Wonolo
This week chatted with Savy who is on our engineering team in San Francisco. Feel free to watch the short interview or read our conversation below.
Let’s meet Savy!
My name is Savy Brandt. I’m a front-end software engineer in San Francisco, and I work on the customer portal where Requestors post jobs for workers to pick up.
What events in your life have led you to your current role/job today?
Before I was a software engineer, I actually was a yoga teacher, and I taught yoga for a few years. I even taught kids and family yoga. I was working at a company called Yoga Works, and I was working for their corporate. I got really interested in Google Sheets, automating things, and making the computer do some of the work for me. My boss at the time had given me the feedback that he thought I would be interested in software engineering. So I went and did a three-month intensive coding boot camp, and that led me to do front end engineering. Then I found Wonolo, and Wonolo was actually my very first gig out of software engineering boot camp.
When you have to make a difficult decision, what do you lean on?
To me when I need to make a difficult decision, I am fortunate enough to have a lot of really wonderful friends, colleagues, and family members that I’m able to lean on and get advice from. But at the end of the day, I’ve found that when making a difficult decision, the most important person to lean on is yourself. It might sound really cliche or very “yoga teacher-y,” but I find that there are always so many different external factors that are pulling you this way and that. When you’re faced with a difficult decision, sometimes the best thing to do is come back to yourself, close your eyes, and follow your intuition or your gut. I am a big believer in following your intuition in difficult decision making.
What is one life advice you can give to anyone?
A piece of advice that I would give, outside of following your intuition as I mentioned in the last question, would be to balance your expectations- your expectations for yourself and your expectations for others. It’s good to hold yourself to high expectations as a way to motivate yourself. And it’s good to hold the people around you to high expectations to motivate them. Everyone is doing their best. However, if you go too far and have unreasonably high expectations for yourself or for others, you’re just going to be unhappy all the time, because you’ll never meet those expectations for yourself. It’s unfair to expect too much from the people around you as well. You’ll be unhappy with them and they’ll be unhappy with you. Balancing expectations I think is really important.
Please finish this sentence: If you really knew me, you would know that ______.
If you really knew me, you would know that I am a huge PlayStation nerd. I have PlayStation sweatshirts and swag, and obviously a PlayStation and a PlayStation VR. Most evenings after work, I go home and play PlayStation. If not, I go and watch other people online play games. So that’s a big thing about me. I’m kind of a video game nerd.
