Eric Newhouse

Eric is from Kauai. He came up through graphic design and photography before pivoting into IT, which is why his desk in the Indevtech office has the composed visual language of someone who has thought about what goes where. The Vinylmations are in formation. Boba Fett stands guard at the corner of the windowsill. The plants — which arrived on their own, one by one — are in matching white ceramic pots and have outlasted several office reorganizations.

Three years in, he's the Centralized Services Manager and almost nobody on the team thinks of him by his given name anymore. He's House. The nickname stuck for the reason most good nicknames stick: it was already true before anybody said it out loud.

What makes House valuable at the company is hard to describe in a job description. When something is on fire — a client outage, a vendor going sideways, a Friday afternoon that's decided to become a Friday night — he sits at his battle station and gets steadier. The pace is the same pace as Tuesday morning at 10 a.m. The decisions get made one at a time, in the order they need to be made. You can hire for this. You cannot train it.

He has two little girls under seven. He goes home to them at the end of the day.

For more on House: House's Greenhouse in The Bishop Street Letter.