Career Moments

You’re Only Doing One-Third of What We Want

This blog entry starts with my six month contract as a computer science teacher in the early 1980s. I had an altruistic impulse to teach, but I wasn’t willing to bet the ranch on it. So even though I was considered a full-time teacher at Penn State Brandywine Campus two days a week, I continued to work part-time at Burroughs three days a week.

The number of students (around 30) in my first class surprised me. I asked one student why an introductory programming class was so popular. He said he thought it was because a computer-programming course was easier than the alternative math course. I immediately grew doubtful of my new career.

During this six month stint I worked about 60 hours per week. I received no help whatsoever from the administration or the staff. In fact when I asked a secretary how much lead time she needed to type materials for me she responded “two weeks. "

I was operating on about two hour lead-time.

At the end of the first semester I ran into the dean who hired me, and the first thing he said was “Bob, you’re only doing one-third of what we want you to do?” I said, “Whaat, please explain?” “Well we expect all of our faculty to excel in teaching, to do research, and to perform community service."

And it’s not like the students themselves were appreciative. I had to deal with them cheating a lot. When I received the their feedback forms after the semester one said: “Monotone voice, change it!”

I went back to systems programming after that.

Do I Have to Answer That Question?

One day at Burroughs I received a phone call from a recruiter. Usually I don’t give these headhunters the time of day, but this one mentioned a startup company. It was either intrigue or boredom but I decided to interview. Then I was hired to write compilers which I had been doing for about six years at Burroughs.

The company was a small startup in Lawrenceville, NJ. The CTO was a charismatic engineer named Robert Knight. The CEO was a wealthy businessman, Charles Lombardo, who provided most of the company’s funding. Somehow, maybe because Lombardo’s wife worked on Wall Street, our tiny company, MultiSolutions Inc., actually went public. Even though they actually did not have a product or a revenue stream.

The product, under development, was an Operating System called S1. The marketing department used the slogan “Unix is a dinosaur, MS-DOS is a toy.” This was in 1984 and it was true that there was an opportunity for a new OS in the marketplace.

To kill any suspense, the OS never caught on. But I did have an interesting experience giving a deposition to an SEC lawyer at the Federal Building in NYC. The cause for this was a disgruntled employee who was fired from MultiSolutions. He decided to call the SEC and tell them that statements in the company’s IPO were false. Statements like we had a Pascal, a Fortran, and a COBOL compiler ready to go.

Well I was responsible for writing the Pascal compiler so I was asked to testify as to my competency in compiler writing. I was represented by a company-provided attorney who previously worked for the SEC. When the SEC lawyer asked his fourth question, my lawyer says “he doesn’t have to answer that.” “Yes, he does,” says the SEC lawyer. “No, he doesn’t” says my lawyer.

This continued for the next few questions and for about 20 minutes. I was perfectly willing to answer the question asked, but my lawyer wouldn’t let me. I was practically getting whiplash looking back and forth between the two lawyers.

My ordeal ended pretty quickly. Later the SEC dropped the charges against MSI.

Why Are They Shooting At Me?

I had a lot of different jobs at Burroughs which became Unisys (MultiSolutions was in the middle of this). At one point I was in the LINC product group. LINC was a rare software success at Unisys coming from the Burroughs side. It was a 4GL and 4GLs were popular right before the computing world when fully client-server.

This was in the early 1990s, which was also a time when CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) tools were popular. My department was experimenting with CASE tools that could be used to generate design inputs for a LINC system.

The second surprising thing about LINC was that it was developed in Christchurch, New Zealand. I was sent down to Christchurch to demonstrate some of these CASE tools along with Unisys marketing managers.

I was really impressed with the LINC headquarters. It was specially-built, four-story glass-skinned building where it stood out from the drab business buildings on the outskirts of Christchurch.

They showed me a room on the first floor where I could work rehearsing my presentation and demo one last time. Then out of the clear blue, I hear a loud pop and see a round hole punched through window about two feet from where I sat. I ran out of the room, right into a crowd of people who heard this and came to see what had happened.

I heard a female say “well he’s done it again.” I’m thinking “someone shot at the building again?” but when I turned and looked through the window I saw a workman pulling a mowing harrow across a field about 50 yards from the building. This guy was hauling ass so he could finish as quickly as possible. He was also catapulting stones from the field in the process. Apparently he had done this before.

Don’t worry, Bob, they’re really not shooting at you. They're only slinging high velocity stones in your general direction.

Will It Work?

I left Unisys to work at Vanguard. I worked hard to develop marketable skills in order to be able to change jobs in my mid-forties. I earned Microsoft Solutions Developer status right at the time Vanguard decided to abandon OS2 and switch to Windows NT.

As the technical leader of this migration effort I was very busy. I was not a shill for Microsoft products, but I was a supporter. After all, Microsoft was all that I knew.

The first effort was just to port some of the major client server apps to Windows. At the same time some new projects were getting underway including Defined Benefits Front End. This was a C++ project and I basically had nothing to do with it. It was a client server app with data coming from the mainframe. The path to the data involved Sybase (Sybase was a hot product at the time) middleware along with MS Open Database Connectivity (ODBC).

This all sounds rather bland but it put me in the hot seat one day. I was invited to a meeting with many Vanguard principals and my manager at the time. I really didn’t know why I was invited until they started discussing whether ODBC over Sybase middleware was going to work. I finally realized that my manager’s ass was on the line so when he was asked “will it work?” he immediately turned to me and demanded to know “Bob, will it work?”

Remember, I had nothing to do with the project. I also did not know that there was a Sybase consultant (remember I did say that Sybase was hot) running around whispering in manager’s ears “it will not work.”

Since I wanted to exit the room wearing my head I looked my manager in the eye and said, “Yes, it will work.” That’s when I stopped respecting that manager who, incidentally, did not last there nearly as long as I did.