To celebrate International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month in March, I’m interviewing 4 exceptional female professionals who I admire to talk about topics on career development, leadership and gender equality in STEM.
My second guest is Pooja Salpekar, Senior Engineering Manager with over 10 years’ experience in tech. Pooja shared her experience starting as an engineering consultant, moving to the startup world and then growing her career at Babbel. We also touched on topics like how to find mentors, how to improve the ratio of women in tech, salary negotiation and more.
Here’s a summary of our conversations. Please enjoy!
Personal journey
Sinan: Please tell us who you are and what you do professionally.
Pooja: I’m Pooja Salpekar. I am a Senior Engineering Manager at Babbel. At the moment, I am leading two cross-functional engineering teams, one in Berlin and one in New York. My day-to-day job is navigating the teams through delivery management, enabling iterative software development, and helping the individuals in the teams to unlock the best of their potential.
Sinan: That sounds a lot to manage! It’s not just managing two engineering teams, but two teams across different countries and time zones!
Pooja: Managing distributed teams has been challenging and has definitely been one of the things that I learned a lot during the Pandemic. On paper, it sounds really hard, which it was for a lot of things. But it also makes things practically easy to give proper focus time to the individual teams because of the time difference. I have my mornings dedicated for the Berlin team and my afternoons dedicated for the U.S. team, which actually gives me an organic break in between.
Sinan: How did you get started in the field of engineering?
Pooja: I did my bachelor in Engineering and Computer Science. Afterwards I got a job in consulting. I was an Engineering Consultant at a software consulting firm working for different clients in the U.K., East Africa and India. I had the first few years in my career working in different domains. Naturally in the consulting world, you would not just be scoped into one project or one team. Early on that helped me not get attached to my code and move on from one codebase to another very quickly.
After that, I joined a food delivery startup in India as one of the founding engineers. I had to do everything, e.g. frontend, backend and the infrastructure. I wore all the hats that I would get until the team grew. I worked in the startup for a year and a half before I joined Babbel.
I joined Bubble about six years ago, working as a Software Engineer and then moved up to become an Engineering Manager now.
Sinan: What made you decide to join Babbel?
Pooja: I was looking for an opportunity to start afresh. I was working in India. I wanted to work in a mid-sized, more structured company instead of a startup. I wanted to work in an international setup, where people are thinking differently from how I’m thinking, and I’m being challenged at every single thought process. I knew I had to start looking for opportunities elsewhere. I also wanted to work in a domain that excites me. All of those things came together for Babbel. That’s how I landed here.
Finding a fit
Sinan: You’ve worked at companies of different sizes, ranging from an early-stage startup to a mid-sized company and a giant consulting firm. When you made the decision to join a different company, did you see beforehand if that’d be a good fit?
Pooja: Honestly, no. Whenever you’re asked this question whether you knew that you would join this company, I think most of the time the answer is no. I still don’t know what will come after Babbel, or if I have a certain company that I would definitely like to join. It mostly depends on what your current situation is and what opportunities are laid in front of you.
Picking between a small and a big company is a big decision. There are multiple factors that come into play. Some of them would be processes and resources. Are you used to structured frameworks versus chaotic or loosely structured frameworks? Are you used to getting definite resources from your company, e.g. legal and accounting support ? Or do you thrive in an environment where everything is loosely coupled? Another piece is innovation. Bigger companies do try to work on inventing the next big thing, as opposed to smaller companies where resources are limited and there’s not enough leverage to do so. All of those factors plus some logistical factors like compensation and job security come into play when you’re making that decision. I think for every individual, that decision changes depending on what point and stage they are in their lives.
Sinan: As a hiring manager, what do you look for in a candidate? How do you know that they are a good fit for this specific work environment?
Pooja: Things in the interview process can give visibility into this question. If you give a coding challenge to a candidate, you can observe how they push commits into GitHub. Are they more used to making just one giant commit and bringing the change into the production environment, without deploying into a staging system first? That’s an indication that they come from small-scale companies, because that’s how startups work, while in bigger companies smaller commits are more encouraged by team members. They do the smallest change because the impact to the production system is too big. That is an example of some indirect factors to assess.
Additionally, having conversations with the individual on what makes them pick Babbel, and what things about Babbel they are most curious about would also give a window into how this person would fit into the team.
Building mentorship relations
Sinan: What has been the biggest impact on your career development so far?
Pooja: It’s been the people that I have worked with and the mentors I’ve had. I have learned from them about not just hard skills, like how to write better programs and how to improve the time complexity of code, but also how to challenge your stakeholders, how to read requirements better and how to document requirements better. In many aspects, I give credit to the mentors I’ve had over the years for much of my career growth.
Sinan: Having a good mentor might be one of the most important things that one can do for one’s career development. Do you have any advice for early-career engineers to look for a mentor to help them grow?
Pooja: One thing that multiplies productivity or accelerates your learning curve is to have someone that you can learn one-on-one from. That individual can be your friend in the company, or just a colleague that you have never worked with. Having someone by your side that you can blindly trust into and know that there would be no judgments and only learning would help you find the unknowns and know the unknowns.
For my direct reports, I always recommend them to have mentors for technical or even non-technical topics. For individuals early in their careers, I would say, talk to your manager and ask for that support.
Sinan: Do you have any specific tips for maintaining a healthy mentorship relationship?
Pooja: I think finding the right mentor is the key. Sometimes you think that just because this person is on your team and a senior, he or she would be a good mentor for you. That’s the right thing to start with. But sometimes that doesn’t scale because you both start to think alike, and you need a mentor who would challenge you.
Practical tips would be to get prepared for the first few sessions, ask as many questions as you have. You might already have answers to them, but asking them would give you nuances that you wouldn’t have thought of. So ask questions. See how your mentor thinks differently from you. With those questions you can identify the areas that you don’t know about. For example, as a frontend engineer, I’m asking questions about how React Router works. I know how it works, but if I ask those questions, I’m pretty sure there will be some in-depth knowledge that I don’t know about. That gives me an opportunity to learn more.
Leadership
Sinan: What made you decide on the switch from the technical track to the management track?
Pooja: Coming from a consulting background, I knew that I wanted to work at an intersection of technology, people and business. Even when I was on the individual contributor track, I enjoyed figuring out the requirements and ways to collaborate with stakeholders, sometimes even more than improving the performance of my code. Once the opportunities were in front of me to lead a project and to solve bigger problems, I knew 80% of my motivation was to figure out the unknowns from 0 to 1. Then from 1 to 100, I would think, good, I can do it, but I’m just not enjoying it as much. Those were some of the early indicators I had.
For an individual to choose between the technical and management track, I would say it’s the hardest decision. If I were to give a very generic statement on how anybody should decide that, it’d be a very strong statement. What helps is having a fluid management track early on. If the company offers an experiment-based role for engineering management with part of the responsibilities like hiring or mentoring. That can give a flavor of how people management looks like. That would help individuals to see if this is what they want or if this is a good fit.
Sinan: What would you say is the biggest difference between being an individual contributor and a people manager?
Pooja: I think the biggest difference is the ability to detach yourself from the implementation. There are people who absolutely enjoy solving the problem from 1 to 100. They have a problem in front of them and they want to see it working for a mass scale of users. For some other people, they enjoy problems being solved, but they don’t necessarily want to solve it themselves – “I know this should be solved. I know why it should be solved and what the impact of it is.” So that’s the difference as in how an individual finds the biggest motivation and excitement when they are presented with the problem.
Sinan: Is being a manager different from what you had expected before you made the transition?
Pooja: It is very different from what I imagined. I still don’t fully know what it means to be a great manager. On a very high level, you are influencing the technical decisions, the opportunities and the career development of your direct reports. But on a granular level, it has so many avenues that I’m still ready to learn. I would say, on a high level my expectation about this role has been met, and I wouldn’t regret any of the decisions I’ve made to come into this stride. However as a manager, the learning never stops.
Sinan: What has been the biggest career challenge for you working as an Engineering Manager?
Pooja: I think the Pandemic presented the biggest challenge. Back in 2019/2020, we were thinking of restructuring and starting a new team. Little did we know that life had its own plan. The Pandemic happened and the team was fully remote even before it started. Starting a new team in a hybrid setup, then moving across the continent to work for a different team was the biggest challenge that I’ve faced so far.
In the role itself, one challenge is to hire the right people remotely. When you’re interviewing people in person, there’s a lot of indirect assessment you can do, e.g. how they interact with the team in the office. When you’re interviewing a person in just a 45-minute Zoom call, it’s very different. You don’t know what this person is outside of this window.
Sinan: Do you think leadership skills are innate or they can be learned?
Pooja: A lot of people do believe that some leadership skills or traits are innate, but I personally believe that most of the leadership skills can be learned and leadership is akin to learning any other skills. From my experience, most skills are not innate. They are developed early on since one’s childhood. So are leadership skills as well.
Sinan: What do you think is the most helpful skill that one can prepare oneself for, if they want to become a leader one day?
Pooja: When I look at all the leaders that I know, I think the common trait among them is the ability to look at a problem from the widest angle possible. They are able to understand things from a zoomed-out perspective, to grasp the scope of the problem and not to get attached to the minor details. It’s hard to learn this every day, but as an individual contributor, you’re presented with many opportunities to solve problems, which you can use as an exercise to develop such skills.
Gender equality
Sinan: There is a much lower ratio of women in management roles than men, especially in non-traditional fields like STEM. What do you think individuals or companies could do to change the situation?
Pooja: Many companies have been doing a lot to close the gender gap. But I think there is still much more that companies can do, e.g. hiring more women into leadership roles. One of the reasons that women leave is because they feel that’s the end for them. They don’t see any female leaders in front of them. Does that mean it’s the end of growth for me? So hiring more role models for women is one area where companies can do better.
Another area is on the managers and leaders who have the job of finding the right opportunities for all of their direct reports. That doesn’t mean you find one blanket opportunity for everyone. Every individual is different. Their needs and interest level are different. Finding the right opportunities for your female direct reports, so that they can be objectively assessed in their performance evaluation for the next level and for promotion, is also on managers. Sometimes you could not be promoted because you didn’t perform a particular task. Whether you were presented with the opportunity to do that task is an equally valid question to be asked.
On a high level, as a company, assessing what your current stats are, where the biggest gap is, and then targeting the weakest area would be the first place to start, which is what Babbel did. Back in 2018, we looked at our female ratio in engineering on different levels and figured out that we had low senior female engineers in the company. Then we redirected all of our efforts to increase the female seniors in the company.
Sinan: Not having enough women in management roles is one piece of the gender inequality in tech. Another important piece is the pay gap. There are many causes contributing to the gender pay gap. One very real reason is related to negotiated compensation. When negotiation is involved in determining the pay, women tend to get paid less than men. What do you think the problem is? Do you have any advice for women who might not feel the most comfortable when negotiating for a higher salary?
Pooja: A change in the industry that I’m seeing now is that most companies are moving towards an equitable pay model instead of the “fair pay” model. It means having a defined salary grid, having a committee that assesses the parity between individuals, and having an objective way of comparing two individuals instead of subjective pay decisions. The more we move towards the equitable model, the better we are at conversing about salaries.
If you are not in a workplace which follows the equitable pay model and you have to negotiate for your salaries, I’d like to share some skills I’ve learned over time. One of the foremost things that you would want to do is getting continuous feedback from your peers and from your manager. That feedback not only helps you find development areas where you can improve on, but also acts as your data where your manager has already vouched for you. You don’t have to vouch for yourself, but your manager and your peers have already vouched for you for that task.
When you go into a salary negotiation conversation. You don’t have to come up with things. You just rephrase your peers and your manager’s previous feedback – “You mentioned six months ago that this went well. I added this much value and because this particular business metric was improved by X percentage. My peers told me that I have this skill which helped the team to do so and so. I think with the above skills, I’ve been able to change in the last six months by this way. I have plans for myself to achieve these specific goals so that I can address the next metrics.” So the preparation for salary negotiation has to happen not a day before the meeting, but throughout your stay in a company.
The last question
Sinan: If you could go back in time to ten years ago, would you have done anything differently career-wise?
Pooja: I would have probably chosen some of the companies I worked at differently. It’s not a reflection on a company being unsuccessful for me. Sometimes when you retrace your path, you’re curious about what the alternate path would look like. I would have been able to reassess my decisions with a little bit more maturity. But if I was at the same maturity level, I think I’d have made the same decisions over and over again :)