Thomas Ware

1. What do you do?

I lead a team of developers at our client, Wakefern, and coordinate with other teams. My day-to-day involves making and managing Jira tickets, doing code reviews, designing features, and interfacing with the client. I don’t do as much development as I used to, but I still get my hands dirty with debugging, migrating, and setting up new applications.

2. What’s the coolest part of your job?

Wakefern is a grocery cooperative, which means I get a behind-the-scenes look at how the food gets to the shelves. It gives you a lot more appreciation for the work that goes into stocking a supermarket. 

Once, we visited the seafood warehouse where every piece of seafood at a ShopRite gets made and went to the New York fish market at 2 a.m. Grocery stores are enormously complicated, and you don’t really understand why until you have to figure out how to automate a complex interface between fishermen, food processors, and brick-and-mortar stores that’s been done on paper for 40 years.

3. Why are you passionate about it?

I love working with talented people and making new stuff. There’s no substitute for sitting down with your team, sketching a design, and watching it come to life and impact thousands of people in real-time. My work matters — I can tell because of how many calls I get when something goes wrong!

4. Which skills from your IAC degree have helped you be successful in this career?

Do the readings. Seriously. I don’t remember the exact formula for marginal profit under a monopoly or the details of that one election in Bolivia that I wrote a paper on. But I do remember how to read through a document and pick up on subtext, understand the perspectives of multiple authors on the same issue, and bring it all together to present to someone who might not share those same views. 

It’s all about developing those critical thinking skills so that when two managers from different departments are telling you opposite things, you can talk to your client lead and synthesize what you’ve heard into a solution that hits both of their pain points.

5. What’s your #1 tip for students and alumni interested in your field?

Technical skills are your foot in the door, not the end goal. You need to have good software proficiencies to get a job, but your career path will be defined by your soft skills, like project management, design thinking, and good communication. Anyone can learn Java — stand out by being the best leader, the best coordinator, or the best trainer.