What’s The Stack | Season 1, Episode 5: Teena Glassick, Director of Support Engineering at Skedulo
Welcome to What’s The Stack! As tech recruiters, every day ask the question – “What’s The Stack?” and now, we’re bringing that question to life as we ask some of our favourite technical friends about their own tech stack all while enjoying stacks of pancakes in Brisbane’s most iconic church turned 24/7 pancake restaurant – The Pancake Manor!
So, what is What’s The Stack?
Every day we get the opportunity to work with some of Brisbane’s best tech companies and throughout this process, they also get to have insightful conversations with developers and tech leaders about how they got to where they are, where they currently are in their careers and what they’re trying to achieve. But what don’t they get to do? Jump on camera to capture these conversations with some of our favourite people in tech. Until…. Now!
What’s The Stack takes a peek behind the curtain of the careers of Brisbane tech leaders and emerging developers to explore Brisbane’s Tech scene through a series of interviews with some of your favourite faces as well as some that you may not have seen before.
Each episode of What’s The Stack will take you through three levels of conversation:
- Tall Stack: Questions about our guest and their career history
- Full-Stack: In-depth questions on tech-related topics
- Short-Stack: Funny, short sharp questions that no one else is asking
Let’s get into it…
What’s The Stack Episode 5: Teena Glassick, Director of Support Engineering at Skedulo
When Skedulo hosted Product Tank earlier this year, it was a real eye-opener. Not only did we get an in-depth look at the amazing work Skedulo is doing with both their core product and their vaccination booking product for the state of California, but we also got to see the fabulous Teena Glassick in action.
Like a lot of tech leaders we speak to, Teena Glassick didn’t have a direct path into technology after high school. No, not at all. In fact, Teena started her Bachelor of Arts in Dance at the Victorian College of Arts in Melbourne to pursue a career as a professional dancer! But it wasn’t too long later that she decided to switch things up and embark on a Bachelor of Applied Science (Hons) in Microbiology and Biochemistry! After completing her honours year in research, Teena spent five years navigating a number of research roles before…
*cue another pivot*
Teena decided to switch things up AGAIN and complete a Graduate Diploma in Information Technology!
Clearly, Teena has had a very interesting career pivoting from science to development and now working as Director of Support Engineering at Skedulo, a cloud-based software company based in Brisbane making mobile workforce management efficient and pain-free — no matter what business you’re in.
We almost needed to write a novel with all of the brilliant, takeaways we have from our conversation with Teena. She is brilliant, knowledgeable and incredibly open about sharing her learnings.
We’re so grateful to Teena for giving up her time during what has been an incredibly busy period for Skedulo. If you’ve ever wondered how to make a career transition, whether it’s from science to tech or dev to support engineering, this one is for you!
We hope you enjoy this blueberry pancake-fuelled chat with Teena as much as we did.
Interview Transcript:
Carly Shearman:
Welcome to What’s the Stack. As technical recruiters, every day we’re asking the question “what’s your stack? “And we thought, why not bring that question to life while asking some of our favourite technical friends what their stack is over a stack of pancakes in Brisbane’s iconic church turned 24/7 pancake restaurant, The Pancake Manor.
Emily Conaghan:
Today we’re meeting with Teena Glassick. Teena is the Director of Support Engineering at Skedulo. She also has a background in microbiology and biochemistry. So we’re actually going to scrap today’s tech questions and I’m going to ask her about photosynthesis, a concept that I learned in year nine and still don’t understand.
Carly Shearman:
We absolutely won’t be doing that. Instead, what we’re going to be doing is talking to Teena about the last 12 months at Skedulo, which has included building a for-purpose product to help with COVID vaccinations in the US, as well as Series C funding, which resulted in $75 million being raised for Skedulo. Let’s go inside and talk to Teena.
Teena Glassick:
Oh, we’re all getting the same?
Carly Shearman:
We’re all getting the same.
Teena Glassick:
Oh, very cool. Oh, okay. Well, I hope you enjoy it.
Emily Conaghan:
Well, Teena, thank you so much for joining us.
Teena Glassick:
No problem.
Emily Conaghan:
And I guess to kick us off, what’s your stack today?
Teena Glassick:
What’s my stack? So I went, I’ve kind of gone a bit desserty because it’s just after lunch. So I’ve gone with the blueberry.
Emily Conaghan:
Amazing. And what is your tech stack?
Teena Glassick:
Okay, so our tech stack at Skedulo… So we have a mobile application and a web application. From a mobile perspective, there’s Swift and Kotlin. Web app, the front end is TypeScript, and React. And then the backend is Kotlin, Node.js, and some Scala as well.
Emily Conaghan:
Good job. Tick those all off. I guess, to start off with, give us the elevator pitch of your career. So how did you get to where you are today?
Teena Glassick:
Started out doing a Bachelor of Arts in Dance at the Victorian College of Arts in Melbourne. I think when I got to Melbourne, I realised that I probably wasn’t going to cut it as a professional dancer.
Teena Glassick:
And then I decided, of all things, to enrol in a science degree. I did an Honours Year in research and then I worked in medical research for about five years.
Teena Glassick:
And then while I was working in research, I knew that if I wanted to further develop my career in that area, I would need to go into a PhD and wasn’t really sure that I was sort of committed enough to one particular area because once you do a PhD, you’re fairly sort of locked in.
Teena Glassick:
And I was quite interested, at that point in time, in a field called Bioinformatics. So I thought I’m going to do an IT degree and then maybe after that, I’ll go back to research. So yeah, I did a postgraduate IT degree and I finished that right before sort of all the Y2K bubble. So I finished that and there was just a mountain of jobs available.
Teena Glassick:
So I thought, “Okay, I’m just going to try my hand at a technology career,” then I just… Yeah, I think then it was quite that sort of natural progression to Team Lead type role.
Teena Glassick:
Then I moved into an engineering management role and then I’ve sort of done various permutations of engineering leadership, probably for the past, oh, probably 10 plus years now.
Emily Conaghan:
I’m always so impressed with people who can finish their science degree. I started my science degree.
Teena Glassick:
Did you?
Emily Conaghan:
Yeah, but mine came out of… I think I’d been watching too much Grey’s Anatomy at the time so… I got caught up in that. I wanted to be a doctor. It looked so fun.
Emily Conaghan:
It was really hard.
Teena Glassick:
It’s really, really hard.
Emily Conaghan:
Yeah. So it’s always really impressive, but I guess in terms of your experience in that microbiology and that sort of area, what did you learn from that experience that you were able to take? What were the transferable skills that you took through to your tech career?
Teena Glassick:
Research. That was something that I absolutely loved and something that I really still love.
Carly Shearman:
Something that’s kind of spoken about in technology is the ‘leaky pipe’ and kind of how women come into the industry, but unfortunately, kind of exit throughout.
Carly Shearman:
So what that means is when they’re kind of getting into leadership positions, there’s less females to pick from as candidates. You’re now, obviously, in the leadership field within engineering. I guess what influenced you to stay in a career in tech?
Teena Glassick:
I think I was incredibly lucky to be in what was probably quite a diverse organisation when I started. The company that I started out with, we built… It was started by a couple of mathematicians out of UQ, and we built journey planning software.
Teena Glassick:
I think you’ll find that in maths, there are actually a reasonable number of women. So when I started at that company also employed a lot of mathematicians, I didn’t feel like an ‘only’, which I think is fairly common in our industry. It can be quite isolating.
Teena Glassick:
So I think I was very fortunate that I did join an organisation where there was a reasonable amount of gender diversity. It was still more men than women.
Carly Shearman:
Yeah, but you could look left or right and hopefully see something that looked like you.
Teena Glassick:
Absolutely.
Carly Shearman:
And I guess for you, what advice would you have to Developers and Engineers that are wanting to progress in their career and step away from the tools a bit more, and be more in that strategic management and people management position?
Teena Glassick:
Yeah. So I think there are lots of opportunities as a Developer, as an individual contributor, to sort of dip your toe in the water. I certainly started taking on a team lead role. I really enjoyed that task coordination and coordinating delivery. So I really enjoyed that. It allowed me to sort of see what that was like whilst still remaining on the tools. Once you move into that people management, it’s a slightly bigger leap. And I think it’s something I would certainly encourage people to give it a go, but if it’s not for you, that’s okay.
Carly Shearman:
What has been your biggest tech fail?
Teena Glassick:
My biggest tech fail. I think this was probably not too long after I, sort of my first engineering management position. We had a really, really keen developer who built a standalone solution to solve a customer problem. Our product manager got incredibly excited by what they built and sold it many times over and it was a prototype. It wasn’t production ready. So we kind of had a prototype go live and there were a lot of learnings from that. I would count that as a fairly significant failure because it took us a long time to recover from that, just the technology choices that we’d made. They were appropriate for a proof of concept. They weren’t really appropriate for something that we were going to run in production. So that was a really massive learning. So I’m quite purposeful now when we’re prototyping, just to realise that there is quite a significant gap between building a prototype and having something that’s ready for production.
Emily Conaghan:
Tech trends. What are you most excited about at the moment in terms of emerging technology in trends?
Teena Glassick:
Trends that I’m interested in and excited about are probably just as much cultural as technical. I’m really loving the increased focus within organisations on diversity, equity and inclusion.
Teena Glassick:
I love seeing companies that have Chief Diversity Officers and we’re starting off a pretty significant program of work in that area at Skedulo. I think that’s wonderful. I think that businesses are starting to appreciate that it’s not just the right thing to do, but it’s actually very beneficial to businesses, particularly when you’re working in a product development organisation.
Teena Glassick:
And having that diversity does actually make you, help you build a better product. So I’m loving seeing that.
Carly Shearman:
Is yogurt a solid or a liquid?
Teena Glassick:
Liquid.
Carly Shearman:
Oh.
Emily Conaghan:
Here we go.
Carly Shearman:
Discuss.
Teena Glassick:
I was going to say semi-solid. I was going to sit on the fence.
Emily Conaghan:
You got a science background. If you could learn any instrument, what would it be?
Teena Glassick:
Oh, piano. I love piano. My daughters play piano and I desperately would love to learn.
Carly Shearman:
If you could create a COVID travel bubble with just one country in it, what would it be?
Teena Glassick:
Italy because I love food and I love that country.
Carly Shearman:
Food, wine, and nice views. What more do you need in a country?
Teena Glassick:
What else can you ask for?
Carly Shearman:
You give up your career in tech today and you have to go train for the 2032 Brisbane Olympics. What’s your sport?
Teena Glassick:
Gymnastics. I like the look of gymnastics. Yeah.
Emily Conaghan:
Who’s playing you in a movie version of your life?
Teena Glassick:
Cate Blanchett. I love her. Yeah.
Emily Conaghan:
And the final question, what do you love about having a career in tech?
Teena Glassick:
The way that it’s always changing and you’re always learning. It never stands still. You are never ever bored. I don’t think I’ve ever had a boring day. There’s always something new. There’s always something to learn. There’s always a new problem to solve. And there’s just such great variety of roles, which I think is awesome.
Thank you for watching What’s The Stack! Looking to hire new talent, seeking new opportunities, or just loved this episode and want to let us know, go ahead and email hi@huntandco.io
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What’s The Stack… roll the credits
Powered by: Hunt and Co.
Executive Producer: Emily Conaghan
Producer: Carly Shearman
Hosted by: Emily Conaghan & Carly Shearman
Support Crew: Elise Le-Galloudec and Matthew Hunt
Video Production by: BITL
Location: The Pancake Manor
Special Guest: Teena Glassick, Director of Support Engineering at Skedulo
A special thanks to The Pancake Manor team and everyone that played a hand in making this project possible.