Work Blog: 20!
This is the 14th and final post in my work blog series. I'm sure there will be more eventually, but for now I've ran through the backlog of posts that are generically relevant enough to consider posting here. Today's post went up on Thursday, May 19, 2022. Hey, that's today! With my 20th anniversary at work being tomorrow, I guess it's topical! I'll have some more personal thoughts about this anniversary next week, but for now you can enjoy what I wrote up for my coworkers.
I removed the name of my company and our products over and over again. I also removed a bunch of names altogether (they were all google unique) and reduced others to just first names. I also took out some extremely general financial info out, because paranoia. This means the post lacks a bit of punch compared to the original versions, but such are the compromises we all make. It probably wouldn't be hard to figure out where I work from 18.5 years of blog posts and some digging, but why make it easy for people, right?
I didn't actually link the 672 concerts post in my real work journal, but couldn't miss it here. The links to some basic info like "Wisconsin" and Cleveland Browns" is because people from other countries with minimal knowledge of the U.S. are in the audience for this. Other links notes:
- I obviously had to remove links to the Core Values in the first paragraph.
- The line about the first adult job in January 2002 linked to another post that told stories about a job I had in fall 2001 that couldn't be genericized nearly enough to make it postable here.
- The paragraph about learning to program had links to two posts about mentoring by one of my colleagues that I'd totally steal if I were unethical because they are great.
- The line about "spinning out along the road" used to link to one of our press releases about race cars.
- The last line about "your 20th anniversary post" used to link to our guest author guidelines.
Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of my first day at this employer. Tradition says that I should have some grand overarching lessons to share with you based on my long tenure, but frankly if I’ve learned ONE thing in the last 20 years, it is that things are going to change. Almost nothing here has stayed the same in the last 20 years, and outside of our Core Values I wouldn’t bet heavily on anything remaining unchanged for the next 20 years. So instead, to quote one of favorite baseball bloggers, "I'm here to talk about the past." Please indulge some rather rambling recollections, secure in the knowledge that I won’t do a post like this again for at least another decade!
As far as I can remember, the 6 full-time employees and 4 interns in my start group were the very first group of new employees to join the company after it moved to the current headquarters campus in Westlake, Ohio. I actually interviewed at the prior location in the Bridge Building in Rocky River, Ohio. The Bridge Building is a really neat looking building, but it was far too small for the 149 employees who were working here on May 20, 2002, so they were spread out over a number of nearby spaces. Building #1 in Westlake was much more spacious and could hold everybody who was based at headquarters back then, even before we did not one, not two, but three expansions to it.
Of course, that assumes I’m remembering the number of expansions correctly. If I’ve learned TWO things in the last 20 years, the first is that things are going to change and the SECOND is that memory is a fragile thing. Even major details about key events are easy to get wrong. I fight back by making a lot of lists, mental and electronic, for both my personal and work life. As a personal example, my lists let me that I’ve been to 672 concerts in my life, which was helped along immensely by the flexible hours here that let me roll in at 10am after a late night out.
Or maybe, you’d prefer a list about work. Here is a list of all the issue tracking systems that we’ve used in R&D over the last 20 years. Not counting any systems we got through acquisition, I can recall using:
1. Bullpen - We really leaned into the baseball theme in the early days.
2. Rhino - Built on our product, our first universally used issue track was named for Rhinoceros Success, a book much beloved by our founder. I started after he had retired, but that book was still on many desks for years to come.
3. Ceros - This was a relaunch of Rhino with new features and a new name. Why Ceros? Look at the second half of Rhinoceros.
4. Si-SCR - Both Rhino and Ceros had a lot of custom code, sometimes lovingly called ChuckBase after a developer in IS who wrote much of it. When we stripped out all that custom code in favor of out-of-the-box features, we rebranded it as Si-SCR, which was short for Support Issue Software Change Request. Our founding CTO briefly floated the idea of calling this iteration Albatross, which showed conclusively that he had never read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or listened to it. Speaking of listening, special thanks go out to Tim for lending me his entire collection of Iron Maiden CDs and thereby turning me into the guy screaming “Up the Irons” at the gig.
5. Jira - First there was QA Jira, then Production Jira, and as of last month Cloud Jira.
Issue tracking doesn’t do it for you? Back in the day our unofficial motto was “Work Hard, Play Hard,” so now that we’ve talked about work, let’s talk about play, or as play often became, parties. Back when we almost all worked in Westlake (with apologies to my friends in our original remote office in Lincoln, Nebraska), we had big fancy holiday parties at various Cleveland area locations. For example:
- 2002 - A long defunct Irish themed bar in Westlake called Brendan O'Neil's hosted my first holiday party. We barely all fit inside the building. Now this building is a hibachi restaurant called Arashi.
- 2003 - The almost as long defunct Rock Bottom Brewing in Cleveland hosted this year’s holiday party. Besides the holiday party, for years when Education Services hosted a training class we’d take them out to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame followed by Rock Bottom Brewing on Wednesday nights. Pro tip: do not do shots with middle-aged women from Wisconsin. It will go poorly. Wisconsin residents take their alcohol seriously. This space now houses the Greater Cleveland Aquarium. Thanks to a wedding I attended in that aquarium, I can tell you that shots also go poorly with fish tanks.
- 2004 - LaCentre Conference Center in Westlake has hosted a great many management off-sites and a few annual meetings, plus one holiday party.
- 2005 & 2006 - The House of Blues Cleveland hosted back to back parties in these years. The first year featured The Spazmatics and the second Disco Inferno (the cover band, not the post-rock band). I am good friends with two couples (consisting of three former coworkers and one current coworker) who would say these are their favorite holiday parties because they met their spouse at them!
- 2007 - The only time I’ve been in a suite at what was then called Cleveland Browns Stadium was the 2007 holiday party. We flew people in from all our remote offices for that party to celebrate our initial partnership with our private equity partner. Fireworks went off over the lake at midnight. This party was a lot more fun than the other time I went to Browns Stadium courtesy of work. I was given free tickets to see the first Monday Night Football game in the new stadium back in December 2003. Speaking as someone who grew up in North Dakota and has a lot of experience with cold weather, it was brutally cold. Predictably, the Browns lost to the Rams. If you’re looking for nearly unchanging constants, one thing that hasn’t changed much over the last two decades is the frequency of the phrase “the Browns lost.”
- 2008 - The last of the over the top holiday parties was at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I don’t have a good story about this party, so instead enjoy Prince killing the greatest moment in Rock Hall history. I’ll wait.
Since 2008, most of our parties were in one of the Westlake offices, whether Building 1, the original Building 3 (aka the Viking Building), or the current Building 3. Soon enough we were spread out over so many geographic locations and so many thousands of people that parties at that scale weren’t really feasible anymore. If I still loved partying late into the night I’d regret this a lot, but since a hot night now prominently features being in bed by 11pm at latest, I’m good. Also, someone needs to start a party planning company called “Parties at Scale.”
Speaking of parties, we’ve had plenty of non-holiday parties; poker nights, release parties, one release party that included a poker night, Clam & Jams, random “our CEO rolls a keg around the office” parties, racing themed parties when we hit 5000 and 10000 active customers, at least two wakes for products that got sunset (I personally planned both of those), and all sorts of other parties that I’ve probably forgotten along the way. I should have kept a list! Outside of the holiday parties, there are two parties that really stick out in my mind:
- I believe it was the summer of 2003 or thereabouts when one Friday we all got an email from our then CEO telling us we were having an all hands meeting in the atrium of Building 1 that afternoon. This was completely unheard of, and so there was a little apprehension when we showed up. It turns out he wanted to celebrate. First, he congratulated the first group of people to pass the then brand new internal certification program. The person with the highest score spun the equally brand new wooden prize wheel for the very first time, and actually won a week at our timeshare in Orlando on the very first spin of the wheel. The second reason to celebrate was that the company had just that day passed $100 million in total lifetime sales, so we all went to a Westlake bar called the Savannah (also now defunct) for a party.
- My all time favorite work party was probably the pub crawl somewhere in the 2007 (2008?) range, where four separate buses of colleagues were driven around to multiple different bars, and we all ended up at Rock Bottom Brewing at the end of the night. I was the bus captain for the “Black Cherry” bus, and I still have the captain’s t-shirt to prove it. If we were still pulling folks up on stage at the Monday Morning Meeting for their anniversary, that’s the shirt I would have worn.
Of course, we did actually do some work too. After my first grown up job spun out shortly after it started in January 2002, I needed a new gig to get out of North Dakota. I’d already turned down an offer from here back in 2001 so I reached out to my good friend, fraternity brother and already employed developer Eli and asked if they were still still hiring. HR called me the next day (hiring was a bit more casual back then), and I started a few weeks later. I figured I’d work here for two or three years, pay off my student debts and then head out to the west coast. Little did I know…
Speaking of how little I knew, I sure thought I knew how to program when I got out of college (no crime in having an opinion, right?). I was assigned to work with Eli, and with him as a mentor and Dan as (effectively) my first boss, I got a master class in how to write and debug code effectively. I owe those guys a million apologies for all the times I interrupted their flow to ask what was usually a stupid question, and a million thanks for all the help they cheerfully gave me. Eli left in 2007, but Dan continued to be a fantastic manager and mentor for me as I moved first into managing developers, then into managing quality assurance and tech support and then into creating Release Management and our first PMO team in what was then Development. Dan retired in 2020 and I still talk to both him and Eli regularly.
20 years is longer than I lived in my home state of North Dakota. It’s more years than I spent in formal schooling. 20 years is longer than I spent in Boy Scouts and playing football, combined. I’ve watched (ok, I helped) us grow from a company with 150 people in two locations that hadn’t even had $100 million in total lifetime revenue to a company with 4300+ employees in more locations than I can conveniently count making a LOT more than $100 million a year.
Most of you have never heard of any of the host of things I worked on back in the day. That stuff doesn’t matter anymore, except that it all helped us get to today instead of spinning out alongside the road somewhere in the last two decades. If I’ve learned THREE thing in the last 20 years, the first is that things are going to change, the second is that memory is a fragile thing, and the THIRD is that instead of trying to plan your career years ahead, you’re probably better off focusing on the work in front of you to the best of your ability. Learn as much as you possibly can. Step up and do the difficult work that nobody wants to do. Help everyone else as much as you can. If you (and the company) can keep doing these things consistently, good things will continue happen.
So to recap, here are the top three things I’ve learned in 20 years here.
1. Things are going to change.
2. Memory is a fragile thing.
3. Focus on the work in front of you to the best of your ability. Learn as much as you possibly can. Step up and do the difficult work that nobody wants to do. Help everyone else as much as you can.
Apparently, one thing I haven’t learned yet is how to combine a bunch of disparate points into easily digested bullet points, but I’ll work on that for my 30th anniversary. Bullet point issues aside, it has been a wild ride, and I expect it to continue for quite some time. I hope the next 20 years of our history have just as much growth and excitement as the last 20! Maybe you should start taking some notes so that your future 20th anniversary blog post has more reliable information than mine! Or, why wait? Throw some good stories in the comments now!
I removed the name of my company and our products over and over again. I also removed a bunch of names altogether (they were all google unique) and reduced others to just first names. I also took out some extremely general financial info out, because paranoia. This means the post lacks a bit of punch compared to the original versions, but such are the compromises we all make. It probably wouldn't be hard to figure out where I work from 18.5 years of blog posts and some digging, but why make it easy for people, right?
I didn't actually link the 672 concerts post in my real work journal, but couldn't miss it here. The links to some basic info like "Wisconsin" and Cleveland Browns" is because people from other countries with minimal knowledge of the U.S. are in the audience for this. Other links notes:
- I obviously had to remove links to the Core Values in the first paragraph.
- The line about the first adult job in January 2002 linked to another post that told stories about a job I had in fall 2001 that couldn't be genericized nearly enough to make it postable here.
- The paragraph about learning to program had links to two posts about mentoring by one of my colleagues that I'd totally steal if I were unethical because they are great.
- The line about "spinning out along the road" used to link to one of our press releases about race cars.
- The last line about "your 20th anniversary post" used to link to our guest author guidelines.
Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of my first day at this employer. Tradition says that I should have some grand overarching lessons to share with you based on my long tenure, but frankly if I’ve learned ONE thing in the last 20 years, it is that things are going to change. Almost nothing here has stayed the same in the last 20 years, and outside of our Core Values I wouldn’t bet heavily on anything remaining unchanged for the next 20 years. So instead, to quote one of favorite baseball bloggers, "I'm here to talk about the past." Please indulge some rather rambling recollections, secure in the knowledge that I won’t do a post like this again for at least another decade!
As far as I can remember, the 6 full-time employees and 4 interns in my start group were the very first group of new employees to join the company after it moved to the current headquarters campus in Westlake, Ohio. I actually interviewed at the prior location in the Bridge Building in Rocky River, Ohio. The Bridge Building is a really neat looking building, but it was far too small for the 149 employees who were working here on May 20, 2002, so they were spread out over a number of nearby spaces. Building #1 in Westlake was much more spacious and could hold everybody who was based at headquarters back then, even before we did not one, not two, but three expansions to it.
Of course, that assumes I’m remembering the number of expansions correctly. If I’ve learned TWO things in the last 20 years, the first is that things are going to change and the SECOND is that memory is a fragile thing. Even major details about key events are easy to get wrong. I fight back by making a lot of lists, mental and electronic, for both my personal and work life. As a personal example, my lists let me that I’ve been to 672 concerts in my life, which was helped along immensely by the flexible hours here that let me roll in at 10am after a late night out.
Or maybe, you’d prefer a list about work. Here is a list of all the issue tracking systems that we’ve used in R&D over the last 20 years. Not counting any systems we got through acquisition, I can recall using:
1. Bullpen - We really leaned into the baseball theme in the early days.
2. Rhino - Built on our product, our first universally used issue track was named for Rhinoceros Success, a book much beloved by our founder. I started after he had retired, but that book was still on many desks for years to come.
3. Ceros - This was a relaunch of Rhino with new features and a new name. Why Ceros? Look at the second half of Rhinoceros.
4. Si-SCR - Both Rhino and Ceros had a lot of custom code, sometimes lovingly called ChuckBase after a developer in IS who wrote much of it. When we stripped out all that custom code in favor of out-of-the-box features, we rebranded it as Si-SCR, which was short for Support Issue Software Change Request. Our founding CTO briefly floated the idea of calling this iteration Albatross, which showed conclusively that he had never read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or listened to it. Speaking of listening, special thanks go out to Tim for lending me his entire collection of Iron Maiden CDs and thereby turning me into the guy screaming “Up the Irons” at the gig.
5. Jira - First there was QA Jira, then Production Jira, and as of last month Cloud Jira.
Issue tracking doesn’t do it for you? Back in the day our unofficial motto was “Work Hard, Play Hard,” so now that we’ve talked about work, let’s talk about play, or as play often became, parties. Back when we almost all worked in Westlake (with apologies to my friends in our original remote office in Lincoln, Nebraska), we had big fancy holiday parties at various Cleveland area locations. For example:
- 2002 - A long defunct Irish themed bar in Westlake called Brendan O'Neil's hosted my first holiday party. We barely all fit inside the building. Now this building is a hibachi restaurant called Arashi.
- 2003 - The almost as long defunct Rock Bottom Brewing in Cleveland hosted this year’s holiday party. Besides the holiday party, for years when Education Services hosted a training class we’d take them out to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame followed by Rock Bottom Brewing on Wednesday nights. Pro tip: do not do shots with middle-aged women from Wisconsin. It will go poorly. Wisconsin residents take their alcohol seriously. This space now houses the Greater Cleveland Aquarium. Thanks to a wedding I attended in that aquarium, I can tell you that shots also go poorly with fish tanks.
- 2004 - LaCentre Conference Center in Westlake has hosted a great many management off-sites and a few annual meetings, plus one holiday party.
- 2005 & 2006 - The House of Blues Cleveland hosted back to back parties in these years. The first year featured The Spazmatics and the second Disco Inferno (the cover band, not the post-rock band). I am good friends with two couples (consisting of three former coworkers and one current coworker) who would say these are their favorite holiday parties because they met their spouse at them!
- 2007 - The only time I’ve been in a suite at what was then called Cleveland Browns Stadium was the 2007 holiday party. We flew people in from all our remote offices for that party to celebrate our initial partnership with our private equity partner. Fireworks went off over the lake at midnight. This party was a lot more fun than the other time I went to Browns Stadium courtesy of work. I was given free tickets to see the first Monday Night Football game in the new stadium back in December 2003. Speaking as someone who grew up in North Dakota and has a lot of experience with cold weather, it was brutally cold. Predictably, the Browns lost to the Rams. If you’re looking for nearly unchanging constants, one thing that hasn’t changed much over the last two decades is the frequency of the phrase “the Browns lost.”
- 2008 - The last of the over the top holiday parties was at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I don’t have a good story about this party, so instead enjoy Prince killing the greatest moment in Rock Hall history. I’ll wait.
Since 2008, most of our parties were in one of the Westlake offices, whether Building 1, the original Building 3 (aka the Viking Building), or the current Building 3. Soon enough we were spread out over so many geographic locations and so many thousands of people that parties at that scale weren’t really feasible anymore. If I still loved partying late into the night I’d regret this a lot, but since a hot night now prominently features being in bed by 11pm at latest, I’m good. Also, someone needs to start a party planning company called “Parties at Scale.”
Speaking of parties, we’ve had plenty of non-holiday parties; poker nights, release parties, one release party that included a poker night, Clam & Jams, random “our CEO rolls a keg around the office” parties, racing themed parties when we hit 5000 and 10000 active customers, at least two wakes for products that got sunset (I personally planned both of those), and all sorts of other parties that I’ve probably forgotten along the way. I should have kept a list! Outside of the holiday parties, there are two parties that really stick out in my mind:
- I believe it was the summer of 2003 or thereabouts when one Friday we all got an email from our then CEO telling us we were having an all hands meeting in the atrium of Building 1 that afternoon. This was completely unheard of, and so there was a little apprehension when we showed up. It turns out he wanted to celebrate. First, he congratulated the first group of people to pass the then brand new internal certification program. The person with the highest score spun the equally brand new wooden prize wheel for the very first time, and actually won a week at our timeshare in Orlando on the very first spin of the wheel. The second reason to celebrate was that the company had just that day passed $100 million in total lifetime sales, so we all went to a Westlake bar called the Savannah (also now defunct) for a party.
- My all time favorite work party was probably the pub crawl somewhere in the 2007 (2008?) range, where four separate buses of colleagues were driven around to multiple different bars, and we all ended up at Rock Bottom Brewing at the end of the night. I was the bus captain for the “Black Cherry” bus, and I still have the captain’s t-shirt to prove it. If we were still pulling folks up on stage at the Monday Morning Meeting for their anniversary, that’s the shirt I would have worn.
Of course, we did actually do some work too. After my first grown up job spun out shortly after it started in January 2002, I needed a new gig to get out of North Dakota. I’d already turned down an offer from here back in 2001 so I reached out to my good friend, fraternity brother and already employed developer Eli and asked if they were still still hiring. HR called me the next day (hiring was a bit more casual back then), and I started a few weeks later. I figured I’d work here for two or three years, pay off my student debts and then head out to the west coast. Little did I know…
Speaking of how little I knew, I sure thought I knew how to program when I got out of college (no crime in having an opinion, right?). I was assigned to work with Eli, and with him as a mentor and Dan as (effectively) my first boss, I got a master class in how to write and debug code effectively. I owe those guys a million apologies for all the times I interrupted their flow to ask what was usually a stupid question, and a million thanks for all the help they cheerfully gave me. Eli left in 2007, but Dan continued to be a fantastic manager and mentor for me as I moved first into managing developers, then into managing quality assurance and tech support and then into creating Release Management and our first PMO team in what was then Development. Dan retired in 2020 and I still talk to both him and Eli regularly.
20 years is longer than I lived in my home state of North Dakota. It’s more years than I spent in formal schooling. 20 years is longer than I spent in Boy Scouts and playing football, combined. I’ve watched (ok, I helped) us grow from a company with 150 people in two locations that hadn’t even had $100 million in total lifetime revenue to a company with 4300+ employees in more locations than I can conveniently count making a LOT more than $100 million a year.
Most of you have never heard of any of the host of things I worked on back in the day. That stuff doesn’t matter anymore, except that it all helped us get to today instead of spinning out alongside the road somewhere in the last two decades. If I’ve learned THREE thing in the last 20 years, the first is that things are going to change, the second is that memory is a fragile thing, and the THIRD is that instead of trying to plan your career years ahead, you’re probably better off focusing on the work in front of you to the best of your ability. Learn as much as you possibly can. Step up and do the difficult work that nobody wants to do. Help everyone else as much as you can. If you (and the company) can keep doing these things consistently, good things will continue happen.
So to recap, here are the top three things I’ve learned in 20 years here.
1. Things are going to change.
2. Memory is a fragile thing.
3. Focus on the work in front of you to the best of your ability. Learn as much as you possibly can. Step up and do the difficult work that nobody wants to do. Help everyone else as much as you can.
Apparently, one thing I haven’t learned yet is how to combine a bunch of disparate points into easily digested bullet points, but I’ll work on that for my 30th anniversary. Bullet point issues aside, it has been a wild ride, and I expect it to continue for quite some time. I hope the next 20 years of our history have just as much growth and excitement as the last 20! Maybe you should start taking some notes so that your future 20th anniversary blog post has more reliable information than mine! Or, why wait? Throw some good stories in the comments now!