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. ...
I don’t remember how I wound up at the Internet Archive. Obviously I interviewed and all that but I don’t remember how I found the job or anything. Maybe through someone I met while I was volunteering as a sysadmin at the 24 Hours of Cyberspace event? Regardless, it was my next job after Sun Microsystems, which I left after the JavaStation work I’ve already written about. Fascinating place, no matter how I got there. There’s not going to be any central thread to this post, just a bunch of memories of a cool place to work and a bit of technology nostalgia. ...
My dear wife S. likes to look at me despairingly and ask why I’m the way I am. It’s a fair question. My usual trite response is that my mother raised me that way, at which point she says I should show my mother more respect, and so on. (I love my mother, truly.) While this series is more focused on my career in tech than on my formative years, those formative years do explain a lot, and I like all the stories. This is the story of how the family wound up half-moving from Cape Cod to New Hampshire, plus an explosive revelation. It captures a lot of our family dynamics, and sheds a little light on my tendencies to resist authority. ...
This is a Scott McNealy story. Kids these days may not remember Scott; he was the long-term CEO and co-founder of Sun Microsystems. He was legendary for being outspoken, opinionated, and a maverick. He wasn’t a technical guy at heart, leaning way more towards the business side. Nevertheless, he was pretty smart about which way the technical winds were blowing. Sun Microsystems was built on the idea that a computer which wasn’t attached to a network – preferably the Internet – was less useful. I’ll loop back and talk about the first two jobs I had at Sun at some point. Right now, we’re gonna talk about the last job I had at Sun, which was working on the internal Javastation deployment program. Javastations were perhaps the pinnacle of Scott’s network-oriented philosophy, so this was pretty important stuff. ...