(January 2007) Note: it's been 6 years since I wrote the previous installment. After a marathon of writing, I decided that the story was getting too long, too boring, and wasn't very helpful. Who'd actually bother reading it anyway? However, recently I've had a number of requests to finish the story, so here we go.
During the last days of Futurist Computers (remember Futurist? Neither does anyone else.) I was spending much of my spare time looking for another job. I had quite a few interviews, and many of the jobs even involved Unix in some way, but none of them every panned out. During the last weeks of December 1998 (when no one in the world was hiring) I was reading my daily email from the Twin Cities System Administrator's mailing list and spotted a job notice for a shell programmer. I had just completed several weeks of training in shell programming, so I sent my resume. The employer was Euler Solutions, a local (and ritzy) consulting/training company, and I knew that I had no chance, but I sent my resume anyway.
Wow, did I ever feel deluxe when they actually called me for an interview! I had listed "C programming" on my resume--I had learned C as a hobby in 1987 and had used it (to varying degrees) ever since. The president of the consulting company wanted to know why I had listed C programming when I had never actually done C programming on the job, and wanted to give me a technical interview to see whether I really knew anything. I dug out my copy of "Teach Yourself C Programming in 21 Days" (which I'd bought at the outlet bookstore a year earlier) and studied in the days before the interview (usually during work, since the burnout days of Futurist/Ion left us very little to do).
The day of the interview (late December 1998, sometime between Christmas and New Year I think) was cold and snowy, typical for Minnesota. After talking with HR I met the president, and he grilled me on C for 45 minutes or so and wound up saying, "I think someone should give you a job as a C programmer!" I replied, "I agree! When do I start?"
Well, it took about 3 months altogether. A few weeks after the interview I was sent to interview as a contractor at Guidant CPI, a medical device maker north of St. Paul. I'd previously spoken with one of Euler's contractors who worked at Guidant and had a good time discussing Linux and programming languages; my interview would be with him, another programmer and their manager.
You always know an interview isn't going to go well when the manager starts out with the words, "Well, I don't know why they bothered to send you here but I'll interview you anyway." The programmers at the interview were pleasant, friendly and encouraging. The manager was completely the opposite. I left the interview knowing full well that I would not be hired.
And I was correct, for a while. Two months later, during my days at DCA, an Euler hiring manager called me and told me the story: the Guidant manager in question had an opening in his department, but didn't want to fill it. The programmers worked and worked at him to hire me, but he consistently refused. Then one day... the manager left the company and started his own staffing company. Aha! He didn't want anyone to fill the position because he wanted to fill it himself. But he didn't get the chance: after he left, the new manager was ready and willing to follow the advice of his programmers, and I was in.
Guidant CPI was my first Unix job, and also my first contracting job. I started in April of 1999. My job was to support an Ingres database application which was about to be replaced. Guidant was the first time I'd been paid for working primarily with Unix. At Guidant I worked with Solaris for the first time, saw Sun servers for the first time, and worked in a very professional corporate environment for the first time. And I made more money than I'd ever made in my life, a good thing since we had a baby on the way. A year earlier I'd heard a radio story about the kind of salaries paid to computer science graduates and dreamed of getting that kind of money; at Guidant I was making even more.
The work wasn't taxing. My main job was to support users of a database application, but there weren't many users left. I ended up answering 2-4 phone calls per day. After a while I started getting requests to write SQL queries to handle data extracts which weren't supported by the usual applications. And for fun, a few of us kept a running log of interesting names we found in the data. With millions of data records, there were always a few interesting ones. I found a James Bond, James Kirk, Marge Simpson and others.
Also for fun I started learning Perl programming, a skill which would play a big part of the rest of my IT life. At Guidant we had a database table with millions of lines of data; joins against that table were guaranteed to take at least 2.5 hours, and usually took longer. One afternoon a manager came to me with an urgent request: he'd previously had me write a SQL report for him, but had forgotten to request the phone numbers in the data. Rerunning the report as-is would have taken the rest of the day, and he needed the data in less than an hour? What could be done? Perl came to the rescue: instead of rewriting the report, I was able to use Perl to process the existing data, adding and reformatting the phone numbers. In all, it took 15 minutes instead of 3 hours. I was impressed.
Unfortunately, Guidant was a dead-end for me: with the new database application coming online soon, my job lifespan was limited. And I still wasn't doing what I really wanted to be doing: Unix administration. But it was the late-90s, and the IT field was hopping. By the end of 1999, thanks to Perl and to several headhunters' inability to find me jobs, I reached my goal.
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