She Started on Research Ships. Now She Leads 300+ IT Pros | Darcy Van Patten

Darcy Van Patten joins Bob Hansen to make the case that an IT career does not have to start with a conventional plan. Her route began in oceanography, collecting and analyzing data on deep-ocean survey ships and helping run computer labs aboard them. That work put her close to data, systems, and real operational needs long before she saw herself as a technology executive. From there, she moved through nonprofit and consulting work before higher education gave her a setting in which the technology problem and the mission problem were closely connected.

At the University of Washington, Van Patten supported the associate dean for research and built a business case for a $4.5 million research-administration system. When she was offered the chance to lead the application-development team, she chose the leadership opportunity. The discussion treats that move as an example of building a career through opportunities that develop new capabilities, not merely through a predesigned ladder. It also explains why she declined a chief-of-staff opportunity connected to an interim provost: she wanted to own a path in IT rather than define her contribution solely by supporting someone else’s agenda.

Another intentional pivot followed. Van Patten took a remote individual-contributor position at Oracle to make a family relocation to Arizona possible. In a conventional résumé reading, it could look like a step backward. In the conversation, it becomes a reminder that a title change can be strategically useful when it yields experience and makes a larger life decision workable. At Oracle, she saw how cloud organizations and global, single-instance codebases operate. The episode does not romanticize every career disruption, but it frames calculated changes as a source of resilience and context.

At the University of Arizona, Van Patten entered an executive role amid a need for clearer IT leadership. She led Student and Academic Technologies, developed relationships with academic leaders, and worked to translate their needs into technology strategy. A central example is enterprise CRM and student digital-experience work: the effort replaced an older user experience and brought disconnected systems toward a more cohesive experience. The episode’s underlying point is that IT leadership cannot be only about choosing tools. It requires listening to the organization’s mission, connecting people to decisions, and making the business case for change.

The conversation also focuses on what happens inside a technology team. Van Patten describes inheriting a group in which business analysts had been treated as interchangeable resources. That model had eroded morale and effectiveness. Her response was to reshape how the team worked, bring in Agile coaching, and accept a short period of difficult adjustment so the group could develop better norms. The lesson is not that a process framework alone fixes culture. The more important issue is recognizing expertise, giving people enough safety to speak openly, and creating conditions in which a team can become self-managing rather than dependent on one person for every answer.

That point connects to her distinction between mentors and sponsors. Mentors can offer guidance, but sponsors use their influence to recommend someone for a stretch role before the person has already performed every part of it. Van Patten presents sponsorship as vital for people moving into leadership, especially when their backgrounds are not a perfect match for a job description. The advice complements her broader story: a career can be built by taking on unfamiliar work when someone credible sees potential and when the individual is prepared to grow into the responsibility.

The latter part of the episode turns to AI, IT employment, and hiring. Van Patten’s view is not that AI ends the need for technology professionals. Instead, it shifts the work toward building, securing, supervising, and integrating increasingly complex systems and agents. She also points to cybersecurity as an area of continuing demand. At the same time, she warns that AI has made it easy to produce and submit huge numbers of applications, while employers are also using automated screening. The result is a crowded process in which a capable candidate can fail to reach a person.

Her practical response is relationship-driven. Applicants should identify relevant managers, use personal networks and internal referrals where possible, and make their interest specific rather than relying entirely on high-volume submissions. For students and new graduates, she stresses hands-on experience early, including student jobs and adjacent roles when a direct IT opening is not available. That advice is paired with a sober discussion of résumé tenure: rapid movement can make employers question whether an investment will last, while staying too narrowly in one role or sector for too long can make a person easier to pigeonhole.

The episode closes on sustainable professional habits. Van Patten’s advice is to perform consistently, meet commitments, communicate clearly, and avoid creating unnecessary organizational friction. It is a modest standard, but in the context of a career that spans science, consulting, enterprise software, and higher education, it becomes the thread tying the conversation together. Career growth is not presented as a sequence of perfect promotions. It is the accumulated result of useful risks, credible relationships, respectful leadership, and a willingness to keep learning as technology and hiring practices change.