What hinders your career as a developer? – Mindset.

This episode is sponsored by Tonic.ai – where your data is modeled from your production data to help you tell an identical story in your testing environments.

[00:01 - 05:08] Opening Segment 

• Need to generate fake data that looks, acts, and behaves like production data for your test environments? Check out Tonic.ai!
  • Head over to https://www.tonic.ai/ and sign up today for a free two weeks trial sandbox!
• Dagna talks about experiencing a plateau in her career as a software engineer
• Realizing the lack of support networks
  • How this led her to set up her own coaching business

[05:09 - 11:26] How Cultural Upbringing Affects Work Performance

• What Dagna is doing to help immigrants like her fit into their American workplace
• Using the Hofstede model to understand the culture
• Cultural differences in the US and other countries
  • Individualism and collectivism
  • Long-term orientation and short-term orientation

[11:27 - 26:14] Engineering Mindset for Success

• Coaching clients on career advancement and finding fulfillment
• The importance of mindset
• Common limiting beliefs engineers have and overcoming them
  • Being your own advocate, your work does not speak for itself
  • Creating a safe space for feedback
• The feedback Dagna received from her superior and how it changed how she was writing code
• Knowing when to move on
• The state of the US and European job market

[26:15 - 29:54] Closing Segment

• Dagna’s advice: Don’t take code reviews and feedback personally
• Know more about the process Dagna uses to take her clients’ careers to the next level at https://www.themindfuldev.com/podcast
• Final words

Tweetable Quotes

“How you think is how you act.” - Dagna Bieda

“What you really have to do is market yourself. You have to talk about your achievements and accomplishments and not expect everybody in the company to just know what it is that you're doing.” - Dagna Bieda

“It's very important to understand how what you're doing fits into the business as a whole, the business that you're working for, and how to communicate about it.” - Dagna Bieda

Resources Mentioned

• https://www.tonic.ai/ - Sign up now for a two-week free trial!
• The Culture Map by Erin Meyer - https://erinmeyer.com/books/the-culture-map/
• Dagna’s Website

Connect with Dagna by following her on LinkedIn. Go to theMindfuldev.com and theMindfulDev.com/podcast to learn more about her coaching business.

Let’s Connect! You can connect with me, Dr.  McKayla on Instagram, Twitter and Youtube to look into engineering software, and learn from experienced developers and thought leaders from around the world about how they develop software!

LEAVE A REVIEW + help someone who wants to know more about the engineering software world. Your ratings and reviews help get the podcast in front of new listeners. 

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Transcription

[00:00:00] Dr. McKayla: Hello, and welcome to the Software Engineering Unlocked podcast. I'm your host, Dr. McKayla. And today I have the pleasure to talk to Dagna Bieda. She's a software engineer turned career coach for software engineers. She's been coding for over 10 years and has been a coach or has been coaching for the past two-plus years.

[00:00:24] Dr. McKayla: And today I will learn everything around how to get a job, how to be successful as a software engineer, and how to advance your career. But before I start, let me introduce you to an amazing startup that's sponsoring today's episode, Tonic.ai, the fake data company. So what does Tonic.ai do? I'm sure you know how complex and cumbersome it is to create quality test data.

[00:00:51] Dr. McKayla: It's a never-ending chore that eats into valuable engineering resources. Random data doesn't do it and production data is neither safe nor legal for developers to use. What if you could mimic your entire production database to create a realistic dataset with zero sensitive data? That sounds amazing, right? 

[00:01:10] Dr. McKayla: Tonic.ai does exactly that. With Tonic.ai, you can generate fake data that looks, acts, and behaves like production data because it's ma