Read on for Tyler Jensen (MCS '11)'s follow-up Q&A to his 2017 Alumni Profile piece. Here, Jensen discusses how to avoid burnout and the importance of soft skills.

When we last contacted you in 2017, you were the Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of SpareChange, an app dedicated to modernizing the process of donating to non-profit organizations. Where has your career and research taken you since then?

I sold SpareChange in 2017 and rejoined Microsoft in the Azure AI team where I have been ever since. After starting on the AI Platform team as a Software Engineer II, I worked my way up to Principal Engineering Manager over the past 6 years and now manage a large team across two cloud products.

Were there any experiences you had at Iowa that you feel were particularly useful for your career?

Participating in ACM and building actual systems as a research assistant. Learning how to interact with others, being a leader and active participant in various efforts paid off big time.

What is your perspective on achieving early but continued success in a computer science career?

A career is a marathon, not a sprint. Work hard early on but be careful not to burn yourself out. There will always be more work, so you need to learn how to pace yourself to avoid burnout because no one will put those boundaries up for you.

What advice do you have for students currently studying computer science?

Do not ignore soft skills. The brightest engineers are useless if they can't convey their ideas to others, build consensus and generate energy. Mediocre engineers with strong people skills will go further than a strong engineer with poor people skills.

Looking back, is there anything you wish you knew in the early stages of your professional career?

I wish I would have paced myself better. I climbed very quickly at the cost of burnout and mental health. No job, I repeat no job is worth ruining your mental health for..

Are there any projects that you’re currently working on?

We're building global-scale AI platforms that companies like OpenAI and others build on top of. Even with all the advances in AI in recent years, it's still all just code that needs to run on a machine somewhere in the world with high reliability and availability.

For additional alumni/ae recollections of their time at Iowa, click here!

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