I grew up moving. My father served in both the Army and the Navy, and we relocated every one to three years — which meant an introverted kid who would rather have been playing video games had to get good at walking into a room where he knew nobody. I played baseball and football badly enough to make friends across a lot of different groups. That turned out to be the most useful thing I learned before college.
College itself I mostly wasted. I started in History, switched to Sociology because of one extraordinary professor, and loved it — the study of patterns and behavior at scale rather than one person at a time. I've come to think it's the most relevant degree I could have brought into this job. But I didn't want to be there for the rest of it, and I did just enough to finish. Just before I started, my father was diagnosed with lung and neck cancer and given six months. He lived another twenty. He never ate solid food again after 2009. We spent those years in and out of hospitals and specialists' offices, and I spent them waiting tables and then bartending — restless, reading rooms for a living.
There was a small technical college on my drive to work. I passed it something like a thousand times before I finally stopped, at twenty-five, and looked at the course list: an associate's in computer networking and administration, almost all of it the actual thing and very little of it the wrapper. I signed up for night classes and rearranged my shifts around them. Near the end of the program a vendor came recruiting unpaid desktop support interns for a local hospital — Springhill Medical Center in Mobile, where a lot of my family had been treated. I could get paid to do my hobby, and I could do it for the people who took care of the people I loved. I started in early 2012, fixing printers, removing viruses, and rebuilding PCs, and I was hooked immediately. I did it for free for a year, on top of the restaurant and the night classes. Then one of the paid technicians got caught smoking pot in his car on his lunch break, and in 2013 I got his job. I quit waiting tables and never went back.
What I'm curious about right now is mostly one question wearing two hats. At home, I'm working out the transition from the Josh I've always been to something more like a patriarch. I provide well, the way my father did — but every generation wants to correct something it felt was missing in its own, and I'd like to understand what I'm correcting before my kids have to explain it to me. At work it's the same shape. I spent a long time as an individual contributor who overachieved on the strength of a chip on my shoulder, and a chip doesn't transfer. Working out how to hand a team the results without handing them the grievance is the most interesting problem I have.
Outside of that: I think augmented reality is the next platform — not VR. Something closer to a JARVIS you talk to, arriving first through phones, then through sunglasses that actually look like sunglasses, then through something about the size of an earbud. I don't think the version that ends up under the skin is as far away as it sounds. Ask me in ten years.