Work History - The Last Few Years, 2017-2021 - Not the End

Wow, I was going to retire!!!  But I didn’t want to blow it.  Among other things that could go wrong, I worried about how to tell my friend, Boss15, about this, and if that would poison my last days at D&B.  Various websites advised not to announce retirement until the last minute for fear of retaliation, etc.  But I knew that if I just walked out the door I’d feel horrible.  I still remember my conversation with Boss15 in early January 2021 clearly.  I asked if he remembered our recent conversation about planning for retirement (he was a conscientious manager and had raised that subject), and told him that my biggest worry was leaving my friends in a bad spot when I retired.  He thought I was rambling but then got it and said, “Oh my God, when??”  He probably had no idea that I was of retirement age, but he understood right away what I was trying to tell him and what it meant.  He was afraid I was going to say, “In two weeks,” and when I told him that it’d be the end of June he let out a huge sigh of relief and said, “Ok, message received, we have to start planning for this now.  And by the way, congratulations!!”

My last six months went really well.  I wrapped up parts of the huge news vendor project and handed that off to finance people, and was told that my one remaining goal was to document everything I did..  The question was who was going to succeed me?  The long-term plan was to not depend on one person or one technology for the important task of ingesting and analyzing news, but this was not going to happen soon.  Luckily, we were able to re-hire a colleague who’d worked with Avention legacy technology before.  My last few weeks were mostly meeting with him and walking him through parts of the @200 pages of documentation, spreadsheets, slide shows, and back of the envelope drawings I’d compiled.  My qualification to everything I showed him was, “This is how I did it but you should do it your way.”  And I’m content in feeling that he will.  I ended my work career doing a highly multi-dimensional task, and feel that my colleagues will continue to do right by it, which may (should!) mean moving on to better technologies and methods.  Time for me to head out to the upper pasture.

And I was very fortunate to get five retirement parties!  I went out to drinks and dinner with some old work friends from Inforonics.  I also had lunch with my successor and his current manager, who was my Boss12.  Many of the old gang from OneSource/Avention (including some who didn’t work there any more) took me out for a big lunch at Kimball’s in Westford, a place I’d been going to for years for work lunches and other functions.  And the big official going-away party was at the Mighty Squirrel brewery in Waltham.  Lots of people from the Waltham office showed up; the office hadn’t existed for almost a year at that point and it was a reunion for everyone.

The fifth was that I finally got to meet and hang out with Boss15.  He’s a Red Sox fan (grew up in Connecticut) and drove up to visit his sister in Lexington, and then take me out to a Red Sox vs. Yankees game at Fenway!  We had great seats and it was a warm, mellow afternoon, and the Red Sox won.  What a wonderful gesture from a friend I’d gone through some work battles shoulder to shoulder with over the past year and a half.  This was a great ending to my work career.

June 30th 2021 came, and there wasn’t much more for me to do.  At the end of the day I logged off the VPN, shut down my faithful laptop … and the world didn’t end.  Another chapter of life had started.

Work History - The Last Few Years, 2017-2021 - D&B, Data Owners

And I was right.  I was about to experience yet another big change at D&B.  Our “news and events” operation was not a great fit where we’d ended up and I wasn’t surprised that it didn’t last, but what happened next was pretty fucked up.  I’m still shocked at it and not sure why it happened but here’s the story.

Apparently, D&B as a company was used to having parts not fit from time to time, and living with a certain inefficient churn in how things were organized.  There must have been a perception at some top level of the organization that when Boss8 was laid off, we “news and events” people had become one of those parts that didn’t fit, and that we needed to be repurposed.  The importance of my department-mate’s legacy “business as usual” work in Center Valley was understood, but not the importance of the work I did to maintain and improve news flow into Avention products.  It was also not understood that in the past couple of years we’d changed things around so now the legacy work couldn’t be done without my work!

And so one morning I was told that I had a new job, as a “Data Owner,” which was a new department meant to supplant the old means of acquiring content.  And I was expected to be giddy with delight at this for some reason.  My new manager (Boss14) was going to be a guy in our Hong Kong office, and they gave us just the faintest hint as to what this new “Data Owners” group was supposed to do.  It soon became apparent that a) Boss14 didn’t really have time to manage people from 12 hours away, b) they expected me to be an expert at doing something I’d never done before, and c) I was expected to just drop the “business as usual” that I was doing.  This was a very stressful thing for me, to put it mildly.

My last couple of years of work were quite dramatic.  To my great relief I soon was switched to another new manager (Boss15), who turned out to be one of the best I ever worked with.  And I got him to understand the strategic issues that needed to be faced and why I thought the sky was falling.  This was now January 2020, and our contract for news was going to expire in April 2021; there were some major strategical decisions to be made and there was no one to make them.  Well … there was me and him and as it turned out, we had to make them.

Yikes, this was stuff I’d never done before!  We were stuck between our new “Data Owner” bosses insisting that we had to save money over our existing contract, and intransigence from many places in the organization when we told them we might be serving them news differently.  They did not want to change and did not have the time to engineer for any change.  And besides those agendas, there was dealing with the “do modern stuff” agenda.  Incorporating “analytics” and new sets of data such as “Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG)” were the hot thing in that time.  These sciences were young and not yet proven.  But the teams were desperate to succeed, and they tried to hijack our news vendor process, even if it meant not supporting our proven products.  One leader in Austin made a totally inappropriate offer to me to join his team (with a big raise) and stab Boss15 in his back.  Needless to say, I did not respond.

I have to say that this was an empowering time for me, though I didn’t enjoy it as much as I might have.  I’d never been close to the business end of acquiring content.  My strengths were in evaluating it, exposing truths in it, and implementing it.  I now had to develop a list of potential vendors (including the incumbent of course), compile requirements throughout the organization, analyze what vendor(s) could meet the requirements and would charge us less, gather political momentum for change, select a short list of candidates, and negotiate technical details of a new source of content.  Most of this was new to me, and I had to do it in a very transparent way (as opposed to being a one-man band) and keep on producing spreadsheets and slide shows about our progress, as well as leading lots of meetings.  I ended up performing pretty well, though it was a very stressful period.

Well, soon after we started to get our shit together about the huge “news vendor” project that we were faced with, the clock ticked around to March 2020 and suddenly everything was different, and I mean everything.  Boss15 and I had planned a huge summit meeting in Center Valley with a large list of stakeholders as a first step in getting requirements together, but ended up having to do this virtually.  Everybody had to switch immediately to a whole new way of interacting with our colleagues dictated by the realities of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic.  Geez, as if we needed more strangeness!

The news-vendor-selection part of the drama reached a fitting climax.  We were just about to select a vendor that would have checked off all the boxes (including my most important criterion FWIW, better quality and user experience), when they were bought by one of our competitors!  Truly a last-minute twist that was too dramatic to be true.  We had to change course right away (continuing with them would have meant heads would roll, like ours), and managed to get to an acceptable alternate ending.  But we were really close to doing something very good, so it counts as a win in my book.  And I feel I really grew a lot in the experience.

Working at home every day was not bad for us older people.  Our office managers and IT staff did some great work to supply all of us with the technology and tech support we needed at home.  And the company actually gave us all a stipend to buy furniture we might need.  Some had been working at kitchen tables and in their childhood bedrooms in the cases of some of our younger employees. In mid-2020, D&B announced that since we were all doing so well at working remotely, they were going to close many of our offices permanently, including the one in Waltham.

This was sensible to me, but in retrospect it added yet another layer of disconnect between me and my job.  The dramas mentioned above were reaching a peak and in some ways I was more involved with my job than ever.  But in other ways Sarah and I were feeling more and more distant from “work.”  I’d always needed a job for income, but we were reaching the end of this need.  And not having a physical office to go to increased the feeling of being a ghost going through the motions of work, but not being fully involved in it.  I loved not having to commute and I was interacting with colleagues all over the globe.  But somehow I felt myself moving more and more away from them.  And I’d never met Boss15 face to face.  Was he really real?  Was I?  Would the pandemic ever end, and what then?

Working for D&B was rewarding in many ways, though it was frustrating and anxiety-producing in others.  In my last year I made around $135K, which was way beyond my expectations, and I always felt valued there and had the chance to work with some extraordinary people.  But I guess I wasn’t alone in feeling an increasing disconnect from my job.  The pandemic produced a wave of “quiet quitting” (an inexact but popular phrase).

Sarah and I had always figured we’d work until mid-2022, when she’d be 65 and could get her max pension and I would be 66+ and could collect full Social Security.  But she was feeling as disconnected as me, fooled around with the books some, and announced one day that there wasn’t a huge reason not to retire sooner!  If we moved things forward a year and retired in mid-2021 we’d lose a little bit of income, but would still be within acceptable risk parameters.  Well, neither of us could come up with good objections to that, and neither of us wanted to.

Work History - The Last Few Years, 2017-2021 - D&B, News and Events

Some friends had been involved in due diligence before the Avention acquisition and assured me that my job was in no trouble.  In fact one of the reasons D&B bought us was that they liked our ability to mine alerts from the news.  And suddenly being part of a huge company was thrilling and exciting.  I continued to get good raises and had lots of opportunities to work with new people.  I’d never been with a company bigger than a hundred or so people before (except Tufts, long ago), and now I was in a 5000-person company.  In some ways, the 4½ years between our acquisition by D&B and my retirement was one of the most challenging and at the same time rewarding periods of my work history.  I was able to improve my part of the business, integrate news and Triggers into more and more processes, add to my own commercial, technical, and inter-personal skills, and help share knowledge within the company and with our customers.  I was paid well and respected.

But working through the Byzantine intrigues of a large company was stressful, and there were many bad decisions by people in charge.  Dun & Bradstreet has been around since 1841 and has employed four people who went on to become U.S. President.  But everyone knew that there was rot in the company, and a lot of the questionable decisions came from trying to deal with this.  Some people had worked for the company for 30-40 years and no one really knew what they did, but management didn’t want to find out by laying them off.  At the same time, essential people were laid off for no reason with drastic results.  In the time I worked there we had a string of different CEOs and presidents, and went from public to private and then back to being a public company.  There were constant re-orgs, sudden blood-lettings, and incessant harping on moving away from old processes and toward new ones, usually blindly.

D&B was very good about treating us with respect.  They told us that they’d done acquisitions before and, though several of us might be laid off, we should not be scared.  This would not happen right away, and if and when it did we’d get severance pay.  We should all calm down and continue doing what we’d been doing.  They maintained all our benefits as-is through 2017, which was a huge thing for some people.  And though “the Concord office” was now a small outpost in a company headquartered in Short Hills NJ, and most technical work got done in their office in Center Valley PA, they were very good about having people travel back and forth to get familiar with each other.

D&B people were eager to understand our technology and Boss8 and I were eager to communicate it to them, and maybe learn new things from them.  We did an online presentation for the whole Center Valley office soon after the acquisition and were one of the first groups in Concord to feel fully integrated with them.  We got two people from Center Valley added to our department, now up to 6 people instead of just me, and picked up responsibility for the legacy news-to-product-feature process they had.  We were assigned to a well-positioned top-level manager (Boss11) and got a new department title, “News and Events.”  I got the title of Program Director and the funny thing was that for the next few years I’d get about one email an hour addressed to the Events Director … they wanted me to rent tents or something.

Soon though, D&B did start trimming.  There were big parts of what we did that were duplicative of what they did, and there were parts of our business that they didn’t want to continue.  They also had an office in Waltham MA that had lots of open space, and soon many people were laid off (with good severance packages), many other people were moved to the Waltham office, and by the end of 2017 the remaining programmers, IT people, and content people were collapsed into just a corner of our large office.  Our old finance department was there too, but they knew that they were on the list to be eliminated, as soon as our legacy contracts could all be expired or transferred to D&B paper.

Boss8 and I found ourselves in some R&D meetings and these were very fruitful.  We were on a team with a woman in Center Valley and a guy in the D&B Austin TX office, and what we came up with was a way to route Triggers through a machine-learning program to enhance information in them.  These were then sent through an interface for one of our third-party partners in the Philippines to vet.  The results were then routed back into our products and to the D&B mainframe for use in other areas of the organization.  We all were very excited about this in the planning stages, while realizing it might never see the light of day.  And the four of us got along very well also, we were like Dorothy and her companions on the yellow-brick road.  This was one of the most fun projects I’ve ever been involved in, we were mind-melding with each other and working to create a process that would actually move our huge behemoth of a company forward.

In the middle of all this the other shoe finally dropped, and we were moved to the 610 Lincoln Street, Waltham office ourselves.  This is right off route 128, in the middle of Boston’s Silicon Valley.  It was sad to say goodbye to the building where I’d worked for nine years.  When you’ve been in a place that long it becomes very comfortable for you.  I walked all of my lunch-time routes one last time, went to our cafeteria for one last quesadilla day (my friend the grill cook gave me lunch for free), and waved goodbye to the volleyball court.

I was glad to move to Waltham, as it was a slightly shorter and less stressful commute (again, I always took back roads, never the rush-hour highway).  They had a very modern layout, where we all had simple desks that could move up so we could stand, or down so we could sit, and that were crammed together and surrounded by group working spaces of all different sizes.  Our desks had very little storage space and we all had laptops rather than desktop computers.  No one had an office (supposedly), we were all thrown together and expected to be able to move quickly and to collaborate.  We had headsets hooked into VOIP phones and team software, and for many meetings we all just stood/sat at our desks and met virtually, since some attendees were in other offices and/or other countries.

Our office managers were great and had bagels for everyone in the kitchen each Monday and snacks all day, as well as fantastic cold-brew coffee (hard not to get addicted to this).  There was a very small cafeteria where I almost always picked up my desk lunch, though I soon learned to just stick to their salad bar.  We were near a couple of other fine places for lunch, and there were suburban neighborhoods and construction sites to inspect on my walks.

Our R&D team called a summit meeting of the product people our new process would benefit and our top-level bosses and presented this all to them, complete with simple diagrams, the staggering quantity and quality improvement figures we’d gathered, and a few cost estimates for running this outside of a test-tube.  None of us four was prepared for the negative reactions we got.  Basically, the product people were disturbed to learn that what they had thought was good data from our department could be improved that much, and so was faulty to begin with.  And the top-level executives were nasty.  They wanted us to move into the 21st century and here we were proposing a new process that involved even more people than before!?!  We were getting ready to ride the Wizard Of Oz float in the D&B parade, but the wheels fell off before we’d even left the garage.

And while this was going on, my Dad’s health was failing.  He turned 90 in October 2018 but had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.  He published a book of poetry in his last months, almost all of his relatives visited him for his birthday that Fall, and we had a beautiful event on the Ithaca lakeshore in fine Fall weather.  I drove out to visit him over the Winter and Spring (sometimes through some of the worst weather I’ve ever driven in) and I was just one of many supporters.  He soldiered on in the nursing home of Kendal at Ithaca, but he finally didn’t wake up one day.  His last words to me had been, “I love you,” after a struggle to get the words out.  To my mind, his last great accomplishment after a lifetime of them.

My department was shrinking again, and then we came in one morning and everything had changed.  Boss8 *and* Boss11 were both laid off suddenly.  This was really cruel and really wrong, the worst decision ever.  There was no replacing Boss8, though I took over some of what he did.  This meant that the improvements in functionality we’d envisioned were not going to happen: we no longer had enough people to do them, let alone manage the changes and communicate benefits up the chain in manager-ese.  I’d mentioned rot in D&B?  Boss8 had been on the verge of digging out some of this rot, but now all his work was gone.

This started a sequence of explaining what I did to new managers.  Most people were nice and professional, but it was Sisyphus rolling a rock up a hill until the new managers finally understood, “Oh, that’s what makes this important!” … or not.  And then I’d get a new manager and have to roll the rock back up the hill.

But I liked working on my new team.  It had a bunch of middle managers (Boss12 was my direct manager) reporting to one young guy (Boss13), and a gaggle of mostly very young programmers reporting to them.  I was a totally odd duck in that group, I was over 60 and didn’t speak Python.  But I resurrected the presentation we’d done for Center Valley back in the early days and did a presentation for the new group, which went over well.  They realized that though I didn’t speak Python, I was indoctrinated in the dark secrets so was ok.  We went on outings, since we were (almost) all young people who needed entertainment.  We had a great bowling and pizza party and later all went to the new Star Wars movie as a group.

Boss12 and Boss13 latched on to what I was doing pretty quickly and it’s always fun working with smart people.  But what they needed was visualizations.  They were new school managers and needed some dashboard-available reports where they could look at my work and say, hmmmmm … looks like he’s doing an excellent/good/fair/bad job.  Then they’d be able to manage my process.  For years I’d never had anyone looking over my shoulder, except Boss8, who was so curious he didn’t need visualizations, he could read the raw data.

So I learned Power BI (we were a Microsoft shop) and whipped them up some visualizations.  But what I was really trying to tell Bosses 12 and 13 whenever I got the chance was that there were bigger issues that they needed to deal with.  I was doing the tactical stuff and trying my hardest to deal with strategic stuff, but there were strategic decisions coming up that needed to be planned for now and were over my pay grade.  We had vendor contracts that were going to run out and we needed to plan if we should renew them, or if we should go in other directions, and how to get this decision accepted by our users (the product people).  Before the recent developments, I’d depended on my managers to do this but could not now.  Maybe I could do it, but I needed a lot of back-up from my managers and … then who would do the tactical stuff that also needed doing?  I tried my best to explain this and eventually they got it and we had a basic outline of a way forward, but I had a sense of dread too.

Work History - The Last Few Years, 2017-2021 – A Slight Disclaimer

I’ve taken several breaks in writing this narrative.  The main reason has been that I want to keep the same tone, and have paused because I was not sure that I could.  I’m definitely far enough away, time-wise, from my earlier jobs to write about them objectively and keep a balance between the good things and the bad things that happened.  But I’m still not sure that I’m ready to do that for my last job at Dun & Bradstreet, after the acquisition in 2017.

I still have some open wounds from the OneSource/Avention time, like seeing my good friend stabbed in the back, not being promoted and not knowing what to do about that (they gave me fine raises anyway!), and seeing dysfunction all around me and deciding I’d just live with it.  But my time at D&B will be even tougher to be objective about because some fucked up shit happened.  But part of my appreciating my job was realizing that I didn’t really care.  Did it matter to me at the end of the day if my input was not needed?  I had a secure and comfortable place, interesting work, enough friendly interactions with colleagues to keep me happy, good pay, and good vacation and commute times.  And I was getting older.  Perhaps that was good enough and I could just laugh at what I felt was dysfunction instead of speaking up about it.

I used to be afraid that bad management decisions were going to ruin my company and I’d be out of a job, now I just felt a slight amusement.  And I started to count the days until retirement, which made me realize that I was suddenly older than everyone I worked with.  How did that happen?

Work History - Out West Again, 2009-2017 - Technology

And here's another bit of a sidebar about what technologies I used in my Work History.  As stated, I’m hoping that this personal history will shed some light on how I picked up the talents and skills I did, which is a bit of a mystery to me.  Maybe a review of the technologies involved will help.

In my early jobs we used mechanical or electric cash registers and adding machines, string tying machines, manual and electric typewriters, shovels and hammers and knives and stuff, big ledgers, telephones, and the U.S. Mail.  In college there was no advanced technology used by the students; we used pen/pencil and lots of notebooks, wrote term papers longhand, went to the library to use the card catalog, and read books or sometimes newspaper archives on microfiche.  We’d listen to the professors lecture (sometimes smoking cigarettes or pipes in class, both us and them) and a few of them, art history teachers particularly, would use overhead or slide projectors.  Class handouts were produced by mimeograph machines.  I and a few friends did an arts letter for a while, which I typed onto a single page with a manual typewriter, and would take into Harvard Square to get Xeroxed.  I used a huge Xerox machine when I worked for the government, which we’d often have to do surgery on to remove paper jams.

When I was a cab driver our big tool was Checker Cabs, big cars with internal combustion engines that our mechanics kept running all day and had to be retired after four years or so.  Each cab had a Motorola short-wave radio with a hand-held mike.  The dispatchers would broadcast to the whole fleet (e.g., “Top at 7?”).  We could respond directly to the dispatcher, starting each message with our cab number to bid on fares.  My friends and I would exchange numbers each morning (e.g., “I’m driving 209 today”) so we could keep track of each other and try to meet up.

At Tufts and in graduate school I was introduced to dumb terminals, which were like typewriters but a bit smarter.  The terminals in Wessell communicated with the mainframe at OCLC in Ohio over phone lines.  In graduate school I took a course in “online searching,” which was done by one student at a time using a dedicated keyboard/display that communicated over phone lines with one of the few academic databases available at the time.  In both cases we’d have to configure the router correctly and reboot it all the time.  For one of the last projects I worked on at Tufts, we used Apple IIs to catalog books into our new online database (“TULIPS”) and produce barcode labels for them.

As mentioned, working at Inforonics (“the marriage of electronics and information” was an early marketing slogan) starting in 1987 was moving into the space age for me.  We used dumb terminals networked to a mainframe at the Boston Public Library and then moved to terminals networked to one computer with a 286 chip.  And at Geac we used Apples to do word processing, but the end result was printing everything out and compiling our bid documents (with illustrations) into fancy loose-leaf notebooks which we shipped to our potential customers.

A huge change in how our offices operated came about slowly.  At Inforonics back in the late 80s we still communicated with each other over telephone.  You kept a list of phone extensions next to the most important bit of technology on your desk, the phone, and called up and down the corridor, even to the office right next door, when you needed to collaborate.  And when the phone rang you answered it.  If you knew the right incantations, you could even set up our phones to run conference calls, though this feature was error-prone and wasn’t used much.  Communication with clients was done by calling them up, writing them a memo and mailing it, or doing a business trip.  Then in the early 90s we started running an email server on our 286.  I was assigned the username “jbx” since I didn’t have a middle initial, and gradually most of the people in the office began to use email rather than the phone, though external communication was still old school.

When I started at SilverPlatter, many of our customers would still buy CD towers from us to run our databases, but over the course of my 4 years there almost all switched to Windows or Apple workstations and would load CDs we’d ship them.  Some customers were even on our web product by the time I left in 1998.  As far as what was on our desktops, a huge jump occurred just as I started there in 1994 with the introduction of Windows 3.1, which was the first GUI OS that really did it successfully.  We all had PCs running the latest Windows operating system when I finished.

But another revolution had started.  We still used email constantly, but we were all signing up on AOL Instant Messenger and using that more and more for work communication.  Strange because most people used the same account for both personal and business stuff, and sometimes awkward overlaps would occur.  But everyone found it much easier, less formal, and cooler than email or the phone.

Back at Inforonics, we all had Windows desktops, but would spend most of the day on UNIX terminal emulator programs, such as Putty.  Some used newer editors, but many of us still used the old VI program.  We were writing programs in our proprietary Blue Sky language (and using Blue Sky databases), in UNIX shell scripts, and most of our stuff was written in Perl.  Over at Prospero we were also using the most current Windows desktops.  We used editors like HomeSite (an essential tool) and Notepad++ to edit our HTML templates, and our databases were SQL Server.  As mentioned, the huge thing at Prospero was the use of our own forum software for communication and as an archive of technical knowledge.  On email I had started as “jbx” but when I moved to Prospero my user name became “jbxpro,” which I still use.

IM was ubiquitous when I started at Mzinga, and we all still had AOL accounts.  But enterprises were adopting the new tools by then, and when I started at OneSource we were beginning to use real collaboration software.  One Source had grown out of Lotus and we were stuck on their venerable 1-2-3 product for email and source control.  But soon we shifted to Microsoft Outlook for email.  Again, we all had Windows desktops there and kept our huge databases in SQL Server.  We also had some LINUX boxes, because we had a department that used LINUX for bespoke professional services jobs, and also sometimes when ingesting content from vendors that ran on UNIX.  I had an account on a LINUX box and used Putty and SCP to do some content manipulation before I became really comfortable with SQL Server Management Studio.

Another big change happened in the OneSource/Avention years.  Many people had used things like pagers and what came to be called PDAs (such as the PalmPilot), to be connected when remote.  But gearmakers kept making laptops lighter and with bigger screens, and soon everyone was ditching their big desktops and the pagers/PDAs on their belts and hauling their laptops around everywhere with them.  People who didn’t really need computing power, that is!  Those of us who used huge databases had to keep our desktops, but we were also freed up by the ability to VPN into the office and to different servers.  That meant that when there was a bad Winter storm or I was feeling a bit sick, I could work from home … all I had to do was leave my desktop powered up and I could use Virtual Private Network software to connect to it securely.  Wait a minute, was this good or bad?  Pretty much “good” I guess, but this development meant that people were expected to work from home, instead of just when they were in the office.  And many people did, checking email when on vacation and never being off the work grid.

It didn’t take long before enterprises went all-in on this and started pushing devices on their employees to help them stay connected 24x7, and started installing hugely complex collaboration programs on all of the devices.  Soon, people were joining in on sales calls from the chairlift on their European vacation or attending meetings while stuck in traffic on the George Washington Bridge.  Not me!  But I loved the mature versions of Microsoft Teams in my last few years of work.  It was routine to be in a video meeting with people all over the globe and to be talking with my boss on a side-chat during the meeting (saying things like, “He didn’t fucking say that, did he??  OMG, what a tool!”) and checking the status of lunch plans in another chat.  And to be able to organize and hold a meeting with remote colleagues immediately instead of having to wait for an empty conference room or for everyone to check their email was huge.

By the time we moved to Waltham I’d junked my desktop too and was just on a fine laptop running the latest Windows.  We were expected to carry our laptops home with us in case we needed to work from there, and I had no problem with this.  And when I needed computing power I could RDP into one of our servers that was located … in the cloud.  The cloud was ubiquitous by then, we had data centers here and there and it was hard to keep straight what physical machine was actually located where, which made a difference when running cross-server SQL queries.  Early on, laptops were not able to quickly (or successfully) switch between hardware setups, but my latest couple were great about portability.  My laptop could live on my desk at work hooked up to a docking station that ran two large monitors, my VOIP phone, and input devices, then I could unplug from the monitor and go join a meeting and have the same windows open up successfully on the smaller screen, then take it back to my desk and plug it back in and the windows would stay where they were supposed to, and then I could take it home and switch to the monitors there with no problem.  A miracle!

The COVID-19 pandemic came along in March 2020, and collaboration software was even more important, and it was layered with a new level of informality.  There was no expectation that people had to be wearing suits, sitting up at a conference table, and paying attention.  I was in many high-level meetings where someone was interrupted by their toddler, their dog, the washing-machine repairman, the toilet flushing or the dishwasher making strange sounds.  And no one held it against them, we were all in the same boat and trying to keep it afloat.

Wow, that’s a huge span of technology just in my working lifetime.  But I’m not going to miss not being around for the next developments!  Many people (like me) kept their cameras off while in online meetings and eventually (like me) acquiesced and turned the camera on.  It *does* make a difference to see the people you’re talking with.  I could already sense the next step to collaboration software though, that people expected a new level of transparency, demanding that other people on their team post their notes and preliminary findings.  Geez, talk about taking something meant to save time and fucking it up with paranoia!  Oh well, say hi for me at your next video call.

Work History - Out West Again, 2009-2017 - MIMA

Here’s a change of pace.  Back when I started with OneSource in 2009, the wish that I was going to retire someday started to become real to me.  Perhaps that was part of why, a few years later, I found myself happy in a job that was interesting but not really fulfilling??  Anyway, my mind would sometimes wander to what I was going to do when I retired, and that it would be great if it could add a dollop of “fulfilling” to my life.

Sarah and I have always really appreciated our National Park system in the U.S., and taken advantage of it when we could.  I was thinking idly that working in the National Park Service would be fulfilling, and then I realized that (duh!), I was driving right through a National Historical Park every morning and evening on my commute, Minute Man NHP (MIMA).  As with all people who have something so local that they don’t appreciate it, we’d rarely visited the Park until one fine Fall day in 2010 when we walked the Battle Road and they had most of their houses open.  We loved it and it made me read a history book … a rare behavior … on the American Revolution called Paul Revere’s Ride.

So I interviewed with the Park’s volunteer coordinator (Boss10), and was enlisted as an interpreter.  I started volunteering there in 2013, working four-hour shifts in the Minute Man Visitor Center, assisting the Rangers and talking with visitors about the significance of the Park, what happened there back in April 1775, and where the bathroom was.  My manager at OneSource was fine about me coming in in the afternoon on one day a week and making up the time on the other weekdays.  I really appreciated that, it was important to me and he realized that immediately.  Later managers also had no problem with this flex time.

Soon I got to know other Rangers and employees there and I got to understand the governance structure of the Park and the NPS (much more hierarchical than anything I’d experienced), what motivated the Rangers, and what incredible professionals they are.  I think they came to appreciate me too, how I interacted with visitors (you have to be sensitive to how to enhance their visit, not just be a man-splainer), and the fact that I’d do grunt work such as standing in the parking lot for hours handing out polls.  What I wanted to do was to assist their mission, and I was willing to do whatever it took to do that, as opposed to some volunteers who wanted to do only what they found rewarding, and on their schedule.

I realized that the Park’s “interpretation library” was just an unorganized pile of books, and the Ranger in charge jumped at my idea to organize it when she found out that I was a professional librarian and knew how to catalog books.  So that became my main task, as well as working with the Park’s educational mission and assisting Rangers in running programs for school groups.  After a few years doing that I graduated to working with the Park archivist.  I’ve also continued volunteering in the visitor centers from time to time and helping at Park events, like the annual extravaganza on April 19th.  I’m not a people person but I’ve had many rewarding experiences there and plan to continue helping out.

Work History - Out West Again, 2009-2017 - Avention

OneSource had grown out of Lotus, and had a long life with a lot of different parent companies.  Soon after I started we were re-acquired by a company in Omaha NE, and then a few years later we were sold to a venture capital company in Chicago.  They acquired another software company in Austin TX, and that changed things a lot for us.  We were told that they were going to be producing a new flagship product.  I asked Boss7, “Shouldn’t we worry about this, aren’t we the Product division?”  She couldn’t really disagree, though she tried to.  Soon she’d been laid off and the guys from Austin were showing up and deciding which of us they wanted to keep.  I’d been working on evaluating vendors of IT information to be incorporated in our products at that point, and I think my write-up that argued none of them would work for us was part of the Austin guys deciding I wasn’t one of the ones they wanted to keep (though my recommendation proved to be correct).

They couldn’t really get rid of me because no one else could do what I was doing.  But they told others that they were going to re-do everything, including automating the process of managing our business taxonomy and producing Triggers.  But they didn’t tell me, and this really pissed me off.  They didn’t even have the decency to tell me they were going to try to do what I was doing better, they just considered me soon-to-be-roadkill.  They made a real enemy there.  But they were never able to do it and I just kept on and on, doing what I did.  They complained behind my back that my signature still called me “Product Manager,” which was wrong since they were doing product now.  But I never heard about a new title from HR and so kept using the old one.

I was on Boss7c by then, the head of development, but then they brought back an old employee (who’d been a VP) to manage Content.  Another colleague, was also put in our new department and we hired an intern full-time.  Suddenly what had been just me, though I was also on other projects, was a 4-person department!  We made some great advancements in tagging news and producing Triggers during that period and my new manager (Boss8) was great to work with, one of the best managers I’ve ever had.  He brought an analytical, curious mind to what I was doing, and we had many great discussions about work, 70s movies, and geography.

Somewhere in there (early 2014 as I remember), the company had brought in a new slew of marketers, and they figured that we needed a major re-branding.  We had a huge event at a hotel at Logan Airport to announce this, flying in executives from our offices all over the world.  The big announcement was that from now on we wouldn’t be called “OneSource” because that was such a common name.  From now on it would be “Avention,” and we got a new batch of t-shirts.  A manager who came on board later from a competitor told us that they all laughed when they heard OneSource had changed its name.  We’d suddenly gone from being the most recognized name in the area of sales enablement (yup, that’s what we did) to the least.

The new marketing types decided that our office needed a severe facelift as well (they were right about that), and spent a lot of money on doing that, including moving us all to a swap space elsewhere in 300 Baker Avenue.  The funny thing was that when our office was most discombobulated, our owners in Chicago apparently decided we weren’t performing as they expected, and they brought in a new president (Boss9) to clean house.  He wasn’t a data guy, but was a good guy at running a business and quickly got rid of the new marketing stuff and their off-focus projects, re-named our flagship product back to “OneSource,” and eventually fired the guys in Austin who were so full of themselves and hadn’t produced a lot.

The company was doing pretty well at that point, and we apparently were doing enough growing to satisfy our Chicago owners.  Then early one morning in January 2017 we were all told that there’d be a company-wide meeting in a half hour, and I noticed that one of our conference rooms was filled with guys in suits.  “We’ve been sold!” I announced to my friend at the next desk.  And I was right.  Dun & Bradstreet had bought OneSource/Avention, one of the thorns in their side.  They seemed like nice owners and things were looking up.  Boss9 announced, “I’ve done what I was brought in to do, make this into a salable company, now good-bye!” and he left the building.  The new guys took over the meeting and the first thing they said was to forget the names Avention and OneSource, from now on we were part of Dun & Bradstreet.  Message received.

Work History - Out West Again, 2009-2017 - OneSource

Then I heard from my friend about a small company in Concord MA called OneSource.  We’d worked together at several jobs and she’d just been hired there.  Our contact there was a friend from Inforonics, and I realized another old colleague was working there, and that a current colleague (in sales) used to work there.  His recommendation was vital.  It took that many contacts to get in the door!  They ended up offering me a job, after several interviews.  It was great timing because they'd just decided to go ahead and develop a new flagship product and needed some jocks who could define it, spec it, and get it implemented.  Even so, it took the recommendation from the sales guy for them to get really enthusiastic about hiring me.

The thing was, OneSource was as sales-centric as Mzinga had been marketer-centric and Prospero was built on engineers.  I'll always be grateful to my new boss (Boss7), who was VP of Product at the time, for hiring a 53-year old guy (at $90K) who wasn't exactly this and not exactly that, whose son was just starting college, and who really needed a job.  She showed faith in me and picked me off the scrap heap at a time when no one was hiring.  There was a little delay while we traveled out to Ithaca College for Dave's orientation, but then I started there on July 14th 2009, after having been mostly out of work for almost 4 months.

I was back working out West again, commuting out route 2 in my Ford mini-van and then in my blue Subaru Forester.  OneSource was up on the top (third) floor in a massive building at 300 Baker Ave in West Concord, and I worked in that building for 9 years.  It had a volleyball court in back, acres of parking lot (most of which was not used at the time), a cafeteria and a gym, and was on the Assabet River.  During my time there they built two more huge buildings in that parking lot, a health clinic and a hotel, re-did the cafeteria and gym, and hosted some big tenants like Dassault Systemes (the huge defense company), KAYAK (the travel company), and Emerson Hospital's PT offices.  It later became the HQ for Welch's, the juice/food company.  We were always one of the smaller tenants.

It was a weird building, kind of duct-taped together from some other buildings apparently.  It had straight halls over a hundred yards long, their attempts to brighten it up for Christmas or Spring each year were sometimes pitiful, and it was a strange mix of medical offices, high-tech companies, and manufacturing headquarters.  But I worked there for 9 years and came to feel very comfortable with the building and the location.  I started off bringing my lunches but eventually picked up food in the cafeteria all the time, which I ate at my desk.  They had great soups and Thursday was quesadilla day, which was a National Holiday in my mind.  I loved walking around suburban West Concord on breaks and being so close to places I loved to kayak, which I could do after work.  The commute was not bad (I always took local roads rather than highways), and the Fall scenery was beautiful.

But it took a while for them to get adjusted to me and for me to get adjusted to them.  I mentioned the libertarian/authoritarian schism before, and this workplace was severely tilted towards a hierarchical, authoritarian approach.  Sales was the dog wagging our tail and the reason for everything else was to support it.  We aggregated business information and dispensed it through our flagship product, for which we had global customers, and also dispensed it in one-off professional services engagements.  As I say, I was hired as a product manager for a new flagship product.  But Boss7 soon realized that I was not a traditional product manager.  They’d hired me because I had the technical experience that was needed, but I was never quite the whole enchilada my boss wanted because I wasn’t enough of a business person.  I could communicate fine with the sales people, and in fact went drinking with them after work many times.  But I could not think the way she needed me to about what would sell and what wouldn’t.

But there was plenty to do, and it didn’t take Boss7 long to change expectations and get me on tasks that I could do, very well.  In a reprise of the TIAA-CREF experience, they had hired a design group for the new product, and this was a recipe for disaster.  I thought at first that they were going to back up their concepts with HTML, but they didn’t and so we had to do it.  Sure, if we had unlimited resources we could have done what they thought would be great (for their portfolios that is), but we didn’t and so needed someone to translate their ideas into hard technical specs, and that’s one thing I always did well.  And when our programmers started implementing the specs I had to spend lots of time doing user acceptance testing (as opposed to technical QA).  So I guess I soon became valuable, as opposed to some other “product managers” who were fired or left pretty quickly.

But (third paragraph in a row starting with “but”), it took me a while to feel comfortable at OneSource.  I had several contentious but polite meetings with Boss7, we always got along well but she was always ready to point out that I wasn’t exactly what she needed and I was always ready to point out failures of communication or cooperation within the company.  There was a good deal of back-stabbing that went on and people who did not talk to other people.  So for a while I felt that I’d either be laid off at any minute or would quit for another job.

And I was looking hard.  The experience with Mzinga had reminded me that I always needed to be looking, and I had momentum in the job-seeking arena from the last few months.  There were two really hot opportunities, one was Care.com in Waltham and the other was EBSCO (where I’d applied before) in Ipswich.  I interviewed at both places many times over my first year at OneSource, they both really liked me but for various reasons neither place worked out.

This was fortunate too.  By that time I realized that I liked the job at OneSource and was feeling comfortable and useful there.  One big thing was that they threw a project on UK Postal Codes at me.  As I say, there was plenty of back-stabbing at OneSource at the time, and this was clearly given to me as an opportunity for me to fail, as a couple of the departed product managers already had.  But I was able to use research skills to find a good source for the needed information, and use programming/spec writing skills to communicate how this information could be incorporated into the product for our UK users (the UK office was a really squeaky wheel, but they were delighted to realize I spoke English).  It helped that I was able to get on a LINUX box we had and come up with some proof-of-concept Perl scripts to show our developers how to process the information.

Another opportunity for failure thrown at me in those early days was incorporating Australian company codes into our products, which was harder than it sounds.  I had to not only figure out what Australian company codes were, but then come up with how to get an authoritative source for them and how to associate them with companies in our database (automatically that is, there were hundreds of thousands of Australian companies in our database).  I also had to work with development on what tasks they needed to do and how to fit them into their release cycles, and work with marketing and sales on how to release this and how to make the biggest bang with it.  There was a lot to learn in this job!  I looked around and realized that a couple of other “product managers” had been laid off, so realized that I’d gotten to the point where they really valued me.

And then some more good things happened.  Our new flagship product had been rolled out, so they had to find a new main gig for me or lay me off, and they wanted to keep me.  At that point (Fall 2010), a friend and fellow product manager (and Deadhead) had suddenly given his two-week notice, and this put the company in a difficult spot.  He was the only one who understood how to manage a process we’d developed for the new product to create alerts from business news.  I was told that for the next two weeks, learning this process was the only thing I should be doing.  This may have been another opportunity for me to fail, but both my friend and I are masters of information science (he had gone to URI too, and studied with my favorite professor), and I was able to understand the whys and whats of the stuff he was dumping on me, as well as the whos and hows.

I was left with a bunch of SQL scripts (I’d gotten into our SQL databases a bit before that, but now had to immerse myself in them), an unfinished project in a software tool called Teragram, and a pretty big responsibility.  One of the top selling points for our new product was those alerts that I was now the only one who knew how to manage.  I was able to see what needed to be done in the Teragram project to complete it and improve performance, was able to cast around like a blind person in the SQL databases until I understood what was going on, was able to write up for programmers what changes I needed to the process, and was able to produce and communicate enough statistics to Bosses7, 7a, 7b, etc. and our marketers to convince them that our “Triggers” were improving, the feature was expanding, and I was doing a great job.

There were many people I worked with at OneSource, et seq.  I was there for 12 years!  One fun thing we did every year was great, informal Yankee Swaps at Christmas.  We would all gather in the cafeteria downstairs (this wasn’t an official company function and we didn’t want it to be) and bring mysterious presents, which we’d draw random lots for … but it was more complicated than that.  There are several ways you can do a Yankee Swap and we may have had our own, but it worked and was fun for everyone.  I was making beer and I’d usually give beer as a gift, and it was always a popular one.  A good friend just missed getting my beer one year and was very upset that he’d missed out, so I left a six-pack on his desk the next morning, from Santa.

We’d also play volleyball on the sand courts out back at lunchtime, and we were not that competent at it.  We had a convention called “OneSource Rules,” that we’d invoke whenever we really screwed up and wanted to do it over.  Again, the point was to blow off some work anxiety and have a little fun before going back into that strange building at 300 Baker Avenue.

Life started to flow by pretty quickly.  Dave graduated from college and ended up getting a job with the Commonwealth and living in Quincy.  We converted to a smaller car, which I commuted in, a Subaru Forester.  I got some good raises and was suddenly making 6 figures, which I’d never imagined would happen.  I was always being put on other projects, but my main responsibility was to keep the Triggers flowing, and to keep directing a rotating cast of programmers in how the process worked and what improvements we needed to make to it, including incorporating feeds from recently contracted news vendors.

Work History - Another Level, 2005-2009 - Mzinga

The president of our new owner, Mzinga, came to present to us and he was another very friendly and approachable boss (Boss4).  He told us that we would be reimbursed immediately for our accumulated vacation time and would all get exactly the same salary and time off that we were entitled to at that point.  He had papers ready for each of us to sign saying this.  It pained me that many of my colleagues would now have a much worse commute (lots of them lived West of Littleton, and Burlington was almost the Big City), and that a number of them would not thrive with the transition.  But I was ready to thrive and for a while I did.

"Mzinga" means "beehive" in Swahili and a team of crack marketers had hit on that name as an "original" (it was not) expression of what we wanted to be.  Mzinga had a company song and passed out recordings of it at the big reception they held for us in March 2008.  But what a strangely structured company it was for me.  As much as Prospero had been engineer-centric this was marketer-centric.  No decisions could be made until a roomful of marketers had discussed it for days or a couple of alpha-marketers were psyched about it ... YMMV.  They had free snacks, cookouts every week in the summers, a wealth of branded swag they expected us to wear, and plans for rapid growth and moving to a big building somewhere on 128 where they could show their sign to everyone on that highway.

I seized a desk in the Burlington office pretty quickly.  It was an 11-minute commute for me, and for most of my time there I drove our small, dark-green Saturn and left the mini-van at home.  I started a series of programmer and designer meetings to introduce them to Prospero technology and our way of doing things.  Mzinga was a flurry of marketing concepts masquerading as a company, and was highly leveraged to a group of angel investors we never met.  They had acquired another company right before us, and had a vision of combining the learning software that the new acquisition in Mechanicsville PA had with the social software we Prospero people brought to the table.  They thought they'd made a key acquisition when they bought us, and we agreed.  We had a world-class platform.  Unfortunately, they didn't figure on several things such as us having existing customers we had to serve (though they loved our client list) and that we had a lot of positive momentum that shouldn’t be disturbed.  The executives at Mzinga needed to communicate to some of their existing staff that they bought Prospero because we kicked ass.  Another problem was that all of us Prospero types were sensitive to bullshit, and it was dealt out all the time there.

I worked with a number of great people at Mzinga.  I've been lucky enough to find good people at all my jobs.  Besides the snacks and cookouts and pizza we had a company softball team (I alternated at first base with our president; 5 middle-aged guys pulled hamstrings in our first game) and the spirit of a start-up.  We also had regular Friday beer events, and a foosball table on which I excelled (it had been my sport in college).  We were going to do great things, whatever they were!  And as I've said, people in the high-tech world are generally polite, diverse, liberal, and highly intelligent, and Mzinga was not at all an exception to that.  There was a small sandwich shop across the parking lot, and I usually ran over there to grab something then ate at my desk.  We were busy and I was usually in early and one of the last to leave.

I remember going to a reunion up in Vermont of our clique of buddies from high school that Spring, and being very excited about my job and what we were going to do.  Another life milestone, this one very sad, was that my Dad's second wife passed away that Fall.  She and Dad were childhood sweethearts and re-met a couple of years after my mother and her husband had both died.  They got married and had a fantastic 16 years together before she died of cancer, as had my Mom.  This was a great love story.

But the company didn't know what to make of me.  I was a round peg that did many things and they needed to fit me into a square hole and have me do one thing well.  They couldn't understand how there could be people who weren't marketers (unless you were a programmer, and *they* barely spoke English).  When they saw my new title of Director of Product Information they parsed that and concluded that I was a product manager.  You know, the kind of person who understands the market and can cite statistics of how much market share we'll gain if we release this product or mothball that one.

They hired a new head of Product Management (Boss5), and I really liked working with her, she was a smart cookie.  She realized that she needed to understand this Prospero thing, but was really turned off by the passive-aggressiveness she ran into with them.  So she leaned on me to translate Prospero into terms she could understand and coach her on what capabilities we really had when push came to shove.  She realized that even though I was on her team of (five) product marketers, and was perfectly capable of doing what she expected from her team members, what was needed was that I keep doing what I had been doing for Prospero.  If it ain't broke don't fix it.  I learned a lot from her.  When she realized that I didn't know marketing from a hole in the ground she started loaning me what she considered the best books about the discipline, which I really appreciated.

I continued working on wikis, but shifted to another big project in the second half of my time at Mzinga.  This was a widget that customers or end-users could run on their desktops (possibly integrated into web pages) or phones (yes, smart phones had finally started appearing and "mobile enabled" had become the sexiest phrase in software development) that you could set up to do polls on the topic of the second.  I'd worked with Boss2 on how to get around the cross-site scripting issue that we needed to deal with, and he had some great ideas.  But implementing them meant a lot of work, especially since we thought it essential to allow customers to brand our widget with their own CSS, as with our other offerings.  I had got this working and our department was starting to click, when the shit hit the fan.

We're maybe too close in time for there to be one narrative, or at least a reasonable number, of how the Great Recession in the late part of that decade started and was exacerbated.  I think a great factor was Republican laxness in finance regulation, and it took a sweep by the Democrats in 2008 to (partially) fix it.

In any case, ever since we'd been bought by Mzinga, at company meetings we were assured that the tanking economy wasn't going to affect us, since we were such geniuses and had successful products and investors who had unshaken faith in us.  Yeah, that didn't last that long.  As I've said, our market niche was closing and our old Prospero model for doing things needed to change (the app I was working on was an example of the new things we needed to do).  The concept of "social learning" was getting no traction, this was not the time to throw money around on R&D, and eventually our investors pulled the plug.  And our flagship customers were disappearing as they brought social media in-house.

One great thing that happened during that time however, was that Barack Obama was elected president, and we were all so relieved about this for many reasons.  For his inauguration in January, they set aside our biggest conference room for people to watch it, and it was packed!  We were shoulder to shoulder and latecomers were trying to push their way in.  This was a great moment when we all felt like we were on the same team and that the world was getting better.  Not fast enough though.

In February 2009 there was a round of layoffs which included about a third of the company, most shockingly Boss5.  She'd been recruited heavily to join the company 10 or so months before that, and was the kind of visionary but practical person we needed to get us past this, but she was kicked to the sidewalk.  I helped her pack and carry things out to her car.  She was hurt and infuriated, justifiably so.

Suddenly I was even more in limbo.  My supposed new boss (Boss6) was the head of marketing, but he knew that I and the other "product" people weren't marketers, so he didn’t value us very highly.  I remember sitting with a roomful of panicked marketers who thought their heads were going to roll at any minute and trying to explain what our new "polls" app did and why it was marvelous.  They were hostile, and I couldn't help but take it personally.  They couldn't understand the app and asked me for documentation about why this would fill a market need and what my rollout plans were.  I told them that neither of those questions applied to my role and that I had been asked by marketers (who'd since been laid off) to develop the product ... ask them for documentation.  The handwriting on the wall was pretty clear after that meeting!

March 19 2009 will go down in history as Mzinga Day.  A lot of us had really cared about Prospero and thought we were headed for even bigger things when we were bought by Mzinga.  Instead, their incompetence and being in the wrong place at the wrong time led to our wonderful little company becoming a smoking crater in a little more than a year.  I'm sorry to be bitter about this, but people got hurt.  It was strange, but we all knew when we showed up that March day that some serious shit was about to happen.  And half the remaining company got laid off, in alphabetical order.  Our president, Boss4, got laid off himself.  To his great credit he did not shirk his responsibility, and took the rest of the day to call people into his office one by one and let them know the bad news.

I tried to approach it calmly.  I had a couple of irons in the fire for other jobs and had the experience of having been laid off twice before.  Many people just left, they just wanted to get the fuck out of there and never think about Mzinga again.  But I stayed to politely close a couple of email threads I had open with vendors, to pack up my desk, and to go around and say goodbye to colleagues.  In the meantime the Prospero types had gathered at a nearby Thai restaurant we all liked, and I finally joined them.  A bunch of beer had already been imbibed, Thai food eaten, grievances aired, and support shared.  I participated whole-heartedly.  Prospero had several reunions after that, but they petered out after a while.  We still have a Facebook group though!

None of my irons in the fire worked out though.  In Spring 2009 no company was hiring and everyone was trying to avoid risk.  This was not a great time to be out of a job, and I had somehow become 53 years old, not a great age for being hired.  Dave graduated from Woburn Memorial High School in June 2009, when I was wondering if I’d ever get a job.  He was excited about starting at Ithaca College in the Fall (I was excited too!).  But hanging onto the faith that I’d get a good job soon was getting harder and harder.

Work History - Another Level, 2005-2009 - Prospero

So I was moving to a great job in April 2005, making the same @$84K I had been at Inforonics, and was very excited about it.  But I remember having a chair-lift conversation during a ski trip around that time and being asked what I was going to be doing in my new job?  It was then that I realized I really didn't know!  Well, I did a lot of things and did a lot of growing up there.  Inforonics was a great ride (though a rough one) and was like living in a large, weird family.  Prospero was a family too, but I needed to be one of the adults.

Prospero was named after the magician in Shakespeare's "The Tempest" who brought order to chaos.  It was a very engineering-centric company, led by a president who was actually the lead programmer (Boss1), a CTO (Boss2), and the head of Sales and Marketing and product also (Boss3), though he said that his job consisted mostly of answering the phone and saying, "How much did you say you want to pay us?"  [Starting to number bosses now, ‘cause it gets confusing.]

The reason that Prospero was printing money in the later aughts, was that we were really one of the first social media companies ... the term hadn't even been invented when I started.  Prospero had grown out of Delphi Forums, which had grown out of online bulletin boards.  Prospero had taken this form of interaction, user-based content, to another level.  We were a white label partner for some pretty heavy hitters.  Companies like the major publishing, television, and entertainment networks had realized that they needed to have "comments" sections along with their content, but that this was not their main business.  Instead they hired us to do the interfaces, back-end databasing, and moderation, and to integrate it all with their web pages.  In my time there I worked with clients like NBC, Meredith Publishing, and ESPN/Disney.

Prospero was a really small company when they hired me.  I think I was employee number 12 (not counting the Mallory Ventures staff who did our back office stuff, like personnel, payroll, and cashing the checks), but we grew fast.  There were a lot of clients and a lot of work to do and we all wore multiple hats.  I could do a little of this and a little of that and that's what I did.  I don't think I ever had a title there until I made one up for myself.

Briefly, we had a platform and some tools to configure it in a variety of ways, and a fast SQL server back-end.  Almost all of what we did was centered around the same set of HTML pages/snippets: search, list, edit, list comments, add comment, etc.  And when we set up a customer they got default templates for these pages.  You could configure these to a huge extent by using our control center interface.  This enabled you to set basic settings like captions and text size, but also very technical ones, like Javascript, cascading style sheets (CSS), page dimensions, etc.  And so users would get customized-looking pages while using the same templates that we could edit globally to add features.  You could also write custom templates for customers that needed to add pages or do something custom.  We could serve full web pages for users but most often served the HTML as snippets that could be included in the customer's other pages, preserving their branding.  This was quite different for me in some ways, especially since UNIX/Perl wasn’t involved at all and that it was mostly front end stuff, but I picked it all up really quickly and got very good at it.

I could go on, but the bottom line was that you could set up simple services for some customers, or get VERY involved with writing custom stuff for them.  I started off with simpler stuff ... one of my first assignments was setting up a discussion group/bulletin board for NBC (National Broadcasting Company) to enable Hurricane Katrina refugees to find each other and get their lives back together after that diaspora.  As tragic as that event was, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to use technology to help people directly.  The job at Prospero started off well and I was soon doing more custom work.  My background as a programmer, my ability to master bespoke languages, and knowing a lot about HTML, Javascript, and CSS were just what was needed.  The company needed jacks-of-all-trades and I thrive in a situation like that.

There were two things that really contributed to our ability to work together and be creative.  One was that we all had "Z flags."  In Prospero lingo that meant that we all had total permission to do anything.  If we needed this or had to get that done we could do it ourselves and not have to wait for other people or to get permission, and we all trusted each other with this power.  One thing it meant was that we were all terrified of fucking up!  Every once in a while someone would make a change that would be a mistake and/or affect someone else's setup.  But we had a great attitude about that, if you fucked up you had to bring in the donuts the next morning and all was forgiven.  Most companies are unbalanced in one direction or the other, libertarian or authoritarian.  Prospero was a programmers paradise and was libertarian to a fault, we all had the right to do really well or really poorly.  Some people crashed and burned but most did not.

The other thing was that we ate our own dog food.  We had a couple of internal forums, most important was the "ptech" forum/discussion group.  When you came in each morning the first thing you'd do, before checking email or getting a cup of coffee, was to check ptech to get a quick read on what was going on.  We were running some important stuff 24x7 and we all needed to know immediately if there were any all-hands-on-deck situations, hopefully before the client realized it.  But the real magic of the forum was that you could not have a clue about how to do something, but then get a clue really fast by searching what had happened in the forum in the past or by asking questions in it.  And we all bought into this wholeheartedly, if someone asked a question we answered with no ego involved.  We had all been there and jumped at the chance to help each other, knowing that they would help us the next day.  This positive use of a forum helped us to proselytize to potential customers, we all bought into the power of open communications.

There's a bad side to forums of course, they can be dominated by bad actors and this got worse and worse as forums/discussions/comments got more common on the web.  We set up a really complicated network of forums for ESPN to embed in their pages, but then had quite a struggle trying to prevent bad actors from taking it over.  We had moderators on staff but they had a hard time with these assholes who were more interested in insulting each other and giving the finger to everyone than they were in actually discussing sports.

I was helping Boss3 organize and execute new product ideas, using our platform.  We came up with a really good blog product and also a profile product (that could incorporate the blog) that enabled you to say a lot about yourself, to post pictures, and to brag ... some people posted pretty obscene pictures, which our ace moderators deleted or blocked.  We also fooled around with wikis.  Though some people are assholes, there’s a much greater number of good people out there and we were doing neat stuff for them, enabling them to exchange information and ideas.  Some of the forums we enabled, such as the Meredith Publishing ones, helped people trade child-raising tips, agricultural advice, vacation information, etc.  One of our customers, VRBO, started a new industry and Boss3 was one of their first adopters.

We grew and grew and within a few years blew past the 50-employee mark.  I became kind of the organizer.  I hate to use the phrase, "the grown-up in the room," but sometimes it seemed that way.  As I say, the company was really engineer-centric and this was good in some ways but bad in others, such as in accountability and all pulling in the same direction.  There was passive aggression ("Hmm, he doesn't want to do this so I just won't do it either") and as we grew the egos started to pop up.  I remember one new guy trying to blame me for something when he didn't know I was on the phone.  I remember a new employee thinking she out-ranked me (we were a totally flat organization, there was no out-ranking) and trying to tell me how I should do things.  I was asked to attend a lot of meetings, and became the note taker and spreadsheet-tender for a good deal of what we did.  I was the one who had to (nicely) remind people that we needed them to do this by that date or point out to the executives that this or that could not get done on the schedule they wanted.  I never got credentials in project management but that’s what I did.  Even when we hired some professional project managers, they struggled to understand the issues they needed to be on top of; you needed to understand the guts of how it worked and if you didn’t, the people who did weren’t always kind.  It was the Rosetta Stone problem all over again and as we grew, the gap between Egyptian and Greek got wider.  I was able to be effective in this environment, the engineers, the marketers, and the graphics people were all my buddies and didn't take it poorly when I told them what they had to do since I had the chops to really understand their challenges and objections, and to find ways forward.

Two big projects I was asked by Boss1 to lead in Summer 2007 were with Disney Family and with TIAA-CREF, the teachers' pension/retirement conglomerate.  Things didn't really work out with Disney Family, and that was interesting.  They needed us to give them 100% of our attention, resources, and time and they were puzzled when we didn't.  Sure, we had other customers, but they were *Disney* and they were used to getting their way.  I'm sure they considered just buying us and then being able to tell us what to do.  For me, this was bit ominous.  It was getting to the point where our small but growing company just couldn't grow fast enough, and maybe the handwriting was appearing on the wall all over again, though in a new language.

The TIAA-CREF project was mostly a good experience, but ominous as well.  They had a vision of creating a portal for their customers and, as their customers were mostly teachers, hosting intellectual discussions there as well as supplying pension, career, and retirement information.  They had seen what we'd done with personal pages/blogs/profiles, and wanted that to be integrated into the portal as well.  AND they'd hired a graphics company to draw up the pages they wanted us to implement and host.  I told the sales guy, who had promised them everything, that we could not do what the graphics company had created with the resources we had, and that he'd have to get back to them to manage expectations.  He never did, he just left it up to me to be the bad guy and tell them no.  That worked out but only after a series of painful meetings, and TIAA-CREF finally realized that they would have to step in and fire the graphics company.  The market niche we’d been thriving in had been branded as “Social Media” and was being taken over by people with unrealistic expectations and dollar signs in their eyes.

A crazy thought occurred to me that Fall, maybe I should become a manager!  They'd tried to hire others who could take on some of what I did, they wanted to advertise for "Another Jon Bourne," but things were complicated.  There were so many ways that we *could* do things, no clear answer to how we *should* be doing things, and no documentation on best practices or how we’d done things in the past.  So when people tried to do things the right way they were stymied by too much or too little information.  I saw a need for someone to be the official manager of documentation, and it really needed to be someone who understood the templates, Javascript, CSS, and the challenges of our employees.

So I wrote up a presentation and met with Boss1 and Boss3 about this.  I even had a new title for myself (Director of Product Information) and a plan for what staff I would need.  They didn't laugh at me!  In fact, they thought it was a great idea and accepted it right away, though they told me that at first they wouldn't expect me to hire/fire/assess employees, which was a great relief for me.  They didn't say that they also still expected me to do what I was doing, but I figured that would sort itself out.  What had I done?!?  Possibly a good thing.

Well, what they knew but that I didn't at that point was that things were about to change in a big way.  Mallory Ventures had apparently been looking to sell their very valuable asset, Prospero.  One morning, our president showed up at one of the TIAA-CREF team meetings I ran and announced to us that we'd been sold and that we'd be moving to ... Burlington.  Yay!!  We'd been restricted all along by the penny-pinching ways of our owner, Mallory, and moving to Burlington meant that I'd have a much shorter commute.  I remember that the next day we had another meeting on TIAA-CREF that I needed to project my screen for, but when we got to the room all of the power cords were gone.  Mallory Ventures had decided that they needed to grab our power cords before we took them, they were that cheap.

Work History - Back To the Family, 1998-2005 – Inforonics (Second Stint)

It didn't take long to find a new job this time!  I reached out on email and almost immediately heard back from a friend still at Inforonics.  She told me the company had changed a lot since I left in early '93 and that they would probably be very eager to have me back.  I lined up an interview with the current president and my old boss.  They barely asked me about what I'd been doing over the past 5 1/2 years, took me out to a nice French restaurant (not the old one we'd had our Christmas parties at), and basically offered me a job right off the bat.

Inforonics had a "tiger by the tail.”.  They had started providing computer services to the Thomas Register of American Manufacturers, and the future looked really bright.  The Thomas Registry was an essential resource for B2B commerce and their huge set of green books was an essential reference work at all serious university and public libraries.  Inforonics was moving out of the bowling alley with war-surplus furniture to a new office building in Littleton, had plans to grow and grow, and wanted me back.  I asked for $75K and they didn't even blink.  They hired me back at 2 1/2 times what they'd been paying me when they laid me off a few years before.

So I showed up back at the bowling alley in Littleton at the beginning of August 1998, and it was an exciting time.  In some ways it was like putting on an old pair of slippers, my commute was so familiar and some of my old friends were still there.  In other ways it was really new and fun.  I figured out quickly how to link the possibilities of Blue Sky with web pages and was ready to go.  I drove my green Plymouth mini-van out route 2 like I used to at first, and then when we moved to the new office at 25 Porter Road in the Western part of Littleton I would go North up route 3 to 495 and around that way.  In 2001 we got another new mini-van, this time a Ford Windstar.  I made that commute 5 times a week for 9 years and still remember every inch when I drive those highways.

The dot.com boom was about to start, and e-commerce was the word of the day.  Thomas was in a great situation, having tens of thousands of suppliers wanting to advertise in their books and/or piggyback on their early web products, and having us behind the controls in the back room, with the personnel, experience, and vision to help them get everyone in line and online and start making big bucks.  As planned, after a few last months in the bowling alley on Newtown Road, we moved into half of the first floor of a pretty new building on Porter Road in Littleton, which was a giant cube farm with a few offices for the executives.  We soon grew into the other half of the first floor, the second floor, and a big space across the street.

A problem was that there wasn't enough for all of us to do.  Inforonics was hiring as fast as they could (I told people that they were hiring anyone who could spell "www"), and Thomas Register was eager to spend money with us and dominate the space.  A number of us were working with Thomas (we all had the title "e-Programmer"), I had been since I started and was the main guy on the Thomas Registry of Agriculture.  We were already on the ninth release of a web site for their main product when I started and were quickly adding features to it.  The problem was that it had been done with Blue Sky and you didn't learn about this home-made language in school.  So there were a core few of us who were tapped for most things, and the crazy skills everyone else brought were lined up for the other customers we were bound to get.  The saying was that we were hiring for "the bench," and would be bringing those people into play soon.

But many people got bored and left for better jobs before we could fill in our portfolio.  We had the tiger by the tail and we couldn't afford to say "no" to Thomas for anything, and most of our efforts were spent on them.  We needed to diversify, but the company didn't have what it took (sales acumen? experience?) to get more than a trickle of new customers, so we were stuck with 80% of our business being Thomas.  Inforonics wanted to be a cutting-edge company but couldn't really get there even though they went through re-orgs seemingly every week.  In my 6 1/2 years there during this stint, I had at least a dozen managers and eight desks in two different buildings.

I was working in Blue Sky and UNIX shell scripts, but then learned about SQL, and most of all Perl.  I picked up Perl from looking at/fixing/expanding other people’s code and from my inclination to write little experiments (this did that, if I did it this other way, what would happen?).  Things were going really well and the Y2K bug didn't stop us; we had people in the office all night when the calendar turned to 2000 but nothing major happened to our systems.  With my 6 months of double pay and the referral bonuses I got, we could afford to build a house on our land in Maine, and I made many weekend trips up there right after work on Fridays, leaving Maine at 5AM on Monday and driving right back to work.

During that time, those of us with stuff to do had lots of fun when we weren't working really hard, and usually when we were.  At lunch we'd go for long walks in the woods they have everywhere in Littleton, sometimes in big groups and sometimes individually.  One colleague got us all playing soccer once in a while, and that was extraordinary fun, especially for the people who barely knew how to kick a ball and found it hilarious that there were people who did.  Our games were eventually discovered by jocks from all over the Western route 495 belt, became twice a week and much more serious, and eventually petered out because of too much testosterone.  The company got together weight training and yoga classes that were such a great relief from the stress of daily work.  We even had a couple of bowling events.

There was endless pressure to hype Inforonics and get more people/customers on board.  One friend wrote a company song to the tune of "Oklahoma" recorded it for our recruiting.  We had a company newsletter in which we goofed on the company without mercy; I wrote an article about our "buttprint technology" in response to people proposing that we work on facial recognition.  People liked the newsletter so much I was assigned by my manager to spend 10% of my *paid* work-time on it, which I should have written a satirical article about.  Inforonics was trying to become a sexy but serious 21st-century company, and a lot of us regulars worked and played really hard.  But the great new customers never showed up and a lot of money was wasted.

And I'll never forget driving into work one morning in September 2001 along route 495 and hearing Dave Palmatier on WUMB announce that a second plane had just crashed into the World Trade Towers.  It was a very subdued yoga class that day, and after that I realized I wanted to be with my family and so left work early.

We needed to upgrade the Thomas site yet again, and this time we were determined to do it in a more widely known language.  We still used a Blue Sky database but we wrote all the UI and commerce back-end in Perl.  I was the tech lead on that "release 12" project ... I knew how to iron out the database problems and though I knew Perl all right at the beginning, I ended up learning a lot more about it from reading the code that the really skilled people wrote.  And I herded the sheep, keeping schedules, figuring out what tasks people did well and assigning them to that, meeting with executives and Thomas about how we were doing, and trying to keep things fun.

So wait a minute, Jon.  You've said several times that you never were a manager, yet you talk about being a tech lead and sometimes actually had the title of "project manager" or "product manager."  So what gives?  Well, what I mean is that a) I never had hire/fire power over anyone or had to write performance reviews, b) if I asked someone to do something and they didn't want to I just said ok and changed plans, and c) my "management" skills were devoted to managing tasks, not people ... tasks don't have feelings that can be hurt or hidden agendas to make others’ lives miserable.  I never felt that I was a manager, just a well-organized person who tried to get along with his colleagues and facilitate knowledge sharing.

And then the dot.com bubble popped and everyone panicked.  Most of us had the feeling that the company wasn't being run well, but that wasn't our concern until it was.  Inforonics was probably in as much debt as it could be, and when everything crashed they had to face reality and their bills, and lay off scads of people who were being paid a lot to not do much.  We still had Thomas and they were still making demands of us, but they started to feel the pinch too as the economy tanked and the market niche they'd exploited became more crowded.  Manufacturers had more and more options for selling online.

Everything must end and Thomas eventually broke off with us, trying to save costs by bringing things in-house.  We still had some smaller legacy services and type-setting jobs, and the company tried to re-invent itself as a hosting company with specialized computer services.  We remaining programmers were given the choice of moving into our NOC (network operations center) and becoming Tier II support, or leaving the company.  We lost another wave of people at that point, especially when they then announced that our salaries were going to be cut at least 10% across the board (to their credit, the remaining executives took the largest cuts).  I had gotten up to near $90K but had to grin and bear it when I was sliced back to a salary of $80K.  It wasn't a good time for people in the high-tech world to be changing jobs.

During that time I was able to keep a foot in programming, writing tools for the NOC people to use and participating in our few and far between outside jobs.  We had Stop and Shop for a customer and I wrote a tool to enable quicker logging and response to customer complaints.  But I also pulled my weight in the NOC, doing several all-night shifts (we were 24x7) and having some marvelous conversations with pissed-off consumers.  There’s never any positive feedback when you’re doing support, when people contact you it’s because something’s wrong and when you fix it they rarely are delighted, they just grunt and hang up.  I had continued to do well, to thrive, and hopefully to help the company and my co-workers for over 6 years.  But by this time I could see the handwriting on the wall and figured it was time to move on, even if it meant a pay cut.

I wanted to stay close to what I thought was my core strength, librarianship.  Of course, I didn't want to *be* a librarian and take the pay cut *that* would mean, but there are plenty of companies making products for librarians around.  One of them I always kept my eye on was EBSCO in Ipswich, a database publisher and serials source that marketed mostly to libraries.  I checked out a job there but it was not a good match at that time.  Another place was Ex Libris, in Watertown, a local branch of a maker of turnkey library systems.  Two colleagues from earlier jobs worked there;  I interviewed two or three times and they really wanted to hire me as a programmer/librarian ... seemed like a great match ... but they struggled to meet my salary demand of $80K.  They finally gave in and offered me that, but in the meantime...

Inforonics had acquired a few other small companies during the time I worked there.  They were mostly assimilated, and then their employees left or were fired, we just wanted their customers.  But it was quite another story with the acquisition of Prospero.  They were in a very lucrative niche and the executives at Inforonics were smart enough to just leave them alone and enjoy the profits.  Inforonics restructured for tax purposes and became a holding company called Mallory Ventures that owned Inforonics (that was losing money) and Prospero (that was making money).  We shared office space with Prospero, and I came to know some of the guys there from running into them in the kitchen and the halls.

We hit it off and they knew I was looking.  When they soon had a job opening for an implementer/customer contact they offered it to me.  It was a no-brainer to move my desk 30 feet, still work in the same office with my good friends, and work in a job that delighted me instead of one that was more and more of a drag.  It might have been a mistake to turn down Ex Libris (the offers came at almost exactly the same time), but that would have been a bit of a gamble and as it turns out, the Watertown office closed soon afterwards.

A couple more notes on Inforonics:

• The executives were pissed that our sister company had hired me away, but I talked with my boss’s boss and hopefully unruffled the feathers.  He knew that my position at Inforonics was no longer a great fit, and that I'd had to take a pay cut there.  It was when I told him that I'd been looking and would have left for another company if Prospero hadn't offered me a job that he sighed and got over it.

• Dave needed a job after his sophomore year of college in 2011 and interviewed at Inforonics.  When I dropped him off for that a few of my old friends were waiting out at the front desk to say hi.  They hired him and he had a great experience similar to mine there.  It was always a very laid-back and friendly company, I was very lucky to have such a long-term relationship with them and I’ll always be proud to be an Inforonics alumnus.  When Prospero was sold and moved, I went through the Inforonics office and said individual goodbyes to all of the people there, we'd been a family and had been through some tough times together.

• The last days of Inforonics came suddenly, when they did.  The company continued to go downhill and was bought by a really bad absentee owner who ran them into the ground almost immediately.  They sometimes were far from having their act together fiscally, but the company Larry Buckland formed after college at MIT somehow survived for over 50 years.

Work History - Library Vendors, 1993-1998 - SilverPlatter

Wow, this was much more like it!  SilverPlatter was where things really took off for me.  This was an eclectic company that was organized around doing things right for the library/information user community rather than actually making money, which eventually led to its downfall of course but held appeal for a lot of us.  I made some great friends there too.

This was a very non-hierarchical organization.  I was hired at $36K as a Product Designer in their new Product Design and Usability group.  As with GEAC, they were very happy that I was an actual librarian.  This was an entirely differently laid out office than Inforonics or GEAC.  We had the whole second floor of a building on River Ridge Road in Norwood MA, and it was basically 4 or 5 *huge* rooms with some smaller conference rooms off of a main corridor.  It was all about collaboration and sharing what we were working on.  I didn't have an office, I just had a desk.  Everyone had a small desk there rather than an office, even top executives.

The dress code was back to "office casual," neat pants (clean blue jeans tolerated) and collared shirts.  And the commute was the most onerous I've ever had, though actually not that bad.  If there was no traffic I could make it there or back in 35-40 minutes, but there was never no traffic because the commute was mostly on route 128 around Boston.  I'd drop Dave at day care (later elementary school) and then get on 128 in morning rush hour, get in the left lane, and crawl around to the route 1 exit, then South past "auto mile" to River Ridge Road.  Commute time was pretty predictable in the morning, but varied wildly at the end of the day.  Several times it took me two hours to get home when it was snowing.  But mostly it wasn't bad and it was well worth it, this was a great job.

SilverPlatter was founded by Béla Hatvany and you might want to read this article about his life and vision.  Basically, he felt: "A healthy company ... serves five constituencies: first and foremost, the people who work in it; secondly, the customer, who deserves excellent products and services; thirdly, the investor; fourthly, business partners like suppliers and distributors; and finally, society as a whole."  He regularly took new employees out to lunch to try to share his vision.  I have to say that when he took me (age 37) and three young guys out, he and I talked through most of the lunch and the young guys just tried to follow the conversation.  What an eye opener!  He told us that he started SilverPlatter as an example of what a company could/should be.  It didn't hurt that the company was in the right place at the right time to exploit a market niche; when we had serious competition in that niche we began to lose our advantage, but the vision still remains.  What a great feeling it was to be on a team dedicated to helping each other and society as a whole!

So what was my role there, what did I do?  When I think back on it I'm abashed by how little I did in four years, but they really liked what I was able to contribute, gave me great raises, and I'm proud to say my co-workers came to depend on me.  I started out as a product designer and part of the usability group, but this was when I really came into my own as a project leader and a "Rosetta Stone."

What we did was contract with traditional library content suppliers like ERIC, MEDLINE, and PsycLit ... who accumulated huge scholarly indexes ... and we published them on CD rather than in expensive sets of books.  Libraries were dying to buy these because of the drastic reduction in price and savings in shelf space, but how could they make them available to their users?  Of course, when the company started this was long before SAAS and for most libraries, long before they could migrate to computer systems for public service.  So we sold CD readers and user interfaces to them for what would now be considered stone age Apple and Microsoft workstations.  I did some work on the Microsoft interface and soon on our new web interface.

But what I really did was translate stuff between marketing and programming.  I had the background to understand what needed to be done to serve library customers, and also had the chops to talk to programmers and understand the challenges they were facing.  That theme re-occurred in all my subsequent jobs.  I don't want to say that marketers are clueless or that programmers are misogynist cavemen (some programmers I worked with were female or trans), but it's sometimes very hard for them to work on teams when they can't understand the language each other is speaking ... hence Rosetta Stone.  I wrote specification documents and kept on picking new stuff up, like HTML and Javascript.

SilverPlatter was co-headquartered in London UK and Norwood, pretty different cities.  No one function was done in just one place, so there was a lot of back and forth.  I traveled over to the UK twice on business, which meant I could spend the weekend with my sister's family in London afterwards, which was a great benefit.  A few of the staff there were pretty self-entitled; the London developers staged an open revolt against a manager and at times refused to work with some women in the company.  My second trip over there was basically to step into a dysfunctional situation.  Maybe that's part of the baggage of employees being a prime "constituency."

In my four years at SilverPlatter my salary took off.  I'd never made very much money and started there at what was a pretty good salary by my terms.  Then I got better than 15% raises in my first two years, got a promotion, and by the end in 1998 was making $64K, which was pretty astronomical to me at that time.  Sarah and I had the resources to split a plot of land in Sedgwick, Maine with my other sister in 1997.

My role there changed when the company started shrinking and our business plan had to change.  We began to move to doing professional services for clients.  I was leading a team to deliver a website for the Modern Language Association, that would integrate some of our legacy databases but would mainly provide member services.  I traveled back and forth to New York several times for that, including unhooking their web server at 3AM and driving it down to NYC so it could be hooked up down there by the time business started that day.  I stayed in the Washington Square Hotel in Greenwich Village for that trip, quite a thing for a folk music fan.

During this period we ran through several executives with many ideas in a desperate attempt to find some that worked, it was a company of ideas.  But one executive told us that there were too many ideas, that we needed to improve our focus.  Soon after this I was at a sales meeting where one young marketer from the London office presented an excellent slide show rife with ideas, with graphics explaining how we could spread our brand in different directions.  She apparently hadn’t gotten the memo.  Another marketer raised his hand when she was done and asked gently how this fit in with our new concentration on focus.  Her life passed in front of her eyes and then she said something truly brilliant:  “Well, this is an opportunity for diversity of focus!”  I loved it.

But then things changed even more.  As mentioned, competitors had moved into our niche, and the company needed to change to stay alive.  The company had to do something, and I again totally missed the fact that it might impact me.  One morning in April 1998 they crammed 40 of us into a room in our suddenly too-big office at River Ridge Road (rats had been leaving the sinking ship at quite a pace) and cut off all our heads at once.  Some of the people in the room saw it coming, but most of us did not.  We thought we were vital!  Yeah, we were, but the company couldn't afford to pay us any longer.  They had made the decision to move all development to the London office (it was actually cheaper at that time), and they would continue with just sales/marketing in Norwood.

But SilverPlatter was great to us employees even then.  They told us in late April that they would lay all of us off at the end of July, and they would give us generous severance pay: one month at full salary for every year we'd been with the company (they rounded me up to 4, why not?).  And they added yet another goodie.  They needed most of us to finish the latest software release we were all working on, and the deal was that if that release was completed on schedule in July, then they would give us each two months more.  I got laid off (in a good market for getting re-hired) and got six months of full salary!

I wasn't working on the release but wrapped things up with the MLA, and then didn't have much else to do except to go out for long lunches with my friends, look for a new job, and experience the sadness of seeing what had been a great company get dissolved.