It has been nearly 15 years since I last time changed my employer (my whole employment history can be seen on LinkedIn). I must admit, that I really do not remember much how I felt at that time. But I know that it was exciting, as it is now. Now it is again time to make next step in my career and go on.
My beginnings at the bank…
What I do remember is, how the infrastructure looked like, when I joined the bank. This was the time, when servers were 10U high and I could count all servers in the rack on fingers of one hand. Servers at that time had only one core and amount of RAM was measured in single digit GB. I think I can easily say, that those servers were about as powerful as mobile phones, that you are carrying in your pocket right now (if not even less).
Those were also the times, when day started much slower as today, even though I have to admit, that emergencies in infrastructure were part of daily routine. (With smile on my face…) I remember regular morning mails “Due to delayed night operation procedures and consequently delayed SQL calculating jobs, network drives will not be accessible till 11AM.”. Funny though, nobody complained very much. I cannot imagine, what kind of escalations this would cause today…
However, it was not all so bad and if nothing else, then this was opportunity for me to build infrastructure more or less from scratch. I did not do this alone, of course. I was just one player in this team efforts.
…and other tasks
One of the first bigger projects for me was to replace frame relay network with, at that time just fresh of the shelves, MPLS. I remember approaching local telecom with MPLS idea and they told me, that they are not so far yet. We implemented MPLS in course of several months with a great success (8x the bandwidth, much easier use with IP network through and through, keeping the same costs and with skyrocketing branch user experience). Unfortunately MPLS was also not known in our banking group and I was the first to implement it. This caused a lot of paper work, explaining, negotiation and much more, to convince our owners and peers. But I am proud, that after completing implementation of MPLS into complete local network, MPLS became standard for all banks in the group.
There are many more infrastructure and business projects, where I was either initiator or just a member. One common point of all those projects is, that in each and every one, I learned something new. Let it be about new technology or about proceedings in a bank. I am very thankful to all project and team members, who were working with me, because they helped me grow. They provided me with new knowledge and experience.
Knowledge and experience played very strong role in more than 2 decades of my “dwellings“ in kingdom of ICT 🙂 What made my eyes shine in this time are questions from my colleagues and peers… “how does this work?”… “How did you do this?” … “Can you tell me…?” … “I was thinking of enhancing this service in a such way… What do you think?”. Those questions and challenges are like oil on my fire of sharing knowledge and helping colleagues to grow. This also pushed me to participate on many community meetings as a presenter.
Let this be enough for this monologue 🙂
I just want to say… I am, what I am, because of my previous employers, my team mates, peers and of course because of my family. They were always supportive and understanding for my eagerness to know something more.
This makes me who I am right now, and next step in my professional live is even even upgrading all this and giving me opportunity to share all with much wider audience. Stay tuned and in the mean time…
One thought on “Time to “go on””