Profile

Oracle builds business software.  Companies use our software to manage everything from building rockets to managing banks.  Oracle’s suite of applications includes software for accounting, shipping logistics and analytics.  Our end customers are business users.  They need to be able to understand how to get the most value out of our software.

I translate between the super techy people and normal business users.  This is the position that I’ve come into after being at Oracle for almost 20 years.  It isn’t what I set out to do when I started but over time I learned that my strengths were in being able to understand the technology and explain it to somebody who may not be technical.

I work at Oracle’s headquarters in Redwood Shores in a beautiful set of buildings.  I work from the office 3-4 days a week.  I have a nice office. There’s a gym, which is nice.  It helps me balance my stress level.  I try to integrate exercise into my daily life.  It ends us giving me back more energy.
Oracle also has restaurants on site and dry-cleaning.  They make it easy to stay at work.  It’s good for the company and employees to get some of the life management activities done at work.  I work from home 1-2 days a week.

I work with software developers and sales people, both sales reps and the people who do demonstrations of products.  I also work with marketing people and people who help us formulate the key messages in advertisements.  I also work with customers.

I often have to learn new products. I listen to podcasts and attend training workshops that we give internally.  Then I have to create presentations and other documents that distill that information and make it understandable to a different audience.  For example, I make it easier to understand by changing the words and adding graphics.

I do a lot of learning and networking with many people in the company.  

Organization is key.  The ability to listen is also key.  You learn a lot from other people and their perspective.

I now have a full time schedule.  I have a six-year-old and a three-year-old.  When I was just coming back from maternity leave with my first child, I was on a reduced schedule.  Over the years I have ramped up back to full time. That means between 35-50 hours a week.  It varies by the week.  Some weeks are intense.  I can usually keep it in a normal zone but it can be challenging in an environment like Oracle when people definitely work way more than a typical 40 hour week. 

On the days I go into the office, usually Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, I get in at 8:00 or 9:00 and work until the end of the day when I pick up my children.  On Thursday and Friday I usually work from home or from Oracle’s office in San Francisco, which breaks up my week.   It puts me in touch with different people.  It stimulates my creativity and my willingness to work and get excited about it.  Working from home is nice because I can work in my running clothes.  I can do more of the work that doesn’t require interaction in person with other people.  It feels comfortable.  It’s a little more relaxed atmosphere if you don’t have to get all dressed in the morning.  As a mom, if I can save the time from showering and putting on makeup, that’s a great thing.

I don’t travel anymore. I have in past roles. That was fun.  Right now, it’s not something that I do.  It would be a challenge with my kids right now.

I love being able to share what I’ve learned with other people.  I like working with smart people who I can learn from.

Not really.  I have always had a great experience with Oracle. I think that’s why I’ve been there so long.  They make it really nice to go to work. 
I have been lucky enough through the years to find a position that uses my skills.

Ambition.  Seeing it in other people who have aligned their ambition with their passion.

My dad and not in a typical way.  We would lay out in the backyard at night and watch stars and talk about the future and what I wanted to be when I grew up.  He built in me the sense of wonder and of creating yourself over a lifetime.

The best advice and the worst advice was the same comment from my boss.  He delivered it in a stern way:  “Amy, don’t boil the ocean.”  It was terrible advice at the time.  I didn’t like him for that.  I thought he was restricting my sphere of influence and he wasn’t appreciating what I was trying to do for the company. 

But it was actually really good advice.  After sitting with it for a while I realized that I wasn’t as effective as I could be because I was thinking about so many aspects to a problem that I wasn’t making progress.  He helped me narrow my focus and start chipping off the parts of the problem in sequential order rather than dealing with the whole problem at once. 
Don’t make things bigger than they are.  If you are facing a big problem, break it down into component parts and go after it one piece at a time.

Go create a relationship.  Go meet someone that is doing what you would like to do and see if you can help them.  When I was a kid, I thought I was going to be a dentist.  I patrolled around. I met a dentist I really liked and asked if I could work in the office.  That didn’t end up being what I did when I went to college but I liked interacting with adults and learning about a real job.  That’s a fun way to explore the environments you like to be in, what you like to do, and the people you like to meet.

I don’t think so.  I really appreciate the learning that’s come from each stage of my life.  I would definitely still go to college. 

I just wish that I’d had a little more belief in myself and my interests when I was a younger woman in college.  Just trust that voice inside that tells you what to major in.  Rather than “I need to go work for a bank training program.” That’s where I started. Commercial lending was big in the 80’s. I thought I had to do that.

I enjoy jogging.  I’m starting to get back into the bar method and weight training. I like to read.  I like to play with my children and take them to San Francisco.  We spend a lot of time up there in our joint interests exploring the local food businesses and the city.  I’m introducing them to my friends. We play in the kitchen and it’s really nice to integrate my family with my interests and my friends.  That’s how I prefer to spend any free time in the kitchen with my friends having a little party cooking up something together.

Teaching is the core of my passion.  I like doing multiple jobs.  I’ve learned that I don’t have to be just one thing.  I have a patchwork aspect to my career right now that I’m comfortable with.

I’ve always been interested in cooking and food.  For many years while I was working at Oracle I tried to reconcile those passions with my normal job.  What I really liked about food was discovering how to make healthy food and sharing that with others.  I enjoy teaching other people how to get the same enjoyment out of shopping for and preparing food for their friends and family as I do. 

Creativity in the kitchen gives me a lot of peace.  I discovered that if you can center yourself, be present and involved in the creativity of the process and get your children involved in the creativity of the process it is fun.  It really brings people together.

A blog was an easy way for me to self publish the recipes that I created.  A blogger platform is easy to learn.

The creativity and knowing that some people are looking at it.It inspires me to create something new on a regular basis.I like being able to share what I’ve learned with other people. 

I stopped saying the word balance to myself.  In my mind, I cannot escape the scale that has two things that are trying to get equal balance.  I’ve changed to the word integrate. I think that is a better word for me because it supports the notion that on a given day or in a given week some things are going to take priority over other things.

I’ve had a huge year this year. My husband died in an accident last fall when he was backpacking. It was a real rock to all of our worlds. It shook us to the core. I have found amazing support through my friends and network of neighbors and people at work who have buoyed me up. I feel stronger now. 

Our world is bigger because I have finally learned how to ask for help and receive help.  That’s the key for me now. I’m able to do what I do at work and with my other interests and be a mom by accepting help from other people. I have childcare help on certain days. I have friends help me with kids, food, and shopping. I’ve learned that it’s okay to do.  It lets me focus on what I want do whether it’s doing something special with my children, or working at Oracle, or writing a new recipe for my blog. 

Getting help lets me spend the time where I most want to. It’s not always easy.  There are times when I think I need to dial things back a little because I am interested in so many things. But that’s the kind of person that I am. I need to plan in the time to take care of myself, to exercise, to center myself regularly so I can be present and get the most out of each day even though it is busy. I don’t want to be frenetic in my pace but I do like to do a lot of things.  If I’m careful getting exercise and rest, I’m usually in good shape.

Back in college I thought that if you wanted to go into software, and I didn’t even know what that was at the time, you have to have a computer science degree.  That’s not how it turned out for me.

I have a degree in agricultural and managerial economics from UC Davis.  It is the closest thing to an overall business degree.  We used agriculture in our case studies and learned about futures trading but it was really a platform for me to learn finance, accounting, and economics principals. 

From there I went to a bank-training program that lasted a year.

I spent 3 months at Nordstroms because I knew banking wasn’t for me.  I was convinced that I could be a store manager very quickly.  I didn’t’ like that.  All of my customers were buying beautiful clothes. I kept asking them where they worked and they all said Oracle, Oracle, Oracle. The sister of one of my college friends worked at Oracle and I interviewed for their finance department.

In my early days at Oracle we had a rotation program through all of the different areas of corporate finance. We would go through and learn the business and implement changes. 

Also, we used the software that Oracle was developing at the time.  Using the software was more interesting to me than closing the books at the end of the month.  I was curious how the software made the system print checks to the supplier.  It was really cool.  Pretty quickly I switched over to the software development arm at Oracle.  My knowledge of the purpose of the business software has helped me identify with our users.

I’ve had the best career with Oracle because they have been so flexible with me.  They are very smart. They hire people who they know have potential. Then, they want to help you find the right fit within the company.  My experience has been great.

My husband died in a backpacking accident last year.  The key to overcoming a challenge like a death in the family is finding your inner strength and realizing that you don’t have to do it by yourself.  Not having family in the area made it easier for me to ask for help. 

This is the major event in my life that made me realize that I can’t do everything myself.  I’m a very independent person and I’m very capable. I’ve always been able to do what’s been demanded of me until this.  This was the event that made me reach out. It made my world bigger. It’s ended up being a great thing –- not losing my husband -- but finding these other friends and large network of support who helped me when I needed it. I’d built the network over many years but I didn’t see it in action until I needed it. It came to life.  It was incredible.