For obvious reasons I am not detailing why I left each role. The only parts that matter for this is what I learned.

Internships

Also known as the time no one counts.

Startup

My first internship was at a small startup making a legal CRM. Here I got the authentic intern experience. The startup operated out of a small office in a New Jersey strip mall. They didn’t have enough space for me so I worked out of one of the empty storage rooms, and they didn’t have a spare device, so I set up a VM on my laptop to run their application.

So what did I learn?

Three key things.

One, how to take a manual task like tracking every query that runs for each specific workflow, and how long they take to run. Then automating the process to generate a report.

Two was how to identify a problem, gather requirements, build a solution, get feedback, and iterate till it is finished.

Number three was how quickly things moved when physically knocking on the CTO’s door was a few steps away.

Corporate

My second internship was in a corporate office at a local grocery chain in Pittsburgh.

Also had three key things I learned.

The first is similar to my last internship, how to identify which queries are expensive to compute.

Two, how to send and receive a SOAP request to integrate with a vendor. In other words, the basics of how data goes over the wire albeit with a cumbersome abstraction.

Three, just how slowly things move when you need multiple levels of approval.

Big Boy Jobs

Big Company

Starting my career at a very big bank.

You learn a lot more about your own gaps when you interview candidates.

Building bespoke container orchestration and managing your own data centers is incredibly hard.

Industry has a pattern of building tools in-house instead of using a vendor. Can be a home run or a miss.

Grad School

Grad school try one.

You get to learn a lot of interesting trivia that doesn’t map cleanly to industry.

Be ready to kill your social life if you also work.

Your mother complaining that all neighbors’ betas or betis have a graduate degree isn’t a good reason to start.

Smedium Company

Working for a smedium-sized robotics company.

It’s a lot of fun wearing steel-toed boots, safety glasses, and a high-visibility vest. Supply chain logistics are fascinating.

Carnegie Mellon has produced some phenomenal PhDs in the space of computer vision.

Don’t assume you know more than your product owner, there’s a reason we have them.

Teaching

One big lesson from moonlighting as an instructor for a coding bootcamp.

What is simple to me is not to others.

Your value is in how you make it just as simple for them.

Another Big Company

Working for a big tech company, making those big bucks.

No matter how much your clients or colleagues show you respect.

No matter how much they pay you.

Money’s great but it isn’t everything.

Another Smedium Company

Working for a small fintech firm.

It does not matter how well you know the abstractions.

Don’t always expect a clean one.

Legacy systems can be incredibly profitable. We’re here to get the job done, not to blame the DevEx.

Big Company Take Three

Working for a big bank.

Haven’t left but here’s what I learned so far.

Sometimes it’s good to have some stability.

It’s nice when there’s a clear org chart and a museum of artifacts to learn from.

Grad School Take 2

Grad school try two.

I want to dig deeper into applied statistics.

Bit late to this Data Science hype cycle.

School’s a lot easier when you’re interested in the topic.