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Sunday, June 10, 2012
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New era
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As most here know, I recently changed jobs. This is not something that I generally do too often, having been at my last job for just about 14 years. It was a job that I liked and while not the highest paying place in the market, it was a nice place to work, had great benefits, provided well for my family and suited me well. Not a bad run.
It is interesting in a way how much of ourselves we wrap up in what we do for a living. While maybe you should not do that, it seems inevitable given the amount of time we all spend at whatever we define as "work."
The place I left was a fascinating place, really, before the new owners messed it up with some pretty ill-advised business decisions. When I hired on there it was a smallish somewhat quirky company that was growing rapidly, riding the beginnings of the wave of the 1990's telecommunication boom. I was part of a small group within the company that was responsible for designing and building all of the equipment and infrastructure that the company used to produce our end product. We made "thin film optical filters" which is a fancy way of saying that we put layers of stuff on bits of glass. Such filters are deceptivly ordinary looking. While they did not look like much, they were often coated using million+ dollar machines that could deposit precisely controlled layers of material only a few molecules thick.We could take a 50 dollar glass plate and make it into something we could sell for $15,000 dollars. Amazing stuff. One guy there described us all as "modern day alchemists."
And it was an exciting time to be there, rapid growth, tons of work to do, deadlines, long hours and a million problems to solve. The group I worked in was in interesting collection of guys. At the peak there were about 15 in all, with an impressive assortment of personalities and skill sets. All were problem-solvers by nature. There were college graduates, guys who barely finished high school, stoners, ex-druggies and a hippie or two. But all were unbelievably clever, creative and highly driven. They possessed talents that relatively few people can understand or even appreciate. As a team, we helped to more than triple the size of the company in just a few years, making it the largest privately held company of its type in the world at the time. Like I said, exciting times.
All of these guys clearly fell to the alpha-male end of the spectrum, no shrinking violets or pacifists. Every one capable of instantly switching to "obnoxious jerk" mode at a moments notice (well, except for me, I'm always nice) sometimes for no apparent reason. These were people who made stuff happen. Many group decisions were arrived at by yelling, tool throwing, name calling, and fist pounding. Threats were very common. A few times some of guys all but came to blows. We somewhat marched to a different drummer, which annoyed the management, but the jobs always got done and done well so we tended to get left to our own devices. Most of what we built is still there and still working.
One time one of the guys brought in a gas grill so we could have BBQ lunches on the roof of the building when the weather was nice. Realizing that he had forgotten to bring a spatula to flip burgers after putting them on the grill, two guys ran off to the machine shop scrap bin and returned with a nicely fabricated, welded up, all stainless steel burger flipper. I wish I had a picture of it, it had a distinctly cool Klingon warrior weapon style to it. All fabbed up before the burgers burned. At one point owner hired a new chief operating officer for the company, a Harvard MBA and former VP at Goldman-Sachs. This guy wanted to meet with all of the groups in the company to get to know folks and how things generally worked. He said he liked to hold "lunch meetings" as the informal atmosphere encouraged dialogue. So we put on a BBQ and had him climb through the hatch onto the roof to have lunch with us, which to his credit, he did. While he never did quite "get" us as a group, he did seem to always leave us alone to do what we needed to do. We were never quite sure if he respected our skills or was just afraid of us, but the relationship worked well enough.
I do miss that crew and rush of the job there. Things had calmed down considerably as time went on of course, but that was likely true of all of us as well. A few of these guys I consider real friends, as differentiated from friends-from-work, people whose opinions I sought and respected. I can of course keep in touch with them, which so easy in the connected world we now all live in. Interesting that we all made some miniscule contribution to building that world. But I suppose I can't help but miss the day-to-day, hour-by-hour interaction that had gotten so well honed over those years. It'd be hard not to.
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thus voiced The A, Mistah @ 4:47 PM
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