All the Things I’ve Done

I just started my first full time job out of college and I love it. I like being involved with code that is used by millions of people across the globe. And I also like that each paycheck is what my campus developer job paid me in five months. I thought it would be fun to write about the different jobs I had along the way. A resume of sorts, but more fun.

Papa John’s

What: Phone Answerer / Box Folder
When: 2014
Length: 1 month (I think)

My very first job was at the Papa John’s store in Herndon, VA. I was 16 with a new driver’s license and wanted to get rich. I went around to several restaurants that day with resumes in hand and tried to talk the managers into an interview with no luck. When I handed the Papa John’s manager a resume, he invited me back to his office without even looking at it. We didn’t even do an interview, he just started filling out the paperwork for me to start working. I told him I would work whenever he wanted as long as it wasn’t on Sunday and he sent me to the corporate office there for some training. I got a t-shirt, hat, and free pizza at the onboarding meeting. It was everything I ever wanted. Except I was never allowed to make pizza. I was responsible for answering the phones and folding boxes. They used ancient computers that I couldn’t figure out how to use. The kind with just a green and black screen and no mouse. And my boss kept scheduling me for Sundays. I took the first chance I could to quit. I offered two weeks and my boss sent me on my way. I got out before the busiest day of the year, Superbowl Sunday, with more than 600 pizzas in one day.

Jerry’s Subs and Pizza

What: Cook / Delivery Driver
When: 2014
Length: 6 months

I got the call for an interview while ice skating with my friends. I wore dress pants, a white collared shirt, and a tie to the interview. For a job making and delivering sandwiches and pizza. Needless to say, I aced the interview and got the job. I managed to get 25 cents above minimum wage and I would get tips. This place was different in every way from Papa John’s. It was certainly less well known so there were typically only three people working in the store at a time. My boss was great about working with my schedule and I got as many hours as I wanted. I was even allowed to cook. I finally learned how to stretch pizza dough into a pizza shape and wrestled with cooking cheesesteaks on the griddle. My parents were nice enough to let me use their car and gas for work so I actually did quite well for a sixteen year old. Though most of my coworkers were in their twenties I got along great with them. I remember a few asking if I wanted to smoke and drink with them after work when I first started and I declined. I’ve come to appreciate that they didn’t even question my decision or try to convince me otherwise. In fact, as people were hired after me, the original coworkers would stick up for me and get after the new ones that were not as understanding of my choice.

I learned that you should listen to common sense when you’re unsure of how to handle a situation. One particularly busy Saturday, we had a large order that needed cookies and we had no cookies ready. The boss working that day was the kind of boss that didn’t often give direct orders, but when he did you were expected to follow them. He told me to get a batch of cookies in the oven. When they were close to done he handed me the oven mitts and said, “Take these and put them in the freezer so they’ll cool off faster when they come out.” Now, what does “these” and “them” and “they” refer to? Common sense would tell you he meant for the cookies coming out of the oven to go in the freezer. But, he had handed the mitts to me and told me very clearly to put “them” in the freezer. Well, my 16 year old brain decided to put the oven mitts in the freezer and leave the cookies on the counter. A few minutes later we were packing up the order and he went to grab the cookies out of the freezer only to find a pair of frozen mitts. He looked at me, thought for a second, and told me what I had done was too funny to be upset about.

My parents weren’t the biggest fan of my coworkers activities outside of work and how often those activities happened during work. So after six months I was on the job hunt again.

Valvoline Instant Oil Change

What: Technician
When: 2014-2015
Length: 9 months

My brothers worked at JiffyLube in high school and I thought I should follow in their footsteps. I was surprised at the hiring process for this job. I had to take an aptitude test when I applied online, do a phone interview, interview with the store manager, and then one more interview with the area manager. Even though my experience with cars consisted of filling gas tanks and tires they decided to hire me. As this was during my senior year of high school, I thought working on cars made me seem more cool than working fast food. Also, working at a place that closed by 7pm was great for having a social life. My boss and coworkers taught me everything the store offers from changing oil to balancing tires to fixing flats to replacing transmission pans. I could never quite figure out how to change serpentine belts on my own though.

I learned that reading instructions all the way through is generally a good idea before trying something you’re unfamiliar with. One slow day I was hanging out in the office and reading papers hung on the wall. One of them had instructions for how to use the phone. It showed how to use the phone as an intercom and I thought it’d be fun to mess with the people in the bays since no one else knew about this feature. One of the managers was with me and I asked him if he knew about it. He said no and we decided to try it. We got a call from the owner a few minutes later. Instead of broadcasting our voices to the other phones in our shop, it went to all the phones at all of the shops. The owner was furious and I thought he was going to fire me. The manager working at the time thankfully stepped in and took all the blame and said it was his idea. He saved my job.

Larry H. Miller Ford Lincoln Provo

What: Technician
When: 2017-2018
Length: 6 Months

After a two year mission for church, I started college and needed cash. My mom told me plenty of times to get the first job I could find. She reasoned that since there are a lot of college kids looking for jobs the good ones are hard to come by. I was willing to wake up early to do custodial work, but I was also pretty sure I could find a job with the skills I had with cars. I wrote up a fresh resume, printed out a dozen copies, and started making my way around Provo. The managers I talked to were nice enough to say they were impressed with the resume, but it seemed no one was hiring part time. I did manage to get a job at the last place I dropped a resume off at: Larry H. Miller Ford Lincoln Provo.

Walking into the shop for the first time and seeing at least 15 lifts was intimidating. My coworkers were real mechanics who owned their own tools and knew how to rebuild engines. I hadn’t even changed oil in two years. Working at the dealership had more of a corporate feel to it. The company provided lunch on Saturdays, we had team meetings to go over numbers, and even had a Christmas party and got gifts. I got a fishing pole. I don’t like fishing.

I have a clean driving record. I’ve never been pulled over, never gotten a parking ticket, and never been the one driving in an accident. The building was originally a Toyota dealership and was pretty old so the garage was built big enough for small Toyotas, not mammoth size F-350’s. One customer came in with a brand new top of the line F-350 for a routine oil change. I was asked to drive the truck into the garage and scraped the whole side of the truck against the side of the garage door. Everyone heard it and was staring. Fortunately the owner was understanding that accidents happen and the dealership would repair it for free. I thought I would be fired and the repairs would cost everything I had earned up til that point. It also didn’t help that my boss was on vacation. When he came back he came up to me and said he heard I made a $1,300 booboo. He could clearly tell I was not having a good time and said, “You gotta try harder than that to get fired. I’ve done damage twice as bad as that.” After everyone had given me the obligatory grief about wrecking a customer’s vehicle they started to share that they had done the exact same thing or worse at some point in their career. Accidents happen. Insurance is good. My boss made a judgement call that I had just made a mistake instead of being reckless and helped me get my confidence back.

Eventually the trend of full-time only technicians caught up with this dealership. In February, my boss invited me into his office and told me the news, gave me my last check, shook my hand and said, “You’re a damn good worker, Ryan. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.” This combined with some recent heartbreak made for a miserable next couple of weeks. But, it was also a turning point for me. I was in my first programming class and was pretty sure I wanted my long term career to be in software. I had made enough money and gotten a nice tax return (thanks to my CPA brother) so I figured I had enough funds to focus on finding something I enjoyed instead of worrying about how much it paid.

Soccer Coach

When: 2018
Length: 3 months

After getting laid off, I volunteered to coach soccer. You can’t get laid off from a job that doesn’t pay you anything, right? Really, I was tired of feeling like I had nothing to do outside of school, but didn’t have the skills to get the coding jobs I thought I was qualified for with my two weeks of programming experience. I played soccer when I was a kid and thought I could do some good for the kids in the area. This was the first time being a coach so I was somewhat worried when I couldn’t find an assistant coach to help me. I loved going to “try-outs” and choosing my team. This was a rec league, so my goal was to make sure everyone on the team had fun and developed good sportsmanship regardless of their skill level. We lost our first few games while the team was learning how to play with each other and I was learning how to coach. But, we learned together. They improved their passing, shooting, and running. I could start to see what skills we needed to work on in practice. Eventually we did start to win some of the games. And the ones we lost were good, competitive games.

I learned that parents are the hardest part of coaching. Some were fantastic. Some were not. Some brought their kids early to everything and responded to my emails in a timely manner. Others were late, unresponsive, and stopped bringing their kid to any of our games or practices. One practice early in the season it was windy and chilly, but not extreme. The kind of weather where middle school boys will wear shorts and a t-shirt and ask, “How is cold?” I got emails from at least six parents (out of 13) asking if practice was still on just five minutes before practice would start. I was at the field with everything set up already. There was no lighting and it wasn’t raining or snowing. During games, kids would show up late and parents would try to get me to just send their kid into the game during the middle of a play. a) they should have been on time and b) I’m going to wait for a pause in the game to do a substitution.

BYU Police

What: Computer Technician
When: 2018-2019
Length: 8 months

This was the BYU job my mom was talking about that worked really well with your schedule, paid well, and was hard to find. I had failed interviews for several campus developer jobs before I found this IT job. Growing up in DC where everyone has jobs they can’t talk about, I loved working a job that was in the security realm. It opened my eyes to a whole different world at BYU. I learned how to manage all of the technology the department uses across the campus like cameras, radios, and alarm systems. I was given access to just about everywhere on campus. I got to see the data center, tunnels, the press box in the stadium, and I sat in the President’s chair while doing work in his office. I was getting into more programming classes and figured a lot of my job could be automated. One of my coworkers showed me a tool called Sikulix which lets you use Python to automate mouse and keyboard inputs. I made many scripts that never worked, but two of the ones that did were very helpful. We had an excel file with >20k rows that had info about every security camera on BYU’s campus. I wrote a script that would go line by line of the excel file and look up the health status of the camera and attempt to reboot the camera if necessary. This was a process that we had to do by hand and usually took 2-3 weeks to do. The script was able to get through the whole file in a few hours.

For the nerds wondering why I used a GUI automation tool to read CSV files instead of using any of the very simple and easy to use data parsers: good question.

I was really sad to leave this job. I even cried as I closed the door for the last time. I took a lot of pride in what I did and what it supported. I worked on the technology that allowed detectives to solve crimes (there’s more than you think at BYU). I didn’t balance it with my life outside of work though. My life consisted of this job and school. I worked an 18 hour shift on the Fourth of July, ended dates to work late, and missed extended family events for work. Near the end of 2019 there was a suicide at BYU while I was working so I saw it in the cameras. I was already emotionally stretched thin having chosen to make my entire life about this job and I was not prepared for the emotions that came from that event. I wasn’t happy, I wasn’t doing well in my classes, and I never spent time with friends or family. Something needed to change. I finished my third CS class a week later and convinced myself that I was qualified enough to get a job as a developer.

BYU Broadcasting

What: Software Developer
When: 2019-2021
Length: 2 years

Over Winter Break I got invited to interview for two developer jobs on campus. One of them was to work on BYU Broadcasting’s (BYUB) streaming apps and the other was in the Humanities department to work on a tool called WordCruncher. The BYUB job interview was intimidating, but very fun. I started out being interviewed by 3 or 4 of the senior engineers, did a coding test, and then had a last interview with the hiring manager. The whole process took about 2.5 hours. The other job interview was similar, but just one person and a whiteboard coding test. Ultimately I got offers from both. The WordCruncher job paid 11% more than BYUB, but I went with BYUB. I was excited by the environment I would be working in and that I could easily show people what I do for work. The office had walls painted with whiteboard paint, brightly colored chairs, an open concept design, free drinks (not free snacks though), ping pong, foosball, and a team of 15 or so student and full time software developers.

I was so excited for this job. It was the real deal. The people I would be working with were the brains behind BYUtv and BYU Radio’ websites and apps on all platforms. The only problem was I had no experience with JavaScript. I had only done school projects in C++ or C and hacked my last job with Python. There were so many terms I had never heard before. I had never worked with code that had files in different folders, let alone in different repositories. My first task was very simple, but I had no idea how to do it.

I had a great mentor who was very patient with me. He held my hand through my first month or so. Despite the encouragement and support from everyone, I still felt like I was going to get fired for not knowing how to program. I bought a book on developing JavaScript applications and took a class on web development. Slowly, but surely I was able to figure out how to use the high level, single threaded, garbage-colleged, interpreted or just-in-time compiled, prototype-based, multi-paradigm, dynamic language with a non blocking loop that is JavaScript.

Not very well apparently. On Fridays we would have team learning sessions and thought it’d be fun to use one of the sessions to take an online test together to assess our JavaScript knowledge. For you non-nerds out there, JavaScript is known for having a lot of quirks and “features” that can cause many headaches and make you wonder what the purpose of life is. As a team of 8 we scored something around 60%. According to the website that was higher than average!

I loved this job too. It had the work-life balance I wanted, the flexibility to work the hours I wanted, the opportunity to try new things out, and learn from people who are really good software engineers. If I didn’t graduate and got paid more than a student wage, I would have happily stayed there.

Kids Who Code

What: Director
When: 2019
Length: 1 year

Coming off of the events at the end of my time at BYU Police, I thought it would be good to devote some of my time to making the world a better place through service. I noticed a new service organization through BYU’s Y-Server called Kids Who Code. This was a brand new program that was going to teach elementary age children the fundamentals of coding. I immediately reached out to volunteer and found out they were still looking for people to get it up and running so I volunteered to do that.

Our first semester, we had 2 Girls Who Code clubs and 2 STEM or robotics clubs that we would either teach or help out at. I ran one of the Girls Who Code clubs and had a class of about 13 or so girls and had 2-3 volunteers teach the class each week. We used books from Girls Who Code to teach a lesson and then helped the girls write a program in Scratch online. I remember one week the lesson was on algorithms and one of the girls was not a fan of the topic. I found out later that there was a boy in her class that she thought was annoying because he knew everything. I offered to teach her something he didn’t know and help her put it in code. She was excited by that idea and that’s how I got a 4th grader to get excited about learning factorials.

Our second semester we started 2 more Girls Who Code clubs and had even more volunteers. Unfortunately I was starting to feel spread thin. I had taken on a heavy class load, started dozens of interviews for internships, and even though my job was flexible, I still needed to put in the hours there to get paid. I burned out and had to cut back. As much as I loved this program, I knew that one of my other directors would be happy to take my place and would keep it running. (This was a month before the pandemic began and schools closed lol)

Uber ATG

What: Software Engineering Intern
When: 2020
Length: 3 months

I thought my last job was the real deal, but this was really the real deal. Not only was it a Silicon Valley company, but it was the self-driving car unit within the Silicon Valley company. I got very lucky to get the internship. One of my friends I met at the start of college interned here the previous year and was able to get me a referral. I somehow managed to pass the coding interviews and got an offer. I was shook to be offered more than triple my BYUB pay. I asked the recruiter if it was real and she assured me it was and asked if I was interested. I said yes. Cool project, cool company, and a lot of money.

Covid threw a wrench in the plans as everything in tech shifted to remote work, but luckily, everything else went on according to plan. In the weeks leading up to the internship I was invited to a Facebook group to meet the other interns. That was intimidating. So many people were introducing themselves as Master’s or PhD students from schools like Purdue, Harvard, and Carnegie Mellon.

I was given a single project to take from start to finish over the 12 weeks I’d be there. The learning curve at BYUB was steep. The learning curve at ATG was a cliff. Turns out self-driving cars are more complicated than a website. I worked on the infrastructure team, so basically I worked on a team that did what BYUB pays AWS to do for them. So I had nothing to go off of as I dove into things.

I had an amazing mentor and the team I got placed on was fantastic. They were all helpful and patient with me asking them questions about things as simple as turning on my computer. My mentor helped me understand the project, but let me take the lead on it and come up with the design for everything. He helped me get past roadblocks and helped me believe that I could finish it in time. We had game nights and happy hours on Zoom. By the end I was close with everyone and they threw me a surprise party on my last day. My mentor even Uber Eats’d an ice cream cake to my apartment.

When I started college my goal was to get into one of the high paying silicon valley companies. I didn’t actually believe I would get there anytime soon though. This job helped me gain a lot of confidence in myself. I learned to trust my instincts and communicate with other team members so that they can catch things I miss. I got a taste of what a job can be like when you have a huge mission like developing autonomous vehicles and work with some of the smartest people in the field. Going back to BYUB afterwards was really difficult. I missed the scale of the impact I had and I missed being part of the decision making process for tasks to work on. So I was thrilled to get an offer to come back full time after graduating.

Uber

What: Software Engineer
When: 2021
Length: Ongoing

That brings me to my current job at Uber. A lot of things happened between the end of my internship and the start of this job. Uber sold ATG to Aurora and I got a new offer for a new team in a new city. There’s a lot I could say about the job so far, but I think I’ll leave that for later posts. For now I’ll just say, it’s so much fun.