What’s it really like to work at Chicago startups and tech companies? Blue Sky’s Inside Job lets people on the ground tell us in their own words.
Saranga Komanduri, 38, Technical Lead at Civis Analytics
Civis tries to help companies be more data driven in their decision-making. This is the magic of data science. You can take a person, and you can have thousands of attributes, pieces of information about that person, and throw that against a modeling algorithm, and get back which of those attributes matter and which of them don’t for whatever outcome you’re trying to measure.
I didn’t personally work on the campaign, but during Obama 2012, our CEO, Dan Wagner, was chief data scientist of the Obama campaign. There’s a lot of technology that gets built during a campaign that sort of disappears when the campaign disappears. Eric Schmidt of Google, who was heavily involved with the campaign, was trying to change that. So he funded Civis Analytics to keep those brains together and see if they could take that data science and data analytics experience and bring it to other domains and other companies.
I manage a small team of, right now, two other engineers that work on the back-end infrastructure of our platform. When you want to solve a problem with the Civis platform, you want to build a model around data and make some predictions. We write the code that does the computation.
I’ve been into computers since I was like 5. We had a personal computer at home, an IBM, so I would play with it quite a bit. I used to write programs in it.
I went to school for computer engineering, and I actually didn’t really like it at all. I was an undergrad at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and I dropped out completely. My parents were very unhappy.
I got a job at Best Buy working at the service bench, which eventually became the Geek Squad. So then I started working there, and I moved from there into working with the local county government in Toledo, doing their information technology.
I think I was 28 when I decided I wanted to go back and get a degree. I went to Bowling Green State University and looked at what degree I could graduate the fastest with, and it was computer science. One of my professors asked me if I wanted to do a master’s, and they would fund me as long as I did an assistantship.
In the course of doing my master’s, I realized I actually really liked computer science. It’s easy to think of a programmer as someone who just sits in front of a computer and writes code all day. But the actual problems you’re thinking about and solving are very interesting. Sometime later, I went to Carnegie Mellon (University) in Pittsburgh for a PhD in computer science. My thesis was on modeling the strength of passwords.
While I was still completing my PhD, I applied to a small amount of places in Chicago that looked interesting, and one of them was Civis. When I started at Civis, I was finishing my PhD, and my wife and I moved to Lisle and had a baby. So it was sort of a lot.
One thing that’s really nice about working here is how much you can learn about other stuff just being here. There’s a journal club that I’m a part of. So every Friday we meet, and if anyone has read any interesting papers that week, they present them at journal club.
We also do lightning talks once a month. They’re five-minute talks about any topic you want. One person did a lightning talk about their childhood, like how they grew up. Someone did a lightning talk about how they built their house. There are a lot of food ones. Or beer.
We also have this thing called Wizard School once a week. It’s basically teaching programming fundamentals. It’s called Wizard School because the book they use has a picture of a wizard on it.
The perks are things like the Big Table. It seats about 20 to 25. A lot of people will go out and get a lunch and come back to the big table so they can be part of the conversation. It’s just a very laid-back environment.
When I started, I think there were 60 employees, and now we’re at 110. The culture is very open. It’s very collaborative. It kind of has to be because every part of the organization depends on another part of the organization to get work done.
As told to freelance reporter Erin Chan Ding. Stories are edited for length and clarity.
