My Techie Timeline

In my career (of >32 years) in the information technology industry, I’ve had a front row seat witnessing the amazing evolution of computing technology.  I've also had an opportunity the lead the transformation with computing technology on many occasions.  Below are just a few reflections of my time from the 1980s to now (2016) - my techie timeline.

• I've connected a telephone handset to a computer coupler to "dial in" to connect to the mainframe computer remotely to work.
• At Texas A&M University, I had the opportunity to flip switches on a historical computer to perform a single arithmetic operation.
• I have punched cards, waiting in line for the card reader and then the program code compile and execution.
• I’ve stood in line at Texas A&M University computer centers during “happy hour” (or worked after midnight, a privilege for grad students) in order to use the computer for free. 
• I learned 14 computer programming languages to be surprised that I'd need 5 more in my job.
• I taught high school math and FORTRAN programming to university undergrad engineers, but later managed training in my company's US data centers and helped define the job roles, skills requirements, and skill development activities for >60K managed operations personnel globally.
• A big  factor in my first job selection was the assignment of my "own" computer
• I've supported software that ran in many operating systems (e.g., MVS, DOS, VTAM, TCAM, VSAM, CICS) and the early PCs (e.g., the IBM XT, the IBM AT).
• I've helped develop and supported software products that shipped on floppy disks.
• My Mom insists on keeping the PCJr that I bought for her, with the sidecars attached to provide 256K in memory.
• I developed online computer-assisted instructional systems before anyone thought of Coursera.
• I created early expert systems before anyone thought of Watson.
• I supported paper-based employee opinion surveys, reading completed paper questionnaires through the Scantron, validating open-end comments manually entered on the computer, and maintaining JCL and code to print millions of pages of reports to deliver to managers.  
• I lead a project to move from paper-based surveys to online surveys in the US in my company,  eventually supporting survey servers and questionnaires on 36 mainframe computers. This work led to my dissertation topic (nonresponse and response effects in online organizational surveys) and (eventually) to a face-to-face interview at corporate headquarters with the company's CIO to win my former job role as  research manager for the Global Employee IT Satisfaction Survey (for 10 years). 
• As a research project manager, I've paid consultants hundreds of thousands of dollars to manually code and to analyze open-end survey comments over a decade. However, I won an internal innovation competition that came with funding to enable me to use text analytics software to eliminate manual coding, reducing the categorization from several weeks to less than an hour.  I now regularly use the software to perform data mining, data cleaning, and identification of insights within multiple types of data (e.g., survey responses, employee social media posts, public social media posts, "jam" or crowdsourcing application posts, online search terms, chat transcripts). 

It's been an amazing journey -- I'm looking forward to enjoying the next eras.

(Image credit:  forrestercomputing.wikispaces.com) 

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