Jofish Kaye on industry research, having an impact, and values-driven decision making

Jofish Kaye is a Principle Research Scientist at Mozilla, and before this he worked at Yahoo and Nokia. Jofish made a deliberate decision not to pursue an academic career after he finished his PhD and it’s interesting to hear how his decision-making criteria evolved from being primarily about the people he could work with to being more values-driven and being able to make an impact. A strong sense of values and having impact are threads in a lot of what he talks about. He also discusses his experiences more generally working in an industry context and also moving into more management/leadership roles.

“I think I’m the only person on the planet who likes job searches because you get to re-invent yourself.”

“I am concerned the way we treat publications as the way to make success in the world.”

“It’s so important and so incumbent upon research as a field to make clear and visible how valuable what it is we do.”

“We need to be taking seriously this call for public outreach.”

You can download full transcript here

Overview:

Jofish discusses (approximate times):

01:38 Getting a PhD at Cornell and moving into an industry job at Nokia and being able to teach at Stanford

09:24 Why he didn’t want to apply for an academic position – the difficulty getting funding vs the freedom to do what he wants in industry, the current Mozilla grant process and research they have supported

19:16 Triggers for moving to different companies, looking at what he really enjoyed doing (CHI4Good), and seeking out a way to do that – the job search as a way to reinvent yourself

25:11 Moving from more of an industry research role to now also being concerned for shipping product to customers and having impact in the world in a different way

30:55 How his thinking about job searching has changed over time, from thinking about the people he would work with, to more values-driven decision making with some additional criteria

36:00 Broader accessibility for young people to universities, and the role of public universities,

38:40 His usual pattern of working now with kids/family; and experiences being in a management role, recruiting people, and the ‘Noah’s Ark’ theory about having people who share the same assumptions

42:00 Being a leader and manager – managing as administration, checking boxes, etc; leading as trying to build a strategic narrative and the difficulty of coordinating with people who have different epistemological assumptions and how you measure impact

50:45 Practical team strategies when people are distributed, combining in-person and online techniques, daily video ‘stand up’ meetings

57:18 Challenges around issues of diversity and inclusion across the industry and in particular how to improve diversity in an open source volunteer community

1:01.40 Challenges for academics moving into industry, getting to actionable insights quickly and how to communicate those in the slide deck (the coin of the realm)

1:07:38 End

Related Links

Phoebe Sengers - http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/sengers/

Elizabeth Churchill - http://elizabethchurchill.com

Wendy Ju - http://www.wendyju.com

Pam Hinds - https://profiles.stanford.edu/pamela-hinds

Terry Winograd - https://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/

John Tang - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/johntang/

Jed Brubaker - https://www.jedbrubaker.com

Allison Druin - https://www.pratt.edu/faculty_and_staff/bio/?id=adruin

Casey Fiesler - https://caseyfiesler.com

Anna Cox podcast - http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2017/3/5/anna-cox

CSCW Medium posts - https://medium.com/acm-cscw

DeleteMe - https://abine.com/deleteme/

TallPoppy - https://tallpoppy.io/