I Got Fired on a Friday

My boss, Mr. Long, the namesake owner of the custom software company where I worked on my very first job, met me on the sidewalk with my last paycheck in his hand. I remember squinting into the sun, holding the envelope with the check, watching movers carry out the IBM 360, the terminals, and the state-of-the-art Compaq luggable which I often used to code.

I don’t remember all of what he said, more the angry tone of his cigarette-stained voice. Something like “They shut us down. They said we were only worth ninety cents on the dollar and they didn’t want to lose any more money.” The ‘they’ emphasized with enough acid to melt glass. Apparently, he’d gotten in bed with the local branch of a big consulting firm, I think it was Arthur Anderson, and things ended like they normally do when you put a small fish in a large fish’s aquarium.

Mr. Long said some words after that, maybe about wishing me luck, maybe about what he was going to do next, I don’t really know because I was in a full-on panic. I was thinking of my almost-brand-new Toyota Corolla and my newly leased apartment in the almost-good part of Johnson County.

I didn’t even know the word at the time, but in that moment I became a consultant.

Out of sheer desperation, I called the customers with whom I had been working, not expecting much. But they were thrilled to hear from me. I was very young and utterly ignorant of how the world really worked, so this surprised me. But of course they were glad… their project had just been abruptly ended, their progress payments up in smoke, and I was literally the only person within the flight radius of a Boeing 747 that could help them. Their projects were in a cutting-edge (at the time) language called Dataflex, which few people knew — you could probably count the number in Kansas on one hand with fingers left over — and I was the sole developer for each of them.

Who ya’ gonna call?

That first job didn’t last long, but it taught me a huge number of things, many of which I didn’t realize until much later. An abbreviated list:

First, Mr. Long was a stand-up guy. He made sure all his people got paid. Can you imagine Zuckerberg on the curb handing out checks to his employees if someone shut down Facebook? Stand-up guys in power are rare. When I had to shut down a company in 2001, I remembered Mr. Long, and everybody got their last paycheck. I may fail, but I at least want to try being a standup guy.

Second, don’t smoke. Mr. Long died of lung cancer about three years later.

Third, ask for what you’re worth because you won’t get it if you don’t. I had been making $6/hr (no, I didn’t miss a decimal place. It was 1983 and also, see above, re: ignorant). And thinking myself clever (the first unavoidable sign of ignorance), when I started my ‘consulting’ I gave myself a raise to $8/hr.

I had them over a barrel, and they’d been paying him $45/hr, I learned. I shouldn’t have stuck it to them, of course, (and I didn’t), but $8 an hour? If they ever do invent time travel, old me will go back and scream at young stupid me. For that, as well as some stuff involving a ’65 Impala, a fiberglass horse, and a grocery bag of M-80s. And Apple stock. Definitely Apple stock.

Fourth, no job is permanent. We are knowledge workers, our security is in our ability to learn, not in some company. Case in point: Arthur Anderson (the company), one of the Big 5. Whoo boy. They were also Enron’s accountant, were tried for related crimes and defuncted all over themselves not that many years after RA Long Consulting went under. Big fish, meet even bigger fish: Mr Government.

Fifth, beware fad toolchains. Dataflex was a dead-end, much like Dbase, Powerbuilder, and Lotus Notes. I jumped to C, and then C++, taking journeys into Java, PHP, Solidity, et al. Maybe not an optimal course, but they’ve all served me well. I will learn whatever framework is necessary, but I’m never going to be a ‘Laravel guy’, or a ‘React guy’, or a ‘Unity guy’. I’ll do my best to never paint myself into a corner.

And that’s it for now since I’ve read that people don’t like to read long articles.

This was just my way of introducing myself:

“Hi. My name is Dean. I’m addicted to computer programming.”

I’ll be writing about software development, consulting, and travel. Lots of travel. With probably some unavoidable detours into design patterns, architecture, and the Thirty Year’s War.

If people find it interesting, I’ll keep writing.

If they don’t, well, to be honest, I’ll still probably keep writing, because I like it.

Blatant Self-Promotion

If you are into software development articles and are in the earlier phases of your career (or still studying) you might find my series on the principles of software engineering of interest. I developed it after witnessing the — shall we say ‘uneven’ — level of material in my daughter’s CS curriculum.