Linguistics Jobs: Interview with a Software Engineer
Like today’s interviewee, Brooke Lynne Weaver, I worked through my undergrad degree. While not everybody is lucky enough to be able to do both study and work, it can be a useful way to develop skills beyond those in the classroom. I now use my coffee making skills only for self-caffeination, but cafe life taught me a lot about task prioritising and staying upbeat under pressure. Brooke used her work experience to move into Software Engineering, and uses her linguistics in her approach to her work, and her everyday life. Brooke is also on Twitter (@Milayou).
What did you study at university?
My degree is in English Language (Linguistics with an emphasis on the English language) from Brigham Young University in Utah, U.S.A. Basically, when we covered morphology, syntax, phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics etc. it mostly focused on those applications in English, with some examples and work from other world languages. I also took a couple computer science classes and worked as a web developer while in school.
What is your job?
I'm a software engineer. Right now my job title is Platform Engineer, and at my last job it was Platform Architecture Engineer. I write code based on the needs of my company, which generally involves understanding the task you need the computer to perform autonomously, and doing a bunch of Googling to remind yourself (or learn) how to tell it to do that. You run the code, look for certain things to happen, tweak the code, run it again, look for different results, tweak it again, run it again etc. The ask from the company is generally as specific as humans tend to be, which is not nearly as specific as machines tend to be; you have to be on the lookout for instructions that should be given that were never expressly asked for by the company in order for everything to run smoothly. Our stack is mostly written in Python 2.7 but we're moving to Go, and the project I just finished up has parts written in both. It's really satisfying when you've finally communicated your message properly to the machine and it behaves accordingly.
I work for Vivint.SmartHome right now, doing home automation. I help the Vivint centralized system interact with peoples' homes and phones all over North America. When someone pulls up their Vivint app on their phone, it requests data from our platform. When they want to make changes to their smart home system, it interacts with our platform. Recently I've been helping migrate our Nest integration from using the (now deprecated) Works With Nest API to the new Google Home/Assistant API (a transition Google recently made public).
How does your linguistics training help you in your job?
I like to tell myself I went into translation, just between human and machine languages rather than from one human language to another. The things I learned studying linguistics help me in less obvious ways.
Knowing how flexible semantics is and how language changes so much across time and space, I feel like I'm a much better communicator than I was when I first started college. I'm a lot more flexible in interpretations and I care a lot more about getting to the root of what a person is trying to communicate, rather than what words they chose and what those words mean to me specifically. Communication is a pretty important part of writing software, because you're almost always trying to realize the ideas of other people. Knowing how to be confident you're on the same page as the people requesting your work is critical.
Linguistics also gave me a much better understanding for how important context is. I leave comments everywhere it makes sense to in order to help future engineers understand why I did certain things, which puts them in a better position to understand what to change down the line. It's very common to come across some code written a few years back that seems to make no sense at all (or seems like a bad way to do something), and if someone left a comment explaining why they wrote it that way at that time, you can better decide whether to leave it or in what ways to change it. The comment might say "Here's the current state of affairs and we need to do this weird thing to avoid this problem" and now, several years later, that problem is irrelevant or the current state of affairs has drastically changed; you might not need to do that thing in such a weird way anymore. You can then feel more confident about making your change. Or, maybe the state of affairs has not changed or the problem still exists and still needs to be avoided; you now have really important context and that weird thing might actually look logical now, or you know how to change it while still avoiding the problem it was originally trying to avoid. As an example, earlier this year I implemented a library I wasn't very familiar with in a pretty short amount of time. I left a comment explaining that if someone else was more comfortable with the library, they should feel free to rewrite it in a more idiomatic way; I explained what parts of it I wrote somewhat poorly due to lack of time and familiarity (something like "I know you should be able to do it like A, but I couldn't figure out how to get A to work so I did B instead which isn't as good but gives an acceptable result. It's not deliberately done this way for any other reason, so if you know how to do A, please change it."). A lot of times we try to change legacy code as little as possible, for fear of unknown downstream affects, because we weren't there when it was written and don't know why it was done the way it was; I hope by leaving context comments I can help future engineers feel more comfortable keeping the codebase clean and efficient.
Do you have any advice you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
I have some advice I was given that I think is valuable. I had a really hard time choosing a major field of study because I was interested in almost everything. A counselor reminded me that you can still have any hobby you like, regardless of what you study at university. I was afraid that by choosing something I was cutting myself off from other things, but that's not actually true. I still love playing the piano even though I didn't go into music, and I still love math even though I didn't go into mathematics.
Also, my university offered a lot of student jobs. These were jobs that were only allowed to be worked by students, which meant the barrier to entry was fairly low. I don't know if other universities offer student on-campus jobs, but if they do, I very much recommend them. I worked student jobs the entire time I was at school, which meant I graduated with seven years of work experience. Yes, it took me seven years to get my bachelor degree, but that work experience meant I had no trouble getting jobs after (and even before) I graduated. That said, maintaining a job while going to school is an awful lot of work and it's not the right path for everyone; everyone's situation is different, this just worked out well for me.
Any other thoughts or comments?
Besides how linguistics training helps me at work, it's made me a FAR better human. I'm a reformed pedant. I was really condescending and had a bit of a superiority complex about language when I was young. I was all about correcting and fixing people and being exasperated when people wrote or said things "wrong." Studying linguistics has given me a LOT of empathy and understanding and freed me from most of my pet peeves. My perspective on language and communication is so different now. I feel free. It's a far pleasanter experience to put your energy toward really understanding and being understood by a person than on looking down on people and discrediting their thoughts because they don't know how some dude in the 19th century wanted a part of English to work that doesn't even make sense anyway. I think a lot of unnecessary conflict comes from different groups of people having different understandings of certain words, and fighting over the definition of the word rather than over the real human issue at the heart of the debate. It would be nice if we taught language a little differently in schools, so more people could be aware of how semantic drift occurs and how different people can use the same word to mean different things, and that language change is okay and actually beautiful.
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