CIO OPINION
I moved around F5 for years into different roles until I landed in the office of the CTO to help with strategy and vision and thought leadership .
Lori MacVittie , Principal Technical Evangelist , Office of the CTO , F5 Networks
A woman ’ s world : Achieving C-suite success and challenging stereotypes
It ’ s no secret that being female in the IT industry can mean a long , hard struggle to get to the top . We hear from Lori MacVittie , Principal Technical Evangelist , Office of the CTO , F5 Networks , who discusses the struggles she ’ s experienced as a woman in technology and the lessons she ’ s learned along the way .
cCan you tell us about your role and
how you landed in your position ?
My current role is to basically distil very complex , technical concepts into something that people can understand . F5 is , at its core , a very technical company . We deliver applications and we secure them , so we ' re into everything from the network to applications – the Internet is very much where we operate , so there ' s a lot of moving parts .
It ' s my job to look at that , look at the trends and technologies that are coming and see how that impacts what we do , how we interact with applications , how we make them faster , how we secure them , as well as then try to explain all that technical jargon to the market at large .
I started as a developer and moved into this publishing testing world where we would test all sorts of technical equipment and then write about it . I was really good at the technical piece , not so good at the writing piece to begin with , because that ' s something you have to learn – not everyone just has that talent .
Through the eternal patience of many editors , I learned how to write in a way that was consumable and eventually ended up at F5 . I moved around F5 for years into different roles until I landed in the office of the CTO to help with strategy and vision and thought leadership .
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