Looking for work, surprise edition

First things first, The DataBS Conf videos have been made public, and here's the playlist to all the wonderful talks! Thanks to everyone who came, spoke, laughed, and just chatted up a storm. It was an amazing experience organizing it and seeing everyone have fun.

Life is full of sudden turns. I was literally at my desk and doing some light research on bomb calorimeters so that I could write something about food calories when I suddenly get an unwelcome email – my Quantitative UX Researcher position at Google Cloud has been eliminated. Apparently a pretty large swathe of my now-former-teammates got hit too. As people affected start reconnecting their broken networks, the blast radius on the UX teams I know seem pretty bad. It's not a fun situation and my relatively calm writing here hides the inevitable churning in the pit of my stomach.

I now have a big clock over my head that counts down the days I have to find a suitable alternative position within the company in some other division, or I get the official boot. Given the reality of the situation, I'm not optimistic about that being a viable option.

I've experienced being laid off in Q3/Q4 before. I am fully aware of the utter hell of "we don't have budget/headcount/people to even give interviews" in the coming holiday season that will soon happen to all hiring managers across the entire industry. And that doesn't even factor in the extremely tough job market that exists today, especially for mid-career people like myself. So I'm not wasting time with this. I've got a spouse, young kid, and fluffy cat to feed, and bills that won't stop due to any such speedbumps.

I am very actively looking for work. Right now.

I'm based out of New York City but will very happily work remotely with all sorts of time zones having worked with teams across the globe the past few years. I speak Japanese and Chinese on top of everything.

I obviously do tech and data stuff, having done the whole data analyst, scientist, quant UX researcher, data engineer bit at various points. I'm a generalist at heart but have gone pretty deep in all the roles at various points. I've also been around the block enough times to have a lot of opinions about doing good data strategy, research processes, and running broader programs. I've worked on B2C and B2C, across a bunch of industries. I've spent the past 7 years at GCP using all sorts of stuff for usability purposes and wound up learning a surprising amount of it. I usually love the craziness of younger startups, but can do the Big Megacorp thing now without trouble.

More recently I've done usability research using logs analysis, text classifiers, experiment design, instrumentation and metrics design, surveys, even some qualitative usability studies and interviews. I've been working on web based product design for over a decade. The list is sorta endless.

I seriously know what I'm doing at a very high level, and am very scrappy in terms of how I can apply that knowledge to make things work for your problems. Only downside is I'm not cheap, again because of close to 20 years being in the trenches. But I'm fast.

Leads to full time positions are ideal, but I'm also open to doing consulting and contract/fractional work. If you've wanted to hire me to specifically work on something you've got going on, now is the perfect time to fork over some money to pick my brain or do a fixed rate project of some sort.

I'll be spending the next few days digging up my resume LaTeX file and giving it an 8 year overdue refresh. Please reach out if you know of anything or have a name of someone I can reach out to.

Thanks!