Why an Autistic Developer is Your Next Great Hire w/ Matt Nigh of UW Medicine

**Matt Nigh** (0:00)
I have been autistic my whole life, but I've only been diagnosed within the past two years. So I would say my advocacy is really for anyone who has similar experiences, not necessarily diagnosis. And to answer your question of how has it changed how I think about work in my career, it really helped me understand my strengths and my weaknesses better.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:19)
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**Dan Lines** (0:39)
Hey everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines. And today I'm joined by Matt Nigh, the data engineering manager at the University of Washington Medicine in Seattle.
Matt, thanks for joining us.

**Matt Nigh** (0:54)
Happy to join. Thank you for inviting me.

**Dan Lines** (0:55)
Yeah, awesome to have you here. Let's start by giving our audience the opportunity to get to know you a little bit better.
Can you tell our listeners a little bit about the work that you're doing at UW?

**Matt Nigh** (1:07)
Sure. So as you said, I'm the data engineering manager, which breaks into a few high level things. I am responsible for the two primary data warehouses that are the two enterprise data warehouses, one of which is the new one that we're migrating to, one of which is the old one we are deprecating and moving away from.
Me and my team are responsible for all of the technical work within that, as well as I am responsible for what is called the dog team. And the dog is one of those data warehouses, one of the new data warehouse that we're essentially moving and moving our old data warehouse to. My other job functions, I also act as a product owner for dogs, so I'm out there talking to our customers, figuring out what their needs are, decomposing those into epics, figuring out kind of what are their requirements that they have, and then figuring out and working through the reports and data sources on the old systems and trying to understand how we need to migrate and support those in the new systems.

**Dan Lines** (2:07)
That's awesome. Yeah, I checked out your LinkedIn, of course, a little bit. It seems like you're, you come from like a DevOps type background.
Can you say a few things about your career before you got to UW?

**Matt Nigh** (2:19)
Sure, I'm happy to. So I essentially led mostly a startup life for most of my career. I did start kind of at a big mid-sized company, Franklin American Mortgage, that got me wonderful training and really helped me kind of develop foundational skills and managing developers.
And then I moved to a startup, Vanik Digital, and I had a long career there. I had about six years there and a number of different roles. And you're right, I was in a multitude of positions, which is why to some extent, I even consider myself a generalist with my background because I've moved from project management to DevOps to managing developers back to project management and then managing developers again, which is where I am now.

**Dan Lines** (2:58)
How was the startup lifestyle for you? How did that work out? You know, I'm also, of course, a startup person and there's a lot of interesting challenges, life-changing experiences. How did it go for you?

**Matt Nigh** (3:10)
I loved it. That's one of the reasons I was there for so long because I do not personally consider myself like one of those long timers. Like I work with a lot of people at UW, for example, who have 30 years. And that is just an amazing thing to me because I can barely process working at the same place for that long. And in startup life, I think it's, especially for someone with autism, wonderful because it just kept throwing new challenges my way. I kept having the ability to grow.
So much of my own challenges, the solutions were in my hand and I was able to do them myself. When you're in a massive enterprise, you have so many dependencies and things like that that you have to work through. And it's not to say that's good or bad necessarily because everyone has preferences, but I just, yeah, startup life was super fun.

**Dan Lines** (3:58)
Yeah, whenever someone comes and talks to me, hey, should I try that, like joining a startup or should I stay at a larger enterprise? Like I always try to tell them, yeah, try startup at least one time in your life. You'll learn something at such an accelerated rate.