From Computer Repairman to Data Scientist

Having just turned 40 and mentoring several young professionals, I started to reflect on my career. Having a high-school diploma, no college degree, coming from a coal mining family in Appalachia to working as a data scientist at Microsoft was a crazy journey and the lessons learned along the way have helped several of my mentees in their own careers. So I figured I'd share with the world and if it helps motivate just one person, then it was worth my time. I'm going to try not to write a book here (although, thinking about it, it might make a good read), so we'll see how concise I can be.

Early Beginnings

I grew up in a small town, graduated with a class of only 36 students just to give you an idea of how small. My family were coal miners, going back generations. When I was 8, I wanted a computer and on a coal miner's salary, my dad bought a Tandy 1000 from Radio Shack. Looking back, that was a huge sum of money for my parents, but that one sacrifice they made shaped my entire future. The time on the computer was always Jan 1, 1980 because the time chip was an extra $300+ and the computer only had 512kb of RAM. My first experience beyond playing games and using the paint app came when I bought a game for it that required 640KB of RAM and the game crashed with a glorious display of hexadecimal code and letters/symbols. I started figuring out that those hex numbers correlated with the words on the other side of the screen and realized there was more to this beige box. I wanted to know more, I wanted to know how to make it work.

Even though my high school was small, we did have a few computers and I was fortunate enough to have access to them from 8th grade on. I had a BASIC class and started competing in competitions thanks to one teacher that saw my potential. Over the next 5 years I would immerse myself in anything and everything I could find about programming, learning Pascal, C++, web development, even Assembly language. I saw (and still see) computer programming as part art, part engineering, and part science. Maybe it was a benefit of going to a small school, but I had unlimited access to our computer lab because one teacher saw something special and encouraged me.

Early Career

I graduated high school and didn't quite know what I wanted to do. I felt like I was already burned out from spending so much time in school computer programming, winning medals & trophies and being an admin for our school's newly purchased computers. But I also knew that I was good at it and I loved the art/science of building something from nothing; taking an empty file, writing code, watching the compiler run, and seeing a functional program running that didn't exist before. So I decided I was going to get some certifications and start working. After getting my MCSE in Windows NT & Windows 2000 along with my A+ certification, a door opened for a computer repair job. I jumped on it! That first job paid $11/hr. While spending time tearing apart and repairing computer internals, I was still programming, building Linux kernels, and reading anything/everything I could get my hands on.

After 6 months I landed a gig as a system administrator\help desk support. While on that job, I started working with a developer that was looking to automate the installation of software across our network. I jumped in and started coding. My manager recognized that not only was I good, but I was also fast. He gave me the role of building more and more automated systems. Every piece of software that our employees had, we built a no-touch, automated way to push the installations to their desktops. After 4 years, I saw a job posting for a full-time developer in New Jersey to automate software installations. It paid over 2x what I was making. I interviewed and got the job. My new manager gave me tons of opportunities, including leading a small team as we got our entire codebase moved to the web and even more automated. That one manager took a chance on me, saw potential, and gave me the opportunity to grow.

After getting married, my wife and I decided to move back to Western Pennsylvania to start a family. Now with some solid web development experience, more doors opened up and I was working on some cool web services backed by an Oracle database. However the work environment was caustic and I left in less than a year to work for a local cable company as their C# developer. Most of their code was on mainframes and they wanted to expand their web experience for their customers. And the job came with free cable, phone, and internet. After almost 2 years, I knew I wanted to do more. I had written some cutting edge code and got to work in a myriad of environments. I was 26 and I knew it was time to find a new challenge.

Mid Career & Microsoft

I spoke with a contracting company that really impressed me and would only find jobs in the pay range I wanted. Within weeks they found me a gig building a new web application for a large company in Pittsburgh. It paid 2x again what I was making, so I jumped on it. While there, I jumped in on building some custom interfaces to a new software they had purchased and quickly extended my contract out for another 6 months. We were now able to pay off vehicle loans, student loans, and move into a new townhouse. But as that contract was coming to an end, it was time to decide what to do next. Find another contract gig or take a full-time job somewhere. Fortunately the contracting company I worked with was able to find me something, but it was in Seattle. I had three phone interviews with the company and the interviews were all about how I dealt with data and how I could work with a brand new system that has no documentation. At the end of the last interview, I was in. I asked "Can you tell me the name of the company so that I can do some research on your business before I come out?" The guy on the phone laughed and said, "Yeah, you might have heard of us, we're a small startup called ... Microsoft." So now my wife and I had to make a decision, take a 12-16 week contract where I would be out of town every week on the other side of the country or take a full-time job at a local company. It was one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make since I had an 18 month old kid at home at the time.

I decided to take the contract with Microsoft. I mean, I was a developer and this was Microsoft, how could I not take it. And it was only 12-16 weeks. They were looking for a C# developer to build big data pipelines on their new map-reduce big data system. A few months in, I felt like I was at a crossroad. If I continued with this big data stuff, I would lose my skills as a developer. But I also saw something exciting when working with data measured in terabytes and sometimes petabytes, making code work efficiently. We couldn't just join two tables together (there were no tables), we had to find new novel ways to work with the data, some of which became tools that came to the marketplace. So I decided to stay. I took the chance on something that was taking me away from my comfort zone and made a huge sacrifice of family life, but without that sacrifice I don't know if I ever would have gotten to where I am.

I excelled at the job and before my contract was up, it was extended for another 6 months. I couldn't continue to only be home on the weekends, so we agreed that I would be in Redmond, WA one week and home the next week, splitting my time between coasts. I had no algorithm design background, no data warehousing background, but my manager at Microsoft saw my work and continued to give me more contract work. As my contract ran out, he found another team that needed my skills. There weren't that many people in big data at the time and I had developed a unique set of skills during that first year. I easily bounced from contract to contract at Microsoft for 8+ years. Again, I had one manager take a chance on me, saw that I could quickly learn something new (like bleeding edge new), and gave me the opportunity to continue learning & growing on the job.

During my time working in big data, I was drawn to the handful of data scientists we had on the team (not many people had that title then). I always loved math and saw this as the joining of my skills as a programmer, my experience working with data, and my passion for advanced math. So I slowly started learning more about machine learning, applying what I was learning on side projects at the company and running my results past some more experienced data scientists. I knew what I wanted my future to look like.

Microsoft Data Scientist

After applying for and being turned down from several data science jobs at Microsoft, I finally saw one for a Cloud Solution Architect in Pittsburgh, PA. A big data job for Microsoft in my area, I was dumbstruck. I applied and finally, I had an FTE role at Microsoft, after 8.5 years as a contractor. My role was to talk to customers about Azure, helping them figure out how to get their data into the cloud and how to do data science work. I continued to focus on machine learning. I eventually landed with a manager that got me engaged in public speaking, and quickly was on stage at some of our biggest events like Ignite talking and demoing how to build ML models in Azure. I was asked to travel to the Dominican Republic as a keynote speaking with one of our customers conferences. And I started working with several esteemed universities as a guest lecturer. I never envisioned myself as a public speaker, but one manager saw my presence and opened a new door for me.

My job has evolved to where I focus on data science almost full time now. My career is still evolving and I'm still at Microsoft. I'm still speaking at conferences about data science, machine learning, and now quantum computing. I've had plenty of opportunities and doors open. What lies next is unknown. My advice to new college grads in our family, when they have the notebook to write advice at their grad parties, is always the formula for the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states that it is impossible to measure or calculate exactly, both the position and the momentum of a particle. When applied to life, I tell young adults that the more precisely you know where you are in your career, the less precisely you know where you are going, and the more you know where you are going, the less likely you know where you are in your career. So I know where I am, and I look forward to what is next, even if I don't quite know exactly what that is.

Closing Thoughts

In closing, I hope that my journey can motivate just one person. The "American Dream" is still alive. You can climb that mountain, one step at a time. You CAN change jobs and even careers over time, and excel at them. Regardless of what your degree is in or even if you don't have a degree, grit, hard work, and a learn-it-all attitude will take you on an amazing journey. Enjoy the journey, the twists, the bends, the setbacks, even the sacrifices. You never know when you'll find that one person that gives you an opportunity and opens a new door for you.