When Does Folklore Begin 4173

Oh no! ...just another grunt. I did have the advantage of working my way through college as a technician, so I knew which end of a soldering iron to pick up the first day on the job. It didn't take too long to gain the trust of my hiring manager (fisrt day ;).

BTW, "announced" in IBMese meant (enforced by the '56 Consent Decree) that the product had to be shipped to the customer within one year. I was buttigned the project (took over from the other engineer) and asked what the schedule was; seven months to FCS. No workable design had been started. Oh, Sh....

We worked more or less side by side. He was good though, I was able to run simulations while he caught my stupid logic mistakes. ;-) Forty hours per week of time-an-a-half and double-time adds up.

Purely for selfish reasons, I butture you. I found it easy to get people to do work with me. I learned early that credit for work wasn't a zero-sum game. Spread around, it multiplied and eventually came back. Everyone is happy. Everyone had fun, but that was long ago...

The fact is that it *worked* for us. Management knew it worked, but it still didn't fit the mold. The second line manager (asymetrical organization; his boss was a division VP) had no troubles with anything that worked. His job, as he saw it, was in fact "poo umbrella".

My schlepping out at 4:00 on a summer Friday with an "emergency" pending was just so much icing. ;-)

I never go into work in the middle of the night. Well, I used to when I needed to get an extra run of simulations through. Other than that, I just write it down.

I'd get home at 2:00AM from a debug session and lie there staring at the ceiling, too wired to sleep. Once I went in late and the bastards had shipped the only working example of the widget that I'd just got working 2:00AM before. At least they were nice enough to copy the contents of the PLA.

I had no choice. I went salaried after a year, and already had 20hrs OT in that week when it was announced. I told my manager that he had better have put in a suggestion award claiming that money saved.

-- Keith