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Career Phases Joseph
Ellsworth
My career has
had 4 distinct phases. Each of these has contributed to my ability to do my
current job. They are listed most current first.
My time at
Hewlett Packard.: I came to HP as
a consultant working out of their
You could say I
went to a Hewlett Packard to learn to compromise. I have learned the value of
compromise as a negotiation technique and I think I have gotten pretty good at
it. I will not compromise my personal ethics or my goals although I have found
that as I have risen through HP that my goals have shifted from a small
business / consulting world view to being #2 in a mid sized business.
I have a
reasonable promotion record in HP, which means they must like me. I started 4
years ago as a consultant ended up managing a team of engineers as a consultant
for a year with stellar success, I did this for about
1.5 years. I Hired on as a manager, when my 2 year
consulting limit was approaching. Received a promotion to a first level section
manager in 1 year. Received a promotion to second level section manager in one
more year and I am sitting pretty good for another promotion if we are successful
over the next six months. In addition to that I introduced the WEB and
E-Business to CSO. Delivered our (SSO) Single Sign On technology which has
grown corporate wide and now I own 1/2 of the E-Speak e-services technical
development team. In 1999 HP invested many millions in marketing E-Services so
I figure my work is important to the company. Oh and in my spare time I wrote a
HP Linux business plan of which parts are now being executed by BCC. I also
conceived, introduced and kicked off the HP - O'Reilly partnership for open
source development "Open Source Exchange" although I originally named
it "Open Awards"
Personally I
find it satisfying that when I left my last team behind within 6 months all of
the managers I liked and respected and most of the good technical people had at
their initiation ended up working for me again. One of these I have
rehabilitated from a dead end position who was ready
to leave HP into a manager who is now respected throughout HP.
I am at H.P. on
a 5 year plan of which I am just finishing the 3rd. We are in the process of
creating the e-services business and I expect to be able to jump out in to a
V.P or CTO of a smaller company with mega-stock options within 2 years. This is
dependent on being successful in creating the new niche continuing to own a
fraction of that niche. You never know but I may even rise high enough in HP
that I don't have to go to the outside in order to get sufficient financial
rewards.
Consulting
Hired Expert: During the latter
half of 1989 I was able to parlay my significant Object Oriented experience in
to a career consulting for large corporate clients. I had become an expert in
Object Pascal, C++, Smalltalk during the time I was self employed I had also
been following the early OOA, OOD work and had as good of a working knowledge
of that as anybody in the business at that time. I specialized in two types of
clients. A) Those that where just starting in to Object Oriented client server
projects. B) Those that where a year or more in and had hit problems that had
put their projects in jeopardy and needed a GURU to bail them out or help them
kill will as little pain as possible. I worked on behalf of many top companies
during this time including Northern Telecom, Sprint, NCS, Anderson, DEC,
Systems House and HP. I learned a lot about getting along from inside of a
company during this period and I learned a lot about those political aspects of
software that I had avoided up until that point in my career. I was happy as a
consultant and I made a lot of money. I was able to take 3 months a year off
and could generally get my clients to pay to fly me home to see my kids every
other weekend. The only problem with consulting is that I didn't get to have
has much influence over the complete life cycle of the product as I would like
and you never get the credit for what you have built. I believe I was pretty
successful since when I left consulting I was in the top 4% of the highest paid
consultants in
Training
& Learning.: During college
and for the first two years after I worked as a troubleshooter for a small
computer store. When the customers of the store started threatening lawsuits I
was called in to smooth things out and figure out how much we would have to
give the customer in order to avoid lawsuits. In some instances I would either
fix or write software to help solve their problems but it was just as likely
that we would sell them a different kind of hard disk or donate some training.
I learned a lot about how to deal with upset people during this phase. I also
spent a year at NASA where I worked in flight data acquisition.
Self employed
(more learning): I started my own business when I left NASA. This was pretty
much a desperation affair because I had moved from