Fri, 04 May 2007

End of an Era
My last day with AARP was today. I’ve been there 13 years, met my wonderful wife there, made lots of friends and learned about everything from natural lighting for video production, to the need to avoid self-selection in survey respondents, to the perils of cross domain AJAX calls. I will really miss my friends there but it was time to move on.

I started in ‘94 in the Broadcast Department (thank you Bob) as a photographer, and did some database work for that group when I wasn’t lugging a video camera around. I also started to dabble in web pages and audio and video presentations delivered on the web. I was slowly sucked into software programming for the web by the renegade team that was forcing AARP into creating a web site and joined the Research Group doing early web development for AARP (thank you Robin and Joel). That led me to helping build research.aarp.org (greatly changed now as http://www.aarp.org/research/), which got me noticed by AARP’s IT folks who brought me into an official role supporting http://www.aarp.org/. And I was moved into AARP Services when the unified Web Strategy and Operations group was founded (thank you Mark).

Some of what I’ve learned in my last position with AARP
(nothing new, but these I’ve learned by experience rather than book):

Hire good people, give them the tools they need and stay out of their way.
Criticize as little as possible — making it unusual makes it more effective.
Be honest with yourself and those you work with.
It’s better to be the bearer of bad news than the person who finds out last.
Sweat the small stuff enough to be sure it doesn’t grow into big stuff.
Describe your job in one short sentence and refer to that when things get ambiguous.
If you can’t find something fun in your work, look for other work.

I really want to thank you guys for making this the most special place to work:

Jake
Chris
Kathy
Josh
Gina
Joseph
Justin
Classic John
New John

And, of course, to everyone else who helped build and run AARP.org — thanks very much. Thanks Chris for the photos (don’t blame him for any shortcomings, I forced him to use my disposable camera). Mike posted some of his surreal cell phone photos on his blog as well.

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