Feedback: Landed the job!

Looked everywhere for an appropriate place to offer feedback, but didn't find anything. But I just want to share my recent success story with everyone as encouragement. I'll make the story short as possible. Let me just preface it with, I'm more of a determined person, than I am a smart person (in my opinion).

Just over 5 years ago, I was scooping popcorn at a concession stand. I had some Helpdesk experience, but couldn't find work. You do what you have to do. Eventually I landed a job at a Radio Shack shortly after. From there I somehow landed a job where I Photoshopped black and white signature images for a company and burned them to memory devices. I got this job because when asked what a DIMM was, I hesitantly stated "memory." That was more than anyone else could do apparently. This job was very mundane, but it helped me get a job in Technical Support for that company over time. Here is where Treehouse came in.

I started noticing some flaws in the way we did things in my Technical Support role, and wanted to learn programming to see if I could improve some processes. I found Treehouse and this is where I dedicated my time. Everything I learned I put into practice. Because I was focused on improving things, they made me the Manager over Technical Support. While in that role, I started building diagnostic tools that simply parsed printer data, and identified key pieces of information in the file so nobody had to manually look through them. Try reading PCL5 printer data, and you will know why I did this. This was a time saver for everyone! After this, I started writing software for everything I could think of! Every single application went right on my resume under an accomplishments section. This was on the heels of someone telling me, "it isn't how many languages you know, but what you've actually written!" That guy was right.

Fast foward to my job interview with a 1 Billion dollar company (took over 2 years of trying to get that interview). I'm showing off all of my applications, and describing what problem they solved. There were 6 back to back interviews that day. After the interviews ended, they wanted to hire me, but had a corporate hiring freeze for auditing purposes; it was a sad day. 8 months later, I gave up on the company. At that time I noticed a programming position in the paper. This was a shock because I live in a smaller area. I interviewed for it, and I got a call back that day! I told someone from the first company that I was offered a position as a programmer elsewhere. To my surprise, they counter offered in that same day! I had two offers in front of me 1) Programmer and 2) Consulting Engineer II. I took the Consulting Engineer II position for the company I had been waiting for. They are a leader in Software Simulation.

Today (2 months into my new role) I'm writing an OS independent python automated install tool for one of their largest applications. Me, the guy who was scooping popcorn 5 years ago, writing an installer for a 1 Billion dollar company. My income went from 8.50 dollars an hour, to 65k annually, in about 5 years. It doesn't matter how "smart" you are, just stay determined. Take breaks, but don't give up, and never chase the wind. And try to never sacrifice the important things in life. For me: God first, people second, things last.

Hope this helps.