IT Boot Straps (How did you get where you are?)

I just successfully completed a new career milestone! After our year-end release freeze I will be releasing a new enterprise CRM implementation into production that I have installed and configured myself (despite having no real qualifications to do so!) The last couple weeks have been really stressful as my management wanted this by the end of the year and it is an enormous relief.

This got me to wondering how some of you other IT folks have gotten where you are. Was it a plan from early on or just random opportunity like mine?


The Murgatroyd Story (A Lifetime Christmas Special)

Thanks to my computer wiz older brother I've always had computers around but I've never had any formal training. Well, back in the days of the tech bubble that was more than enough qualification to begin a career in IT but I began working in the CRM field just a little over six years ago at entry level.

I was hired to do basic user support at first. (Siebel 7.7) We had a great team of developers and business analysts and I learned a lot, and quickly. I taught myself to write SQL queries and before long I was performing data administration and some low level production support.

Then the economy tanked in 2008 and the financial institution I worked at failed spectacularly. Most of the team was let go and the rest split for greener pastures. By late '08 I was all that was left to keep the application maintained. Doing so was no great feat as our devs had been very talented and left me a healthy environment, but this was still a nice achievement for someone with no formal training.

After several months they brought back one of the old team members as a contractor. He was unfortunately the least talented of the former devs (in fact he had kind of washed out of the dev team and had moved to the BA team before getting hit in the first round of layoffs.) This made it easier to at least take the occasional day off but his assistance was pretty minimal so I still handled the majority of the upkeep as our institution passed through FDIC conservatorship to a new owner in '09.

Most of '09 was just a matter of maintaining the status quo and I literally phoned it in, making heavy use of my VPN access to work from home. In 2010 things got underway again as we shifted from mortgages to retail banking and needed to integrate some other acquisitions. Things were busy, I was learning new systems (albeit some fucking terrible third party hosted crapware that is still the bane of my existence) and business processes, plus the company was operating profitably so job security was good again at a time when many people in the workforce were still nervous.

In early 2011 we retired Siebel and took on a new project to implement MS Dynamics CRM. Since our "CRM Team" was just me and the Siebel "dev" we had a third party contractor help with the install and setup, however my paternity leave started just as we were getting started so I missed most of it and had to learn the app on the fly.

Early this year they let the other guy go because his contract was up (and mgmt noticed his, uh, general lack of usefulness.) Once again it was just me left to maintain and support the app, however this time it was for a growing and active application! I've been doing everything from taking the 4AM command center calls ("There's no heartbeat from the server." Huh-wha?) to meeting with execs, documenting requirements then executing the customization.

Finally we've hired a CRM dev but he's green and is used to being one dev on a team. He has already been a big help but he’s accustomed to writing compartmentalized pieces of code and letting someone else worry about how it fits with everything else. He's learning which is great but it'll be a while yet before he's got the confidence to step up his game. Then they decided to migrate our app to a new datacenter as part of a co-location rebalancing and I had three weeks to get it done before the end of the year. Ug.

Well, as of yesterday I have a couple of app servers and a db running a perfect replication of our prod environment in the new datacenter and this coming year I’ve got a huge enterprise BPM project coming. I’ve just had a pay raise in time to figure in to my annual bonus and best of all, I find my work interesting! It’s been a great ride at this company, despite the frustrations. (From my early experiences here I know what a proper support team should look like. Wish I had that kind of backup again.)

Congrats on bootstrapping yourself into a successful IT career :)

My story is a much less inspiring "born with a silver hard drive in his mouth" sort of thing.

I liked computers the second I saw my dad's PC XT in his office in something like 1984 when I was like ten. That came home to our house in maybe 1987 when my dad upgraded to a PC AT. Got my own PC (an IBM PS/2 Model30-286) in 1989.

I started off college thinking the computer programmers sat in cubicles all day doing boring programming so I majored in physics. I took CS 101 on a whim my sophomore year and never looked back and it's a good thing because I was terrible at physics so my double-major in CS was a godsend. Started working in 1996 when "graduated with a CS degree" seemed almost like an instant jobening compared to the dot com crash and the financial crisis years.

I've done a small variety of things from Client/Server software for the advertising industry to CAD software to enterprise business software with increasing levels of responsibility.

If there is one thing that seems tragic and commonplace in the world of IT though is that companies do not seem to understand that there simply are no free lunches for IT systems. You either staff appropriately and do things right or you spend the money anyway on maintenance costs, downtime, inefficient systems, lost sales and missed opportunities, or outright failures.

Your experience of being one guy doing the work of several is depressingly common. The industry is still in its infancy compared to some other things though so hopefully people will learn. But probably not.

As for me, today I sit in a cubicle all day and do programming if I'm *lucky*

Mostly I sit in a cubicle and coordinate other developers and do application architecture and design. I would love to return to the days of doing coding all day :D

The sad part is that when somebody shows promise as a developer that person is immediately tapped to be a "dev lead" or whatever and immediately starts to corral other less talented developers. :(

I had similar opportunities with computers around me since I was about 6 years old (though we had Commodores.) However I went the slacker route and picked up a lifelong video game habit, but no programming chops. The late 90's/early 2000's were so tech-intensive it was easy to get a job if you just weren't affraid of computers. So many very strange and completely unqualified people got into IT during that period.

Our CRM implementation is two years in and we're barely tapping its potential. Infact I expect to have to state exactly that to our planning committee in a couple weeks when I justify why we initially asked for x configuration dollars and only spent a fraction of it. We spent half the year bereft of programming support!

Some of the best advice I received was from our lead Siebel dev: "Don't be affraid to do other peoples jobs for them." There has been no better trick for winning friends and influencing people.

Edited for grammar crackers.

I remember in my required CS classes for me EE major, we'd do assignments alongside some of the CS majors and some of them were completely awful. Copying assignments, taking/paying for someone else's code and renaming a few variables and turning it in, and basically just coasting so they could get out of school and get a "HIGH PAYING PROGRAMMING JOB!". I'd like to think they found themselves a new career when the dot com thing happened and their dreamed of easy riches wasn't so easy any longer.

I wouldn't be surprised if that's still the case. Some folks I've encountered labor under the delusion that getting a particular cert or degree will somehow enable them to make more money doing the exact same thing they're already doing, instead of being a stepping stone to more advanced work. I wonder if other professions are as afflicted with that particular brand of tilting at windmills by people already in the workforce.

Mine's relatively boring. I grew up programming in anything I could get my hands on in Junior High (which was basically Basic and later a bit of C), went to a tech oriented magnet highschool in Maryland, and then dropped out of a shitty college and went to work on a helpdesk as a contractor on a military medical base. Was promoted to server ops a year later, and stuck around for about five more years building up a resume.

Interviewed remotely in Boston, and since moving up here I've worked for three different companies figuring out exactly what I felt like specializing in (started as a VM expert, moved to an internal cloud-esque processing system, now I'm a systems architect focusing mainly on automation and tooling)

Really, it just pays to have a passion for tech work since you need to actually give a shit and constantly pick up new stuff if you want to be good at it. Most of the folks I've met who simply saw the salary numbers haven't advanced much from the entry levels. They still stick around because even entry level sysadmin pays pretty well compared to retraining for something else, but thankfully I've not met one in a high level position yet.

Honestly, I just love my job when I get to sit around and redesign shit. Datacenter builds are the best thing ever since it's a chance to fix whatever you found to be painful to scale.

I've loved tech and computers since my first Vic-20/C64 sometime in the early 80s as a gamer/programmer. After High School I wanted to get a College degree in computers but was informed that you needed math classes as well, which was my worst subject. So I went the business degree route instead.

After College in 1990, I answered a blind ad for a finance position near my parents house where I was living. Turns out it was Acclaim Entertainment and I got the job in finance. It was a blast working for a young gaming company that had just gone public and was pumping out Nintendo games. Even though I was in finance, I ended up fixing everyone's computers. I was also dating the head of Investor Relations, a nice looking blond 10 years older than me, who was very eager for marriage. She told me that management was so impressed with my computer skills that they wanted to send me to network training to take over from the moronic IT director.

Seeing the rest of my life unfolding at 21, I completely freaked out, figured there was absolutely no future in computers (still pre-dot com boom) and quit my job to go to Law School to learn a real profession. Broke up with the nice looking blond and quickly met a better looking blond in Law School who is now my wife. On graduating Law School, there were almost no legal jobs but tons of tech jobs. Great decision Jag.

20+ years later I'm running an in-house legal department for a health based company and hanging out with the IT geeks talking gaming and gadgets.

So my path to IT was to run away from a golden opportunity to work with computers and gaming to pursue a non-IT career. I still have no idea why I did it and since I'm here, I guess I prefer IT geeks over any other profession!

I wandered into the IT world completely by accident. In 1998 I put my college on halt because I'd put myself in a horrible debt situation and trying to work full-time nights to pay for things like rent and food was killing my grades. I decided I'd better ditch college temporarily and find a full time job to do for a year or two until my finances were in order. I mentioned this to an acquaintance of my mine, the boyfriend of my then-girlfriends older sister, and he told me that the company he worked at needed an entry level desktop support IT tech. I had zero qualifications on paper but some background in fixing computers due to years of messing around with it as a hobby. The guy actually made me come to his house and disassemble/re-assemble his PC before he'd give me a recommendation, but he did and I got the job. Being terribly paranoid that I'd somehow gotten a job I wasn't qualified for, I dedicated quite a bit of my own time to study and taught myself network administration, *nix administration, and shell scripting. I didn't know it at the time, but that dedication to learning new technologies and staying on top of the game is the main ingredient to any recipe for success in the IT world.

After six months of study and on-the-job learning I realized I was now actually better at this IT stuff than all my coworkers. They were routinely bringing their thorniest problems to me to solve. This was the late 90's and good IT people were in demand for big money so my company had only, um, less-good IT people. And me. My boss realized how much I'd improved, and knew I was intending to return to college, so to avoid losing me he gave me a promotion and a fat raise. That sealed the deal and I never did go back to college. Instead I've been an network admin, a programmer, a DBA, and lately a technical architect.

The above + genuine interest in technology == great career.

I've told my story before but:

In college I majored in history/archaeology and did work-study in the multimedia lab all four years. It was an all-mac lab, which was fine by me. I picked things up really quickly since most of the professors were fucking assholes and didn't know the programs they were teaching, so you'd have to jump in to show them what menu did what. I had absolutely zero interest in going into IT, even though my coworkers were all computer science majors, and graduated in 2001 in the middle of the dot com burst, which meant that the market for FUCKING EVERYTHING was swamped with people with a ridiculous amount of experience compared to me, who only had COLLEGE on my resume. After a summer of finding no work anywhere and being denied to my graduate school of choice, I was offered two weekends of work helping a law firm move from one building to another. They were getting all brand new computers and it was basically just plugging things in. The night before I had to go over to my best friend's house so he could show me how to plug in a PC cause I'd never used one before.

They were one of the first companies to be using Windows XP (I think they were actually bug testing a beta or something, it was weird) so NO ONE knew the operating system. After those two weekends, they liked me enough that they asked me to stay on for an extra week just answering the slew of calls from everyone in the building who had no idea how to use XP. Since no one else knew it, I ended up being the go-to person since I picked it up so quickly, and after that week they asked me to stay full time as the assistant to the PC Technician, the guy that actually worked on all the hardware when it broke.

Three days later he quit and they put me in his position. I had never opened a PC in my life. I did not tell them that. My first call was from the Big Major Senior Partner whose computer would not turn on. I pulled it down to the work room, opened it up, opened up a good machine, and stared at them both until I figured out where the power supply was and how it would plug in. After that, if anything broke that I couldn't figure out I'd call Dell, who would send a tech, who would then be nice enough to show me how he did what he did so I never had to call them again when that thing happened. Eventually my position was rolled into Help Desk calls too and after a year at that place I left for another call-center Help Desk thing and eventually I ended up where I am now, doing Junior Sysadmin/Security work, with being the IT Manager thrown in so that I manage the Help Desk guys. Turns out I LOVE doing network stuff and I'm really good with servers. Who knew?

I recall the trepidation I felt the first time I cracked open a computer. It was an Amgia 2000 and my brother and I were adding a megabyte of RAM. The RAM came as individual microchips that you had to slot into the board yourself! I was sure we were going to turn the whole thing into a paperweight, but it worked. :) After that experience computer assembly was more like (carefully) playing with legos.



Want to play a game?

I have a hand tremor, and thus hate doing hardware work. Thankfully I've been doing this long enough that I have MINIONS to send to do hardware work!

edit: also, everything in a server rack is made of sharp fucking edges, and no matter how careful I am I will always end up with at least one cut on my hands after any datacenter trip.

My career itself hasn't been that exciting so far (I'm still at my first post-graduation employer!), but education-wise I managed to get lucky and get a scholarship at the end of high school. That and living at home paid the expenses for my first couple years of uni, and in the second year I went for the UofA's co-op work program, where the faculty helps arrange 20 months total of work terms with tech companies (three summers and two semesters, extending it to a 5-year degree). The money made from those terms then covered the remaining school expenses, and in the end I managed to graduate debt-free, and with a job already lined up with one of the companies I'd worked for during one of the terms.

Man, that's the only part that I can see as being fun!

Grew up tinkering with PCs, but I went to college for secondary education/history. I got about 3 years in before giving it up. After that, I did many and varying jobs. Gas station clerk, Borders book geek, Lowe's/Home Depot learning gardening/lawn equipment and lumber/construction. Tutoring. Overnight data warehousing with tape backups for NCR. Did phone support for a subcontractor for Apple software/hardware around the time the iPod was being launched. Taught a couple odd-ball high school courses where I had to learn whatever the particular student was having trouble with. Most of those jobs overlapped in some way where I was usually doing 2 jobs and school. I ended up working at Apple after being fired from Home Depot for making too much money for the position I was in. Went from a sales person to a "Genius" in a few months. A quite awesome friend of mine who worked part time at Apple worked for a small design firm. He was once their IT guy, but he had left there a couple years prior. They were having trouble replacing their IT Manager with someone competent and not awful. So, here I am. I've been doing this for about 2.5 years, and I've learned a crazy amount of things that I've never had any experience with before. Supporting several offices in varying time zones and countries all by your lonesome is quite interesting.