Wolfram Research

I joined Wolfram Research in 2010 as an intern in the Kernel Technology department. I was in the Siebel Center and just so happened to walk through a job fair, where a very friendly recruiter from Wolfram Research asked me about the longboard I had clutched under my arm. I ended up sending my resume, interviewing, and was hired as an intern on the Mathematica team.

A random memory - I had just finished my first semester of Swahili at UIUC when I was interviewing for this job, so I listed it on my resume. For the interview, I sat in a room while several people asked relatively easy behavorial and technical questions. The final interviewer came in, sat down, and asked "Unaongea Kiswahili?"

I instinctively responded "Ndiyo, mimi ninasema katika chuo kikuu" (Yes, I'm learning in my university). The rest of the interview was just talking about how cool Swahili is and nerding out on the conjugations of verbs, with a guy who I later learned was a top engineer. He told me about his time in the Peace Corps in Tanzania, and was quite gracious during the times when I couldn't keep up with his fluency.

Fifteen years later, I'm willing to admit that I was definitely unqualified for this job at the time. But I got the job anyways, because someone decided to take a chance on me based on a totally unstructured conversation. Later on when I had to do my own hiring, I found that unstructured interviews are a terrible way to evaluate candidates.

My first project on Mathematica was a symbolic interface for generating C code. I had only written Java code up to that point, but thankfully there is a massive library on the 4th floor of Wolfram Research with plenty of reading material.

Meeting Stephen Wolfram#

Stephen Wolfram is a truly wonderful guy. I consider myself enormously fortunate to have met him, and especially grateful to receive a letter and book from him in the mail 5 years later with a handwritten note. The man has the memory of an elephant and a relentless determination. After meeting many CEOs in the past 15 years, I can say confidently that he is the greatest micromanager of all time. The cohesion of the Mathematica language (now called Wolfram Language) is largely thanks to his attention to detail.

I wish I had asked Stephen Wolfram for a picture on one of the many occasions that I met him. I actually was more acquainted with his son Christopher, who was 12 years old at that time. On October 2012, I presented my work at the Wolfram Technology Conference alongside Christopher Wolfram, who was thirteen at the time and an avid user of my internship project on connecting Arduinos to Mathematica.