Just When You Think It’s Over, It’s Really Just Begun

 Work  No Responses »
Jan 022012
 

This is part 4 of a series of blogs about my career change.

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.

Microsoft ASP.NET LogoThe 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.

 Posted by Kevin at 1:52 PM  Tagged with: , , , , ,

GSA, My Work Home for the Past 11 Years

 Work  No Responses »
Dec 312011
 

This is part 2 of a series of blogs about my career change.

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.

 Posted by Kevin at 9:27 PM  Tagged with: , , , , ,
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