Every year when June 23rd comes around I’m reminded of my first day on the job at The Boeing Company in Everett, Washington, June 23, 1980.
I was 20, had been married for a little over a year, had a 3 month old daughter and would have loved to have been able to find a job in my home town of Portland, Oregon, but jobs were extremely scarce. Fortunately Boeing was still ramping up the 757/767 programs before first flight n 1980 and gave me an opportunity I have never regretted taking.
So we moved young family up to Marysville, Washington and started a new life. The job itself was anything but exciting. Having recently been credentialed with an impressive AE degree in Electronic Engineering Technology, I felt I was ready to be done with school and start life. I soon found out that $7.50/hour wasn’t much to live on for a family of 3, soon to be 4. I spent my days combing over 11×17 printouts of paper that represented the point to point connections of …. wire bundles. The title was Tech Aide Level II, Wiring Design. But there wasn’t really anything to design. A new airplane would get ordered and a configuration would start to take place. The systems engineers would lay out the basic wire bundles needed to accomplish the configuration, and our job was to fill in the details of what wires were to go where. Pretty big yawn but it was a step up from my previous employer, The Centennial School District where I held the title of “Night Custodian.”
I have mostly fond memories of my time at Boeing. Made a lot of great friends there. Participated in their golf league, had some regular running partners, finished my degree while there and got promoted to an Engineer. I transferred to a few different departments during my 12 years there. I spent a couple of years in an Instrumentation Lab running tests with transducers and measuring equipment on what they called the Iron Bird which was.a mock-up of a 767.
After my time in the labs I got lucky and found a window into a software engineering role, but it came with the caveat that I had to travel to Boeing Field which was 44 miles each way. A brutal commute. I did that for 2 years and got some valuable software experience (mostly assembly language) on DEC PDP machines before transferring back up to Everett to join the Flight Controls Avionics group. Finally, some work that was super interesting.
I won’t go into specific projects but suffice it to say that it was a superb learning experience. I loved learning what the black boxes did and why. Every time I fly on a plane I gaze out at the wing surfaces and ponder which black boxes are controlling their surfaces and wonder if any of the software I had written might be still in use. They worked us hard at times. For one period we had 15 months straight of 56 hour weeks minimum. That was with a young family, so not easy on anyone.
In 1992 I made the decision, along with my wife, that it was time to try to move back to Oregon. I found a job in a 10 person engineering group in Beaverton working on a clone of the Adobe PostScript Level II interpreter. I learned a ton from those guys. Yes indeed, life is different outside of aerospace. More was expected to be sure.
After a very brief stint at a complier company (Verdix), I landed at Tektronix. Tektronix seemed like the story of the three bears. Boeing was too big. Oce’ too small. Tektronix was just right. A medium size company that could pay a living wage and provide interesting work.
I had to crack the shrink wrap off of some documents for a very early version of ClearCase (v1.2) and found myself in the role of “Software Tools Guy” to a few development teams. That was a lot of fun actually. I really enjoyed helping people with their tools issues.
Tektronix kept growing and the workload along with it and the next thing I knew I was managing a team of 6 people for Software Tools. Managing at Tektronix was great. They had a culture that very much empowered 1st level managers to make decisions and run with them. Very little bureaucracy. Then Xerox took over and that was the end of that.
On the plus side, Xerox had the budget to fund the build-up of an A3 solid ink printer, which Tektronix did not have. To their credit (or blame if you want to look at it economically), they pumped about 500M into the build up of the first printer over a 6 year period. It kept the finances going which was great. Xerox was a little unlucky however in that the iPads came out and suddenly nobody was printing anymore. There were some lean years in printing after that, but overall, an 18 year run where I learned a ton of stuff both personally and professionally.
Next stop was Cambia Health Solutions where I had to learn about supporting Java development teams. Totally different than anything else I had done before but luckily enough of my skills transferred over and I was able to make myself pretty useful there. After a few years I got drafted into the DevOps team (again, starting over on skill-set), but it was great people and fun technology so all good.
As I was getting close to the end of my career I decided I could take more risks, so I made the leap to work at ComScore with a colleague from the Xerox days. At ComScore I probably had too much responsibility. I was one of 2 people who had root on all 28 AWS accounts. The Company had fallen on hard times though and I didn’t realize what a hot mess it was until I got there. Morale was very low and the environment was more toxic than I wanted to be in.
Last stop Venmo? I found a gig contracting at Venmo with a bunch of unbelievably talented engineers. The one year contract ends September 28th, 2020, but there’s always the chance of getting extended out to 18 months. After that however, I may take the first break longer than 2 weeks in 40 years. I don’t think I’ll be totally done in 2021. I’d like to keep working at this for a while, but more than likely I’ll be contracting.
View from my PDX Window 