About Me
This log is an attempt to bring myself in the Web 2.0 world. I intend to keep this site professional and educational, although clearly documenting my career.
Professionally and personally speaking not really too much to write home about. I was pretty content working for Sears for most of my youth just selling appliances, but after the K-Mart… I’ll stay positive and just say, it’s wasn’t the job for me any longer.
From there, I decided I needed a real career, I figured anything had to be better than retail. I had heard the Comptia A+ certification was a great way to start in IT, so I studied for that and grabbed a job at the Geek Squad fixing computers (they used to be full service in store). I spent a year there, learned a lot about working on computers and general home networking. I left when they started shipping the computers out for repair and tried to turn us into sales people.
After all that, I went ahead and picked up a help desk job at a Bank. One very strict departmentalized place. They didn’t capitalize on their talent as well as I would have liked, but otherwise good people and a great opportunity to finally see how IT is deployed in a professional enterprise environment via ITIL and MOF. I would certainly work there again, no regrets.
But almost out of no-where I got a phone call and offered an interview for a small but highly profitable division of the Bank. I was offered an opportunity to get a great vantage of how the process of application development and deployment intersects the varying business needs. Pretty awesome stuff really. It wasn’t supposed to be what it became though.
Recently, the guy ahead of me who was training me left for greener pastures, so a lot fell on my shoulders. I’ve had to take 7 applications on at the same time, and they have only been able to afford (both in time and money) to train me on half of one. It’s been a great challenge and hard work (normally plus or minus 45 hours +15 hours of commuting!). I can’t think of a better place to be at this point in my development professionally.
Making changes with Visual Basic, SQL and administrating a number of applications who’s purpose are going above my head.
As far as education, I have never been too much of a fan of the school systems. I got my AA degree and even attended Cal-State Hayward (since renamed Cal-State East Bay) and in the middle of studying outdated technologies I realized it was a bit of a waste of time and I needed to work on my career more, bills were piling up. This was solidified when I found myself studying a book on Assembly programming for the 8086 processor written in 1986. (yes, 86!) I spoke with the instructor there and when he told me, “The computer science department here is a joke, you won’t get a job with any of this” I think I made the right call in leaving and not going back.
I think I made the right call there, go back after I pick up my MCSE and MCTS: SQL Server 2005 certifications, but that’s a year down the road. Bank of the West offers education reimbursement, which is nice. So I am not going to let go of that.
