Linguistics Jobs: Interview with a Developer Advocate

I often talk about how Linguist Twitter is a great place to hang out. Twitter can be a big, confusing, noisy platform, but I’ve enjoyed building a little world full of linguists, and one of those excellent people is Rachael Tatman. It has been great to follow Rachael as she completed her PhD, got a job in data visualisation with Kaggle, and then moved on to chatbot maker Rasa. Rachael is not only a great linguist, but a thoughtful linguistics communicator. Her blog Making Noise and Hearing Things has a wonderful back catalogue covering data science, professionalism and emoji. You too can follow Rachael on Twitter (@rctatman).

What did you study at university?

My BA is in Linguistics and English Literature (I double majored) from William and Mary (in Virginia, USA) and then I went to the University of Washington for grad school. I got my PhD in linguistics in 2017, and my dissertation was “Modeling the Perceptual Learning of Novel Dialect Features”. Over the course of my PhD in particular I moved more and more into natural language processing, although I was still pretty much calling myself a computational linguist.

What is your job?

I’m a senior developer advocate for a company called Rasa. We make an open source framework for building chatbots/virtual assistants and free software for improving your assistant over time. (If you’re a business using the free software and want additional fancy features, we also have a paid enterprise version.) Developer advocates are basically peer-to-peer technical educators. Our job is to help make it as easy as possible for developers to use whatever product it is that we support. So my day to day involves a lot of developer education–things like writing blog posts, giving talks and making videos–as well as providing technical support and product feedback. Because I have a research background and Rasa has a research team I’ll sometimes help out with research projects as well.

How does your linguistics training help you in your job?

It helps me every day! One great example is that it’s given me a good idea of the typological diversity of languages in the world. Since Rasa is a language-agnostic platform (we want to be able to support as many languages as possible) knowing what sort of differences there are between languages is very helpful. My linguistics training also taught me how to communicate complex topics succinctly and accurately which is a huge part of developer relations and related fields, like technical writing.

Do you have any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?

Be really kind to yourself, especially when you’re on the job market. There’s a large emotional regulation component to searching for jobs that I don’t think gets talked about enough. Find something that helps you disconnect from thinking about work or looking for work and commit to doing it often. That could be something as simple as following along with yoga videos in your room or setting up a weekly time to play video games with your friends or just taking a walk outside every day, maybe with your children if you have them. Building a brain break into my routine and keeping it stable really, really helped me both in graduate school and when I was on the job market.

Also: your goals and identity will change over time. You may think of yourself as an academic now but won’t in 5 years. That’s ok. It’s normal. And it’s also normal for those shifts to come with a grieving process, especially if you weren’t expecting them. Give yourself grace, and time, to feel your feelings. And know that you can have a rich, happy fulfilling life that looks nothing like what you’re planning for yourself right now.

Any other thoughts or comments?

The great thing about studying and having a fascination for language is that it’s everywhere. Your linguistic training will give you a set of lenses you can look through for the rest of your life, and that’s a thing to celebrate and cherish in its own right.

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