2/3 - My First Technical Job

Life at Medidata

My first opportunity as an employee at a tech company was a Technical Specialist at Medidata Solutions. We were living in Briarwood, Queens at the time in an apartment that I owned, and the commute to Edison, NJ was extremely daunting. We started looking for apartments in Jersey City, and found an amazing duplex in historic downtown. The move-in date was immediately before my start date at Medidata, so everything was falling into place at just the right time.

I started New Hire Orientation in July 2011, and was scheduled for 2 weeks of training before I would join the support group and take on RAVE, Medidata's primary software solution. It turned out that my start date coincided with all of the employees from a company called Clinical Force, which was recently acquired by Medidata. I didn't know this yet, but Clinical Force had no technical support team outside of the principal architect and engineers who built their Clinical Trial Management System (CTMS) from the ground up. I also didn't know that I would be pulled out of orientation before completing basic RAVE training, and would be assigned to support CTMS along with one senior member of the support group.

CTMS Training

The president of Clinical Force, Les Taylor spent about 3 hours per day with Pramod and me, walking us through all the details of the CTMS front end. Without any clinical trial experience, and without any support experience, I had no idea what I needed to retain from this training, and found it very anxiety inducing. At least I had Pramod there... It wasn't long before I realized Pramod was not bought into the idea of supporting a product beyond RAVE. For this reason, I took ownership of Les' knowledge transfer session, and tried to learn as much as possible as fast as possible. This was out of pure necessity and fear of the unknown. I took copious notes, and hoped what little I could do would be enough to get me started in supporting CTMS clients.

In the following days, I was put in contact with Pete Gilchrist, who was one of the two creators of the system, and would be my primary escalation point, and trainer for understanding the back end of the system. He would be working from South Africa, and we would primarily keep in touch via Skype. Pete definitely had an engineer's mind set, and had extremely high expectations of me. He was very reluctant to explain a concept twice, and did not seem particularly sensitive to the fact that I was literally brand new to this line of work. There was certainly a communications gap, and I was left primarily on my own to figure things out. The amount of requests I had to handle was overwhelming at times and I had made requests of my management to allocate additional resources to the CTMS product. I found out that this doesn't happen overnight. Eventually, however, I had my first trainee in Greg Carolan, and when we shared the workload it was certainly manageable. 

Additional Training Outside of Work

At the same time I was being thrown into the deep end at work, I continued to pursue additional education outside of work. In October 2011, I simultaneously took introductory classes at NYU in C#.NET, Javascript and Java for Programmers. Having access to 3 great teachers certainly helped with some of the technical challenges I'd face, and the learnings from these classes would often come in handy filling in the blanks at work. Needless to say, I was fully immersed in code and technical challenges day in and day out.

At some point, I was lucky enough to find a new escalation contact in Chris Broderick, who was the other principal architect of CTMS. With his guidance, I came to understand as much of the code as I could, and over time became extremely confident in my abilities supporting this product. I was promoted to a Production Support Engineer (Tier 3) in February 2012. Around the same time, I started a course called "Java Programming Intensive" at NYU, which would supercharge my understanding of Java, but also added a large amount of work to my already full plate.

Life at Medidata with Layla

In July 2012, Layla was born and I would be taking 6 weeks off to help raise her. In anticipating this, Medidata was able to hire another CTMS support specialist named Michael Goldsmith. Greg and Michael became proficient in supporting clients on the product, and upon my return, escalated to me far less frequently than they had in the past. With my new found free time, and tech skills, I developed some features for CTMS that seemed like they could be a great help. However, this was not particularly well received by Product or Engineering, and was a bit frustrating for me. I was able to contribute to the custom report development effort, however, which was fun, but not a full time opportunity for me.

Time for Something New

By September 2012, I recognized that I was becoming too comfortable in my role, which I had learned means it was time to look for more. I started asking around about opportunities at Medidata, including Product Management and Software Engineering. It looked like I had the possibility of becoming a business analyst, which wasn't the exact direction I wanted, and also started interviewing for a Ruby on Rails developer position (despite having no Ruby experience). While going through this search process internally, a totally random opportunity presented itself.

Finding Out About and Applying To AppNexus

Judith and I are friends with a couple named Lauren and Tom, and had them over to meet Layla and hang out around October 2012. Tom was super enthusiastic about his new job at a company called AppNexus, and suggested that a technical guy like me (:-D) should consider opportunities there. At first, I didn't take this too seriously, as I felt that I was too new to tech, and wouldn't have a good shot at such a cool NYC startup like AppNexus. Judith insisted that I at least check it out, and I found that there was a Technical Support role that seemed comparable to my experience at Medidata. Sure enough, I asked Tom to refer me and passed along my updated resume.

Time passed, and I was surprised not to have heard anything from AppNexus. I decided to get in contact with Tom to see if he could find out why I wasn't being considered. It turned out since I listed my current continuing education at the top of my resume, they assumed that I was still in college, so disregarded my application. Tom was able to clarify that my school experience was in addition to my current work at Medidata, and they immediately set me up with a phone screen with the head of the Product Specialist team, Wade Ware.

What Led Me To Technical Account Management

As luck would have it, Wade became unavailable at the scheduled time of the phone screen, so Justin Pines called me in his absence. We immediately hit it off, and asked me if I'd like to be considered for a Technical Account Manager role on his team, instead of the Product Specialist role for which I'd originally applied. I told him I would certainly be open to it, and we scheduled a day of interviews.

The Day of the Interview

I was super excited for the opportunity to interview at a company like AppNexus, especially because the company represented my goal of getting into a high visibility, high tech startup in NY. I was also nervous, because even though my interview at Medidata had gone well, I did not have many positive interview experiences under my belt. The interviews were a lot of fun, but became exhausting by the end of the day. I met with members of the team who mapped out the entire technology stack upon which AppNexus runs, and asked me to figure out where there might be problems. I met with 2 team members at once, who quizzed me on logic and probability problems. I met with Justin, and we had our second opportunity to talk shop. I met with the head of Services, Brandon Atkinson, who wanted to see if I would be a good fit for the values that he had outlined for the Global Services organization. When the whirlwind of a day had finally passed, all of the interviews had gone very well, and I couldn't wait to hear back from the Talent Acquisition Group.

The Offer

Sure enough, within about 1 week, I did hear back with an offer that I could not refuse. I came back to Medidata with the news that I would be moving on, and they were disappointed, but not very surprised. I didn't realize until later that I was still being considered for the Ruby developer role that I had interviewed for weeks earlier. In fact, the hiring manager told me that they were in the process of putting together an offer. Oops? In any event, this decision concluded my 1.5 year experience at my first technical job. I could now officially say that I had established a career in technology, and had finally gained the confidence that I can now interview successfully, with the professional and educational experiences that future employers would want.