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kirkcudbrightToday, September 1, is my 10 year anniversary at Epilogue/ISI/Wind River. (Although the 1st was Labor Day, so I actually started working on the 2nd.)
By the start of 1997, the ship of FTP was already foundering badly. Our core product was networking for PCs, but Windows 95 came with networking, and we didn't seem to have a workable plan to deal with this. Our product was better/faster/more secure/etc, but we couldn't seem to find the niche of people who were willing to pay for that when they got something that pretty much worked for free. We had a lot of bright people, but they were generally working on me-too apps, or niche products, or research projects that had no immediate commercial potential (e.g. VoIP, IPSec, and IPv6 before it was even called IPv6). In the early '90s, our competition was Novell NetWare and Banyan Vines, and the technical management was singing from the hymnbook of "TCP/IP on everything, everything on TCP/IP". Microsoft wasn't a competitor, because Microsoft didn't have networking. Microsoft is not an early adopter in any field, but when they come, they come like a bulldozer, and when they decide to enter your field, your choices are generally to be acquired or go under. (Except in the embedded field, because WinCE sucks dead frogs.)
Anyway, Microsoft was eating our lunch, and we couldn't find another place to eat, and in June, the company announced there would be a "reorganization", with more details in 30 days. I'm not sure what the point of this announcement-of-an-announcement was supposed to be, maybe to calm the stockholders, maybe to prepare the employees for the inevitable? At any rate, it didn't do much for morale, but then one of my associates had already been looking at the income and expense numbers, and predicting a 40% layoff. Which, in fact, it turned out to be. (Oh boy. Right. Again.) With 30 days advance warning, I talked to my VP, and said "I don't know who's making the list, but you can put me on it." And he said "I don't know about any list, but I'll pass it along." And I talked to a few people at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mrw42's wedding, and the long and the short of it was that I had a couple job offers befor I had a departure date.
It was Hobbit who said that when you decide to jump, it's actually very easy. The hard part is getting to that point. After 7 years and change, I had seen the writing on the wall, and I had seen the exit strategy, and I was ready to go. July 17, looking around the conference room, I saw a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, but I swear I was the only one smiling. (ceo was in a similar frame of mind (and I have his email to prove it), but he was in support at the time, and in a different meeting.)
Presumably under instruction from management, IT had disabled DNS, NFS mountd, and things of that sort, but I'm the sort of person to leave connections up for weeks at a time, so I still had access to outside email, source code, etc. Boneheads. Of course, if I really wanted ot hose the company, I had more than a month to do it in. And then, I'd been caching /etc/passwd for a while (back in the days when everyone was in one world-readable file), so I was able to produce the most definitive axe list when the dust settled.
So, back to July 17, 1997, the only surprise was that I was "transitioned", meaning I had to stay for another month to get my full severance. So I spent the next month cleaning up 99% of the compiler warnings in the DOS PC/TCP code (the remaining ones being mostly "function too large for optimization"). Because I cared about that code, even if no one else did, and I wanted to leave a good-looking corpse.
When you decide to jump, it's easy, but it still took a while to dissociate myself from the company. I held stock in the company until it crumbled to dust, and it was almost a year later that I finally burned my FTP business cards, one by one, in a campfire at Baitcon.
The first time I was laid off was in 1987, from Plumbley's, a restaurant in Amherst where I'd been working for 4 years, first as a dishwasher, then as a prep cook, finally as a line cook. I'd done the Sunday brunch gig, left work at 4pm, was due back at 8am for lunch set-up, but got a call from my chef at 11pm, telling me not to bother coming in, because the restaurant was closed. I got no warning, no severance, no access to the few personal things I'd left in my locker there (chiefly a notebook with recipes and recipe ideas), not even a thank-you. That's apparently the way the restaurant business works. So I did what anyone would (should?) do in the face of a layoff - I went to Camp Random for a week.
In 1997, Camp Random was long gone, but we went to San Francisco for 2 weeks, before Kylie started pre-school at the Andover School of Montessori (where she will be going into Middle School next week). When life gives you lemons, go on vacation. Seriously.
When I joined Epilogue, they had already been acquired by Integrated Systems Inc. However, ISI was bad at actually integrating their acquisitions, so we were left as an autonomous engineering office, doing our own product planning, our own releases (including manufacturing and shipping), our own documentation, our own support, etc. Everything except things like HR and sales. And ISI sales didn't understand what we did, so we went a year or more without any new sales. (Oops.)
In late 1999, ISI was acquired by Wind River, and the project I was working on just stopped, even before the deal was finalized. In the very short term, this was a good thing, because I was Arisia '00 con chair, and this meant that I didn't have to pretend to do any work - I was just there to abuse the office supplies. Of course, the hangover, after the con was over, with my project killed out from under me, was pretty horrible.
So here's some irony - it appears thatmrw42 hired me not for Mobile IP, which I'd been working on most recently, but for sockets. Back at FTP, chocorua taught me that if you complain about something, you are expressing an interest in its improvement, and you are volunteeering to improve it. Which is how I ended up cleaning up FTP's port of the Sun RPC library, and then the devkit in general. At Epilogue, I worked on adding a sockets layer to the Attache network stack. In a twist of fate, I seem to be one of exactly two people left at Wind River today with a) experience in TCP/IP implementation and b) US citizenship. The former and the latter are subjects of even more extended rants, but suffice it to say that it's 10 years later, and I'm implementing sockets. From scratch. Again.
So, what else to say? To my considerable surprise, I survived at least four rounds of large-scale layoffs, plus smaller, more targeted ones. Like when the entire network stack group was let go not too long after I left that group. See, they were all in Alameda, and I was in Nashua, and working long-distance wasn't working, and spending even 20% of my time commuting cross-country was getting very old. So I went back to reporting to a local manager, and was immediately loaned out to Calgary. Now I'm working on a project with a fellow in Texas, but a) he's easier to coordinate with than an entire team in California, b) my actual manager is still local, and c) my collaborator will probably be working on something else when he gets back from sabbatical, so I'll be left to my own devices again.
So that's one nice perk to Wind River - a 5 week sabbatical every 5 years. Four years ago, I took that plus some vacation time, and biked across the country. Dunno what I'm going to do this time, except that I'll probably wait until next summer to take it.
I never planned to be here this long. But I hate trying to sell myself, I'm not really burning to do something else, and it's failing to suck in the ways that FTP was sucking. But OTOH, there's the knowledge that, thanks to the FTP diaspora, I'll never have to work for strangers again.
The highly-motivatedmrw42 is gone, as well as several other folk whose technical chops I deeply admire and strongly miss. But I'm pretty much median for our office - e.g. frobzwiththingz and tactical_grace have been there longer, since Epilogue was an independent company.
So most likely I'll continue to putter along here, until it sucks, or I figure out something I'd rather be doing (e.g. graphic design), or something else happens. Newton's first law, and all that...
By the start of 1997, the ship of FTP was already foundering badly. Our core product was networking for PCs, but Windows 95 came with networking, and we didn't seem to have a workable plan to deal with this. Our product was better/faster/more secure/etc, but we couldn't seem to find the niche of people who were willing to pay for that when they got something that pretty much worked for free. We had a lot of bright people, but they were generally working on me-too apps, or niche products, or research projects that had no immediate commercial potential (e.g. VoIP, IPSec, and IPv6 before it was even called IPv6). In the early '90s, our competition was Novell NetWare and Banyan Vines, and the technical management was singing from the hymnbook of "TCP/IP on everything, everything on TCP/IP". Microsoft wasn't a competitor, because Microsoft didn't have networking. Microsoft is not an early adopter in any field, but when they come, they come like a bulldozer, and when they decide to enter your field, your choices are generally to be acquired or go under. (Except in the embedded field, because WinCE sucks dead frogs.)
Anyway, Microsoft was eating our lunch, and we couldn't find another place to eat, and in June, the company announced there would be a "reorganization", with more details in 30 days. I'm not sure what the point of this announcement-of-an-announcement was supposed to be, maybe to calm the stockholders, maybe to prepare the employees for the inevitable? At any rate, it didn't do much for morale, but then one of my associates had already been looking at the income and expense numbers, and predicting a 40% layoff. Which, in fact, it turned out to be. (Oh boy. Right. Again.) With 30 days advance warning, I talked to my VP, and said "I don't know who's making the list, but you can put me on it." And he said "I don't know about any list, but I'll pass it along." And I talked to a few people at
mrw42's wedding, and the long and the short of it was that I had a couple job offers befor I had a departure date.It was Hobbit who said that when you decide to jump, it's actually very easy. The hard part is getting to that point. After 7 years and change, I had seen the writing on the wall, and I had seen the exit strategy, and I was ready to go. July 17, looking around the conference room, I saw a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, but I swear I was the only one smiling. (
ceo was in a similar frame of mind (and I have his email to prove it), but he was in support at the time, and in a different meeting.)Presumably under instruction from management, IT had disabled DNS, NFS mountd, and things of that sort, but I'm the sort of person to leave connections up for weeks at a time, so I still had access to outside email, source code, etc. Boneheads. Of course, if I really wanted ot hose the company, I had more than a month to do it in. And then, I'd been caching /etc/passwd for a while (back in the days when everyone was in one world-readable file), so I was able to produce the most definitive axe list when the dust settled.
So, back to July 17, 1997, the only surprise was that I was "transitioned", meaning I had to stay for another month to get my full severance. So I spent the next month cleaning up 99% of the compiler warnings in the DOS PC/TCP code (the remaining ones being mostly "function too large for optimization"). Because I cared about that code, even if no one else did, and I wanted to leave a good-looking corpse.
When you decide to jump, it's easy, but it still took a while to dissociate myself from the company. I held stock in the company until it crumbled to dust, and it was almost a year later that I finally burned my FTP business cards, one by one, in a campfire at Baitcon.
The first time I was laid off was in 1987, from Plumbley's, a restaurant in Amherst where I'd been working for 4 years, first as a dishwasher, then as a prep cook, finally as a line cook. I'd done the Sunday brunch gig, left work at 4pm, was due back at 8am for lunch set-up, but got a call from my chef at 11pm, telling me not to bother coming in, because the restaurant was closed. I got no warning, no severance, no access to the few personal things I'd left in my locker there (chiefly a notebook with recipes and recipe ideas), not even a thank-you. That's apparently the way the restaurant business works. So I did what anyone would (should?) do in the face of a layoff - I went to Camp Random for a week.
In 1997, Camp Random was long gone, but we went to San Francisco for 2 weeks, before Kylie started pre-school at the Andover School of Montessori (where she will be going into Middle School next week). When life gives you lemons, go on vacation. Seriously.
When I joined Epilogue, they had already been acquired by Integrated Systems Inc. However, ISI was bad at actually integrating their acquisitions, so we were left as an autonomous engineering office, doing our own product planning, our own releases (including manufacturing and shipping), our own documentation, our own support, etc. Everything except things like HR and sales. And ISI sales didn't understand what we did, so we went a year or more without any new sales. (Oops.)
In late 1999, ISI was acquired by Wind River, and the project I was working on just stopped, even before the deal was finalized. In the very short term, this was a good thing, because I was Arisia '00 con chair, and this meant that I didn't have to pretend to do any work - I was just there to abuse the office supplies. Of course, the hangover, after the con was over, with my project killed out from under me, was pretty horrible.
So here's some irony - it appears that
mrw42 hired me not for Mobile IP, which I'd been working on most recently, but for sockets. Back at FTP, chocorua taught me that if you complain about something, you are expressing an interest in its improvement, and you are volunteeering to improve it. Which is how I ended up cleaning up FTP's port of the Sun RPC library, and then the devkit in general. At Epilogue, I worked on adding a sockets layer to the Attache network stack. In a twist of fate, I seem to be one of exactly two people left at Wind River today with a) experience in TCP/IP implementation and b) US citizenship. The former and the latter are subjects of even more extended rants, but suffice it to say that it's 10 years later, and I'm implementing sockets. From scratch. Again.So, what else to say? To my considerable surprise, I survived at least four rounds of large-scale layoffs, plus smaller, more targeted ones. Like when the entire network stack group was let go not too long after I left that group. See, they were all in Alameda, and I was in Nashua, and working long-distance wasn't working, and spending even 20% of my time commuting cross-country was getting very old. So I went back to reporting to a local manager, and was immediately loaned out to Calgary. Now I'm working on a project with a fellow in Texas, but a) he's easier to coordinate with than an entire team in California, b) my actual manager is still local, and c) my collaborator will probably be working on something else when he gets back from sabbatical, so I'll be left to my own devices again.
So that's one nice perk to Wind River - a 5 week sabbatical every 5 years. Four years ago, I took that plus some vacation time, and biked across the country. Dunno what I'm going to do this time, except that I'll probably wait until next summer to take it.
I never planned to be here this long. But I hate trying to sell myself, I'm not really burning to do something else, and it's failing to suck in the ways that FTP was sucking. But OTOH, there's the knowledge that, thanks to the FTP diaspora, I'll never have to work for strangers again.
The highly-motivated
mrw42 is gone, as well as several other folk whose technical chops I deeply admire and strongly miss. But I'm pretty much median for our office - e.g. frobzwiththingz and tactical_grace have been there longer, since Epilogue was an independent company.So most likely I'll continue to putter along here, until it sucks, or I figure out something I'd rather be doing (e.g. graphic design), or something else happens. Newton's first law, and all that...
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no subject
Date: 2007-09-02 12:25 pm (UTC)I don't recall this email, but I'd love to see it.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-02 04:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-03 12:35 am (UTC)Life's funny, I was ready to go down with the ship, and the layoff gave me extra for the mortgage and the courage to go get a higher paying job closer to the house.
The only thing I really miss tho is the people. ;-)
(Hm, didn't I first meet John Woodward at Banyan? Or was that someone else...)
no subject
Date: 2007-09-02 09:40 pm (UTC)