No one is reading your resume, Jason.

It has been brought to my attention, repeatedly, that no one who knows me or even knows of me has the slightest idea what I do for a living. I think part of this is beginning my career in tech in the Midwest in the nineties which was a small community to say the least. Add to that the number of industries and geographical boundaries I’ve crossed and here we are today. So I figured why not talk through my resume? Why not indeed. Bottom to top, let’s go:

Campbell-Ewald

I started working at C-E in 2004, a little over a year after being fired from the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment where I worked as a systems administrator. That job was notable for a couple reasons: I got the job in the first place because at the interview right there on the spot I was able to debug a PHP issue the person I was replacing struggled with. Which, pretty impressive given the time frame and that it was an actual issue not a set up challenge. I was fired for causing a mail server outage during a weekend hardware upgrade I was performing. The short of that one being I should have informed my manager ahead of time that I had run into an issue but at the end I wound up doing a bare metal rebuild of the IMAP server and Kerberos password authentication system from an AMANDA backup process I had implemented all with my manager literally standing over me for most of the time. Was back up and running before the end of the maintenance window and with minimum interruption to faculty access apart from time spent restoring larger inboxes. Pretty righteous fix for a solo admin I thought. Apparently not so much.

Anyway after that year-plus of unemployment I got dumped by a long-time girlfriend, (this will become a motif) quit smoking, started drinking, (more on this later) worked a short stint at a non-profit and moved from Ann Arbor to downtown Detroit. Then the fun began.

Highlights of my slightly more than four years at C-E included:

• Going back to school to complete my Bachelor’s degree with the original intent of going to law school.
• Being promoted twice.
• Almost being fired twice.
• Hiring and developing a technical team from the ground up including several people who were working their first full-time jobs who have since gone in to successful technical careers.
• Architecting and implementing a large-scale multi-year legacy migration project which began with consolidating existing firm customer applications into a service-based infrastructure culminating with a multimillion dollar modernization of the US Navy recruiting platform. Not so bad if I do say so myself.

Then I got fired. There are blog posts about it. Good times in 2008.

Booz Allen Hamilton

Being unemployed in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis was just as exciting as it sounds. As the universe would have it I wound up meeting up with one of my fraternity brothers during a visit to our nation’s capital for the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States. We got to chatting about network security (because this is the sort of thing I talk about apparently) and he offered to float my resume at his place of employment. Less than a month later I was on a plane to an all day interview after which I was extended an offer to join the wide (not that wide) world of defense contracting, where I would spend the next six years. I spent twenty-four months being processed for my TS/SCI clearance with not one not two but three full scope polygraphs before I was cleared. During that time I kept myself billable by working engagements for NASA and the National Institutes of Health, only one of which expected me to keep the coffee station supplied and ready every morning before I spent the day cleaning out supply closets or climbing under desks to help drill holes for cable. All while wearing a suit I couldn’t really afford. Other highlights:

• Designed, documented and completed a proof of concept on a PXEboot based system for imaging multiple desktop machines hands-free using a blade server with multiple stored images. This stemmed from a task I was asked to do where I had to image machines manually using a floppy disk one at a time. The method I devised cut time spent to a fraction and was scalable based on available network throughout and storage space. I thought it was pretty solid. I don’t think my meticulous documentation was ever given more than a cursory glance.
• Completed my PMP certification after a boot camp I paid for out of pocket. When I got out of the exam I had a voice mail from my manager demanding to know where I was. When I caught up with him and told him I had just passed my PMP and had sent him several emails detailing the time and location of the test prior to I was told that he didn’t check his unclassified email. And that I should take out the trash in the server room. So.
• Completed my CISSP certification. Also paid for out of pocket including airfare to Minneapolis to take the exam since there weren’t any openings locally at the time. Not only did I pass on the first try I passed in four hours for a test that takes about six hours. I was so early I went back and checked all my answers to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. The customer at the engagement I’d gotten the cert for then demanded I be fired from the project for incompetence. I was replaced by the resource Booz had fired when they won the work, who had worked for the customer for years before I arrived. That was cool.
• Once I finally got my badge I went to my leadership, none of whom knew who was actually responsible for me since my clearance had taken so long. Apparently I’d been shuffled back and forth a few times between managers without being informed. By the time they figured it out and had a cleared space engagement for me I had submitted my resignation and was off to greener pastures.

Oracle

Or so I thought. I landed at Oracle right when the person who hired me was quitting, leaving a gap in leadership that meant I was in a similar position to the one I’d left at Booz. By this point I had learned not to wait around for someone to give me guidance so I set about finding out the lay of the land and establishing my role to the best of my ability; no more taking out the trash for this guy. While my badge was being transferred across the river I worked engagements for DoE and FBI. Consulting for Oracle at least from my perspective existed just as an upsell to the hardware business: Buy an Exadata device and get one hundred hours of consulting as a package deal. So all the proposals and pitches I participated in had a hardware element and members of the sales team involved. This was exciting in that I got to expand my business-facing skill set for the first time while putting together “bake off” decks comparing Oracle products to competitors and identifying key technical differentiators apart from price. I got some excellent if challenging work done here particularly for the FBI customer. Highlights:

• Driving to Clarksburg, West Virginia in the middle of the night for an 8a customer meeting. Do not do this.
• Flying to San Francisco for training in Pleasanton, California. Across the Bay from where Oracleworld was happening. Did I actually go to Oracleworld? I did not. The rules said we weren’t supposed to go unless we’d been approved specifically to attend and I’m a rule follower. I was of course the only person who followed this rule.
• Dealing with the most openly cartoonishly racist person I’d personally experienced in the workplace (to that point anyway…). Actual quotes included “Hi Jason! I haven’t seen you in a coon’s age!” and (to an Asian co-worker) “wow your ID picture makes you look like a Chinaman!”
• Learning that some federal consultants care a lot more about billable hours and bonuses than they do about solving a problem for the customer, which in fact they are often incentivized against doing. I have a lot to say about that so let’s put a pin in it.
• My first full experience with DMV office politics. I had experienced it previously at Booz but I didn’t know enough to realize it. Here it was right up where I could smell it.

Long story short I quit while I was ahead. To take a position where I would finally be recognized as a leader and have a full career path ahead of me.

Deloitte

Right until I fucked it all up.

This seems as good a time as any to take a break. Plus this one is probably long enough to be its own post. Yeah. Strong plan.

Catch you in the next one, where we will finish the Deloitte story along with:

• Amazon

• General Motors

• That time I graduated with my MBA to go back to consulting six months before COVID-19

• Today

See you then!