Administrator Spotlight: Clayton Gates
Director, Digital Products
Tell us the story of how you came to work at NYU Law? Were you always in your current position?
A friend of mine put me in touch with a former head of Communications. They were working on a new website project. He knew I worked in the field and thought I would be interested in getting involved. The project sounded interesting. I started helping out, first as a consultant, then later full-time. And now somehow 15 years have passed.
My position started in Communications, but gradually it evolved into more of a technical role—hence a transition into Tolga’s [Ergunay, Chief Technology Officer] department. But honestly, I’m the least technical person in IT. All my colleagues are way smarter than me. I’m mostly just good at connecting other people to make digital things better.
What’s a typical day for you like?
After I’ve had my coffee—French Peru from Porto Rico on Bleecker—I don’t check my email. OK, that’s stretching the truth. I do check email, but it’s my least favorite communication method. Most of our web team communication happens all day over Slack, or Jira, our ticketing system. IT lives on tickets. It’s a love/hate relationship. Jira is a powerful tool, but also a relentless nudge.
My job is primarily about identifying solutions for information delivery, keeping projects moving, and lots of collaborative troubleshooting. There are website analytics to parse, user experience challenges to overcome, accessibility requirements to stay on top of, and so on. It’s a fun mix of topics that keeps me engaged and on my toes.
A typical day includes adding and updating tickets in Jira, checking in with colleagues either in IT or other departments, maybe a Zoom meeting with an outside developer, and finding time to advance the myriad of projects that we get involved in. As I’m not a programmer/developer, I often do a lot of the initial user testing to make sure features work as expected. I try to break things by using the site or application in unexpected ways. When I find a problem, I create a ticket and assign it to someone to fix. I’m sure my team thinks of me as a relentless nudge.
Oh, and I do promise to respond to your email soon.
What’s the most challenging thing about what you do? And what’s the most rewarding?
A constant challenge in my job is keeping track of–or trying to keep track of–the endless bits of information that need to come together to create digital products. A single web page can have dozens of component parts: content elements, styling rules, images, files, scripts, authors, menus, metadata. And when a feature is in development, there are many conversations about how things should behave, who should have permissions to do certain things, how things connect to each other, and so on. Keeping track of all that information and how it evolves during development is difficult. We use a lot of tools to support this information management: Google Drive, Jira, Slack, email, Notion, Airtable. I’m sure I’m forgetting six or seven others.
The most rewarding thing is working with smart people and watching them creatively solve difficult problems, sometimes under real-time pressure.
What do you wish you’d known about the Law School on your first day of working here?
I wish I’d known earlier how important mobile devices would be to all of us at the Law School. I would have started planning for that a lot earlier.
What is your favorite spot on campus, and why?
Mamoun’s. Oh, is that not on campus?