Changing Careers from Clergy to Computers

In mid-1998 when I decided to change careers and get into IT, I had a very specific goal: I wanted to be a Unix administrator. You can read about the reasons back in the first installment of this series, so I won't bore you by repeating them.

For much of 1999 I worked in a support job using primarily Unix, but it wasn't administration. It was close enough to keep me satisfied for a while...but as time went on I started getting the itch to keep looking for a Unix admin job.

In 1999 a number of headhunters were trying to find me Unix administration jobs, but without success. One headhunter got me an interview at the company then known as SGI, but I wasn't hired. She passed my resume to another recruiter, who then passed it on to another friend. Late in 1999 that recruiter called me with a lead on a Unix administration job at a company called Control Data and asked if I'd ever heard of it. Of course I'd heard of it: I was working in the same building!

I didn't have far to go for the interview: I drove from the south parking lot to the east lot. I could actually have walked down the hall, but wanted to keep up appearances. (Ironically, during my 8 months at Guidant I'd occasionally upgraded from business casual to business casual + tie, but no one ever said a word. On the day of my Control Data interview, though, a coworker stopped and jokingly said, "So where's your interview today?")

Although I was interviewing in the same building, just down the hall, going to Control Data was like walking into a different world. I suppose it was. Guidant was (relatively) new, shiny, corporate. Control Data was an older company, its part of the building felt older and worn (though Control Data had originally built it), and it felt a lot more relaxed and comfortable. I liked it, and that was even before meeting the first of the interviewing managers.

The first manager I met was in his 60s and had been in IT forever. We had a nice discussion about the joys of Unix, and then he passed me off to his technical manager. That manager was in his 40s or 50s and looked like your stereotypical Unix guru: long hair, beard, glasses, random circuit boards and drives on his wall. After another nice chat he showed me around, asked me some questions, and I was out the door.

On the way home, I realized that this was the job I'd wanted: a Unix admin job in an old-time computer company. I told the headhunter that this was the job I really wanted, but I didn't expect a job offer: it seemed too good to be true.

Well, I was wrong: a week later the recruiter called to tell me that I'd been offered the job.

I worked at Control Data for 6 years. It was the best job I've ever had. Why?

• I reached my career goal... Fifteen months after resigning from my last congregation and setting out to become a Unix administrator, that's exactly what I became: a Solaris and Linux administrator in an infrastructure group. We kept the systems running. We kept the rest of the company in business.
• ...at a company with some real history... These days everyone knows the big names of IBM and Microsoft and Intel, but in the glory days of mainframes Control Data was one of the big dogs. Founded in Minnesota, Control Data built the Cyber line of mainframes, some of which were used in education, some by the US government (and might have been used on nuclear submarines--I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you), some for complex design (the 747 and the Dodge ... were designed on the Cyber up on the second floor) and spun off other outfits like Cray Supercomputers (Seymour Cray worked just down the hall from me...25 years earlier). Unfortunately time and management decisions hadn't been kind to Control Data, and the mainframe days were long past. When I worked there we managed systems and handled high-volume email customers. It was like working in a huge monastery whose time had passed but which was still full of history...because it was.
• ...with great top-notch coworkers. Although I had some great coworkers...well, really at every job, I really had a lot in common with my coworkers at Control Data. We loved working with Unix. We all felt like we were getting paid to do our hobby. We had a lot of fun. Coworkers at Guidant spent their time discussing their boats and cabins and stocks; coworkers at Control Data spent time discussing programming and operating systems and our collections of vintage computer hardware. We really liked what we did. Some coworkers had been working at Control Data since the early days, had seen much of its history and had interesting stories to tell. Some of them were young and loved doing cool things with the tools we had available. We didn't have huge budgets: we had to do our best with older hardware and free software, and we made it work. Great days.

I began working at Control Data in November 1999, just before Thanksgiving. My first assignment was to build my own computer. Shortly afterward my manager decided to test my Perl skills by assigning me the task of writing a tool to check user password expiration dates and email notices of impending expirations. I worked with the backup guru for a few weeks, learning Netbackup and juggling tapes, writing more tools for automating jobs. Then I worked with the reports guru for a while and learned the reporting system. Pretty soon I found myself doing exactly the type of work I wanted to do: writing tools to automate repetitive processes.

After a year or so I got a big job: to write a web-based interface between our system monitoring tools and our customer service database. When system alarms arose, rather than manually looking up data and entering it into trouble tickets by hand, the new system would automate the drudge work and allow creation of new cases with just a few mouse clicks. It took some work to get everything to play together, but we rolled out the new system in March 2001 and saw almost zero downtime over the next 5 years.

After that my work shifted primarily into the realm of tools, reports and automation. It was exactly the type of work I wanted to do. Over the next 5 years I had plenty of opportunity to automate jobs, improve processes and make a difference.

In 2001 my wife and I decided that it was time to move. Our roots were in Michigan, not Minnesota: almost all our family still lived in Michigan, and none (with the exception of my cousin) near us. Our son was growing up barely seeing his extended family, and we had another on the way. Although the IT job market in western Michigan had apparently died on January 1, 2000 (just like it died everywhere else), a few months of searching found me a job in Battle Creek, Michigan, working for a defense contractor. I flew to Michigan one weekend, tracked down some housing and made the arrangements to move to a new city, state and job.

The following week back in Minnesota, my manager stopped by one afternoon to ask why he'd received a phone call asking for a reference from a townhouse manager in Michigan. That wasn't how I'd planned to give my two weeks notice. Over a few beers that afternoon he and I discussed the situation and he could see why I needed to leave.

But it didn't work out quite that way. After a year and a half I had my hands in many projects, and my managers didn't want me to leave. So...they offered me the opportunity to keep my job and work as a telecommuter. We could still move back to Michigan, but I'd keep my familiar job, coworkers and benefits. There was no downside. I'd be a fool not to accept, and I was no fool.

In July 2001 we packed up all our belongings in the Twin Cities along with all our belongings up in the town where they'd been stored since 1998, and we hauled them all to Battle Creek, Michigan. I set up shop in a bedroom of our townhouse, got cable internet and I was back at work.

Telecommuting was a real blessing for our family. When my wife needed help I was there, and I got to spend lots and lots of time with my kids. Work was a little different, since I was no longer able to see my coworkers or track people down for information. On the other hand, I was usually able to work undisturbed and learned to handle most work issues through email and phone calls. I was even able to handle training sessions via teleconference, with coworkers in Minnesota handling displays remotely.

After a year in Battle Creek we decided that it was time to look for a real house. Unfortunately the company (called Syntegra at this point) was starting fairly regular layoffs (we joked that every time the executives would hold an all-hands meeting to tell us how well we were doing, layoffs were sure to follow. But it wasn't a joke.) and I decided to play it safe: I started looking for a house in Ann Arbor, the IT center of the state. However, house prices in that part of the state were ridiculous, so we began looking a little farther west...and ended up with a house in Grand Rapids, less than 50 miles from where my wife and I had both grown up. My manager assured me that things were looking up, and I didn't need to worry about looking for another job.

Between 2002 and 2005 I made several trips back to Minnesota and one to Dallas, where we met another remote member of our tools team. I was able to get involved with reports work in a serious way when the team leader suddenly resigned, and put in some serious effort to help get an entirely new reports system up and running.

However, as time went by the company was changing. It had been bought by BT (British Telecom), and BT began pushing its corporate culture and goals. The work we had been doing for years, managing systems and handling email, wasn't bringing in the profits BT desired. It tried several schemes to reorganize us and push us in the direction it wanted us to go: high-profit consulting.

Unfortunately, we didn't have the name recognition required to make that successful. In a serious situation, who are you going to hire: an IBM, an EDS, or...BT? What IS that?

As 2005 rolled on, the financial situation became serious. In mid-summer our backup guru was laid off. That was the warning sign I needed to get my resume updated and start looking. But I didn't look too seriously. I had an interview (and we took a nice family trip) in Madison, Wisconsin, but by the end of the summer I was more concerned with getting signed up for the master's program at the local university. I decided that I'd improve my job prospects (either at BT or another company) by studying database design and project management, and spent the fall juggling work and two master's-level courses (hint: never do this yourself).

By midterm (mid-October 2005) I'd had a nice case of bronchitis. One morning I was taking a walk with my wife and boys and remembered the early-morning all-hands meeting I needed to attend via phone. I hurried home and found that it was bad news: due to some mistakes in direction and management, we'd fallen half a million short on our budget and the company was going to lay off 15 people. Rather than wait around all day for bad news, I called my manager and told her that I'd prefer to know sooner rather than later. When she told me that she'd call me back, I knew the answer. Sure enough: I was one of those who'd been cut.

It wasn't a complete shock. I'd expected this phone call for a while. The periodic layoffs had been cutting deep for a long time. My job would end in mid-November. I'd been hoping to get back to Minnesota in 2005 to see coworkers I hadn't seen in 2 years; instead, I found myself looking for a job in a state and a city where the IT job market is practically dead.

There was a little cushion: my severance package would keep the checks coming for the rest of the year, and my tuition would still be paid. That allowed me a month to focus on school and the job hunt without worrying whether Santa would have to skip our house at Christmas. I updated my resume once again and hit the job boards.

Looking back, I still consider my years at BT to be the best job I've had...so far. I had responsibility, recognition, ability to do interesting and important work, and best of all I had great coworkers. That's what kept me at BT even when things were noticeably going downhill. I still stay in touch with some of them, and we still discuss our programming interests, computer games and vintage hardware.