Twenty Years

My life changed twenty years ago, this very month.

I was a developer, working for a small software company outside of Boston. Our product was a warehouse management system, built with PowerBuilder on top of Oracle. We had a handful of large customers helping to keep the lights on, but a few went dark at the start of the year, casualties of the dot-com bust. 

We were soon a casualty as well, forced to sell to a competitor at the start of the year. And despite their promises and assurances about not making changes, the layoffs started within the first few months. 

They hit about a dozen folks the first day, including me. I was stunned.

I still remember the phone call from an executive I spoke infrequently with. “Can you come meet with me in the small conference room we never use for anything?” Yeah, sure. I walked across the office, knowing what was coming.

I’ve been cut from a team before, but I was just not prepared for this. And no one could explain to me why I was chosen as opposed to someone else, there didn’t seem to be any reason. It just…was.

And it really pissed me off. 

I did everything I was assigned. Traveled when other developers refused. I asked to take on challenging assignments. Noticing we had no DBA, I asked to attend Oracle certification classes. It seemed any and all efforts were ignored, or discounted.

And thus my first real corporate lesson: Nobody cares about your effort, they only care about results.

The remaining employees huddled in the large recreation room to hear about the layoffs. My friends looked around and noticed I wasn’t there. That’s because I was at my desk, putting my stuff into a box.

Packed up and walking out the door I said goodbye to a few people, and piss off to a few others. 

I put the box into my car and I started driving. I’m thinking to myself “Surely someone must need a PowerBuilder developer, right?” I drove up to Lexington, where Suzanne was working. She had stepped out to get a coffee. While she was walking back she saw me walking towards her. She didn’t hesitate to stop and yell across the street “what happened?”

She knew.

I told her what happened.

We were scared.

I vowed to never allow this to happen to me again. Never would I be the one to get cut, not in this manner, and not treated so poorly in the process. But I needed to find a job, and fast, since living in West Newton was not cheap.

My only marketable skill was PowerBuilder. Fortunately, it was still in enough demand, and it wasn’t long before my phone rang.

Not from job offers, no. It was recruiters calling me with the hope and promise of finding a job. I had worked with a handful of recruiters in the past, but I was still young and inexperienced in how to play the recruiting game. Or, to be more to the point, how they play games with kids like me.

And I was still scared. 

So I listened to what they told me to do. One recruiter took my resume, rewrote it, put c++ at the very top (because I knew how to spell it, apparently) and sent me off on interviews where I would sit with someone for 5 minutes and they would say “why are you here if you haven’t done any c++ programming before?”

Good question. Talk to the recruiter, I guess.

Another recruiter scheduled me for an interview where I had to sit for an analytical reasoning test, because apparently my MS in Mathematics wasn’t a good enough indicator of my analytical reasoning ability. Shockingly, I scored 50 out of 50, was told no one ever scored perfect before, I didn’t get the job, and never got those 45 minutes of my life back. 

I had no offers, and no prospects.

I was low.

And then, out of nowhere, a recruiter contacted me about a job down in Hartford.

Hartford!

Hartford is 90 miles away from West Newton, but mostly a reverse commute. I could drive to Hartford in about 75-80 minutes as it was all highway driving. Folks commuting into Boston from Nashua, NH along Route 3 take longer than that!

I decided to go for the interview for two reasons. First, the scared thing. Fear is a great motivator. If I had to drive 90 miles each way, I would. Second, I knew getting hired by an investment firm in Hartford is job security. People there had careers, you know? It didn’t matter if you had skills or not, you just needed to get past your 90 days. Once you are in, you are in for as long as you want. 

I interviewed with a wonderful human being named Craig. He needed PowerBuilder help. I needed a job. He asked about the drive and I told him it would not be a problem. He mentioned the company offered some relocation assistance, if I wanted to move. I thanked him, we shook hands, and I drove home.

When I got home, I had an offer. Well, offers. One was from Craig. The other was from a software company in East Boston who specialized in point-of-sale systems for cruise lines. East Boston is only 11 miles away from West Newton. However, it would take me an hour to get to work during rush hour combined with the Big Dig. They also expected employees to work at least ten hours a day, but in reality they were only paying me for eight. I really liked their company, and the idea of being “forced” to work on a cruise ship a few weeks each year. 

Suddenly, the fear was back.

I couldn’t choose East Boston because I’d be doing the same PowerBuilder job, with nothing to grow into. I needed a job, sure.

But I wanted a career. 

And I had vowed to never get cut from the team again.

So I chose Hartford.

And my life was forever altered.

Within a few months 9/11 happened. A few months later, Suzanne and I bought our first home, in Worcester, in order to cut down on my commute (reduced to 60 miles, but not by much time because I was a bit further from the highways). We had our first child there, got pregnant again (the best part about babies is making them) and decided to move once more. This time to be closer to both sets of grandparents. Right around the time of the move, “it” happened.

“It” was the 1.5 DBAs at my company quit within a week or so of each other. One was a contractor who simply gave his 30 day notice. The other was a part-timer who was offered the full time job and he said “yes” then changed his mind a week later. This left no one except the guy who had previously executed the following commands successfully:

BACKUP

and

RESTORE

No bootcamps. All it took for me to be handed this opportunity was the fact I knew how to do a backup, a restore, and change passwords.

So, the greatest manager in the world asked Craig (one of the few truly good people on this Earth) if he could “borrow” me, and Craig knew that the best thing for me (not for HIM, but for ME) was to become a DBA. So Craig agreed, we set a transition period over the next six months or so and that was that.

I was now the DBA.

There was a lot to do, a lot to learn, a lot to accomplish. In time I found and joined PASS. I connected with others. I helped take my company from what was essentially a wild west show into a more stable environment. Now, I wasn’t always nice (I think my communication skills have improved in time), but I was always thinking about the company, and whatever actions I took needed to benefit everyone and not just the one or two people looking to take a shortcut.

As my skills grew, so did my thirst for new challenges. Eventually, I hit the limits of my role. There was nothing more for me to grow into. And what had once seemed an amazing opportunity and role now seemed like a prison sentence.

I could still remember how I was so excited and so proud to have a job with a company in Hartford. It was not just a job, but a career. And here I was, nine years later, burned out and tired. Worse yet, the people around me were tired of having me around. It seemed as if I would say ‘black’, three people would say ‘white’ just on principal alone. I felt my skills were called into question every day, or the environment I spent six years building would be called into question, if for no other reason because I was the voice on the other end of the phone.

There was nowhere else to go.

On a whim, I decided to drive into Boston for a SQL Saturday event. While there I was walking past the vendor tables and I heard the phrase “I bet you’d look good wrapped in bacon”. It was probably the best pickup line anyone could use on me. I handed him a bacon gumball. He tried one, got sick, and still wanted to talk to me. I felt bad about making him ill with the gumball so I did something I had not done in over five years:

I attended a dedicated vendor session.

They talked about their product. They promised me it would monitor my SQL and Sybase instances, something I asked other vendors to give me for years. I agreed to give their product a trial, if for no other reason because they did some heavy name dropping and they told me they read my blog. 

I installed the trial, let it run for a week, and started to fall in love. About a month later they came to visit and walk through my data with me. I liked it even more. We had lunch together. The next month we all met up again at a SQL Saturday. It was me, David Waugh, and Matt Larson (CEO of Confio Software). We agreed to meet and have dinner prior to the SQL Saturday dinner. It was, essentially, my job interview. There was no exchange of resumes, just some conversation over dinner. No talk of salary, just talk about our children. No talk about managers, just talk about the role they felt I could help with.

And there was no job opening. We were creating one. Right there. In a hole in the wall in New York City, on a Friday night in the Spring. 

I was a long way from that walk across the office. 

I still had fear. Joining a startup was a risk. Matt looked at me and said “Tom, lots of things can happen. But I’m fairly certain in a stack of resumes, yours would float to the top”. 

Suddenly, I felt like I had a place to go. A place to grow. New challenges. The opportunity to build something, together. 

I took the job(s). I was a sales engineer, customer support, marketing, product support, and maybe a few other roles. You know how everyone wears a lot of hats when you are small.

I clashed with others, wanted to quit, and was almost fired. Fortunately, Confio had their version of Craig. His name was Don, and Don believed I was a value-add even if others did not. Don saved me, just as Craig saved me before. 

I held on. I survived.

Not long after, we were purchased by SolarWinds, where I am today.

This post is really long and doesn’t have a point. If you’ve read this far I thank you and feel I owe you something of value. Something like “focus on the things you can change” or some type of sage advice. 

I’ve got nothing. Well, maybe something.

Always be learning.

Twenty years ago I had no job. Today I have a career. I went from software developer to database administrator to sales engineer/customer support/product support to technical product marketing. I’ve sought roles where I have the opportunity to grow and be presented with new challenges. These past few years I’ve been immersing myself in data science.

If I needed to find work tomorrow, I believe I could. The same should be true for you, too.

Don’t settle for what you already know. Don’t let your opinions block your judgement when it comes to tools, products, or technology. Be open to new possibilities. Be humble to the idea that you don’t know everything, and you can always be learning something new.

If you can do that, then you’ll always have a place to go, a place where you will add value.

That’s it, that’s the post.