Category: Work Page 4 of 8

Kelly and I had an interesting discussion last night about her work. Her work is very similar to mine in many ways. The work Christian does has similarities to mine, but they are superficial (see his office in the picture to the left). Some have assumed I pushed Christian toward the kind of work I do to live vicariously through his superior training and skills. Over all the years of homeschool, I fought against that, sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much. In the end, though Christian went off into an area for which I am admittedly a fan-boy, but that is so deep in the bowels of the theoretical math associated with network information theory, I have no clue about how even to talk about it with him.

My pleasant surprise with Kelly was revealed when we talked about something she does at work. She developed and ran a survey for use in creating a marketing strategy for her company. She is in the process of figuring out what the data mean. One of her first steps was to find where and how different sets of features (answers to survey questions) cluster with respect to the characteristics of the customers who took the survey. Crazily, she is using precisely the same algorithms I use every day to find clusters of motion pixels in video images that indicate someone is about to fall out of a bed in a hospital. She predominately uses the R statistical programming language, but also Python which she is in the process of learning. The clustering algorithms she is trying are k-means clustering, mean-shift filtering, density based spatial clustering, support vector machines, etc.

For my part, my undergraduate degree is in marketing. I implement all of the same algorithms with C++, python and am learning R, but to perform image segmentation. She LOVES that stuff. I LOVE that stuff. I actually think she has the perfect job for her. It is exciting to her the same way my work is exciting to me, both on a technical level and for her love of engaging with customers and fellow employees. I did not plan it this way, but I am getting a little bit of a vicarious thrill from watching her in her new job.

• W. of D. = Word of the Day
• Water Spinky = Reminder to water boss’s office plant
• Latin words = The person’s animal in Latin–People guess what they are and write it in the blank
• COD = Colloquialism of the Day
• Tony Salad Tally = Count of how many salads vegetable hating office mate has eaten

Kelly is having too much fun at work.

It is not much of a joke, but in terms of my work, I describe myself as a one trick pony. I generally hired to fix one hard problem in the domain of machine vision and image processing. I do that one trick and then I am on to the next thing. I can do other stuff in the domain of certain specialized types of programming, but the one thing at which I am really good is that one trick. My single minded focus over the last couple of months has been to do that work in most of my spare time at home as well as at work. I figure I have one or two more months of that kind of work before I have all my volunteer work, contract work and other sundry efforts under control well enough to get back to a more normal life. I really do love it, but it gets in the way of exercise, reading and even eating well, so I need to get it all out of the way. I am writing this because 9/11 is a nice reminder to put some things into perspective. This is fun stuff that pays the rent, but it is still not nearly as important as what comes down to relationships, first with God, then with family, friends and neighbors. I guess it is time to make a plan to really get this stuff out of the way and get on with real life.

I have been at my current day job for about four months. My normal stay at a job is usually in the one to three year range because I am usually there to solve a narrow, very specific hard problem that, when it is solved, they have no more need for the likes of me. This time, though, there was a prefect storm. When I first got there, I got put into an office with a door that had a lock because it was over on the business (as opposed to engineering) side of the house. The lock was a pain in the neck because I had to use my key on Thursdays and Mondays to get in after the cleaning people came the night before. Now, the business is doing well, so they hired a new business guy which was timed by one of the technical guys moving on to another job and leaving me a double size office with a beautiful wood desk and a window. Alright, the window is one of those tall narrow ones beside the door that looks out onto the hallway, but it is still a window. Feels good!

Christian sent me a great article about a guy who got “bait and switched” by the Amazon interview process. The title of the article is My Interviews with Amazon. Full disclosure: Amazon has approached me three times. I made it through the first interview to the second time one time before I got feed up and told them to not call me back. I was smarter on the next two passes, telling them I was not interested at the outset. Amazon has a reputation as notoriously bad place to work. It might not be as bad as Apple, but it seems to be pretty bad. Even though I love their services and prices, I am rethinking how much I really want to spend with them.

My experience in the interviews I had with Amazon were very much in the same vein as that described in the article. The funny deal is that I have a good friend who works for them at a high level. He is good at his job, but the first product he worked on for them (a famous hand-held device they tried to make) failed miserably. The reason they interviewed me was because they knew I had the exact skills they wanted from the mouth of one of their most highly regarded scientists, but were willing to treat me badly enough in the interview that I knew working for them was something I would neither do nor advise any of my highly skilled colleagues to consider.