Career Reflection

Career Reflection

- 11 mins

While reflecting on the choice to focus my attention more towards Linux and Linux development I have found a list of different places that I have chosen to work for to get my foot in the door would and could have been the end of my career but my mindset at the end of the day helped me push beyond the job title and the working environments.

No longer a cable repair man flipping burgers.

After getting my CompTIA A+ certification I applied for Best Buy in the Geek Squad department. I was persistent enough to catch the eye of one of the managers there. She liked the facts that she told me to come back in on 3 different occassions and whether it was raining or not I came in, parked my motorcycle, and showed up on time to ask more about the open position. She set me up with an interview that I thought was for the geek squad department. I was so excited I changed my scheduled around just for the 4pm interview. I later found out that the manager that was supposed to interview me left early for work that day and the computer sales manager decided to interview me. The questions were all pc and computer related so I thought nothing of it and wanted to get out of working at cracker barrell and sams club selling cell phones and flipping pancakes. The idea that this job could be an entry point into the IT feild. and could possible allow me to not work two job and trade my motorcycle in for a regular car and get out of the rainy days hiding under a freeway bridge had me overlooking that the sales manager pivoted the interview questions. He offered me the job and during the one week of training in house and the other week of training in Hollwood florida that pushed my honda cbr 600 to the test I found out that I would be in the computer sales department selling printers and low budget laptops to college students. The advertised pay was also not the pay lsited on the job offer but I knew it was a step in the right direction so I took it. 3 months into that job I was being scolded for not selling the BEST BUY PROTECTION plans with the printers and laptops when I was making sales. I, as a customer, didnt like when I would walk into a store and someone would treat me like a car salesman treats a used car buyer. The secret fees and backdoor maintenenace charges that you want to tack onto this protection plan that doesnt make support or routine maintenance any easier or convenient for the customer doesnt make sense to offer if the customer is an older person buying a laptop for their grandkid whos going off to college. IT was brutal. Best buy sales agents, or what I call the “blue shirts” is ideally anyone who you see in the store that should be helping you buy something. There have been a lot of changes since 2013 or so when I worked there but some of best buys sales practices are still the same. They dont make the most money off the printers or laptops that they sell, but the best buy protection plans they offer make them a good chunk of change. Customers pay for convenience. Its much easier to pay monthly for netflix instead of finding a 10TB hard drive and downloading all the movies you might want to see, creating a streaming based website to watch it all. Same goes for buying a laptop and having someone else handle broken parts, hardware related faults, and more. Thats what Best Buy provides with their proteciton plan, but the plan is a plan backed by the one-year warrant you already get for purchasing the laptop so if anything happens after two years best buy does very little compared the HP or Samsung or whatever company is selling the product. One night after realizing that our sales program that we submit daily sales reports was gamified to show that Brittany had the most sales for the team every week because she was good at getting people to add protection plans to anything she helped with, but did not offer commissions on sales, I realized I had to find a sales job that could give me incentive to sell plans, or to find something new. That same day a guy came in looking for a laptop with an HD screen and good audio to watch porn. As soon as he said the P word two other co-workers of mine walked away blushing. To me, i’m here to solve a problem, and as long as your not hurting anyone or doing anything illegal I can help. I pointed him to a new hp envy because HP and Beats Audio had a collab to add new speakers into HP computers to match high end audio with quality video from the new AMD chips in their computers. He was in a rush and decided to leave that day buy came back the next day and told me my talents were being wasted at that job. He convinced me to take a lunch break and drive to Delray Beach and apply for an IT job. Enter Vast Tech Support also known as OMG TECH HELP. My first official “IT” job that allowed me to exercize all my skills at the time. Virus removal, remote connectivity, IT support and customer services skills, soft skills, hard skills, networking, working with other colleagues with the same discipline and talent. I thought I had it made. I met a few men that were there that continuously talked about how this had been the best job that they had ever had. Most of those men were in their 30’s with kids and a bunch of crazy life stories that I loved to hear during the work day. However, during the nights or weekends I was off I would talk to my friends and girlfriend and the time who would mention things like “they are that old and still doing jobs like this”?. At the time I thought about what my next certification would help me get further in my career so I dont look back 10 years and realize that, even though the environment had crazy stories, amazing people, and great connections, I didnt want to look back and feel like I wasted a decade joking off and having fun when I could have been growing in my career. That job introduced me to the FBI MoneyPak Virus which triggered my bloodthurst to learn programming and find a solution to remotely remove the virus from customer computers. The idea that tons of customers were calling into our hotlines crying that they have lost family photos or important documents because this screen on their computer is forcing them to pay Bitcoin to retreive their information had me feel like I needed to get into a telephone booth and save people. I ended up leaving that job after becoming a supervisor. In the team meetings I kept pushing to get microsoft certifications for all the technicians I was supporting and managing. My thoughts were that if we could incentivize our team to get certified we could be a microsoft certified partner (and the company could pay for any and all of my future certifications). The changes happening at the company that ended up having me spend 4 weeks walking some of my favorite co-workers out into the parking lot and telling them they were fired did things to me mentally that made me phsyically sick. I pushed more and more to help the techs on my team and after countless arguing I may have ended up on a list of “confrontational” leads so when it came down to consolidation I was first on the chopping block of supervisors. Unfortunate but it lead to better roads.

Laying down a foundation may lead to Nebraska bricks

After helping my roomate get a job at Rapid Tech Support and having phone conversations with tons of people that were laid off creating their own MSP with leads to do the same shady sales ideas that end up capturing customers computers hostage and putting them into a queue of the same old same old tuneups I decided I wanted to find something that gave me a different opportunity. My girlfriend had left the same job and helped me land a job at FastFix123 which was a MIcrosoft Partner. I quickly learned that a lot of the customer support companies in the area were all the same. Regardless of the partnership or where they got their sales leads it started to feel all these companies were “Boiler room businesses”. Fast Fix gave me the opportunity to take my free time and learn C# and build the VB Tech Toolkit and possibly focus on selling the toolkit and becoming an app developer. That change would allow me to work from home, preventing me from adding more wear and tare my my current motorcycle, possibly find a new car, and find more stability, or even work from home. The financial benefits for finding a different kind of work was good but the educational and career benefits of learning a new programming language and solving a problem is what drove me to work for FastFix and learn something new. The team that ran the company were known as Nebraska Bricks and most of them were on tour or not in the office more that 30 percent of the times so I was never able to get all parties involved to sell the idea of the toolkit.

Many of my other co-workers, whether it was at OMG or FastFix or RapidTech or any of the companies I had friends working at reminded me that the IT feild can be brutal, and the self studying im doing wont go to waste. Many of the poeple I worked with were just looking for a paycheck but I was in the pursuit of professional career growth and advancement so the mental stress of losing a job or the confliciting comfort of wasting time playing videos games instead of learning are reminders that i’m taking roads less travelled but the road im on is a good one, and the journey will have its waves, you just gotta ride them.

A few things it taught me after reflecting on these things. The customer support area of the IT feild is a great entry level area to get you foot in the door but it would be too stressful to do long term. I needed to find something different. My work on trying to be the little guy to sell a toolkit was a perfect way to break free from the freecodecamp and online learning academies because it gave me insights on how to use a programming languages, how to market an application, and how to create a service that solves problems.

I knew at the time that even if they team wasnt interested in what I was learning I was in the right place and building that application strengthened my Linux skills, allowed me to learn about containers (which was just a common discussion at the time before Docker was released), and got me interested in doing Linux work full time.

Giving myself the time to reflect on my career beginnings helps me stay focused in my current career at NASA. Working for a big company provokes the biggest sense of pride to me in the world, but its been intimidating as well. There are many avenues and areas to learn that im being exposed to but like the Miami Heat I have to “keep the main thing the main thing”. A quote I will leave to anyone reading this reads below.