Jerome Cukier
About Jerome Cukier
After graduating from business school, working as a consultant then a program manager, I used spreadsheets and dashboards a lot. In the mid 2000s, I saw a treemap for the first time, and discovered it was possible to create charts beyond what the simple choices of spreadsheet apps. At that time I was a statistician and I turned my focus on communicating data visually, while I learned the science of data visualization and also how to make charts with code. Eventually I was hired by Facebook to help them with visualization. I worked there as a designer to explore how visualization could support their products. Eventually I found that I liked building products more than prototyping what they could have been. So I transitioned to an engineering role at Uber. I started there with a narrow focus on visualization, building internal tools. Then I found that I was doing mostly front-end work, not necessarily visualization. Then I was spending more time on the webserver layer. Then on the integration with backend... By the time I left Uber I was doing very little visualization and a lot of everything else. Engineers are not expert at one technology. We are experts at learning technologies. Now I'm a tech lead at Google. I work on the testing strategy of Google Assistant.