Product-person fit

If you don't have those voices in a company that are developing services for people that need it, you are going to miss out on insight. You are going to not understand them to then be able to create services that are inclusive, that are thinking about those things. And that to me was a real draw about AcureX, because I felt like me having a disability was actually a real bonus to the company, and I felt like the weighting for me was like, actually, not only they're going to understand me more, but I can do really good things here, because the people that we're serving are people that I feel that I can relate to some of the situations, not all, but some of the situations they may be going through and actually could improve those services as a result.

Previously in my career I would work with recruiters and they're like, "I've got these jobs on my board. You could apply for this. You could apply for this," and it's like, “No, I don't want to work for gambling." So I was like, "No." And then they're like, "Well, what about this?" And so, "I don't want to work for a dating app. I can't really relate to it. I'm married. I don't know what I want to do." And I see this now actually, when I'm interviewing, you have to have that passion about what that company is, the problem they're trying to solve and their product. Because if you haven't got that, then you're not going to enjoy your job. You're not going to be able to relate to what the problems are. You won't be able to prioritise the problems, or talk to your customers and really understand what's going on.

So when I've moved roles into potentially something that I thought was good for me on paper, so very early in my career I went to consulting. I was blinded by the fact that someone older than me had told me that, "You need to go into consulting. It gives you a really good solid framework." And I was 24, and I was like, "Okay, I'll go to consulting." So I got a consulting job and I tried to make it work, but it was in a domain that just didn't excite me, just didn't interest me. And I tried my hardest for two years and then I just had to admit defeat that I was like, "It's just not my bag. It just, it doesn't excite me." It just wasn't the right thing. Whereas the roles that I rave on about, and the things I get really excited about is where I really enjoyed the company, I liked the culture, and I enjoyed the problem.

A tech company has tech priorities, it understands its engineers, it understands what goes into making a good product and formulating a good process to create said product. And the places that I've managed to do the work that I like the most, at least, and spread my wings, were those that kept to this heartbeat of the engineering team. An engineering team works in predetermined increments. The rest of the business understands it, they work with clients around it, they sell around it, and they respect the engineering team's time, and their decisions.

I know that an engineer's job is to deliver value to the company, it's not to write the best code possible, or to be the best at following industry standards, practices, et cetera. It is to make money. You get paid, you make money for the company. It's fair. But when you have to go against this internal sensor that you have, generally, people do have a core of these values that they try to follow in order to do good work. You violate those principles enough and you get less happy, and you know your work is not the best.

And you can see the issues that will accumulate in the process, because the industry standards exist for a reason. And very often they are in conflict with a given business' objectives. There's always the slider between quality and delivery. And what I've been doing at least to mitigate that, is go in any given project, where is the slider? What are we doing right now? Are we doing delivery, or are we doing quality? And time considerations come into that. And then that's a more evolved way of handing that, I suppose, because you can then say, "Well, if we're doing delivery, now we can make provisions for quality later."

The biggest difference between being an academic and being in an industry, is that the goals that you have are set by other people and the work that you're doing is trying to drive business goals, not trying to do research for the sake of doing research. And that's a mindset that's a really big shift from academia because you're not just kind of running after ends that might lead to nothing, everything you do has to have an outcome and you have to get really good at figuring out the highest impact outcome from your work. And you don't learn that in academia. And it's this business sense that people talk about, is that was the biggest challenge in the first part of kind of getting a job outside of academia.

Otherwise, there's habits, things like how to run a meeting. Those are things that you kind of pick up over time, but learning about things like what's a KPI? What's retention and growth and how do we define these things in a business? And who do you talk to if you have a problem. Yeah, the biggest things were definitely around business goals and tying business goals to your work.