2011

The recession technically ended in 2009, but the recession was still going strong for those of us inside the property industry.  I was production support for a department I had largely automated and/or virtualized, and the most interesting work I had was when I was supporting brand new development efforts.  Those development efforts were hard to come by as they typically required new investment, and when a lead developer put in their two-week notice I had serious thoughts about moving on myself.  I had a wild idea that perhaps I could switch divisions and fill in the departing developer's shoes.  I talked to my fiance about it who was full of support, and I took a night's sleep on it.  I was surprised to find myself waking up excited about the idea.

I called the developer in the morning and asked him if he would recommend me for the position, and he explained he wasn't even aware I could code.  He gave me some casual interview questions, and then showed me some samples of what he had been working on most recently, and then asked me a few database questions... and then was shocked that I seemed to know what he was talking about.  I explained to him that I had gone to school for software development, and did the occasional moonlight development work, but that I never wanted to code for the company because it was a direct conflict with my current position.  My main job up to this point had been being responsible for production environments, and that included loading finished code for our custom applications onto production servers.  Folks that write the code don't get access to the servers, and folks that manage the servers don't get access to the code. 

I interviewed internally with a few more people, and then I officially switched to software development within the same company.  I still recommend to anybody in a large organization to consider opportunities elsewhere within the company before jumping ship entirely.  Then I had the task of getting to know the masterwork of what was a really top-notch development team.  I had approximately one week of dedicated cross-training from the departing developer, and there was still the rest of the team behind him to help me get up to speed, but it would take me closer to 90 days to really get comfortable with what I was looking at.

Over the next few months I worked an absurd amount of hours per week in hopes of maintaining the same deadlines that were set for the developer that left, and thanks to a few breaks where deadlines extended due to outside circumstances things more or less stayed on track.  As a 2-year CS student with various hobby level side projects I really thought I bit off more than I could chew.  I didn't know anything about the following that were loaded throughout the projects I was now responsible for: ORMs, Reflection, Telerik, and builder patterns.  I didn't even know how to check-in and check-out my source code because for me and my independent contractor ways, "source control" had always just been carefully managed zip files.  Merge conflicts were now a part of daily life and I found myself apologizing to somebody else on the team at least twice a week for breaking their builds.

By the end of the year I was really in it.  I felt good about what I was doing and I was helping colleagues as much as they were helping me.  I was back to taking on some side projects in development and got hungry for more experience in it.  I was over the hump and now had a whole library of examples of how to code enterprise applications correctly.  Side work for developers came a whole lot easier than for sysadmins and was a lot more fun.  Sysadmin side work is running Malwarebytes on your relatives' PCs or explaining to them you cannot recover their files off a dead hard drive.  Development side work was creating new solutions for actual small business problems and getting paid rather well for the efforts.  I was hooked, and I was officially switching career paths.