Getting to New York

10 Mar 2010

A number of people have asked me how in the world I ended up in New York City. Here is the story, to the best of my memory. The entire series of events takes place over three or four weeks, so I will break it up into multiple parts.

Part I. The Call

I had been consulting for right about a year and a half, and things were looking pretty good. Chris and I, under the company name of Gestault Solutions, had managed to architect and implement a complete resource scheduling system for outpatient healthcare centers. We were not without the help and business guidance of Randall, who is perhaps one of the most intelligent and honorable businessmen I will ever meet.  I’ll be the first to admit, it was an incredible undertaking for such a small team in such a short time, and I while I may wince at a few spots in the codebase, I’m proud to have worked with Chris and Randall on it.

Of course, every company has problems, and while ours weren’t so much in the codebase, but in those pesky people we call “clients,” who seem to be the most disorganized and incoherent bunch of people under a roof. I really hate business politics. Our main client, to whom we were very dependent upon for revenue decided that they wanted to fork our legacy product, iOrder, and use their staff to continue incremental feature improvements on it. We had concluded several months earlier that while iOrder was doing very well for when it was written and the circumstances thereof, that it was outdated and had several architectural flaws that hampered further development. Fortunately, Chris and I were both very adept at the suite of new .NET technologies, notably WPF and very quickly WCF, so we were able to leverage both of those frameworks to get well-designed software out the door orders of magnitude faster than teams using older technologies.

Our client’s team was expecting to make a release in September of 2009 with a pittance of feature improvements. Since we were brought on to help their team transition, we had a good idea of how things were progressing, and it was our professional opinions at the time that their chances of success were slim to none, based on the skill sets of their developers and architectural choices. It’s worth pointing out that these guys were accustomed to maintaining software, making tweaks and small changes and this was new development, which requires a whole different set of skills. It may not surprise you then that as of this writing, they still haven’t finished their handful of upgrades.

Around the same time as the client’s stated release date, we were testing our completely new WPF user interface with a good bit of success. There were some initial bugs, but that’s to be expected. Despite having blown their own release date and given the opportunity to ditch their ailing project and purchase our finished one, our client (if you could call them that at this point) decided to persist with their team with a slightly revised schedule. I’m not sure how many deadlines they had, but they are now aiming for a June 2010 release. From what I’ve seen, a pig with a model rocket strapped to its back has a better chance of getting off the ground.

We continued working on our project, albeit at a lower rate through the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010, but it was looking like we were not going to pick up again anytime soon. Randall had found a second client to bring onboard, but they weren’t in a hurry to do anything either. I had just graduated in December and was looking to kick off my career, but every week things became a bit grimmer, despite Randall’s best efforts to show our main client reason.

I wasn’t really worried until Chris started interviewing. That was when I got my résumé in order and started making phone calls. The job market wasn’t looking very interesting to me; there was a lot of web work, internal management systems, so forth and so on, but very little WPF work or companies on the cutting edge looking for employees. I was also looking for a senior position, which may seem a bit audacious for my age and credentials, but I was more than willing to prove to anybody that I wasn’t wasting their time with my job application. A recruiter called me and introduced me to a particular FedEx/Kinkos project designing some kiosk interface with a bunch of contracted developers. I was pretty skeptical, since without strong project leadership, success becomes a fleeting goal, and I’d hate to have my name pinned to a failed project, even if it wasn’t my fault.

On Friday, 5 January, I was called by a guy who introduced himself as Ryan Elberg from Lab49, a software consulting company. He noted, “I saw your résumé on Dice and that you were available for relocation.”

“Depends on the job,” I quickly replied. “Where are you located?”

“New York. Are you interested?”

I had marked the “Available for Relocation” checkbox on Dice, the monster.com of IT, in case a company in Houston, Austin, or San Antonio was looking for a programmer.

Not really knowing what to say, I went with my previous remark, “Depends on the job. Which part of New York?” It could have been Albany, for all I knew.

“Downtown New York City.”

At this point I was just stalling for time. I had no real intention of moving to New York, but there are a lot of premier software companies in NYC, so why waste a good job opportunity? I quickly decided that I’d go through the interview process, which would surely include a face-to-face interview, at which time I could decide whether I wanted to be there or not.

Ryan asked me when I would be available for a quick pre-screening test. I told him I was ready immediately, so he commenced with a little multiple choice test over the phone. Apparently, I did quite well, so he set up another phone interview with a developer named Nick for the following Monday.

After I hung up, I couldn’t help but feel a bit exhilarated. It’s not everyday people quiz me on CLR garbage collection and such. At the same time, I was filled with dread toward to idea of leaving my friends and family behind in my beloved Texas, a bastion of freedom and conservativism, for New York, a place with neither family nor friends, except my Uncle far upstate in Rome. And New York City was recently in the news for Mayor Bloomberg’s thoughts on how someone with a concealed handgun license could shoot up a movie theater. Not exactly the kind of rhetoric I was accustomed to in Texas.

I decided to procrastinate on figuring out what I wanted to do. Being fresh out of college, I was an expert at putting things off until later. Maybe something would happen along the interview process where I could find an out and not end up moving. It’d be interesting to say that someone called me from New York thinking I’d be great for their team, but I turned them down because they didn’t have it together.

I was in for a surprise.

Continued in Part II.