Late in 2005, a recruiter called me. He was representing Flock, a social browser. They were past just starting out. They had a few engineers, a president, and not much else, and were looking for a VP of Engineering. They were at the point where they needed adult supervision. Would I be interested?

Well, I thought to myself, a startup could be quite lucrative, which would be great for my expanding family. It would take all spare time, which would not. However, with a title like VP, maybe the stock options would be generous?

From the recruiter:

The Culture

The Company’s goal is to attract motivated people who seek career opportunities with the industry leader, a growing company, whose products are superior to the competition and is dedicated to excellence.  The Company takes great pride in its people, and realizes they are its greatest resource; the desire is to make the environment one of opportunity for personal and career growth.  Like most start-ups, our work environment is fast-paced, collaborative, demanding, and highly productive. We all readily take on responsibilities outside our job descriptions and are all focused on getting a lot done. We value intelligence, flexibility, energy, perseverance, resourcefulness, commitment, willingness to learn, and ability to work at any level of detail and scope. Excellent oral and written communication skills are required, as well as good inter-personal skills. Accurate estimates of identified tasks, and the capacity to work under pressure are all a must.

Intangible Qualities they are looking for

They need an executive that is excellent with customers, respectful, cares about people, strong integrity & ethics, Someone that has a record of over-achievement success, & strong performer.  They are looking for an executive that prides themselves on long term career opportunities and personal growth ability.

This company is very much a “people” person company and that is the key driver with everyone they hire.  What they are looking for is a team builder, strategic thinker, bold, energetic, dynamic, change agent, someone that can partner with other executives, expand international markets, “eye of the tiger”, very sharp, articulate, brilliant, smart, &, charismatic, sense of humor, and self starter.

So, I decide to check it out. They sent me a white paper-like doc, and it starts with the following:

Flock is a new browser, built on top of firefox (sic). It is a functional browser with excellent features (including firefox features like tabbed browsing, etc.). What really makes is stand out are two additional features they’ve added to build social networking directly into the browsing experience: social bookmarking and a wysiwyg (sic) blog writing tool.

It then proceeds to describe the various features, referencing del.icio.us-type features. And it talks about its builtin blog editor. All somewhat interesting. So I agreed to stop by.

They were located in downtown Palo Alto in an old Victorian-era house, apparently owned by the venture capital firm backing them. The place as a house was sorely lacking; there was dry-rot, and it needed cleaning and painting. I walked in the front door, and was immediately assaulted by what I can only describe as Startup Funk. Took me back to StyleWare. It had elements of mildew, unclean bathrooms, unbathed young men, and stale Chinese food. The main room had 2 or 3 banquet tables covered with computers. The president’s office was a room off of the main room, and it was pretty nice.

We talked for half an hour about software management, scheduling, QA, demos, hiring, etc.; all of the stuff you would expect to talk about in a management interview. Then it was my turn to ask questions. So I asked the one that had been on my mind ever since the recruiter contacted me.

“How are you going to make money?”

“Well, we are working on our second round of funding.”

“No, what’s your revenue model?”

“The browser is free”

I paused, trying to be nice. I continued, “At some point, somebody who is not buying a stake in the company is going to have to pay you for something. It could be a cost to download, a cost for a subscription, or by selling ads somewhere. What’s your plan?”

“Oh, we aren’t worried about that right now. Our goal is to grow as fast as possible. At that point, it should be apparent how we generate revenue. Or we will be acquired.”

A couple of days later, I told them I wasn’t interested. This tech wasn’t interesting enough to work on without a business plan.

A few months later, I was in downtown Mountain View by the train station, and saw an office with their name on it, and movers moving stuff into it. At the time, I guessed that they had secured another round of funding.

However, they did not ever figure it out. They were acquired by Zynga in 2011, and the brower is no longer supported.

I never got to ask them how they were going to handle Firefox updates…

 

Got contacted by a recruiter about a manager position at Tivo. It would be managing an internal tools group.

Went to the interview. It went really well. I talked to 4 people, and we discussed compilers, debuggers, linux distributions, and how they were built and tested. How the open source community worked, and Tivo’s interaction with it.

We discussed personnel issues and performance reviews, and philosophies about hiring. I thought it was a great day of interviewing.

Then we got to the close. They asked me to sign something authorizing background checks (OK). And then they asked for a drug test, and gave me a list of approved labs.

I have never partaken of any illegal drug in my entire life. But that’s not the point.

I asked them why they cared. They told me that they really wanted reliable people that they could count on. I asked them if the background check included a police check. They said yes. I gave them my opinion that the police check should be good enough. They still said that the drug test was necessary.

I told them that if there was a false positive, and somebody told the health insurance provider, they could drop me from the health insurance, even if it was company provided. They tried to assure me that the false positive rate was very low.

I told them that I was not willing to submit to a drug test unless they had some legal reason, such as the handling of classified material, and if that were true, I would need a formal security clearance. I was certainly willing to do whatever it took if that were true. They told me that the security clearance was not necessary.

So I told them, “I’m not doing it. If that disqualifies me from this position, so be it,” and walked out.

The recruiter called me the next day, and said that they were willing to make me a generous offer if I would submit to the drug test. I told him no.

 

 

Apple was a difficult place to work. When I got there in 2001, Mac OS X had just been shipped a few weeks before, and my group was putting out the first separate Developer Tools disc. OS X was not a guaranteed winner; it was an “all-in” bet that the Mac could be advanced by replacing the OS with a NextStep descendant.

I managed a small team, but the team was somewhat dysfunctional. And we had a lot of work to do. One person was let go, and we hired another. But basically, we were swamped.

I also did a lot of non-management work; I build a lab of machines to test building Mac OS X with new compiler versions. Looking back, this was what I was most proud of from this period.

However, my relationship with my boss was rocky. One reason is certainly that I was naive in many areas, and just needed to grow up some. And it made my boss absolutely nuts.

During my second year, we got a new VP of our division, and most of the management staff changed. My boss was given a smaller team. I was not a manager anymore. Two of the other managers that had reported to my boss left Apple.

And I was left with a position called “Technical Project Manager”, whose job description was basically, do what it takes to make the Developer Tools as a whole to work for internal and external developers, but don’t do code.

I struggled. Right before I went away on my honeymoon, I made a call to integrate the latest software update into our Developer Tools build. This turned out to be a big mistake, as the Developer Tools had to be based on the first version of the shipping OS for compatibility, but I did not find out until I got back that my ex-boss had spent most of his Thanksgiving cleaning up the ensuing mess. More reason for us not to get along.
In 2003, they made a new organization called the “Developer Tools Program Office”, hired a new manager, and put me under her. And I blossomed. I largely defined the work I was doing, but she had feedback when I was going off the rails.

At one point, the VP of Dev Tools laid off a couple of people. My new boss informed me that I had been on that list, but since she was new, she told the VP she could not do her job without my knowledge and experience.

I tried to latch on as a developer on the compiler team. I ran into two problems: 1. Nobody at Apple believed I could code since I never interviewed as a coder, and the last experience I had at coding was 5 years earlier, and 2. The VP did not appear to think much of me at that point.

Also during 2003, I was asked to get another compiler ready, this time training another engineer on how to do it. That engineer’s boss was a friend of the VP, but this new QA manager was a workplace bully.

He berated, yelled at, questioned the ability, and otherwise mistreated his direct reports, while putting on a happy, productive face to his managers. With me, he got my boss to agree that building Mac OS with a new compiler was part of compiler testing. He then told my boss later that my work had been a “failure” because it had not been more automated, despite the large number of bugs we filed that got fixes, and the fact that the OS X management considered the compiler a success.

With all of that turmoil, I received my first ever “Needs Improvement” performance review. Given that I had almost been laid off, I figured it was time to find a new job.
Of course, there were very few jobs in 2003-2004 because of the bursting of the Dot Com bubble. But one day, I got a phone call from a recruiter at Amazon.

They were looking for somebody to manage their internal software tools team, which maintained their internal development and deployment environments. Sounded right up my alley. There was only one problem.

“I don’t want to live in Seattle.”

She went on the wax poetically about Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. I told her that it would be expensive if they wanted to hire me to move to Seattle. Neither me nor my wife was really interested in the place. She had me agree to fly up there for the interview anyway, provided I passed the phone screen.

I verified that the phone screen did not required coding, and set it up for the time I was driving to work (at the time, my commute to Apple was 1+ hours each way). The person called me. He asked my about tools for inter-team communication, and I mentioned chat and wiki. He then asked me what a hash table was. 40 minutes later, as I pulled into the Infinite Loop campus, he said, “Well! You sure do seem to know your hashtables!”

When I got to the fancy downtown hotel in Seattle on a December Thursday night, I could tell this was a hiring factory. I got a little gift bag with some kinds of chachkis in it. There were dozens of them behind the registration desk of the hotel. In the morning, this hotel messed up my room service breakfast, so I got to the Amazon office quite hungry.
There were six interview sessions, with a break for lunch. There were basically discussion-based interviews; no whiteboard sessions or the like. I spent a lot of time talking about hash tables and priority queues with various engineers. Some kind of VP took me to lunch, which was in this awful little cafe a couple of blocks from the interview.

The first interview after lunch, somebody I knew walked in. He had worked on the ill-fated embedded IDE project in Atlanta when it was canned and he was laid off. Then, somehow, he landed with some StyleWare buddies on their failed startup in Portland, and then hired on to Amazon.

I flew back home that early evening.

On Tuesday, I got a call from Amazon. They said that they were interested in writing an offer, and wondered what I was looking for in salary and total compensation. I gave them basically double my salary. She said, “What? That’s really high. We don’t pay anybody that, pretty much.”

“I told you that it would be expensive for you if you wanted to move me to Seattle to work the very first time the recruiter called me, and I have reminded your people ever since.”

“Yes, but still, that’s really high! We can’t do that.”

“OK, what can you do?”

She gave me a typical, not-outstanding package that, given the cost of living adjustment, was just about the same take-home as I was making at Apple. I told her, no. She got off the phone. A few days later, I got this in email:

I wanted to personally send you an email in follow up to your recent interviews with us here at Amazon.com.  I sincerely appreciate the time and effort you spent coming to Seattle to meet with all of us.  However, after some serious discussions and review, the interview team has decided to pursue some other candidates for the roles you interviewed for.
As a result, I will personally place your resume back in our database for all of our recruiters and hiring managers to view.  If anything appears to be a good fit that matches your skillset (sic), they will contact you and discuss the opportunities with you directly.
I want to wish you luck in your search for a new role and again thank you for your time and energy.  I also want to thank you for your continued interest in our company.

She signed it, “Fondly”. Really? “Continued interest in our company”?

As for Apple, it got a lot better. I grew up a lot in those years. My new boss and I clicked, I figured a lot of stuff out, and things started being fun again. And I even managed to remain friends with the ex-boss.

On January 2, 2001, the Dow Jones Industrial Index closed at 10790.92, and the NASDAQ (where much of the tech sector listed stocks) was at 2474.16. Bay Area traffic was completely choked; commute times were horrible. Most restaurants had at least an hour wait at dinner time, and were turning people away at lunch.

At Red Hat, my team had basically mutinied, and told me that they were going to work in the Red Hat San Francisco office (instead of Sunnyvale), which was the office of a company that was acquired a few months earlier. San Francisco itself was a party. The Red Hat office was south of Market (called “SOMA”) was full of startups. And, every night, there were parties at some of these companies. At these parties, where the price of admission was your resume, supposedly you could get anything you want, including possibly illegal activities like drugs and prostitutes. I do know you could get free drinks and food. These companies were taking venture capital money, and throwing these parties, because they needed engineers. But it had the effect of lighting $1000 bills on fire.

And then the world changed.

When I went to work the week of February 15, there was no traffic. It was gone. Many, many companies had gone bankrupt in the six weeks previous. The restaurants had tables. Rents started going down. You could tell that the dot com bubble had burst. It was palpable, and there was panic, as unemployment went through the roof.

By March 31st, the Dow Jones was at 9799.47, and the Nasdaq was at 1830.42. And it would get worse.

The product I had been managing was a commercial failure, so my role was changed to manage GDB engineers, and the engineers formerly on my team were basically assigned to miscellaneous integration tasks. Red Hat was starting to lay people off to reduce headcount as it absorbed us.

At one point, my team was assigned against its will to bolster a huge project that was in trouble. The project itself was being run out of our Atlanta office, and we had to fly out there to learn how to develop this product.

Eventually, Red Hat and the former Cygnus engineering management team pulled the plug, and laid everybody in Atlanta off. There was one engineer working remotely from a farm house in New England, and they forgot to lay him off! He eventually was laid off a few months later after he did not adapt to working on GDB very well. One result of that project was that two of my better people left, both going to Apple.

So, Red Hat was in turmoil, and during all of this, I got another call from a different recruiter at Apple. It was for a Quality Assurance Manager position.

I was not a QA person, but I had managed some, and had come from a background of strong QA, both manual, and automated. So I agreed to come in.

I walked into the conference room at Apple, and there was the same hiring manager I had talked to a few months earlier. “Oh, hey, good to see you. Haven’t heard from you in a while.”

I said, as evenly as I could, “Well, you were going to call me with next steps, and you never did. So I figured that you weren’t interested.”

He looked genuinely puzzled. “I never called you? Huh. Thought I did. Sorry about that! We were looking a for a pure project manager, and decided that you did not match the roll.”

“I agree.”

He continued. “We are looking for a QA manager for the Developer Tools group for Mac OS X here. Have you installed Mac OS X yet?”

The first commercial version of Mac OS X (Cheetah) had shipped a few weeks earlier.

“Well, I have a Power Mac 8600/300, which does not support it. I have not purchased a machine on the off-chance I would get a job that needs it…”

He laughed. We went ahead with the interview. I don’t remember much about it (other than an interview question I still can’t answer 17 years later. I don’t think that there is a solution, but the fellow was obviously expecting the answer to be easy). One session, though I got a surprise.

A few weeks earlier, one of my friends decided to throw a music parlour party. She asked many of her friends to bring some prepared music, and we would all play/sing for each other, and have dinner and wine. She sang, and her accompanist on piano was a good player. At some point, he started playing “All Blues” (jazz), and I started playing soprano sax along with him. We jammed out.

He was one of my interviewers; he was the compiler manager. So that was cool. And evidently, one of the guys who worked for me at Cygnus/Red Hat, and who had worked with me at Sun Labs, had recommended me. He met me at the door, and took my temp badge on the way out.

The interview seemed to go well; it was on a Monday. On Wednesday, my grandboss at Red Hat told me that he was moving me into a more senior management roll, managing GCC engineers. It was a step up in prestige and responsibility for me. I wonder if he knew I was getting ready to leave…

And I got the offer! Finally, the company I had most wanted to work for for 12 years was hiring me.

And I took it. My Red Hat grandboss tried to keep me, but my heart was already at Apple.

When they showed us the “Think Different” ad during orientation, I cried. I was home.