Life after IBM

 

Those of us who remember IBM in the good old days (™, ® U.S.Pat.Off.) will shed the occasional virtual tear for the old girl, knowing full well that her glory days are gone forever.  There will never be an IBM like the one we knew.  For the benefit and illumination of those who never had the experience, we tell our tales.  Some of them reflect well on IBM;  others...  not so much.

STSS

In the mid-70s, somebody, perhaps Roy Turnbull, the manager of the Endicott Suggestions Department, got the idea that the process of logging suggestions in, routing them, tracking them, and awarding the ingenious and lucky suggesters should become more automated.  'Suggestions' was a corporate function although the individual Suggestions Departments were administered locally by the plants that housed them, or FE (Field Engineering) for the non-plant employees.  As a result, it was Armonk that mandated the Suggestions Tracking and Statistical System (STSS) and FEHQ Information Systems (White Plains) that got the task of building it.  It was unclear for a long time why FEHQ management named me, the new kid on the block with only 4 years experience, as lead programmer for FE's first IMS DB/DC application consisting, finally, of 9 HISAM clusters, 40+ MID/MODs, and 27 PL/I application programs.

Dave Boyd, an analyst with many years experience in systems design, was lead analyst and he produced a brilliant design that has stood the test of time.  He also demanded that STSS's code be rigidly structured and peer-reviewed.  By the end of 1978, the entire system had been running in parallel-test-mode for 6 months and the team felt comfortable with calling it 'done'.  The team dispersed and I set to work collecting and categorizing the fragments of documentation that we had generated over the past few years.  The first submission was rejected as 'incomplete' and I spent a month building the missing parts.  Then it was rejected for a different reason and another month went by.  Then another rejection.  And another.  I asked my manager for political help to overcome the nit-picking from Production that was denying STSS final approval.  He politely declined.

In May of '79, I was directed to demo STSS at the FE Awards Conference in Miami.  I thought then it might be a ploy to get me where I could be given a surprise award for what I considered a great achievement.  It wasn't;  it was just a work assignment.  My appraisal in June was disappointing, the raise following was insulting, and an expected promotion to Staff Programmer did not appear, nor did the one thing that might have kept me happy enough to grin and bear it: a transfer to Tampa.  I considered it 'the handwriting on the wall'.  I updated my resume, soon had a job offer, handed in my resignation, and left to do some contract programming, eventually winding up in Houston.

After I left IBM, all hell seems to have broken loose.  Endicott complained to Corporate that their beautiful, fully-functional system wasn't yet in production.  Corporate told FE to solve that problem pronto and — voila! — it was suddenly accepted for production.  When Armonk finally saw it in operation, they mandated it for all Suggestions Departments world-wide, and Dave Boyd got to tour Europe (the parts with IBM plants, anyway) installing it here, there, and everywhere.

It turns out that FE management didn't like the idea of bean-counters in Armonk deciding what projects FE's programmers would work on, so they handed STSS to someone they thought would probably screw it up.  They wanted STSS to fail but never bothered to tell me, so I made that bumblebee fly.

P.s.:  when we loaded the tracking database with historical data, the oldest suggestion we could find was from September of 1929, so all the code in STSS understood that a year smaller than '29' was, perforce, 2000-something.  STSS was the first Y2K-compliant application in IBM's history.  In 1978.

1984

Houston had been riding on this huge bubble of oil, and the housing market was on fire.  When the bubble burst, oil companies started laying people off and the housing market collapsed.  Preferring to set my own course, I had started looking elsewhere.  One recruiter asked if he might send my papers to IBM-Clear Lake and I agreed.  A week later I had an interview, but when I got to IBM that day, nobody seemed to know who I was or why I was there.  They had me (re)fill out the 6-page IBM application, then spun me through the canonical four interviews before sending me on my way.  Two weeks later, I received a letter:  'thank you for spending time with us, etc., etc., unfortunately...'.  The letter was dated the day of my interviews, but it was mailed much later.  I assumed they had finally seen my historical personnel jacket and realized their error.

A former colleague at IBM happened to be talking to me in 1984 and casually asked: "How's the job?"  I admitted that I was looking and he offered that IBM-Tampa might be interested in my skillset.  I recited the above tale and suggested that if Tampa were still interested in me after reviewing my jacket, they could call.  On December 4th as I was sitting down to dinner, my phone rang.  Whatever had happened at IBM-Clear Lake remains unexplained.  One thing led to another, and by year-end, I was an IBMer once again.  I often suspected that institutional-IBM later came to regret it.

I had been 'over the wall' and had discovered that there is breathable air there.  There was life outside IBM!  Further, I also knew that IBM was not The Emerald City whence originated all the really good ideas.  My presence contaminated innumerable otherwise-faithful IBMers.  By the time I pre-retired in 1992, there were managers in Tampa who wanted to see me dead.  Not 'gone';  dead.  It goes without saying that I never made it past 'Staff Programmer'.

Life on the outside

For two dozen years, contracts have kept bread on the table, put kids through college, paid the mortgage (off), and sent us on European vacations.  As much as we might miss the familiarity of the IBM we once knew, we realize that the nature of modern employment is such that no company can ever again hope to have a workforce that thinks of itself as 'family' and expects to work for the same company for an entire career.  The pace of life is itself enough to prohibit that, and the ability to seek out more optimal situations with ease means that job hunting is no longer reserved for times when 'the handwriting is on the wall'.