The Value of Curiosity

pghfllws
May 15
2 min read

As the Fellows program wraps up and I transition into a full-time AI engineer role at Gloo, I’ve been reflecting on what the past year has taught me. Essentially being a startup, the culture in my office is very fast-paced, and we are always building a lot of new features. As a result, I quickly realized that I have a lot of agency in how I architect projects and systems, which forced me to think about bigger picture effects. A piece of advice my team received from my supervisor, which was heavily echoed throughout the Fellows program, was to always ask why we are doing a particular task. What’s the overall objective? How does it impact the business? Does it actually benefit customers? Over time, these questions became automatic in the design process, and I found myself thinking more critically about dependencies, tradeoffs, and long-term impact.

During my time at Gloo, we hit our IPO which meant there is now an even greater initiative to grow profitability. I started evaluating not just how to build something, but whether it should be built at all. In one case, I was planning a project to automate ingesting feeds into our service. However, I realized that both the architectural lift and time spent completing it would not be worth the business case, especially since there did not appear to be any customers asking for this feature at the present moment. I brought this up to my supervisor, and he agreed, so I shifted priorities elsewhere.

Oftentimes, I feel that young adults starting their first job or internship believe they just need to complete the task they were given. However, I see a lot of benefit in thinking about how the task one is doing fits in the grand scheme of things. It makes work much more rewarding and also signifies to others that one has great value and is not just a task monkey.

In the business world, we are called to glorify God through our work while serving business needs. Adding unique insight, critical thinking, and delegating time wisely are great means of doing so.