My Thoughtworks journey: Rebecca Parsons

Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

Thoughtworks

Careers, Business, 907234, Technology

4.7 • 53 Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2023

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Thoughtworks CTO Rebecca Parsons has had a long and varied career in technology. Even before joining Thoughtworks in 1999, she completed a PhD, worked as a postdoc researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and taught at the University of Central Florida. Becoming CTO in 2007, she has seen Thoughtworks — and the wider tech industry — evolve through a period in which the business mainstream has become increasingly comfortable with cutting-edge innovation.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Neal Ford and Birgitta Böckeler talk to Rebecca about her career, starting from Caterpillar warehouses in Peoria, Illinois, to being awarded the Technical Leadership Abie Award by AnitaB.org. It's the latest episode in our ongoing mini-series of Thoughtworker Journeys, offering an insight into the diverse and sometimes surprising experiences of technologists at Thoughtworks.

Learn more about AnitaB.org: https://anitab.org/

Read the new edition of Rebecca's book, Building Evolutionary Architectures: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/books/building-evolutionaryarchitectures-second-edition

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome everyone to the ThoughtWorks Technology Podcast.
0:12.0	I am one of your regular hosts, Neil Ford, and I'm joined today by another of our regular host, Brigitte.
0:18.0	Yes, hi, I'm Begeta Bukla, and I'm recording today from Berlin, Germany.
0:25.0	And we are doing today one of our series of podcasts that we call the Thoughtworker Journey
0:33.0	podcast, where we take someone who's been at ThoughtWorks for a while, who has been at several interesting roles,
0:40.2	and we're interested in the sort of career path that they got to, or they managed to get to that position,
0:48.8	which is a clumsy way of saying it's the Thought Worker Journey podcast.
0:53.2	And the Thought Work worker that we're discussing
0:56.5	the journey with today is another voice that you will certainly recognize if you are
1:01.1	frequent listener to our podcast. It is our very own CTO and one of the other hosts, Rebecca
1:07.6	Parsons. Hello, Rebecca. Hello, Neil. Hello, Marigita. Happy to be here. So the last one of the other hosts, Rebecca Parsons. So, hello, Rebecca. Hello, Neil. Hello, Mariguta. Happy to be here.
1:13.6	So the last one of these journey podcasts that we did was with Gojiao, our CEO. And he was interesting
1:22.3	because he had no real career before ThoughtWorks. He started, his first job was ThoughtWorks as a developer
1:29.7	and then became eventually through many years and many experiences CEO. Rebecca is perhaps the
1:37.3	polar opposite of that. And it's had many interesting twists and turns before she made it to ThoughtWorks and then even within ThoughtWorks.
1:46.4	So let's talk about Rebecca's journey as a technologist and how Dr. Rebecca Parsons ended up as the chief technology officer at ThoughtWorks.
1:58.8	So the best place to start really is, um, in my freshman algebra class, um, because, um,
2:09.4	we had moved from a small town in Wisconsin to Peoria, Illinois, which for me was, you know, a big city.
2:21.7	The school district in Peoria thought, well, you know, she's coming from this small rural
2:28.6	school district.
2:30.8	Well, I had actually been in a special program.
2:34.7	And so in the fifth grade, I took freshman algebra.
	...

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