Hello friends.  For the last six and a half years I worked for Hertz Corporation (HTZ).  That’s right, I was laid off in the first round of layoffs on January 5th. I’m now seeking a new job.  Here is my resume .

You may have noticed I haven’t written about who I was working for or what I did. Not because I wasn’t proud of my work. I have lots of pride about what I did for Hertz. I loved my job and I liked the people I worked with.  I didn’t write about it because the company discouraged it. Now I’m almost free to speak my mind.

   

If you don’t know me, I was working in the Internet Systems and Design (ISD) group helping maintain the companies website, Hertz.com .  When started in the Information Security department, in 2000, I was maintaining their Internet firewall and user access to Hertz systems.  In 2001, Hertz had been struggling for two years to launch a completely new version of Hertz.com without success. The stress level was so high, on this thirty (30) million dollar project, people where quitting their jobs. When one key employee left, I was asked to step in and Hertz created ISD to get the project going again.

There where lots of problems. This was not Hertz’s first website or their first e-commerce system.  It was their first content management system (CSM) written in Java.  This system was developed by the IBM winter Olympics website development team.  The Nagano website was a big deal and well known.  But this first generation CSM didn’t know much about keeping user information (state) and it has big problems growing to provide the millions of “hits” Hertz gets today. You would think for thirty million dollars (a number quoted lots of times to me) managing it would be a dream.  It wasn’t.  In 2001 Hertz took over the development of the code and brought the system online.

For the next several years, programmers in Park Ridge developed a new version of Hertz.com and the ISD team developed a new hardware configuration to make the system redundant and reduce costs.  This new CSM is multi lingual and provides for weekly updates from countries all over the world.

Today Hertz.com takes as many or more reservations than all their call centers, and is growing as it expands to other countries like Hertz.fr .

Did I say I’m proud of my work at Hertz?  It may seem strange that a guy gets laid off from a company and still has good things to say about it. But this story is about what I did, not the company.  As time goes by I may have more to say.