In trying to describe my new job to someone yesterday, I told him that “it’s a lot like sociology, with less interesting questions.” The more I think about it, the more I think that pretty much sums it up.  Not necessarily in a bad way, mind you.  Let me explain.

Yesterday I spent several hours pulling hundreds of addresses out of a database, cleaning up the data for a batch geocoder, plotting these points on a map, then checking the mean distances of these points with another set of points I had already derived.

Thanks to all of this work, I can now tell you what proportion of our employees live within 1 mile of an Equinox Fitness Club.

See? Complex problem solving, multiple layers of analysis, less-than-riveting questions.

The thing is, I don’t particularly mind this. First, there is a difference between dull and unimportant.  The work I do has very real implications, and I know this.  But more importantly, the bulk of my time is not spent pondering the dullness of the question; it is spent finding answers. And as dull as many of these questions might seem compared to the Grand Questions of the World, they are never easy. The company dress code might be lax, the rhetoric might be hip and fun, but the methodology is muthafuckin’ rigorous. There will be no slacking. Guessing is okay, but only if it’s the “best unbiased estimate” you can muster. When it comes to data analysis, they mean business.

I shouldn’t be surprised that a company that made its fortunes building hypercomplex algorithms to beat the stock markets would be so quantitatively driven in other ways. What’s surprising is the degree to which this ethos permeates everything that happens there. Even the company’s interior aesthetic, as designed by architect Steven Holl, emphasizes the presence of order in what looks to be random. Over a staircase on my floor hangs a 9-foot-tall tapestry depicting pi to the nth decimal place. You cannot walk to the coffee maker and back without seeing something to remind you that there truly is order in the universe.

Astronomers look for this order in the stars. Geneticists find it in chromosomes. I search for it in the average employee’s mean proximity to high end health clubs. So what?