Career

I always thought certain behavioral questions were silly…. My view has changed.

I’m taking a sabbatical.

Today was my last day at ReviewTrackers. I’ll miss RT. Over almost two years, I got to experience “startup” life and I transitioned to full time software engineering (after years as a nominal data scientist who happened to do some dev work). My fellow engineers there were good teachers and listeners, and engineering management was always open to feedback. I’ll be starting a new gig at Capital One on Monday, working on cybersecurity tooling.

I recently visited Westville Correctional Facility, an Indiana penitentiary, to talk about jobs in the field of computing. It was an unusual opportunity that was honestly somewhat eye-opening; never have I had so enthusiastic and engaged an audience. I was sponsored through the Moreau College Initiative, a program in which residents of the facility are able to take full academic courses and potentially earn a bachelors degree before re-entering society. You can read more about the program here, if you are so interested.

In data science and engineering, technical skills are often the quickest way to early-career advancement – a new contributor who can write decent code is immediately an asset, in a way that a business-savvy developer with no coding ability is not. Companies often publicly espouse the benefits of softer skills, but that may not ring true in entry-level positions. In some technical fields, non-technical strengths can actually be viewed as negatives by peers, a betrayal of the ethos of the programmer.

I was recently interviewed for 84.51˚’s podcast on the topic of upskilling the data science function.