Friday Fun : The road to Atlassian .... How did you get there ....

[Kris Dewachter]

Hi all,

When talking to other IT colleagues, it's always interesting to hear about their career history. How did they get into IT, become an Atlassian Consultant or admin .... IT was not always people's first choice.

I know people who had other careers before IT. They were actor or warehouse pickers.

For me, my story is actually very boring. Growing up in the 70's en 80's, with the emerging of the first PC's, I studied IT in school. At that time, that also involved 6 hours of accounting a week, which offcourse, I did not like.

After graduating, I think I've almost done every IT job role there is ... developer, tester, installing machines and software, analist, consultant, project manager. For many years I was able to work with the Atlassian tools before I was able to become an Atlassian Consultant.

What is your story? How did you get there?

Enjoy your weekend

Kris

[Kristian Klima]

I studied politics and English in the mid 1990s (fun fact, you can call me 'Doctor' :) ) and then had a career in journalism.

But I was always standing one foot in the IT, tech, and science world. It all started when I got embarrassed at the university's resource center because I didn't know how to use a computer.

So I got a 10-year old PC (286 CPU, 20MB HDD, MS Dos and Volkov Commander) and had to learn how to troubleshoot my way to make it usable. It was the same story with a Windows 95 PC, then I got a Mac in 2000 - Macs were rare, resources scarce, self-learning was the name of the game. When I got my first journalism job, I could provide L1 support on Macs and PCs to my colleagues :D

Later, as 'our own correspondent' working overseas, I was actually maintaining our agency's infrastructure on locations at various press rooms. A journo who can troubleshoot the network 4K miles away from the base... it doesn't get better than that.

With that background, moving to software development as a tech writer capable of managing the tooling and infrastructure needed to make the docs happen was only logical. And I enjoy it.

Despite being latecomer to the computer world, I was lucky to experience it all from early PCs, thru ancient Macs, mainframes, until today... while having a chance to write about that one way or another.

[Jimmy Seddon]

Very interesting topic @Kris Dewachter!

I grew up in the 80's & 90's where tech was around me from a reasonably young age.  I took many computer-based classes in High School & College and straight out of College started working in Customer Support for an Atlassian competitor. 

While I was there I moved over into the software testing department, all with the goal to eventually become a developer.  When that company was purchased by another company (not Atlassian), I moved to a small start-up as a junior developer.

I didn't stay in a pure development role for very long before becoming the admin for their Jira Server since I was the only one with experience configuring workflows in some capacity.

I stayed there for a number of years added to their Atlassian Stack until I move to my current company, where I was hired as an Atlassian Admin.  I've been in the ecosystem for the majority of my career and I love the community that has been built here.

[Dan Breyen]

After using a internally built tracking site many years ago, a previous employer found Jira to use as their tracking system for developers.  Loved the application, and this was before Scrum and Kanban was the thing.  The next employer used Jira as well, so I was content.  And now, I'm at my third company all using Jira, and for the fun of it, now we're using JSM as well!

[melissa_hedge]

I live in the Marketing realm, but a die hard lover of all things Atlassian!!!

I got my start in the Atlassian world in 2013 at Contegix. For years they were the Atlassian Cloud. Business came easy. No need for sales or Marketing. But when I entered the ring, Contegix was in an uproar. Atlassian brought the cloud in-house. Contegix was back to the drawing board. Where did they fit in now? Duh...Atlassian!!! No one really knew it better than the Contegix team. You have a tricky instance that breaks when there's a new Jira release? Host with us and we will take care of you. The business model has since changed, and I moved on. Short stints for some software companies, but found that nothing compared to working in the Atlassian ecosystem! It's definitely its own little world. I came back to work for Tempo and now Appfire. I love working on the Marketplace side of things, and Partner Marketing at that. I get to work with countless solution partners daily.

Since Anheuser Busch is no longer using their slogan, "Making Friends is our Business", I think the Atlassian ecosystem should steal it ;)  (btw, also worked there for a few years....it's no Atlassian)

[Summer.Hogan]

Welcome to the community @melissa_hedge! Great story and we are happy to have you here! 

[Dan Breyen]

Mirror, mirror on the wall

Whose the fairest of them all

Server or Cloud 

They make us proud

Needing my Kudos for Friday Fun

Now this new post is finally done!

[Summer.Hogan]

Great one @Dan Breyen!

[Summer.Hogan]

Love this topic @Kris Dewachter! 

I actually started my career wanting to be an MD. I first went to school to become a Medical Assistant (MA) and good thing I started small because when I went to do my internship I hated it! So, then I went to a real college (Arizona State University) and could not figure out what I wanted to do so I majored in Communications with an emphasis on Organizational Communications. I started out just taking the first job I could find and ended up being a supply analyst for a supply company that provided hardware to large IT organizations. I'm glad I landed there because it gave me a great introduction to IT and a few years later I moved into IT as a Quality Assurance Analyst. After a few years of doing this I moved up to a Business Analyst role and that was the first time I was introduced to Jira. As a BA I worked for many companies who used Jira and Confluence including McKesson, Hawaiian Airlines, and now CSAA Insurance Group. I'm in a PM/PO hybrid role and I use numerous Atlassian tools everyday!

I found throughout my career I am happier working at companies who use Atlassian tools and I don't think I could work for one who doesn't! 

[melissa_hedge]

Do you get a discount at Hawaiian Airlines ;)

[Amanda Barber]

What a fun topic! I was a Kindergarten teacher for 12 years who had a knack (and passion) for all things technology. My husband is also in technology, which always kept it front of mind. In 2019, I decided to make a career pivot after that school year (which was miraculous with the timing of COVID-19.) So, in 2020, I made a shift to working in educational technology. My first job was at a small startup, which gave me a taste of Jira, but no administration of it. Then, I moved to my current company and became the administrator of most of our tools, ha! I got to dig deep into Jira and Confluence in my role as a project manager. I've switched positions, but still manage most of our tools and love to work on improving our processes and teamwork. I also fell in love with Atlassian Community Events and became a Community Leader in hopes of building up my local network since I'm new to this new career path!

[NAYANA]

I am a mechanical engineer by choice and a IT product and program manager by chance. I am deeply passionate about building sustainable, user friendly solutions for complex problems. Empathy and efficiency are the two principles that drive me through solutions architecture. I am an intentional PO although this is not the exact title, I had in mind 20 years ago when I started my journey as a developer and then moved on systems analysis and then project/program management reincarnating into a product manager. 

Bottom line I have worn, I wear, and I look forward to wearing many hats on my way to solving business and user problems using latest and greatest technology. I have hands on experience working in financial services, insurance, pharmaceutical, software and retail domains. Automation and Integrations are my favorite kind of projects followed by leveraging Data modeling, AI and ML projects.

For many years now I have used several Atlassian tools and in my current job, I am working as Jira Platform Product Owner. I am a fan of Atlassian's ethos including leaders, employees, product suite, culture and values. I am a wannabe Atlassian. By writing this comment, I am telling the universe just that and hoping to manifest an opportunity of working at this incredible company. 

Cheers

Deepthi

[John Funk]

I spent about 25 years in project and program management - many of those in the US Federal Government contracting space doing Waterfall. 

Then about 10 years ago, I made the move to the commercial world and various agile methodologies. A consultant brought in Jira shortly after I started in that company. Since it was new, there was no administrator already in the company. And since I like tools, I volunteered to do the job. It was a Cloud implementation from that start, so that's how I cut my teeth on Jira. 

[Shawn Doyle - ReleaseTEAM]

Atlassian was a natural progression for me.  I had been administering SW dev tools around the time my major vendors were fading, Atlassian came along and I picked up Jira, the other products followed shortly after.

I started as a tool admin as a co-op employee assigned to do UNIX (SunOS) admin while in college, none of the other employees wanted to touch the development tools so I volunteered and ended up as the go-to person. Years later I founded a consulting company focusing on supporting the same types of tools, eventually, Atlassian became the primary vendor in our portfolio.

[Hana Kučerová]

Great topic!

I studied numerical mathematics at the university, because I wasn’t courageous enough to study informatics and IT, but I started programming during the high school.

My first job was a technical documentation writer and we also developed a few e-learning courses. Because the platform we used had some problems and I had some experience with PHP language already, I fixed them. This resulted in my first job as a PHP developer. In this company I also implemented ticketing system Kayako.

Later I moved more to project delivery and started to help coordinate teams. When the guy, who was responsible of Atlassian systems, left, I volunteered to take care of them and realized I really love this and found a full-time job as an Atlassian consultant.

[Filip Callewaert]

I love the asynchronicity of this - why not adding value on Valentine's day for a 1 February Friday Fun!