Recently in Work Category

It’s interesting, enlightening… could be depressing, but I won’t let it be… to assess the changes to my personality over the years. I went back and read some journal entries from some 12 or so years ago and was a little shocked by how “raw” I was then. I was much more easily provoked and much more easily frustrated. My stress levels were off the charts.

Here’s an excerpt, edited to protect the innocent (I don’t believe I would have bothered to protect the innocent back then.)

(My employer) has been forced to move into our new office space before we were ready because we found out this morning that as of Monday, the building we’re in is scheduled for demolition. I also found out this morning my boss no longer has an office reserved for him. He will be in a cubicle with the rest of us weenies who are not worth of an office.

So… I’m kind of depressed. I really don’t feel like the managers of this company are very considerate of those working for them- making the company work. And… most of all, I just don’t enjoy what I’m doing. I don’t enjoy the working conditions.

So… I just don’t know what to do. (Our vice president) used to spew &%^$ about honesty and openness and how he wanted good communication in this company. I don’t know how you promote good communication in a company, but we sure the %&$ don’t know how to do it. The communication in this company is so &%$#@& screwed up… I feel we could be a prototype for bad communication.

I don’t think (Employer)’s problem is that nobody’s TRYING to communicate. Everyone is yacking and spouting constantly. It’s just that nobody’s listening and nobody’s considering what anyone else has to say. In fact, nobody seems very considerate at all. I’ve tried to be considerate. I don’t know if I am… but I try to be.

I know I’m a lot more wise now than I was then. I probably have a long, long road ahead of me in the path to wisdom accumulation, but I’m proud to say I’m a lot more level-headed now than I was then. If I could talk to the person I was then, I’d have a lot of advice on how to deal with the situation I was in, but I’m fairly certain the person I was then would just deflect the advice and make excuses for why the situation was dire, grim, and hopeless.

The problem at that particular company was that of leadership- there wasn’t any good leadership. We had good technology, really good technology, but we were undermanned and overtasked. I really didn’t have much experience under my belt at the time to realize I should have, could have, stepped up to the plate to contribute some of the badly needed leadership. I had a good deal of confidence and passion about what I wanted to do for the company, of course, but felt mostly unsupported by those above me.

Today, on the other hand, situations are different. I have very little of that passion I had then. I’ve force myself, intellectually, to learn new skills, to do a good job for my employer because I know I need the skills, not just the technical skills, but even the simple ability to accept and complete tasks given to me. My confidence shattered in the intervening years is on a slow but steady growth curve, accompanied by a small sense of humility I didn’t have back then. I’d love to regain that passion, but I suspect a newly gained apprehension of faceplanting looms, everpresent.

Dear family, friends, and others,

Every year, we receive wonderful cards and Christmas letters from others and I always think it would be nice to do the same and send out some written Christmas well-wishes and deliver a year’s worth of news about our family. Well, this is it, folks. I’ve finally gotten around to it.

Merry Christmas to you!

Great! Now that’s over with. Let’s talk about us!

2010 was a terrific, momentous year for the Bartons. We moved into a new house in Herriman, about a mile southwest of our previous home, on December 15, 2009, just in time for last Christmas. We purchased the home as a short sale and got a wonderful, luxurious home for a killer deal. The house was entirely finished so, unlike with previous homes, we were not faced with any challenges of finishing basements or anything like that. Instead, we’ve had to do some work on the yard and furnishing the extra space inside.

In February, a client that had been giving me the majority of my contract work let all their employees go. They continued to keep me busy managing their servers for the next couple of months, but I could see the writing on the wall. I started looking for other work— even something that was more like a “real job.” Christine hoped I could find something that let me work from home doing software development instead of I.T. work.

In April, I flew to Pittsburgh, PA to interview with Grant Street Group for a position as a software developer on their TaxSys product. The interviews went well and in May, they asked me to come on board as a telecommuting software developer. It’s been a very challenging job for me as I haven’t had a “real” development job in about eight years, but it’s all been great experience for me as I’ve learned and grown a lot.

Also in April, I ran in my first running race and first half-marathon, the Thanksgiving Point Half Marathon. This was a major accomplishment for me as I’d been running to get into better shape for several months prior and really had no idea if I could do it. I ran a 5K in September and am planning to run the Thanksgiving Point Half Marathon again next April.

Maya, Lucy and Eli changed schools in the Fall because we moved into a different elementary school area and because Maya started the seventh grade. Maya took an special algebra class over the summer to qualify to be in Pre-Algebra in seventh grade and had no problem passing the tests. She’s doing very well in middle-school and brought home her first report card with straight As.

Maya is also now in the Young Womens program in our church and loves it.

Lucy is in fourth grade and her classmates in our neighborhood frequently inform us she is the “smartest kid in the class.” Lucy is also doing very well in piano lessons and on the non-competition swim team at South Jordan’s recreation center. When the new Herriman Recreation Center opens in February, we’ll probably be looking into signing Lucy (and Maya) up for swim team practices there.

Eli is in second grade and got straight As on his first report card. Eli started piano lessons this year with the same teacher Lucy has and is doing well at that also.

Christine has been at Sorenson Communications for almost six years now and is the manager over the quality assurance department where she has about 50 employees working under her. She recently got a new boss who is shaking things up and taking a hard look at how things are being done. Christine is enjoying the excitement, challenges, and new directions her job is taking her in.

On Sunday, 19 September, we came home from having dinner with my parents to find the mountain near our home covered in flames and our neighborhood being evacuated. After we hurried and packed a few belongings into our cars, we could see the wall of flames, stoked by strong, dry winds, moving down the north slope of South Mountain toward the homes on our street. With firefighters nowhere in sight, we had little confidence our home or others around ours would survive the fire.

You can read more about our experience here, but to make a long story short, what happened that night was nothing short of a miracle. Elected officials, police, and firefighters felt the fire would destroy dozens, if not hundreds, of homes. The final tally the next morning was 3 homes. All of the homes in our neighborhood emerged intact, some with charred brush right up to their yards.

It was a humbling, spiritual, and emotional experience that brought neighbors closer together and reminded us that nature is what it is.

Also in 2010, we lost Christine’s paternal grandmother Elna Nielsen. I knew her for years before I met and married Christine. She was a vibrant, loving, wonderful woman who definitely left her mark on the world.

We recognize and acknowledge many of our friends, neighbors, and family members are struggling these days with employment and other economic woes. It is our hope that new congressmen and local elected leaders, with a fresh appreciation for the U.S. Constitution and the philosophy of our Founding Fathers, can steer us in the right direction and back to being a productive, successful people.

With that being said, Utah does seem to be one of the best, if not the best place to be right now.

If you’ve made it this far, congratulations! Thank you for your kind indulgence and have a happy New Year!

Sincerely,

Doran, Christine, Maya, Lucy, and Eli.

Day Five was a short day because I had to leave to catch my flight back home around 3 in the afternoon.

Last night, I watched a couple more training videos in my hotel room. This morning, I watched one more and was all caught up on what I was supposed to watch this week. I talked to one of the business ananlysts with some questions I had come up with from watching the videos. I got all my questions answered.

I spent some time with my team leader going over some more development practices. I’m glad he’s patient with me. :)

Last night, I looked up a few coworkers on Facebook and added them as friends. One of them, a functional architect, accepted my friend invite almost immediately. She admitted to me today that she looks up every new hire on Facebook. It was a little shocking to discover I had been “stalked” before I had “stalked.”

Today, I went to lunch with two of the functional architects, one being my new Facebook friend, to a little “hole in the wall Indian place.” The food was super-tasty.

Now I’m on my way home. It’s been a great week.

Now, our development manager talked to me about my blog posts. He’d heard from the functional architect I went to lunch today that I had written about my previous lunches on my blog and that gave her a good idea of where we were going to go to lunch today.

He expressed concern that I had information about the company in my posts. He acknowledged that I hadn’t published any secrets but that I had discussed names and what could be construed as business practices.

I was devastated. For all my efforts to be a good new employee, I had “caused concern” with what I was doing outside of business hours. My lack, perhaps, of tact, respect for the company, consideration of possible consequences of revealing what I did reveal, was causing friction with at least one person of decision-making capital at the company.

Crap!

I went back and edited each of my blog posts for the week, removing any names, any names of any software, hardware, or services that I may have mentioned by name. The only thing I thing I left was my Apple MacBook Pro. I hope that’s not a problem.

In retrospect, I made a serious miscalculation, which isn’t surprising considering I seem to have a history of miscalculating things of a social nature. Chalk it up, maybe, to my maybe being afflicted with Asperger’s Syndrome.

Now that I’ve thought about it, I can see that if I had been an employee with the company for some time, to the point everyone, especially those in decision-making positions, knew who I was, what kind of person I was… Basically, if they knew me well enough to trust me, it probably wouldn’t have been a problem, or as much of a problem. But with me being the new kid on the block, coming in and blogging names and crap, even if I was being careful not to divulge anything that might be a company secret, I understand now why they’d be nervous.

These corporate social dynamics are a real challenge for me. It’s almost like I never know when I’m being appropriate and when I’m not. I guess I should be more careful and just ask more questions about everything.

Day Four. I will be going home tomorrow and will be home for approximately 28-30 hours before hopping on a plane again and heading back to Pittsburgh for the second week of training.

Today was my first development team meeting. As many of our developers work remotely, the meeting was held via a conference call and an online screen-sharing solution . I liked that it was short (about an hour) and to the point.

I closed three issues today. Now, I wouldn’t be so proud of that except that these were all supposed to be very simple issues, like “change the spelling” types of issues. One of them, however, ended up being more complex than anyone thought. I found the problem extended into the database schema data. As a result, what my team leader thought was going to involve minor editing of one, two, maybe a handful of files, ended up being something like 14 files and a new schema change. To fix this issue, I had to go through the process of testing schema changes and writing detailed instructions for testing.

It felt good to get that one done.

The other two were pretty simple. One was just changing the text of a link inside the application. The other was formatting a date from a string that looked like this “YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS” into this “MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS”. Pretty simple stuff, but it still gives me good experience working with the source code management tools, issue management system, and the applications themselves.

Because of all the actual work I’ve been doing, I’m behind a day or so on watching training videos. I’m going to try to catch up on those tonight.

I went out looking for a bookstore last night. Google Maps erroneously told me there was a Barnes and Noble near 6th Street and Wood Avenue. Of course, I didn’t figure that out until I walked over there. A security guard in the building at the address just laughed at me and told me the nearest one was clear out of town.

Bummer.

I went to lunch with two of the system administrators for the company. We had a lot to talk about because of my background doing systems administration.

Day Three was more of the same. More hacking on fairly simple and straightforward problems. More watching training videos. More training on coding practices and standards. More training on time tracking. Another lunch with a couple other people — a business analyst and one of the developers who I interviewed with a couple weeks ago. They took me to Euro Cafe which was decent food and the dining room was refreshingly quiet compared to most places during the lunch hour.

Tomorrow morning, I’m providing a urine specimen to fulfill the mandatory drug test requirement. They were going to work with the drug testing offices in Utah to get this done before I came out, but the offices in Utah apparently don’t use any of the barcodes or identification numbers that the offices in Pennsylvania do.

I’ve been warned that the drug testing facility is very strict and, to prevent fraud, they have removed sinks from the rooms and a nurse must be present while you… provide you specimen. That has a lot of potential to be embarrassing, don’t you think? Perhaps I’ll ask the nurse if he or she would mind if I took a picture of them while I was providing my specimen? Hah hah.

Google Maps told me there was a Barnes and Noble near my hotel, so I walked to the address given and found no bookstore. Stupid Google Maps.

Lots of stuff downtown closes in the late afternoon. It’s odd, but I guess the bulk of their business is the white-collar crowd that evacuate the city at 5pm.

I was tired on Day Two because I only got about six hours of sleep between getting home from the Porcupine Tree show and getting up for work. It rained most of the day in Pittsburgh. I didn’t have an umbrella, so I wore my new Porcupine Tree hoodie as I walked to the office. It worked nicely.

At the office, I finished watching a training video I started watching the day before. I also met with another telecommuter via an online screen sharing solution and a phone call to get some training on the internal issue tracking system.

I set up MacFUSE and sshfs on my Mac laptop so that I could remotely access, via SSH, files from the main development server from my laptop. This way, I could use a graphical text editor like MacVim (gvim for OS X) to do my code edits. My officemate — the manager of all software development — suggested I blog about it on the internal developer blog. I did and that stirred up some conversation in the developer chat room.

I went to lunch with one of my co-developers and a business analyst today at a place called Storms. It was alright. The developer asked me what life was like in “semi-rural Utah,” using the words I had included in my introduction e-mail message sent to everyone yesterday. I told him about Herriman- how the population has just exploded over the last decade or so, and how there’s very little sales tax revenue because it’s mostly homes, but that’s changing, and how there are still a few farms and planted fields.

This afternoon, I attended a training meeting with several others and found it to be very educational. Also this afternoon, I committed my first changeset and submitted it to my team leader for code review.

My first day at Grant Street Group was a nice mix of gentle easing me into the water and tossing me into the deep end.

I got the expected set of papers to fill out as a new contractor and a guided tour around the office to be introduced to everyone who works there (the ratio of onsite to remote employees is swinging, but there are still a majority of onsite workers.)

I also got my new MacBook Pro and had some time to play with it, learn some ropes.

I watched most of a training video (had trouble playing it on my Mac because it was in some obscure WMV format, but finally got it to play in my Windows XP VMWare guest), got a username and password set up on most all of the systems I’ll be working with, and met (virtually) with my team leader on working with the codebase.

Before day one was over, I had a handful of issues assigned to me to address.

At lunchtime the manager over all development and another telecommuter that was in town took me to Mexico City for dinner. I was excited to have some mexican food as it is one of my favorite food genres. I was a little unsure of what to expect because my experience eating mexican in New York City a few years ago was so bad (“I ordered an enchilada.” “That is your enchilada right there.” “No, this is a quesadilla!”)

Mexico City wasn’t bad, but it definitely represents a far-from-the-border interpretation.

After work, I grabbed some dinner at Subway and took a cab to Millvale, a few miles outside of downtown Pittsburgh for the Porcupine Tree concert I had a ticket to. More on that in another posting.

I have arrived in Pittsburgh for my first of two weeks of training for my new job at Grant Street Group.

When I flew out here a couple of weeks ago for my interviews with the company, I flew on US Airways on a connecting flight through Phoenix. What was nice about that was that I got to lunch with my good friend Dave during my two-hour layover. What was not nice about that was that it was US Airways. The onboard service was just lacking all around.

I asked if I could fly on a direct flight or a different airline for this trip. Grant Street was very accomodating. In the end, I gave them the flight numbers of the Delta Airlines flights I wanted to take (I researched and found inexpensive flights that resulted in a minimum amount of travel time).

There were no direct flights available, that I could find, but one of the shorter flights went through Detroit. I wasn’t exactly thrilled about laying over in Detroit, but now that I’ve been there, I must say the Detroit Metro Airport is actually pretty nice. I expected portions of the airport to be on fire and people gathered for warmth around 55-gallon drums with burning debris in them, but it wasn’t like that at all.

I didn’t leave the airport, so I have no idea how the environment outside the airport is, but the environment inside the airport was pretty nice.

I grabbed some lunch at one of the restaurants in the airport and was a little taken back by how ambivalent and disinterested the young lady was that took my order. I mean, I’m used to that to an extent from service people at airports, but this ambivalence was cranked up (or down, as the case may be) a couple notches.

A short flight (35 minutes) from Detroit and I’m in Pittsburgh. It’s a little windy, but there’s a baseball game going on across the river from my hotel.

More to come as my stay here unfolds.

Iodynamics is, for a lack of better words, in a pickle.

A few weeks ago, we finally found our technical salesperson whom we had been searching for since May. We found a gentleman who had substantial experience in technical sales and, while not that knowledgable about open source software and Linux, knew enough about the kinds of I.T. problems companies face in today's world he could sell our products and services after taking some time to become familiar with our edge over traditional (AKA "Microsoft") approaches to problems.

We found out a couple days ago that our new salesman is quitting. Apparently, a company he'd been courting long before we talked to him, offered him an opportunity he couldn't turn away from.

I understand his decision and wish the guy the best, but it really does put us in a pickle.

Up until now, Iodynamics has managed to grow (quite well) without any dedicated sales personnel. Most of our business has come through word-of-mouth and referrals and such business contacts seem to remain loyal.

We decided in order to take our company to "the next level," we would need to start doing serious sales and marketing. Our first step was hiring a salesperson who would work with Chadd, Mike, and Dave (the partners with marketing background) to develop a sales and marketing thrust that would generate more business.

We realized in order to do this, we'd need some capital to fund our marketing efforts and pay a salesperson while they got up to speed and started making commissions. To accomplish this, we set up some business financing.

Once our salesperson was hired, we started dipping into that financing. Now we've got a balance on that debt and nothing to show for it. It's depressing and it kind of sours me on the whole idea of a hiring another sales person.

Iodynamics is currently seeking an outside salesperson and we're in a hurry, so tell your friends, your neighbors, your cellmates... anyone.

You can send this URL to people: <http://www.iodynamics.com/corporate/employment.html> or just send them this job description:

Outside salesperson

Iodynamics, a growing IT and web services company based in the Salt Lake Valley, seeks an outsides sales representative. Join the friendly staff of Iodynamics and earn an excellent salary plus commission.

Responsibilities:

• Sell the firm's products and services, which include IT support services, web design, programming, and server management.
• Prospect and pursue new leads.
• Work with existing clients to find new work and leads.
• Assist the firm in developing and maintaining marketing material and copy.
• Assist in developing the firm's overall sales and marketing strategy.

Perqs:

• Excellent, negotiable base salary (will be based on experience).
• High potential for commissions.
• Insurance benefits (after 90 days with firm).
• Lots of opportunity for success and growth with a relatively new and growing company.

Requirements:

• College degree in business-related field or equivalent experience in IT-related sales and marketing (pre-existing business contacts along Wasatch Front is a plus).
• Strong computer and Internet skills (high degree of proficiency is a plus).
• Familiarity with the products and services of the IT industry (knowledge of Open Source software and/or the Linux operating system is a big plus).
• Business-like, professional appearance and personality.
• Ability to communicate well verbally and in writing.
• Must be able to operate throughout Cache, Weber, Davis, Salt Lake, and Utah counties for 40-hour work weeks.

To apply:

Send resume in text, HTML or PDF format to iojobs-AT-iodynamics-DOT-com.