Dataprise - Amid Taller Weeds

At a particularly low moment, I found myself looking online for comparisons of job markets in different metro areas. I found one with ratios of applicants to jobs, not specific to types of jobs.

Los Angeles was 8:1.
Detroit was 16:1
San Francisco wasn't bad. But it was expensive.

But...
Baltimore was 1:1
D.C. was 1:1

No one else was better than 2:1. Most were 4:1 and worse.

It was Friday evening. Rather than post to area jobs, I applied to jobs near D.C. By Monday morning I had four call backs, two of which turned into solid offers. I had another offer that emerged from a callback days later but I got red flags.

I accepted Dataprise's offer. The recruiter I spoke with was average. The engineer who phone screened me was exceptional. He asked very tough questions. It was to-date the hardest interview of my life. He got more into detail on Cisco ASAs than I had been, despite everything I had done at UCLA. Enterprise firewall configurations are very different from the myriad of permutations used in small businesses. I configured a VPN but after than never touched it. Most things, once configured, sat like that. If it worked, I never thought much about the why or how. I thought I knew what I was doing because I had set it up. These questions told me otherwise.

But I passed. They made an acceptable offer that was something like 15% up from my modest salary. I accepted.

There was still an outside chance that, once in Maryland, I would have a face-to-face conversation with the other interested company and they would make an offer and I might go for that. But after the interview I felt Dataprise would get me deeper in the weeds.

I won't say too much about Dataprise. I lasted from Oct 2009 to about April 2010.

I started as one of three network-focused engineers supporting about 100 Windows and VMWare engineers. Because none of them knew networking we functioned as Tier-III, the rock stars called in when nothing else worked. And we fixed the problem. And few knew how relatively simple much of it was compared to their miseries. We came in and fixed, then on to the next one.

One week after my arrival, the first engineer who was to train me was fired. My boss was careful how he told me, fearing I would wonder who was next. I didn't feel bad. I thought the guy was not terribly diligent. A month later the really smart engineer who'd interviewed me was picked up by Amazon and he moved away. So it was just me supporting the mighty 100. They didn't add another network engineer until they had to replace me.

I had a few regular clients which I supported mostly for networking, sometimes for systems. I didn't enjoy the systems part much. Occasionally I was thrown into a situation where I absolutely didn't know the problem or the fix. I struggled with wireless, never having dealt with it. When the company asked me to fix their Norton antivirus, I had no clue (nor any interest).

I learned a lot. I maintain now that for a young engineer needing experience, go work for one of these consulting companies. They will run you ragged. They will use a number of minimal incentives to effectively get you to donate your time (instead of using overtime). And I suspect a good portion of the profits depend on getting engineers to work over time for less stellar incentives. And the small customers that get only a portion of your time are very exacting about the money they spend. They demand results and you need to give it to them. And many of your managers will be promoted engineers with little management ability who may make your clients and you very unhappy. And a host of other problems. And you'll have to pay nervous attention to your utilization rate (billable vs. total hours clocked). Probably this applies to a number of similar businesses.

But I don't feel bad. The engineers Dataprise hires are very good. Some managers were good. If you don't want to work later, you can probably get out of that.

The experience for me was phenomenal. Having to work with multiple clients per day means multiple problems per day. Every one is different. You need to get on-site, assess the situation, fix their problem, get out. You will encounter unhappy clients and develop people skills to manage them, then fix their problem and try to leave them less unhappy or even happy. I became sharper than I'd been at any moment prior. I knew my limited scope of Cisco work backwards and forwards.

And they ran me ragged. Some days were work from home days. But the girl in charge of scheduling me would generate my schedule the same day or night before. I never knew where I was going I  advance sometimes. I used to joke with friends that they had me in Leesburg (VA) in the morning and Baltimore (MD) in the afternoon. Then it happened. One night I had a 3 hour evening commute from home in Maryland during rush hour for emergency work in Alexandria (VA). I returned after 2am. Another trip home from the Equinix datacenter near Herndon got me home later than that.

I saw a lot of problems in the company, but it wasn't all bad. Whatever they've done, some of it they did right since they've apparently bought a brand new headquarters and tripled in size since 2010 when I left.

They have (or had) high turnover. (Where they can staff one engineer on-site permanently, I expect the turnover is much less -- this is where you want to go in this business, where the profit is). A lot of people I knew burned out. Other staffing companies generally agreed that an engineer coming from Dataprise was likely to be first rate. That's something.

I posted resumes. I got interviews with a large financial firm based north of Baltimore and a government contract out of Arlington. I turned down the financial firm after their abyssmal interview and accepted the Arlington job after a terrific one.

And that was that.