My journey into tech began when I was a young girl. My father was a huge influence on me. He worked with computers, initially doing radar and electronics with the military, and then owning his own businesses after he retired. His first business was a video/audio/computer repair store, back in the days when people would pay money to have a VCR repaired. His next business was a computer hardware/networking contracting business. Companies in Las Vegas mostly would pay him to set up and configure their computer networks and their phones.
It wasn’t what he did that influenced me, although I was exposed to computers very early on. I remember the days before Windows when you had to use DOS to do anything, and I watched my dad do anything from soldering parts onto motherboards to running DOS commands.
My journey began with mathematics. My dad’s sister had a math degree and taught high school and college classes for many years, but she lived across the nation from us. My dad never had any bias towards math, and more specifically, towards women and math. He never told me that I didn’t need to be good at math. He helped me with my homework when I was very young- but not very often since I didn’t need much help. He never discouraged me from trying to get A’s in math. My mom was horrible at math! But I was more like him, and she understood that.
I did well in high school, but not fantastic. I was in all of the honors classes with all of the other smart kids- my friends. Most of my close friends ending up ranking as valedictorian or somewhere in the top 10. I think I was in the top 40. I wasn’t as driven as they were. That would come later.
I went to college right after high school. I toured the engineering department at UNLV but was scared off by the foreign professors with thick accents. My first year I’m not sure that I had a major. I took the required classes but mostly partied. I lived in the dorms for the first year, and in hindsight that was an absolutely awful idea. BOYS! In my dorms! Across the hall from me!
Somehow I survived that year, and managed to pass my first college level Calculus class. The professor was Chinese, with a thick accent. I got a terrible grade on the normal grading scale, but it curved to an A because of how awful the teacher was. That scared me away from math for a few years.
I meandered through a handful of majors after that, from criminal justice (I wanted to be a lawyer), to veterinary science (but I’m allergic to animals), and then full circle back to math. Secondary Education- Mathematics, I wanted to TEACH. A few short years had passed and suddenly things in my brain clicked. Calculus 2 and 3 were a breeze. I had friends I would study with, and I’d be the one explaining things. All of a sudden I was really good at something, not just adequate, but GOOD. By the point I took Probability and Statistics, which was near the end of my college experience after I had taken a ton of theoretical proof classes, I was incredibly good. That class was full of engineering majors, but I was the one at the top. I aced every exam, and got the extra credit. Honestly, I really hit the jackpot on that one. I understood the concepts easily enough, but my winning strategy was my procrastination techniques. I waited until the night before the exam and did ALL of the homework. That helped me get to know the book very well. The exam was open book, and most of the other students thought that meant the exam would be easy because you could look everything up. They were wrong. The tests were incredibly long, and those students weren’t fast. I was fast. It was awesome! That class also made me appreciate working with actual numbers again, after having spent so much time in abstractions.
Besides math, one other very important thing happened during the course of my college experience. I had an advisor in the department of education, at UNR. It came time for me to take a computer class, and the options were the basic computing (word/excel/etc) class, but also an intro to programming class. I told him that I wanted to take the programming class. That guy, whose background was in mathematics, told me that just because I was good at math didn’t mean that I’d be good at computers. The nerve! I angrily told him that computers were in my BLOOD, and I’d be taking the harder class. So glad I didn’t cave to that guy’s shortsightedness.
My first class was CompSci 201-Intro to Programming, in C++. By this point I was married and my husband had taken the class the semester before and flunked. We took it together, and in fact, I was pregnant with my first child that semester. The class was amazingly easy for me, and I helped my husband get through the class. I questioned my major- why didn’t I get into this sooner? I was so close to being done with my degree that I decided to finish on the track that I was on. Oddly enough, I’ve never taught, so it all worked out pretty well.
My next brush with computer science would come years later when my husband was finally finishing up his degree at BSU. His major was Computer Information Systems in the Business Department. It’s not as technical as a computer science degree, but he had to take a few programming classes. Among them was a SQL class. Again though, he struggled. Three weeks before the end of the semester it became apparent he’d probably lose his financial aid if he flunked this class. So I opened his book. Taught myself, and then taught him. If I remember correctly, it was PL-SQL. He passed the class!
A month or so later we decided I needed to get a job to help support us so he could focus on school more and work less. I applied for some jobs. Among them, an actuarial entry level position and a job with a software company. The software company called, the actuarial company never did. The software company interviewed me and hired me at the interview. I remember telling them how smart I was, and how quickly I learn things, and how awesome my memory is. All true- but I’m really not that confident. You have to be confident on interviews though, and I knew this. It was painful selling myself like this. I was so confident in my abilities and I really wanted the chance to work for them, I offered to start at $13/hour. Yeah that was ridiculous, and it was 2006! They took me up on it.
The language was FoxPro, which I refer to now as the Great Equalizer. The vast majority of programmers who came to work at this company would have to learn FoxPro on the job. I learned quickly. I was doing billable work within two weeks, and leading big projects within 3 months. When it came time for a raise, my boss bumped me up significantly. Within a year, I was teaching other programmers and I was promoted to “senior programmer/analyst”. Honestly, FoxPro was not hard. However, the environment it was used in was difficult. It was built by a company much bigger than we were, and they took full advantage of the object oriented environment. Inheritance was everywhere. A programmer could easily get lost in the code if they chose to “step into” every line of code they saw while debugging. I didn’t get lost. I seemed to have a knack for filtering out the extraneous information around me and focusing on what I needed to. Maybe it all that practice solving word problems in math.
I was at that software company for over 6 years. I loved the work immensely. I was on the front lines, dealing with customers, traveling, overseeing projects, coordinating upgrades, you name it I did it! Except for selling- that’s what my boss the owner did. He often sold “vapor-ware” though, and I’d end up coding a huge project quickly under pressure as a result.
Eventually the stress started to catch up to me. Troubles started to surface with my mental health and in my marriage. I was always working, even when I was home. I really took ownership of the things I worked on, so if there were problems, I worked tirelessly to rectify those problems. Most of the time those problems were because of poor leadership at the company, and poor quality with my coworkers.
Due to the economic downturn of 2008, technical jobs became scarce in Boise. Two big companies in the area had laid off massive amounts of highly skilled workers. The company that I was at was thriving, and growing, even during this downturn. Finding another job during this time would be nearly impossible. I looked for years, but never got as much as an interview. I remember at one point when the software company was hiring we received over one hundred applicants for three positions. I was involved in the hiring process, and it was intense. I was glad I wasn’t unemployed during that time.
Years passed, the stress continued, my marriage held together somehow, and eventually I decided I had to take drastic steps to get out. I applied for graduate school, and got in. I was going to get a master’s in mathematics, and my plan was to focus on statistics as much as possible. The day I told my boss that I was going back to school he nearly croaked (we were in Iowa on a business trip together, and that business trip was going horribly. Again, lack of leadership.) Shortly thereafter he told me to name my price “north of where I was now but less than 100K”. I never told him a figure. I was tired of being married to that job and I wanted a divorce! And there’s no way I could’ve taken that kind of money from them. His wife, who also helped run the company and was there every day, didn’t understand all that I could do. She wasn’t technical, and had no perception of how smart I was or how much money I was worth. She’d resent me and she’d resent her husband for giving me that kind of money. No thank you.
I went to school for one semester, but it didn’t go well. Things were much different now. Maybe my brain just didn’t work that way anymore, or maybe the professors at BSU were really that bad. The classes I was taking were far too on the abstract side of math, even from the Statistics professor, and not enough on the applied side. I didn’t like that at all. Not what I envisioned one bit. I didn’t go back the second semester, and then I ended up landing another job! FINALLY!
This second job in tech was for a healthcare company that had several teams of highly technical people. I was hired as “SQL Developer II”, and initially I felt out of my league. I didn’t know as much as it seemed when they interviewed me, I just knew enough to sound intelligent during the interview. I interview well. I’m personable and I talk clearly, at least during interviews. I’m great at technical interviews though, my memory serves me well. People are usually impressed.
I did very well at that job. Huge data set, in health care claims processing, and much to learn. I liked the coding, which consisted of writing TSQL stored procedures and functions. That took up about half of my time, but the other half was spent in meetings. Testing meetings, release meetings, you name it meetings. That was boring.
I had a few run-ins with one particular female coworker. She wasn’t a developer though, and she was a pretty smart woman working in a lower level management position of a configuration team. She was also a manipulative conniving @!%*$. Word seemed to spread pretty fast that I was smart, but she went out of her way to throw me under as many busses as she possibly could. She would tell me that she needed something from me, I’d research that and then respond to her through email that I needed something from her, she’d neglect to see that email, and then blame me for dropping the ball. She’d loop in as many bosses as she could on just about every email string, in an attempt to make me look bad to upper management. It was quite frustrating. Her efforts really bothered me, but they weren’t very successful.
When it came time for me to give notice that I was quitting, the boss over my small team told me that they were really impressed by how fast I picked things up and they wanted to promote me to a different position. This company was national, but had accounts in every state. The job they wanted to promote me to was one that served the company nationally instead of just locally. WOW. The type of promotion that people at this company aspired to, and they were offering it to me and I hadn’t been there one year! Again, another chance at $100K. It would be much more work, and it’d be stressful. I wasn’t ready for that. I enjoyed having time with my family again, even though the days at work dragged by and I was bored beyond belief. So I declined.
I took a position in Salt Lake City for a company that I had visited while working for the software company in Boise. They were impressed by how quickly I got things done, and when they saw that I had left the software company, they started talking to me. The people at this company are among the nicest most generous people I have ever known. I couldn’t resist that opportunity, even though we’d need to pack up and move. My husband was unemployed at the time, so it was perfect timing. We made the big move! My new title? IT Manager. Department of 1 (me!)
Back to supporting a FoxPro application, but they’re on SQL Server thank goodness. I took what I learned from the healthcare company, and even some while just on the periphery (SSIS/SSRS- thanks Harsha and Will!) and applied it to my new job. I installed and configured SSRS, created a ton of reports, and then automated those reports for email delivery. My bosses thought I was a genius! Shhhh- it’s super simple to automate reporting with SSRS! But they don’t need to know that. I use SSIS and TSQL to automate things that we need to happen with the data, thereby reducing the likelihood of user error or even reducing the need for a person to do a certain job. I’m also the DBA, the reluctant DBA who’d rather develop, but I’ve been able to learn a ton in my tiny little environment on a standard edition of SQL Server 2008r2. I learn from people’s technical blogs and websites, thank goodness I’ve got awesome google powers and smart people out there blog as much as they go. They’ve helped me countless times, from answering other people’s questions or from just covering a subject they’ve chose to write about. I’ve been to the Pass Summit twice now, and I get to see these brilliant people present there and at SQL Saturdays. Thank you #SQLFamily! I look up to you so much!
So now I’m beginning to get bored at this job too. I’ve done so much in the short two and half years I’ve been there. Lately I spend the majority of my time doing things I’d rather not do- supporting the network, the hardware, the users. I want to code! They do give me a long leash, and I have creative license to a certain extent, so I’m using that leash and license to learn C#. I’m planning on replacing some of the FoxPro programs with C# programs, and who knows where that will take me. I just hope it’s closer to the CODE! For now, I’ll stay put. They’re a great group of people to work for, which makes up for the fact that I am a lone developer surrounded by absolutely no one who is even remotely like me. I actually miss the geeks. I learned a lot from my fellow coworkers, and I miss that terribly, even though sometimes they smelled funny or were difficult to talk to.
