James Hargis

My wife and I are relocating to Roseburg, Oregon, and I'm looking for an opportunity where I can apply my thirty years of hands-on IT experience.

I'm CompTIA Network+ certified and have been hands-on with infrastructure since my Air Force days managing mainframes and making component-level repairs. At QuoteWizard I designed and installed a 12-access-point wireless mesh network for 120 employees, managed the full hardware lifecycle, and configured both the Mitel phone system and InContact ACD; configuring routing, scripting, number porting. This required working directly with Telco and SIP providers and managing the relationships with their staff.

I'm currently building commercial software that bridges hardware and software ecosystems. My app JigFlow.com helps laser cutting and engraving companies generate custom-ready output across different device formats. JigFlow is also a Windows app that provides a Wi-Fi accessible kiosk for customers to browse products and create custom orders directly from their phone. I bring that same integration mindset to connecting hardware and software into unified systems. As someone who builds custom arcade cabinets and virtual pinball machines in my spare time, hands-on technical work is something I genuinely enjoy.

I work with APIs and scripting, architecting systems across Go, TypeScript, React, and Python that connect multiple services into unified workflows. I've automated everything from employee onboarding scripts to knowledge base maintenance that saved over 200 man hours. When it comes to SOPs and documentation, I write documentation that provides concise steps and procedures while keeping the technical jargon to a minimum so that non-technical users can understand and follow.

I also spent six years as a QA Test Engineer at Ft Lewis supporting the Defense Health Agency, where I led testing operations and provided project leadership for systems serving over 9 million users. This experience taught me the total software lifecycle and the mindset needed when managing complex, interconnected technology environments.

Beyond technical skills, I bring over ten years of direct customer-facing experience working in call centers; answering phones, resolving technical issues, and handling escalated customers. I have a lot of patience and a knack for explaining technical problems in plain language that anyone can follow. That experience shaped how I work with people today. Whether it was helping employees at QuoteWizard understand their technical issues and how to prevent them from happening in the future, or sitting down with government stakeholders at Ft Lewis to work through software design or technical limitations of the government environment to find solutions to their needs. I do well under pressure and I'm good at turning a frustrated person into someone who feels heard and helped.

I'd love the chance to discuss how my background fits what you're looking for.

I've spent over thirty years supporting technology and the people who use it. I enjoy solving problems, figuring out why something isn't working, communicating the fix to people who just want their problem solved, and building systems so the same issues don't recur. I've been on both sides of support interactions enough times to know what separates a good experience from a bad one is whether the person helping you actually understands your problem, or they're just running through a script.

The kind of work I do best is collaborating with a team to determine priorities and contributing from a hands-on position — whether that's direct user interaction or working alongside engineering and business leaders to solve bigger problems. Here are a few examples of interesting problems I've solved:

My first week at QuoteWizard

When I was hired as a Help Desk Engineer at QuoteWizard, the company had 50 sales and customer services employees in a call center growing faster than its infrastructure. Agents were tied to a specific phone and desktop because the Mitel phone system had a very basic configuration and no one had network storage. My first week there I helped facilitate a desk move that involved everyone disconnecting all their hardware and moving it to a different desk. It was a frantic scene with hardware piled on chairs and cables strung all over the floor. It required redirecting customers to voicemail and took a half day before people could resume their normal duties. Within a few weeks I figured out how to set up hot desking on the phone system. I installed Google Drive on all the machines and defaulted their home directory to that remote drive. The next time we did a desk move it took less than an hour and we were able to stagger it in a way that allowed sales and support to remain online during the desk move.

Automating onboarding and offboarding

A couple years later, QuoteWizard had migrated from Google to O365 and the call center was now using InContact ACD. We were growing at a fast pace and I was the sole person responsible for onboarding every new employee creating accounts across O365, InContact ACD, and internal tools, one at a time, by hand. The company would hire 10-15 new sales people every few weeks and over half of them wouldn't last more than a month. I was spending hours on repetitive account creation instead of doing actual systems work. So I built a solution. I created a Power Apps form that HR filled out with new hire details. I then wrote a PowerShell script that pulled from that form and automatically provisioned every account the employee needed; O365, phone system, internal tools and automated notifications to management when it was done. What used to eat up 10-20 hours of my week became a 10-15 minute automated process per employee. I wrote a script for offboarding as well. When someone left, the script immediately disabled all accounts and placed their email and network drives into legal hold status. This system gave management confidence we could grow at the speed we needed without being slowed down by technology.

Solving the biggest problem in my own company

My wife and I run a laser engraving side business doing custom work at craft fairs and pop-up events; pet ornaments, personalized gifts, that kind of thing. The problem with live custom engraving is that every single order is unique. A customer fills out an order sheet with their pet's name, a date, and a message. Then I have to manually open the laser software, recreate the design from scratch, position the text, pick the right font, get the sizing right, and export it to the laser. At a busy event, doing that for every order meant errors — typos, wrong fonts, text that didn't fit the product. And it was slow. I was spending more time designing files than actually running the laser.

So I built JigFlow. The Windows app allows me to design a product template once with a visual editor; place the text zones, set the fonts, and configure the laser settings. Now for every customer order, they browse a kiosk style frontend, type in their personalization details, check out with their credit card and JigFlow generates a perfectly aligned, laser-ready file in seconds. No manual layout, no alignment guessing, no errors. It exports native files for LightBurn, xTool Creative Space, and SVG, so it works with nearly every laser machine on the market.

I built it to solve my own problem, but I quickly realized every engraving shop doing custom work has the same issues. So I rebuilt the app and recently launched it as a SaaS product at JigFlow.com. There is a free tier to get started, paid plans for shops doing higher volume; with Etsy and Shopify integrations coming soon; so orders can flow directly from a storefront into laser-ready output without any manual steps at all. What started as an idea to save me time and frustration has turned into a commercial product that solves a real workflow problem for an entire industry.

Why I do what I do

It was over 20 years ago but my first jobs after leaving the military were spent working in call centers. From 1997 to 2010, I was on the phone, taking calls from customers that were just learning how to use a computer to IT managers trying to get their server back online. I started at 800 Support, a third-party center where I took calls for Micron Computers and IBM dot matrix printers. Helping people when their PC wouldn't boot or writing custom init strings for their dial up modem. Diagnosing drive issues with dot matrix printers that were considered antiquated and out-dated even back then. This is where I learned and adopted a first call resolution mindset. Then Easystreet Online Services, an ISP where I handled residential and business technical support before being promoted to the NOC. From there I moved to Transcore, supporting freight logistics software for business customers who needed their systems working because shipments were waiting.

Across all of those roles, I was the person angry customers got transferred to. I was good at handling escalated customers because of the first call resolution mindset I had learned at 800 Support. I learned to listen before talking. I learned that the person yelling about their printer isn't just angry about the printer, they're angry because they've been on hold for forty minutes and nobody has helped them yet. I learned to read people quickly and adjust how I communicated. A frustrated home user needs a completely different approach than a logistics manager whose warehouse is down. And I learned that the fastest way to de-escalate someone is to make them feel like I actually understood their problem and genuinely wanted to help them resolve the issue.

That experience is the foundation for everything I've done since. The patience and communication instincts I used supporting all 120 employees at QuoteWizard came from the call center. The product thinking behind JigFlow; designing software from the customer's perspective, came from thousands of conversations with people who just wanted something to work.

What I bring to any team is someone who spent 30 years learning how to help people, driven by a genuine desire to find the solution that's best for both the company and the customer.