Dilip Chetan's path into tech started with a plan that fell apart, and a bet on himself that put him at Oracle. Twenty years later, his career runs through Salesforce, Intuit, Meta and Google. At Meta he ran one of the company's largest human-AI interaction studies, tuning how Reels decides what you see next. Today he's the founder of Defensible Zone, building tools that help people find the work AI can't take from them.

In Part 1 of this two-part conversation, host Madhusudan Bangalore Nagaraja sits down with Dilip for a frank talk with students and early-career engineers. They get into how much your feed knows about you, why AI is splitting the engineering profession in two, and the one signal that tells you whether your role is getting safer or slipping away.

They cover:

— What a Kevin Hart joke reveals about how much recommendation engines know about you

— Why engineers build things just to see if they can, and what that costs the rest of us

— How engineering roles got pigeonholed, and why AI is splitting the profession in two

— The honest advice he'd give a CS graduate who can't find tech work

— The one signal that tells you whether your role is becoming more defensible or less

Part 2, for leaders, is coming soon.

Connect with Dilip Chetan:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dilipchetan
Defensible Zone: defensiblezone.ai

Connect with your host Madhusudan Bangalore Nagaraja:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/madhusudannagaraja/
IEEE Senior Member, Technical Delivery Manager, eSystems Inc. | PMI Infinity Advisory Committee | Irving, Texas, USA

IEEE TEMS Radio — Engaging Conversations in Education, Engineering, Management and Technology.

Produced by: IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society
Please write to us at ieeetemsemail@gmail.com to share your feedback.

Andy Chen spent 30 years inside Ontario Power Generation, Canada's largest electricity producer — starting as a trainee and retiring as Chief Technology Officer. Along the way he led the first successful replacement of obsolete direct-control computers at a nuclear station, a first for the entire industry, and helped prepare the plant through the Y2K transition. He later served as President of IEEE TEMS (2020–2021), led the IEEE Systems Council through its growth from 20 to 25 member societies, and co-founded REDDS Capital — a venture fund built with three billionaire partners to bet on unproven, disruptive technology.

In this episode, host Madhusudan Bangalore Nagaraja sits down with Andy for a wide-ranging conversation on what three decades in the highest-stakes engineering environment there is taught him about making decisions when the cost of being wrong is either catastrophic or just expensive.

They cover:

— Why "risk is easy to mitigate but hard to escape" — and why the word that matters in that sentence is mitigate, not escape
— The billboard image that shaped Andy's entire decision-making philosophy, and why he refuses to make a decision with only one option on the table
— Inside the first-ever replacement of a nuclear station's direct-control computers — and the "defense in depth" design principle the industry adopted after Fukushima's flooding failure exposed a blind spot no one had designed for
— Why speed matters more than people think: the 30-second difference between a small fire and a big fire, and why solving a problem today keeps it smaller than solving it tomorrow
— The one due-diligence question Andy asks before funding any startup — not "what's the technology," but "who's on the team," and why he'd rather back people with grit than people who've never failed
— What a $10,000 360-degree leadership assessment revealed about his own biggest blind spot — and the one-sentence verdict his wife delivered for free
— The single action Andy wants every leader listening to take this week: treat every interaction, however brief, as a chance to leave someone better off than you found them

Connect with Andy Chen:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chenatl/
REDDS Capital: reddscapital.com/investors/andy-chen/
IEEE Systems Council: ieeesystemscouncil.org/contact/andy-chen

Connect with your host Madhusudan Bangalore Nagaraja:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/madhusudannagaraja/
IEEE Senior Member, Technical Delivery Manager, eSystems Inc. | PMI Infinity Advisory Committee | Irving, Texas, USA

IEEE TEMS Radio — Engaging Conversations in Education, Engineering, Management and Technology.

Produced by: IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society
Please write to us at ieeetemsemail@gmail.com to share your feedback.

Usually the president answers the questions. This time he asks them.

IEEE TEMS Radio launches a new format - the Reverse Podcast - where IEEE TEMS President Dr. Sudeendra Koushik turns the microphone around and interviews the volunteers who make the Society work. In this inaugural installment, he sits down with three senior practitioners who came to TEMS after building careers in industry first.

Jaya Kandaswamy (IEEE DFW, Region 5) works at the intersection of the IEEE Standards Association and TEMS - a published author and SA working committee member focused on how AI gets adopted safely.

Harshavardhan Peddireddy (IEEE Central Tennessee and Cincinnati Sections, Region 3) is a Platform Architect at Meijer Inc. with 18+ years in enterprise data, AI governance, and privacy engineering. IEEE Senior Member, Ph.D. scholar, and reviewer for IEEE, Springer Nature, and Wiley.

Nirdesh Pachoriya (IEEE Fort Worth, Region 4) brings close to 19 years in performance engineering and software quality, contributing as reviewer, session chair, and conference coordinator while exploring how AI-assisted tooling is reshaping engineering practice.

The questions are deceptively simple, and the answers are anything but. What actually pulled each of them into IEEE - and into TEMS specifically? What did they expect when they raised their hand, and what did they actually get? A common thread emerges: none of them came for a title. They came to share what they knew — and stayed because of the rooms it put them in.

Dr. Koushik does more than moderate. As the conversation unfolds, he maps each story onto the wider set of opportunities inside IEEE TEMS - the committees, programs, and communities most members never discover because nobody told them where to look. The result is part oral history, part practical roadmap for anyone wondering how to move from paying dues to actually belonging.

Essential listening for members considering a volunteer role, mid-career engineers and managers weighing where to invest time outside work, chapter and section leaders focused on recruitment and retention, and anyone curious what a technical society looks like from the inside.

Want to be featured in a future Reverse Podcast? IEEE TEMS volunteers can self-nominate here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfT9oZh5BZQcDcKI2IGIf5X81gyA5BQ8dSHZImf_eU24JjSdw/viewform

Host / Producer: Madhusudan Bangalore Nagaraja, IEEE Senior Member, Technical Delivery Manager, eSystems Inc. | PMI Infinity Advisory Committee Contributor | Irving, Texas, USA
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/madhusudannagaraja/

IEEE TEMS Radio - Engaging Conversations in Education, Engineering, Management and Technology.

Produced by: IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society
Please write to us at ieeetemsemail@gmail.com to share your feedback.

IEEE TEMS Radio — Engaging Conversations in Education, Engineering, Management and Technology.

Produced by: IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society
Please write to us at ieeetemsemail@gmail.com to share your feedback.