If there’s anything the pandemic has taught us, it’s the importance of hospital resources.
Unfortunately, many hospitals have outdated infrastructure for modern-day operations. This can lead to problems with equipment, safety, security and more.
That’s where Cox Prosight comes in.
Prosight is a real-time location system that helps hospitals monitor assets, environments and people across a facility. From tracking the status of hospital equipment to helping patients navigate through a facility to supporting staff safety, Prosight helps streamline healthcare operations.
Prosight, a Cox Communications innovation, is a full stack solution including software, hardware and services from a single provider. It’s designed to help hospitals improve operational efficiency, staff safety, clinical workflows and patient engagement.
Jai Balasubramanian is Director of Strategy and Product Management at Cox Communications and is a leader in innovating smart hospital solutions. Jai shared some insight about the technology behind Prosight and why this product is important.
Certainly. My team’s mission is to unleash the true potential of a connected hospital by enabling complete asset tracking and monitoring solutions, giving hospitals the data and tools they need to improve processes, realize operational efficiencies and deliver better experiences to staff and patients. This new IoT business line venture was established in 2021.
Every role in our team is pretty hands-on and directly contributes to the development of cutting-edge cloud- connected IoT applications and offerings with the latest tools. Our teams have a degree of collaboration among highly talented, cross-functional and geographically dispersed locations.
We are looking for talented and creative problem solvers who would like to be involved in the complete software development life cycle, seeing your hard work transform into a finished product in an agile environment. You’d be working with a dynamic team of professional intrapreneurs who are passionate about solving customer needs using disruptive technologies.
It’s safe to say that most people don’t find car shopping to be a pleasant experience.
From spending hours in a dealership to fretting about payment terms to completing piles of paperwork, most of us have experienced the nail-biting process that leads to finally being able to get behind the wheel of a new ride.
On the other side of the desk, dealers run into plenty of frustrations as well, trying to ensure a great experience for shoppers and move inventory off their lots, while still staying profitable.
Imagine being able to transform this process forever, impacting both how dealerships operate and how people find their dream cars. Tech employees at Cox Automotive have that opportunity by working on products like Esntial Commerce, an artificial intelligence retail technology that helps provide shoppers with an automated, 100% online financing process.
Esntial helps optimize the sales process, estimating payment in such a way that is appealing to both shopper and seller. It offers payment personalization based on the shopper’s risk profile, selected vehicle and preferred deal structure using an AI/machine learning algorithm. It offers actual financing and the ability to immediately transact online, meaning that customers can move forward confidently knowing that their financing has been approved.
Pretty cool, right? We wanted to know more about Esntial and what opportunities are available in this space, so we sat down with Isaac Hogue, Associate Vice President of Software Engineering at Cox Automotive, to get the inside scoop.
Sure. First of all, Esntial is a web-based platform that’s fully AWS on a serverless stack, so it’s the best of the best in terms of what an engineer would want to be working on. It’s also a really meaningful product in the marketplace, transforming how dealerships operate with a consumer-centric focus. It’s a win-win that hasn’t historically existed in the industry.
We’re using machine learning to assess the marketplace and find opportunities to present to consumers and dealers when a car is being transacted. This product sits squarely in the machine learning space so if you’re interested in data science and modeling out different algorithms for machine learning, you’ll love what we’re doing here.
We have about 250 people working on this right now, and 26 scrum teams. We’ve got a very diverse group of tech professionals, with people from all over the world.
We’re primarily looking for web developers, web engineers, user experience experts, product owners, data engineers and DevOps engineers.
It’s out in the market with a progressive release. The initial launch was last July and we’re ramping up to different clients this year. We’re primarily focused on the used car market, but in the future we’ll be turning our attention to new and certified pre-owned vehicles as well. We’re also working on building self-healing capabilities, asking ourselves how we can build reliability and resiliency into the product itself.
I love that we’re working on something that makes a difference; not things that are just going to find their way onto a shelf somewhere. This is a place where you get to redefine the entire automotive industry.
If you ask Belinda Loi – Manager of Network Automation at Cox Communications – to describe her team in one sentence, she’ll probably say something like this:
“We are building the next generation of network engineers with a focus on automation-first design.”
Born in Norway and based in Atlanta, Belinda said that her friends and coworkers alike would describe her as “a hype woman” – someone who loves bringing out the best in everyone, empowering others and collaborating for success.
“Our focus is not to build big applications, but rather services that support business processes,” she said. “It’s less about the applications or products, and more about training and growing our people to apply the open-source products that are already available.”
Belinda and team have the unique challenge and privilege of having multiple tech stacks beneath their umbrella. One specific one that comes to mind is Red Hat’s Ansible platform – which Belinda says is a flexible solution for helping network engineers “crowdsource” automation.
“With thousands of modules prebuild and curated into Ansible Galaxy Collections, you can create automation that turns up a VM, sends emails or reports, communicates with REST services, modifies ACL’s on network devices, deploys Docker containers, manages Kubernetes clusters or performs a backup of the configuration on your network devices…the possibilities really are endless.”
What does the word “innovation” mean to Belinda?
“Innovation is often born out of necessity, starting with an idea and fueled by passion,” she explained. “To supplement and foster innovation, the Network Automation team is working to equip our engineers with ways to leverage the latest technology stack to continue challenging the status quo and making things more efficient and reliable.”
One example of how Belinda’s team makes tech more efficient and reliable is a project that took place in 2021. Belinda’s team was asked to provide automation in support of NIST-800 compliance efforts that the Cox Business Engineering and Security teams were focused on delivering.
“This work would require some very complex cleanup and validation of our prefix-lists on the Cox Business Nokia fiber network, as the inventory is a staggering 45,000 devices strong and growing,” Belinda said. “That’s combined with some of the most cutting-edge and emerging software design patterns, GitOps, Network ‘as code’ and closed loop automation style principals as the core of the design.”
Partnering with other network engineers at Cox, Belinda and team set off to deliver an Ansible playbook that could maintain one source of truth about IP prefix-lists for this network, house those “golden configs” in Git and then calculate the remediation plan on a per host basis – executing and ensuring ongoing compliance in a unified way.
At the end of the project, the team deployed configurations to the entire Nokia Core (approximately 750 hosts) in all six regions of the enterprise on several separate occasions in 2021, causing zero service-affecting or zero-impacting outages. The project was even used as a source of demonstration for Pair Programming at Red Hat’s AnsibleFest 2021 Developer Conference.
“These kinds of opportunities and challenges are my favorite thing about working at Cox,” Belinda siad. “I like that I’m able to voice my opinion on projects and my leaders are very supportive of things I want to try.”
Belinda worked in the telecom industry before beginning her career at Cox and understands the importance of good workplace culture. Referring to the telecom company she worked for previously, Belinda said: “I was really invested in the company but didn’t feel like they were invested in me.”
When a recruiter reached out regarding an open position at Cox, Belinda was intrigued by the opportunity.
“Cox cares about their people,” she said. “It’s something we pride ourselves on and I was struck by that from the very beginning.”
Belinda feels that she’s contributed to meaningful tech transformation during her four years at Cox.
“At Cox, I feel like I’ve made an impact and that I’m valued,” she said. “There’s a path for my career here.”
Valentyna Yurtyn is always up for a challenge.
She’s an active person who can often be found hiking, biking, going to CrossFit and swimming in the Pacific Ocean – and the promise of adventure was the very thing that attracted her to a career in technology.
“What brought me to software engineering is the challenge,” said Valentyna, Principal Software Engineer at Cox Automotive. “I enjoy the changing environment.”
If you’ve ever shopped for a car online, chances are you’ve interacted with Valentyna’s work. Her group develops and maintains high-traffic websites for Cox Automotive brands like Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book.
“Cox is ahead of the curve for things like native ads,” Valentyna said. “Sometimes I hear about companies doing things and I think ‘Oh, we’ve been using that technology for a while now; we integrated it a long time ago.’ We’re using a breakthrough approach. Our tech stack is wide and we have lots of different projects.”
Elaborating on the tech stack, Valentyna shared that her team builds micro-frontends with JavaScript ReactJS. For backend development, they build services using NodeJS, Microsoft ASP.NET Core and Java. All infrastructure uses cloud-based architecture with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
One of the most impactful projects for Valentyna’s team is working on web performance optimizations.
“Web performance has been at the top of the list in discussions within web developers’ communities,” Valentyna said. “Our company leadership made a commitment to focus on user-centric performance, and engineering teams work in coordination with ad sales, operations and product teams to identify performance opportunities.”
Valentyna’s team looks at different aspects of web performance and have been able to significantly improve user experience and performance metrics. They’ve driven server-side optimizations that improve response time and improve data query speed. They’ve driven content delivery network (CDN) updates for fast protocol, compression and image optimizations. They’ve driven UX and accessibility updates, like optimization of JavaScript bundles and improving cumulative layout shift (you can learn more about that project on our blog), as well as optimizations for analytics scripts and other third-party libraries.
“As I work on projects as a software engineer, I can see connections from start to finish and the results of the project,” Valentyna said.
Valentyna didn’t originally plan for a career in information technology. Her background is in business, and she slowly merged into a tech career when she realized she enjoyed its pace and potential.
“My degree in business actually helped me quite a bit,” she said. “It’s beneficial to have an understanding of business and good coordination with product teams.”
Software engineering teams at Cox are knee-deep in collaboration, often working in cross-functional discovery groups with colleagues in UX, analytics, research and more. Valentyna said that’s why she loves hackathons – a fast-paced event where different teams join forces on a project.
“It’s new and exciting to work with the team in quick sprints,” Valentyna said. “Not all ideas lead to successful implementation but executing on ideas and running user testing allows us to stay current with ever-changing environments.”
These are particularly challenging times for Valentyna, who is from Ukraine. While she has lived in the US since 2001, she has many friends and extended family who still reside in her home country.
“It’s been really scary and painful to watch,” Valentyna said. “It’s been hard to concentrate on anything else.”
Valentyna stressed the importance of staying informed about the current situation in Ukraine, contacting elected officials, keeping perspective on the impact of economic sanctions on Russia and making donations (the James M. Cox Foundation is leading by example by giving $500,000 to the American Red Cross to provide humanitarian assistance to Ukrainian refugees).
“My biggest fear is that people around the world will get used to the war in Ukraine and move on with their lives,” Valentyna said. “Russia must be stopped. The war must be stopped.”
During a time filled with upheaval, Valentyna’s commitment to creating a meaningful impact stays the same, both at work and outside of it.
“To me, that’s what innovation means: responding to new environments and initiating change.”
There’s a stereotype about technology being an introverted profession.
As an artistic thinker and a self-professed social butterfly, Afsheen Mozammel is quick to negate any misconceptions about tech being an isolating field of work. It’s not uncommon to find her serving as a mentor, acting as a mentee or simply building relationships with peers and leaders.
“I like to connect with people,” Afsheen said. “That’s my thing. I’m very social.”
Connections are particularly important for Afsheen’s role as Manager of Engineering Enablement at Cox Communications – a fully remote role that is part of Cox’s Business Process Optimizations team. Afsheen’s group supports workflows of different technologies (including WATTS, OPTIX, EPS, JIRA, iGrafx and Visio) to ensure efficiency and visibility for Cox’s Field Engineer & Operations teams. In other words, Afsheen and her team use a data-driven approach to connect the dots between how a team operates and the impact it has.
“My team is always trying to find a way to get things done in a better and efficient manner without reinventing the wheel,” Afsheen said.
For example, one initative is an end-to-end engineering capability roadmap, where Afsheen’s team is exploring how to give Cox’s executive leaders a single source of truth for status, progress and collaboration opportunities among different engineering departments to minimize duplicate efforts and maximize efficiency.
Another example is a “proestimation” for time study. Afsheen and team used a data-driven approach to prioritize work based on business impact analysis, improving efficiency by 53%.
Afsheen, who was born in Dubai and raised in Bangladesh, pursued a tech career after getting her undergrad degree in business. After getting her master’s in industrial engineering, she worked for several different companies and often experienced a cutthroat, male-dominated and predominantly white environment.
“I was used to being the only woman in the room, let alone the only person of color in the room,” Afsheen said. “But if you asked me how I felt, I would say that I always felt like I was special. Because there was something about me that got me in that room.”
Afsheen began to crave a warmer atmosphere – literally. After 13 or 14 years of Midwest winters, she began to turn her attention toward a milder climate. Atlanta struck her as a good option, especially since her sister already lived there. Afsheen said that Cox – a values-driven tech company – appealed to her.
Afsheen was hired as an engineering manager at Cox and began to build a diverse team of tech experts. Having experienced a lack of diversity and inclusion at previous companies, Afsheen has made it a personal mission to be a champion for inclusion at Cox, getting involved with various inclusion efforts and serving as part of Cox’s ID&E ambassador program.
Afsheen’s life goal is “to impact people’s life in a positive way.”
“That’s my life’s work; my vision is to impact people whether I’m there or not,” Afsheen said. “Everything I do is a subset of that.”
Whether she’s leading her team on a new project, serving as a mentor for a fellow Cox employee or participating in inclusion efforts, Afsheen is encouraged to know that Cox’s vision is so well aligned with her own.
“[Working at Cox] is one of the best career moves I’ve ever made,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve worked with so many women in technology and the people here are so friendly. It feels like home.”
This month, we’re spotlighting the people who work Behind the Code at Cox. Read below to learn how our technology employees are building a better tomorrow.
For Tonya Wallace, being agile is a way of life.
We’re not just talking about being flexible and resilient (though as a hardworking mother of six, Tonya has plenty of experience with that too!). We’re referring also to Agile methodology: an IT project management approach used to deliver fast, high-quality technology solutions.
Tonya, Director of Agile Delivery at Cox Automotive, is an advocate and user of the agile methodology and its accompanying frameworks. She knows firsthand that the methodology allows for collaboration and quicker results.
“Our company drives to the same scaled agile framework, which helps to deliver high business value in short-cycle increments,” Tonya explained. “That’s the whole point of agility: to get the product out to the customer as quickly as possible, to get feedback as quickly as possible and to iterate on what that feedback is.”
Tonya leads agile delivery for four release trains. Each powers finance and insurance solutions that enable the behind-the-scenes of the car-buying process, such as digital contracting and lender aftermarket products. The newest of her release trains will lead Cox Automotive’s AWS migration to cloud services in a two-year effort.
The importance of agility really hit home for Tonya in March 2020, when COVID struck and automotive dealers could not be on-site in their offices.
“So what do you do if you’re a dealer who’s still relying on paper and face-to-face transactions?” said Tonya. “We quickly pivoted and delivered assisted remote signing out into the field. That’s the benefit of having smart people working within an agile framework. We broke down silos. People worked across different teams and trains, and we leveraged our remote environment like nobody’s business.”
Tonya’s tech roots were planted in 2002 when she opened a small, minority-owned tech company to build custom applications with small teams of developers.
“I fell in love with requirements, automation, collaboration, iterative development and relentless improvement,” Tonya said of her first experience in the field. “I didn’t find out about Agile until years later, and I went back to school for my MBA in project management in order to enhance my understanding and knowledge about the project management discipline.”
Post-graduation, Tonya hit the ground running with her new passion and skills.
She was hired as a business analyst with the Department of Revenue, where she participated in Agile transformation. She moved on to a pharmaceutical company, where she led the cloud platform Agile team as a process specialist and trainer, coach and consulting liaison. Afterwards, she became senior scrum master and Agile coach at an automotive technology company. But in these positions, Tonya said she found the project management process to be – well, not agile.
“It was very heavy, very rigorous, very stringent,” Tonya said about one experience. “No one led with the ‘why,’ so people didn’t understand why we were doing things the way we were doing them, and if we lack buy-in, it creates gaps.”
A friend who worked at Cox recommended that Tonya explore a position with the company. In 2018, Tonya became a senior release train engineer for Cox Automotive’s DealerTrack brand. Not only did Tonya find Cox’s tech teams more conducive to Agile, but her leadership skills blossomed in Cox’s flexible environment too. Tonya has since spearheaded initiatives, facilitated DISC personality trainings and served as a thought leader in the industry.
Tonya has the heart of a teacher, and that translates to her life outside of work too. She loves being able to nurture and coach her daughter and five sons.
“The way I parent is the way I coach an agile team,” she said. “I believe the strong foundational principles of having the confidence to fail fast, self-organize, be courageous and transparent and drive toward relentless improvement builds solid character. I will often run mini retrospectives after practices and games!”
Tonya contrasted Cox with other companies when it comes to valuing employees.
“I love that Cox gives engineers a voice,” she said. “I’ve seen workplaces where it’s more of a ‘just sit there and code’ type of environment. Not here. They encourage communication and transparency. All teams have the ability to share ideas. We have senior leaders inboxing engineers to say things like ‘How are you? Is everything going okay? I saw you did XYZ today and I wanted to thank you.’ I’ve never had that at any other company.”
Tonya said one reason why voices are elevated at Cox is because it’s a culture of achievement.
“This is an organization of high-performers,” Tonya said (and she would know!). “What we do matters. We’re creating things that will progress our culture, our environment, our world and how we do business tomorrow.”
Tonya, who is part of Cox’s diversity and inclusion working group, added that Cox is intentional about its stance on increasing numbers of minority employees in leadership positions and nurturing talent and diverse employees within the company.
And the cherry on top?
“Sometimes in companies, you’ll find personalities clashing and a cutthroat environment. I’ve found that people here are nice. I mean, actually, genuinely nice. We’re constantly pushing the message of collaboration, communication and respect. I’ve never seen leaders so accommodating and caring.”
Interested in learning more about the people who make innovation happen at Cox? Check out the rest of our Behind the Code series and follow along on social using #BehindTheCode.
This month, we’re spotlighting the people who work Behind the Code at Cox. Read below to learn how our technology employees are building a better tomorrow.
In another life, Emmet McGuire might have been a carpenter.
It’s something of a family business: his father, uncles and brother all do carpentry for a living. And while Emmet isn’t a craftsman by trade, he loves building things and always has a project happening at his home in Burlington, VT.
His talent for constructing things makes Emmet a natural fit for his role as a Lead Software Test Engineer at Cox Automotive.
“I think my family’s history of carpentry instilled in me the passion to build things the right way, which translates well to developing software,” he said.
In 2009, Emmet started working a software tester at Dealer.com (acquired by Cox Automotive in 2015). He’s been promoted many times since, becoming a QA tester, a QA engineer, a senior QA engineer, a lead QA engineer and a senior software test engineer before moving into his current position.
Emmet loves the variety of projects he’s worked on at Cox.
“I have had the opportunity to work in different product spaces over the years,” he said. “When I was part of the Dealer.com group, I worked on teams that developed our websites as well as the backend services which support our websites and inventory. I got to work on projects for large customers like Ford and Subaru, but also projects that were used by the millions of users shopping for cars on Dealer.com websites.”
Emmet was an electrical engineer at a large technology company before joining Dealer.com.
“That switch was like a breath of fresh air to me,” he said. “I took computer science classes as part of my education and I always enjoyed them, but it wasn’t until I started my career as an electrical engineer that I realized hardware wasn’t for me. I wanted to work on software.”
Emmet explained that in his previous job, projects took months or even years to complete.
“But being on an Agile Scrum team at Cox Auto, we work in two-week sprints and that’s a much better pace for me. You also have a much closer working relationship with your team, and that’s what I needed to be successful.”
Emmet credits those close relationships with his growth as a technical leader. And he loves the fact that he and his colleagues have a prominent voice in the company.
“Working in tech at Cox Automotive is simultaneously fun, exciting, challenging and rewarding,” he said. “I think for a lot of companies, the testing role is looked at as an afterthought or secondary to the development team, but that couldn’t be further from the truth when it comes to Cox Auto.”
Cox’s tech team members are high performers, and Emmet said he is consistently challenged to evolve the way he develops and tests software. One example he gave was the company’s switch from traditional development and release processes to CI/CD, which brings with it a slew of challenges.
“As a team, we had to learn what the implications of that were, and how to best handle it,” he said. “I am very proud of the process that we came up with, and we feel extremely comfortable releasing production changes that impact millions of users a month multiple times a day without users noticing any issues.”
Emmet explained that when there is an issue, his team almost always knows about it before any customers do.
“For the application my team owns, we have a 99.95% availability, so we can’t have many outages and we’ve been able to keep that standard, while releasing as frequently as we do. From a testing point of view, the primary process we use for maintaining that availability through all our releases are Blue/Green deploys, and running automated tests on the inactive instance before routing traffic to the new instance. That’s a massive oversimplification, but that’s a critical process for achieving the high level of success that we have been able to achieve.”
COVID has changed a lot of things about the average workweek. Emmet believes that his team’s relationships and rapport have remained intact.
“In terms of environment and culture, my team is like my second family,” he said. “I really enjoy working with every single person, and they are all incredibly smart, thoughtful people. I don’t think there is a single person at Cox Auto that I couldn’t learn from, and that’s a very humbling experience.”
Interested in learning more about the people who make innovation happen at Cox? Check out the rest of our Behind the Code series and follow along on social using #BehindTheCode.
This month, we’re spotlighting the people who work Behind the Code at Cox. Read below to learn how our technology employees are building a better tomorrow.
You can easily catch glimpses of Jenny Clyne’s creative personality in her work-from-home space.
A sewing project is tacked on a whiteboard, evidence of her passion for crafting. A big collection of books graces the shelf behind her, including many by her favorite author, Dean Koontz. Tucked away elsewhere are drafts of novels she’s writing herself (she promises to remember us when she’s a famous author). And she’ll frequently rock a funky fashion accessory during the workday, like pink monster feet slippers.
Being empowered to bring her full self to work is one of the things Jenny loves about Cox.
“You are who you are, and Cox won’t try to change that,” she said. “That means a lot to me. I am who I am and not one person here has tried to tell me differently. And that’s the first time I’ve experienced that.”
Jenny said that when she began her Cox journey, she was first struck by the supportive people and leadership.
“Cox’s culture is different than anything I’ve experienced,” she said. “Here at Cox, there’s a theme of family – meaning you’re part of a gigantic family and everyone matters. And it’s true. Everyone matters. I’ve met tons of people at Cox, and that’s how it is. Everyone is part of something magnificent here.”
Jenny is a Project Support Specialist with Cox Communications’ Field Engineering and Operations group. Jenny, who lives in Wichita, KS, moved into this role three years ago after being a contractor for Cox. Her role requires a sharp eye for logistics and project management.
“I support the group of engineers that build Cox Communications’ engineering work package,” Jenny explained. “They look at the entire network to determine what pieces of equipment a customer needs. Our engineers get together and look at the map to see how the network is built and basically build a to-do list for our technicians: the equipment that’s needed, what they need to build and where they need to install it.”
Jenny’s project oversight extends beyond Kansas to include cities in Nebraska, Arkansas and Oklahoma, requiring her to be nimble and communicative with her fellow tech employees. But that’s a challenge Jenny welcomes, especially after a stagnant experience at a previous company.
“I felt like I had plateaued there,” Jenny shared. “And I didn’t like the culture and how they treated employees. You can’t survive in that atmosphere – you don’t have any room to grow.”
For someone like Jenny, who is always on the lookout for a new adventure, the culture of Cox was a breath of fresh air.
“Cox is different from companies I worked for previously because it’s an enterprise of learning,” Jenny said. “They have a mindset of making YOU better. We aren’t just achieving goals. We’re here to make new ones. There’s always room for improvement and asking ‘what’s next.’”
As an example, Jenny shared details about a big project she recently completed: helping transition the Field Engineering and Operations group to a new project platform.
“We were struggling with the old platform; it wasn’t working right, and it was slowing us down,” Jenny said. “This one speeds us up and helps us produce more information that we need to fulfill customer expectations.”
It was a big undertaking, and Jenny was given the opportunity to train others, lend ideas and resolve issues – and eventually become the project’s subject matter expert for Cox’s central region.
“Working with this group really broadened my family at Cox. I learned so many different things and the rapport we all had with each other was a blessing.”
Jenny’s experience with this project gave her a renewed passion for her job in technology at Cox.
“I have an amazing group of people, an amazing team to back me up. It makes me want to push harder and go farther than I have in my life.”
Now that she’s been with Cox for three years, Jenny said that she can’t imagine working anywhere else: “Cox is stuck with me until I retire.”
Jenny is especially encouraged by Cox’s focus on emerging technologies and building a better future.
“Cox is innovation itself and is highly adaptive to the fluid changes of the world,” she said. “We have a beautiful future ahead. We don’t just see the horizon; we see past it to something that can and will be. And with all of us working together, we make it happen.”
Interested in learning more about the people who make innovation happen at Cox? Check out the rest of our Behind the Code series and follow along on social using #BehindTheCode.
This month, we’re spotlighting the people who work Behind the Code at Cox. Read below to learn how our technology employees are building a better tomorrow.
Zeddikia Chisholm vividly remembers his unconventional experience of learning to swim.
On a trip to Guadalupe River in Texas, Zeddikia jumped from a swinging rope and plunged into the water below before making his way back to shore. After many more similar jumps, he was swimming with ease.
Zeddikia’s approach to learning new things at Cox Communications is very similar.
“That’s how I learn new skills: jump into the deep end and figure it out,” he said. “From the moment I started as an intern at Cox, I would challenge myself with projects that required new proficiencies. My skills with R, Python, JavaScript and Tableau are all skills that I developed by stretching myself at Cox.”
Zeddikia is now an Atlanta-based Network Engineer on Cox’s Systems Engineering team. He previously held roles on Cox’s Network Planning Automation (NPA) and Customer Premise Engineering teams.
“I’m an explorer at heart, so the opportunity to learn about different departments, leaders, places and people was priceless,” Zeddikia said. “Anything that gives me opportunities to learn or experience something new is a win in my book.”
This explorer at heart is currently learning SysML, a modeling language that supports the specification, analysis, design, verification and validation of a broad range of systems and systems-of-systems.
“It’s a new thing for us, and I get to help lay the foundation of its implementation here at Cox,” Zeddikia said. “I believe that my work on this current team shows that Cox is open to change and trying new ways of doing things.”
COVID-19 – aka “the vid” or “-rona,” as he calls it – has impacted Zeddikia’s work life in a number of ways. The most obvious, of course, is the fact that he has been working remotely for almost a year.
“Working from home has been a great time-saver and energy-saver, as I no longer waste my energy in Atlanta traffic before coming to work. The peace of mind that I can keep my family safe, and still do my job is great. I have an incredible amount of flexibility with the current environment and it has been a lifesaver as far as stress levels go.”
But Zeddikia also felt empowered by the opportunity to participate in an important coronavirus project for Cox.
“Since the pandemic started, I’ve been working on the Executive COVID-19 Impact Report,” he shared. “In short, we are looking at the effects of COVID-19 on our network. The increase in work-from-home, distance learning and other factors had initially strained our networks quite a bit. The congestion levels in many of our markets had risen to crazy high levels.”
Zeddikia said that he was proud of the insights his team was able to provide because it helped the company respond proactively to the situation before it impacted customers.
“With our work on the Node Congestion Relief Analytics Team, we were recognized and awarded a Synergy Award. I was happy to receive my first award as a full-time employee and put it on the fireplace since I don’t have an office desk these days!”
Zeddikia explained that his team’s inherent love of engineering and data analytics has created a culture that is very relaxed and focused on the end results.
“If I looked in my team members’ closets, I would guess the first shirt I would see would say ‘I Love Engineering’ or ‘Show me the Data,’ Jerry Maguire,” Zeddikia said. “I like that my team brings their passion to their work. It makes me happy to see this.”
Zeddikia loves that the culture of Cox encourages technology employees to bring their full selves to work.
“The backgrounds of people in engineering alone are incredibly diverse,” he said. “In engineering, I know people that have a background in music, psychology and other fields you wouldn’t normally expect in a hardcore engineering environment. It is this diversity that has led to a lot of the fun I have talking with different people.”
Zeddikia is among the employees with a cool assortment of hobbies and talents outside of work.
“I spend a lot of my free time creating websites, building things and designing things on my laser cutter,” he said. “I spent 2020 learning construction skills because I’ve always wanted to, and I plan to continue in 2021. I also enjoy staying active. Just last week I signed up for my first Spartan Beast, a 21- kilometer 60-obstacle course race through the Nevada desert in November. I’ve done Spartan Supers (10 km, 25 obstacles) before, but this Beast is on another level. What could be more fun!”
Interested in learning more about the people who make innovation happen at Cox? Check out the rest of our Behind the Code series and follow along on social using #BehindTheCode.
Throughout the month of March, we will be exploring the people and projects who drive Cox technology forward in our Behind the Code technology series. Read below to learn how Cox is creating tomorrow’s tech solutions, today.
Climbing through the ranks
Shernovius Bennett started at Cox Communications as an intern and co-op with a love of technology. He advanced through the Cox organization as he became a leader at solving network problems, and now serves as a Service Assurance Technical Engineer.
Shernovius supports about 300 applications, including internal apps like Mosaic and external ones like the billing system for Cox customers. He helps mitigate issues and outages on all of them, striving to make them more efficient and reduce the number of false alerts. Shernovius isn’t intimidated by this level of responsibility – he thrives on it.
“We’re industry leaders in our NOC support efforts and how we monitor our infrastructure applications,” he said. “I love the constant challenge of identifying new solutions for evolving technologies. The wave of technology changes forces us to operate outside of our comfort zone and find new solutions.”
Recently, Shernovius has been especially proud of his work on the Service Assurance team’s incident analysis automation (IAA) project, a major effort seeking to identify incidents and set up efficiencies that reduce “noise” (false network outages).
Behind the code and serving others
As a freshman in college, Shernovius enlisted in the Alabama Air National Guard and completed tours in Afghanistan and Kuwait. Today, he’s an active member and commissioned officer.
“Less than 30 percent of Americans qualify to join the military,” he said. “Of that 30 percent, only one percent ever become officers. It’s an honor to be able to serve and lead hundreds of airmen in the world’s greatest air force.”
He’s also the operations lead for Cox Communications’ African American employee resource group and is active in the veterans’ employee resource groups. Last year, for example, he served as the moderator for a panel discussion with four Tuskegee Airmen at a special Cox Enterprises event.
Shernovius says that Cox’s family culture and emphasis on work-life balance means that tech team members don’t have to sit in cubicles and code all day – rather, they can mix up their time at work with campus activities, social events, and community service programs.
“Cox’s culture never forces you to choose between family and work,” he said. “Work-life balance is a priority and pushed throughout the organization.”
A born leader
Shernovius, who is currently earning his Executive MBA, has big aspirations in technology leadership. His dream? To become the Chief Technology Officer someday.
In the meantime, Shernovius takes advantage of Cox’s professional development and mentorship programs. He loves having the opportunity to get frequent face-time with executives – something unheard of at many other tech companies. As he earns his executive MBA from Auburn University, he’s also managing four off-shore team members. And he proactively finds ways to grow as a leader in his day-to-day work at Cox.
“The company has thousands of employees and a plethora of job opportunities, so there’s always room to learn something new,” he said. “I’m constantly meeting new people and learning new skills.”
Interested in learning more about the people who make innovation happen at Cox? Check out the rest of our Behind the Code series here, and follow along on social using #BehindTheCode. Ready to explore a career here? Search for a new role today.
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