jobs

This page contains a lot of notes and reflections on myself and what motivates me in the context of finding jobs that I like. The fact that I’ve had a bunch of different jobs indicates that I haven’t yet figured out what I want to do for the rest of my life, so this page is my attempt and recording my journey.

Who am I?

I am an HPC person, not a tech person. I don’t obsess over consumer-facing trends, the latest programming languages, the open-source community, or technology for the sake of technology.

I am an infrastructure person more than a software person. I like grappling with complex systems and understanding how to build clever systems through a complete understanding of components. I find software, apps, libraries, and frameworks too open-ended to wrap my arms around and understand to the depth that I want to. Infrastructure components—memory, processors, and network technologies—are a lot less varied and worth investing the time to really understand.

I am knowledgable about storage, networking, and compute (in that order). I built much of my career focusing on storage at NERSC, and I carved out a niche of deep knowledge of how storage technology works. I understand things down to the device level (magnetic domains on disk platters, floating gate NAND cells) and up through the software that transforms those devices into a POSIX file interface for applications. I’ve had to learn networks because they invariably sit between compute and storage in HPC environments, and I know compute simply because it’s central to all HPC.

I am a designer and critic more than an operator. I operated production storage and clusters at 10x Genomics and led NERSC’s Storage Systems Group for a year, but I didn’t find those jobs as enjoyable as systems design. Operations, by definition, locks you into learning the systems that you have. However, I like learning about the systems that can be, and comparing how others design their systems to how I would design mine. This led me to really enjoy sitting on review boards for big DOE procurements like Frontier and identifying risky decisions.

Attractive job features

Intellectual engagement and technical depth

I love to learn how the world works, and in the context of HPC, how different technologies can be composed to create new supercomputers. I also want to understand everything deeply so that I know exactly when it is (and isn’t) possible to connect different parts together. The best way I’ve found to understand something deeply is either use it to solve a problem (such as writing code; this is how I learned Python, pandas, matplotlib, …) or explaining it to others.

Recognition, thought leadership, and industry presence

I ultimately feel best when I am helping others who need help. When I learn something I find interesting, I want to share it with as many other people as I can so they have an easier time of learning it than I did. This may have come from my own entry into HPC being self-taught and been bolstered by my first job in HPC being in user support. This desire to help leads me to give a lot of presentations and talks in public venues, and receiving positive feedback from either strangers (who have no incentive to be nice to me) or people I respect (whose recognition is hard-earned) is the most gratifying thing I do.

I do a lot to preserve my credibility for this reason too; losing the respect of strangers or people I respect due to my own overconfidence or lack of depth would probably shake me to my foundation. For this reason, I’d rather present facts and and let other people reach their conclusions whenever I can.

And for what it’s worth, I really don’t like the term thought leadership. It’s almost always used in the same way as No true king. But people (including ChatGPT) button roll my love of sharing my opinions under the “thought leadership” umbrella.

Strategic & high-level customer engagement

Talking to smart people who are masters of their domain offers the best chance for me to learn something new. I often struggle to support novice or inexperienced customers, especially if they are willfully ignorant or antagonistic, because I stand to gain nothing. I am much more enthusiastic to help if they seek help from a place of good intent or are solving meaningful problems.

Deeply understanding what strategic customers are doing also gives me insight into the future of HPC and allows me to think about the unexpected problems they may face. Selling what’s on the truck is relatively uninteresting compared to thinking about what to put on the next truck.

Ethical considerations and impact

I have been uncommonly fortunate in my career, and a lot of my financial success has come from venture capitalists and institutional investors. I have guilt about my good fortune since I was neither born into my success nor did I work unduly hard to achieve it. In an attempt to counterbalance that, I try to use my current privilege to work on things that bring good to the world in some way or another. Sometimes this means helping people who don’t get a lot of help (like answering random strangers’ questions on reddit), and other times it means actively not working on things that make other people’s lives worse.

There is a growing list of companies for whom I will not work. Giant corporations who prioritize scale and efficiency at the expense of local economies, sustainable production, and fair wages have done more harm to society than I think many people realize. Similarly, social media companies who have a record of manipulating public opinion through negligence or algorithmic amplification of polarizing content profit from bringing negativity and ill will into the world.

I also struggle with indirectly working for societally harmful companies as well, and I would have a hard time knowing that my paycheck was paid for, in part, from revenue coming from one of these societally harmful companies. When given the option (and I often am), I’d rather spend my time contributing towards better efforts.

Things I really enjoy

There are a few specific scenarios where I consistently feel like I am at the top of my game. Alternatively, there are a few things I’ve been willing to work 18 hours (or more) per day to do:

Industry conferences

Conferences like SC and ISC are an ideal mix of many things I love to do:

• Walking around and getting accosted by people who want to talk to me makes me feel like I’ve done something useful and contributed something to the community.
• Walking around and accosting people who are staffing booths. The world is full of interesting people who do interesting things, and conferences are one of few places in the world where it’s not only acceptable to strike up a conversation with a stranger, but there is a high likelihood that they do something really interesting for a job.

• Getting on stage and expressing my opinion or sharing things I’ve learned with whomever will listen. I love putting on a show.
• Sitting in sessions and critiquing what industry leaders have to say. It builds my own confidence in the things I know by letting me compare what I would say to what they are saying.
• Sitting in sessions and learning something new. A lot of presentations, papers, and workshops are full of interesting content that I just wouldn’t set aside time to learn about in the daily grind.
• Getting to sit down, one-on-one, with the people I like. I am pretty selective when it comes to the people in whom I invest time, so most of the people I really enjoy talking to about our mutual passions are scattered around the world. I only get to talk to them via text (which is infrequent; I always worry about imposing) or at conferences.
• Booth duty. It’s like getting on stage and accosting people all rolled into one. I love teaching people about things for which I can claim credit, and at these conferences, you never know what people will care about so it’s a fun test of my own knowledge too.
• Travel. I’ve found that travel really breaks up the monotony of work and forces me to excessive different parts of my brain. It’s also the best way to build rapport with coworkers and work feel more lifelike.

There have been SC conference weeks were I average four or five hours of sleep per night.

Technical proposal writing

There’s a deadline, a ton of creative, technical, and differentiated work that has to be done, and a team of people who are all pulling in the same direction. I have also come to realize that I am unafraid of designing and describing systems starting from a completely blank sheet of paper, and that is a rare skill. Being the architect of a complex solution is not only a fun technical challenge, but a team of people are relying on me to play a part that nobody else can. This is the height of being useful and helpful to others, and I’ve experienced this both at SDSC and Microsoft.

I’ve spent the final two week leading up to multi-hundred-million-dollar RFP due dates working on five hours of sleep per night, seven days a week.

Writing code and papers

I’ve written a few scholarly papers that required months of sophisticated analysis to get novel results. A year in the life of a parallel file system is the instance I remember most clearly, because I had to learn some complicated statistics, write a complex Python library, and learn how to perform large-scale data analytics using Dask to get this paper out the door. Learning all those tools (which still serve me well today), writing code, and validating the correctness of the conclusions I was drawing under a time constraint was really fun.

The ideal job

An ideal job for me would:

• be technically engaging and public-facing role because I thrive on learning and contributing to the AI/HPC infrastructure conversation
• allow me to interact with world-class engineers and researchers, because these are the best places to learn and maintain my technical credibility
• work on hard technical problems, whether it be solving problems on paper or in code
• value my desire to write, speak, and share knowledge freely, because sharing what I know both helps me learn and offers the fulfillment of helping others
• offer me the latitude to not compromise my personal ethics and principles
• have travel every month or two, and have conferences or other broad events be a part of that
• have an office or other opportunity for me to work in the same building as my teammates or, at minimum, people I know

Questions to ask

Culture

• Can you describe the last time your team encountered a challenging technical problem and how it was resolved?
• Can you walk me through a recent collaboration between engineering and customer-facing teams?
• Can you give an example of a time when feedback from an employee led to a significant change or improvement?
• How does the company recognize and reward technical expertise and thought leadership?
• How do team members balance discussing your products with engaging in broader AI/HPC technical discussions? Are there guidelines or expectations around this?

Learning and development

• What are some examples of professional development opportunities employees have pursued recently?
• How do team members typically stay up-to-date with the latest advancements in HPC and AI?
• What mechanisms are in place to encourage cross-disciplinary learning within teams?

Ethics

• Describe a time when an employee raised an ethical concern about a project. How was it handled?

Corporate values and priorities

• When was the last time someone from your team presented at a conference or industry event?
• How does the company support involvement in the broader HPC community, like working with standards bodies or open-source contributions?
• Can you share how the team balances operational responsibilities with opportunities for innovation?
• Can you give me an example of a time when someone on your team discussed AI storage trends in an industry-neutral context? What value resulted from that event?
• Can you share a situation where maintaining technical credibility was challenging due to corporate messaging or marketing priorities? How was it handled?

Actual

• What’s the mission statement?
• Productive outputs?

Diversity

Like many technology-focused sectors, HPC is male-dominated and skews towards a specific set of racial and ethnic groups. Since I don’t see myself as a tech worker, trying to fit in at a tech company that fiės this male-dominant mold that does not see a problem with this can be a problem. At best, it leads to awkward conversations and embarrassing moments (e.g., every panel is a manel). At worst, I’ve had it contribute to a high level of latent stress (I have no common ground with any coworkers) punctuated by uncomfortable interactions.

I’ve realized it is in my best interest to understand how a company sees its own employee makeup. All the widely cited benefits of a diverse workforce apply, but selfishly, it also means I always have an ally in whatever I am having to deal with (technical or nontechnical).

Here are some questions, informed in part by ChatGPT, on how to probe around this.

Can you give me an example of how employees handle disagreements in technical discussions? (Real question: Is the corporate culture to allow the loudest voice to win?)

Red flag answer: We’re all really passionate, so sometimes things get heated, but it’s all in good fun. (Translation: The loudest, most aggressive people dominate, and others are ignored.)

Good answer: We encourage debate, but we also emphasize respect. We make sure discussions don’t become personal or exclusionary.

Can you tell me about the diversity of the engineering leadership team? Have there been any specific efforts to improve diversity in technical hiring? (Real question: Is your male-dominated leadership reflective of a tech bro culture? How blind are you to your homogeneous workforce?)

Red flag answer: We just hire the best person for the job. (Translation: Diversity of talent is not a consideration during hiring.)

Good answer: We recognize that our leadership isn’t as diverse as it could be, and we’re working on improving it by mentoring diverse talent into leadership roles. We’ve made an effort to broaden where we recruit and remove unconscious bias in hiring, but we know we still have work to do.

How do you ensure that quieter, thoughtful voices are heard in discussions?

Red flag answer: We don’t really have that problem; everyone speaks up. (Translation: It does not occur to anyone doing the shouting that others may have something valuable to say.)

Good answer: We try to make space for different communication styles, and leadership is mindful about ensuring everyone gets a chance to contribute.

What do the social dynamics during morale and team-building events look like?

Red flag answer: We’re all really close, and we grab drinks together all the time. (Translation: It does not occur to leadership that not everyone wants to drink at a bar.)

Good answer: People hang out outside of work, but there’s no pressure. We try to create an environment where different personalities and backgrounds feel welcome.

Who are the rising technical leaders in the company, and what makes them successful here?

Red flag answer: X and Y are total rockstars. They built half the company themselves. (Translation: Lone-wolf behavior is valued, and they likely have a culture that promotes prima donnas.)

Good answer: We have some strong technical leaders, but what really makes someone successful here is their ability to collaborate and bring others along.

If I were to talk to one of your female or underrepresented engineers, what would they say about working here?

Red flag answer: You could, but I don’t know if they’d have much to say. (Translation: They don’t have enough diverse engineers to make this a relevant question.)

Good answer: We’d be happy to connect you with someone who can speak honestly about their experience here.