Ryan Thompson
Four years ago I wrote Rod an unsolicited letter of recommendation (as if his resume wasn't enough) because I wanted to make sure he, and anyone interviewing him, knew exactly how I felt about him. I wanted to share the letter here:
February, 5, 2016
To whom it may concern,
I am writing this letter of recommendation on behalf of Rod Allen. Rod did not ask me to write this letter, but because of all the hours of help that Rod has given me on my projects over the years I couldn’t pass up this chance to recommend him.
I have had the privilege of working with Rod Allen for eight and a half years. During that time I have seen him demonstrate only the highest level of commitment to the company and his assigned projects including working through the night too many times to count, long spans of time on the road supporting high profile customers and events that were “too important to fail”, and many late nights and early mornings. Rod’s talents and experience quickly became invaluable to our company. Any project that was management's top priority was assigned to Rod Allen to work on and to make “flawless” which he did time and time again.
Rod also demonstrated amazing flexibility. Even after dedicating weeks of work on a project if something higher priority came up and Rod got pulled off he was more than happy to set aside those weeks of work and jump in on whatever was deemed the new critical initiative.
Attention to every detail is Rod’s hallmark, but what has been the most impressive thing to me is his ability to almost never forget those details. I have been in meetings with Rod where bugs were being discussed and Rod would pause and kindly ask the development team something like this “This problem sounds similar to that database issue that we (meaning himself) found and fixed four years ago, could this be related?”.
Rod really impressed me one day while we were onsite at an event when we needed to input a 12 digit security key to gain access to our onsite database. I would normally have to log into a different system to look up the security key and then copy and paste it, but Rod just asked if he could use my keyboard and he input the security key from memory. Rod knows that onsite every second counts so he memorized the 12 digit key to save critical time. Only Rod would do that.
No description of Rod would be complete without mentioning his unique human qualities. Rod is a kind and genuine person, who helps people with everything from personal software and hardware problems, and even car trouble (Rod is great with cars). Rod isn’t selfish with his time or talents. He shares both of these freely with anyone who needs them.
If you have the chance to have Rod join your team I would suggest that you grab him, point him in the direction of your biggest pain-point and then watch as your most difficult problems start to fade away.
Sincerely,
Ryan Thompson
Thank you Rod. I'm a better person because I know you.