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. I guess the final reason is that we all kind of, not everyone, I guess,

but I was included in this, have a concept that being

more successful means being more senior. And so in order to not necessarily show others,

but definitely myself that I had achieved and become successful, I needed to keep moving

...