First and foremost I like my coworkers and management.

My IT Director, Steve McClure hired me, and he has been both a great director to work with as well as a truly great friend.  If and when I move on from working at US Script, I will continue to remember him– the times we burned midnight oil working to get the pharmacy encounters through another phase of improvement, or through another emergency.

My close friend, Jimmy Hanson, has been a great friend at church for many years.  And my current manager, Brian Olson, was one of three great managers hired to help Steve out as the company was growing rapidly and Steve was heavily overworked to the danger of his health.  Brian has been a great asset to the company and a great guy to work for and I will hold him in high esteem as a friend no matter where our careers take us.

Second, I like the way we work together as a team.

I like the way we are committed to the well-being of the company while being committed to the well-being of each other.  I like the way we communicate and work through issues together.  Sometimes we all get frustrated and have to air how we feel, but we seem to feel pretty much the same way about the highs and lows of the job.  Once again, I feel I am really blessed with great coworkers and management.

Third, this is probably the reason that is more likely to scare people away from the job than draw people in, but the job is challenging in many ways.

Initially, US Script was focused on commercial pharmacy benefits management.  Once we were acquired by Centene, our volume of business multiplied suddenly and we began processing claims for several Medicaid health plans as well.  This required us to begin transmitting pharmacy encounter records to the different states involved — something we had not previously done.

When I started with US Script, I inherited several programs that appeared to be prototypes scratched together quickly to meet a compliance requirement and prematurely escalated into production.  Claim records were being sent through to the states with some errors that would go for months undetected, and all plans without provisions for pharmacy reversals or any scanning and processing of error reports from the state.  Missing data would cause claims to be held without any reporting of the problem.  And we had several health plans in this condition.  This project would be a major untangling project requiring development of production quality software while correcting old errors and filling in data that had gone long unsent.

Prior to my coming aboard, other developers had lasted about 3 months in the position before leaving in frustration. And, strangely, although I intended to stay only six months to a year, I ended up staying with the challenge now for nearly two years.  There is something about a challenge that attracts me and keeps me until the challenge is met.

But choosing to accept this position at US Script was not an easy decision for me.

Just before I started with US Script, I was offered position at Babcock & Brown in San Francisco.  The salary was more than double what Centene and US Script could afford to offer me and about $40,000 less than I made at IBM and Clickmarks not to mention no stock options.  I had two clear options:  stay in Fresno far away from my daughter in the bay area and pay $1,300 per month in child support to my ex who broke up our family with an affair several years ago, or accept a more normal salary and have my daughter with me as well.  The decision was obvious — I chose Babcock and Brown.

I thought everyone would agree heartily and be happy about the decision.  But, my fiancee, parents, and brother had long faces, and that was a source of frustration for me.

Eileen and I were soon to be married, and as Eileen would be moving away from her home in Adelaide, Australia, she hoped to have some time here in Fresno to get to know my family better.  She did not cherish the thought of being home alone in a strange place while I was at work during the day, and my parents would miss us.  Still, it was more time with my daughter and more money, and we really needed the extra money.  But something told me that a wise man listens to his family and takes into consideration their feelings and thoughts.  Everything within me was screaming at me to make the decision and seek forgiveness rather than permission, but I prayed for wisdom and chose US Script.  Strangely, later, Babcock and Brown would encounter serious financial difficulties while US Script seemed to weather the storm and remain profitable.

Furthermore, our family had been through a lot of trials and tribulations together.

My brother was handicapped from brain damage caused by a heart failure years before, and my grandmother had recently died.  I had also gone through tremendous stress years before with my first wife’s difficulties with bipolar disorder and with her affair with another man that broke up our marriage and gutted our family financially.  My family was concerned for me and felt I needed some time in Fresno close to family and friends while getting back into my career and into a new marriage.

So, with pain in my heart, I turned down the Babcock and Brown position and accepted the job at US Script.  I would later discover how much I needed to be here in Fresno during this time.  My father suffered a heart attack and needed a triple bypass shortly before Eileen and I were married.   Then a year later, my brother’s congestive heart failure ended his life in September 2008.  I am deeply thankful Eileen and I were here with family in Fresno at that time.

Now that things are settled more and now that Eileen and I have had a chance to take trips back to the bay area to see my daughter there, we are both excited about getting things ready to make the move and we are opening ourselves up to opportunities to work and live close to my daughter, Michelle.  We both miss her dearly and feel excited about moving to the bay area.

But, this article is supposed to be about what I like about US Script.

The position I took as Senior Developer was unusual in that I was already a Programmer/Analyst over 30 years ago and had held many more senior technical and managerial roles with NASA, Ingres, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Clickmarks, and IBM.  But, there was some madness to my method.  (I think I was supposed to say that the other way around.)

Working as a Senior Developer would allow me to relax back into an old role and clear a bit of the rust away and get my edge back in IT with a vengeance once again.  This job would involve software architecture, Oracle PL/SQL programming, Oracle Reports, Perl programming, PHP, C, HTML, PHP, shell scripting, as well as helping to mentor the Solaris/Linux systems administration staff.

What excites me about this position is not just the technology alone, but taking on major projects that have a major impact on the success of the company.  As the data becomes more complete and accurate, actuaries begin to depend on this data for rate setting.  Reinsurance or recovery of high-costs also depends on the completeness and accuracy.  And, there are consequences in terms of sanctions and withholds possible where data is incomplete or inaccurate or late-coming.  Above and beyond all this, if we have a good, rock-solid encounters system in place that can be adapted easily to different health plans with widely differing specifications, then the company can scale up and take on more business more easily and effectively.  As our quality improves, so does our reputation.

And, that makes me happy.  When a company gives me the privilege of working for them, I want to give them something back to make them glad they hired me.  I want to see my company succeed and to see my coworkers succeed as well.  I know Centene and US Script are great companies and I am very confident they will continue to prosper and succeed, and I will be happy to know I had the privilege of being a part of that success in some capacity.