My name's Katie Johnson and I'm a data scientist.

Johnson is 31 years old and lives in London.

She grew up near Bristol, went to university in Birmingham and since then, has held a series

of increasingly impressive jobs at a series of companies.

These were all what are known as IC jobs, IC standing for individual contributor, which

means what?

It is someone who makes, as opposed to managing people who make.

Johnson loved being an IC.

She loved analyzing data and she was really good at her job.

But after a while, she thought it might be nice to become a boss.

Yeah, I wanted to manage more and more people.

And you wanted to manage more people because why?

You were just power hungry like the rest of us?

I think there's a couple of reasons.

So the first is that I wanted to start getting more autonomy over what I was working on.

I would be working on stuff in my IC role and I think this isn't the most important thing.

And I thought that if I became the leader of the team, then I would get to pick what

I worked on.

Okay, that seems sensible.

The other reason was to have more impact at the companies I was working at.

So you could describe this as having a seat at the table.

Also sensible.

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