The Carlton Dance

I was born and raised in Tennessee.  Don’t bother asking which city, because there really wasn’t one, but I still consider Tennessee to be my main home even though I have been away for 15 years.

When I was 14, I took a drafting class because my high school required me to take a vocational course.  To my amazement, I loved it!  It is fair to say that my first efforts met with mixed results, but I had a really awesome teacher who bore with me and encouraged me to stick with it.  As a result, I wound up taking drafting every year in high school and eventually won three state titles in individual competitions.

My enthusiasm for drafting led me to study mechanical engineering, which I also thoroughly enjoyed.  I had every intention of working as a mechanical engineer, but while I was in school a new contraption called the “World Wide Web” made its debut.  (Spoiler alert… it turned out to be a hit!)  During the dotcom boom there was such a shortage of IT talent that companies were hiring anyone with a cross-trainable skill set, so straight out of college I went to work on the road crew for a company that was building out its own national network.

I thought this would be a short-term adventure (much like traveling abroad for a summer or running away to join the circus), after which I would come back to reality and find gainful employment as an engineer.  However, after 4 promotions in 18 months, gainful employment had found me.  My responsibilities were ridiculously above my abilities at that time, but with a lot of effort I was able to grow into the role reasonably well and got to experience the full ride of the dotcom boom firsthand.

Unfortunately, I also got to experience the dotcom bust as well, but the good news is that the bankruptcy court hired me to decommission and recover the entire network that we had just built.  Although less satisfying, this actually proved to be considerably more lucrative than building it had been.  (I also wound up inadvertently setting a personal record by visiting 41 US states in 40 days while we were consolidating assets).

After that, I continued working on one short-term project after another for a few years.  In 2006 I was working on a project in California, when I got a call asking if I could consult on a project in Ukraine.  I agreed, but wound up staying more than 5 years.  During that time, I helped prep a telecom company for sale, after which the new owners asked me to stay on to help launch and run the company.  It was also during my tenure in Ukraine that I began studying Finance seriously.  Collaborating with the C-suite officers on two equity events persuaded me that I needed to learn more in this domain, so I completed the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) program, which is generally more common for investment bankers than engineers.

In 2012 I returned to the US (with my wife, whom I had met in Ukraine) and went to work for Amazon, but we still try to go back to Ukraine each year and just bought a dacha (i.e., “country house”) outside of Kyiv.  With Amazon, I spent 5 years setting up fulfillment centers in the US, Canada and Australia, which had very little relevance to my prior experience.  In that role I mostly coordinated construction, conveyors, racking, robots and so forth.  This has been followed by 4 years setting up data centers for AWS, although the hyperscale data centers that support cloud computing have limited similarity to the ones I worked in straight out of college.

When I look back on my career path to date, I am reminded of a well-intending advisor who asked me shortly before graduation what I wanted to be doing in 10 years.  I informed him that if I was doing anything that I could possibly anticipate at the time, I would be sorely disappointed.  I am happy to report that I did not let myself down since I knew nothing about wireless telecom, Ukraine or finance at the time.  As I move towards software projects, I believe I am likely to repeat this feat.  Advanced skills in computing can be a passport to virtually any domain imaginable.  Energy projects, economics, robotics… once again I have no idea what projects I may be working on in 10 years.

But I’m eager to find out.