winding-path

You’ve heard the Scott McNealy story; this is the rest of my time at Sun Microsystems. I started working at Sun in 1995, directly after I left Netcom. For the first chunk of my Sun employment, I was a contractor through Taos Mountain Software. Taos Mountain was a significant consulting company in Silicon Valley at the time; when I found out how badly Netcom was underpaying me, they were the easy outlet to make a reasonable salary. There was an insane appetite for competent engineers at the time. Those were the days, huh? ...

The term of art at Amazon for events like Black Friday and Prime Day is “high velocity event.” My entire time at Amazon was a high intensity event. I learned a lot, I appreciate what I learned, I liked the people, I’m grateful to the company, and I never really wanted to go back. Here are some Amazon stories, which I can’t tell without talking about Disney a bit. Bear with me. ...

Eh, I had to get to the jobs I didn’t really enjoy eventually. I wound up at Oracle because I badly wanted to leave Amazon. Never the best reason for taking a role, but we’ve all been there. Also, true story, Oracle rejected me back in 2002 because I didn’t have a college degree, so I felt a little bit like I was getting some of my own back. Not really rational but we’re all human. ...

I am pretty sure this is the specific story that’s gotten me hired more than once. It’s a good story about a project I’m really proud of and I’ve gotten pretty skilled at telling it. It’s also a great example of how rapidly careers could move in those days. I’m good at what I do but I also got lucky here and there and this story is about me being both competent and lucky. ...

I’ve told the big Netcom stories; you know how I got there and you’ve heard about my brush with history. This post contains a bunch more that aren’t really big enough to hang an entire article on. My first day at Netcom, everyone was freaking out. It felt like the sky was falling. When someone slowed down enough to explain what was going on, I decided the freak out was justified. Back in those early days of the Internet, nobody had realized that you could just send bulk messages to as many people as possible on the theory that some small percentage of them would reply. Commercial spam hadn’t been invented — in fact, people were a little bit dubious that asking people to pay for an Internet account made sense. ...

Set the Wayback Machine to February 1995, and let’s head back to the Netcom offices. I’d been promoted from tech support to email administration by now, so I was no longer trailing into the office at 5 PM — which is not to say I was an early riser by any means, so that day I got in around 10 AM or so. Either way, I was completely weirded out to see a total stranger sacked out in a sleeping bag under Robert Hood’s desk over in the network administrator bullpen. ...

I have a lot of cheerful funny stories about interviewing and being hired. I also have a similar number of harder stories about leaving jobs. This is the toughest one. It’s a layoff story, too, just not my layoff story. There I was at AltaVista in 2001, entering my third year or so as a director and my fourth year as an AltaVista employee. I ran Production Operations: our system administrators, our NOC, a very small project management team, and a few other things. I owned servers for AltaVista.com and the Zip2 services, and another director — Ken Rouleau? — owned shopping.com. There were a couple other departments in there but we don’t need the laundry list. ...

It’s a point of pride for me that I oversaw technical operations for a pair of very smooth MMO launches at Turbine. Back in the early 2000s, this was by no means a foregone conclusion; in 2004, World of Warcraft had a very rocky (yet successful) launch, and EverQuest had a bad launch in 1999. I’ve had people compliment me on the Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online launches at the Game Developers Conference. One person, anyhow. I even did a talk on why Devops is important for online gaming companies at GDC back in 2012, but I can’t figure out where my slides went so I’ll spare you the somewhat outdated evangelizing. ...

I’m going to tell a couple of related stories about a similar topic today, just because they fall together in my mind and I think it’s an interesting contrast. Let’s talk about time off from both a management and a human perspective. (All quotes are paraphrased from memory.) I’ve generally been fortunate enough to have managers who, at the worst, would listen to HR when they were told that they needed to make me use up my accrued vacation time. And I assume they weren’t generally just waiting for HR to nudge them; they genuinely understood that vacation was important and everyone needs time off now and again. Even working in the video game industry, which is legendary for crunch, I only had a really brutal stretch once. Even Chris Chong, my boss at Amazon, was pretty good about nudging me – although not during preparation for peak traffic periods. At Amazon you gotta plan your life a little more carefully than usual. ...

Time for another “how I got hired” story, this time about my entrance into the video game industry. I’ve really enjoyed the time I spent working in games, and Turbine was maybe the best of it. Despite being the only job in my career where I had to support Windows servers. A couple of years before I got to Turbine, I’d started playing their first MMO, Asheron’s Call, fondly known as AC. At the time, particularly if you were an AC player, AC was one of the big three massively multiplayer online RPGs or MMOs. The other two were Ultima Online and EverQuest. They were way bigger than AC, which was a distant third, although big enough to claim that third place status legitimately. Later on, Blizzard would destroy all of us with World of Warcraft (and cause me some difficulties getting datacenter space), but that’s another story. ...