Welcome to episode 112 of the Nerd Journey Podcast [@NerdJourney]! We’re John White (@vJourneyman) and Nick Korte (@NetworkNerd_), two Pre-Sales Technical Engineers who are hoping to bring you the IT career advice that we wish we’d been given earlier in our careers. In today’s episode we discuss a personal experience with pregnancy during a tech career in the second half of our conversation with Caitlyn Bryan.
Original Recording Date: 02-08-2021
Topics – Pregnancy During a Technical Career
Caitlyn Bryan is an Enterprise Client Executive at VMware based in Dallas. Catch the first half of our conversation with her in Episode 111.
02:36 – Forced Leave and Unplugging

* It’s a good idea to check out a company’s benefits before joining. Caitlyn’s current employer (VMware) gives 18 weeks paid maternity / paternity leave. This also goes for adoption.
* Caitlyn’s son was born premature by 2 months, so her day-to-day came to a screeching halt.

* She ended up with pre-eclampsia and was forced to be on bed rest for 3 weeks.
* When she called her boss to tell him the issue, he said she was to stop working and focus on her health and her baby’s health (very supportive).
* The 18 weeks did not start until after Caitlyn’s son was out of the NICU. She was on leave for a total of 6 months.

* The culture of Caitlyn’s employer supports focusing on family first, and the support of her management chain helped force her to keep that focus during this time.

* In Sales, you are always on and need to be there to support your customers. For Caitlyn, turning everything off so suddenly was a real challenge.

* She had to take e-mail off her phone to help here.
* Listen to the fun anecdote from one of Caitlyn’s customers on this.

* From a maternity leave standpoint she was completely taken care of.
* It was great to completely power down, and once her son arrived, it was not a problem.
* When you’re used to being in charge or being "the warrior," you wonder how everything else can still be ok without you. It’s kind of a humble yourself moment.
* Caitlyn was thankful she took the entire leave. She has seen so many people who only took a certain chunk, and they never could find an exit moment to take the rest.
* Caitlyn’s husband only got 2 weeks of leave and had to go back to work soon after their son came home. Their family lives in another state. Amazon Prime came to the rescue.
* Check in on your maternity leave from a personal perspective, and don’t be afraid to take it.
* Caitlyn was afraid of her pregnancy being perceived as weakness.

* Was there anxiety when asking to take the maternity leave early?

* Caitlyn had fought so hard to get to this point in her career, and part of her did not want to give up on the projects in flight and the customers depending on her. She didn’t want to skip a beat and wanted to be able to jump right back in where she left off.
* She had some reservations about revealing she was pregnant.
* At one point she went to club based on her great performance. Not long after this, she learned she was pregnant.
* The first trimester was many weeks of being extremely tired and craving sugar.
* The VMworld conference was coming up soon,