Head of Technical Support Engineering at Meta
UW Majors: Classical Studies and History
Tell us a bit about your job (e.g. what kinds of things you’re working on, what types of problems you solve day to day, etc.)?
I am currently the head of Technical Support Engineering and Product Service Analytics within the Meta Family of Apps Product Services & Operations team. We cover advertising and business product support. We solve a range of technical problems for customers, create patches and workarounds to unblock people from using our tools, and develop solutions to improve products based on customer feedback. We leverage data analytic techniques to identify trending topics and opportunities for improvement and then the support engineering team conducts code forensics and R&D to make or recommend improvements.
How do you think your humanities education has influenced/advanced your career path?
My degree in Classical Studies and History have given me two powerful tools that I apply daily:
1) A perspective on the shared aspects of humanity across the ages and the depths and limitation of human knowledge, capacity, and achievement. I studied a lot of Greek and Roman texts in my time at the UW and these texts gave me insight into the thoughts, motivations, and feelings of ancient peoples. In many ways they are both vastly different and no different from our own all at the same time! This has made me a better manager as I feel that the humanities have given me a broad view into humanity and has helped me be better at aligning peoples strengths and motivations to impactful business problems.
2) A love of learning! Studying ancient languages and people created a lifelong love of learning, and more importantly taught me how to learn! The analytical skills that I used to read and deconstruct ancient texts translates well into the technical work that I do and gave me a foundation to become a full-stack developer. This fast-tracked my ability to learn new languages extremely fast. The critical thinking skills the humanities taught me have given me a powerful ability to not only think critically about what information I am consuming, but also gave me the skills to be self-reflective. These abilities help me cut through the noise and get to the heart of what I am trying to learn faster.
Want to read more? Check out the profiles on the Humanities Alumni Careers page for more information on what our humanities majors are up to.