I am decidedly not as pessimistic as some people here. Why? Because I am a geek in the middle of geektown. I didn't get here by privilege, formal education or speculative investments. I got here with passion, curiosity, sobriety and luck. But I am not alone. I want to tell some people here that all is NOT lost and we are NOT in a cycle of irrevocable failure on our way to living on cat food in bomb shelters.
I was raised in a baby boom family of 8 kids in Santa Barbara, California. My father was a pharmaceutical salesman and my mother stayed at home. They divorced when I was 13, and when my mom remarried, it was to an engineer and consultant for various defense contractors. We moved a lot to follow his work, making our way from Southern California to New Jersey, New York and even Rome, Italy for a few years.
When I graduated from high school in 1981 I moved to Los Angeles to ostensibly go to school and start my adult life. My parents provided no regular financial support to any of us at this point. I knew a lot of kids whose parents were paying their rent, tuition and car payments, but that wasn't what my parents did. I lived with my older brother in UCLA off-campus housing until my partying ways got me booted out of both school and the housing.
I eventually found a job working as a security guard at a local business park and I did that for several years. During this time I became interested in robotics (I was always kind of a geek) and decided to take some engineering classes at a junior college. I managed to get through a few drafting courses, and found a job drawing circuit diagrams for the service manuals of a local ham radio company. I found that I had a real aptitude for the technical writing and production part of the process, and I eventually took more of the responsibility for the creation of the service manuals.
It was also around this time that I encountered my first computer (this was about 1984 or so). It was an old Kaypro that had a fold down keyboard and about a 5' screen, but I loved it. I begged my boss to let met use it to do the "typing" part of the manuals. When he saw how easily I could create documents using Wordstar (ah the joy) he let me play more and more with the computer.
Its a much longer story at this point... but I eventually found my way to the Manufacturing Engineering department of Hughes Aircraft Company, where I was tagged quickly as "the computer guy" and became proficient in more than just little Kaypros... I installed PCs, Macs (yes we had those) and eventually a real 32-bit workstation (The Apollo).
All this time, I knew I was hobbled by not having even a bachelor's degree. I saw people around me my own age that had been put through school by their parents, making more money than me as the coveted MTS (Member of Technical Staff) titles were doled out. But I kept teaching myself about computers and I found a new love in the software world: Databases.
The world we live in runs on databases. Everything, even this diary, is in a database. They are sometimes small, like the ones that live in your cell phone, and sometimes massive, like google or facebook. But I knew early on that data was where the action was going to be if computers kept growing in importance and adoption.
Getting hooked on databases changed my life in ways that I can't even begin to enumerate. As I learned more and more about how computers capture, store, modify and access data, my value increased (as well as my income). All of this was without ever setting foot in a Computer Science class on the subject.
Fast forward to today (because really, you don't want to the hear the tales of my first marriage, divorce, amazing children and legacy of sobriety, at least not in this diary!)... where I now live in Seattle, an work as a Business Intelligence Consultant and Data Architect. No one EVER asks me about college anymore (unless we are talking football), and it hasn't been an impediment to my advancement in many many years.
My job involves helping companies that have huge amounts (and I mean HUGE) amounts of data to understand, analyze and make sense of the information that they collect. The discipline is called Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Data Marts, VLDB (Very Large Data Bases) or a host of other names.
Living here in Seattle, we are blessed with near perfect weather, safe communities and a generally liberal body of politicians (except Dave Reichert... he has to go!).
But one thing I am also blessed with here is work. And I mean WORK. More work opportunities than I can even keep track of. And not just for me. For ANYONE that has even a basic knowledge of database design and the delivery of analytic content based on data, there are more open positions that ANY company can fill. Positions that don't require degrees. Positions for creative people, gearheads and wonks alike. I am contacted DAILY by recruiters and competitors, trying to lure me away to some other company. Having just spent 5 amazing, wonderful years with a great company, I am just this month making the leap to another firm, not for financial gain, but because they have a more interesting technology stack for me to learn.
But EVERY company I have touched in the 15 years that I have been here, has almost ALWAYS been in hire mode. Even during the dot com crash, almost all of my peers and I landed just fine in other companies, even though it looked like catastrophe from the outside. The one statistic that I love to share with young interns and hopefuls is that in 25 years or so of being in the database business, the LONGEST I have ever been unemployed is about 25 minutes. And even then I had an offer letter in my pocket as I sat through the layoff speech that I had seen coming for weeks.
We own a small house on a 100'x135' parcel in an older neighborhood in one of the eastside suburbs. Our house was built in 1969 and we purchased it in 1992 and we have updated the kitchen and remodeled the basement (which we did ourselves).
While our house isn't worth a fortune, it has appreciated to a respectable amount over the long haul (not the short haul.. but I found the peak assessment of $450K absurd at the time and still do), and we are on track to pay it off in about 8 years. We are accumulating a bit of college tuition debt on my smarty pants kids (2 of them) but the interest rate is low, and we are splitting it with them in a sliding percentage (towards THEM) as they move through college.
My wife is employed as a counselor for a healthcare company, and through her diligence at maintaining a network of friends and mentors, she has also maintained almost 100% employment, even through the last several years of recession.
We paid off all our credit card debt a few years ago and got rid of the cards... with today's internet and debit cards, you REALLY don't need a credit card, not even for travel. We have modest retirement savings, not nearly enough probably, but we are slowly working on that too.
Why did I write this diary (other than being up late on coffee and being "between jobs")? Because I want to give people here more than just "we're all going to crash" and "shut down wall street" nonsense. There is GOOD reason for optimism in many parts of the country. There is GOOD reason for optimism in many sectors of the economy. There are skills that you can learn TODAY that are viable, needed and marketable.
Do we need to be vigilant and progressive? Hell yes. But it requires more than just pointing out how BAD things are for some people. It requires giving people just what the sign said... HOPE. To come here every day and read the "sky is falling" diaries depresses the ever loving crap out of me... so I just wanted to tell my story and give maybe even one person some inspiration to explore something that has brought me security, happiness and yes, hope for our economy and nation. Especially during these objectively difficult times.
If ANYONE wants to talk about this field, what to do to get more connected to it... where to learn... or even just to tell me to blow my sunshine up someone else's ass, I am happy to contribute more, or even STFU, as the comments will dictate.
Peace.