Working at The Predictive Index

Joining The Predictive Index

In the Winter of 2021, I began looking for a new role with more growth opportunities and prospects for expanding my professional network. My time at the small, fast-paced web agency Bartlett Interactive was invaluable. Still, I wanted to move to a larger tech company with greater resources and room for upward mobility.

The Predictive Index offered what I was looking for, emphasizing the importance of culture, worker satisfaction, and professional development. From my first day, my manager introduced me to generous mentors dedicated to helping me set and achieve goals and grow beyond the bounds of my current role. On top of that, I was intrigued by our mission of enhancing hiring practices and transforming the modern workplace for the good of the world.

My team comprised developers, marketers, designers, revenue specialists, copywriters, and business intelligence analysts, all working closely to build and optimize the company's marketing site. I was grateful to have access to senior developers to review my code, provide constructive feedback, discuss problems, and collaborate with me on various web projects. Building relationships with them was my priority, and I stressed that I was eager to learn from their experience and maximize my potential.

Working in a diverse, agile team setting, I developed solutions for the WordPress-based platform using client and server-side scripting languages. I built performant pages and bespoke, reusable blocks using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP.

When the marketing team suggested using animations to market our latest products, I jumped at the opportunity to experiment with Lottie, a library created by Airbnb, to develop lightweight, high-quality vector animations. Collaborating with designers and art directors, I envisioned and realized complex motion graphics in Adobe After Effects. With the Bodymovin plugin, I exported the animations into JSON, which Lottie could render into visually-arresting web experiences.

Setting Audacious Goals

The Predictive Index asks employees at all levels to set big, hairy, audacious goals, promising to do everything possible to help them achieve. Managers check in with individual contributors every quarter to ensure they're making adequate progress towards that goal and have what they need to make it happen. My audacious goal was to become a technical expert in JavaScript and the React ecosystem. In my last role, I didn't have the opportunity to build products with the mighty library, and I was determined to change that in my current position.

My audacious goal was quite attainable, but I knew better than to underestimate the learning curve of React. I dove head-first into the comprehensive documentation, tutorials on Gatsby, a React-based framework, and a course offered by the University of Helsinki on the fundamentals of full-stack web development. During work time, I dedicated several hours each week to learning and developing my skills, hoping to start using React in a real-world project within a couple of months.

Building a Virtual Event Platform in React

I got my opportunity to build a product with React in the Spring of 2022, having spent nearly six months studying and practicing with the library.

Every year, The Predictive Index hosts a conference to discuss and grow the category of talent optimization - in which they are the industry leaders. Some recent speakers at the conference include the likes of James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, NPR journalist Guy Raz, and motivational speaker J.R. Martinez.

Since the pandemic, they've offered a remote experience of the event with a service called Bizzabo, a platform for hosting hybrid and virtual events. However, we were frustrated with the costs and limitations of third-party software, so we nixed it in favor of our bespoke solution.

In partnership with the design team and with guidance from my mentors, I built the client-side application for hosting the 2022 Optima Virtual Conference. The event platform is built in React and hosted on a CDN through our instance of Pardot, a marketing tool in the Salesforce ecosystem. Stream Chat provided a real-time chat messaging feed, allowing participants to discuss the event and react to messages. Their feature-rich developer kit allowed us to create chat profiles on-the-fly for each registrant as they entered the event.

To gate the virtual conference, I worked closely with a backend developer who created an API I could use to query information for all event registrants. With access to the registrant database, I set up authentication to only allow participants who registered through the proper channels to log in and view the feeds. The gate would reject anyone who didn't pay for a ticket since their email wouldn't appear in the database.

The virtual conference successfully broadcast the event to over 500 people worldwide who couldn't attend the event in person. Registrants could view the agenda for the day, swap between several pre-recorded video feeds without leaving the page, and network with other attendees in real-time - an essential component of a work conference.

I was ecstatic to put my knowledge of React to the test, grateful that my supervisors would entrust me with the task, and relieved that the day went by without a hitch.

Layoffs

In August 2022, The Predictive Index laid off 15% of its workforce to cut operating costs while facing a potential recession and rising interest rates - I was, unfortunately, a part of that cohort who lost their jobs. I was initially shocked, worried, and saddened by the sudden end of my role at the company and the connections I made there. I thought I was safe. I didn't know what to do next.

Within a few weeks, however, I began to see it as an opportunity to rest and reset. I lived in California then, far away from my friends and family in Massachusetts. I moved back to the East Coast, back to the outrageous weather and my familiar stomping grounds, deciding to start the next part of my career in New York.