There’s something to be said for being at the right place at the right time.
I worked at Intel and left for a few months. When i returned to another division, I learned that about 2 dozen people I worked with there all turned in their resignations one Monday morning shortly after I’d left, including my former boss. They went and hired on with a new startup. Among them were a bunch of guys who all graduated from a Master’s program at the same place at the same time. One of them got ostracized and was not invited to join. He got depressed. A mutual friend said he got a call from a headhunter to interview at Microsoft. This was 1981 before they had gone public. He went but wasn’t very excited about it. They apparently offerred him a huge stock option and sign-on bonus, and he finally agreed. He bacame the manager of a very high-profile team. When the two companies went public, the group of guys all became multi-millionaires overnight. The guy they didn’t invite ended up getting enough Microsoft stock that it was worth more than all of his budies combined. He eventually went off to create a little startup of his own, which you’d know if you were around back then, and he made a shit-pile more when that company was acquired by a much bigger fish. I knew these guys, and worked with them on a daily basis. They all would hang out several evenings a week playing D&D. They all left their work at the office. They made fun of me because I’d spend evenings reading computer mags like Byte and Dr. Dobb’s Journal. I also brought some parts home from work and built a little computer that was the size of a RPi that ran an 8088. That got me a job working with a group that was too cheap to buy a symbolic debugger so we had to debug all of the software looking at core dumps and assembly language generated by a C compiler. It wasn’t a lot of fun, and they kicked me out after 90 days. I probably knew more people who becamse multi-millionaires with startups in the 80’s than people from high school who were killed in Viet Nam. Fortunately or unfortunately, I wasn’t in either group. Back then, friends would get together and kick ideas around, noodle around creating stuff, and a lot of the time it led to a startup. Today, nobody really wants to hang out and talk about stuff unless you have some money to pony-up first. I guess that’s because, you know … those FOSS projects people do in their spare time are like little lottery tickets, right? -David Schwartz > On Dec 1, 2022, at 11:00 PM, Steve Litt via PLUG-discuss > <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote: > > David Schwartz via PLUG-discuss said on Thu, 01 Dec 2022 19:48:59 +0000 > (UTC) > > >> I’ve met a few folks who like plaing with open-source projects, but >> none of them ever said they thought it made a difference in terms of >> getting a job. > > This is an anecdote, so take it for what it's worth: A friend of mine > is a developer supreme: He thoroughly understands algorithms, data > structures and protocols at a deep level. He made a free software smart > phone app and maintained it for his users. A couple years later > WhatsApp noticed it, noticed him, invited him to California, hired him, > and when Facebook bought WhatsApp he got a bonus at least if not more > than sufficient for him to buy a Tesla. > > SteveT > > Steve Litt > Autumn 2022 featured book: Thriving in Tough Times > http://www.troubleshooters.com/bookstore/thrive.htm > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list: PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
--------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list: PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
