Working for Progressive (was Re: Smalltalk Jobs)

Aaron J Reichow reic0024 at d.umn.edu
Tue Nov 12 01:35:34 UTC 2002


On Mon, 11 Nov 2002, Andrew P. Black wrote:

> Did anyone else notice the rather forlorn Booth from Progressive
> insurance in the OOPSLA exhibits hall?

Cool! Know any details about the handheld system? I'm going to email my
old manager at Progressive and see if he can share any info...

I interned at Progressive the summer of my freshen year.  They hired me
for the position after only 3-4 months of self-teaching Smalltalk.  It was
pretty awesome.  Back then, a few years ago, they had 2 or 3 discrete
groups with Smalltalk projects.  I'm not sure how secret the work the team
with which I worked was, but it was a really neat setup, written in
VisualAge and GemStone.  Generated COBOL, XML, C, C++ modules for various
systems that needed to know about insurance products. Way slick.

The group of people with which I worked were great- nice people, willing
to explain a lot of things to a person without any realworld Smalltalk
experience, but with a lot of interest and potential. A pretty neat
company.  My only exposure to corporate America (c), but it seemed fine
enough, seemed to be pretty standard fare, on the better side.  Everyone
worked about 40 hours a week, and when doing a push/deployment, only one
or two folks had to come in for a few hours on a saturday- definately low
stress.

They're always looking for people.  I'm told they pay a little under
market price for Smalltalkers.  This is what I've heard from a couple
consultants working there (about why they wouldn't stay on as perm) as
well as a couple regular employees. The regular perm folks stayed because
they like the area and think lower (but stil acceptable pay) is worth
getting to do Smalltalk rather than Java or C++ and the relatively low
stress work environment.

vv ** ** ** do not read if you're easily offended ** ** ** vv
Being the Smalltalking hippie that I am, I thought this was cool too:
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n969/a06.html
Not to incite any flames, take that as you will, as good or bad.
^^ ** ** ** do not read if you're easily offended ** ** ** ^^

Regards,
Aaron

  Aaron Reichow  ::  UMD ACM Pres  ::  http://www.d.umn.edu/~reic0024/
"one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws"  :: m. l. king jr.





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