From Tech Support to Software Engineering Leader with James Oravec | Ep 014

Episode Information

Show Notes

In this episode of Career Downloads, host Manuel Martinez welcomes James Oravec, a Senior Manager for Software Engineering, who shares his inspiring journey through the tech industry. From his early days in tech support to building a successful e-commerce venture and eventually leading software engineering teams, James offers a wealth of insights for anyone navigating their career in technology.

Key topics discussed:

1. James’s introduction to technology and his first job in tech support
2. The creation and growth of War Toys, James’s e-commerce business
3. Innovative warehouse optimization techniques developed for e-commerce operations
4. Transitioning from entrepreneurship to corporate software engineering roles
5. The patent development process at IBM and the value of continuous learning
6. Recent experiences with job searching in the current tech market

James shares valuable lessons on perseverance, adaptability, and the importance of pursuing your passions in the tech industry. Whether you’re just starting your career or looking to advance to leadership roles, this episode offers practical advice and inspiration to help you succeed in the ever-evolving world of technology.

Tune in to learn how James turned a $15/hour side hustle into a thriving business, developed creative solutions for e-commerce operations, and navigated the challenges of job searching in today’s competitive market. This episode is packed with actionable insights to help you take control of your tech career and achieve your professional goals.

Transcription

Manuel: Welcome everyone. So this is Career Downloads and my name is Manuel Martinez, where every episode I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a new guest to understand more about their career. So we’ll dive into their background and try to uncover any actionable items for you and really try to understand what the different guests have used, you know, different techniques, tips that they’ve used to manage their career. And for today’s episode, I have with me James Oravec and we’re going to dig into his background. So this is something that’s of interest to me. So he is on the software side. So software engineer, software developer, I spent most of my time on the infrastructure side. So I know a lot of infrastructure people, networking, storage, things of that nature. So again, I’m really excited and interested to get to know a little bit more about James. So welcome James.

James: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Manuel: No, I appreciate you coming on. So one of the first things that I want to do is if you can just, and again, we don’t have to get into detail at this point, but if you can just tell me what your current role is now and just like a brief summary of what it is that you do, and then we’ll work our way, you know, to that point.

James: Sure. So currently, I am a Senior Manager for Software Engineering, oversee a team of developers, overseeing a number of products, which we have to go through the normal release process cycles. And that’s everything from coding new features to fixing defects to security patches. And then outside of that, main goal is to wow our customers and give them something delightful to use.

Manuel: That’s awesome. So now the next part that I want to get into is if you can just kind of give me a little bit of background about kind of where you grew up and eventually what got you interested into technology, like have you always had a passion for it? Again, we don’t have to go into detail, but just like a summary, you know, were you that kind of kid that, you know, had a computer at the age of five and that drove you or, you know, was it later on in life?

James: Its’s an interesting question because there’s just so much that has transpired in maybe different directions I could have gone. So I’ll even go back to as far back as I remember. When I was a kid, like elementary school, first job I wanted to be was a cop. My dad kind of talked me out of that, then I wanted to be a dentist. And then after that, why I don’t know why I want to be a dentist, but I think it was just hey make some money and things of that nature. And then one day my mom who was working as a checker, she was talking about some guy who came in and was fixing either an ATM machine or something of that nature, something to do with computers. And at the time, this was a real long time ago, he was making $50 an hour to do this. And I was like, oh, wow, that’s a lot of money. So I was like, I want to get into computers. So that’s what kind of shifted me into that kind of mindset. As far as what got me or kept me there, I think when I was a kid, I was exposed to computers. Started with the Apple IIe, like way back in the early 80s. So the big actual floppy disk and you got to do two.

Manuel: The three, you know, like the five inch.

James: A five and a quarter. Yeah. Yeah. A five and a quarter, right? Three and a half. Five and a quarter. Yeah. Yeah. So it wasn’t like the eight inch ones. It was the five inch ones. So I did that and I enjoyed it and my dad was taking like college courses. So he was writing programs that my brother and I would be playing. So it would be like guess a number or guess an animal and kind of go through that. So I kind of enjoyed that, wasn’t opposed or, it didn’t feel unfamiliar to me to say the least. When I went through middle school, sixth, seventh, eighth grade, they had some technology courses and some computer courses and I ended up getting the computer medal for the school in my eighth grade. And I was actually kind of curious why and I ended up finding out that I had the highest percentage of all the students of all the different classes that took it. So that was how I ended up getting that. In my early teens, I’d say probably about 13 or so, my dad signed my mom up for some courses to learn just general computer skills. So at the time, instead of like Microsoft like Word and the suite that you would be, at the time Lotus was popular. So you had like Lotus 1, 2, 3 instead of Excel, you had Amnipro instead of Microsoft Word, etc. So what occurred was my dad negotiated to get it so that my brother and I could get the courses for free if he signed up for my mom. So through his sales tactics, he got it so that I got all the courses for free and then I ended up over the course of the summer taking like every course that they had to offer. Like every day, like five days a week go there, take the course. So they had beginning, intermediate and advanced. That then led to where I started to find little side jobs like in the neighborhood where someone’s computer wouldn’t work or something of that nature. So this was probably mid-90s and I would charge like $15 an hour, which was a fantastic deal for the people because if they went to a Circuit City or Best Buy or anything at the time, I think they charge somewhere between $50 to $75 an hour. So you could do the neighborhood kid at $15 an hour, which was great money for me, or you could try it. So I ended up getting a decent amount of work, helped tutor, train, helped fix.

Manuel: And this was all just word of mouth. Once you got a reputation for like one or two people, were you going and actually marketing or is it just widespread?

James: I think probably what occurred was my dad was like in sales for most of his life. So he would always be talking to people and as they would talk, if they had like a computer issue or something, he’d be like, oh yeah, my son can, so I actually had like a sales person always there looking out and then word of mouth after that because now you get one person that you help that says, oh yeah, I know someone and then next thing you know, you get a decent amount of side money or not bad for side hustle. But yeah, the main thing was trying to have enough skills and my main thing was like a lot of the time was if I didn’t know it, that was okay. I would play with it long enough until I could figure it out and get it to fix. And for the longest time in my career, especially when I was young, my thing was if you pulled me in to help work on something, you only pay me if I fixed the problem, meaning that so my motivation is I’m going to fix your problem because otherwise I don’t get paid. And then sometimes if it was like a really tough problem, say it took me five hours, six hours, and I thought it should be more like two or three, then I would only charge for two or three hours because when I was having a higher, when I started doing the higher rates, then that’s where like I would come in at the higher, but then I would make sure that the customer always felt like they got more than what they were paying for.

Manuel: And is that, was that just kind of a way to establish a good relationship with the customer? Or did you at that time, and I understand that you were relatively young, but were you using it also as well. This is, I can’t ask them to pay me to learn, so I’ll just charge them for the time that I’m actually spent fixing their problem. Was that kind of the mindset?

James: So to give it like a more modern type deal, like if I went and I was to help someone, if I was to charge them say $110 an hour or $120 an hour now, someone’s not paying me $110 or $120 an hour to learn at that rate. It’s already expected that I know whatever it is. So as a software engineer, for most of my career, and then like I’ve been pretty fungible where I’ve had to learn a lot of cross training, so some of the infrastructure, like when I had my War Toys business, I had to set up my own servers, had to co-locate them, even had to T1 lines at one point. So there’s a lot that goes into it. Excuse me. So the main thing though