Jasprit Panaich on searching for a life beyond coding and the 2 transformational questions she likes to ask other women in tech

Jasprit Panaich’s early interest in tech was fueled by a love of video games. Faced with a broken computer and a wish to play, she began to fix and optimize her computer to be able to play video games on it.

“I like the curiosity of it, I could just tinker away and break it, then learn how to fix it.” Jasprit, senior manager, site reliability engineering at Elastic®, says. 

Jasprit studied in schools that specialized in IT and computing, but at university, she was the only woman in the lecture hall of 50 people. As someone who played male-dominated sports growing up, she didn’t notice at first.

“I was blind to being the only woman in the room,” she says. “I didn’t have the self-awareness to recognize that it was strange. It was hard work, but I’m stubborn and I wanted to do it [work in tech].”

She was also certain she didn’t want to be a programmer — coding wasn’t something she loved enough to do it daily. When searching for a life beyond coding, she found that engineering is multi-faceted. For her, network engineering had the full package and was her first role upon graduating.  

“When I was at work, it was really eye opening to be exposed to more than simply writing lines of code daily,” Jasprit says. “Tech isn’t just about programming, it’s beautifully broad and tech has people at the heart of it."

Her first job in network engineering was to build, automate, and stabilize global networks. Determined to learn more, she took on more responsibility and along the way discovered site reliability engineering (SRE). 

“During my night shifts, I would read up and study on how to make things more reliable,” Jasprit says. “And again, it was curiosity that fueled a lot of my work. I always strived for excellence, so to do that with engineering was incredibly fascinating.”

After a work shift, she wanted to unwind by playing a video game, but it was offline. She thought more could be done to prevent that, so she took a risk and emailed the company who created the game with her resume and a promise that she could keep it online. 

The company took Jasprit up on her offer and she moved to Ireland to work in network operations, specializing in reliability engineering.

“No two days in SRE are ever the same and I love that,” she says. “You have to have the empathy and understanding to merge reliability engineering, marketing, customer support, and retention to get to operational excellence. That’s a big theme in SRE.”

After seven years, Jasprit moved back to England and joined Elastic’s SRE team for Elastic Cloud Platform.

“I loved Elastic’s ethos on cloud,” she says. “Elastic has a program called Elastic Cares, where we can all donate, volunteer, and direct product donations to causes we care about. I can help charities host on Elastic Cloud.” 

At Elastic, Jasprit works to strengthen SRE by guaranteeing uptime and operational excellence through automation. 

“It’s a wonderful experience to use all of my skills and experience working with people and in different backgrounds and bringing that into Elastic to get the best out of the people around me,” she says. 

Jasprit’s team is a combination of software engineers and site reliability engineers. Together, they work to develop, integrate, and maintain the health of the Elastic Search AI Platform. Ultimately, they ensure Elastic customers can retain high quality use of the platform at any time. 

And with a range of skillsets in a globally distributed environment, Jasprit thinks of her team as the Swiss Army knife of SRE — they can tackle any issue.

As Jasprit’s career grew into leadership and management, she became more self-aware of being the only woman in the room. On a mission to change that, she invested in educating herself on how to coach for excellence and mentors, both officially and informally, other women in tech. 

During an executive leadership course for women, Jasprit realized that women have a unique advantage in their set of skills that can translate to better results and leadership.

With those she has mentored over the years, her approach always starts with setting expectations for cadence, action items, and more. She also likes to ask them: “By when would you feel disappointed if you didn’t do that?”

“That question is a powerful tool because it reconnects people with what they want to do. It always turns thoughts and words into actions and direction. In engineering, we have to keep moving forward.”

She also recommends asking a mentee: “What three things do you want to be known for?”

“It’s simple but powerful and the answer can be eye opening,” Jasprit says. “It enables them to recognize their strengths and put a label on the impact and what drives them forward. It’s a good exercise to ground someone.”

Reconnecting with yourself is something she recommends other women in tech do often.

“Don’t lose sight of who you are. But with that, know it’s OK to try on other people’s styles. You can emulate leadership or the way people work, but come back to you and check in. Ask yourself, ‘Is this who I am?’"

“If you do that, the room around you gets comfortable,” Jasprit says. “When you try on other people’s approach, you’ll be able to understand them and work together easier.” 

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