Rachel Houghton talks to us about her job, her awesome boss and what it’s like to work in software.







Transcript



Adam    00:00:06    Oh, my God Thora just hit me in the face! Hi, this is Adam.



Thora And this is Thora



Adam And I like to make her laugh. This is autism on shift where 



Thora we talk to other autistic folks about what we do at work. 



Adam Let’s dive in it. It’ll be fun 



Thora Today. We are talking to Rachel Houghton. Did I say that right, Rachel? 



Rachel Yes. 



Thora Houghton. Awesome. I got it. Okay. And Rachel is, uh, officially your official title is product owner, correct? 



Rachel Yes. 



Thora And you work in software, tell us what that’s like and what that all means.  



Rachel    00:00:46    So I do work in software. Um, I am not myself, a software engineer. Well, yet. I’m hoping to one day. Um, but I work with a team of software engineers and test engineers. Uh, and we basically, we take a bunch of work that I have kind of put together, um, geared towards, you know, new enhancements to the product that we have. Um, or maybe even small tweaks to, you know, fix certain issues that seem very buggy or bugs themselves cause they happen. It’s software. Um, so I take that work to my team and, you know, we, we work together to just, you know, get things done.  



Thora    00:01:38    Awesome. So can I ask what kind of software like  



Rachel    00:01:42    Yeah, so I work at a company called Vector Solutions and we’re transitioning into a solutions company. Um, we have many different types of platforms. Our primary platform is a learning management system, uh, where we do online learning, online based education, uh, courses, um, in many different fields, everything from the general, you know, sexual harassment and, you know, bullying in the workplace kind of courses that, you know, most companies require their people to take, um, to things like crane safety, um, or other courses that would be for someone who is, say a contractor who needs to get their continuing education credits to get their license renewed. Um, so it’s, uh, it’s a whole spectrum of types of courses for online learning. Yeah. You saw what I did there. So yeah, that, that, that is primarily what we do, but, but, you know, we do have also other products like incident management software, uh, which is, you know, if you are in a warehouse situation and, you know, there’s an oil spill and, you know, somebody slips and falls, you can, you know, log the incident and it kind of takes the incident all the way through the, you know, the, the insurance system and everything like that. So we’re kind of trying to integrate all of those different platforms into a single solution at the moment.  



Thora    00:03:15    How cool! Okay, so as a product owner, do you have just like one specific, um,  



Adam    00:03:22    Do you mean like one project at a time or,  



Thora    00:03:25    I mean, could you call it a project or I, um, I’m sorry to sound so ignorant. I just don’t know.  



Rachel    00:03:31    That’s okay. It’s okay. So the, the product that I work on has many different, we call them services, so many different things that it does. And so my team, my group has like a subset of those services. Um, there are multiple teams on that product in general. So if there are in special enhancements for any of those specific services or bugs that come in for those, those are the things that we work on.  



Adam    00:03:58    And do you guys figure out like the enhancements together, like when you’re in meetings or is that, or does someone else come up with those and then you guys work on them?  



Rachel    00:04:06    So we do have an executive leadership...

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