Jason Dentler

Hi. My name is Jason Dentler. I started tinkering with computers as kid back in the late 80s. 20+ years later, I’m still tinkering and loving every minute of it.

I’ve never had a real job, at least not one that felt like a job. In high school, I started a web design company. It was too far ahead of its time and too far from a major metro area to be successful.

After that, I got a job at a local hospital installing dumb terminals after school. Despite the physical labor, I had a blast. Then I spent some time editing together videos of mostly weddings and dance recitals as employee number 1 of a local small business.

Spherion, Part 1

A few weeks in to my freshmen year of college, I got a job with what would eventually become Spherion, a fortune 500 staffing company, setting up PCs at their new call center. Not long after I started, I got tired of the daily grind of updating 300 workstations with a 3.5″ floppy. Laziness being the father of invention, I wrote the first version of ServerPush in Borland C++ Builder. Because of that little program, I made the jump from part time temp labor to full time salary employee. After a couple of years managing everything from hundreds of NT4 and Win95 workstations to load-balancing Cisco 3660 routers, and not being very excited by any of it, I went back to programming.

Then everything changed. After years of selling minutes for AT&T prepaid calling cards, the call center had a chance to land a new contract. We were going to handle inbound sales calls for AT&T long distance, but we had to be certified first. The certification process was basically this: My boss brought in a stack of over-filled 3 ring binders about 3 feet high. Another programmer and I had a week to code an interactive sales script based on 1/2 a tree worth of specs. Of course, we passed with flying colors and landed the multi-million dollar contract.

A few short years later, AT&T got out of the residential long distance game because it didn’t align with their core business, or some marketing double-speak like that, then proceeded to buy up baby Bells and get back in the residential long distance game. In short, our long distance sales contract was toast.

Spherion, Part 2

About that same time, Spherion decided to connect all of their call centers and centrally manage them. They created the Global Technology Center in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, and I was chosen to be 1/3 of their elite programming team. In between lunches at the Hard Rock Hotel and Green Valley Ranch and entertaining business guests on the strip, we created some really awesome software™, We built the IVR bill payment system for Green Mountain Energy – in English and Spanish, thank you very much. We also built some cool e-commerce and call center management tools. But no amount of awesome software could stop the dream from ending. After 8 years and 11 bosses, Spherion chopped up the call center business and sold it off in pieces. The GTC was shut down.

Education and Re-education

I moved back to Texas and took a year off to finish my CS degree from the University of Houston in Victoria.

After getting my degree, I went to work with some really amazing programmers at The Victoria College. We were writing our own student information system – a full-blown education-focused ERP – in Visual Basic.NET and SQL server. Sadly, some office-politicians across campus demanded that we go with a commercial product instead of writing it in-house. Not wanting to abandon the team in the middle of a multi-year, multi-million dollar implementation, I made the decision to leave sooner rather than later.

I landed a job at Alvin Community College, where I’m still working today tossing code around.

- Jason
potential eStalker target