I worked on the Tcl/Tk team at Sun. I spent most of my time working on Mac and Windows, but also worked a little on the SPARC on Solaris. One of the senior guys was working on the new execution engine. Instead of parsing the commands as strings all of the time, the new engine create what is called “byte codes”, cached them with the command, and the executed the byte codes.

I helped several times find difficult crashing bugs in the execution engine. There were memory bugs, alignment bugs, and the normal kind of awfulness that goes with a big pile of C code.

That friend talked to one of his friends in the Boston office of Sun Labs who worked on the Java Virtual Machine, which is the actual program that runs that itself runs Java code.

That person called me one day.

“Hello?”

“Hello. You don’t know me, but your teammate (Bob) gave me your number. He said you were really good at debugging low-level code.”

“That was nice of him to say!”

“I work in the Labs here in Boston, doing research on the Java Virtual Machine. I wanted to reach out and see if there were any interest on your part in maybe working on this team?”

“You are in Boston? Could I stay in Mountain View?”

“Well, that’s not our first choice. But we can cross that bridge if it comes to it.”

“OK. What is the next step?”

“Could you shoot me a resume, and I will talk to people here.”

“OK”

So, I did.

He sent me an email about 4 weeks later, saying that they were still interested, but hiring had been frozen, so he could not do anything right now.

That happens a lot. It’s either a fib, helping me feel better about being turned down. Or getting approval for hires is really hard. Or both.

It was OK, though. During that four week wait, something else came up….

I separated from my first wife in December of 1996. My first order of business was figuring out where to live, what stuff was mine, what stuff was hers, etc. But after that, I had to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up.

I had the opportunity to start over if I wanted. Did I want to do music full time, and maybe go back to music school? Did I want to try to break into major league baseball as an analyst? (Although MLB still did not have people who did that at this point.)

I was not particularly happy at Sun, although it was fine. But I thought maybe I wanted to work on software that really captured my imagination.

I applied and got turned down to positions on productivity applications team like Adobe Photoshop. I talked to some friends who were in the video game industry, and the stories they told had all of the things I hated about StyleWare.

I knew nothing of web programming. I took at class (on Sun’s dime) at University of California Berkeley Extension on Java programming. That was my first introduction to object-oriented programming (and the only A I ever made in a computer science course), so many of the internet startups that were starting to spring up seemed out of reach.

There was, however, one piece of software I used all of the time for my music hobby projects. It was software I had envisioned writing myself the first time I saw a Mac in 1984, but I knew I would have trouble getting funding for and making money off of.

It was Finale. Finale was to music publishing what PageMaker was for traditional print media. It had everything a composer/arranger needed to write down music, play it back trhough the computer, and produce professional looking copy.

Finale was a Mac and Windows app. √

Finale leveraged my knowledge of music theory and preparation. √

And, in Spring of 1997, Coda Music had an opening for a programmer on the Finale team pm their website. √

So I applied. I put together a custom resume with all of my music preparation and theory experience, along with my Mac and Windows programming experience, printed it, and the first page of the above arrangement to show I knew something about the product, and mailed it away to Minnesota. In an envelope. With a stamp.

Was not surprised that I did not hear from them for the rest of 1997.

I started at Sun in March of 1996 as a contractor. I did not really like being a contractor, even if a 3rd party company was actually paying me. I had no health plan. The 401K was very limited. I had no vacation or sick days, and I was hourly. And had no job security. There was almost no paperwork to get rid of me.

I was particularly worried about the health plan. I have always had some chronic health concerns. At the time I started, my then-wife just put me on our plan. However, we separated near the beginning of the year in 1997, and I planned for the divorce to be final by the end of the year, and at that point, I needed a health plan. It’s one of the major reasons I was interviewing around in 1997.

After I had been there 6-9 months, I asked my manager about possibly getting a permanent position. He said, “We’ll see”. Finally, after about a year, I got an offer for a permanent position at Sun Labs. It was actually kind of an ultimatum. I was also told my contract was ending the Friday before the first day in the offer.

The pay was actually a little less than I got as a contractor. The assumption was that I was paying more for benefits as a contractor, which wasn’t true as long as I was covered by my wife’s plan. But given that this was the choice I had in front of me if I wanted to stay employed, I accepted the offer. And then I had insurance, a 401K plan, an Employee Stock Options Purchase plan, use of the onsite fitness center, etc.

The only downside: I had to get a new badge at Sun. This was a nightmare.

When I first joined Sun as a contractor, I did not initially get a badge. I had to sign in at the front desk to go to work, sign out when I left for the day, and had to have coworkers hold the door for me to get into the cafeteria (called “Sparcy’s”; Sun’s most successful product at that time were SPARC-based computers). I was told I was going to need to go to the badge offer to take care of this.

There were two badge offices in the Bay Area; one was in Mountain View, on the same campus as where I worked. However, it was only open 9-12 Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. There was a another office in Milpitas 20 miles away open 9-5 5 days/week. On Tuesday, I drove out there. I then found out that personnel records were uploaded and downloaded across Sun offices via satellite on Wednesdays, and I could not possibly get a badge until Friday.

Friday, I got a badge. Hooray. It opened the door to the employee area when I tried it. Hooray.

It did not, however, open Sparcy’s. Boo. I was then told I had to launch a piece of software called “BadgeTool” from a Solaris box to fill out a request for access to Sparcy’s. Well, I was hired to do Mac and Windows, and did not yet have a SPARC box to work with. I was then told that my boss had to launch “IT Support Tool”, and request a SPARC box for me.

So, the following Wednesday, I got a SPARC machine, which, actually, it turns out I needed for work anyway. I launched “BadgeTool”, this hideous X-Windows confusing app, and request access to Sparcy’s.

Friday, I was informed that I then had it. Great.

The next week, I had to go get something in my car, and go back into the building after 5:00. No dice. I went home. The next day, I asked my boss, and he said I needed to launch “BadgeTool” again, and request after-hours access.

That took a couple of days. And I was set.

Until July 1. My badge stopped working. My boss told me that as a contractor, I had to renew my badge every six months, and he had to request it, and he would.

So I had to get another badge. At least by this time, the Mountain View badge office was open 9-5 5 days/week. Oh, and I had to request access to the cafeteria, and after-hours access to the building again.

And I had to do it all again six months later, in January.

So, when I became a full-time employee, I had to get yet another badge. This time, however, I did not have to request the additional access (all employees had it), and I would not have to renew it every six months.

Badges. We don’t need no stinkin’ badges.

A friend of mine had a friend who had a tiny company in Berkeley looking for a Mac programmer. They were a Digital Asset Management company, which meant that they had a system for tracking documents, including licensing, indexing, etc.

Berkeley was a long drive, but I made my way up there.

There was no chemistry here. I was not really interested in the product/company, and the person I talked to was not particularly impressed by me.

Saved me a hard decision about moving to East Bay, so I got that out of it.

 

Intuit had a job listing on a Usenet listing in ba.jobs for Software Engineer. (Think Facebook group without graphics and you get the idea). I applied.

A nice lady called and talked to me about my Mac and Windows experience, and about computer science in general. She told me that she would get back to me about scheduling an onsite interview.

About a week later, she called back, and said that they had decided not to pursue me any more.

When I started dating my now-wife, I mentioned this to her. One of her friends worked at Intuit, so she talked to him. According to her, an executive at Intuit who had worked at Claris told the team that I was not a good engineer, and they should find somebody else.

Thing is, I loved this executive. I would have done just about anything for him. I consider him a role model for leadership.

Even after he torpedoed my chances at a job at his new company.