Industry Discussion
on Tech Burnout

  • Vice President of Digital Platform Engineering at Nike and leads all elements of powering the Nike Direct Consumer experience, with a re-usable, seamless platform. Her teams are focusing on core commerce services (browse, search, checkout, payment, launch, inventory, fulfillment), user services (login, profile, identity, notifications), consumer data engineering, personalization, content ecosystem (authoring, creation, digital assets, workflow) member services and global retail solutions. Prior to joining Nike, Courtney was the VP of Retail Technology at Starbucks where she was responsible for the global POS and retail store technology experiences.

I started in startups, and so it was like a badge of honor to pull an all nighter and stay up and deploy code, and you got back up and you went right back to work the next day. And somehow our industry has not lost that. It's still something that people talk about like, oh, if you're not sitting at your desk for 12 hours a day, then you mustn't be committed. And it's so opposite.

  • John Willis has worked in the IT management industry for more than 35 years. He was formerly Director of Ecosystem Development at Docker. Prior to Docker, Willis was the VP of Solutions for Socketplane (sold to Docker) and Enstratius (sold to Dell). Prior to to Socketplane and Enstratius, Willis was the VP of Training and Services at Opscode, where he formalized the training, evangelism, and professional services functions at the firm. Willis also founded Gulf Breeze Software, an award-winning IBM business partner, which specializes in deploying Tivoli technology for the enterprise. Willis has authored six IBM Redbooks on enterprise systems management and was the founder and chief architect at Chain Bridge Systems.

I had no idea that I was fire engine red. I was in the highest percentile for efficacy. Like beyond the joke of like kind of fabricated to make it look good. It was beyond that. And then what it did actually for me is I was at Docker time, I was remote, and I was getting very frustrated that they were doing a lot of decisions without me. I had ten startups. I'm like, why aren't they asking me?

  • Chief Architect & VP Software Development. Scott supports the North America Development teams that deliver CSG’s hosted Billing & Customer Care Platform. Scott has broad experience across development and operations functions from startups to large enterprises. Scott is a Lean enthusiast and his mission is to help others learn and improve their environment to maximize value delivery to customers. Previously, Scott was CTO of Telution and built the core runtime and billing architecture for the COMx product suite. Scott lives in Chicago with his wife and 3 kids. In his spare time, he perfects pizza, enjoys wine and code.

When we did a culture IQ and started measuring nps and employee nps and our first culture IQ results, when we came back, there are thousands of comments, but there were a ton of comments, really, around work life balance. Right. Which a lot of people saying that, you know, is not sustainable. And so that kind of really hit me.