Jessicachanstudios

Career Coaching

For a free 30-minute session to see if my coaching style is right for you, please feel free to use this booking link.

What I like to coach

I provide coaching to individual contributors (ICs) and front-line managers, especially engineering managers (EMs), on career topics like:

  • career roadmaps, goal-setting, navigating difficult work situations,
  • breaking into the tech industry, creating opportunities for impact and leadership
  • career transitions including going from IC to manager, managing multiple teams
  • creating cross-functional long-term strategies, earning trust and credibility at a new company
  • becoming more emotionally resilient
  • job hunting & interviewing, career design, and more.

Where I draw my experience

I come from a non-traditional background for someone in software– I was an English and economics major in college– and broke into tech as a SWE. I have a background spanning 20 years in a variety of software domains. I've worked in front-end web, DevEx & infrastructure, back-end performance, general infrastructure, observabilty, SRE, and realtime storage (OLTP NoSQL & MySQL).

My experience at companies includes a wide range from 3-person startups and agencies to corporate companies like Brocade and SquareTrade (AllState) and large tech companies like Pinterest and Google. I have worked in marketing, social media, editing and project management. I have 5+ years of management experience after 15 years as an individual contributor.

I'm familiar with tech company career ladders, having been at Pinterest, Airtable, Google, and worked my way from contractor to full-time, to senior engineer, tech lead, staff software engineer, engineering manager, then taking multiple teams, then leading strategy at a brand new company. My current role is Engineering Manager on the databases team in Google Cloud.

If you'd like a perspective from someone who has had a very wide range of work experience, has been the only woman or underrepresented minority on a leadership team, has bootstrapped mutiple marketable skills through self-learning, has learned a lot about how to survive and dial into strengths, and has experience developing intuition and resiliency when faced with new situations, please reach out. I love coaching and getting to know other people's challenges and helping them solve problems.

Taking the first step

I offer a 30 minute initial consultation chat to get context and talk through anything you'd like (free, no obligation).

If continuing beyond that sounds like it would be useful to you, I can share more about the coaching arrangement that I offer, which also involves no obligation or subscription. I mainly have clients who reach out to me whenever they want to talk through something, so it's pretty lightweight.

I charge an hourly rate after the initial consultation, and for anyone that is in contract with me I am also available via email for no additional charge (within reason :)

If this sounds interesting to you, please use this link to book some time: https://calendly.com/jessdotchan/30min-consult

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out on my contact page.