From a Farmer's Plight to Silverlight
Welcome to my blog. I'm going to use this first post to explain a few things. While my life's path is one not many have shared, the end of the journey is pretty clear: I am thoroughly enjoying my job as a .NET developer for SRT Solutions. When I first joined the programming community, I'd casually mention my former career to a coworker and I'd wind up slightly embarrassed as they'd inexplicably burst out laughing. I stopped bringing it up and recognized that, to the casual observer, my two careers seemed so far apart. Even comic writers made fun of the disparity.
Today I realize that my past influences who I am and how I work. If it weren’t for some strange twists of fate and many years of hard work, I would be in a very different place right now . . . so sit back for a minute. I’ll tell you the story of how a guy who always saw himself behind the wheel of a tractor somehow found himself firmly planted in front of a computer monitor.
I grew up on a family farm, and for as long as I could remember, that was the life I wanted to live. I finished high school and enrolled in the Institute of Agricultural Technology program at Michigan State University with a major in fruit & vegetable production (don't laugh -- well, okay). For the next 5 years I raised tomatoes, sugar beets, green beans, corn, wheat, and soy beans. Together with my family I raised around 700 acres -- 300 of which was tomatoes (not the kind you put on a sandwich, but the kind you make ketchup and salsa out of). I was always interested in computers. When I was a teenager, I used to sneak onto my brother's DOS computer and play Castle Adventure. When I farmed, I used Lotus 123 to calculate payroll taxes for my 30 seasonal employees and other accounting tasks. Computers were becoming a great tool for farmers.
Unfortunately, mother nature wasn’t so cooperative: two of my first five years happened to see the top two droughts in the past 30 years. In other words, I worked hard and didn’t make any money. Political decisions didn’t help my situation, either. NAFTA all of a sudden made it cheaper for Hunt & Wesson (the only local tomato plant) to haul tomato paste in from Chile than to process tomatoes locally. It was a hard hit for my family. After 30 years of raising tomatoes, we were one of many farms trying to sell a $200,000 tomato harvester and other specialized equipment and get out without losing everything.
I was able to sit down with my dad and brother and work out a deal that allowed them to keep their farms running. Without tomatoes, the number of acres we raised could support two families, but not three. As the youngest contributor and with the least invested, I was no longer a farmer. Newly engaged and hoping I’d someday be able to pay off my remaining debt and start over, I essentially turned in my keys to the John Deere and frantically began trying to figure out what the heck I could do if I wasn’t waking up every day and walking out to the barn.
I found my answer a few months later.
You see, farmers spend a lot of time hauling stuff around in big trucks, so I did have a commercial driver’s license that landed me a job that first winter as a truck driver. It didn't take me long to figure out that the life of a truck driver was not for me. As fate would have it, the trucking company I worked for had just invested in a computerized dispatching system. Nobody knew how to run the thing, though, and since I knew how to turn a computer on and was good with people, they determined I was just the guy they were looking for to run their dispatch operation. I was working with computers all day, but it still wasn't a job I could be happy with long-term. On the advice of wise old truck driver who told me I didn't belong there, I started to look for other options. I spent time that winter watching the software engineer who came in to customize the dispatch system. He’d charge around $300 an hour (I now know he was really ripping them off), and I decided that as long as I was determined to completely start over, I wanted that guy’s job.
Growing (creating) something is very familiar to a farmer. I decided a degree in computer science would let me create things on the computer, but it was a long road. As I planned my wedding, I tried to convince colleges that a history of courses titled “Diesel Engines” and “Weed Management” didn’t mean I wasn’t capable of tackling Calculus IV. I tucked away my Spartan sweatshirt and graciously donned my maize and blue and spent the next four years at the University of Michigan. I continued to pay off farming loans as I accumulated student loans. My first little girl was born three weeks before my final exams. That month, I finished my B.S. in computer science and accepted a job developing computer games. I was in heaven. Life was good.
In an ironic twist, I learned the software engineering profession can also suffer droughts. I entered the .com field just before it crashed. I watched one employer go bankrupt, and at another job I experienced an eerie déjà vu as I spent weeks in Korea retraining my cheaper replacement. Chilean tomato paste, anyone? It’s different now, though, because I have a unique skill set: the fortitude of a farmer and the diverse code-solving skills of a man who wakes up each day excited by every new thing that comes along in this profession. I love what I do; I credit my past for making me the developer I am.
So that’s me. The guy who had a string of bad luck that took him away from something he loved and somehow led him to something he is just as excited about. "Retrain all the farmers as computer programmers!" Count me in. Sometimes you do what you gotta do. And if you’re lucky, sometimes you really like where you end up.