I’ve been working in or around IT-related fields since 1997. I got my start working for a friend in his computer retail store.
He’d worked at the local gold mine, and when it closed in 1994, the parent company offered its workers re-training. He chose to learn computers and built that into a business — starting out as a one-man “geek squad,” making house calls as a mobile tech.
Around that time, my father bought our family’s first real PC: a Micron-brand IBM clone running a 486DX4-100. He ran into some trouble with it, and when my friend came by to help, I watched him work through his troubleshooting process and peppered him with questions. “You’re picking this up fast — you’ve got an aptitude for this,” he told me. That one comment more or less signed him up as my mentor for the next several years, teaching me PC hardware, business networking, the internet (still in its public infancy), and everything else technology-related.
Later he turned the mobile business into a brick-and-mortar computer retail and repair shop. I kept after him, hanging around the shop whenever I could, soaking up everything he was patient enough to teach me. Eventually that turned into an actual job running his store — building new PCs, troubleshooting customers’ machines, getting people set up on the internet, and teaching myself whatever else I needed to know.
In ’96–’97, I went to work for a new ISP that had just started up in the area, then later for another one about an hour away in the Central Valley. Both were great learning experiences that got me into web development and hosting.
In ’99, I left my first marriage and moved to Sacramento temporarily to take a course toward an MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer). I was hired almost immediately by a contractor working for a credit-card company, where we were tasked with untangling their “DLL Hell” — some reps had four or five different machines on their desk because the software wouldn’t coexist on a single system. Once we sorted that out, we built a profile-driven, automated desktop build system — based on PXE boot and a FoxPro database — to load and configure everything a rep needed onto a single machine. It was my first real experience with mass desktop management.
After building and testing that system, we traveled to every one of the company’s locations across the country — more than 13,000 users — rolling out the new machines and training reps on how to use them. It was an intense stretch: I was newly separated and threw myself into the work, sometimes 100-hour weeks, with the overtime pay to match. I was eventually hired on as a full-time employee and stayed until 2003, when the stock tanked, the business was sold to WAMU, and IT support was outsourced to a large contractor. I was downsized.
After that I worked a couple of short-term jobs — one at an IT training company doing a lot of cold-calling to recruit students, which I quit once I realized they only wanted me for the phone mill. Then I worked for a small, growing “IT support, planning, and implementation” contracting company — Geek-Squad-style again — owned by a guy I’d worked with at the credit card company.
While there, I reached out to an instructor from the tech school I’d attended, who eventually connected me with people in IT at a large dental insurance company looking for help in their desktop management group. I interviewed, got on as a contractor quickly, and brought my earlier experience to bear — helping them build a network-driven desktop profile/build system to replace the “sneakernet” and hard-drive-imaging process they’d been using. I was hired on as a full-time employee there too, and stayed for almost ten years.
Eventually I landed on a team solving an ever-changing set of business process problems — modifying off-the-shelf software or adapting existing systems to handle new requirements driven by digital transformation, since the business was still largely paper-based. I became friends with someone in their QA group, and in 2009, when he left for Adobe (after a couple of interim jobs), he ended up on the newly acquired EchoSign electronic signature platform team.
He knew my background and thought I’d be a good fit as a Technology Evangelist. He got me to jump ship to Adobe in late 2012, working alongside — and eventually for — him on the EchoSign (now Adobe Sign) product team.
I’ve had a great run at Adobe — one of the best companies I’ve worked for. They treat their employees well and genuinely care about being seen as honest, innovative, ethical, and socially progressive, even while being publicly traded and, like any corporation, beholden to shareholders. Adobe is still a corporation, and that dynamic brings its share of frustrations, but it’s one of the better examples I’ve seen of what a large software company can be. They also have a knack for hiring good people — I’ve had very few issues with management or coworkers here, and when I have, they didn’t last long. The culture just doesn’t leave much room for unethical or unprofessional behavior.
Since joining, I’ve mostly worked with customers and partners on integrations — helping configure our out-of-the-box connectors to things like Microsoft SharePoint, Dynamics, Salesforce, Ariba, ServiceNow, NetSuite, and others, and helping partners build SOAP- and REST-API-based integrations to Adobe Sign as a pre-sales Solutions Consultant.
In 2021 I decided I wanted more of a hand in shaping the direction of the Sign product, so I moved back under my friend, this time in engineering, as a Customer Enablement Engineer. In this role, I’m using eight years of field experience to help refocus product management and engineering around a more customer-centered view, and to keep improving e-signature at Adobe.
If there’s something technology-related I can help you with, drop me a line.