Rob Hope

I’ve been in this industry for a long time. If you had asked me 25 years ago if I would have imagined being in my current role in this industry, with the success I’ve had, I’m not sure I would have believed it. At that time I was working as a pharmacy technician, thinking of becoming a pharmacist (and giving that 6-figure pharmacy education requirement a skeptical side-eye), playing bass in the Boston club circuit, and wondering what I was going to do with my life. At the time I had just a smattering of college classes to my name, and no degree.

Getting Started

I eventually took a customer support job with a new electronics company called VideoGuide, taking calls in support of an early iteration of the integrated channel guides we all use today. It was a separate machine, with infrared transmitters hanging off of it to remote control TV and cable boxes. It was cutting edge back in the day, and a nice shift from public, in-person customer service to phone-based customer service.

I quickly got promoted to the technical help desk, and that was my first exposure to programming. The tech support team was busy crafting the company’s first website, and in between calls I played with Unix shell programming and HTML. I realized pretty quickly that I had an acumen for technology, but I did not have a computer science degree, and was not in a position to pursue one. I then spent time working in customer support for technical companies.

A couple of years later, in California, I signed on with a real estate listing service startup called PropertyFirst. The company had just received major funding and was looking to build a technical support team as it rolled out its desktop software. I was hired to be the lead technical support person. I told the hiring manager, and my manager after I started, that I wanted to be an engineer one day, and I’d join them with the understanding that if I wasn’t doing engineering work after a year, I would move on.

The help desk did not have any software or systems. At all. Nothing to manage customer data, nothing to provide information for call resolution. Nothing. On top of that, as a just-funded startup, the engineering team did not have the resources to build it, as they were already overloaded trying to get features out and manage what software they’d launched at that point.

So I wrote it. I cracked books at night, and between every call I took, I wrote software. We need something to look up customer information? I wrote it. We need something to automate a data change? I wrote it. We need reporting on something? I wrote it. The application, called “WorkCenter”, would eventually transition from desktop to web and become a staple of the company’s customer support processes for years.

And after seven months of proving myself, I landed that position on the engineering team, through hard work, intelligence, hustle, and customer obsession. PropertyFirst would merge with LoopNet, and I would eventually make my way up to what would today be a Principal Engineer or Principal Architect. My work directly led to the successful IPO of LoopNet and its eventual acquisition by CoStar Group.

Reason To Degree

I’ve written previously about my college experience at WGU. I’ve recently gone back and enrolled in a standalone class as I consider whether or not I want to pursue my Masters, and I’m not entirely sold on them again. We’ll see how I feel after the class is over.

What’s important here is the motivation for me to get my degree. I was 12 years into my technical career, and 3 years into my management career, and I was at a crossroads where I wasn’t sure what I was going to do next. I thought of a close friend of mine, who started at PropertyFirst when I did, and was also a technical manager at LoopNet. We built amazing things together, and had both advanced to senior technical manager roles at the company after years of service. I came to the realization that if the two of us were up for a position, we were essentially the same person on paper, with one exception: the degree. With WGU now an option so that I could go to class on my own terms, the decision to get my degree became an easy one.

I strongly believe I would not be the person and leader I am today if I had been professionally educated from the start, as too many of my strengths are built from doing the work, not from school. But I also believe that getting the degree led to my opportunity at Amazon, and to where I am now. A circuitous route to be sure, but a successful route to date.

The Consequences

I remember in my early days, as I worked up to positions as a technical leader, constantly battling imposter syndrome as I led meetings with engineers who were all more educated than I was. I spoke the language differently, and I conceptualized technology differently. I had to work hard to earn trust.

We were solving problems with no solutions as well, as we were ahead of technology for features like full text searching. That led to lessons learned and perspectives that didn’t always align with the overall industry. I remember very clearly an interview with an engineer that worked for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was applying for a position at LoopNet. They brought years of education and experience, but were focused on industry patterns and practices documented by Microsoft. We had already bypassed several of those in favor of our own solutions, and the lack of alignment from a technical perspective was palpable during the interview conversation.

It’s taken years for me to become comfortable with what I’ve learned and what I know enough that I feel my technical perspectives have value. My non-traditional, online degree did not necessarily help me with this. The best thing was my experience at Amazon. On my first day someone said to me, “This is the place where smart people come to feel stupid”, and while I never felt stupid, my ability to learn and eventually provide constructive feedback to senior Amazon engineers eventually helped me accept my own perspectives.

I still feel the absence of a full computer science degree on occasion. Recent interview forays into code challenges expose my inability to write a binary search tree or a linked list. It doesn’t mean I can’t problem solve, but I’ve never once in my lifetime had to write something like this, so LeetCode style exercises still frustrate me. There are certainly times at higher levels of scale, where performance becomes critically important, that I sometimes feel I lack historical context, or miss points others might take for granted. I tend to blame the gaps in my education, but in reality that might not be the case. It hasn’t hindered my progress from a practical standpoint, but it does make my imposter syndrome ramp up a bit.

That said, when you combine my unorthodox background with a willingness to learn, a desire to deliver, and a logical and linear problem solving approach, and then put that with all of the early projects I built that resulted in features we would take for granted today, I would argue my unique background has been a key component of my success, not only as a technician, but as someone open to new ideas, to mentoring others who came from similar backgrounds, and to thinking outside the box to solve problems.