My career

On Friday, I posted about all of the odd jobs I’ve had. Today, I’m going to post about my “career.”

After finding out that I really liked software more than hardware, pretty much the only good thing that ever came out of working for TransEra, I enrolled in school full-time at Utah Valley State College. My wife worked way more than full-time to support us and I scheduled classes in the evenings so that my wife could be home with our son. I stayed home during the day as “Mr. Mom.” Once I had most of a programming class under my belt, I applied for my first programming job. Here’s the rest of my career:

• InsurQuote – I was hired as a “quote routine programmer.” InsurQuote software was used by independent insurance agents to be able to enter rating information once and then be able to compare different companies’ rates. I wrote routines in a mangled version of Pascal to generate the rates based on information in insurance company rating manuals. Despite management being a bunch of pointy-haired bosses, it was a great springboard for my career and I worked with a lot of really cool people that are friends to this day. This was the first job I ever had with benefits like paid vacation and health insurance.
• Utah Valley State College – While attending college, I started teaching lower-level programming classes. It was nice because I could have a credit of tuition waived for every credit I taught. I love teaching and would teach full-time if I could make any real money doing it. I taught a class a semester until a year or so after I graduated from UVSC with my BS in Computer Science and Information Systems.
• Independent Contractor for Utah DCFS – A friend at UVSC lured me away from InsurQuote because his father-in-law was contracting with the Utah Department of Child and Family Services to work on the database that contained details about all of the allegations of child abuse. Originally, I was supposed to be able to work from home, which would be perfect for a part-time college student that needed to work full-time. It turned into a 5-day-a-week commute to downtown Salt Lake during the “luge” days of the I-15 reconstruction prior to the 2002 Winter Olympics. The first snowy day, I went crawling back to InsurQuote to see if they had any open positions. I HATED that commute.
• InsurQuote – They took me back and I worked on a couple of different teams, eventually interviewing for and accepting an offer on the coveted “Research and Development” team. At least, that’s what I thought. Due to some very poor communication, I wasn’t told that the R&D team couldn’t afford to pay me what I was already making, so I left the old team, set up with the new team, and then a few days later, when the mistake came to light, I ended up back on my old team. Angry and disgruntled, I started interviewing at other companies right away.
• Dentrix Dental Systems – I was hired to work on a product called “EasyDental,” which was a cheaper, watered-down version of their main product. I basically ported changes from one code base to another. I didn’t really feel creative, so I asked if I could transfer to another team. Due to some strange HR policies, I couldn’t transfer until I had been in my current position for a year. I ended up transferring to another job at a different company.
• Campus Pipeline – A friend from InsurQuote recruited me to come to Campus Pipeline. This was an incredibly fun company to work for. They had a miniature golf course all over the office, they had video games, ping pong, and Foosball in the break room. If you stayed after 5pm, they brought in dinner. It was a high energy start-up company that was a lot of fun. They also gave me stock options and really hyped that. I was commuting to downtown Salt Lake again though, which stunk. Fortunately, they opened an office in Orem a few months later. Unfortunately, my friend left to go to another company not long after the Orem office opened.
• PageLaunch.com – The same friend that recruited me to work at Campus Pipeline recruited me again to come work with him at PageLaunch.com. This was also an incredibly fun place to work, but for completely different reasons. We used free software (LAMP-Linux, Apache, MySql, and Php) to create a lot of software in a very short time. It was great until decisions based much more on emotion than on business sense caused the people I most enjoyed working with to no longer be employed. When I found other work and left the company a couple of weeks later, the company went under because nobody that had created any of the code or understood how it worked was left to continue.
• NACT Telecommunications – When I left PageLaunch, I had two different offers from two different companies. I accepted the offer from NACT over the other offer because I was sick of the .com boom/bust, and wanted some stability. NACT had been in business for 10 years and profitable for more than 7 of those years. Yet only a few weeks after I started working there, my boss started telling us that our next release (which was still vaporware) needed to be out in a few months or the company would let us all go and buy software that already existed. This made me nervous enough to again, look for work. This was during my FINAL semester at Utah Valley State College, so I could start qualifying for some better jobs that required a 4-year degree.
• Symantec Corp/Altiris/Symantec Corp – I worked on a team that supported a security contract for the Navy/Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI). We were a team that was distributed all over the country, and had quarterly team meetings in fun places like Key West. Five years later, Symantec closed my office, so I found another job at Altiris that was then purchased by Symantec a few months later. Symantec, with its stock options, Employee Stock Purchase Plan, and stellar benefits package was very very good to us.
• Utah Valley State College/Utah Valley University – While at Symantec, I started teaching Developmental Math classes and really loved it. I missed teaching, and I still wish I could make a decent living at it. I’m still teaching there today.
• LDS Church – A friend recruited me to work at the LDS Church. I loved working for the LDS Church. I mostly worked on an application for people to apply for roles in movies produced at LDS Motion Picture Studios in Provo. I was a contractor though, not a full-time church employee. Due to some mix-ups with my contract renewal, I started to feel some job instability.
• Ancestry.com – This is where I work today! I interviewed here when my contract renewal was still uncertain and they made me an offer that I couldn’t refuse! I work for the team that develops and maintains pretty much everything under the “Search” tab on ancestry.com.

And that’s it. I’ve worked at a lot of jobs. I job hopped for a while, but it’s been a good career so far and I still really love what I do.