Preface
I have been looking for Tech jobs since early 1979, just after I got out of college the first time. Needless to say, much has changed in those 46 years.
For this book I’m going back further into a speculative history of the job hunt starting in cave-people times. Then I’ll jump back to 1979 and give my story from start to finish.
Thanks and I hope you enjoy this.
Chapter 1. A Speculative Prehistory
What would the prehistoric “job search”. have looked like? Here’s one possible scenario.
The setting: Europe 707 a.d. Ralf Braveguy had a clothing shop that was growing so fast he could not keep up with it by himself. He enlisted first his nuclear family (all 11 of them that were old enough), then moved through his first batch of first cousins onto the second batch … and with this came his first batch of management hassles.
I would speculate that the word “Nepotism” came into being about this time, because Ralf’s second cousins seemed to be not the brightest bulbs nor hardest workers. They didn’t often come in on time, left early, went out for long langorous (for the time) meals, etc., etc.
Ralf looked at his records and noticed that he was no further in getting control of his business with this latest batch of cousins.
He went to bed ruminating what to do about this and came up with one piece of the puzzle: Stellenausschreibung (German for Job Posting).
That was one piece of the puzzle, which left several others. (a) what to do with the deadbeat former cousins? Sell them into slavery? Stop worrying about them and cut their rations back a bit and try to get them to leave?
How to get this job post out to enough workers to make it worthwhile the effort?
He tried going to the local scribe and paying an exorbitant price to get 30 hand copied duplications of his ad. Then he paid an exorbitant price to another courier to have it taken around with his corporate stamp to authenticate it was really from him, as he was by then a well-known merchant in the region.
Then he waited and waited and waited some more, still struggling with his business. Finally he got one skinny looking guy to show up and respond and Ralf took a deep breath and hired him.
This turned out to be a very good move. Ralf could hardly believe it. This skinny little guy outworked 7 of his deadbeat cousins!
The skinny little guy was from England, named Percy. “Herr Percy, do you have any brothers?” “Yes, sir, 6, 5 of whom survive.” “Would any of them be interested in joining us?” “I will check, sir.”
It turned out that two of the six came “on board” in the modern parlance, and they were almost as good as the first one. The business was saved and they all lived, well, maybe not happily, but survived and thrived to the extent possible in that era.
Chapter (2). 1979–1983
Back to 1979 I had moved to Houston right out of college… I started responding to jobs with the technology of the day, printed resumes mailed to the job recruiters. This worked; I got my first job right out of college, with the huge construction company Brown and Root, programming Cobol, which was not my cup of tea. Other notes on Brown and Root of that era: my supervisor liked to keep an ashtray so he could smoke in my office.) I started looking after a couple of months of all this and got my my next job starting in July at this other company IMSL in Houston.
I had at least one weird experience with a recruiter. I had put my resume on yellow paper, to try and make it stand out from the sea of white and off-white resumes. This lady at the job search office said it “hurt her eyes” … I said nothing, thinking that I said “it’s not about you” that wouldn’t have gotten over so well.
Houston was a thriving city in 1979 when I got there. Then the Reagan Recession of 1980 came in and I experienced gas lines and three super hot and muggy and Wet Houston summers, but I kept my job and even though the local economy was suffering, it didn’t really effect me.
I worked in Houston until March 5 1983, when I left for Seattle. Southern dimbulb that I was, I didn’t have chains or anything and a rearwheel drive Chevrolet towing a trailer. But I got lucky; temperatures stayed above freezing, and despite a little bit of a challenge on the slick wet Snoqualmie Pass, I made into Seattle on March 10 1983, to start my new life.
I stayed in a nice little motel just off I-405 in Bellevue WA. The cherry blossoms were just starting and it was very pretty. There was snow in the forecast for the coming days, which was mostly new for me as I hadn’t seen much growing up, but fortunately (as I had very little experience driving in it), it held off that Spring.
I then rented my first apartment in the area, Northside in north Bellevue WA. It was a largeish one br apartment, but plenty of space for me. I had a comfy chair, couch, dining room table, office with a computer and a phone and a printer.
I started my job search in the office, printing a couple of dozen resumes and mailing them out.
I got my first job in 1983, a little company then called MicroRim. I worked there for about two years. That’s where I first learned C out of a book and worked on a report writer for their system R:base.
I got it done pretty quickly, but it was pretty riddled with bugs. I spent most of the rest of my time there finishing that project and left in 1985.
I had a number of small contracts 1985 and 1986, then got the next large job of my career in 1988.
In the first real break of my career, a guy named Mac Cutchins called me and I went in to interview and he said “I feel like you and I were communicating without talking”. He became my great friend (and our friendship survives to this day). I stayed at that company until 1992. Mac’s company did warehouse and factory automation and I learned a lot there. For example, we started with C and then moved the company to the new (then) C++… I learned a lot, for example I re-invented something called an “island parser” a term I hadn’t heard before then. It was a preprocessor for a language called D++, a procedural database language that compiled into highly performant (for 1988) C++. I used Yacc, Lex and some custom C++ to get this all to work.
One other thing about Mac’s company was another young guy that was hired just after 30-year-old me, Stan McLean. I didn’t appreciate this at a time, but Stan apparently started “thinking like a manager” when he was 6 or 7. By the time he was hired at Intek, he was ready to run the place shortly after he got there. He went on to work for one of Intek’s customers, White Systems and their acquiring company later (name)? and has been a succesful guy all these years.
Basically Stan ran the company and Mac was the wild and crazy Entreprenur at the heart of the enterprise.
I left Mac’s company Intek (Integration Technologies, Inc.) in 1992 when I got an offer to make $60K working for ESCA, in South Kirkland WA.
Cegelec ESCA was a Utility services company (history: check Cegelec on Wikipedia) It was my first Large Bureacratic Organization. It wasn’t quite as much fun as Intek, as I didn’t get to invent as much new stuff.
I worked on systems administration of their Dec Unix systems and at the time, Linux was first emerging. My next project was supposed to be an HP Linux machine, but the corporate hoo-hahs vetoed the deal and said they were going to ditch Dec Unix and go to Vax VMS.
I didn’t want to do that, thinking it a bad career move. (I seem to have been right about this.) So I left there in 1994.
Chapter (3): 1994–2004
Later in 1994 after I left Esca, I went first to … a little game company in Woodinville Washington where I stayed until mid-1996 or so. I worked on payment systems with another contract company that was going by “Rabbit Creek Software” at the time.
Through the rest of the nineties, I was a one-job-at-a-time guy and thought it’s getting a bit fuzzy, I seem
Job Search History
Managment
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