Jonathan Dayley Email and Phone Number

To the confusion of friends and colleagues, I signed my enlistment into the Utah Army National Guard four days after walking the stage for my masters in Data Analytics. My company called it a career change. If I were them, I’d have called it a mid-life crisis.So why did I enlist in the Army right after getting my masters in a hot field? And how did enlisting actually end up _helping_ my tech resume rather than hurting it? Three things:1) The Army offers an education unlike any other. Apart from high quality of instruction—both academic and martial—you never leave the classroom in IET; if you're awake, you're training. For my part, I was blessed with superiors who were deeply interested in my success. My list of heroes doubled while I trained, as did my respect for good leaders and how they affect the lowest levels of their organizations.2) Nothing pulls you out of your comfort zone quite like signing an enlistment contract. In tech, we get pretty attached to our creature comforts, but comfort comes in short supply in the Army, and graduating my course of study at the top of my class took living by that maxim. The truth is that comfort’s a stranger to the successful in general; the Army's just a good example.3) More to the point, my coding ability hit a renaissance in IET. As it turns out, you can write a program for anything, whether it’s making flashcards for class (I made a little over 30K in a year) or turning academic text into a full-featured relational database. While I was a trainee, an hour of programming became part of my morning routine, and I gained unlikely expertise in a variety of languages and frameworks because of it.I don’t recommend Army IET to anyone comfortable in their career—if you like where you are, stay where you are. But if you’re looking to keep your discipline, leadership, and resilience in the face of change as sharp as your tech skills, you could do a lot worse than joining the US Army.Like joining the Air Force.

Despite really bad timing on my application (COVID happened sometime between the first and second interviews), Tecuity picked me up as a database developer and put my partner and I in charge of a data conversion pipeline involving millions of records with a very heavy data cleaning component. Tecuity prides itself on accurate and functional conversions for its government clients, and I felt the pressure of that standard every day in its direct bearing on my role. My primary languages at Tecuity were R for analysis and reporting and SQL for most everything else, and I also had the opportunity of exposure to our .NET and ReactJS codebases as an effect of the environment. I'd also be remiss not to mention Tecuity's engineering staff from whom I gleaned a treasure trove of expert development knowledge that's manifested itself in every private and professional project I've since been involved with.

Every new developer needs a firm that's willing to give them a first shot, and for me, that was RSC. With only my grades and some anecdotal experience with Fox to work on, they took me on as a SQL developer and gave me my first glance into industry-level data management. I trace many of the best development practices that I use every day back to my two years at RSC.

I'll wear my Fox Pest Control jacket until it falls off my back. I was hired as a bilingual customer service rep right after getting back from Mexico, and I wouldn't trade the world for what I learned about meeting customer needs and putting people first. I also had access to periodic data pulls from the company's ERP, which I'm not sure would have been possible for a custom service rep working anywhere else. As my role evolved over my three years at Fox, my team and I shot less and less from the hip when making customer-related decisions (which are all decisions, really) and relied more and more on the company's data, which had gone largely unused. The result was happier customers, a happier team, and plenty of downtime to optimize our processes and get ahead.