Why Devs Break Up with Their Bosses w/ Oliver Wyman's Carolyn Vo

**Carolyn Vo** (0:00)
We do temperature checks on people, because you have to, right? You don't get that continuity, and you just wait until they decide to break up with you one day, and you're like, oh, wait, what happened, why?

**Dan Lines** (0:08)
You said you were happy, you just said you were happy.

**Carolyn Vo** (0:11)
That's happening to people too, I'm not happy.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:15)
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**Dan Lines** (0:55)
Hey, what's up, everyone? Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today I'm joined by Carolyn Vo, partner and head of engineering at Oliver Wyman.
Carolyn, welcome to the show.

**Carolyn Vo** (1:10)
Yeah, thanks for having me.

**Dan Lines** (1:12)
Yeah, awesome to have you here. Would love to start out by giving our audience the opportunity to get to know you a little bit better.
So can you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, your background, your career?

**Carolyn Vo** (1:28)
Sure. So currently I'm a partner and head of engineering as you announced, but that was never in my, ever in my sphere of what I want to do. You know, an engineer goes, I want to be a partner at a management consulting firm, right? So my career has been interesting. I've just kind of found my own way, started off as an intern at Silicon Graphics way back in the day. I think I just dated myself.
And it just kind of went along with the flow of whatever I felt like I wanted to do. Because I think most people go take that trajectory upwards and you go backwards, right? Then you're just a failure. But I just kind of was like, some days I was like, think I'm ready to go back to engineering. And I would do that. And some days I'd be like, you know, like I'm ready for like a management kind of role. And I do that. So my career path has been a little bit just kind of weird in the unconventional way. Because sometimes I wanted to go back to being a maker. Sometimes I wanted to go to leadership roles.
And then I found this opportunity as actually a contractor when I decided to embark on my contract or freelance life. Because you get to choose what you want to do for how long. You're going to choose what technology is going to work on. So that was appealing to me.
But the next thing I know, I'm like, wait, what started off as three months turned into now, it's like over 10 years I've been at the firm, which is kind of crazy, to be honest with you.
Never been anywhere that long. But I think that's a good sign where I just, I honestly have not been just keeping track of the time. Cause I just like, there's so much close up going on.

**Dan Lines** (2:47)
Yeah, I saw that you have an awesome background. You know, computer science background, software engineer, saw you doing some stuff with like C-sharp, possibly Microsoft Stack. And then I see you going a little bit back and forth, like you said, like team leader, maybe hands on team leader, manager, engineer, and then, you know, where you are today.
Is there anything that happened to you when you were kind of going back and forth between like maker, manager, like how did you decide or like what would make you want to do the two different sides?

**Carolyn Vo** (3:23)
I felt like it was a combination of things. That's a really good question. It was like, what did I just go ready for? My gut was just like, okay, I'm bored of working on the 50th, you know, Jira ticket for the same product I've been working on for like X months or years. And it was like, what do I want to do next? You can always choose a different project, but it's still more of the same.
You want to change the subject matter and just get kind of bored with the things you're doing, the technologies you're working on.