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.
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