I was born and raised in Tennessee.\u00a0 Don\u2019t bother asking which city, because there really wasn\u2019t one, but I still consider Tennessee to be my main home even though I have been away for 15 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I was 14, I took a drafting class because my high school required me to take a vocational course.\u00a0 To my amazement, I loved it!\u00a0 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.\u00a0 As a result, I wound up taking drafting every year in high school and eventually won three state titles in individual competitions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My enthusiasm for drafting led me to study mechanical engineering, which I also thoroughly enjoyed.\u00a0 I had every intention of working as a mechanical engineer, but while I was in school a new contraption called the \u201cWorld Wide Web\u201d made its debut.\u00a0 (Spoiler alert\u2026 it turned out to be a hit!)\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.\u00a0 However, after 4 promotions in 18 months, gainful employment had found me.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.\u00a0 Although less satisfying, this actually proved to be considerably more lucrative than building it had been.\u00a0 (I also wound up inadvertently setting a personal record by visiting 41 US states in 40 days while we were consolidating assets).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After that, I continued working on one short-term project after another for a few years.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I agreed, but wound up staying more than 5 years.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It was also during my tenure in Ukraine that I began studying Finance seriously.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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., \u201ccountry house\u201d) outside of Kyiv.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In that role I mostly coordinated construction, conveyors, racking, robots and so forth.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.\u00a0 I informed him that if I was doing anything that I could possibly anticipate at the time, I would be sorely disappointed.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 As I move towards software projects, I believe I am likely to repeat this feat.\u00a0 Advanced skills in computing can be a passport to virtually any domain imaginable. \u00a0Energy projects, economics, robotics\u2026 once again I have no idea what projects I may be working on in 10 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But I\u2019m eager to find out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was born and raised in Tennessee.\u00a0 Don\u2019t bother asking which city, because there really wasn\u2019t 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11946,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/carltjoh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/carltjoh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/carltjoh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/carltjoh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11946"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/carltjoh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/carltjoh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/carltjoh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions\/10"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/carltjoh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/carltjoh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/carltjoh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}