A short note on incentives in hiring in tech vs. academia
Filed in “things you can’t unsee once you’ve seen them”:
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Hi there! My name is Omer. (It rhymes with “Homer”.)
I’m a Staff Software Engineer at GEICO Tech.
I’ve had a rather unorthodox career path. I got my first software development job straight out of high school, and worked as a software engineer from the mid-1990s until the mid-2000s. I then spent about 15 years as an academic linguist, while continuing to nurture my techie skillset on the side. In 2022, I decided to resign my tenured position as a professor of linguistics and return to software engineering.
Between leaving academia and joining GEICO Tech, I worked at Sylabs Inc., developing & maintaining the SingularityCE containerization platform, and on the Authentication team at ID.me.
My contributions to SingularityCE are open-source, and can be viewed here.
Some other things:
If you’re interested in stuff I produced in academia, try my old academic homepage (but please note that it is not actively maintained).
Recent blog posts:
The NBA 3-point shot as a metaphor for Work-From-Home
Here’s an analogy from the world of sports for the current “debate” on Work From Home (WFH) versus “Return to Office” (RTO).
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User Guide?? User Guide!
I recently came across a practice in tech that I was previously unfamiliar
with, and which I think is kinda neat.
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An inverse 'defer' pattern in Go
The Go programming language provides a defer keyword, which registers a statement to be executed after the current function returns. This is useful for a variety of purposes, including situations where you are performing a task that involves multiple setup steps, and you want to gracefully tear down what you...
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A note on good fortune
(This post was written & published on April 1st, but no, it’s not some April Fools thing, it’s 100% sincere. I’m not gonna wait to publish it tomorrow or something just because today happens to be Annual Prank Day.)
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Why academia is so threatened by remote work
Now that I’ve started my new tech gig, I’ve been reflecting on the issue of remote work. (The company I work for is fully remote.) Here are some thoughts about remote work, academia, and the latter’s attitude towards the former.
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How I found a job on Mastodon
As I’ve discussed here before, this past spring I made a decision to resign my position as a tenured Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, and to (eventually, after a bit of a break) return to my roots as a software engineer.
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The did-do list
Someone who I follow in the Fediverse posted a tiny, throwaway joke this morning:
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Some random reflections on leaving academia
Today marks exactly 229 days since my resignation from the University of Maryland took effect. Which is an extremely meaningless number. (Well, it is prime, so that’s something.) But for whatever reason, it felt like a good day to reflect a little bit about my departure from academia, now that...
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My favorite podcasts
(as of right now, anyway...)
I felt like putting together a list of my favorite podcasts and making it a Pinned Toot™️ on my Mastodon profile. But since I wanted to say a bit more about each podcast, the text quickly became too long for that medium, so I decided to put it here, instead....
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