Yvonne Coppinger discusses the skills she learned in the early days of her career, the joy of never knowing what skills will be needed next and mentoring the future leaders of the industry.
A senior site reliability engineer (SRE) at Rent the Runway, Yvonne Coppinger is of the belief that “no skill is ever wasted”. Having not written a line of code until she turned 25, many of the skills she uses now were picked up through “different experiences along the way”.
Coppinger told SiliconRepublic.com, “I firmly believe no skill is ever wasted, because there’s always somewhere to apply it if you want to. I’ve built papier-mâché robots for a team demo and last year I ran an acrylic pour painting workshop for our team at Rent the Runway.”
What skills do you use in your role and are any surprising?
All the ones you’d expect, Kubernetes, Terraform and Google Cloud. My speciality is the software delivery lifecycle, so I focus on how developers get their code from one place to another consistently and securely while meeting all of our compliance requirements. One of the most important skills I’ve built over my career is troubleshooting. At any moment I might need to drop my planned work to help a stakeholder, because unblocking people now always takes priority over future improvements. Being able to get to grips with a problem quickly, read the logs, and find a solution is key.
Communication is invaluable too. I’m a firm believer in STEM youth outreach and for many years I taught HTML, CSS and Python to secondary school students. That taught me how to take complex programming topics and explain them to people who’d never seen a line of code, well enough that they could build a website or a simple game in a single day. I use that skill in every part of my work, because communication happens all day, every day.
What is your day-to-day like as a senior site reliability engineer?
At its core, an SRE’s job is to keep the company’s systems reliable, fast and scalable. On any given day that might mean a planned project to improve things for our stakeholders, a routine upgrade, or automating a manual process that slows us down. Then an incident or an urgent security fix can turn the whole plan upside down. When I started, the sheer amount there was to learn felt daunting, but that variety is exactly what keeps the job interesting and every disruption teaches me something new.
What are some of the challenges associated with building and maintaining the talent pipeline?
Galway has a vibrant tech scene, which is great, but it also means people move between companies a lot. Rather than seeing that as a problem, we treat it as a reason to keep improving; upskilling the people we have, supporting internal moves between teams and getting good at ramping people up quickly, whether they’re joining at entry level or as senior engineers.
The pipeline also starts long before anyone applies for a job. I’ve been heavily involved in STEM outreach in secondary schools. Not long ago, programming wasn’t on the curriculum at all, so students had no way of knowing whether they had an aptitude for it. I speak from experience. I went to college as a mature student and stumbled across programming by accident in the third year of a business degree. I just wish I’d had the chance to try it much sooner.
One of the most important things organisations can do is invest time in future engineers with groups like Teen-Turn, which give teenage girls hands-on experience through work placements and after-school activities. Building brand awareness at college career fairs and offering internships are also valuable. Rent the Runway has an intern program and stays in touch through their final year so they can return as full-time early-career employees. When they come back on day one, they already know the ins and outs of the business and can get straight into working and learning. I’m very passionate about mentoring interns and junior engineers. If there isn’t a steady stream of students choosing STEM and then being hired as junior engineers, there won’t be senior and staff engineers in the future.
What qualifications or skills might make a job-seeker stand out when applying for a role on your team?
Technical skills matter and SRE covers such a wide range of disciplines that any technical skill will come in useful at some point. I specialise in software delivery, but I still need to triage and resolve issues in other areas of the platform. What makes a candidate stand out to me is a proven track record of troubleshooting tricky issues and persisting until they’re resolved. Leadership matters too. Taking a project from start to finish, whether it’s small or spans multiple teams, is a skill that comes from experience.
If someone can demonstrate that in an interview, it’s definitely a plus. At Rent the Runway, we put people before skills. When I joined, I hadn’t used Terraform, which is a core tool for our team, but I had plenty of relevant experience in the space and the team was willing to invest time in helping me ramp up.
Have you any advice for how an applicant might navigate the process of applying?
My biggest piece of advice, especially for women, is to apply even if you don’t tick every box. Women often hold back unless they meet every single requirement on the job spec and I’ve been guilty of that myself. Don’t worry about being an exact skills match. When I applied last year, I had plenty of DevOps experience but very little in the online retail space. What I loved about the process was that, right from the start, I was reassured they were more interested in what I could bring as a person than in a one-to-one skills match.
There’s an understanding that people can learn and transfer what they know from one technology to another. For me, a big one was moving from OpenStack to GCP. The new interface took some getting used to, but the principles are the same. Be authentic and honest about what you know and what you don’t. Don’t try to fake a skill; lean on your transferable skills instead. I was upfront that my skills didn’t exactly match the job spec and my interviews focused on my leadership competencies; my experience mentoring people, the projects I’d led, the problems I’d solved and innovations I’d developed within my team. An interview is a two-way conversation to work out whether you and the team are a good fit for each other.
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