Rashmi Muralidharan, Technical Staff Member at VMware and Leadership Fellow at the Women Who Code Cloud Track, sits down with Mansi Shah, Senior Staff Engineer at VMware and Women Who Code Advisory Board Member. They discuss the importance of bringing your authentic self to the table so that you can play to your strengths and how leadership comes in more forms than management. Mansi also shares that she flies planes and races cars.Tell us more about your career journey. I started my career in storage at IBM Research. As a researcher, I had an embedded systems background at my school but chose to go to IBM Research. It feels like the mecca of distributed databases and data services. After about four years, I joined VMware as an early engineer on a new storage technology called vSAN. It's the HCI, a hyper-converged storage solution from VMware, and is a multi-billion dollar industry.They were the best years of my life when we were building vSAN. All the young engineers on the team had undisputed faith in our actions. Anytime you work on something a bit disruptive, that's cutting edge. Having that faith lets you go through the hardship necessary to get to the other side. I made some excellent friends. Some were my colleagues, some mentors, and some people who still champion me to date. It was rewarding.I left and went to a startup that was not fun. I came back to VMware. I've led several different storage and data initiatives after that within VMware. Now I'm primarily focused on satisfying our warehouse and data portfolio. I've not had many jumps in my career, but the few I've had, internally and externally, have always been the inflection points of growth. What are the phases of the IC that led to your leadership role? To start, I want to debunk the myth that being a manager is the only way to get a leadership role. Being a manager opens up many different avenues, but that's not the only way to do it. When I was much younger and a junior engineer, my work focused on producing the best possible, best-quality code for the given task. You go a little further from there, and you start asking lots of why questions and understanding the more extensive technical ecosystem in which a product sits. You see the touchpoints. You see how it interacts with other products or things within your stack. You try and start offering advice or ideas on how to do something better, improve quality, or improve performance. I think the next phase from there is a small leap into the business world. My few years at the startup helped me reframe my mindset. Do you start thinking more about the core business your company is in? What are your sales channels? How is this product getting to the market? How are customers interacting with it? What are the incentive structures for the sales teams trying to sell this? All of this adds to what you should and should not build within your product. Typically this kind of thinking comes from product leaders, management, and business leaders. Authentic leadership may not be possible if you write code, which is a fair way to live your technical life. If you want a more significant impact, try to figure out how you can mix this business and technical mindset and bring the most value from that angle to the organization.You have a solid technical background. Do you follow a routine to update your skills? I don't participate in the typical hustle culture shared in the Valley and the technical field. I have too many interests to hustle technically constantly. I spend at least 20% to 25% of my time keeping myself abreast of what's happening in the industry, what new things are coming up, and where I need to focus. I look after a reasonably broad portfolio now. I have to understand what's happening. I listen to podcasts on my run, read books during the evening, and do lots of online reading. I would take online classes for things I want to go deep into. VMware will sponsor you to keep upskilling. If your company gives you that, go for it. Take advantage. Why do you enjoy working in systems space, and is it still an exciting area for new grads to explore? I enjoy being in systems because it is a bit counterintuitive. I'm a bit of a control freak. I must understand the entire stack of software I'm working against. What are the limits of the system? How is the memory being handled underneath? What's happening? Not knowing all that was one of the key reasons I focused so much on systems in my earlier days. It helps me understand the intricacies. For example, I was learning about Pandas, the Python library. One day, I tried to understand it before stopping and saying functionally, " Okay, I need to understand how they do memory management underneath. What are their looping constructs? If I don't understand that, I don't know when I can use this, and then I need to move to something like Spark for my workload.The second part of your question was, is this still a good field? We are creating thousands and thousands of petabytes of data every single day. It is a thriving field for anyone who wants to be in data. As a whole, systems also have lots of exciting stuff. There's the networking and the computer and all the other things. But if you ask me about data and storage, many fun things are happening here daily. The storage companies are pushing heavily on the performance and capacity limits of the virtual drives we get. I read that by 2025, a single gig will cost one cent. These are giant leaps in core storage technology. Many innovations happen in the file and block-level storage systems that sit just right on the hardware. I think the more fun work is one level up in the data engines that are getting built on top of this file and block level.Can you talk about a challenge you had to overcome during your career? The system space tends to be a relatively male-dominant space. At least when I started 10, or 15 years back, it was pretty male-dominant. I don't think that was ever a problem for me. You must figure out what core strengths you can bring and outshine in any group. What can you differentiate and contribute to the group? Very quickly, as I started working in the space, I realized that I'm not like most of the other engineers in the space who like to spend hours and hours trying to find how to improve, say, the CPU performance by five cycles or how to squeeze out the last 10 bytes of memory. One of my strengths is understanding the big picture of various complex components and figuring out how to put them together impactfully. How do you rally and network people together behind a familiar technical role? That is not a strength I saw commonly among the people I was working with. Instead of trying to be something I was not, I pivoted on my strength. I became the go-to person when something had to be put together when multiple teams had to be worked together. You have to think about what you can do that is you, that will be both useful for the group and make you successful.What brought you to VMware and your current role?They were kicking off this tiny little project called vSAN. A few senior people from VMware convinced me this was the best thing to happen to me and that I should do it. I jumped in, and I have never looked back. I feel like this company is part of my identity. It has taught me much about people, values, culture, growth, and everything. I get asked, you've been here ten years? Why are you still here? That's not a common thing in the Valley. I'm here because I'm happy, growing, and believe in the company.What are you passionate about apart from work? I travel a lot. I run off every single opportunity I get. I'm a licensed pilot. I fly, and I race cars. I do interior design for my friends, my parents, and anyone who will let me. I love gardening and volunteering for things that I'm genuinely passionate about. There are a few, but mental health is one of my most extensive passions. To answer your question in a more traditional work-life balance kind of way, I don't have kids, and it's a personal choice. I have many other things that I need to sort of nurture. Tell us a little more about your mental health journey. This is very personal to me. I have recently decided to become a very vocal advocate for people taking care of their mental health. I don't know who might benefit from hearing my story. If one person benefits, that is a considerable return to me personally. Also, we need to destigmatize this whole mental health thing. I don't know if what helped me will help others, but I want to say that if you try to figure out the right tools, there is light at the end of the tunnel. I have suffered from depression for almost all of my life. It was from my childhood. I found some tools that have let me move to the other side. Dreams, aspirations, career success, and everything, can coexist with depression and anxiety, and whatever else you might be feeling. Find the right help for yourself. It was a great set of supportive colleagues and mentors who always questioned my sometimes dysfunctional thoughts and sometimes stopped me from self-sabotaging myself. I am so lucky to have a really good therapist. Meditation, exercise, and all those things, whatever the combination, don't give up on yourself.What are your pro tips for women in technology? Be yourself, play your strengths, and don't try to be someone you're not. Don't try to push yourself into a square hole if you're a round peg. Bring your most authentic, genuine self and see how much you can shine by doing that. Don't be scared of asking questions. The only thing that can happen by you asking a question is you have a better understanding. Others also benefit, and next time you ask better questions. Fight for yourself. You will have champions, you will have mentors, you will have all these people, but no one is going to fight for you the way you can fight for yourself. Don't fall into victimhood. We need to be there for ourselves more than anyone else.
