I was reading Charles Stross’s blog the other day, and noticed that he’d nicely compiled all his “How I got here in the end” blog entries into a single post. I’d not read the whole thing, so a quick bookmark and I was off to other things. Today, while going back to the bookmark, I discovered that we may have crossed paths in our respective previous lives:
I spent nearly three and a half years working on technical documentation for a UNIX vendor during the early 90s. Along the way, I learned Perl (against orders), accidentally provoked the invention of the robots.txt file, was the token Departmental Hippie, and finally jumped ship when the company ran aground on the jagged rocky reefs of the Dilbert Continent. At one time, that particular company was an extremely cool place to work. But today, it lingers on in popular memories only because of the hideous legacy of it’s initials … SCO.
SCO was not then the brain-eating zombie of the UNIX world, odd though this may seem to young ‘uns who’ve grown up with Linux. Back in the late eighties and early nineties, SCO (then known more commonly as the Santa Cruz Operation) was a real UNIX company. Started by a father-son team, Larry and Doug Michels, SCO initially did UNIX device driver work. Then, around 1985, Microsoft made a huge mistake. Back in those days, MS developed code for multiple operating systems. Some time before then, they’d acquired the rights to Xenix, a fork of AT&T UNIX Version 7. SCO did most of the heavy lifting on porting Xenix to new platforms; and so, when Microsoft decided Xenix wasn’t central to their business any more, SCO bought the rights (in return for a minority shareholding).
SCO is one of the stops on my resumé that I rarely call attention to, as it was an unhappy and eventually unpleasant stop along the way. Charles says “late 1991”, so perhaps we didn’t actually meet . . . I visited the SCO Watford office in August.
Still, I’d like to think that I met one of my favourite authors before he became famous . . .
Later on in that mega-post he says:
During this process I discovered several things about myself. I do not respond well to micro-managing. I especially do not respond well to being micro-managed on a highly technical task by a journalism graduate. Also, I’m a lousy proofreader. Did I say lousy? I meant lousy.
Dude. You want to talk micro-managed? My (Toronto-based) manager wanted twice-daily meetings where I needed to show my progress since the last meeting. I got so paranoid about “showing progress” that I stopped writing altogether, just showing a list of emails I’d been involved in since the last 4-hourly meeting occurred . . .
Do I need to say that my employment at SCO didn’t last much more than a few months after my visit to the Watford office?
Reading further in Charlie’s memoirs:
Here is an example of a Terminally Bad Sign for any organization in the computer business:
… When you discover that your line manager’s recreational reading is the 1980 edition of the IBM Staff Handbook.
Oddly enough, I had a few co-op work terms with IBM in the mid-to-late 1980’s. There were few books that could strike fear in the hearts of technology sector workers like official IBM publications. My very first official IBM staff meeting had the head of R&D in IBM Canada saying things like “There is business out there that we’re not getting. Business that GOD HIMSELF wanted us to have!” For some reason, I thought he was making a joke. I laughed out loud. My IBM career didn’t exactly go upwards from there . . .
