work
I work for Sun Microsystems, specifically in the MySQL Support team (”the world’s most popular open source database”).
I’ve been with them over 5 years and counting, and don’t regret or begrudge a minute of it. It’s the best job I’ve ever had, and the best job I can conceive of ever having. I am of course not always happy, and I have of course entertained some (interesting!) offers to join other companies, but here I am, and here I hope to remain… for a while yet.
Initially, my time was spent between development and support. Today, although I do remain one of the leading technical resources on the support team and can still be found diving through source code, I am the global manager for the entire team. I should add “Worldwide Operations” to that sentence, sometime.
I was a C++ developer and DBA (MySQL and MSSQL, with an obscene amount of Oracle PL/SQL development) before I joined MySQL. If you assume that I was at least reasonably competent in those roles, and at least passably sane, then you will probably think that MySQL Support must be extremely special in order for me to walk away from the rewarding, creative challenges of software and database development to work for a “tech support” department.
You would be correct. But as it is not my goal to play recruiter, enough of that.
If you are masochistic, or just curious, and want to know some of the topics driving me on a daily basis:
- Scaling distributed, “virtual” organizations without compromising intra- and inter-team relationships or service quality.
- Skill development (”Training”), by which reasonably intelligent but inexperienced individuals may become genuinely competent.
- “Love Thy Customer”. I coined this phrase and then discovered that someone(s) had beaten me to it and written books about it. The, or my, basic idea is that customer problems are our problems, and the only useful differentiator for service organizations is a ridiculously high quality of service.
- “Good Enough Isn’t”. Probably worthy of a “ditto”, and very much tied into my opinion on service differentiation. Anybody can do “Good Enough”, which is hardly to your competitive advantage (nor what your customers deserve).
I’ve done personal and professional software development in various forms of assembler, C, C++, python, PHP and Visual Basic. My full resume is an alphabet soup that would make a recruiter’s head explode (if it’s an acronym beginning with “X”, I’ve probably had some kind of professional experience using it). I’ve used Linux since some of the earliest days of the Slackware distribution (though I have, alas, moved on to other distros); I’ve used most versions of Windows; I’ve used Solaris x86 (x64); I’ve used OS X. don’t mention Amiga; don’t mention Amiga; don’t mention Amiga.
I’ve written warehouse and inventory management programs, invoice and point of sale applications, school/student information systems, games, websites, neural networks trained via genetic algorithms for the analysis of lottery predictions, patches (minor patches) to various open source projects, accounting software, data migration tools, so on, and etc, ad infinitum, amen.
I have managed small web development teams, mid-sized DBA/developer teams, even some small and mid-sized software projects.
In short, I have done a lot of different things, and I haven’t even begun writing about digging ditches and other character-building plumbing work I have done and (more often than one might think) frequently miss. With variety of experience comes widening of perspective.
If the day should ever arrive when I am unable to learn or do something new and interesting, I will be ready for the long, dark dirtnap of the soul, and will thank you kindly to send me on my way.