Episode 298 | Melinda Thielbar - Understanding In Depth

Guest:

Melinda Thielbar

@mthielbar

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: 2:02 - Dave introduces the Show and Melinda Thielbar5:25 - Understanding things in depth, the nature of economics, and incentives9:06 - Melinda and community involvement11:53 - Lessons learned from organizing a meetup group14:44 - Rewards of being a group organizer15:59 - Melinda's career path20:32 - Melinda on management and empathy22:05 - Life at JMP23:39 - Relevance of schooling25:18 - The things that "light Melinda up"27:17 - Melinda's story of failure - a project that cratered due to a lack of access to the necessary information and dealing with human barriers31:24 - Melinda's success story - Software that serves people, making sense of data to make lives better34:04 - Melinda's book recommendation36:08 - How Melinda stays current with what she needs to know37:33 - The influences of Melinda's broad interests and knowledge on her professional presence38:49 - Melinda's top 3 tips for delivering more value40:34 - Keeping up with Melinda

Resources: JMP JMP Community SAS The Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith Mike Cohn on Developer On Fire Rick Pack on Developer On Fire Ian Cook Seth Godin TED Talk Including the Admonition to Start a Movement John Sall CraftLit Podcast

Melinda's book recommendation: The Affluent Society - John Kenneth Galbraith The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction, Second Edition (Springer Series in Statistics) - Trevor Hastie

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?"