Career Pivots

Career Pivots

I started working at fourteen, but I would only consider something a career until after high school, and high school was mostly a disaster for me. I was not one for following orders; I wanted to learn and seemed competent enough despite my ADD, Dyslexia, and a hearing deficiency,

I can’t recall a birds-n-bees talk with my father, but I vividly remember the career talk. Vietnam was winding up, and I wanted to be a helicopter pilot. They would not have taken me primarily because of hearing issues. However, dad suggested I take another crack at school.

In my do-it-my-way high school career, I avoided anything that resembled homework and graduated high school after reading only four books. Upon entering college, I jumped into remedial courses to compensate for the deficit. It took five years to get a four-year degree, but the last two years were spent in a social service internship. I probably could have gotten an award for creative uses of social services in the inner city. I started several programs for working with the homeless, alcoholics, and drug addicts. After ten years in Social Services, which included the first New Jersey state mental Health Ombudsman, the first co-ed Group Home Manager supported by the one-to-one foundation, Crisis Intervention Counselor, Chemical Dependency Counselor, Vice President of Marketing, and several other titles, I started to get interested in those new small personal computers.

So I got lucky enough to enroll in a program that paid for retraining blowouts from Reaganomics. After six months of studying mainframe programming, I got a job selling computer services. This came with a car and a personal computer.

After a year, I found myself in a Think-tank consulting with the likes of Bell Atlantic, Sears, and other fortune 500 clients. They had personal computers also, and I dove in head and feet to learn the emerging field of Knowledge Engineering. Leveraging my experience in counseling, I would interview experts to distill their knowledge into computer code. Expert Systems had a good run but needed to be more practical for reasons of maintenance and upkeep. I also studied Hypertext as a means of capturing interrelated bits of knowledge. Building computer knowledge structures was still my focus at the think tank, but the tools became more sophisticated.

Lotus Notes became the preferred corporate tool for securely capturing and sharing knowledge inside the organization. As one of the early adopters, I started a consulting practice specializing in Lotus Notes. This opened up many new avenues for specialization, including Business Process Reengineering & Automated Workflow (like modeling expert knowledge only involving the whole corporate culture) and global networking leveraging the existing internet connections.

Then BAM, somebody invented the world wide web, not me or Al Gore. After opening my first data center, it became apparent that application hosting would be a good business. I hosted for several companies that wanted the benefit of Lotus Notes but did not have or want the burden of managing servers. Domino dealt with clustering and distributed Systems long before the blockchain became popular. I noticed a clever start-up called Amazon but thought it was too early to do online retail. A partner and I had developed an online store selling engraved rocks. Have you ever calculated the cost of sending rocks to England? Shipping still needs to be fixed for Amazon.

All promising technologies die. Eventually, although Lotus Notes survived its tenure with IBM, It faded from the world like many others.

After twenty-five years of working behind a keyboard, the thrill of new technology was getting old. Cloud computing, Machine Learning, Blockchain, Mobile phones, Yawn. Desperate to find something new, I bought a welding machine to branch out. An opportunity to get into real estate development chewed up a year of my life, and I went back to welding.

At seventy, things start to work differently than at twenty-five, but my brain still thinks I can move at the same speed as I once did. Still somewhat of a cultural revolutionary, I write about the promise of Bitcoin. Back behind a keyboard but sitting in a recliner. After a few minor surgeries, I wonder, “What’s Next?” Is there some synergy between computers, welding, and social services? If there is, I’ll find it.