I have long admired Clay Shirky and used some of his concepts before in my speaking.
I liked his usage of the term reputational capital in this piece:
http://www.shirky.com/writings/situated_software.html
What a clever concept, as it relates to community.
I worked hard to build up a lot of reputational capital at my job, and although it is not gone, I can’t really put that capital to work anymore.
Or can I?
I guess I could solicit comments, a la LinkedIn recommendations to at least save it for posterity’s sake.
Which if you will indulge me, is what I will do here, in the comments section …
You have a lot of reputational capital with myself and I think everyone here who knows you at eNeighborhoods. My personal favorite things about you are the fact that you know your trade 150%, respond quickly when needed (which was quite often) and also you were open to idea/changes in your department.
Just as recently as this past Friday night I got an e-mail from one of our customers which needed to be answered by Saturday. You responded immediately and solved the issue even though we do not work on the weekends. It saved everyone a lot of hassle and the customer was happy.
Thanks Tom, as the lead in the IDXAdmin department you were enormously helpful to our group. Thanks for the help over the years. Best of luck in all future pursuits!
I have known Mark Scheel as my supervisor for almost 2 years while working at eNeighborhoods and know him to be a creative and intellectual person, always trying to present his ideas in a creative manner and striving to find ways to improve the efficiency of business processes and the flow of data in his department. In addition, he demonstrated strong communication skills with his subordinates, other employees outside his department, and supervisors. Mark really enjoyed his work, and this was demonstrated by his willingness to work long hours even on weekends.
When I first started working with Mark, he clearly defined his expectations and goals for me and other employees within the department. He regularly discussed department problems, listened to what his employees had to say about any issues, proposed new ideas, and suggested better methods of dealing with the problems. He respected his employees’ ideas and challenged them to come up with better ways in improving the quality of their work. His attentive listening and great enthusiasm helped him to form strong relationships with his employees and other employees within the company.
Mark also demonstrated excellent technical and analytical skills. He developed several programs, which improved the productivity of the department. Examples of the programs and projects that he developed and worked on were:
- projects that pull and process listing data from variety of different sources such as RETS, FTP, HTTP, SQL Server, etc.
- Reporting Wizard/Form which was used by the department and other departments to view status of listing data and photos in SQL Server database, detailed transaction and error logs.
- Custom applications which were used to improve the accuracy of listing data and deal with variety of listing data formats.
- Program which automatically updated old dynamic library files across remote servers.
- Project to consolidate listing data and photo files to reduce bottleneck in data processing into SQL Server tables.
- Web-based geographical map used to display updated listings for over 500 different MLS systems.
- Modified legacy codes and programs written by former programmers who had left the company
In all of this work, Mark displayed impressive technical and analytical skills, proven by his ability to manage the processing of listing data and photos from more than 500 different MLS systems. Mark is an ambitious person. I have no doubt that Mark will be an outstanding programmer and/or
manager. I wish Mark the best in his future endeavors and strongly recommend him.
Dan – Thanks for taking the time to write out this note, as always you are thorough and exacting in your work. I remember making a presentation to Dominion executives last year and highlighting you as one of the two best employees I have ever hired and managed. I stand by that to this day. You are an incredible asset to the company and I know you will continue to do excellent work.
A long time ago there was an incident I kept hidden from everybody, during that period I had a strange email signature. If you can find those emails and Google “Caesar Square” you might be able to decode the message I was relaying.
It was a tip of the hat to the impression you made on me as a manager and our working relationship, which regretfully, is no longer.
I truly wish the best for you now and always Dan. Thank you so much for all your hard work. I never could say it enough even though I tried. One last time:
Thank You
- Mark
I have been working with Mark for the last 2 months. Mark is a very dedicated professional and an expert in his subject area. We have together worked on understanding the existing system and come up with process improvements that improved performance of the current system which was over 60+ hrs behind in processing to just couple of hours.
Mark is very detail oriented and very good at following up on tasks.
I wish Mark all the best in his future projects.
Sandeep -
As the senior DBA it was a pleasure working with you on the database bottlenecks these last few weeks. I agree with you that despite the thousands of miles seperating us that it felt like we were living together the week before my position was eliminated. Late night chat sessions after midnight and weekend calls contributed. I wish I had been told I was going to be leaving so I could have left you with more documentation and wrapped up the work we talked about Sunday night and were expecting to complete Monday. I have every confidence you will get the ODS back into shape. Best of luck,
Mark
I met Mark at the very first business meeting I ever attended in my professional life.
Among the crowd attending, Mark was truly unique. Didnt reek of sales nor IT. He went on to present his truly brilliant and entirely unique- to my knowledge -(at the scale it is/was at) system for aggregation of IDX data. Anyone who’s aggregated one or more boards can appreciate the intelligence and experience that contributed to truly cost-effective ETL of IDX data with a focus on integrity and accuracy.
I didnt work with Mark a great deal, and spent most of my time giving him excuses as to my delays in regards to our company-wide project, but every dealing I had with him found him to have the utmost integrity. One of the reasons I stayed on with the company for this long (I’m canned on the 31st, fyi) was my desire to work for Mark directly.
Mark is a brilliant systems designer, the type of person I’d take pay cuts to work with. Always reliable- a follow-upper (rare in the corporate environment).
The kind of guy with a new computer and a bright future in sales (in keeping with the Fountains of Wayne references).
Mark- best of luck, couldnt believe the news when I heard it.
Thanks Brad, I always enjoyed working with you via email, I am out of the country, back in about a month (today I hung out with Baboons and swam with Penguins, no joke!), and I’ll be in Chicago in September, maybe we can grab a cup of coffee and catch up. Your seriousness and work ethic are going to take you real far, don’t worry too much about any short term speed bumps, you will be stronger for them, keep your chin up!