Golden Ticket - Part 2

 Golden Ticket - Part 2

I took the job offer with Varian Associates in Silicon Valley with the condition that I could take a week off without pay after a few weeks. I wanted to go back to NY to attend a planned family celebration for my Dad's retirement. Varian was a very early Silicon Valley company. I think they went back to the early '50s, maybe even earlier. FYI, this is a different company than the Siemens owned Varian Medical company.

Varian Associates had contracts with the Defense Department and as a result, had tight security. You had to pass through security when entering or exiting their buildings. So one of the requirements for my employment was I needed to get a security clearance. I didn't see this as a problem since I had previously attained a “secret” security clearance while I was in the Air Force, and it wasn't. I was issued a badge. This was the first time I had to carry/wear a badge at a work place.

I showed up for work and the first thing I had to do was report to security to get a proper badge, my photo, and my security status. After that I was escorted to the IT department where I was going to work. I met briefly with my new boss after which he showed me to my desk and introduced me to one of my co-workers who had been handed the assignment to show me around and introduce me to the rest of the department. The IT department at Varian had over 120 people. My new buddy walked me around introducing me to each and every one of them one at a time. As you might imagine this took a little time. In fact, it took the rest of the day and much of the next one. Now it was nice to meet everyone but each meeting meant basically answering the same questions about myself over and over and over. Now I tend to get bored saying the same stuff over and over. My limit, at least at that time, for repeating myself in the same day seemed to be about 5 times. That first day I probably met 70 people, with another 40 plus to go the next. I soon was varying my answers trying to think up something new to say. I did my best, but before I knew it I started saying all kinds of things some of which were not exactly accurate just to have something else to say. It was a long, long, long day and a half. On day three I was free to actually do something other than talk about my background, my family situation, and my interests. However, I had to attend new employee orientation which ate up half of day three. That was followed by getting computer accounts set up and reading various company and department policies. It took about a week before an actual programming task came my way. Their applications were all in COBOL. Most any good programmer will tell you that while COBOL at that time was the industry standard application programming language, it's not exactly the most fun language to program in. It's a bit restrictive and sort of puts you in a box. Maybe a better way to describe it is it tends to stifle your creativity. However, if you are an applications programmer, and I was, and you want to be marketable, and I did, you better know and be willing to program in COBOL. In college I avoided COBOL like the plague. In the business world if you are not doing COBOL you will be avoided like the plague. Sad but true...

A program written in COBOL must go through a procedure that converts the programmer's English like commands into a machine readable program. It's confusing. You can maybe compare it to having to have your e-mail run through a separate spell and grammar check procedure before you can send it out. Any error that is detected will have to be corrected and it will need to be re-checked again before proceeding. This all must be done before the run will be executed to see if it will actually do what you want it to. At Varian this process was controlled. You were not able to run this check whenever you wanted. There was a mass check routine for everyone run a few times a day with 3 or 4 hours in between. You have to submit you program and have it approved, not have any errors, before on you could do any testing of your program. I was used to running this process myself and there were times when I might do it 20, 30 times a day, sometimes 10 times in less than 30 minutes. The Varian way of doing things greatly reduced productivity leaving large chunks of time with not much to do because an error might only take a minute to correct but then it would be hours to wait for the next scheduled check. For someone like me, who was rather sloppy with their typing, as well as slightly dyslexic, this was a rather slow painful process. Forgetting about the first few days this was issue number 1 and not a good start so far.

Issue number 2: I was used to companies where people were happy to help each other out, at least in the IT department. Being new, I asked a few colleagues a question on various things. My so-called co-workers were reluctant to answer. It was like we were in competition and giving me information was like aiding the enemy. Another bad sign.

Issue 3: I befriended the two co-workers who sat next to me. One was a women who was only a summer hire and the other evidently didn't see me as a threat. The three of us would usually go on breaks and lunch together at the company cafeteria. As the days passed I began to notice that there were very few women in the cafeteria. I had previously noted that the IT department was almost all male and after doing some looking around I did not see a single woman in a management position. This seemed odd and I asked my two lunch buddies. The summer hire said she noticed the same thing. The other guy said he couldn't think of any women in lead positions either.

Well my week off without pay came around. I flew back to NY for the festivities. Flying on the plane I took stock and realized I hated my new job. I had always promised myself after the Air Force I would never stay in a job I didn't like, and realizing I was in exactly that situation, I decided to quit upon my return. My first day back after returning from NY I walked over to my boss's office and asked to speak with him. I informed him of my decision. He was a really nice guy. He said he could tell it wasn't working out for me, that I didn't seem to be too happy. He said he was sorry I was leaving but he understood. He asked me if I had another job lined up. I said I didn't but I wasn't worried about finding one. He suggest I stay until I did, suggesting that it might be easier to find a job while I had one. I told him thanks but I just want to quit right now.

The next day I called up my recruiter and told her I wanted to get back in touch with Consilium. Comsilium was the company I turned down to take the Varian Associates job. She called and asked them if they were still interested. I followed up and informed them that I'd really like a 2^nd chance. They granted me another interview. Things went well. My recruiter called the next day and told me Consilium gave me an offer and I gratefully accepted.

It was now August of 1984. Consilium would be my 7^th company since I graduated from Oregon in May of 1978. If you removed the dates, my resume looked like I'd been working for 20 or 30 years with all the entries on it. It'd been a bit of a wild ride. It's not Santa Cruz, or a college campus, but I had a good feeling about Consilium and my feelings are rarely wrong, so maybe I had finally found the right place for me.