Moving up at Cohere - 27/07/2024

A Sudden Start

The offer to start this leadership position kind of came out of nowhere. I was contacted one day by one of the amazing operations leads for the annotation team at Cohere and asked if I would like to lead a team. I obviously jumped at the opportunity. Getting more responsibilities and working even closer with the people at Cohere was a very valuable prospect for me. I found that it felt like my efforts had paid off, in just a few short months I had been able to make enough of an impact to move up the ladder. Little did I know this was just the start

Leading a Team

Leadership is not easy. At any given moment you need to know what your team is up to, if they are enjoying the tasks they are given, producing high quality work, meshing well with others, among many other parameters in the equation that outputs your team’s current state. I think I did a good job preparing my team members for the work they would be doing at Cohere while also giving them ample opportunity to shine bright. Three of them went on to become team leads themselves which was great to see happen and advocate for. My time in this role showed me that there are no shortcuts when dealing with people. It is always better to be through and complete the first time around when preparing people for their new jobs.

Projects

In this role, myself and a coworker began a small initiative to introduce more software automation and tooling into the annotation teams day to day workflow. We started by tackling the challenge of keeping track of over 300 contractors, all in different time zones and with varying schedules. We learned about Apps Script, an integration by Google that allows you to write javascript to interact with data inside of Google apps like Google Sheets. We got creative and developed a schedule tracker and predictor for the management of the annotation team built directly into Google Sheets.

This was met with great feedback, and we quickly expanded our small developer group to start taking up more complex and challenging projects to further the efficiency of the annotation team. This was a very exciting process, and of course came with its own responsibilities. Managing software projects, team leadership, work, and University meant that my hands were very full for about 6 months. I learned a lot about software development during this, using a variety of languages and approaches while building out projects with my colleagues.

Eventually, we began creating our largest project up to this point. A bespoke annotation tool designed to solve an expensive and persistent problem that had been bothering us for some time. We saw this major blocker that had been at the core of our annotation team for a very long time now, and started to build our solution in the form of a webapp. While I can not give you the full story today, I will say that the people I met, things I learned, and emotions experienced while building this project are something that are genuinely once in a lifetime. I am very thankful for the learning experiences I gained from this, not just as a software developer, but also from the perspective of working with and for a team. Knowing that what we were building would be used by hundreds of people, most of whom our team interacted with every single day, shifted my perspective on how I approach problem solving. It also gave me a huge amount of appreciation for those who supported me along the way, this project would not have gotten anywhere near the success and traction it did without them 🐚💛.

Moving Forwards

Given the success of the aforementioned webapp, my colleagues and I were offered internships at Cohere on the synthetic data team under an amazing manager who saw the potential in our work. This moved us out of our contractor roles and gave us many new affordances, and responsibilities. As of writing I am still in this internship position and will be wrapping sometime in December of 2024. Overall, the role of SDQS was incredibly formative for my career and I am constantly grateful for the lessons learned and the opportunities given to me.