When I was a young(er) man...

I promised I would share with you my opinion of the IT profession in a previous blog.  In order to do that I thought I would give some insight into my initial foray into IT and why I decided to take that dive in the early 90's.

While in the military I worked at the Natick Labs in R&D, more specifically in USARIEM (United States Army Institute of Environmental Medicine).  My position there in the Bioengineering department had been vacant for some time and the work was piling up.  After serving little more than a month at the Pentagon I was transferred to this outpost in what would be my first exposure to the IT world (other than college computer labs which in the late 80's were old DEC systems you had to share time on, but that's another story.)

My primary job was to work with 4 other engineers (all of whom were civilians as I was the only military person attached to that particular section) to design and prototype one of a kind devices that were to be used in research that would help our soldiers in the field.  We had an altitude chamber and several climatic chambers at the facility. 

When I arrived, I was assigned my workstation, a SPARC system.  No PC, no Mac, a Sun workstation.  It was up to me to read the 30 manuals, put the machines together and start working on a backlog of projects.  By the time I had left there and moved on to the civilian world I was an expert in Unix, OpenWindows, Sun Hardware, TCP/IP and SNA, not to mention C programming.

I was hooked.  It didn't take me long to get recruited by IMI systems out of NYC who put me on the disaster recovery project at NYNEX in Manchester, NH.  I worked with some very talented people from Comdisco on the project to build a "hot site" for the phone company.  We planned, built and tested systems from Tandems, to STARS, to every flavor of Unix box running proprietary software built by the phone company.  We were truly solving problems.

After that experience I went to a Litle&Co a payment processor in Salem, NH (my first "startup").  It is here, again in IT where we helped companies like AOL, Swiss America, and Vermont Teddy Bear process their credit cart transactions before the advent of online payments and paypal.  It was exciting, people were motivated and our job in IT was to develop the systems that processed the payments, manage the data and connect new customers to the environment.  There was a blur between what was considered traditional (whatever that means) IT and professional services (in today's terms).

After Litle&Co, the founder who sold the company to First USA Bank for about $100M took 35 of us to start LitleNet.  Again, the line between IT and Outward facing was a bit gray.  Everyone understood the mission of the company and all were engaged in solving problems.

Fast forward to my experiences at Adaytum.  There I served as the head of global IT.  But our team did everything from building best practices labs, to customer implementations when utilization was out of control to me even personally taking "customers on fire" and managing implementations that were on the verge of going bad like Nokia and Cisco.  We didn't care that we were an IT department, our mission was to help the building and selling of software.

IT people up to that point were some of the most talented people I had the pleasure of working next to.  They were engaged, they took risks, they could look in the mirror and call themselves early adopters.  Then something happened on March 10th, 2000.  Anyone care to guess?  Do you know why the movie Office Space has such a huge following now, vs being a complete sleeper in 1999?

The lights came on and the roaches scattered...more later.

Comments

[Christopher Trottier]

I worked in IT for a bit. I couldn't stand it. Now I work in retail and do a little bit of writing/publishing on the side. I love it.

[Christopher Trottier]

I worked in IT for a bit. I couldn't stand it. Now I work in retail and do a little bit of writing/publishing on the side. I love it.

[Pris]

I'm working in IT now, I do enjoy it. Whoa you're so experienced compared to me. Inspiring.

[Drew Thaler]

That one's easy. :-)

The NASDAQ composite peaked on March 10, 2000 at 5,048.62, and started its downward trend. By the end of 2000 it had been cut in half, and in two more years it had halved again. In short, the bubble popped and the bottom fell out of the market.

Venture capital stopped flowing, and so did B2B money. Companies got squeezed, and in turn their employees got squeezed. People stopped getting bonuses... then they stopped getting merit raises... then they stopped getting cost-of-living raises. Then people were laid off only to get re-hired for the same job at half the pay.

Brutal, just brutal.