Who is the Humble Genius? (short version)

Hello! Nice to meet you. My name is Shannon Simpson, and I am a Humble Genius.

This is a short introduction to me, an quick overview of my career, and how I learned to accept the nickname of humble genius, which I then turned into a brand name and a proper designation to bestow upon others.

What the heck is a Humble Genius?

I did not coin the phrase “humble genius”. My last boss/manager called me a humble genius and went so far as to get me the desk nameplate you see in the picture on the home page. It was not the first time I had a cool nickname at work. I was called “superman” at two different jobs before that. However, this nickname resonated with me, and I have happily embraced it.

Once I learned to embrace the title, I took it seriously and further defined it.

The short definition: a Humble Genius is someone with a particular talent for something, who has confidence in their talent to solve problems creatively and to produce things that make the world a better place in some small way without getting a big head about it. A Humble Genius also shares knowledge and lessons learned with others in order to help create more Humble Geniuses.

An even shorter definition: Humble Genius = creativity combined with talent or experience to make the world a better place + humility about that genius + confidence in that genius to share knowledge with others.

The longer definition is at What is a Humble Genius? (Link will be added in a few minutes)

The person

I keep most of my personal details private. Some highlights that I will share:

• I’m GenX (Generation X). I thoroughly identify as GenX. I might refer to this from time to time.
• I’m a guy with a girl’s name. Always been a guy. Always assumed to be a girl until I show up in person or on camera. After 40+ years of that, I was more happy that it became a bit of a social norm to include pronouns with any correspondence. I still get invitations to women in tech type of events, though, so people may not be paying attention to those pronouns as much as everyone thinks.
• I’m married with kids in and out of school. I might refer to them in abstract terms from time to time. Their details are all theirs to share online, not mine.
• Music is a huge part of my life, and I will reference music often.
• I have more guitars than talent to play them. I won’t pretend otherwise.
• Board games, card games and video games have been a huge part of my life, and I will reference games often.

The qualifications

So what do I bring to the table? Quite a bit, to be honest.

I provide the outline of my career at the end of this post, but here are the important takeaways:

• Except in cases where I was a one-man team, I have been promoted quickly and often at every company for which I have worked.
• I developed my own process for project management and technical leadership, which I used successfully at three different companies at different stages of process development with different department sizes and reporting structures and with different technology and product mixes. My process was reliable and repeatable.
• I have interviewed dozens and hired 20+ software engineers, business analysts, software architects and QA engineers at multiple companies. In 12+ years, I only had one employee that I hired leave the job while I was in a leadership or management position. And that employee returned a year later, in part to work with me again.
• I have designed, managed and implemented many high profile, strategically important, technically complex software products and solutions across multiple companies. The majority of these were on time and on budget. All of them performed as expected (or better), were scalable, maintainable, and met all business requirements. Achieving this once is not a pattern. Achieving well over a dozen times over 10+ years is a pattern worth sharing.
• I have never used the same “tech stack” twice. Every time I switched jobs, I was hired with the full understanding that I did not have prior experience with the programming language or environment used by that company, nor did I have any experience in the particular industry. I always left an expert or master of the technology and the industry. I have mastered the art of mastering new things.
• I am highly skilled at communicating technical concepts to non-technical business stakeholders, both inside and outside of the company.

Technology changes. Paradigms change. Methodologies come and go. However, there are fundamental concepts that will never change for as long as humans are involved in the craft of creating software, the challenges of supporting software and the complications of hiring and managing those humans.

My genius lies in my understanding of those concepts, successfully applying those concepts to any given situation, and my ability to share my understanding. That is what I bring to the table, and that is why it is worth investing your time to read my posts.

An expansive career

All of those bullet points sound great. How can I back that up?

My career with digital technology officially started in 1995, though I was preparing myself for a little over a year before that.

I started in technical support, answering support calls for Hewlett Packard customers who bought a Windows 95 powered desktop computer. I started out as a novice and worked my way up to a technical lead and then a team lead in 18 months.

I then moved to Mobil Oil, answering internal technical support calls for the various Mobil Oil business units. I started out as a contractor, but moved to a permanent position as a direct hire and promoted to team lead in the first year. In my second year, the department created a technical specialist position for me and two others. We three had more system administrative access in Mobil Oil than nearly any other individual at the company.

From there I worked at a startup, supporting handheld database software that ran on Palm OS and Windows CE devices. That company stopped selling consumer products, which led to the only time I was laid off from a company. So I contacted their direct competition and worked for their competitor for nearly 5 years. I worked fully remote, from home, for close to 5 years in the early 2000s, before it was the cool thing to do.

I made the switch to software engineer in 2007, working for a credit card payment processor. That company was later purchased by NCR, and I have recently heard that some of the code I wrote from 2008-2010 is still used in production. I held a technical leadership role and got my first experience in the hiring process, here.

I had a short stint as a contractor for Verizon, successfully creating a proof of concept using an HTML 5 and Javascript engine as a portable front-end for consumer media products. This was my first green field proof of concept work.

Then, I wrote software to control ATMs and handle debit card authorizations for a company selling banking services to community banks in the Texas area. I took a partially completed project to production in my first few months, then implemented support for a variety of additional ATM hardware brands.

I moved the family half-way across the country in 2012 to work for a conglomerate that produces hardware and point of sale software for petroleum and other fuel sales. I was hired as a technical lead and Scrum master, then stepped into the role of project manager and product owner for the first time. I also participated in interviewing and making hiring decisions. I led a series of successful high profile projects to completion, setting a new standard for leading and managing projects in that department. Here, I developed my own process for project management and leadership that would repeatedly prove successful for the next 12 years.

I was poached by another company in 2014. This was another conglomerate. I worked on a digital marketing platform based entirely in Amazon’s cloud computing services (AWS). I was hired as a technical team lead and worked as a full time contributor. I was elevated to software engineering manager, then again started acting in project management and product owner roles. I also honed my dev ops and technical operations skills and practiced as a software architect in reality if not in title.

In 2019, another company poached me. I was hired as a software architect, but within 6 months I was the acting head of software engineering. I again became a software engineering manager and hired a development team from scratch. I served as Director of I.T. for a year before making a decision to take my experience to form my own company. I stayed on for an additional year to design and implement a strategically important project.