Alumna Report: Naomi Devlin
Naomi Devlin, who is both an undergrad alum and a grad alum of the Department, submitted this report shortly before attending the alumni conference:
I graduated with my M.A. in linguistics (thesis on pronominal anaphora and quantification) in May of 1997. Immediately following I became a professional ballroom dancer for a couple of years. This was an enjoyable, albeit not very lucrative, sojourn; and in 2000 I joined a start-up as a web content editor and “taxonomist.” It was my job to classify internet auction content using keywords and logical expressions so we could spit out aggregates and make purchasing recommendations. Remember when we had over a dozen different internet auction sites before eBay dominated? An auction aggregator made sense at the time!
At this company I discovered I had a knack for software quality assurance. In other words, I could break any code, not necessarily through trying. And, thanks to some nifty analytical abilities gained studying linguistics, I could retrace my steps and tell the developers exactly how to reproduce the bug.
After a couple of start ups, some time at eBay and PayPal, I joined Google as the 6th person in the “Testing Services” department. My initial job was to provide QA for a new product we were intending to launch called “AdSense.”
As time went on I discovered that beyond software quality assurance, my greater skill was in management. I built and ran a large QA department for Internal Systems for a year. It was an exciting time — I got to truly define and shape the direction of an organization.
In 2005 I left the Bay Area to become the Engineering Site Manager for Google’s Phoenix office. I had the amazing opportunity to build that office, located on the ASU campus, from soup to nuts. After two years in Arizona I returned to Mountain View to manage a group of software engineers responsible for developing and running our internal ticketing system. I am currently exploring opportunities to further develop my management career within Google.
Working at Google is challenging and rewarding. I am frequently amazed at the talent and dedication of my coworkers. In this way it truly reminds me of my time at UCSC, when I had the pleasure of working with great faculty and staff, and had brilliant students to study and collaborate with. No matter where my career takes me, linguistics at UCSC will be that foundation for me.