Camille Fournier MS ’05
What are you currently doing professionally?
After many years of working as a tech executive for various for-profit institutions, I’ve just recently joined a non-profit in the AI space. We partner with leading academic labs building large AI models and help solve the technology and scaling challenges so the PIs can focus on their science and impact. It’s a very new space for me, and it is fun to learn more about both scientific AI models and how to grow a non-profit team.
Is there a project or accomplishment that you’re especially proud of that has defined your career?
I wrote a book on engineering leadership and management called The Manager’s Path that has been far more successful than I ever imagined, including being translated into nine languages. I am proud of the fact that it has had a positive impact on the way people across the tech industry think about and approach engineering management. My goal in writing it was to help people understand the challenges that occur at different levels of management, specifically the challenges of managing software engineers and software teams, and I often hear that I have given people the right words to describe what is important and hard about what they do. It’s just very cool to feel that I have done something good for the industry at large with my writing.
What motivated you to study computer science?
I liked computers and technology, and I thought it would be a broadly useful skillset in whatever type of company I wanted to work for, which turned out to be the case. I have worked in tech, fashion/commerce, finance, and now research non-profit, and the skills I learned studying computer science have served me well in all of these environments.
Why did you come to UW–Madison?
I liked the professors and students that I met when visiting, people felt smart and down-to-earth. Madison seemed like a nice place to live and study, and my sister happened to be in college in Wisconsin at Beloit College, so I had family nearby. I started in the spring semester and came to Madison from Seattle, where I had been working at Microsoft. I remember wanting to kiss the ground because even though it was well below zero and cold as heck, it was sunny and bright.
Are there lessons you learned at UW–Madison that have stuck with you ever since?
I took a class on distributed systems, which was a slight departure from what I had been focused on at the time, and loved it, although it never occurred to me to make that my area of focus. When I entered the workforce, one of the first big projects I worked on was taking a single node system and turning it into a distributed system, and all of the things I learned in that class came in incredibly handy. Distributed systems became my technical passion, and I’ve spent most of my career directly or indirectly working with them.
What are one or two things you did at UW outside of your classes (clubs, study abroad, employment, conferences, internships, etc)? How did these benefit your education, your current career, and/or your life?
I had an internship at Lawrence Livermore National Labs one summer and continued to work with them part time for a while after that. It helped me develop an appreciation for the challenges of scientific computing and computing at massive scale. I also met my husband there, so that’s a pretty big thing!
Do you have any advice for current CS students?
Stay open minded and try a lot of different areas of CS while you are in school. It’s easy to get the idea that you know what you should be doing and try to force yourself into a career that isn’t actually right for you. It took me a lot of experimentation before I realized that I liked working on tech teams in companies that were not pure tech companies, and that I enjoyed both building big distributed systems but also managing and scaling large organizations. There are so many things you can do with your skills; you don’t have to move to Silicon Valley and work for a startup, or Google, or even go to grad school. Don’t be afraid to experiment.
What do you like to do for fun?
I love to travel.