Glen Wang is the CTO and Co-founder of The Third Place. He is a mathematician turned Data Scientist and Engineer. Prior to founding The Third Place, he was at Plethora as a Computational Geometry Software Engineer, helping to give independent inventors the same prototyping power as large manufacturers. At Khan Academy, he led teams to build products used by millions of students and teachers worldwide. When not coding into the night, Glen enjoys visiting Trouble Coffee in San Francisco after a long run, Neo-Futurists in Chicago for its improv shows, and Streb Labs in Williamsburg for its dance performances.
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The biggest challenge is prioritization.
There is never enough time to do everything you'd like. Hence, every decision boils down to making some kind of tradeoff, from small things like when to refactor a piece of code to more significant things like pursuing one product idea versus another. The results of how things get prioritized often have a long feedback cycle — you won't see the effects right away — but the effects have a way of reverberating throughout the business over time, sometimes with a step function delta in outcomes.
At The Third Place, we help local businesses achieve financial returns befitting their impact they have on our communities.
Our relationship with local businesses has become increasingly intermediated by third parties (e.g. delivery apps, and ghost kitchens). These third parties charge high commissions and incentivize fleeting transactions with vanishingly thin margins that threaten the financial viability of the local businesses they purport to serve.
Instead of seeing local businesses as sources of transactions, we see local businesses as centers of gathering, creativity, and culture. In a world where people seek genuine connection, we help local businesses build long-lasting customer relationships that grow with every touchpoint, whether it's a subscription, a gift, an event, or a direct message from the business owner.
I always look for folks who have a tinkerer's mindset — they're curious and enjoy breaking things down to understand how the constituent parts work; they poke at the things they've built to find details that they can improve upon. Moreover, they love to share their work with others and leave the codebase and documentation in a more understandable state than they found it.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
— Arthur C. Clarke
We live in a time where GPT-3 can produce output that seems magical, based on a model so complex that we're not really able to understand how it works. There's an interesting parallel with products that elicit the same sense of joy and wonder, created from layers and layers of technologies that build off of each other to be more than the sum of their parts.
For engineers, seek out teams and people who care about code reviews.
Feedback from code reviews is the fastest shortcut to growth as an engineer.
But good code reviews are surprisingly difficult to come by. Ideally, you want feedback that pushes you to think about everything from stylistic choices to architectural decisions to communication. But code review is more of a rote approval process in many organizations, and reviewers are more interested in checking it off than genuinely investing in your growth.
As a Sr. Software Engineer @ The Third Place, you will be one of the first engineers hired at The Third Place, giving you the chance to both build critical infrastructure as well as create incredible customer experiences. You’ll be collaborating closely with the founders to prototype new product features as well as architect and grow The Third Place’s technology.
Exaltitude newsletter is packed with advice for navigating your engineering career journey successfully. Sign up to stay tuned!
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