Alberto De Natale • 5 years ago
Hi Jesse,
That was a great article, struggle to imagine a developer as talented as you are was once a starter.
Your story is so easy to relate as everyone in their tech careers end up meeting their own version of Mike.
I wonder, how did this experience affected you other than setting you on a more rewarding trajectory?
What are the technical, professional and human lessons that you took home?
Wish you all the best,
Alberto
We all have to start somewhere. The best part of that job was probably not coming home every day smelling like grease. :)
The lessons, well, the most important of which was probably also the least pleasant - office politics and those in power beat out better technical decisions in any company. I came in with that youthful naivety that if I pitched a good idea or did things "the right way" the established folks would be as eager to adapt new ideas and learn as I was from them.
I learned the value of a good mentor with kindness. While the overall environment wasn't very friendly, the person who was the lead engineer at the time was a good human who tried hard to help me adapt to the environment and teach me things that I didn't know. He was patient with mistakes made by someone with only academic experience and little knowledge about things could be different in the real world.
Technically, I learned an awful lot about how to pull cable, how to troubleshoot a preinstalled set of NT4 machines with networking issues, and techniques to crawl on your hands and knees in a crawlspace all day without ripping holes in the knees of your khakis.