Don’t be afraid to learn new things and follow your interests/curiosity, and always know when it’s time to leave. 10 years ago I was a Windows/Exchange admin at a small K-12 school district and didn’t know what a Hadoop was. (1/16) https://twitter.com/ellearmageddon/status/1294097943306280961

My path to doing Distributed Systems/Machine Learning infrastructure work at Netflix isn’t anything I’d call the “paved path” (to use a bit of Netflix jargon). About 10 years ago a friend from World of @Warcraft, @jar349 passed on my resume to a recruiter he worked with.

They moved me from South Jersey to DC to do office IT work. A couple of the devs in that office asked if I could install something called @hadoop on some Linux servers in the office for them to do development work on. I had some Linux experience from before my K-12 job, so I did.

This led to some of the folks at another location the company had in Maryland asking if i could also set up Hadoop for them, which i did. Then I got sent for @cloudera certification for one of our contract bids. Then, the company decided to split into two companies.

The Maryland office would become its own company, and most of the Hadoop work would go with it. I was in Virginia but I knew i had a choice: stay there and so boring Windows IT work, or take a risk and work on this cool Hadoop stuff. I took the risk.

This resulted in me attending a Puppet meetup in Baltimore some months later where I met @technmsg (& @kartar!). We followed each other on Twitter which is how Alex and I realized we’d been assigned to the same contract in Key West.

That assignment would be another turning point for me. I saw the kind of work the Cloudera folks were doing - cool Hadoop stuff with none of the office IT baggage. I wanted that, so the last night of the trip i emailed Alex my resume in an email titled “hey what’s this?”

This led to me interviewing with @fwiffo & another now-friend of mine over a hotel breakfast buffet with very good bacon in Northern Virginia for a job with @Cloudera. I’d worked there for a year and a half when I stumbled into something that I’d basically given up on.

Blizzard (the company that makes World of Warcraft) was hiring a Hadoop person. I did a phone interview with them and 8 months later (after mildly stalking @vmaun at a BlizzCon after party) I got an in-person interview with @andynumber2 & @cooper6581 the week of BlizzCon 2014.

I asked @caelidara, who I’d been dating for 3 weeks at that point, if they wanted to move to California with me. They did and we did and we ended up in Irvine with both of us working at Blizzard over the next 4 years. In retrospect, we were uhaul lesbians.

I would stay at Blizzard for four years until I realized I’d leveled up my distributed systems skills as high as i was going to there, and took my next big leap of faith. We decided to move to the Bay Area (and pulled @cronym along with us) since we weren’t tied to Irvine anymore

And for the first time in my career, I just blanket applied to any company that I felt I could ethically stomach working for (No drones, no Facebook, etc.) that made a product i enjoyed using. @Cronym and I made a big shared spreadsheet of places we might want to work.

We never anticipated we’d end up at the same company again, but through a process of chance and elimination, we ended up interviewing with a lot of the same places. My final four were Netflix, Slack, Apple, and Stitchfix. Not bad for a trans girl from South Jersey with no degree.

My final two choices were @SlackHQ and @WeAreNetflix and @royrapoport (who’d worked at both places) gave me some advice that I don’t think I’ll ever forget: that humans, when faced with two great choices, will toil over them forever, when the difference is minor.

So in the end, I picked Netflix because I could draw the most direct line between how what I do (ML Infra) makes the product better for consumers (recommendations) - and in the end that is what makes me proud of my work.

The last thing I’ll say is: I benefited a lot from privilege. My parents weren’t wealthy but if I completely failed i had a place to go back to. Not everyone has that. That’s one of the (many) reasons I try my best to make sure I drop a ladder behind me for those who follow.

Bonus: read this entire thread to the beat of Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen