Guest Speaking at #TrivagoTech22: From 'Culture Add' and Hotel Review Data, to Contagious Giving and Data Science Mythbusting!

I love public speaking. I love exploring new topics to present, but also being among the buzz of other techies exploring their work, insights, and questions. So it was with an enthusiastic "YES" that I accepted a spot at trivago 's Tech Get Together: #trivagotech22 .

Earlier in the year, I had met the Head of DevOps, ????Thomas Khalil , at the ContainerDays 2022 conference in Hamburg, where I had been an MC for one of the stages. When I told him I was still looking for events to speak at, he eagerly recommended I get in touch with the organisers of #trivagotech22 .

My talk was developed based on a LinkedIn post (see below) about why I feel we should be transitioning away from the concept of 'culture fit' and towards the concept of 'culture add'. As someone who got into tech in my 30s, as an extroverted woman, from a career in opera, and with a newborn in my arms, the term 'culture fit' always felt alienating to me. Would I really 'fit'? Would anyone want me there?

This post gained a lot of resonance, and I loved turning it into a presentation, brainstorming with Axel Springer Global Head of Diversity Sandra Subel to make sure that I covered not only all the bases of the concept itself, but also effectively addressed common misconceptions or objections.

I arrived in Düsseldorf on Monday night, having spent most of the train trip fine-tuning my presentation, and I arrived bright and early on Tuesday morning for my 9:30am Day 1 slot. The location was impressive but also slightly distracting, as it was an event venue directly next to the runway for the airport! As such we all got treated to some pretty spectacular views during some of the talks.

Given I am currently 7 months pregnant, I cannot pretend this was easy! As time wears on, I am finding myself slowing down, having more trouble sleeping, and therefore also struggling to wake up early. Nevertheless, my natural 'Anna energy' kicked in and I found myself right back in my comfort zone: talking to engineers about cool stuff!

The presentation went well and covered a lot of ground. I try to always keep my talks entertaining but also useful, and the feedback I got afterwards suggested that this went well. (That said, if anyone reading this saw it and has extra feedback, I am all ears!).

I am likely to record a video version of this presentation so that fellow colleagues and interested folk can watch it at their leisure while I'm on maternity leave, so stay tuned!

The contents included:

• Why 'Culture Fit' is an Outdated Concept
• What is 'Culture Add'?
• Why do I care and why should you?
• How do you actually use this mindset and what shouldn't you do?

Once the presentation was over, I got to have some lovely chats with a Senior Engineer (not on LinkedIn) and QA Engineer Aleksandra Hermanowicz : I want to give her a particular shoutout for turning into my main 'conference buddy' and often inviting me into her social groups; it makes conferences much more pleasant to have a friendly face by your side!

After my session, I decided to check out some other presentations, and also came back the next day with the goal of gaining a better understanding of some of the cultural and technical challenges facing a company of a similar size to Axel Springer National Media & Tech GmbH & Co. KG .

There were a three standout presentations which I really want to highlight, and hinted at in the title.

Firstly, Carolina Muradas (also one of the organisers of the event!) gave a presentation titled Hacking the Culture: Intentional actions that create positive change. Recapping the contents of a book on the topic of give and take in the workplace, she clarified that 'selfless giving' often leads to being trodden on, but those who tended towards giving (but not indiscriminately) tended to find themselves at the highest levels of success. This aligned quite nicely with a book I read very early in my career called The Go Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann, which highlights how being the person who 'connects' others can lead to a lot of wonderful opportunities and create a lot of value for your own career as well. Furthermore, as you can see in the picture above, this form of giving can also be contagious, meaning that one giving act can have knock-on effects to the rest of a team and create a more giving culture in general.

Secondly, I loved the presentation by Backend Software Engineering Lead Hans Puac about hotel review data, as well as trivago's challenges and solutions for using this data meaningfully and with certain restraints. I know from personal experience how hard it can be to encapsulate complex systems in an understandable way to an audience with not a lot of time available, so I was very impressed at how well he summarised these and used code comments to guide a lot of the explanations. After the talk, I asked a few additional questions about how interservice linking worked, as well as what amount of data was delivered to the frontend to facilitate tasks like user-based filtering. A huge thank you to Hans for taking the time to talk me through some of those finer details!

Last but not least was Data Science Lead Gerard Paul Leyson , who delivered an entertaining and insightful presentation comparing what the internet thinks data scientists do, with the actual work he and his team undertake. As someone with a background primarily in software engineering and with very little exposure to data science, I found this talk to be especially useful in clarifying not only the role of models, but importantly the role of experimentation as the cornerstone of data-driven solutions. I was particularly impressed with how Gerard managed to convey technical information to a technical audience without ever crossing the line into incomprehensible jargon which could lose those with less exposure to data topics. He was a man in high demand following his talk, but I did take a moment to chat to him about one of the topics he brought up: Why is the job of software engineers so much easier to define and stick to? The general consensus was that data science relies so heavily on the specific field/domain/goals of a project that it can be harder to define what any given task could be. I have a feeling that Gerard and Dr. Christian Leschinski would have some interesting conversations if they were ever both in Berlin or Düsseldorf at the same time!

In the afternoon of the second day I grabbed some pastries and did a bit of networking with F.A.M.E, the women's networking community of trivago. It was lovely to be so warmly welcomed, and also to spot familiar faces who had been at my talk the day before. This was also my last opportunity to chat to some of my conference buddies and say my goodbyes!

Funnily enough though, I still made one more 'conference friend': waiting at the train station to go back to my hotel, I spotted someone who had sat behind me during Carolina's presentation. "You're the one with the British accent who was sitting behind me!" I said cheerfully. She laughed and replied, "You're the one who made the book recommendation!". My last contact of the event, and a good train conversation buddy, ended up therefore being Mobile QA Engineer Lele L.

Before I close out, I want to give a huge shoutout, thank you, and congratulations to Andreea Conciu-Ruse who helped coordinate my participation in the event (and was one of the lead organisers on the entire thing!) as well as to trivago CTO Jaroslav Bláha , who was a ray of joyful sunshine at the event and had a lovely chat with me about my musical background and our combined memories of the internet in the 1990s.

Overall it was a wonderful event and I'm so glad I was able to take part and represent Axel Springer National Media & Tech GmbH & Co. KG in my own small way.