Kevin Yen’s team is stranded in an ancient desert, being hammered by relentless heat and blinding sandstorms. The team’s mission, should they choose to accept it, is to locate the scattered components of an ancient flying machine – its only hope to survive this unyielding and life-threatening ecosystem.
Is Kevin an extreme tourist? A death-defying tour guide? No, far from it. Yen is a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) at DAT Freight & Analytics. But outside of his daily, professional mission to locate bugs and potential issues in new software, Yen is also the founder of the board game club: a lunchtime group at DAT’s Denver office enjoyed by enthusiasts from multiple departments throughout the company.
Yen’s personal favorite board game? Forbidden Desert, the game described above.
A lunchtime respite of relaxing gameplay serves Yen well given the complexity of his work.
“Like a lot of places, requirements aren’t written for testers, and [we] need some translation and cross-team research,” he said. “It can be satisfying to make sense out of the chaos.”
Achieving that sense of clarity sometimes requires the use of certain disciplines and techniques many others were happy to leave behind in high school or college.
“One of my favorite bugs was found using calculus to construct a synthetic data set that highlighted a discrepancy between the… expectations and the implementation,” Yen said.
Software development is clearly not a game. But when you work for DAT, you can explore both work and fun.
DAT is an award-winning employer of choice and a next-generation SaaS technology company that has been at the leading edge of innovation in transportation supply chain logistics for 45 years. We continue to transform the industry year over year, by deploying a suite of software solutions to millions of customers every day – customers who depend on DAT for the most relevant data and most accurate insights to help them make smarter business decisions and run their companies more profitably. We operate the largest marketplace of its kind in North America, with 400 million freights posted in 2022, and a database of $150 billion of annual global shipment market transaction data. Our headquarters are in Denver, CO, and Beaverton, OR, with additional offices in Missouri and Bangalore, India.
