Life at Notable Employee Spotlight with Adam Smith, Engineering
Meet the people transforming healthcare through intelligent automation at Notable through this employee spotlight series - featuring Adam Smith in Engineering.
Life at Notable is our employee spotlight series. We want to use it to highlight the people we’re proud to work with and showcase our company culture. This month, the subject of Life at Notable is Adam Smith, an engineer on the patient scheduling team.
Q: How long have you worked at Notable?
Adam: I’ve been here about three and a half years.
Q: What role are you currently in? Has your role changed?
Adam: I am a software engineer currently working on our patient scheduling team, but I am also our native mobile engineer. My work has changed over time as the company has grown and developed. I've done everything from iOS and iPad app development to backend API work and more recently I've started doing frontend web development.
Q: What’s your favorite thing about your job?
Adam: My favorite thing about this job is that we have a fast growing team of smart people all over the country, but we still manage to be focused and disciplined about the projects we take on through periods of rapid growth. There’s always a valid engineering or business reason for the work that we do.
Q: What’s one of the most challenging things about your job?
Adam: Figuring out how to make experiences for patients and doctors that are not only helpful and delightful, but also safe and secure. Sometimes those things can feel like they are at odds. There's always a way to make an experience secure while being delightful, but it can take some serious thought.
Q: How has the company evolved during your time here?
Adam: We started out doing voice dictations to reduce physician burnout, but now we have our hands in a little bit of everything related to automating healthcare. The sheer scale of what we are doing has increased tremendously.
Q: What is your favorite food?
Adam: Nachos. Always nachos.
Q: Are you a morning person or a night person?
Adam: I’ve always been a night owl.
Q: How do you like to spend your free time?
Adam: My wife and I spend most of our free time exploring San Francisco. We've discovered all sorts of cool bars and restaurants, and we are constantly finding amazing views of the city we haven't seen before.
Q: What’s a skill you want to learn?
Adam: I have never in my entire life been able to snap my fingers. I don’t think I am physically capable of it. But if I were to somehow learn to snap my fingers, then I think a whole new world of possibilities would open up.
Q: Where did you grow up?
Adam: Sterling Heights, Michigan.
Q: What was your dream job when you were a kid?
Adam: When I was really young I loved dinosaurs and wanted to be a paleontologist. This was before I truly understood the full ramifications of extinction, and I would not in fact be spending time with dinosaurs.
Q: If you had a day to plan however you wanted, what would that day look like?
Adam: I am a big fan of taking day trips to wine country, in particular Healdsburg. Spending a beautiful day outside while tasting great wines is a perfect day.
Q: Is there anywhere you want to travel?
Adam: I’d really like to travel to Spain and France soon! If only we didn’t have a global pandemic still raging around us.
Q: What’s a failure you learned from?
Adam: I have come to realize that most of the time becoming a better software developer is just realizing you spent a lot of time building something with a subpar approach. “I really wish I had built that thing this way instead of that way” has been responsible for about 90% of my growth as an engineer.
Q: What was the last creative thing you did?
Adam: This is a boring answer, but I am currently prototyping a new piece of functionality here at Notable, which allows for lots of creativity. Engineering and product design are collaborating to build something totally new from scratch, and we’re going to put it in the hands of real people to test it out.
Q: If you could have a superpower, what would it be?
Adam: Maybe teleportation? I mean, there is just too much traffic.
Q: What are you most proud of?
Adam: After college I moved across the country to sunny California. I had never been to California before and I didn’t know a single person. It was tough at first, but I’ve built myself a great life out here with my wife and our cats and I haven’t looked back.
Q: What are five things that make you happy?
Adam:
- Nice, sunny weather
- Free time - either at home or on vacation - where you literally don’t have to do anything
- Finishing a project
- Cooking elaborate meals
- Raw oysters
Q: If you could add one thing to Notable’s office, what would it be?
Adam: A massage therapist that comes in once in a while.
Q: What’s one thing that surprised you about working at Notable?
Adam: Just how quickly we would grow and change. We’re about 10x the size we were when I joined.
Q: What’s one thing you learned at Notable that you wouldn’t have learned somewhere else?
Adam: I think we have really mastered the art of scaling. We figure out how to do something for the first time, and then we figure out how to repeat it efficiently. And that concept can be applied to deploying with a new partner, but also in other aspects of work, big and small.
Consider joining our team, to work alongside other passionate and smart people, striving to transform healthcare for the better.
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