• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6

Wow. I had thought maybe I’d do two posts on this topic and be done.  It’s just a lot harder to sum up 11 years in a few paragraphs.

My last day with GSA was exactly two weeks ago.  It’s been quite a life changing experience, full of ups and downs. The first three days were very hard and not because I don’t like my new job; I love my new job. I discovered that I am the type of person to form habits and become comfortable with a routine. My routine for the past decade was to drive to the Denver Federal Center, go to my office, sit at my computer and work on my projects… Now the office, the computer and the projects aren’t mine anymore. Weird.

Things have steadily improved over the past two weeks I am becoming more and more comfortable with my new position. It’s definitely not routine. Every day I’m looking at new challenges and learning new things. It’s exciting, scary, exhilarating, and stressful all at the same time.

And totally worth it.

To my many friends at GSA, I love you, I miss you, and I’ll see you around. It has been a wonderful 11 years.

This is part 5 of a series of blogs about my career change.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6

Things at work were going great.  I had learned a lot about ASP and our team was being approached for help by others in the organization more and more.

Now one thing I had always wanted to do but never really had the opportunity was to travel. Working for GSA provided a lot of opportunity for travel.  My first trip was to Washington D.C. to participate in discussions regarding a national Web site (www.gsa.gov). I was only there a couple of days but I stayed in a very nice hotel and had plenty of time to see quite a few tourist attractions. The picture to the right has always been one of my favorites; my reflection on the Vietnam Memorial.

After Washington D.C., I was sent on a trip to Virginia, after that it was Kansas City, followed by Chicago and Atlanta. The purpose of these work trips varied. Some were for training, others were for meetings. One thing was always the same, I enjoyed being in a new place and having the opportunity to work with new people.

Finally, in 2004, I worked on a project that would take me to some very special places.

The year before, I had worked with Jess (marketing specialist) and Ann Marie (realty specialist) on a survey management application. We built this application from the ground up using Lotus Notes. The application worked very well, but we thought the functionality could be improved by switching to a different technology (yeah, ASP). GSA at the time was running a program where individuals within the organization could pitch different solutions to organizational challenges. We thought our survey management tool (known as the Customer Satisfaction Survey Tool or CSST) would be a great candidate.  We put together a proposal and submitted our idea.

The committee loved our idea and asked us to meet with them in New Orleans to do a formal presentation. We flew to New Orleans and did a couple of presentations over a few days.  The trip was a big success, but mostly, I remember the fun we had there.  The committee approved our proposal with one caveat.  We had to partner with two other regions and help them improve their survey scores using our application. No problem. It meant even more travel as we partnered with an office in Seattle and an office in New York City.

Over the next six months, I made a few trips to New York City to work with their Oracle Administrator on the database portion of the application.  The work days were long, but I still made plenty of time to visit Times Square, the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center and a lot more. Even today, I still have thoughts of selling my house and car and moving to New York. Fortunately, the astronomical cost of living there prevents such thoughts from becoming reality.

By this time, I had worked at GSA for about two years. Lotus Notes was the web development platform of choice not because it was good, it was just what GSA had. After the first year, I had grown weary of the terrible data structure, poor HTML generation, and really the whole program just made me want to quit. My constituents at GSA who developed using Lotus Notes enjoyed the program for reasons I still cannot completely fathom.  The best way I can summarize it would be that Lotus Notes made simple tasks easy, but it also made complicated ones virtually impossible. Which was lucky for me as we had some complicated projects coming our way.

I was approached with the concept of an employee recognition program that would operate like Amazon.com.  Users would have a set number of points that they could award to their co-workers for various reasons as a means to provide peer-to-peer thanks and recognition.  Users could then redeem points they had received for real merchandise, and a lot of the products were really nice! From day one, they wanted this to be managed via a website and the question “can we use Lotus Notes” came up. Now, my desire to move to a different technology was very well known. You might say my bias had undermined my opinion on the subject but I was adamant that developing a transactional application with Lotus Notes was a terrible idea. Fortunately, the other Lotus Notes developers agreed with me and said trying to develop this system with Lotus Notes would be difficult. I wasted no time in pitching my idea; I would become an Active Server Page (ASP) programmer and build this web site on the Microsoft development platform. It didn’t take much convincing before I found myself in a one week course on ASP. The class took place in an old, rundown hotel but I didn’t mind. I was reinvigorated by the prospect of becoming a “real” web developer.

The class was mediocre and the instructor was not an expert, but he knew enough to answer all the basic questions. During that week, I spent eight hours in class, grabbed something to eat on my way home, and went over my lessons from the day for the remainder of the evening.  I lived, ate and breathed ASP that week and enjoyed every minute of it. I couldn’t get enough. I thought Web design was the career path for me, but programming with ASP had usurped it. Even after the class ended, I continued to work a full day and follow it up with another six to eight hours of study in the evening. I even began teaching myself how to construct databases to interact with my ASP applications.  It was all coming together.

The biggest factor to my success as a programmer came from my job at GSA. They could have easily let me go and hired a programmer with all the knowledge and expertise necessary to begin working on this employee recognition project right from the beginning.  Instead, my boss at the time Sally, decided it was worth the wait to invest in me and give me the time and training it took to become a proficient programmer. I don’t think I let her down. The employee recognition program, renamed the “Peer Awards Store,” was a massive success when it opened a few months later. I had never been prouder of any website I had built before this one.

I was definitely ready to abandon Lotus Notes for good and I sought to do just that. Every new project was pitched with the use of ASP. Lotus Notes rarely came up. After the Peer Award Store came a project management tool we named TRAX. It shared many similarities to modern day SharePoint, but it was streamlined to work how we worked. Yet another exciting project that made all thoughts of leaving GSA disappear. And bigger opportunities were coming shortly.

This is part 3 of a series of blogs about my career change.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6

So my first week at GSA had passed. The following week, Sally was back in the office and we began developing a strategy moving forward. It included learning a lot of new software.

As I stated in my previous post, the software situation at GSA was abysmal. While other companies were doing cool things with Java, ASP, PHP, and ColdFusion (different development technologies for the creation of Web sites) GSA was using Lotus Domino for it’s regional application development. Strictly put, Lotus was a dying breed and had been for quite some time. The vast majority of companies would never even consider it as a viable option, let alone actually use it.  Contrarily, GSA had fully embraced Lotus and their family of products years ago and continued to use it to develop new projects and applications. Lotus was a complete suite of (bad) software.  We used it for email, databases, instant messaging, online meetings, and to my chagrin, web site development.

Lotus Notes was awful for a number of reasons. It never fully supported the latest HTML standards (to this day, it still renders HTML worse than IE 6 ever did). The menus were clunky, unintuitive and chock full of icons that had no easily discernible meaning. While attempting something as simple as typing an email, commands like Cut, Copy, and Paste exhibited odd behavior or at times just wouldn’t work. The Undo command rarely worked and often deleting text was an irreversible task that destroyed many well written messages. The user interface was downright ugly. Clearly put together by engineers rather than designers, Lotus Notes was full of menus with functionality tucked away in no discernible order. If I want to change my background color, do I go under User Tools, Database Properties, Program Tools, Settings or Options? It made absolutely no sense.

Now, I was a pretty good web designer if I do say so myself. I had worked with Dreamweaver and Photoshop and I was an expert at HTML. But I knew nothing about creating Web sites with Lotus Notes and you may be asking yourself why GSA would hire me. The short answer was, because nobody knew Lotus Notes. So I was sent to a two week crash course in Lotus Notes followed by a one week professional level class on developing and designing for Lotus Notes a couple of weeks later. The classes were conducted at a training center in downtown Denver and I thoroughly enjoyed them.  I was never sold on the so called benefits of Lotus Notes, but there’s no doubt that learning this platform opened the door to programming rather than just design. However, I am convinced the only Lotus Notes jobs out there are training people to use Lotus Notes. It’s evil, stay away.

Over the next two years, I used Lotus Notes extensively. In the process, I got to know three people who provided plenty of professional guidance and became close friends of mine. It was Nicole, Staci and Dean who first altered my thinking from “I gotta get out of here” to “this isn’t so bad, and there are some really cool people here.”

Nicole, Dean and Staci were also contractors, working in a different department in the same building.  Nicole and Dean were Lotus Notes developers and Staci did system support and some Lotus Notes work as well.  Nicole in particular, spent a lot of time tutoring me in the practice of Lotus Notes development. I can’t say I ever really warmed up to working in Lotus Notes, but I really enjoyed spending time with Nicole. She was a patient teacher with a quiet demeanor and a personality both genuine and caring. Nicole and I became good friends and she regularly invited me to join Dean, Staci, and her, for happy hour.

Over the course of the first couple of years, I worked extensively on our regional Internet site (defunct circa 2004), and built a brand new regional intranet (internal only) site. Both sites were developed in Lotus Notes and both had some interesting but relatively basic functionality built into them. I enjoyed the projects I worked on, but the Lotus Notes platform irritated me more and more. Either the technology we used had to change or I was going to start looking for something else.  In early 2002, a change began that would alter my thinking for years to come.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6

I feel it is necessary to establish my employment situation at the General Services Administration (GSA) both to be clear and for legal reasons.  I was never a Federal employee.  I started doing contract work at GSA as a full-time employee of the Greenbar Corporation. This wasn’t your stereotypical contract job. First of all, the job was for an indefinite period of time and many contractors work in the  same position for many, many years as was the case for me. While contractors work side by side with Federal employees on Federal projects and in Federal space it is important to note that contractors are explicitly instructed to never allow themselves to be mistaken for a Federal employee (hence, the legal part).  It makes for an interesting workplace dynamic for sure when a good portion of the staff are identifying themselves in the following manner: “I’m a contractor for so and so company, my name is so and so and my job is what not.”

Admittedly, I took this job out of necessity rather than desire. I had no intention of working for the government, especially as a contractor. But, I figured the pay was good and it would give me time to look for my “real job.”

So my first day was Monday, October 30th, 2000- the day before Halloween. I remember meeting my Program Manager from Greenbar, Willie, in the lobby of the office building I would be working in.  He led me upstairs and into a small office where I met Sally, the Team Lead for the GSA department I would be working for. Willie said a few more words and departed soon after.  Sally then gave me a tour of the enormous office building I would be working in. The building housed over 300 employees working in an ocean of cubicles. We stopped by office after office working our way through the maze of space so I could meet droves of people. Attempting to remember names was futile. By noon, I was thoroughly lost and afraid to go to the restroom for fear I would never find my way back.  Eventually I was led to my workstation and right away, I was impressed.  Keep in mind this was the year 2000. The technology at my disposal was astonishing; my computer had not one but two monitors and triple the amount of memory of my home computer.  I certainly had the hardware necessary to get the job done. The software situation was not so bright, but I’ll provide details about this later.

At the end of the day, Sally informed me that she would be out of town the rest of the week and that I should contact our co-worker Dana (not her real name) when I arrived at the office the next day.  Tuesday arrived and I reported to work at 8 a.m.  I was lost.  I couldn’t find my desk or Dana’s desk and I must have wandered the building looking for something familiar for at least 15 minutes.  Finally someone took notice of my confused state and offered to help.  We located Dana’s office but she wasn’t there. Great, now what?

I finally found my desk and called Dana from my desk phone. She didn’t answer.  After leaving a message, I did the only thing I could think of.  I sat at my desk and surfed the Internet…all day, as Dana never arrived and never called me back.

Wednesday morning, Dana stopped by my desk around 10:30 and apologized that she had been out sick the day before. Dana didn’t have a technical background and didn’t really have anything for me to do.  I spent the rest of my first week surfing the Internet and trying to figure out where everything was in the office.

Yep, I was certain I wouldn’t be working here long.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6

I accepted a new employment opportunity yesterday. Yeah, that’s big.  After 11 years at my current position, I am moving on. My last day will be January 10, 2012. It seems appropriate at this time to start a new blog and detail my career “coming-of-age” story.

I arrived in Denver about 2 a.m. on an unseasonably snowy, October morning in 2000. I was 21 and on top of the world having lined up my dream job and a place to stay with friends in a city I just knew I would love. I had a week to kill before my first day on the job and I made the best of it. I must have spent $1000 on cover charges, drinks, dining out and adding a new CD player to my car. Life was good, no, life was great! And I just knew it could only get better. As soon as I started my new job, I could get my own apartment and things would be perfect.

The start date arrived and I made the drive to my new place of employment. It was a company called Tanning Technology and they were located in the Denver Tech Center.  Ah, the Tech Center…that’s where techies like me belong. It was perfect. I walked through the front door of the office building and met the HR Manager, Kurt Peterson, in the lobby.  We proceeded to their office on the 15th floor. I expected to meet a few people on my way in and I remember how odd it felt when we detoured to a little conference room just outside their main office. Once inside, Kurt motioned to me to take a seat at the table. As he sat down across from me, he released a long, loud sigh. Uh oh. I don’t think Kurt paused again after that sigh, he just started speaking and didn’t stop until it was over.  “We’re very sorry and extremely embarrassed. Management has instituted a hiring freeze and announced that they will be laying off a portion of our staff. I deeply regret I could not inform you of this earlier but at this time, we cannot hire you.”

I was crushed. This was supposed to be the pinnacle of my new career path. Move to Denver, get a job, be a success.

I did the only thing I could think to do and thanked Kurt for his time (yeah really, thanks) and left. I never heard from Tanning Technology again but I did hear they were purchased under hostile circumstances and the company ceased to exist shortly after. I spent that evening drinking beer and watching TV and wondering what in the world I was going to do.

After a sleepless night, the next morning I decided to take a drive through the mountains to clear my head. I walked up to my Ford Probe and noticed the trunk was open an inch or two. I did think this was odd, but having just moved here, I had made several trips to my vehicle to grab various belongings and could have easily forgotten to close it at some point. I closed the trunk, walked around to the driver side door, unlocked it, and sat down in the seat. It was at this moment I realized the dashboard had been ripped apart. My new CD player was gone. The thief had been merciless. The dashboard had been torn into three pieces and the wires were sliced clean through to facilitate a speedy exit. I walked back into the apartment and watched television the rest of the day.

The next morning, I vowed to make an ambitious effort to find a job.  I set a goal of five phone calls and line up at least one interview. I ended up making one phone call and leaving a message. Failure.

Over the next two weeks, I managed a few phone interviews and finally landed an in-person interview.  It was a contract position, working for the Federal government. Yuck. It was at the Denver Federal Center in Lakewood; nowhere near the Denver Tech Center. Double yuck. After the interview, I left with the impression the job would be boring and not at all challenging.  It had the yuck trifecta. The next day, I got a call from the hiring manager, Willie. He informed me that they would like to offer me the job. I had lined up another interview in the meantime and decided this position was not for me. I politely turned it down. An hour later, Willie called me back and said he could sweeten the deal with an extra two dollars an hour. This equaled almost double the salary from my last job but I was unwavering, resolute in the conclusion that this was clearly not the job for me. Willie explained that they could not hold the position for me but if I should change my mind, I should give him a call.

The next day, I dressed for my next interview.  It was in an office building downtown and just had to be perfect!  I pulled into a parking space nearby and paid the $7 parking fee. They better cover parking, I thought to myself. I proceeded to the third floor of a beautiful, old office building. The lobby, hallways and stairwells were timeless and well cared for and I could already see myself working there. This was it!  I found their office and proceeded inside.

Upon opening the door, I froze at the sight of a room with floors so dusty you could see the footprints of recent visitors. The room was completely empty except for a cheap, green card table with a computer on it connected to  a bright orange extension cord strung 20 feet across the floor. Behind the computer was a middle-aged gentleman seated on a folding chair. I no longer recall his name, so we’ll call him “Doug.”. I thought I was in the wrong room until Doug said “you must be Kevin” in a booming voice that echoed through the empty room. I responded affirmatively and the interview commenced. The experience lasted all of ten minutes. After asking a few questions, Doug informed me that he wasn’t hiring, but he liked my resume and wanted to know if he could give me a call in the future if something ever came up. I said “sure,” fully intending to never speak to Doug again.  I quickly left.

As soon as I got back to my car, I called Willie and asked if the position was still available. He said it was and asked if I had had a change of heart. I diplomatically stated “having given this some additional thought, it does sound like the opportunity I’m looking for.” I had a job.

I started my career at the General Services Administration on Monday, October 30, 2000 as a full-time employee of the Greenbar Corporation. I’ll stop here for now and continue this story in my next post.