The 3 A.M. Version of This Job

My degree is in communications, my major was PR, and marketing is the work I know best. That’s the straightforward part of the story. The part people don’t expect is that, somewhere in the middle of it, I spent a couple of years working for a Singapore company as their NOC engineer, on twelve-hour shifts that ran eight to eight, sometimes days, sometimes nights.

A wall of monitors, a lot of coffee, and the particular calm of a room where nothing is supposed to happen. When something did happen, it usually happened at 3 a.m., and it was my job to figure out what and put it back. It doesn’t sound like a marketing origin story. But it changed how I do marketing, and I’m glad it did.

What a broken network teaches you

When a system goes down at 3 a.m., nobody wants your theory. They want the thing working again, and they want to know, afterwards, exactly what went wrong so it doesn’t happen twice. You learn to reason from evidence instead of hunches. You learn that “I changed one thing and it broke” is the most useful sentence in the language. You learn to distrust coincidence.

That habit turns out to be rare in marketing, and valuable. A page moves, and everyone has a story about why. The useful person in the room is the one who can say which change, which week, which query, and show it. I got the marketing from my training. I got that particular stubbornness about evidence from the NOC floor.

Two halves of the same brain

I don’t think of the technical years as a detour away from marketing. I think of them as the other half of how I work. The communications and PR side is what lets me write something a person actually wants to read, and understand why they’re reading it. The operations side is what makes me check whether the thing I believe is actually true before I say it out loud.

Search sits right where those two meet. The question underneath it, why this page and not that one, why now, is half human and half system. You need both to answer it well.

Why the mix matters

Plenty of marketers are excellent without ever having touched infrastructure, and plenty of engineers can’t write a sentence anyone remembers. I like being able to do a bit of both. It means I can build the strategy and also read the logs, tell the story and also prove it.

The night shifts are behind me now. The habit isn’t. Most of what I write here comes out of that combination, one way or another, which is a strange thing to owe partly to a room full of blinking racks. But I do.