As of yesterday, June 27, 2016, I’ve worked for 15 years at Fiserv.

Given I got my first “official” job when I was 14 and I turn 40 this year, that’s over half of my professional working life that I’ve been here.

I started in the marketing department back when the company was Corillian. I got hired to help work on the corporate web site, www.corillian.com (which now redirects to a Fiserv page on internet banking).

I think it was a year or two into that when some restructuring came along and the web site transferred to the IT department. I transferred with it and became the only IT developer doing internal tools and working on automating things.

I remember working on rolling out the original SharePoint 2003 along with Windows SharePoint Services in an overall Office 2003 effort. We had some pretty fancy “web parts” in VBScript to do custom document indexing and reporting. I vaguely recall updating several of those parts to be .NET 1.1 assemblies.

It was in 2004 when a need arose for a developer to work on some proof-of-concept and demo web sites that our sales folks could take around on calls. I happened to be free, so I worked with our product folks on those things. As sometimes happens, those POC and demo sites became the template for what we wanted the next version of the product to be like. And since I’d already worked on them… why not come over to product development and do the work “for real this time?”

I worked on the very first iteration of the Corillian Consumer Banking product. That was in .NET 1.1 though 2.0 was right around the corner. I remember having to back-port features like ASP.NET master pages into 1.1. (I still like our implementation better.) This was back when Hanselman was still at Corillian and we worked together on several features, particularly where the UI had to interact with/consume services.

In early 2007 CheckFree acquired Corillian. After the dust on that settled, I was still working on Consumer Banking - basically, same job, new company. There were definitely some process hiccups as we went from a fairly agile Scrum-ish methodology that Corillian had into CheckFree’s version of Rational Unified Process, but we made do.

In late 2007, Fiserv acquired CheckFree.

Yeah, that was some crazy times.

Fiserv, for the most part, adopted CheckFree’s development processes, at least as far as our group found. RUP gave way after a while to something more iterative but still not super agile. It was only pretty recently (last five-ish years?) that we’ve finally made our way back to Scrum.

The majority of my time has been in web service and UI development. I did get my Microsoft Certified DBA and Microsoft Certified .NET Solutions Developer certifications so I’m not uncomfortable working at all layers, but I do like to spend my time a little higher than the data tier when possible.

In my most recent times, I’ve been working on REST API stuff using ASP.NET Core. Always something new to learn, always interesting.

Also interesting is that with the various acquisitions, reorganizations, and re-prioritizations we’ve seen over the years, while I have worked (effectively) for the same company, it’s given me a lot of great experience with different people, processes, tools, and development environments. In some cases, it’s been like working different jobs… despite it being the same job. Definitely some great experience.

Plus, I’m afforded (a small amount of) time to help out the open source community with Autofac and other projects.

That’s actually why I’ve stayed so long. I can only speak for myself, but even with me sort of doing “the same thing” for so long… it’s not the same thing. I’m always learning something new, there’s always something changing, there’s always a new problem to solve. I work with some great people who are constantly trying to improve our products and processes.

And a bit of seniority never hurt anyone.