This week, a group of middle and high school students from St. Joseph's Catholic School visited two local companies to learn about jobs in technology, including here at Website Pipeline HQ.
The adventure began at Greenville-based Immedion, provider of hosting, colocation, and cloud services to companies like us - Immedion is a hosting partner for Website Pipeline.
Immedion CEO Frank Mobley and a few members of his leadership team gave a presentation about the history of the company and the enterpreneurship lessons they've learned along the way.
The presentation also included a great explanation of what "cloud" means, and how the internet-behind-the-internet really works, including these topics: servers, network backbones, ISPs, virtualization and storage technology. The students also learned that it takes a lot of hardware and network infrastructure to be a top-level cloud hosting provider, along with backup redundancy of all systems.
Following the presentation, we all got to take a tour of one of their data centers, where we discussed racking, cabling, fire suppression, and air conditioning.
On to Website Pipeline HQ
We all made the short drive back here to our offices, where we forced the students to pose for a picture in front our new blue wall with CEO Brian Seidel:
And since we wanted these young people to be successful, we taught them the secret of our success: the Website Pipeline Pointing.
That was followed by a short tour of our newly-completed office.
Everybody listens as Brian tells the story of our bell and why we ring it
After the tour, we settled into a conference room for a series of presentations from Website Pipeline team members on how their jobs use technology, and how their college majors and career paths led them to their current roles.
Brian Seidel explains what Website Pipeline does and how we help B2B companies
Content Marketing Specialist Ashley Fenlon talks about how we use technology in our marketing
Sales Team Leader Eric Alexander explains "The Best Job on Earth"
Director of Project Management Gary Lamb talks about the skills needed to be a PM
Developers John Mark Smotherman and Blake Yoder discuss the career path that leds to dev jobs
Design Team Leader Matt Gleason covers both the graphic design and technical skills needed to be a web designer
You may have noticed the Nerf weapons and ammunition on the conference room table. Each presenter got six minutes for their presentation, but if they went over their allotted time, the kids peppered them with darts. After sitting through an hour of our talks, we rewarded the students with
The Nerf Attack
The students correctly chose CTO Eric Ward as their target for the Nerf raid. Everyone loaded up on ammo and then streamed into the office with overwhelming force.
That's Eric behind the glass on his cell phone. His next words were a hasty "I've gotta go!"
Chaos quickly erupted in the office where Eric and three other developers work as they scrambled to mount a defense and counterstrike:
ERP Developer Louis Roselli decided to protect his coffee and sit this one out - on his trash can
Don't feel too bad for Eric Ward - he got a chance to return fire
To learn more about Website Pipeline and what makes us successful (and fun), check out the culture section of our website.
