a minibio

alexstx21 asked:

Say, completely unrelated...how did you get into your field? I was thinking about it earlier today and wondering what lead you to where you are now....

huh -- I'm flattered that you asked. I have a BA in Linguistics from [data embargo: pretentious Northeast school], and when I moved to upstate New York with my wife (er, now ex-wife) I was looking for work in Ithaca New York. This was back when Google had just risen over the horizon, and I was an early adopter thanks to my little brother the CS geek, and I tried it out:

but it *worked* then. I found a job listing at [no-longer-existing-company], which -- at the time -- wrote speech synthesis software. I moved (with [ex-wife]) and applied for a job, interviewed, and was given the job. I was just a linguist, with a knack for computer-y stuff. I spent two years working there, learning my way around and programming linguistic knowledge into a specialized language that [erstwhile-company] used for encoding linguistic understanding. But as the job went on, I learned a bunch of the hard-core geek stuff by hanging out with the programmers in the office and wound up being the person who spoke both dialects: linguist and geek. I am sure that going through a divorce around this time made it very easy to throw myself into the kind of single-minded focus that learning-to-program requires.

Then one of my co-workers got head-hunted to work for [another erstwhile], a startup company out here. He left, without much notice, and I missed the nearly-daily lunches we used to have together. Two months later, he called me and told me I should apply "if nothing else, you'll get a free trip to Seattle, and you can visit me!" I did as told, got offered the job (at about double the salary, which in real dollars was a substantial but not nearly 2x raise, because Seattle is much more expensive than Ithaca), and moved out to take a job in Redmond. At the new place, it was much clearer that my job was to be both a programmer and a linguist, and I thrived (throve?) on the work but hated the politics. The money was nice too -- until it started sputtering out. I had seen the writing on the wall, and had already submitted my application before they laid me off, and I wound up in school.

Over the last two years, I've pendulumed back and forth between thinking "I know everything the academy has to teach me" and "oh my god I'll never catch up"; so long as I'm in the swing between I'm okay, but when I reach a maximum -- on either end -- I think about dropping out. But usually I'm pretty happy as an academic for the time being.