Employee Spotlight: Sue Jasmin

The Director of Agile Coaching at Sonatype, Sue narrated her journey through various industries, and what brought her to Sonatype.

The road less traveled

I’m a little bit of a canary in the coal mine when it’s come to my career choices. I seem to have the uncanny ability to enter job markets at their peak and then some economic or social upheaval shifts the entire market trajectory and along with that my career. It’s made for an interesting path to Sonatype.

My first internet job was 1998-1999 at the Adventurous Traveler Bookstore aka AdventurousTraveler.com, which was founded in 1995. I recently found this brief article from 1999 in Inc Magazine, “Niche Picking: An adventure-bookstore owner thought he had conquered the Web”. It didn’t occur to me until re-reading this article that we were a very early start-up and one of Amazon’s first victims in the bookstore world.

I was a Content Creator for the online catalog, but it was a small business of about 30 employees so we all answered the phone, talked to customers, and helped out in the warehouse which was attached to the office. We also did our turn in the brick-and-mortar bookstore and walked the office dogs. It was a great mix of people of a very Vermont mindset who came to work by bike, or with kayaks on their car and a rack of climbing equipment.

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After moving to Virginia in 1999, I became the Content Manager at the book and music publisher Time-Life. Just months later it was subsumed in the 2000 Time, Inc./AOL merger. Sadly, after several years of very hard work by our very small team, re-platforming the entire website’s e-commerce and content platform in collaboration with IBM, we went through significant lay-offs as the publishing and (Read more...)