What a long, strange trip it's been

Monday, July 10, 1978
30 years ago today I started my first post-college job at NCR (formerly National Cash Register). It's kind of been the only place I've worked but it's had a few little wrinkles.

Over the years my job was bounced from location to location. To see where I've been for the last 30 years, here is a file that lets you navigate through the waypoints of my career using Google Earth. For those of you without Google Earth, here's an image from it that shows the spots. The yellow is where I've lived and the red is where I've worked.
I started my job in the Engineering and Manufacturing-San Diego (E&M-SD) division of NCR at in Rancho Bernardo, a community of San Diego (double-click on Waypoint 1 in my Google Earth file). I started in the (Programming) Languages (I forget whether it was I or II) group. We had two people in each office. I was put with Ray, who you might remember is is the one who lent me the projector and screen for the backwards movie and the chainsaw for the Escondido Chainsaw Massacre. Ray and I were working on maintaining a COBOL compiler.

Rancho Bernardo is a planned community. When I started it seemed to be planned for retirees. It was scary to drive to the shopping and restaurant area with all those old people driving their large cars. The drugstores stocked a lot more hemorrhoid treatments than acne products. Over the years it has attracted younger people but it still has its strict rules. You can't have your garage door open unless you are in the process of driving a car through it. I don't plan to live there.

Where I ended up living was in a one-bedroom apartment Escondido (at point A in the Google Earth file). It was much larger than I needed. It had a large living room and the bedroom was large. I didn't have much furniture so I had a lot of open floor space. The closet in the bedroom was probably large enough for me to live in. I didn't shop around much in my search for a place to live.

Some time later Ray (remember Ray?) bought a bigger house for his growing family and stayed at his old house until it sold. I moved out of my apartment and lived in his new house so it wouldn't look abandoned. After his house sold I moved to an apartment that was a quarter of a Victorian house (see point B in Google Earth). This was a much more sensible apartment than my first. But it had no laundry room. I had to lug my laundry across town.

April 1980
The first major reorganization of my career happened around this time. It was decided that the compiler development we did didn't belong to the E&M division. It belonged to a "Systems Engineering" (SE) division. So we were given to the SE-Torrey Pines division. That division was new and didn't yet have a building. So we were moved to a temporary location (Waypoint 2). There was a lot of undeveloped land to hike in at lunchtime. The phone book for the division had an entry for "Snake Removal." I never had to call it. There was (probably still is) a pet cemetery down the street. I explored that a lot. Cemeteries fascinate me and I don't think I had encountered one for animals before that.

I don't remember how long we were in the Sorrento Valley buildings. We eventually moved to our permanent location (at Waypoint 3). It was just a short walk to the Torrey Pines Golf Course. They just had the U. S. Open Championship there. It would have been a major headache to work there through all that.

Another benefit of working there was we could walk to the beach through the Torrey Pines Reserve in a long lunch hour. The scenery and exercise were great.

May 1981
I bought a condominium. It was a two-bedroom apartment conversion. Jack cosigned the loan. The unit was at the end of the building next to the laundry room. The living room window looked at the laundry room (and vice versa). Oh, well, it made washing clothes convenient. Besides, I had a cute neighbor I could peek at through the curtains while he did his laundry. *sigh* I'd get to know him in about five years. My condo is Point C in the Google Earth file, the cute neighbor's is Point D.

Things settled down for a while. No big upheavals at work (for me...we did go through layoffs at the end of each year for several years. Ah, the good old days!) or at home. My job evolved at a nice pace.

The pace picked up.

June 1986
The cute neighbor and I finally summoned the courage to talk to each other. Soon we consolidated our homes. Jerry moved into my unit. His mother sold his. And there was much rejoicing!

Later that year?
There was a Systems Engineering-San Diego division in addition to the SE-TP that I was in. They decided that was one too many SE division in the area so they were combined. The Torrey Pines people were moved to Scripps Ranch (see Waypoint 4). (Before I made it to Scripps Ranch I was waylaid in Sorrento Valley (somewhere in the region of Waypoint 2) at a company NCR was buying some technology from. I was on the project that was going to support that. It was shelved.)

November 1988
Jerry and I bought our house (Point E in the Google Earth file) in a frenzy during a sellers' market. The sellers got what they were asking. Other than two major remodels things have been pretty stable in our housing since then.

At work things got weird and I don't remember the dates for some of the events.

Back to Rancho Bernardo
I can't remember when or why we moved back to the plant where I started my NCR career. But we moved. See Waypoint 5.

Somewhere along the line my group was transferred to a division that was based in Dayton. I never understood how our group fit in with the Dayton organization. Somebody thought it was an important thing to do. The Dayton division had one more holiday than the San Diego division! We got Good Friday off. We got to say "Nyah, nyah, nyah!" to our San Diego colleagues on Holy Thursday as we left. Apparently our San Diego colleagues didn't like something about the Dayton organization so they kicked us out.

Back to Scripps Ranch
We set up shop in Scripps Ranch. See Waypoint 6.

AT&T
AT&T bought NCR in 1991. (I'm really not sure whether this happened before or after we moved back to Scripps Ranch.) We became "NCR, An AT&T Company" for a while. Then they came up with the catchy name "AT&T Global Information Solutions," or the shorter, sassier "AT&T GIS"!

Back to Rancho Bernardo
AT&T GIS gathered all of its San Diego operations into a new campus (see Waypoint 7). No more moving! And there is much rejoicing! But I did change companies several more times.

TOP END
The Dayton-based division I had been in was dissolved and we all had to find new jobs. I think this was around 1994. For the first time in my more-than-15-year career, I changed departments. I didn't have to look for a position, I was told that the TOP END group wanted me. So off to TOP END I went. For more about the TOP END group and its aftermath, see an earlier posting where Colleen suggested it would have been easier to follow with a chart and time line. (Well, Colleen, no chart but here's basically the time line but I'm not convinced that this is easy to follow. Sorry.)

Back to NCR
AT&T decided that NCR didn't really fit in with them so in 1996 they spun it back off to be an independent company with the name "NCR."

BEA Systems
In June 1998 the TOP END group was sold to BEA Systems (which is now part of Oracle). They had a product that was a competitor of TOP END's. NCR wanted to unload products that weren't really part of its core efforts and TOP END was one of those.

Chuckbert has left the building
BEA bought TOP END, a product competing with one of theirs, apparently to take the good bits for its product and to kill it. In February 1999 they laid off half of the group. I was in that half. BEA had rented space from NCR until they got everybody laid off. So I never left the plant until BEA sent me on my way.

I spent the next month and a half unemployed. I watched "Teletubbies" (that Tinky Winky!) and Clinton's impeachment on TV.

Back to NCR, take 2
I got a job with the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) department back at NCR. After a year with that department, NCR decided that they needed a CRM solution faster than a home-grown product could be brought into production so they bought a company with a somewhat mature CRM product. The management of that company was given control of all things CRM and they decided that what was being done in San Diego didn't fit in with their vision so they shut us down. We had to find new jobs. Many of us found positions in NCR, many were laid off.

I found a position with a group that was making tools for the Professional Services (PS) people. I wasn't terribly thrilled with that position but at least I was still employed. After a short time there, one of the managers from the old CRM group recruited me to work on giving a tool in his new department a graphical user interface. I did that for about three years and was then recruited to work again for the manager I had when I was doing stuff for the PS people (but for a different product).

Not long after that my manager's manager decided that my manager was overworked and that his people needed to be managed by two different people. My project ended up working for a someone who came to NCR by way of another acquisition. NCR had bought a small company in Toronto, Canada. The manager we got had a management style of a small, startup company. That is, get the job done quickly and that's all that matters. Quality doesn't matter. Just get what was promised delivered and fix errors later. Old timers didn't like that. We like to deliver quality. The manager alienated everybody in San Diego and everybody left the group. I was one of the last two to go. We were "involuntarily" transferred to the group I am now in. We were very happy to be transferred. There was much rejoicing!

The manager in Toronto was fired a year or so later. His manager was given a new job with very few responsibilities. (The manager's manager screwed up other big products. I can't figure out why he didn't get fired, too.)

Teradata
Way back before AT&T bought NCR, NCR here in San Diego was doing some sort of development with a database company called Teradata. I had heard that the contract between NCR and Teradata said that if either company was acquired that the other company could bail out of whatever contract they had. After AT&T acquired NCR I heard that they figured that Teradata was going to get out of whatever was being done with NCR. So NCR/AT&T bought Teradata to keep from losing whatever investment they had with the operation.

Over the years the work that was being done in San Diego was more and more focused on this database business. We were told that investors didn't like the mix of the old NCR and the new Teradata. So last October they split the company into two companies to make them more attractive to investors interested in one or the other of the businesses. I ended up in Teradata.

So, after 30 years without ever really changing companies, I have worked for NCR, AT&T, NCR, BEA, NCR, and now Teradata.

I wonder what the future will bring.

(I told you up front that this was long. Sorry.)