Today is my last day at Avantas. I started working there just under 17 years ago, in August of 2004, while I was in college. My first job was as the receptionist. I had applied for an early-morning job running reports and doing other "office work" for a department called Agency Management. The shifts were 4am to noon on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays. The idea of waking up early terrified me, but it was by far the best paying job I could find that fit with my class schedule, so I applied, then followed up the next week, and was more than a little surprised to get an interview.
I wandered in uncertainly and was soon taken into the main conference room to meet the HR leader and the Director of Operations. I was in a good mood - which must have been apparent - and they were in good moods, we all laughed, I gave honest answers even when they were unflattering and I remembered their names when we parted. I got a call the next day - they thought I'd be a good fit for an IT internship instead, which was fine by me, but I'd work at the front desk the first two weeks while the IT leader vetted me. Avantas managed hospital staffing, and the receptionist position was normally filled by one of the secretarial pool staff that were not on assignment. But, business was booming and everyone was on assignment. Having built websites in high school, I immediately started helping the Marketing director rebuild the company's. Meanwhile, the IT director gave me data entry tasks and some rudimentary data analysis.
Two weeks later I got a cubicle next to his, and along with the other intern (a guy named Jerome who I incidentally knew beforehand) the IT group grew from two to four. Jerome was doing statistical research to predict patient volumes and I was running & modifying Crystal Reports, then learning to build them, later I started using ASP.NET to build an online portal & dashboard, learning as I went. The latter took me a few months, I coded all the graph rendering from scratch using the drawing libraries (I was too naive to know there were 3rd party packages to do this). A lot happened in the first year - Jerome and the other IT guy left, then my boss was let go. I had already been promoted from Intern to Analyst - within a year I was promoted to Analyst 2, then Analyst 3. The two guys I worked closest with then were both cynical and endearing, I had a fraction of their experience, but they were patient, they accepted me, and they taught me a ton. I didn't appreciate it enough then, but looking back, I'm tremendously grateful we crossed paths.
We modified a mostly-finished version of a web-based shift signup application that a contractor had previously built - fixing some glaring omissions and hard-coded parameters, while I softened the shrill UI. We had enough time for functional testing, but not load testing, and the night it went live (at midnight, for reasons lost to time) it timed out on the users due to the database load. No customer support plan existed, and when users called into our 24/7 staffing office, they transferred them to us. We hacked together a series of fixes that night and the following days.
Soon after, we started building version two of the app. We convinced our new director that it would have to be rebuilt from scratch - too many of the foundational assumptions in the code were wrong and couldn't easily be refactored, plus the database was horribly un-optimized. The process of defining the requirements and technical design of the new version was one of the joys of my professional career. My coworker friends taught me how to think about requirements, business object definition, database design, coding standards and more. I look back in awe at what I learned that year. Mid-way through the project, one of them left - then the other six months later. We hired a new UI Developer and I was promoted to Lead Developer. As I was finishing up the last pieces of version 2 - testing the [properly modular] interface I had designed to our 3rd party staffing software - work halted. My boss had signed a contract for another company to build us our own staffing software from the ground up! Being reliant on a 3rd party solution had long held our consulting and business intelligence businesses back, so this was a huge strategic opportunity for Avantas, and one the company subsequently capitalized on. But it meant that version 2 - the only software app I ever designed and built from the ground up - would never see the light of day.
I moved into a Product Manager role and began collaborating daily with the owner of the other company. He and I collaborated to craft and execute an initial product vision and iterative roadmaps - I was a liaison to the users and a subject matter expert, he had experience bringing new software solutions to market, which we did with Smart Square in less than four months, in the spring of 2007.
The following year and a half was a whirlwind, spent building out the rest of the toolkit that we had long envisioned providing our customers. Meanwhile, the idea of going back to school nagged at me - I had never finished my degree, having accepted a full-time position with my second promotion after my internship. I went part-time in 2008, then left completely at the end of the year to do a semester abroad in Finland (I started this blog just prior).
I came home in mid-2009, when the the financial crisis was weighing most severely on the job market. Avantas had done a round of layoffs during my absence and any hires were out of the question. But at the end of that year, a woman who had started our Data Analytics department in 2008 hired me back to work on our patient forecasting - she actually contracted me back for a set number of hours (80, if I recall correctly, mostly to build and validate some data cleansing improvements in SAS), afterwards I proverbially 'kept showing up'. Soon thereafter, she left, and I found myself the sole member of our Analytics team!
When I graduated in the spring of 2010, I was hired back full time into a senior version of my old role. If there is one time in my history at Avantas that I wish I could go back to, it is then, so I could tell myself: "make sure you stay on a track you want to be on." Instead, I stayed - almost mindlessly - in the same role for eleven years. Why?
Because it was good enough in the right ways, I think. It paid enough, I knew enough, it was occasionally satisfying and I was always ready to believe greater things were just around the next corner. But too often in eleven years, they haven't been. The size of our team has increased by an order of magnitude, but it feels like the ability to innovate died years ago, and ultimately the promise of innovation is what has motivated me to work there since the earliest days. I am endlessly proud of the string of achievements from my first five or six years at Avantas. But the solidifying organization strangled our degrees of freedom, leading to a step-change down in our ability to deliver incremental value to our users. Successes now are small and isolated things, and many days it feels like the company - or at least the product - is in some sort of slow "run-off" mode, even though we're still signing contracts and growing revenue.
But I don't want to dwell on this, and even now it's not what I think about when I take a step back to assess the whole arc of my journey at Avantas. Even from the last decade, I'll remember working in good faith with coworkers and customers I liked and respected. And I hope - if I choose to work in technology again - that I can recapture the feeling of those early years, when I walked into an opportunity I couldn't then comprehend, stumbled around, somehow falling mostly forward and upwards, and came out the other end with the skills and experience that would define my career.
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