Company: Allstate Workplace Division
Location: Jacksonville, FL
Industry: Life Insurance
Duties: VB.Net, Visual Basic, and C# Developer, Database Developer.
When I started here, it was called American Heritage Life Insurance. I guess Allstate bought them, but that transition is a blur.
The programming department at this division was huge. There had to be almost twenty of us, and that was just the programming staff. They had a dedicated testing department, and a full graphics development team. They even had a separate department for database administration. Allstate was the largest technology team I ever worked with, even to this day.
This job taught me a lot. I was first introduced to deep SQL (Database) development here, like views, indexes, stored procedures. They showed me the importance of performance minded code. My disturbing love for database development began at Allstate.
Allstate catapulted me into a more rounded understand of the inner-working of business. I was thrown into the deep end of knowledge about privacy, HIPAA compliance, disconnected data, documentation, meetings, encryption, screen scraping, and bureaucracy… so much bureaucracy. Things moved so fast, most of it is an obfuscated mess.
After two years, they placed me on a special projects team focused on rewriting their legacy Visual Basic code into the new C# development platform. That was a steep learning curve, and I’m a much better developer because of it.