It’s crazy how your course of life, no matter where you begin, gets so highly influenced by the availability of opportunities (and your will to seize them.) Of course, there is a strong connection between where you start and what opportunities are available, but that’s a topic for another day. Today, I just want to gratefully focus on the fact that I stumbled upon the opportunity to join the Responsible AI team at Workday, pursued it, and ended up getting an offer! This note is gonna focus on this specific topic of how grabbing an opportunity changes life so suddenly in various ways and how I am super grateful for it.
I am now officially a Responsible AI (RAI) research scientist at Workday and I am elated to be a part of this wonderful organization! I actually can’t believe I’m already a week in! There’s so much to learn and so much to explore. This is my first big corporate organization post-academia and it’s a tech company headquartered in the Bay area, California. The latter bit is important to mention because I am being pampered at this point and it’s just a weird reality to face (in all positive ways!) In the following, I am going to be penning down my experiences as a former academic experiencing the Workday hiring process and week 1 at a new job!
Let’s start with post-interviews where I learned that I got the offer and I accepted it. From that moment on, I became a new incoming Workmate and I was treated with a ball of a time following the “Congratulations” email. There were dedicated folks to ensure there was a smooth onboarding and then my new manager brought me the news that coincidentally day one of joining would also be the Workday Integrity team (WIT) summit where everyone from WIT, or the WIT nation as well call it, would be in the Pleasanton, CA campus. This coincidental opportunity helped me merge into the fast(track) lane by accelerating my networking (carpooling? 😜 ) with colleagues. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself weaving in the Bay Area / California way of work life.
I am gobsmacked by all the resources available to me as a Workmate. What’s even better is that Workday goes out of its way to explain to you that you need to use these resources! Haven’t we all been through situations where our realization of our lack of knowledge of the presence of a passed opportunity makes us filled with regret? It really felt like Workday is like Andrea desperately trying to let Miranda know what she doesn’t know 😂 (if you know, you know.)
So what are these changes, you may ask. Well, before Workday, I was working at a start-up called Fiddler AI focusing on RAI and I was there for two years. Since I was freshly leaving an academic environment and joining a start-up, I didn’t have much context on the employee perks and benefits of tech companies. Of course, a start-up cannot afford to spend its limited resources on much extravagance and so this baseline experience just further added to my surprise of how well employees get treated at big tech companies. And don’t get me wrong, even with Fiddler, I felt the surprise of the perks, with the lunches and dinners and the team-building events. Every experience is relative to your past ones and that’s the point: getting new opportunities shifts that relative scale for yourself and you can only just feel super grateful that you are experiencing that! So back to Workday campus: At every newly discovered corner of the Pleasanton campus, I was excitedly slacking my manager about the available perks and she couldn’t stop laughing at my kid-inside-a-candy-shop experience! Some of my exclamations to her were: “Oh specialty coffee machine!”, “oh flavored water machine!”, and “Unlimited peanut MnMs?!” c’mon! The Pleasanton campus also has its own gym free for Workmates via a wellness subsidy and a cafeteria with deeply subsidized food. The funniest part was how some folks were apologetic about not being as good as the “big players” like Google with its perks and benefits and here I was just grateful for all of these experiences! Talking about that relativity!
Ok, so perks and benefits are just the cherry on top of course. The cake really is my team and my job remit which focuses on all things Responsible AI! As a research scientist, I am expected to focus on innovation and integrity the two pillars of Workday through which I hope to engage in thought leadership as well as do some cool applied research work in RAI. A sneak peek into this would be (I am also figuring it out of course - I’m just in week 1 for now) - deeply thinking about fairness and bias in the context of Workday products, developing a culture around the responsible development of AI along with my teammates who are already miles ahead in this endeavor, and ultimately contributing to workflows that help build trust in AI! I am super excited for this opportunity to build bridges across various teams and collaborate with engg and product in a way where we can all contribute to a culture for responsibly developing AI tech and independently concluding that it is indeed the optimal pathway for developing enterprise AI!
So back to the crazy changes - An interesting and sudden change via this opportunity for me is how closely RAI at Workday works with C-level execs! Week 1 at Wday I got to meet several C-level folks including the CTO (tech), CLO (legal), and CCO (compliance)! This is an extremely important organizational structural design at Workday which, I strongly believe, is necessary because of the sociotechnical nature of RAI. Of course, as a new hire, this can also be very intimidating but I kept reminding myself about the awesomeness of this opportunity and that excitement helped me through the jitters!
So there we have it, a new job, with a new set of talented individuals, in a new environment, and a sea of opportunities to make an impact and move the needle - all because I pursued an email. Super grateful for this and to the readers who read thus far - go grab your opportunities! Cheers!
No comments:
Post a Comment