My mom doesn't fully get what I do for work.
Why is it so complicated to explain it.
I mean, you know, I wanted to bring the dog
because, you know, he needs to understand what Dylan does too.
[WHIMSICAL PIANO MUSIC]
Hi.
I'm Dylan Capone and I'm a data engineer at a media company.
Hello.
I am Maria, and I am Dylan's mom.
Tell me what I do for a living.
One day you describe that, what you were doing
is like creating little robots to analyze
how many videos people watch or something like that.
So it's kind of like getting something valuable
and then converting it into something that's more useful.
Probably, 80% of what I do is data engineering.
Do you know why is it called data or data engineering?
There's a lot of data that you want that exists
throughout the internet.
But for it to be useful, you usually
want to change how it's organized.
Let's say you have a bag of dirty laundry,
and I say, find all the white t-shirts.
OK.
That's going to take you a while,
because you have to sort through the whole thing.
But if you get like-- if you do like a laundry service
and you get it back, and I say, find all the white t-shirts.
It's going to take you two seconds, because they're all
together, and they're all in one spot, and you pull them out.
In a way I guess I understand.
You organize the data.
What would you say are the best parts and the worst
parts of your job?
So the best part of my day is, any time I
can automate something, and I do it in a way
where I spend a lot less time automating it,
then I would doing that repetitive
task, that's a great day.
The worst part of my day, I would say is I guess,
when different social media platforms update their--
the versions.
Oftentimes , they're just like changing the name of field
or something like that.
And so we have to do some things on-- sometimes it depends,
right?
So we have to do things on our end,
and we're not necessarily getting any more information
out of it.
Do you interact with the other parts of your media company?
Because they make also videos and--
Yeah.
I mainly work from home, and I'll go into the office--
Where there is food?
Yeah.
If there's free food.
If there's something exciting happening,
I'll come into the office.
But I do love that freedom, and I
think that that's something that is very common now,
but I think even more common in software engineering.
Did you ever work from home?
And what do you think about--
what do you think about working from home?
Do you feel like--
I think that it is great.
But also you have to be very well organized,
because otherwise either you work 24 hours a day,
or you don't work anything.
You know, so organization is very important.
And also to have a place where you can work from home.
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What kinds of skills do you think an engineer
like me needs?
For that kind of job like you're describing,
because a lot of that is new.
Not everything is well known or you need
to know how to do research.
How to inform yourself.
How to figure out-- how to new things.
So it needs a lot of curiosity, I think.
Did I or our family help you to set you up
for success in your career?
OK.
You put education above everything else.
I think you cared about me going to college more than I did.
No cable TV.
But you have one of the first computers.
Right.
You got my brother and I a computer.
Your dad did, yeah.
Under the premise that like, it's a learning thing.
It's not-- which I obviously, just installed games
on anyways.
It wasn't like, oh, you just install the thing.
It was like a whole process.
Yeah.
You had to learn how to do that.
Right.
Do you like your job?
Are you happy there?
Like, I'm happier now that I see that something I'm working on--
like I see the direct impact of something I'm working on.
I've been at my current job for years,
and I've automated a lot of things.
And I've gotten rid of a lot of bugs
and now things are running very smoothly.
And so I don't have to worry about it as much.
And so now I'm moving more towards, how can I
use this data that I've set up all these systems to acquire?
How can I actually use that for something more interesting?
So like, maybe I can start doing more actual machine learning
on--
Data analysis?
Right.
Do more data science.
How can I now take all of this data
that I have and do something interesting with it?
Like, predict how well a video is going to do before we even
upload it, and make suggestions about, oh,
instead of using this title, there's some indication
that maybe we should change this word for that word.
Whatever it is, you can run experiments
and start trying to do predictive data science.
That's super interesting to me.
So do you feel like you have a better sense
of what I do for my job now?
Yeah.
I think that I know how you sort laundry.
[LAUGHTER]
But, I think it's a great metaphor because it helps
to keep the idea of what it is.
So when you say, OK, what do I do with data.
I mean, what does it mean to be a data engineer?
How can I sort it so that it creates something more useful?
Are you proud of me for the career that I've chosen?
Yes, of course.
Thanks for watching.
If you enjoyed this video, please
make sure to click through to the next episode of That's
my job folks.
But we also FaceTime a lot and we FaceTime with our dog, Doug
as well.
He likes to jump--