Chad Rhyner Keeps Everyone Running
Dev Ops Engineer at Medium, the only military strategist in the room
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Chad Rhyner, a development operations engineer at Medium, is not your standard tech guy. He entered the Marine Corps straight out of high school and served two tours in Iraq. “I know people haven’t experienced the stuff that I’ve experienced,” he concedes readily. “In this industry, I’m often the only guy in the room who was in the military.”
It’s also likely that he’s the only guy in the room who spent the first eleven years of his life on a dairy farm, “milking cows every day. We had eighty acres of woods, eighty acres of land, twenty head of cattle, goats, pigs, chickens.” Rhyner laughs, “I was a go-getter, but I was also a hick. My favorite thing to do on the weekend was to go out and chop firewood with my grandpa.”
His family moved into the town of Wausau when Rhyner was in sixth grade:
We had no idea how to live in town. We didn’t know what city people did with their time. On a farm, you get up in the morning and milk cows, fix your equipment, plant crops. You make hay in the summer, harvest barley and wheat and corn in September and October, then you might plow again and plant some winter rye. If you don’t have any work to do, you sit down because you’re tired. I was bored in town, so I got into computers.
The round-the-clock work ethic of farm life was already, however, deeply engrained. “I worked almost forty hours a week in high school at an Eastbay Shoes call center,” Rhyner recalls. “I would get up in the morning and go to school, bust my butt. School ended at 2:50 and I’d be at the call center from 3:30 to 9:30. Dinner was a can of Dinty Moore stew. Then I’d go home and start my homework
Rhyner’s life has, in a sense, been indelibly shaped by the first and second tech bubbles. In high school, he was saving his hard-earned call center money for college. A penchant for computers motivated him to invest that cash in mutual funds tied to technology, and, at the age of seventeen, he lost his savings in the dot-com crash. Soon after, an Army recruiter called him up and started quizzing him on the price tag for four years at the University of Wisconsin.
Instead of heading directly to Madison, then, Rhyner enlisted as a MAGTF (Marine Air Ground Task Force) Planning Specialist. “I planned wars,” he says bluntly. “In MAGTF, we strategically plan large-scale invasions and operations. What if, purely hypothetically, Spain attacked America? You have to have plans on the books. If we get word that something like that has the potential to become a real threat to the U.S., we dust off the books, revisit the plan, and update it according to our current organizational structure and status.”
Rhyner’s own experience was far from hypothetical. The Iraq War began on March 20, 2003; he was in Kuwait on February 6. The invasion was, as he puts it, “a race to Baghdad. The objective was to clear all obstacles and get there as fast as humanly possible. The Marine Corps is always the tip of the spear.” He recounts weeks of sleep deprivation and physical peril: “Our food supplies couldn’t even keep up with our front lines. There was no sleep. It was like, dig a foxhole, set up post, deal with any issues that are happening, be there for twelve hours, get your gear up, drive again for twelve hours, do it all over again. You slept when you could.”
Two deployments later, Rhyner has two Navy Achievement Medals and a medal for valor in combat. Ask him about the combat situation and he refers you to the film Taking Chance—he was driving in the convoy in which Chance Phelps was shot, narrowly escaping death himself when his vehicle came under fire: “I should have been shot in the head.”
Rhyner left the Marine Corps with several decorations and a permanently altered perspective on what qualifies as stressful. “Tech ops,” he notes, “can be stressful, but, in relative terms, what we do every day is pretty easy.”
After he left the Marines, Rhyner earned a computer science degree at Madison and went on to work at Cisco, Box, and Gigwalk. He compares the parameters of his job to military structure and procedures: “It’s no coincidence that we call what we do in technical ops fire-fighting. I think, after the Marine Corps, I have a pretty good aptitude for this field.” He elaborates, “In tech ops, we’re here to be the gatekeepers. Having procedures in place ensures that users have a good experience and that people aren’t writing code that messes up the site. I make sure that we avoid mistakes.”
Medium appealed to Rhyner because he felt that traditional media outlets skewed popular perception of the Iraq War and military operations in general. “Medium,” he contends, “could change the publishing industry so that real people with real stories can be read, can get exposure. It’s not supported by lobbyists or political action groups.”
Being the only guy in the room who served in the military can be exhausting, even when the service gives you invaluable, on-the-ground experience. Rhyner points to his goatee, asking, “Why do you think I have this? So I can fit in. In the Marines, it’s better to be part of the crowd than to stand out against the crowd. One person is not as strong as the entire team. I try to be exemplary about that at Medium, too.”
And, for once, the physically strategic language of military action translates perfectly to tech ops:
“I work hard to be sure that everyone here is running as fast as they can.”
