15 minutes with: Maggie Hunt

What is your background and what brought you to PA?

My career is a bit squiggly. I’m a software engineer, working on a digital team. However, I don’t have a traditional technical background. At university, I studied foreign languages. After graduating, I started a career in executive search, which gave me a great introduction to the industry. I soon realised, however, I didn’t want to recruit technologists; I wanted to be one.

A colleague recommended I try a Code First Girls coding course, who PA were partnering with at the time. I loved this new way of using my brain, and soon moved into a techier role at my firm. Then, at the end of 2020, after about a year of evening classes, I joined PA. It was a completely fresh career change, and I started from scratch as an Analyst here.

How would you describe your role to someone you’ve just met?

I’m a Digital and Data Consultant. Over the past couple of years, I’ve worked on a range of technical projects that handle either how data gets from one place to another, or what you do with data once it gets to you. For example, that could mean figuring out how to get value out of data, by putting together a dashboard that enriches data, or it could look at rolling out an AI solution.

I’m also really interested in sustainable IT. A couple of years ago, sustainable IT wasn’t something people were really thinking about, and already I think many are worried it’s fallen to the wayside in the industry, with AI booming.

Sometimes it means it’s hard to talk about sustainable IT without AI being mentioned – because that is its biggest use case!

Beyond sustainability considerations, I’m closely following the debates around the ethics of AI including inequality of access to resources. The debate is necessary to building our way towards a more equitable, responsible, and inclusive technology industry.

Could you share some more on what sustainable IT is?

It’s a practice that’s emerging and growing now: optimising your digital technology to reduce its environmental impact.

It involves things like making the actual tech more sustainable, minimising the energy used to run a programme, and looking at the lifecycle of hardware. How can we build software that’s compatible with a wide range of devices? Or run things in ways that are lower energy by default?

It’s not about using tech to become greener – which is its own thing – we’re not using AI to tell us when to turn the heating down, or building a wind farm; instead, we’re looking at the tech we already have and optimising it and improving things, like our approach to recycling hardware, minimising the size or number of data transfers in a programme, or optimising the load time of web pages.

There are towns in the US for example where a third of the locals’ drinking water is being used to cool datacentres, disrupting water supply for residents. It’s a full ecosystem, and community, issue.

How has your role changed in recent years because of changes in tech and the rise of AI?

There’s still very much a need for my skills; I am not directly building a machine learning model from scratch, but work on the parts ‘around’ the model. Not all of my projects have related to AI, so far, but there is a definite increase in interest in that work, from clients.

There’s a lot of scaremongering around AI taking people’s jobs away. But AI is no better than the people using it – UN interpreters have had Google Translate for some time now, and we still need them. I am excited to see new projects where AI is making a real difference to people – and also projects where people are making a real difference to AI.

What project are you most proud of?

I’ve worked on some exciting and innovative stuff, but there is one project I loved which had a real and tangible impact for people. We worked with Hampshire County Council to develop an automated call service to speed up support for vulnerable people shielding from Covid. We built an accessible web form that could be completed by patients or carers, to triage checkups. This meant the humans could prioritise speaking with people whose needs had changed, rather than those who did not need support. It meant people in Hampshire were able to receive social care way more easily than before.

I’ve also been part of the PA Women in Tech team. We’ve done some amazingly impactful things together over the years, like our award-winning mentoring scheme, our coding courses, and a career changers scheme. Some of my proudest moments with PA have been as a direct result of the work of this group.

What would you say makes PA different?

The people. I describe my colleagues as excited nerds; anything you ever want to know about, they’ll teach you. The only limit is your own mental capacity and time. When I joined, I hadn’t touched STEM since my A-levels, and my knowledge of tech now is simply an accumulation of everything people have been kind enough to teach me. There isn’t anyone I’ve spoken to at PA who doesn’t have a ton of knowledge to share and isn’t excited to do so.

Another thing I love about PA is that we respond well to people having ideas. I’ve never thought of an initiative I’ve wanted to run and been met with anything but encouragement. Senior sponsors are willing to advocate for you, and people are keen to collaborate and share knowledge. It is a very enabling culture.

What advice would you give to someone following your career path

Firstly, have a growth mindset. You need to understand it’s not always about being better every day, it’s just as important to be vulnerable and ask for help. I’m still learning how to do this myself!

Secondly, be curious, and not too rigid about what you want. When I first learnt to code, I thought I only wanted to be a back-end web developer, but I took a chance anyway on projects that weren’t web development. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have discovered sustainable IT, data engineering, or got involved in AI strategy work. You should have an open mind, as you will not necessarily know what’s out there for you.