Promoted to Distinguished Engineer

While on vacation, it was officially announce at IONA that I’ve been promoted from Principal Engineer to Distinguished Engineer. (I figured my inbox would be flooded just from normal traffic while away. Add MANY “congrats” messages and I’m totally swamped.) This is a very big accomplishment. For folks not at IONA, Principal Engineer is basically the highest level of engineer that you can get via normal merit reviews with your manager. The next level up, Distinguished Engineer, involves a lot more than that. A larger review board is setup consisting of all the managers, other DE’s, the CTO, I think a VP or two, etc… to review the entire body of work that the applicant has accomplished. That work has to encompass a wide range of contributions both technical and business related, both internal to IONA and external, and also shows significant knowledge and leadership. Basically, my manager and I spent quite a bit of time constructing a packet of information about my contributions over the last 8 1/2 years at IONA which the board then reviewed.

Anyway, it’s now done. I’m now officially a Distinguished Engineer. Finally. 🙂

Major thanks to my manager, Aileen Cunningham, for taking the time to do a lot of the leg work to assemble the packet. It was quite time consuming and I’m sure she had other work that she could have been doing instead. I’m sure that without her, the packet wouldn’t have been done in time.

Also, major thanks go to the entire Engineering team at IONA (including the engineers that are no longer with IONA) It’s much easier to “shine” and produce major accomplishments when you are working with a great team. Over the 8 years I’ve been at IONA, I’ve had the pleasure to work with a lot of very good engineers. There is no way I would have been promoted without the support of the rest of the engineers. Heck, they deserve a major kudos just for putting up with listening to my rants over the years. 🙂

I also need to thank Jason van Zyl for stepping up last minute for a needed recommendation letter. I’m sure he had more pressing Maven related stuff to work on, but he really came through.

I obviously have to thank my wife, Julie, for putting up with the late nights on the computer, the checking of email while on vacation, etc…

Oh, and congrats to David Bosschaert for also being promoted to Distinguished Engineer.