of stories.
Kai Stowers
Thank you so much for listening to Season One, Episode Five of TNG Worklife, an independent podcast produced by Kai Stowers LLC. This podcast is always free, and if you enjoyed it, you can support the work by subscribing at tngworklife.subtack.com for as little as $8 a month. Your generous support goes towards production costs and paying subscribers receive additional content as well as discounts on workshops and trainings that I lead. If you would like to learn more about my coaching and consulting work, you can contact me through my website, kai stowers.com.
Finally, I wish that each of you find grounding, connection, and abundance in your lives.
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