kinda like batman, but with a wife and 3 kids

I got asked, via e-mail, today how I went from a retail pharmacy store manager to systems architect and it was such a good brain dumping that I figured I’d blog it too. =:) Here, then, is a brief overview of how I got from .A->.B.

• met the woman I knew I wanted to marry at Taco Bell. realized I couldn’t support a family on Taco Bell wages, so started looking for work elsewhere as I was still trying to finish college.
• started working at a tiny little Thrifty Jr. in Rancho Bernardo, California with my amazing friend Brad Prosek, stocking shelves and scooping ice cream.
• went into shift manager training for Thrifty in Ocean Beach, CA.
• got promoted to second assistant manager.
• got married shortly thereafter, still trying to finish college to be a Math teacher.
• somewhere around here (1994-ish?), I bought my first real home PC (non-Apple) and started getting involved in Open Source.
• accidentally got promoted to first assistant manager.
• had to drop out of college. was told I could either work or go to school, but not both.
• worked for a couple more years as first assistant manager.
• went back to college, trying to finish up last year+ of school.
• accidentally got promoted to store manager.
• had to drop classes in the middle of a semester.
• immediately started asking around if Thrifty/Payless/Rite Aid had entry level computer programmers. took a Wolfe test at Rite Aid and apparently did so well they offered me a position right there and then. had to finish working the rest of the year as store manager in Ramona, CA, to get the store through the Christmas season.
• packed family (wife and 3 very young kiddos) into a (really small) Toyota Tercel and drove for 4 days from sunny San Diego to Harrisburg, PA, in the dead of winter.
• went into Rite Aid’s ELSE (Entry Level Systems Engineer) program. spent 3 months learning COBOL, JCL, DB2, CICS, and other really antiquated technologies.
• graduated out of the Rite Aid ELSE program into the emerging technologies group which was working on a next generation pharmacy dispensing system that, although it was and still is used by Drugstore.com, never went into our stores. had to hit the ground running and pick up systems and languages that I’d never been trained on (visual basic *spit*, PL/SQL, Oracle, C *love*, etc.).
• our group transitioned and took over as the Internet team. I designed and implemented the fault-tolerant Linux cluster that powered the new riteaid.com site and led our team to rewrite the whole site from ASP to PHP. we had 0 downtime and this solution served Rite Aid for 5+ years until they decided to rewrite it in JSP.
• our group transitioned again and started working on the Next Generation pharmacy dispensing system for Rite Aid. this time, we found the right mix of resources, training, company backing, good management vision and strategy, etc., and we landed a hit. I became the expert in Java in our team and also came up to speed on UML and RUP and worked with a couple of other folk to lay down the foundational Java code and system design for the first year or so.
• management wanted everything and yesterday, so they outsourced the coding and pushed me, unwillingly, into a systems architect position. I reviewed every bit of Java code that went into the system, approved every new/change design and mentored the onslaught of new people coming in. I also helped to code, rafactor, performance test, improve, and provide oversight to the entire Java codebase. I was the expert Swing GUI guy, which as it turns out is a pretty rare skill-set.
• we deployed NexGen out to the chain and thanks to the intense focus on getting the requirements, design, performance tuning, and coding done the right way, we had tremendous success.
• a year or so went by and my team began dropping like flies. my manager that I loved working with and for left for better pastures. my best friends left the company. I was continually pushed away from what I loved to do (code and develop) and into the roles that I hated (managerial/oversight/planning/meetings, meetings, meetings/etc.). management was making increasingly stupid and irrational decisions and I was ignored. so I jumped ship. everyone else on my team that hadn’t already left jumped very shortly thereafter.
• I landed at CVS in Rhode Island. what actually won me over was a couple of conversations I had with some higher-ups at CVS that showed me their focus on Linux throughout the chain.
• turns out that I ended up getting sucked into CVS’s next generation pharmacy system, although at a much worse level than I was at Rite Aid… no designing, no coding, no implementing, lots of meetings, lots of unrealistic demands and schedules, lots of insanity. I started feeling very stupid and foolish and started praying that God would provide me with a job where I could work on what I loved: writing code and specifically for the Linux desktop.
• out of the blue, a recruiter calls me from VMware (Hi Antonio!! =:)), and I totally fell in love with the company. I’ve been a VMware workstation user since Workstation 3. I relied on it because I absolutely refused to run Windows on my corporate desktops/laptops, much to the aggravation, irritation, strife, conflict, and chagrin of my managers and directors.
• and now I get to do what I truly love: write code for the Linux desktop, on the Linux desktop.
• the end… well… that’s where I am now anyway…

Note: this is not an attack on Rite Aid or Taco Bell or CVS or outsourcing. I’m sure everyone out there has a similar story if you’ve had any job whatsoever, much less a career in IT.

Well, anyway, there’s my brain dump for the morning. I’m sure that was far more information than you’d have willingly asked for, had you a choice… =;)

12 Responses

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1. 

   Jos

   Great dump! It sure beats ‘sort ~/.bash_history|cut -f 1 -d ‘ ‘|uniq -c|sort -nr|head’.
   Such personal IT stories are very recognizable indeed.

   Monday June 23, 2008 at 3:27 pm
2. 

   maninalift

   Are you allowed to say you love C now you are one C++ congregon?

   ps “congregon” is my word and I’m sticking by it.

   Monday June 23, 2008 at 5:06 pm
3. 

   anonymous

   Great story to read!

   Greetings from someone starting his career

   Monday June 23, 2008 at 6:01 pm
4. 

   Jonmonji

   Hey! That rant …er… dump looks very familiar. Perhaps I saw that in an email today.

   ::takes a bow::

   Monday June 23, 2008 at 6:18 pm
5. 

   Nate H.

   Thanks for sharing. I was pleasantly surprised to see you were in Ocean Beach for a time. I grew up there, and certainly lived there in the ’90s. I imagine you’ve said “Have a nice day” to me once or twice at Rite Aid, although I don’t recall you from the picture on your site.

   Maybe some day you’ll be able to retire back to OB.

   Monday June 23, 2008 at 10:46 pm
6. 

   Linda

   Thank you for all that you do for our family. You forgot to tell everyone how you used to work 12 to 15 hours a day and all the sacrifices you made. Thank you for always trying to make things better for us.

   Monday June 23, 2008 at 11:15 pm
7. 

   Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper

   @Jonmonji: LOL!! That was you? =:) Hah. That is TOO funny!! =:)

   @maninalift: I loved C at the time. Now, I’m totally lovin’ C++. =;)

   @Nate H.: Hey!! =:) Let’s see… I was working at the Ocean Beach Thrifty (which used to be a grocery story, iirc), which became Thrifty/Payless, which became a Rite Aid store. I think I was there from 1992 to 1996-ish? I almost always worked the night shift at the time, and was tall, blonde, and my hair had a noticeable swoop/wave to it. =:) If you were there during those years, I most probably scooped you some ice cream. =:)

   @Linda: Thank you for commenting, sweetie. I love you. =:)

   Tuesday June 24, 2008 at 12:51 am
8. 

   Jonmonji

   Hey…I sent off a SYSM to your pals Tony and Val. Tony wanted to know if you are still with VMWare.

   Later!

   Thursday June 26, 2008 at 9:07 am
9. 

   Shawn

   heh. Aw– those were the days. I’ve always felt privileged to walk with you during some of those days. Hopefully, I wasn’t the catalyst for chaos…although, I do seem to be quite skilled at such things.

   I must say, however, you seem to be missing some important developmental and life shaping details of your journey. Being the guy that I am, I’m happy to point them out:

   1. Being schooled in b-ball over lunch, in 90 degree heat.
   2. Being chased off previously mentioned b-ball courts by the good officers of the law. (You were simply too skilled)
   3. Eating Bigg’s donuts while he was off having meetings and such.
   4. Hunting any available food, not guarded, and left sitting in cube-land.
   5. Taking over said favorite manager’s computer and reseting his home page to butts.com.
   6. Watching Matrix in boycott of certain corporate policies.
   7. Being scared by Jeff’s driving on the streets of San Fran at the Borland Conference.
   8. Creating important classes throughout the application called pants and shorts.
   9. Frequent visits to Mikey’s cube for entertainment and restored sanity.
   10. Shooting down that remote control blimp Jim “whats-his-name” used to fly over our designated cube airspace.
   11. Box-head, and his incredible contribution to our team, personal mentoring, and your shanny-town cube with door and window.

   …and the list goes on…

   always been an honor…and I’ve never since laughed quite as much…

   Thursday June 26, 2008 at 12:02 pm
10. 

    Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper

    @Jonmonji: Awesome! =:) Yeah, I just sent Tony an e-mail the other day. I’m definitely still working for VMware and _LOVING_ it! =:)

    Thursday June 26, 2008 at 1:21 pm
11. 

    Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper

    @Shawn: Heya dudely!! =:) You weren’t the catalyst for chaos, but you did fall neatly into the “my best friends left” bucket. =;) A few points of clarification, however:

    1) I seem to remember being beaten up, not necessarily schooled. One broken finger and a sprained ankle is a small price to pay for the fun we had, but I think that’s different than “schooling”, persay. And I distinctly remember it being 100+ on the tarmac. =;P And I also definitely remember my awesome sky hook of death. =:D (… which went together nicely with Biggsey’s elbow of death…)
    2) Yes, sadly, I was nearly arrested for playing basketball along with Mikey, Brian, and Tim. You were “conveniently” absent that day. =;P
    4) YES! Hunter/gatherer!! =:) lol
    5) Oooh yes!! I totally forgot that! Not only that, but setting up an “at” job on his windows computer that kicked off “Disco Inferno” at random intervals throughout the week that I went on vacation!!! Muahahah!!! =:)
    6) Yep. Totally remember that. Poor Deron. =:(
    7) I’m still trying to block that out. When I went on a trolley ride in San Francisco, I think I spotted the echoes of my long-ago screams of terror. =;) http://flickr.com/photos/vr/19259182/in/set-452425/
    9) Not to mention viciously air-attacking him with my green M&M lady!!
    10) LOL. You were the captain on that mission, sir. I was only the stealthy spy. =;)
    11) Yeah, totally!! I still have Jeff’s and my first shanty-town pics somewhere… Ahh: http://flickr.com/photos/vr/sets/452530/ Hah! Man, those were fun days!! =:)

    I’ll add a couple more:

    12) Sticking 30 desktop/server class machines in the office next to Doug’s office which happened to also have the thermostat for that entire row of offices. If I recall correctly, Doug froze his butt off and convinced Bob to climb through his ceiling panel into the conference room on the other side (wrong room) and we came in the next day and asked why he had shoe marks and footprints at the top of his ceiling. LOVED IT!

    13) “Appropriating” a webcam, sticking it in a binder to disguise it, and aiming it at Doug’s office window. I think the original idea was to be the “Boss cam” and alert us to his many moods and presence, but shortly thereafter we used it to watch his facial expressions when we VNC’d into his computer and kept changing his home page to butts.com. BWAHA!

    14) Our masterful stress-release strategy of shooting rubber bands at the overhead florescent lights. The first goal was to get them stuck up there and then the next goal was to get them down. =:)

    Man, I miss those days! =:) I’ve never laughed as much in my entire life during our years together at Ye Olde Rite Aid. I think it’s quite a testimony to our mad hacking skillz that we actually got so much seriously high quality work done there. =:) I miss ya, bro. =:)

    Thursday June 26, 2008 at 1:41 pm

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1. B T » Blog Archive » From Point A to Point B?

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