It was a great gig, but the working conditions kinda sucked. My desk was more-or-less in a hallway between the operations office and their sales office with the door leading to the elevator behind me. And it wasn't really a desk, it was one of those small reading tables you might find in a library. If I was going to use a reference book or read some of the Blackboard documentation I had to put my keyboard on top of the monitor.
The location was a perfect place to learn about 'The Big Apple'. It was on the 500 block of Broadway, NY which is between Houston (pronounced 'how-ston') and Canal Streets which put me right in the middle SOHO near the neighborhoods of China Town and Little Italy. It is this area of the city where at 5 p.m. the sidewalks are packed shoulder to shoulder with people trying to get to their train or bus so they can go home.
Regardless of the working conditions I had to stick-it-out, I rented a house on Staten Island having made the move from Taylorsville, NC.
At the end of 2000 the "dot.com" bubble was about to burst and NYU decided to take the endeavor in-house, reducing the funding. When they had released half of their sales and operational staff I saw the writing on the wall and went to Monster.com to find another ColdFusion position in New York City.
I had two job offers fairly quickly. ColdFusion programmers who can also do database work (now called "full-stack" developers) were a rare breed back then. It was only a couple of days before I had two interviews both of which turned into job offers.
The first was MarthaStewart.com. This was the time when Martha was at the top of her game and a full three years before she reported for a five-month term in federal prison for lying to federal investigators. They had a large staff working on her web presence, the offices were nice and fully decorated as an homage to Martha with pictures of her and food too pretty to eat.
The other was LAWTRAC.com. Their offices were on the eleventh floor of an office building on Montague Street in Brooklyn. Here I would be the only programmer taking an older application and converting it to a web-based offering.
With both offers being exactly the same dollar wise the choice was easy. I went to work for LAWTRAC where I would be 'the guy' with, more-or-less, a free hand to simply develop.
For the next fourteen years I was 'the guy'. Not only did I do all the application programming, but I designed the database, made the hosting and delivery decisions, added modules and functionality that no one in our industry of matter management software for corporate legal departments had or were even close to having.
I was in Hog's Heaven, working most of the time from my house on Staten Island, then moving to Brooklyn after a stabbing incident (another story) and finally to a neighborhood on Long Island called Carle Place.
I was fully engulfed in ColdFusion and database programming and the world of corporate legal needs and using the programming to meet those needs. I traveled the country doing product demos, working with customers, tradeshows and had speaking engagements on both corporate legal data management and ColdFusion programming techniques.
By 2009 we had hired two additional programmers. One had a focus on creating custom reports for clients and the other's forte was writing the data exchange packages so the legal and financial data could talk to other programs.
Life was great - I was THE big fish in a little pond, making great money and had earned five-percent ownership in the company, a reward for sticking around during the lean times when the company was struggling.
By the time we received our buy-out offer from Mitratech and Vista Equity Partners the software industry had completely recovered from the 'Dot.com' downturn. This recovery period ushered in more structure to the methodologies software companies were using to produce their products. The older method called "Waterfall" turned to piece-meal structure called "Agile". The industry incorporated things called Product Managers who worked with the clients to identify needed changes to continue to meet client needs. The Agile methodology also used positions called Scrum Masters who took the needed changes and broke the requirements down so the changes could be done in a structured, more modular method.
A far cry from what we at Lawtrac were doing. After all, with a programming staff of three we didn't need all that additional overhead because I was doing all the things Product Managers, Project Managers, and Scrum Masters were doing. And we were doing fine, we had clients like Oprah, United Technologies, all the major oil companies, health care equipment providers, Federal Express, even the American Bar Association used our software to track their legal matters.
The American Bar Association, getting them as a client was like getting the contract to provide the candles to the Vatican. To this day I don't understand why the new owners haven't leveraged that to boost their sales.
Mitratech is a 'best practices' company using the Agile method to produce software. So quickly I had to adapt; I took classes on Lynda.com, bought books from Amazon and by February of 2014 I was up to speed and had brought the Lawtrac development and support staff up to speed as well.
I realize now that during the time I was the 'big fish' writing the software I did so in a bubble. My world consisted of writing code, caring for customer needs, speaking at conferences, doing trade shows, generally helping to enrich my meager five-percent ownership. The industry of software production had introduced business processes I was unaware of and the handing-over of Lawtrac source code to Mitratech felt like landing on the moon.
But I had helped to build a software company. I fought the good fight and afterwards walked away with enough money to buy and furnish a house in Austin, TX. I moved there thinking that I would fit in at Mitratech and could continue working on what was more-or-less my baby and help it grow even more.
I eventually had to resign because the person at Mitratech (VP of Product Development) removed me from the role of being a programmer who worked with clients to continue to build a better product had placed me in a role of doing nothing more than support ticket changes and handed the day-to-day programming tasks to complete strangers.
Three years have gone buy, I'm still trying to fit in where I can use the ColdFusion and database programming skills I have to earn a living.
But I'm finding that software companies don't want learned programmers. The conventional hiring practice follows the acronym "HIPLE" which stands for 'High Potential, Low Experience'. Recently I interviewed with a company which does corporate patent and trademark software (which would be right up my ally) called iRunWay and they actually said during the interview that they were concerned how I would fit in with a staff made up of all younger people. Two months ago, I meet with a company called CoStar; I had gone through four interviews before they meet me in person and I guarantee you that the only reason they rejected me was my greying hair. I'm still getting calls from recruiters about that position, CoStar had no other reason to reject me.
Since leaving Mitratech I've worked to bring my skills up-to-date taking courses for my Project Manager Professional certificate and Amazon Web Services Architect certification.
Getting past the young recruiter staff software companies employ too has been a challenge. If I remove much of my work experience and the dates from my resume so my age is not as apparent I get calls, but once they begin to since I'm over thirty those calls go downhill very quickly.
The whole experience reminds me of Shakespeare's St. Crispin's Day Speech, the ending….
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
Of all the start-up companies in Austin, TX you would think that one would like to have a seasoned programmer who would bring a 'been there, done that' attitude. One that has experienced programming pit-falls many on their HIPLE staffs will make.
But I really think Shakespeare was onto something. A recruiter or young hiring manager looks over my resume they experience their own feelings of having missed out on something, like the birth of the Internet and that history that has lead up to what the industry is today.
@TheCoStarGroup
@iRunwayInc
No comments:
Post a Comment