It amuses me to make the comparison between Mr. Kellogg's credentials and my own. I am no undergrad either; shedding that status took me four tries, two universities, and just over seven years. I graduated in Physics with no distinction to speak of, in December 1995, and it was rather an anticlimactic affair as I had effectively been in the astronomy Ph.D. program for a year and a half. I didn't last much longer in it, though -- I was a lousy excuse for a grad student in almost every respect, and though I respected several professors, the one that I admired (and the only one remotely likely to supervise my Ph.D. thesis) broke his neck in a car wreck the next summer and died not long thereafter.
Besides, I got married that summer, and marriage focuses the mind wonderfully. I went back into industry (by way of the quick-and-easy sysadmin path) and, two jobs later, split to co-found a shoestring software startup with a buddy. (In the meantime, I had witnessed for the second time the beginnings of the collapse of a company due to a botched million-dollar deal involving contract terms that did not reflect the economic reality of the exchange.) The startup was a textbook example of "experience is what you get when you don't get what you thought you were gonna get"; I got a lot of experience in the next six years or so. I've been back in the corporate game for a couple of years now, racking up my lifetime score to date to a total of four Fortune 500 companies, two US government agencies, two universities (not counting mere dabbling), and numerous flavors of start-up and small business. Along the way, I have been involved in negotiating some rather complex business relationships with contracts and statements of work and pricing schedules attached. I have seen first-hand the operations of almost every class of software license there is, with trade secrets and patents and copyrights and trademarks and a dozen kinds of dollar incentives flying fast and thick. I have watched people use contract language to game pundits and public opinion and the stock markets and the tax system and international trade. Corporate legal staff and outside counsel have been known to come to me for a briefing on the facts of what legal risks I see myself and my colleagues taking, for editorial review of the factual portions of contracts, and in some cases to compare notes on the applicable law itself. Among my peers I am considered the person to ask to evaluate the primary literature on almost any topic from psychopharmacology to French Renaissance performance practice -- if you can get me to turn my attention to the problem long enough not to just shoot from the hip. I may not get the right answer but you'll find out things about the field that you never expected. What authority does that grant me? Absolutely none. But once I've put a thousand hours or so into thinking about a given topic, I generally have something to say, and some evidence to back it up. And it makes for an interesting life. Cheers, - Michael
