Started off in phone technical support and one of the first pure (dialup) Internet Service Provides back in the early 90s. (prior to this I was a machinist) That moved around to phone support for MSN, McAfee, and CompUSA computer support. Decided, I wanted nothing to do with customer support. Got a job doing data processing for a wholesale and retail liquor distributor. Using my technical skills, I automated myself out of a job. They were so impressed when I took my full days work down to 15 minutes a day that they made me a systems administrator. From there, I learned storage and networks also and became a full infrastructure admin building Enterprise infrastructure for our new building. (ie, corporate office infrastructure)
At this point, I was still living in the Dallas / Fort Worth area and my career started to stagnate. There were no opportunities to grow technically or financially. A friend of mine from NY told me I should move to NY because if I can make it in NY, I can make it anywhere. Three months later, I was living in NY working for a non-profit. They wanted me to convert their Solaris / Oracle web infrastructure to Linux and Oracle on Linux.
I completed that transformation after about 9 months. I stuck around for about a year and I moved to a media and marketing company. (for a substantial raise, as non-profits really don't pay much) I worked there for about two years, but they sold to another company and I quickly figured out they intended to move the company to Nebraska. Nope, I was staying in NY.
I then got a job as a Senior Infrastructure admin for start up online trading platform in the Financial District in NY. I build them a high availability private cloud for their online trading platform with multiple locations which paid off when Hurricane Sandy hit NYC. We were down a total of five minutes (not even during trading hours!) when the entire building in NYC went offline. We flipped over to a secondary location and trading continued.
I worked there until that company sold and they were moving the main office from lower Manhattan to New Jersey. Since I live in Connecticut and my commute was already 1 1/2 each way. I left and joined my current company.
I've been here for almost six years. About six months after joining the company. They promoted me from Senior Infrastructure administrator to Director of IT. About two years after that, I was officially named a company Officer taking the title of Chief Technical Officer. (CTO)
These days, I don't do a whole lot of hands on technical stuff anymore except where I can or at home on personal projects. Today, professionally, I mostly manage / mentor people, strategic planning, and architectural oversight from both a infrastructure and software development standpoint.
I still occasionally fart in your general direction.