Painting My Way To The Top: An Artist's Journey To Tech Leadership With Rachelle Mohtadi
Art and engineering might seem like opposite ends of the spectrum, but they share a surprising connection. In this episode, Asmita Puri interviews Rachelle Mohtadi, who discusses her unconventional career path from an art history major to a successful VP of Engineering for a real estate technology startup. Rachelle shares the challenges she faced as a woman in the tech industry, from self-teaching HTML and CSS to navigating her first engineering job after a tech boot camp. Tune in to uncover the fascinating journey of blending creativity with technology, and be inspired to explore your unique career path. Don’t miss out—listen now!
Rachelle's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachmoht
Here are some of the resources shared by Rachelle:
Python (40 - 60 hours for the core chapters but can take +100 hours if you're thorough)
Depending on your learning style, it can be helpful to read the exercises first, take notes on vocabulary that is unfamiliar to you, and then go back and read the chapter looking for definitions. Working from the digital version of How to Think Like a Computer Scientist*, the following are the most important chapters.
How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: https://runestone.academy/ns/books/published/thinkcspy/index.html
Simple Python Data
Strings
Lists
Selection
Python Turtle Graphics
Functions
HTML and CSS
Codecademy's web track is good; you can scroll down and filter by Free, and it keeps track of your progress.
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Painting My Way To The Top: An Artist's Journey To Tech Leadership With Rachelle Mohtadi
Transition From Art To Engineering
As always, I am thrilled to have you join us for this episode. Our guest, Rachelle Mohtadi has a journey that's truly one of a kind. From a degree in Painting and Art History to leading engineering teams in the tech industry, Rachelle's story is a testament to the power of passion and determination. When Rachelle encountered challenges and limitations in pursuing an art career, she began working in retail and taught herself HTML and CSS.
This led to her landing a job as a graphic designer. Rachelle's passion for learning drove her to master PhD and then become a lead developer. However, her love for logic prompted her to consider returning to school for computer science. Ultimately, she opted to attend a coding bootcamp and her determination propelled her to the role of VP of Engineering. That's no joke.
In our conversation, Rachelle emphasizes the creativity involved in coding and the critical role that diverse perspectives play in problem-solving and innovation. She shares her experiences as a woman navigating the tech industry, highlighting the importance of empathy, open-mindedness, and collaboration in engineering and management. If you are considering a tech bootcamp or a career in technology without a formal computer science degree, Rachelle's advice is priceless.
She underscores the importance of diverse perspectives in collaboration in engineering. A key takeaway from our conversation. I hope this insight can inspire your future decisions in this industry. Grab a cup of coffee, and a snack, get comfortable, and let's dive into this fascinating conversation with Rachelle Mohtadi. I think you're going to enjoy it.
Rachelle, welcome to the show.
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Balancing Creativity And Logic In Engineering
I am someone who once took art lessons growing up for years and years but was told clearly and explicitly that this is not what you are doing for a living. This is just a hobby, even though I wanted to pursue art and all those things, but your journey is fascinating to me. Can you share with the readers how you found your way from a degree in Painting and Art History to the head of engineering at Balance?
It was a long journey. I majored in Painting and Art History at the University of Florida and it was because that's the only real thing that I knew I enjoyed. I thought it could sustain a happy life moving forward but obviously, there are some pitfalls with that type of career. I think the goal is to become a curator at a museum and those positions are very few and far between.
I ended up in a bunch of retail jobs outside of college once I left there. I knew I enjoyed the creative stuff. I started dabbling in teaching myself HTML and CSS. It was when blogs started becoming a big thing so I wanted to have a creative outlet in that way. I started taking classes on what was Lynda.com. I don't think that exists in its Sprint form these days and online courses to teach myself how to create a website, etc.
I worked at a bike shop for a couple of years and then I ended up getting hired as a graphic designer for a small web studio in Oakland. I enjoyed that and then the lead developer quit a week in and the woman who owned the company approached me and asked if she could give me a month if I could learn how to do the job. It was a PHP shop. I went back to Lynda.com. I learned everything I could have about PHP. It was a WordPress shop so there's some help there. There's a big community and I fell in love with the logic of PHP. I know there are a lot of haters out there but I fell in love with it.
It was my first foray into anything that wasn't front end. It was very cool to me. I did that. I became the lead developer there and I worked there for about 2 to 2.5 years. It was fun. Our main client was historical romance authors who are very random, but the woman who wrote the Bridgerton Series was our biggest client. That was way back in the day though but no, that was my intro into the world of computer programming because that was never presented to me as an option when I was growing up in high school, all of that. I had no idea of the possibilities out there for computer science, engineering, and all of that.
I started looking into going back to school. I was living in Berkeley at the time. I looked at UC, Berkeley and they laughed because my degree was in painting. There was no Math or Science class. There were no general electives that could come and I would have to enter as a freshman basically. In my Googling for what else can I do, that's when I found a bootcamp.
I ended up enrolling in Hackbright Academy, which still exists now. Back in the day, their main goal was to change the ratio of women to men in tech. That was their tagline. Change the ratio. It was right when diversity, equity, and inclusion were gaining traction in the tech world. It was a three-month program. I quit my job. It was full-time in the city. I commuted to San Francisco every day, Monday through Friday. I had to take out a loan to do it. It was a very vague life decision but that's when I got my first engineering job out of a speed-dating round of interviews that Hackbright set up with a bunch of tech companies in the Bay area.
You had like five minutes to pitch yourself to a company. They decide if they want to move forward with an onsite interview. I think I got six interviews out of that feed dating round and I got my first engineering job out of that whole experience. It was great. I worked for six and a half years out of that. I worked my way up from being a QA engineer. I switched to CloudOps because cloud was the hot new word on the street back then and I was like, “I don't know what that is, but I want to do it.”
I got into that and I just loved talking to people. I loved the kind of connections you could make in the office. I think that's how I ended up moving into engineering management because I liked getting to know people. Also, I think the social aspect is what got me into conversations that shifted my career path in that direction. In December 2021, I left that job for a startup called Balance Homes where I was the first engineering hire and slowly found other engineers interested in our mission.
I built a little engineering team. I was head of engineering there. We just got acquired. I'm now VP of Engineering. It's been a long road. It's been a very unexpected journey, but I wouldn't change anything. Every turn was a learning experience. It remains challenging. There are new problems every day. I love the engineering management aspect because there is this intersection of technology problems and people problems every day. It keeps it interesting.
It's such an inspiring and unusual journey or maybe it is not. I think it's unusual and it's very inspiring. That one month that you had to learn something and then you took that one month and took off from it essentially. Also, it speaks to your resilience, learning on the job, and perseverance. It's amazing. I want to dig deeper into that journey so I'll start with your degree in Painting and Art History and how it maps to engineering. Art is often associated with whimsical and creative expression while coding in tech can seem more logical and structured. How do you find a balance between these two seemingly contrasting aspects of your world?
I found coding to be much more creative than I think people assume because I think the best part, maybe when you're working with a really good product manager, they help guide you to the job to be done, but they don't give you the answer or the solution on how to get there. I think the creativity lies between point A and point B. If you gave me a problem and you gave my partner for example, who is also an engineer a problem, we would go about solving that in a completely different way and that's where the creativity lies.
I find it so fun to sit down and think about how I'm going to take these blocks of logic to get to point B. I think the best part is when you pull up someone's merge request or pull request, whatever, you're reviewing someone's code and you see a line in there that you look at and say, “I never even thought about it in that way.” I think that unlocks even more conversation and collaboration between you, your peers, and the rest of the team.
I think that's the beauty of trying to increase diversity in tech. We all come from different backgrounds. We all have these different experiences that led us to write that particular line of code that the person sitting next to us would have never thought of. That's why it's so fun to me. It sounds so cheesy and corny to say that, but it's what has kept me interested in continuing to move forward and building things, especially in the startup world. Building things that don't exist out there and can't take an off-the-shelf type of solution. Building it from the ground up is so fun.
The beauty of trying to increase diversity in tech is that we all come from different backgrounds. We all have these different experiences that led us to write that particular line of code that the person sitting next to us would have never thought of.
I also love what you said about looking at a piece of code and reviewing PR. Your approach is, “I had never thought of it that way.” Sometimes people look at PRs and are like, “This is not the right way to do things.” Whereas your look is, “This is an interesting way to go about things,” and that again is a different way of thinking about things. It's amazing. We need more of that in tech where other ways of solving a problem are welcomed and appreciated.
It's also funny because as an engineering manager, you see that a lot where maybe someone is reviewing or you have an engineer reviewing code and they ping you. They say, “This person did not do this correctly.” I love pulling people back, level-setting them, and saying like, “If you take a step back high-level, are they setting us up for success further in the future? Are they more forward-thinking than maybe you might be and see the forest for the trees,” or whatever the saying is. Also, helping other people gain that perspective is another part I've enjoyed as the whole experience.
That’s amazing. I am glad that you as a creative person also enjoy people management because not everyone enjoys people management. I've talked to Ruth about this too. I appreciate having you and Ruth as people managers out there “fixing the world” because we need more of you. I am not going into people management. That's a choice I have made. I appreciate what you all do and it is not easy. Thank you so much for fighting the good fight for us.
Back to the front-end coding and creativity part of it too. I think front-end development, which is the features that people look at on websites and stuff is the gateway drug for creative people to get into. I wonder if you felt that way too. It's moving things around and being able to see something tangible. Speak to that because that helped the front-end development. People are like, “I'm changing things.”
I will say that the first web development job I had in Oakland, the WordPress job, I had an incredible creative director. We worked out of her basement. When I say small, it is small. There were four of us sitting in a basement building websites together but she had this eye literally of an artist. She would draw a lot of the designs that we would then break down and build the websites to mimic. There were a lot of painting inspirations behind it and I think that's what sold me on this as a viable career path.
It was something that hooked me in and kept me interested because it unlocked the possibilities behind it. Back then Blogspot and WordPress had the templates so you could be very within the box if you wanted to. This unlocked the potential of, “There's so much more you can do and you can bring art to people's screens.” That was a cool aspect for me. You're right. The front end got me. It was the gateway to everything else because as a very curious person then you're like, “Where's all the data coming from?” You then start digging into like, “There's a database. What is that?” You keep going and you keep going. It was a slippery slope into programming.
Art To Engineering: There is so much more you can do in bringing art to people's screens.
Challenges At Tech Bootcamp
Just a cheesy thought that came up. As an artist, you are just painting with a different medium when it comes to coding. Moving on to the tech bootcamp side of things. They have become increasingly popular for individuals who are looking to switch careers. What challenges did you face during your time at the bootcamp and how did you overcome them?
I was not used to working with other engineers. My bootcamp was very focused on pair programming. Literally daily, you would pair with someone new where one person would drive and one person would be the clicker. I'm a very independent person so having to give up control or work alongside someone gave me PTSD or flashbacks back to school projects where your grade was dependent on the lowest performer in the group.
However, it was a great exercise in figuring out how to work with other engineers and other people on your team. A lot of times, you have long-running projects where each person is just working on one feature of it before you're able to get a release out for example. The nice thing about it was we had mentors that were assigned to us. I had three great mentors during my time in the program and they level set and they were like, “This is a very small glimpse into what it's like working on an actual engineering team where you're working on enterprise software where you're basically part of this little thing.”
This tiny little feature is part of this grander idea. It was a different way of thinking for me and hearing other people's perspectives of how that would benefit me in the future was helpful. I think it was also hard because it was right when bootcamps were starting to gain traction and a lot of people didn't understand it. It’s because you don't get a degree. You hardly get a certificate. You get a little PDF with your name on it. I think that's still something that people coming out of bootcamps deal with.
However, I think they do a good job at trying to give you as much of a real-life experience where you're working in sprints. We had a standup every day. We followed a scrum process. I kind of already had the habits down when I joined my first team and got my first job out of the bootcamp. I think that's something that people don't even consider for a bootcamp grad.
That's pretty neat. I have not worked with you directly but the little glimpse that I got from when you said you look at code reviews and you're like, “I hadn't seen that way of approaching a solution.” I am mapping that to you learning to pair programs during that bootcamp. You were working with new people every day and you had to make it work with them. You were paying them money. You weren't even getting paid.
All of it culminated in the way I think about engineering and problem-solving now. It was all worth it.
Bias In Tech Industry
Now, this question I'm very curious about and during our initial conversations, I asked you about this too. You have the bootcamp degree and you enter the industry. You were already a part of it, but you joined a bigger corporation, a big enterprise software company. In the tech industry, computer science degrees are highly valued. Things might have changed a bit, maybe or maybe not, but I still remember when I joined, even the school that you went to was a thing that people would fight about.
There were groups that would be like, “This is UC, Berkeley group and this is Stanford group.” I was like, “I don't belong to either of them.” Did you face any biases or obstacles due to having a different educational background? Were there instances in your career where you felt the lack of formal education made it difficult to deal with a particular meeting or a colleague even though you were incredibly capable of handling the task at hand?
Yes, for sure. There are so many.
Whatever you're comfortable with.
I have to start off. I was very grateful for the opportunity to join this company and I didn't even have the experience to know what I was worth I think. I was blessed with extremely encouraging and transparent peers on my first team there so we started getting into, “What was your offer?” I learned that I was making $15,000 less base than another engineer on my team with the same role, same level, and same title, but 1) He was a man and 2) He had come from one of the UC schools. He had a Computer Science degree.
Other than that we were doing the same workload. When I learned that, I was stunned. I hadn't even thought about the pay disparity issue and I didn't know what I was worth. That's what it comes down to. The problem is whatever you start out with, caps what the potential you can make moving forward. They say the best way to get a raise is to leave and go somewhere else. I thought that for two years before I had an incredible manager who right off the bat when I joined his team. He was like, “This is something that's the top priority. You are not paid enough.”
Art To Engineering: The problem is whatever you start with caps the potential you can make moving forward.
He went to bat for me and I cannot thank him enough for just getting me to the level that I deserved. That was one of the first lessons I learned, like, “People do look at me differently for not having a degree.” Even when I went to HR, they were like, “You don't have a, you don't have a degree.” It was like an institutional issue. It wasn't even just the manager who hired me. It was all the way up. There's the first one.
Now, I think I found my voice. I think back then it was hard for me to even speak up because I didn't know. You don't know what you don't know. I didn't know how to do that back then. I hadn't found my voice at that point. It was hard for me to vocalize my needs and advocate for myself. It wasn't until I had that manager who went to bat for me that I started to find the confidence of like, “You know what? You're right. I'm worth more.” That was probably my first experience.
The second is there were definitely people on the team. On this first QA team, each one of us would pair up with a developer and we would QA their features one-to-one. It was very apparent. People knew that we were coming in from a bootcamp. I was hired by a cohort of boot campers. I don't know if it was the bootcamp thing or if I was also the only woman on this team. Anytime I was paired up with him, he would literally say out loud, “Is there anybody else?”
Again, I couldn't speak up for myself. I look back and this is one of my greatest regrets of not being like, “I am fully capable of doing,” and I would still take his tickets. I would still be assigned to them. We had these meetings. I would still pick up the tickets and I would still do it. It would be the same quality of work as if anyone else would pick up his tickets to QA. It ended up being fine. I think he was fired for other issues but it was very much an uphill battle in some situations but they were all good learning experiences for me.
At the end of the day, it teaches you resilience. It teaches you to figure out how to speak up for yourself in the moment. I would never let that happen current day. I would never let that happen to anyone else on my team. For me, it gave me the opportunity to see what I would want to see in the room because even in those moments nobody spoke up for me or stood up for me in those moments where now, I would never allow that to happen in a meeting I was in.
I'm trying to figure it out, but let me finish a sentence. I am so outraged for you. It's not okay but at the same time, I do want to speak to the regret you mentioned. I look back at a lot of things that happened at the beginning of my career where I let things slide because you are just starting up. You people don't know your value yet. You don't know your value yet. You said people started telling you, “You are worth more,” and that's when you're like, “I'm worth more,” because there are not a lot of people that look like us.
If they are people like us, they are hated because cism is real and so is racism, but it is pretty real. You just don't have role models. You are constantly getting these messages that you are not enough, you're not doing enough, and you cannot be enough no matter what you do. What are you going to stand up for when you're constantly being told that you are the problem? You are like, “I'm so sorry for existing. My apologies. Please continue.”
I then reached a phase where I was angry all the time. Once I gained a little confidence, I was angry all the time. It lasted pretty long but at the same time it was hurting my career so I had to relate a little, but I hate that you had to go through that. At the same time, I hope you can let go of that regret because you would have been kicked out if you had stood up for yourself. I think that is another part that freaking sucks.
I know. You have to concede at some of those times where we shouldn't. It's like your first job, your job's on the line, what are you going to do? You're just going to sit back and say, “I'm going to take it at the moment because I have no other alternative right now.” That's the nature of us being in that position, which is terrible.
I hate saying this part out loud but just what you said, I 100% agree with you. I'm getting chills because I know this is not a great opinion but what I like or know what I'm capable of doing and what you are capable of doing as a VP of Engineering is being the ally in the room. When people cannot stand up for themselves because they are in that position, people like us can be there for them and try to educate people around us and be like, “This is not okay.”
It's so interesting because I feel like in those situations the people who aren't speaking up, maybe they don't even know that it's happening. They're so unaware that this other person's bias is making this other person feel so small that they don't know how to stand up or be an ally. I hope someone can take away how to do that at the moment.
Just you saying, “That's not cool.” That's it. That changes everything in the room. It makes the person on the receiving end be like, “Someone else sees it too.” The person can be like, “I just got called out a little bit but also I got called out by someone that looks like me. I thought we were pals. What's happening?” It stops everything in that moment and it's not going to fix the thing but doing it over and over again, maybe. Also if you are not aware of what is happening in the room, it speaks to some massive privilege.
Exactly, which is usually the case. The room is usually filled with cis-White male engineers.
I was telling my sister because she sees these things. She's a doctor. It’s different things but they're still very similar dynamics happening. She's reading some books where I'm like, “Yes. Read those. Those are the books that I was reading in my angry feminist era.” She's like, “I'm not angry like that.” I was like, “I am always angry.” There's this simmering rage.
It’s an underlying anger.
It just comes out. I was like, “This is like Hulk.” That's the dialogue he had in a movie where he is like, “I'm not Hulk all the time because I'm just always angry now,” or something to that effect.
If you're not angry, you're not paying attention. It's a baseline for us these days. We just have to reel it back for work.
Art To Engineering: If you're not angry, you're not paying attention. It is a baseline for us these days. We just have to reel it back for work.
I feel like maturing or my next wave of feminism was doing it all with a smile.
Art Background And Impact On Leadership
I’m interested in learning how your prior experience in the field of art has impacted your role as the VP of Engineering in a tech company. I'm curious to know how you inspire and motivate your team to approach their work with a creative and innovative mindset leveraging your background in arts. Also, if you have any specific examples that would be helpful, how are you utilizing your artistic experience, background, or creativity to encourage your team to think outside the box?
Art is subjective to the viewer. There's a lot of art out there. I literally had someone jump on a meeting with me and start the meeting with, “Did you paint your wall behind you? I don't know if it looks good or ugly. Let me look at it for a second.” I don't take any offense to that because beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I think the lesson is I don't like every art piece that I come across when I'm walking through a museum. Only a couple of them catch my eye. Some of them, I'm very critical of and everyone has the same experience. You like something or you don't like something. We're all different. That's how we come together as this very unique engineering-minded group.
Engineers, that's not to say everyone is the same, but a lot of engineers are very single-track minds. “Do the work. Here's the way I'm going to code this. Here's the way I'm going to solve this problem. I like to remind people. I try to emulate this from the hiring phase and beyond. Even in my list of hiring manager screens, I do like to ask, “Have you been part of any diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the past? What mentorship engagements have you been involved with in the past?” It’s because that gives me a gauge of how open-minded they are from the start. I think it sets the tone. There are very many times, especially with remote work, when the tone is lost in Slack messages or anything over text only.
When the Slack thread is hitting that 50-mage mark, then I know it's time to step in here because someone is missing the tone of the conversation. I just like to go in and remind people. I will say, “Can we huddle and bring this in person because I think the message or the sentiment is being lost here.” When I go into my one-on-ones with maybe the engineers that we're butting heads, I do like to remind them we're all different.
We obviously come from different experiences. So and so came from this background. You have this other background and to frame it in, “Let's think of it from their perspective. I don't think what they're doing is wrong. I think it's just different.” It’s the same with art. There's no art that's wrong. There's no painting out there that's wrong, it's just different. The way people paint is different. There's oil, there's acrylic, there's charcoal, and there's X, Y, and Z. There are sculptures. It's all different.
I think especially when someone's coming up with a spec or with a proposal for how to architect an application, that's where I think engineers are able to get creative and have very differing opinions on what's the right way to do this. I think once people take a step back they're like, “You're from a frontend background. Of course, you're going to want to use TypeScript for this,” for example. It's reminding people that they feel strongly about this because that's the experience that led them to this point in time and facilitating the conversation to be more collaborative is the ideal way to move forward from that.
Art can be collaborative too. There are art collectives where there's a whole group of people working on one big painting or body of work. That's how I like to think of it. We're all working on one thing that will come together as a cohesive body of work, application, or giant enterprise software hopefully in the future. One big platform that has the goal of enabling the company to do the job to the best of its ability.
Pulling people back out of the weeds I think is the way to gain perspective on there's different ways to do things and there's no right or wrong way. Unless you're introducing some insane security vulnerability, obviously that's wrong but there are limits. There's no right or wrong in the grand scheme of proposing a solution.
There's no right or wrong in the grand scheme of proposing a solution.
I absolutely love that. I was getting lost in that answer because it's so beautiful and it ties up your entire approach to engineering and people management where there's no right or wrong in this with limits but at the same time, people are different. Art is different and the fact of your open-mindedness and then you also touched on the empathy piece of it. It’s having space where people are coming from or where they're coming from and how they're doing in that moment or why they are coming to this particular situation with all the things.
You sound like a great leader and I'm not shocked that you are a VP. I’m not shocked at all. Not that I was doubting or shocked before you got my point. It's just you have amazing qualities, especially with that smile on your face and with the calming voice. You go into a heated meeting and be like, “Everyone's different.” I can see how that would like to bring down the temperature in the room and help everyone realize this is work. Why am I losing my mind over a fool?
I feel the biggest sense of satisfaction when I have one of those meetings where I'm pulling someone back from a heated debate, which is fine. I think a heated debate is healthy. I love it when people are passionate about what they want to do, and how they want to push forward, and all of it is to make the company better. At the bottom of it, we're all trying to make this company or the software better.
A heated debate is healthy. People are passionate about what they want to do, and they want to push forward.
However, the best part is when I come out of one of those one-on-ones and an hour later, they'll ping me and say, “I needed that. I needed to be pulled back. Someone needs to level set with me and I need to give them the benefit of the doubt,” or, “I need to think about it from their perspective.” A glimpse of that even once a month is enough to keep me going.
Advice For Aspiring Tech Professionals
I had more questions prepared but I'm trying to see if I want to do rapid-fire because it's difficult to do this advice question in rapid-fire form. What advice would you give to others who are considering joining a tech bootcamp or pursuing a career in technology without a formal Computer Science degree?
I will always advocate for bootcamp. I know that's not always accessible. Also, finances. They cost money. I think just starting is my advice. That sounds crazy but there are so many free resources out there now and I'm happy to put together a list. I sent a lot of friends of mine different resources that I gathered when I was at Hackbright. Throughout the years when I've had people come to me and ask me, “I can't afford a bootcamp right now but do you have some things I can read or poke around in to see if I'm even interested in pursuing this as a career path.?”
There's so much out there that you could even purely just do reading. There are books. There are online resources. There are blogs. There are a bunch of interactive options too where it'll tell you. I'm a Python developer so in Python, it'll tell you to iterate through this list and you test out different solutions and it will tell you if you get to the solution or not.
It sounds terrible but it's accessible to anybody. A lot of those things are free or at least approachable amounts. I had a subscription to one of those online courses. Lynda.com was the one for me back in the day. I know there's a bunch of them out there now. Dedicate a couple of dollars monthly or find the free resources at least to know if that's something you're interested in pursuing and becoming serious about.
Rapid Fire Questions
I can also think of this JavaScript. I don't know who's using JavaScript. I think you still need to know, but there's this JavaScript game that I remember using. There are resources ready. I know you're busy with a lot of things, but if you can send a couple of games or interpret things my way, I will make sure they're attached to the episode. Before I get into the rapid-fire section, can you share a memorable experience where your artistic background and technical skills intersected in a way that surprised you?
I think I have this one interview. I try to avoid this but it was a live coding session and you projected your screen onto this giant projector in person in the office. It was horrible. Other than that, it was a live coding session where they would give you a problem and you would go and solve it. Once you got past the algorithm part where it's a cookie-cutter answer, the next part was a little bit more open and fluid.
I don't even remember what the question was anymore, but I do remember the satisfaction of someone in the room who was an engineer who was there to review the code I was writing in front of everybody. They literally said out loud, “I don't know if that's right,” and then I hit run and the code ran. It worked and they were like, “It works.” Sometimes there is only one answer from point A to point B. For other things though, when you can unlock the creative solution, it's very satisfying. The creativity and the coding come to fruition all in one.
Also, that acknowledgement from that person, especially after they said it might not work.
They were skeptics, for sure.
I took the day off and I took a day at the Korean spa with some girlfriends of mine. It was nice because sitting at my desk, my posture was horrible so I needed a shoulder massage. We soaked in a hot tub for a while. It reset me and I came back ready to get back to work. Otherwise, having a one-year-old, everything is routine. I don’t know.
It’s like I sign off or jump into the dinner and bedtime routine but it's cathartic. You're creating a meal, you're all sitting down, and you're chatting about unwinding the day. Connecting with people in person is essential with remote work. I miss office life where you can connect with someone face-to-face. Reconnecting with my family is the day-to-day way to unwind.
Wrap-Up
We didn't spend a lot of time together but I remember unwinding earlier in the days to look like grabbing drinks and going to happy hour and stuff. It's also just me reflecting on how as we're getting older, where unwinding is a spa day with girlfriends because I did that on vacation. My mom was like, “Let's go do these things.” I told my sister, “I'm spending the day at the resort and I'm going to go check how much a spa thing is.” My sister and I spent two and a half hours getting massages, scrubs, facials, and such and that was relaxing. Finally Rachelle, where can people find you?
You can find me anywhere. You can find me on LinkedIn for sure. I connect with anyone, especially if you send me a message with your request but you can search my name and find me on pretty much every social media outlet there is. I love responding to messages. I've connected with a lot of people over the years, especially ones who were looking at the same bootcamp that I had gone to.
I think I had a story on their blog, which sent a lot of people my way. I'm always open to a conversation. I love connecting with people. I always say I love a first date, not even with some I'm happily married. I love the idea of getting to know somebody. I'm happy to field any message that comes into my inbox and answer questions if you find something interesting about me or want to know something about my experience, especially if you're looking into a bootcamp or engineering as a career path, I would love to chat.
This has been such a lovely experience and it's clear that you do enjoy first dates. You sound very curious and open-minded and I appreciate that. Thank you for taking the time to go through the promotion, baby, and all the things. Thank you for this time. I appreciate it, Rachelle.
Thank you for inviting me and I had a great time. It was lovely to chat. I know it's a good reminder of where I came from too because you get sucked into the day-to-day and you forget everything I've had to go through to get to this point. It was a great reminder.
Also, everything you have freaking accomplished. I hope you were very proud of yourself because I am.
Yeah. Thank you.
Important Links
About Rachelle Mohtadi
An engineering leader with a knack for building teams from the ground up, Rachelle currently serves as the VP of Engineering for a real estate technology startup. Her background in painting and art history from the University of Florida lends a creative perspective to how she tackles complex problems at the intersection of technology and people. Diversity and inclusion are passions that fuel her work.
Now a new mom in Texas, you can find Rachelle in her off-hours wrangling her rambunctious one-year-old, connecting with friends, and likely with a boba in hand.
