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My Non-Traditional Path to Engineering Success
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.
Jumping into the pool in 2013 – the teaching pool…
For the last four years, colleagues of mine at Cuesta College have been after me to begin teaching part-time as part of their “pool” of instructors. This “pool” is used to fill teaching vacancies for classes that the college either doesn’t have faculty for, or to help when faculty leave, that sort of thing; basically a temporary pool of teachers available to teach a class or two each semester.
I’ve been fighting the urge to take them up on it because I already have so much going on, with a full time job that I enjoy, an energetic and busy family, and, ironically enough, my own pursuit of my Bachelors Degree at Western Governors University…the pursuit of the same degree that I am now going to be teaching parts of to other students looking to achieve the same goal. The irony is not lost on me, but with my industry experience, and my current college credits giving me an “equivalency” to an Associates degree, I actually qualify to teach classes at Cuesta. Seems like my industry experience is finally earning me some value other than my continued employment!
So with that, since I enjoy teaching and mentoring and have always wanted to someday get into it, I’ve been approved as a CIS Pool Instructor. I won’t be teaching my first class until January at the earliest, and it may be the fall in 2013, but it’s definitely something that feels like it will be interesting career wise and a way to see if teaching is something I might actually like. Code Camps and the .NET User Group were always entertaining, and this seems like a logical extension of both of those endeavors, in addition to a logical career extension somewhere way down the line.
Just don’t call me “Professor Hope”!
Why I’m a WGU Student, and Why I Believe in Competency-Based Education
I’m a failure as a traditional college student.
It’s true. I was so burned out at the end of high school, bored out of my head with spending time in a classroom, that even though I was Junior National Honor Society, and was ranked 7th out of a class of 542 in my sophomore year, I spiraled and basically crashed my senior year of high school. I simply could not tolerate another year in the classroom.
So I didn’t go to college and went to work instead.
No less than 4 times I’ve tried to go back to school the traditional way. I can show you the transcripts. Each time, they ended the same way, with me burning out on the overload and the ridiculously boring amount of time I had to spend sitting at a desk. I learn extremely quickly, and I can absorb and articulate back things I learn very quickly. So equally as quickly I would eventually lose interest.
This is by no means a reflection on the students who need to learn that way. I get that other people will learn differently but arrive at the same equally qualified result. But it didn’t work for me at all.
Many times over the last 10 years, as my career has progressed, I’ve often said that if I could find some way to get credit for life experience, or at a minimum “test out” of topics that I already knew, that I would consider going back to school, but without that, I saw no way I would ever go back to school and finish my degree.
Early in 2012, inspired by a colleague of mine who was taking online courses to further her degree in computer science, I started looking around for a way to pursue my degree under the following conditions:
- I could do all course work online
- I could proceed as quickly or as slowly as I needed
- I could “test out” of courses as quickly as possible
- I did not have to spend hours and hours in either a virtual or a brick-and-mortar classroom
Today, I’m a student at Western Governor’s University. I’ve just finished my first 6 month term, and in that 6 months I’ve completed 9 classes and find myself about 18 months short of getting my Bachelors in Software Development.
How is that possible, you ask?
Well, first of all, WGU cares that you know what you say know, not how long it takes you to prove you know it. Out are classroom sessions and lectures and repetitive assignments. In are self-driven curricula and online course materials followed by competency exams or papers / projects demonstrating your understanding of the material. Out are teachers, in are equally qualified course mentors whose job it is to make sure you stay on task and give assistance where needed. The “teachers” instead spend time vetting and perfecting the online curriculum to make sure it meets accreditation standards as well as industry standards.
This link is instructive, talking about how their philosophy is based on something similar to airline pilot training, based on competency, and how it was founded with the backing of 19 state governors who agreed with its philosophy of education.
Note that the university is 15 years old now, and fully accredited. In my IT program, I’ve managed to test out of several courses. And it’s not just traditional “testing out”, either. Since my program is IT, the WGU courses are based on industry certification exams. That means that in order to pass Database Fundamentals, I needed to pass the base level Microsoft Certification for database design.
This resulted in two perhaps counter-intuitive outcomes. First, because it’s a Certification test program, I would argue that you learn more in that class, and because you do earn the Certification, the class carries real weight on your resume. Secondly, because my current job requires me to be an expert on the subject matter anyway, I was able to read the material once and pass the exam. In some classes I’ve been able to take a pre-assessment exam, identify my weaknesses relative to the material, review what I don’t know as well, and take and pass the certification exam in as little as two weeks, studying a couple of hours a night after work and life has calmed down.
Under what circumstances would spending 40 classroom hours to arrive at the same result make sense to a student like me?
Not all of the courses are like that, naturally. My humanities course required me to write a paper comparing periods of art, which were graded by three “graders” against a published rubric covering about 20 different specific points of knowledge. So other courses have their own way of determining competency. But even that class only had two assignments, and I was able to choose when during my term to do the class and turn in the work.
In addition, the cost is so much less than your typical school. Because of WGU’s competency-based online curriculum, they don’t have brick-and-mortar schools or teachers in the traditional sense. This means they can charge a lot less. In fact, my 6 month first term cost me a total of $3,000.
But here’s the kicker. While I must take 12 units, I am allowed to take as many as I can successfully finish, at no additional cost. So I spent $3,000 for 6 months, and finished 27 units. Let’s do the math, shall we? That’s $111 per unit, or $333 per class. My pace is completely at my discretion and control, and the quicker I can finish, the cheaper my education will be.
But that doesn’t even begin to factor the opportunity cost savings of not having to spend over 500 hours in a classroom over that 6 months. I was able to do the work at my pace, at my discretion, and accelerate or decelerate my pace at will. I saved a massive amount of time relative to traditional education for sure.
WGU also has a very lenient transfer policy, and transferred in 11 of my previous classes, even though some of them I had taken as long as 20 years ago.
Many argue that this philosophy violates the “college experience”. You know, where you learn to interact with your peers, achieve greater socialization, and all that. That’s great for a lot of people, and I’m sure people who want to go through that do well. Members of my family have gone through the traditional college experience and are fantastic at what they do.
But for me, at my age (and even when I was in my 20s), as a driven, self-motivated individual, what I really want at the end of the day is proof that I can do the job I’m trained to do. The social aspect of that learning is much less important.
The end result is that I have found the school I was looking for and for the first time I can see an affordable, reachable goal of a Bachelor’s degree…and in addition I’ll have 18 industry certifications on my resume to prove my competency. And trust me, competency is what really matters to my employer.
For more information, visit:
Western Governors graduates those who prove ‘competency’
Western Governor’s University
Be welcome and true.
Rob Hope 