Tacktern Series: From Summer Intern to Full-Time Employee
By Pooja Doctor
Cultivating a culture where work is fun
The first thing that struck me about Thumbtack’s culture was how cheerful and filled with party parrot emojis it is! People know how to get work done, but never forget to have fun. This permeated through every meeting I was in.
Throughout my internship experience, the University Recruiting team made sure the interns had a great time, which helped me feel connected to everyone despite being a fully remote internship. We made terrariums, had a ramen-making social, played impromptu game nights, and much more. We also had biweekly check-ins with our recruiter who made sure we felt supported and were having a great time throughout the summer. Any feedback on CBBs (could be better) I gave was implemented and iterated upon rapidly.
In addition to socials, we had brown bags each week with leaders from different areas, ranging from the CEO to the Head of Design and beyond. It was great to learn about all areas of the company and fun to hear all their intern stories! Everyone here has been transparent, humble, and great to speak to.
Intern Brown Bag with Marco My Little Terrarium
Apart from our intern-specific events, we had team and company-wide events every week. My favorite was the Drag Show and live Jazz music show hosted by the ProudTacks and NOBLEtacks employee resource groups, which support our LGBTQIA+ and Black employees respectively. I can’t wait to take part in more events and contribute to a culture centered around transparency, employee well-being and humility as a full-time employee.
What I worked on this summer as an intern
Working at Thumbtack was my first experience in tech, and Thumbtack, being a home services marketplace, brings with it many interesting and unique challenges and opportunities. My team primarily worked on bigger thought-pieces as they relate to the supply and demand dynamics and matching on our platform. Questions like, “How do we define a market?” “What makes a market healthy?”, and “What is the link between supply and revenue?” were some of the areas we tackled together as a team.
My intern project focused on disaggregating our categories into sub-units or subcategories using the request form data from customers when they submit a project on our platform. This would help us get a more granular understanding of our marketplace across over 500 different categories.
Some of the questions I was tasked with answering:
- How do we decide on the right level of granularity? (i.e. what are the right number of subcategories for each category to have?)
- Categories may have different feature types with varying interactions among them, so how do we standardize our code to be able to handle all of that variance?
- How do we make sure that despite only using customer side data to find subcategories, we are not losing/ignoring information from the supply side? It is important not only for us to know what customers want, but also what pros want to do.
Analytics at Thumbtack is rigorous and it pushed me to think harder, challenged my assumptions in approaching analytical problems and most of all, made me a better analyst. I learned a lot from being able to talk to people across different teams. It allowed me to understand the projects they worked on, and to ask many, many questions — which were always met with patience and kindness.
“There is no such thing as too many questions” is one of the first things my mentor mentioned in my first week here and I feel like I have tested that a lot.
Transitioning from intern to full-time employee
Over my 12 weeks as an intern, there were definitely challenging parts, but the fulfillment I got from spending my summer at an exciting tech company helped me make the decision to accept an offer to come back to Thumbtack as a full-time employee this fall! I had the opportunity to be onboarded to Thumbtack’s massive data lake, gain a deeper understanding of the company’s business model, learn to write thoughtful documentation (a rare skill!), and make great presentations.
It’s so rewarding to know the infrastructure I built will be something that will be used regularly and that it will have an impact across my team as well as the company. As I transition from being an intern to joining the company as a full-time employee, I’m sure Thumbtack will have a lot more to teach me and I cannot wait to learn!
