Back to the Mercenary Mode

.NET Steward in a Java Shop

2010-2013

“Industry” was management consulting – services and software.

I was a .NET project collector in a centralized Java leaning shop. I was given exposure into legacy .NET/Microsoft products to make them better or stable; at the time, this was completely within my wheelhouse – “fixing”

Incidentally, working with these made me be unable to be the subject of any of these types of tools ever again.

Meet the Products (from what I recall)

Job Evaluation Manager (JEM) make connected sizable graph for organizations and roles within them

Corporate survey system – I enabled internationalized byte-encoding round-trips to-and-from non-internationalized storage fields

Job Pricing Tool (Metropolitan-Area Markets) – re-wrote 1990s era stored-procedure SQL Server system with SQLCLR by implementing bucket-based aggregates; also used indexed views and columnar indexes to speed it up 10x

Turbo-charged old Access-based report system in another product suite; or so says my old resume…sounds on point

I was (almost) a SQL Server DBA

I also got tagged there as a SQL Server powerhouse – I thought I was high-middling at best, but stature is prominence in the local terrain

Without prompting I did all the legwork for installing SQL Cluster as I had done it 10 years earlier; I had an audience in a conference room with a projection of my screen while performing the migration.

Between clustering and the 10x performance improvement on the Job Pricing tool (above) I was offered a SQL DBA (architect/administrator) role when I indicated I wanted to leave; however I really wanted to do more direct .NET design and implementation and didn’t want to get stuck with just SQL.

The Ebbing Tide

The manager (VP probably?) there was excellent, the weekly meetings were just a staff meetings, not anything else, so they were easy to float. Many of the people were just fine, and I met one of the most intelligent people I had ever had the pleasure to know there (he knows who he is), who explained the logic behind JEM and the Hay Process to me.

Bittersweet to leave, but three and a half years was a record for me in the 21st century; .NET was not their future and SQL alone was not mine.