Last modified: Fri Sep 9 00:47:18 EDT 2005

My Career

"My Career." Sounds pretty snazzy, eh? Well, the truth is that I got lucky; in my freshman year of college I stumbled onto computers, discovered I liked them, and the rest is history. For the past 25 years or so I've been privileged to have work that I usually, more-or-less, like doing.

My current work

I now work for IBM in Westborough, MA. I left BCDSP in the summer of 2004, took a month off to do some hiking, and then started at what was then Ascential Software. IBM bought Ascential in May 2005. So there I am.

The recent past

From January 2000 through June 2004 I was at the Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program (BCDSP). No, we're not narcs; we're a small research group affiliated with the Boston University School of Medicine . In a nutshell, they study prescription drug side effects.

My role at BCDSP was twofold:

  1. The research staff provided me with "data requests", which asked me to identify the patients in the database who meet certain selection criteria regarding medical history (diagnoses, drug use), age, sex, etc. Once these patients have been identified, they are often "matched" to patients with similar histories, who act as controls for the study. Then I would produce a file that provided detailed attributes for all of the patients: drug use, age, sex, height, weight, smoking history, etc. This work is BCDSP's bread and butter.

    The database is actually a collection of flat files implementing a hierarchical data structure with patients as its focus; each patient has an associated set of prescriptions, diagnoses, test results, vaccinations, etc. The flat file structure is very dense; I did some experiments with loading this data into a relational database, and the files grew in size by about an order of magnitude. BCDSP "queries" this database with custom programs (I used C++). It all sounds rather barbaric, but it's amazingly efficient, both in terms of computer resources and programmer time.

  2. I also did all of the routine maintenance that any small network of PCs requires: installation of software and patches, fixing things that break (such as printing, a perennial favorite...), dealing with network issues (such as our DSL connection, Samba servers, etc.), backup and the like.

Where I've been

I try to keep my resume reasonably current; that will give you a quick overview, if you want one. Generally, though, I divide my career (so far) into four phases:
  1. Business data processing
    When I first left college in 1975 I went to work for Orange County Public Schools in Orlando, Florida. Initially I worked for the school board's research department, doing work amazingly similar to what I do now, but with student records, not medical data. I moved from there into the application programming department (think COBOL), and eventually wound up doing what was then termed "systems programming" for the school board's IBM mainframe system, running OS/VS1. Basically, it was system administration: installing software and patches, defining backup/restore procedures, performance tuning, capacity planning, etc.

    I stayed with this for the next ten years, working at a variety of organizations in Orlando, New York City and Chicago. Eventually I wound up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at a small compiler company called Intermetrics. I was hired to do systems programming for the IBM 4341 they had, but I eventually wound up working with the compiler group, and thus began the next phase...

  2. Software development
    At Intermetrics I found myself at the heart of the company's business - writing software for sale to customers. This changed the entire nature of my work; instead of being part of an unavoidable, if critical, cost center, just a part of the overhead, I was now working on the company's product. I imagine it's not unlike the difference between being an anaesthesiologist and a surgeon. In any case, I loved it.

    I worked for a number of interesting and, for the most part, ephemeral companies in the Boston area: Intermetrics (now a small part of The Titan Corporation), Encore (essentially dead), Thinking Machines (really dead) and Torrent Systems (eaten by Ascential Software). I learned Unix, C++, networking and all sorts of other neat stuff. I worked my butt off; mostly it was fun, but the long hours eventually got to me (and my family...).

  3. Consulting
    In late 1998 I left Torrent; I spent the next two years trying to make my way as a consultant. My only major client was Torrent; I taught training classes to their customers (which I discovered I was good at, and really enjoyed) and did special projects that they didn't have the staff to do internally (including a port of the 32-bit Orchestrate system to a 64-bit Unix). I also spent a lot of time with my family.

    By late 1999 it was clear that this wasn't a viable long-term option. I just wasn't up to marketing myself. At this point my long-time friend, Sue Jick, suggested I come and work at BCDSP.

  4. Chief cook and bottle washer
    This brings me up to my current job at BCDSP, where I do a little bit of everything. In some ways its remarkably like my first post-college job at the Orange Country research department: I go get data for the research staff, and I do whatever other random computer work needs to be done.

What's next?

Good question.

There are many attractive aspects to my work at BCDSP: the work itself is socially relevant (a rare thing, in my experience...), the people I work with are nice, the hours are relatively relaxed (especially when compared to the pressure cooker of start-ups).

But, from a technical perspective, the work isn't all that challenging. At some point, I'm sure I'll want to move on to something else. What?

Well, I've been having great fun fooling around with digital media (such as this web site). "Content creation" is very gratifying (and harder than I expected it to be).

Then again, maybe it's time for something completely different. Backcountry ski guide? Aid to a politician? Teacher? Who knows?

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