Melinda Thielbar talks with Dave Rael about software, deep knowledge, data science, organizing communities, and empathy
As a Ph.D. statistician with 15 years of experience in the software industry, Melinda Thielbar uses her broad range of skills as a statistical software developer with JMP, a business unit of SAS. Her specialties include software development, choice modeling, market research, big data, categorical data analysis, network graph analysis, fraud detection, nonlinear time series, data mining, predictive modeling, advanced analytics with large databases.
Chapters:
- - Dave introduces the Show and Melinda Thielbar
- - Understanding things in depth, the nature of economics, and incentives
- - Melinda and community involvement
- - Lessons learned from organizing a meetup group
- - Rewards of being a group organizer
- - Melinda's career path
- - Melinda on management and empathy
- - Life at JMP
- - Relevance of schooling
- - The things that "light Melinda up"
- - Melinda's story of failure - a project that cratered due to a lack of access to the necessary information and dealing with human barriers
- - Melinda's success story - Software that serves people, making sense of data to make lives better
- - Melinda's book recommendation
- - How Melinda stays current with what she needs to know
- - The influences of Melinda's broad interests and knowledge on her professional presence
- - Melinda's top 3 tips for delivering more value
- - Keeping up with Melinda
Resources:
Melinda's book recommendation:
Melinda's top 3 tips for delivering more value:
- Involve the customer and collaborate
- Keep in mind that your idea has been thought and tried - take a moment to search for lessons
- Always ask "how can this be wrong?"