I arrived home from school after my
junior year at Binghamton with no job and no employment prospects
for the summer of '96. I tried to get my high-profile job in the
'movie industry' back (I used to work at a local video store) but
even they didn't want me - which was too bad 'cause I really liked
that job. Sure it paid chicken feed, but all did was stand there and
watch movies & the people who worked there were pretty cool, not to
mention the free rentals! If the dental plan had been something
better than "the store owner will charge your dental bills on his
20% interest credit card" (I kid you not) I'd still be working there
today... but I digress.
"Oh well, guess I will just take the
summer off" I figured - suffice to say this did NOT go over well
with Mom and Pops who were footing the bill for my college education.
Then it happened: some woman from IBM called
and offered me a summer internship paying me ridiculous amounts of
money to do something I knew almost nothing about. It sure as hell
sounded better than flipping burgers at McDonald's...... the
internship with IBM continued during my senior year of college. IBM
got their hooks into me young and I signed on to work for them in my
home town of Poughkeepsie NY full time after graduation.
After 3 years of working at IBM as a software
engineer doing Java programming and getting a Masters in Computer
Science part time, I decided to see what life outside
of "Big Blue" was like. Leaving IBM was a tough decision, and a lot of
stuff factored into it - but I won't mention any names (just
kidding!). Actually, I suspected that they were starting to catch on
and realize I know absolutely NOTHING about computers and bought my
degrees off of the internet, so I got the heck out of Dodge. But
seriously, I worked with a lot of good people (many of whom I'll
actually miss working with) and IBM was good to me, but in the end,
I felt like it might be time for a change.
That's how I ended up at Sun Microsystems.
I've always thought Sun was a pretty cool company so I made the
jump. I started working at Sun in January of 2001. Working for Sun
was cool... it really is a great company. I got to go to JavaOne a
few times, they let me work from home pretty much full time, and the
people were very bright and yet (for the most part) not complete
computer nerds... the group I worked in was kind of like a
dysfunctional family (I mean that in a good way) but we had a lot of
fun and got the job done (you can
check out the project here).
The only downside of Sun is that after basically minting money
during the internet boom, they took a nosedive after the internet
bust. So for most of the time I was there, they were doing what HR
lovingly referred to as "Reductions in Force" actions... you can't just be laid off, that's
too cold. When they have security throw you out on the street it's a "RIF" which
is, apparently, some how warm and fuzzy.
I survived all the "RIFS" but lots of
good people left both via RIF and voluntarily, and they still
weren't making any money so morale was skidding along rock bottom.
So when I accidentally stumbled upon a job working for
MLB.com, I
decided to became one of those people who decided to leave on their own terms.
I was honestly sad to leave Sun and still love the company's
products but it's no fun working for a company constantly losing
money.
The story of how I ended up at Major League
Baseball Advanced Media is somewhat humorous (or maybe not). My
brother was bugging me to put my resume in at IBM - not b/c he cared
about my career but b/c he wanted the $5,000 bonus if I got hired. I
wasn't really crazy about the idea of going back to IBM but since
Sun was constantly laying people off I figured it wouldn't hurt.
Somehow I ended up accidentally posting my
resume on some job board... which I only realized the next day when
my voice mail was filled with calls from recruiters. I quickly took
my resume down and began deleting all the "I'll make you the next
internet millionaire" recruiter speak messages but the very last one
caught my attention: Java engineer working for a major sports
league"... being a sports nut, I took the bait despite being certain
that the "major sport league" would turn out to be US Indoor
Kickball or some stupid thing like that.
Long story short, it was actually legit. I
went to work for Major League Baseball Advanced Media in the summer
of 2006. MLBAM as it's called is basically run by the MLB owners and operates
MLB.com,
milb.com,
mlsnet.com
and quite a few other sites including the ever popular
queenlatifah.com and some
figure skating site... yeah, those
2 are really raking in the cash for the company. Working for MLB was pretty
cool.. my first time at a smaller company and everyone in the tech
department was definitely sharp and hard working. my first experience at a small company.
It was a little eye opening though going from huge corporations to a place where
the company directory is basically an excel spreadsheet that HR
maintains and spams the whole company with periodically :-)
The question I always got asked as an MLB
employee is, of course, do you get free tickets to games (and, more
importantly, can the person asking get some from me!). The answer
is yes and.... for your purposes of scoring free tix from me, no.
For me going to a game, yes. That is they don't generally hand out actual
tickets... they give employees a "game pass" that gets
them into any
major league game for free. Cool perk but not as great as it
sounds... the tickets they gave you (at least at Shea and Yankees
stadium) were cheap seats even when it was a 1/2 full Tuesday
matinee game. The other question I got a lot (after people see my
well developed computer mouse muscles) is did I take performance
enhancing drugs... my answer is "I'm not here to talk about the
past".
After about a year and half at MLB, I came
across another opening that caught my eye... ESPN.com. I'm a big
baseball fan but an even bigger fan of ESPN and sports in general.
Plus ESPN has been the crack that fuels my fantasy sports addiction
since I first discovered rotisserie baseball way back in '96. I
figured if there was any place I could spend my entire day managing
my fantasy rosters, ESPN would be the place :-)
So in August of 2007 I joined
espn.com... or,
more specifically, became a slave of Mickey Mouse. Disney is
majority owner of ESPN and, for all purposes, the parent company.
Don't ask me to explain why (I honestly don't know) but half the
people at ESPN are actual ESPN employees while half of them are
technically Disney employees. Ultimately it makes no difference.
ESPN is, at least for me, a really cool place
to work. People don't always believe it but the headquarters of the
"Worldwide Leader in Sports" is in fact located in
Bristol, CT... and while central CT isn't the most exciting
place in the world, it's a pretty decent place to live, especially
for families not interested in the high cost of the big city.
The job is interesting but, like software in
general, involves long hours and lots of banging my head on the desk
in my cubicle. Still, having a 22" LCD TV in my cube with every HD
ESPN channel and sportscast known to man on it is a pretty nice
fringe benefit. And seing Chris Berman, Barry Melrose and the rest
of the "talent" walking around is kinda cool too.
For the tech geeks that might care, I do Java
programming... pretty much entirely web development these days.
J2EE, web services, JSP, Ajax... all that good stuff. But really I try to
spend as much of my work day as I can managing my fantasy
sports team and trying to figure how I can make a living doing
only that. Various things I've worked on include Sun's now defunct
Woodstock JavaServer Faces framework, the online voting system for
the MLB All Star Game and ESPN's recently unveiled personalization
service.
For more BS about my career check me out
LinkedIn
