Lessons in work life harmony

We continue our conversation with Sowmya Gopalan and Ramya Gopalan, the first software twins to be featured on this podcast. In the first part they shared their origin story and also experiences of working in cutting edge technologies. We paused with a question on how they pay it forward to nurture young professionals. In this episode, Sowmya and Ramya continue to share How one might feel hesitant to approach colleagues or seniors, when starting on a career Nurturing the quality of giving space to others in their seniors, particularly to the junior members in the team Being open to solutions and valuing inputs from all; about sharing tasks to be done equally among the team members Their experience of being women in tech Being in a team with more women Now the ratios are more skewed Feeling more comfortable when there are more women colleagues Moving into teams where being the only woman in the team Though bonding well with colleagues irrespective of gender, having women colleagues being more supporting Having a lady mentor when starting one’s career being of great help Their thoughts on metaverse and spaces removed further from reality and need for better regulation and ethics Their thoughts on the importance of data in machine learning and how to address situations where there may not be sufficient data About using non verbal cues in video processing About extracting intelligence from any kind of audio signals Their career advice for persons starting in IT Their approach to balancing work and life.. Work life harmony! Sowmya Gopalan has 12+ years experience in researching and developing computer vision technologies for consumer electronics. With a formal background in signal processing, I specialize in researching, prototyping and developing robust software solutions for image and video understanding. I tend to be most satisfied when I have the opportunity of seeing a product through its entire lifecycle - from concept, to PoC, to production software. I thrive in collaborative, kind and multi-disciplinary settings where interest and drive matter more than qualification. Outside work, you will find me trying out new recipes in the kitchen with Ramya, or reading a book in the historical fiction genre - I am curious about the world wars and modern history in general, so if you have a good book to recommend, feel free to drop in a line at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sowmya-gopalan-1840719/ Ramya Goplan is a software engineer who has worked on various consumer electronic products during her 12 year tenure in Amazon. Her interests and expertise include working on applications that are rooted in traditional signal processing and machine learning science. Having worked on the speech enhancement pipeline for the first gen and next gen Echo and Alexa products, she is slightly partial to speech and audio tech. She finds taking an idea from prototype to optimized embedded C/C++ implementation extremely enjoyable and satisfying. Outside work, Ramya loves to cook, sketch and listen to podcasts about health and wellness; Huberman Lab being her current favorite. You can reach Ramya at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramya-gopalan-b3bb506/