job updates and a reflection on ten years

 It's now been ten years since we moved back to Seattle after our grand adventure (https://aglie.blogspot.com/2012/02/part-where-we-come-home.html).   After we returned on Valentine's day in 2012, we stayed with Jack's mom and step-dad for a couple of weeks.  I interviewed at Nuance in downtown Seattle, but I believe I set up the interview while we were still on our trip.   I started work on March 21st, delaying my start date while I went through my slightly complicated name change (https://aglie.blogspot.com/2012/04/rose-by-any-other-name.html) which required two court appearances.   Jack found an architecture job on Craigslist, which was described as a 3 month, temporary position.   He started on April 10th.      

We moved in to our apartment at 5th and Washington in Pioneer Square/ID in March, got new cell phone plans and found a dentist.   When we moved into the apartment, we also got our darling cat, Emo, back from Jack's dad and step-mom who took care of her during our trip.   We joined the downtown YMCA which was a few blocks north of us and both had good walking, running or busing commutes.  

That same spring we started looking at properties for our future house, mostly in south Seattle, near the light rail, but also on Beacon Hill and in the Central District.    Eight months after we returned to Seattle, we bought our lot (https://aglie.blogspot.com/2012/11/we-are-landed.html).

It was a busy, but simple time!   Living downtown was fun.  Seeing family more often was nice.   We still had some old friends around and randomly running in to familiar faces was a treat.   Also, people kept giving us free tickets to downtown games and shows, and we ended up out and about a lot, at least in the eyes of this working (from home) mother-of-two, two years in to a pandemic....

I needed to write this little summary of our first year back home in Seattle as context for the double job update I want to share.   

For me, the news is that I now work for Microsoft, via an acquisition that just closed on March 4th, 2 weeks shy of my 10 year work anniversary.   The $19.7 billion acquisition was first announced in April 2021 and took a very long time due to the multi-national nature of it all.   For people paying attention to such things, I guess this wasn't a big surprise as we were already partnered on some projects for the past couple of years.   In retrospect the 2019 spinoff of our automotive domain (which I had been working on) was probably also done with the prospect of possible future acquisition in mind. (https://aglie.blogspot.com/2019/12/spinoff.html)

Microsoft is pretty exciting and the more I learn the more it seems like a company to be proud of.   Not much is expected to change.   Our CEO will still be our boss but he now reports to a VP instead of our board.   In a year or so we'll probably get better benefits.   We're all excited about data and tools and opportunities.   I don't have any plans to go to the office (my old one downtown, or Redmond) but am excited about the Eastlink lightrail that would make for a pretty good commute and will open as soon as summer 2023.

Jack's news is much more of a personal achievement.   This week we signed the contract (as a spouse I had to sign too) and he's now a 15% owner of the firm he's worked in for almost ten years.   He's the first partner in addition to the founder, a fellow CMU grad and Seattle native ten years ahead of Jack.   It means he's done a good job, is good to work with and brings value to the firm.    In his ten years there they've gone from three employees to eight, at present.   He's worked on new residential construction, townhomes, remodels and two apartment buildings.   

Sometime I'll blog more about Jack's projects.   

Jack's partnership has been discussed for several years and it's quite surprising how both of these longer term deals came to fruition within days of each other.

MOMA careers

A few months ago Jack's mom and stepdad gave us a box of kids' books from their house to sort through.   One thing we found was his "Fun With Architecture" stamp set from the Museum of Modern Art that foreshadowed his career as an architect.  How funny!

But wait, there's more.   I still have the "Fun With Hieroglphs" stamp set from ...... the Museum of Modern Art that I was given when I was about 10.   The path from Hieroglphs to linguistics is pretty clear, although I didn't really understand what linguistics was until I was 19.

Choosing gifts from the MOMA gift shop should be done lightly, now that we have scientific proof of their potency.   

 

old view, new view

 

My office moved up the street this week, in to the heart of downtown.  I’m losing my vantage point for our big dig, but gaining a similarly awesome view.  After four years in the same office, the change is welcome.  Another boon is that Jack and I are close enough to have lunch together sometimes now!

Out with the old:

and in with the new:

Although I can no longer see the viaduct replacement tunnel, I can see plenty of other construction projects.  I’ll now supervise construction of the new Rainier Club tower at 4th and Marion.  I can see it from my desk and actually I could also see it from my old desk, so the project will have some much needed continuity. 

The new building is Art Deco and it makes me feel like I’m immersed in the Soviet iconography in the intro of the excellent TV show, The Americans.

five days away

 

We all grew up a lot this month!  I spent five whole days away from D and Jack, when I went to Montreal for work.  The things I worried about didn’t happen and we all did fine with the separation, but I’m really glad work travel is rare for me.

It was fun to see colleagues from a few years ago and, of course I learned some important things (and some things I should learn more about).   The industry is pretty small, so there were representatives from my time in undergrad, grad school and previous jobs, all mingling together.

 

There wasn’t time for tourism, but I got to see one friend for dinner who gave D a great Montreal souvenir - a “Bonjour Hi” drool bib.

I found myself with a much greater appreciation of Montreal’s famous underground than I ever remember having during my years there.  Perhaps that was because my hotel connected to it directly, unlike the places I lived, so I could actually walk around a bit and buy some Smarties without a coat!

 

work: the kind we do for money

 Although I don’t always love it, and I certainly wouldn’t mind a shorter workweek, I really do like my job.

As a new parent, the flexibility of my job is fabulous.  I work from home a little less than half the time, with a team of people spread across several time zones and countries.  There’s an unspoken expectation to let people know if you won’t be available during certain peak hours, but beyond that the start and end times for the day can vary considerably.  This has always been a perk, but now it feels indispensible.  After several years of this, I might be unfit for a more traditional work schedule.

My co-workers are great.  I don’t see most of them outside of work, but I also don’t think that is necessary for good working relationships.   They are simultaneously hardworking and low key.  They are helpful.  There are no difficult egos.  Seriously, the worst thing I can say about anyone is that they might work too hard or have too good a memory for details.

The stress-inducing frequency with which I am contacted by recruiters suggests that I would have a reasonable shot at landing a higher paying job, but the uncertainty of the new team environment encourages loyalty to my current company.

Beyond the flexibility, the people, and the fact that I get paid, I also do really like the industry and the combination of language and technology.  It is still very interesting to me after two years of grad school and six years of work in the field.  Just think, if I had gone for a PhD, I might be finishing now.  No regrets there.

My job is also challenging.

We have to balance research with development deadlines and I’m still learning how to fit in the research when the development part is never done. 

In my group, we build a component model that gets packaged up, tested and deployed to paying customers.  The tools we use to build, test and experimentally improve that component are in-house.  This means that they are fragile, fickle and fussy.  They are a working donkey with a bad attitude, while the final bankable software is a well-groomed, well-exercised racing thoroughbred.

As I work with this donkey, I often find myself in the position where I have to decide whether to ask for help and who to ask.  I ask myself: Is it responsible to keep chipping away at this time consuming problem alone?  Am I likely to be able to figure it out?  Who is likely to know the answer?  Who is likely to be experiencing the same issue?  Should I ask just one person or should I broadcast the question?  How stupid will I look for asking this question?

In real life, I don’t worry that much about looking silly, but at work, it’s harder because how one is perceived really does matter.  As a visible (female) minority, I think I am more conscious of this than most.

An aside about gender: Only about 15% of us are female.  I strongly suspect that this leads to higher visibility, which is both a blessing and a curse.  We’re a large, highly distributed team, as I explained earlier.  By not being a white or asian man (particularly one named after an apostle or having “X” or “Y”  or “Z” in my name), I am more memorable.  If I ask a stupid question, people are more likely to remember it and associate it with me.  Of course, if I do something well, I think they are also more likely to credit me accurately. 

Returning to my point about asking for help with our donkey-like tools, I want to step back in time.

In the 8th grade I was given an award at the end of the year by our social studies teacher, who said something to the effect of “You weren’t afraid to ask questions that benefited the learning of the whole class.”  But work is not school, and the decision of who to ask, is much harder when there is no effectively omniscient teacher (we are talking middle school here). 

Years later, in grad school at a lunch seminar about workplace organizational behavior, I learned that research shows that people ask questions of co-workers they feel more comfortable with rather than person they think is most likely to know the answer.  Social capital means a lot.

I’ve recently had several successful interactions resulting from broadcast emails.  They’ve allowed me to get answers more quickly, learn who else is affected by the same issue and even to share knowledge that I used when trying to figure out a solution.  The responses make me believe they didn’t make look bad and, perhaps best of all, I didn’t squander precious social capital by demanding the time of any one particular person who might not have the time or knowledge to help.  I would rather sacrifice pride in the interest of increasing social capital.

The truth is that most people are in the same boat. 

statistics

I like most aspects of the career path I am on and I think it’s a good fit for me.  Nevertheless, it’s fun to think about what I would study if I had to do something completely different. 

language models

At work, I make language models.  This is a little explanation of what a language model is.

"All models are wrong, but some are useful."

I'm not sure who said this, but it's a good thing to keep in mind.

Imagine you have a language and you want to be able to predict what words are likely to be strung together.  You need to create a model, which is just a structured representation.  This model will never be perfect, because it will always be incomplete and the way people use language is constantly evolving.  Nevertheless, the idea is that if you get enough data (texts, transcripts etc.) and you represent it intelligently, you'll be able to make a useful model.

An ngram model is a model where you look at a window of n words.  The most basic model would simply count ngrams.    Lets say we want to use a bigram (a 2gram, where the window is 2 words).

We will train the model based on this is our very very short input text:
The quick fox jumped over the candlestick.  The fox then melted down the candlestick and jumped over the moon.

If we just iterate through the text using a window of two, we get the following bigrams:
the quick
quick fox
fox jumped
jumped over
over the
the candlestick
candlestick .
. the
the fox
fox then
then melted
melted down
down the
the candlestick
candlestick and
and jumped
jumped over
over the
the moon
moon .

You'll notice some of them occur more than once.  So we'll add counts to them like this:

1 the quick
1 quick fox
1 fox jumped
2 jumped over
2 over the
2 the candlestick
1 candlestick .
1 . the
1 the fox
1 fox then
1 then melted
1 melted down
1 down the
1 candlestick and
1 and jumped
1 the moon
1 moon .

This is a language model, albeit not a good one because it's not based on enough data.

Now, imagine you're looking over someone's shoulder as she types.  If she types "the", based on this model you'd predict that the next word would be "quick", "candlestick", "fox", or "moon."  Because "the candlestick" occurred twice while the other combinations only occurred once, you'd probably guess "candlestick" if you had to pick just one.  Based on this model, and the much more accurate model in your brain, you wouldn't predict "the and" or "the then" or "the the."

Now you know what an ngram is.  This is a fun Google site where you can see the frequency over time of different ngrams in models created from books.

For example:
trigram "thou art my"
trigram "never say never"

Architect, with a capital “A”

That’s right, Jack is now a licensed architect!

In the year before we left on this trip, he studied on weekends and after work and passed all seven sections of the licensing exam.  While we were in Morocco, he wrote a 20-page essay on the exceedingly boring WA state law code related to the practice of architecture.  In combination with a few years of work experience in the various aspects of architecture practice, he’s now ready to go.
Great job, Jack!  I’m so proud of you.