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I moved to Sunnyvale, Ca. in June of 1981, right after being discharged
from the Navy.
About
I turned down jobs in Chicago and Southern Florida and took a job
with GTE in Mountainview, CA. doing Field Service for Gov/Military systems.
My TS/SI Security Clearance from the Navy was a key reason for the job offer.
I picked this job over the other jobs because I had never spent much time
in California and I thought I would check it out a while, and because it did
pay more than the other locations.
Well, it cost much more to live here, and I guess I am still checking it out
after almost 26 years.
On the personal side, here are some milestones.
June 1981, moved to California and met Julie.
July 1984, Julie and I were married.
July 1985, Julie and I bought our first home in Fremont
It was a nice 1st home with a private back yard and pool.
Feb 1987, Rachel was born
Sep 1989, Jessica was born
Oct 1994, Ali was born
June 1995, The family moved to the country in SW Morgan Hill area.
A nice home onan acre, little Barn, very nice pool.
April 2000, The family moved to bigger home in SW Morgan Hill.
Nice home on 5 acres, (sorry no pool)
My first week in California in 1981, I met my then-future wife.
She was out with a friend and I ask her to dance. I felt so good about her
that I went home afterwards and did not even think of asking anyone else.
We started dating the next week, and soon saw each other almost daily.
GTE did not go great though. The group that hired me relied on
Government contracts. They were staffing up when they lost 2 key
large contracts, and suddenly had a glut of Field Techs. I had a year
obligation or I would have to pay for my relocation expenses,
(about $5K). So it was not good to stay and not good to go.
I did two field jobs for the team. They were actually the same job
at two locations. The job was to recable an entire system because
the connectors were not holding up.
It was a slow job because we had to stuff 50 pairs of signal wire
pins into each connector. Each wire of the pair had a solid color
and a stripe color. With the color spectrum they laid out a scheme
across the 50 pairs. We had to look at a chart to see what colors
went to what pins. The first job took about 5 or 6 days with two
shifts working.
But by the end of the job began to memorize the color pattern.
See it had a darkness to lightness flow that rotated through the
solid colors, and repeated at a sub-level for the stripe colors.
When they sent us to do the 2nd job, they were running out
of "charge numbers", which meant billable hours they could cover
their staff with, So they sent twice as many people and expected
them all to work for 6 days.
BUT, the job was on a submarine, and there was only room for
me to do all the cables on my shift. I was able to re-memorize
the color scheme the first couple hours, and I did the whole job
in 3 days. So all of those people's "charge numbers" were only
available half of the expected time.
Well, you guessed it, I had not anticipated that my efficiency was
not what my management expected or wanted. They had to do the
same job multiple more times at other locations. But they took me
off the team for basically working too fast.
They lent myself and a few other of the overhead Field Techs to
mechanical assembly a few months. But when that ran out they had
a Layoff, and I was on the list, and that was the end of my GTE career.
Getting laid off from my first job out of the Navy was a little depressing.
But, over the following years as I worked my way up to the top of my
field, I often told people the secret of my success was getting laid off
of my first job out of the Navy. In other words it turned into a very
motivating experience that carried me into my next ventures. On
the following jobs I made it a habit to finding out who knew what,
and where they got the information.
After leaving GTE, I came very close to leaving California. But my
future wife, (at that time), talked me into going to visit a Head Hunter
that had helped her friends Boyfriend recently.
The Head Hunter was very interesting, a middle aged lady that
did not dress up, but spoke and thought about 100mph. She quickly
assessed my background and case, and decided she thought I would
be better going into the IBM Compatible Business systems as a
Field Engineer. She gave me tips on speaking, dress, manor, and
set me up with an interview at Memorex, who at that time made IBM
compatible Disk and Tape Drives, plus a few other peripherals.
The interview went well and I went to Memorex wearing a suit everyday,
looking and speaking sharp.
The Memorex training and environment was very good. But the company
had negative growth. I was very motivated after GTE, and I paid a lot of
attention to who had the answers, and found from those engineers,
whcih Tech Books to focus on. I also saw that all the top Memorex
Engineers had gone to Amdahl, an IBM compaptible mainframe company
that we sold Disk Drivers to. One of my peers, Robert Molenda took
that path to Amdahl, and 8 months later recommended me to follow
to Amdahl.
The Amdahl Corp heyday in the 80's was one of the greatest places a
young ambitious person could work. If you worked and self-trained hard,
the opportunity to rise to the top was there. There were HR rules that restricted
a non-exempt to be able to afford an exempt position until time-in-grade
raises could be made, which did hold me back multiple times. But after
less than 5 years as a Field Engineer, I landed at the top of my field in
HW support, doing International support and helping Engineering with
Firmware issues.
The early days at Amdahl were great. In the 80s at Amdahl we worked
hard then celebrated with group parties and company yearly Conferences
for the top performers, (which I probably have the record for going to
as a Field Engineer). I had a great mentor in Bill Hickman, who we called
the Walking POO, (IBM Principles of Operation, which defined the Mainframe
architecture). I also had some very sharp co-workers. We used to play
POO Trivial and try to stump each other on operational questions. Since
we were younger, we were also more social, and many of my long term
friends are those from working at Amdahl. Someone once said, "its
like the Marines, once an Amdahl, always and Amdahl". I think that
may be right.
I once had a shirt the company gave out that said, "Amdahl University".
I wish I had another, because it really was a university for me and my
career.
After 5 years as a general Mainframe and Peripheral Field Engineer,
I moved to HQ, and began specializing in Network Controllers, and
helping with the Firmware. As the product matured, I eventually
took over maintianing most of the Firmware on all adapters, and all
protocols.
The Mainframe market became a non-growth market, and the expensive
Network Controllers I worked on, that ran expensive IBM SW, started
getting displaced by Cisco Bridges and Routers. I started studying TCP/IP
a year later than I should of. I also became a CNX Certified Network Expert
for Token ring, and for Ethernet.
In 1994, I migrated to Network Equipment Technologies, (NET), did a
short stint revamping their SysTest setup and procedures, then became a
full time SW / Firmware developer on Cisco Compatible routers, running
Cisco IOS SW.
NET was intense and fast paced. I worked on multiple platforms in the
short 3 years there. In 1997 I had a chance to help a Startup named
Pipelinks.
At PipeLinks, I was an early Engineer and had decent Stock options.
The first 6 months I tried to help set the product direction. We were
going to make a lower cost AddDropMux, which at that time were very
expensive to get Fiber Access. We intended to use the best Routing
Algortihms, have futuristic QOS over Multi-Link PPP. It was an
interesting 6 months, as I went to Stanford University and pulled copies
of all of their advanced Network course materials, and scanned other
university material on the Web for the best known methods.
I made some nice proposals to try to meet the needs of the product,
that used multiple processing stages in a pipeline. Designed an
exceptional QOS scheduling algortihm.
But the 3 main leaders at that time, good HW engineers, but it turned
out not great System Engineers, had trouble understanding the designs
needed, and were unable to define any product architecture.
It became clear eventually that we were spinning our wheels, and
a change was going to have to come from the top. That finally
happened around the 6 month timeframe, and some new managers
were brought in. A simpler product became defined, and the very
hungry Engineering staff delivered the system very quickly.
I handled the IOS porting, then helped the two Driver Engineers resolve
all of their bugs, many having to do with I/O buffer and memory
management. Then I basically supported the rest of the upper layer
SW team, and resolved any difficult system problems that came along.
Which at the end I did get good fame, by developing SW workarounds
for two critical HW problems that apepared tobe show stoppers.
Cisco acquired PipeLinks in 1999, and we all made a little money.
I then worked for Cisco, mostly on the HFR/CRS worlds fastest router
project. The HFR was a hugely Distributed Processing system,
designed to scale up as BW demands rose. At the start of the project,
marketing had the saying that the Internet BW doubled every 6-9 months.
And the HFR was designed to allow customer to protect their investment,
and scale with more LineCards, Route Processors, and even chassis.
I was an early SW engineer and made Line Card Control Plane Tech
Lead. I helped define a lot of the Line Card Control Plane Architecture
across the Distributed Processing elements, and wrote a lot of the
Driver and Platform SW. The system used IOX, (not IOS), which
was based on QNX RTOS.
I resigned from Cisco in December of 2004, but they persuaded
me to stay until February and then take a Leave of Absence. That
turned out to be a waste of time. My plan was to take 3 to 6 months
off, cross train some, pick up Open Source SW, Linux, XML, Java,
and general better Web SW skills.
I took a series of night classes at San Jose Professional Development,
covering XML, J2EE, DB, Web Services, and Javascript. I also
experimented with a lot of OpenSource SW. I setup Web Servers
and other SW utilities. I considered a SpikeSource type of Business
plan, right before I heard of SpikeSource. But decided the work could be
too time consuming and I did not have enough experience.
In May two great job offers came along, and I took the one at Raza
because I liked the XLR SOC a lot, and because doing Field Application
Engineer work looked like a good way to broaden myself some more.
From May 2005 to December 2006, I worked at Raza on the XLR.
It was a great job in the aspect that I was able to constantly train myself,
exactly the ways I wanted to do, while having good pay and benefits.
I planned on learning the XLR inside out, and a lot of the related SW
very well. After the year mark, I was closing in on all of my goals, and
I did not feel there was a growth path for me at Raza. So I left for
another 3-6 month free lance go.
Currently I am running my own SW company, which is mixing
Consulting, SW development contracting, and pursuing my own
SW based ventures.
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