Getting to the End

June 23rd, 2022

Brooklyn Park, MN

I am getting near the end now. On this day I turned in my notice of the final two weeks of my 35 year career in Information Technology. In those 35 years there has been a lot of change in technology as well as the ways in which people work.

I started out as an NCR 315 Assembly Language programmer. Few now know what NCR 315 was. It was an antiquated language when I used it and so is part of the obscure past. I wrote and maintained business processes with it before the company was forced to upgrade by the looming “Year 2000 Date Problem”. I was lucky enough to have taken a database administration course at the local community college and that gave me the foot in the door for their new system with a UNIX operating system and Oracle relational database. The personal computer was also born in those years. I went from writing programs on a terminal with green characters on a black screen to a PC with a graphic user interface (GUI) and a mouse. I experienced the change from mostly batch programs to online interactive programs. Hierarchical and network databases were replaced with relational management systems using the Structured Query Language (SQL).

During the first Gulf War, my employer needed to know what governor parts were being used in fighter jets, armored vehicles, and missiles, as there were warranty issues. It took 2 days to write the assembly language program, another day to test, and several hours to execute in order to get the list of assemblies. A few weeks later, using SQL and the new database, I could get the same answer in 5 minutes.

I moved into the west Chicago suburbs for my next job. I purchase a new 80286 PC, as the old 8088 was too slow. I also need a large enough disk drive to run UNIX and Oracle. So I purchased a 212 Megabyte hard drive. It cost me $450. Now I can buy a drive with 10,000 times more storage for $69.

We passed through 80386 computer processors to Pentium, multi-core, multi-threaded, I3, I5, I7 and I9 CPUs. My first assembly language programs ran in 20 kilobytes of memory. Now they use terabytes. I worked my way through FORTRAN, Cobol, C, C++, C#, Java, and Python languages.

There were not just hardware and software changes. There were people changes as well as changes in the way people were managed. In the early years you were held accountable. If a program failed or an error cost the company money, you had to document the root cause. You needed to explain what steps would be taken to avoid the problem in the future. Your salary and possibly your job depended on that accountability. At a number of companies, I sat through sessions with psychologists learning to categorize my character, personality and work ethic. Those I believe, were mostly to keep the Human Resource employees busy. They were also designed so that HR could protect the company from their employees.

I enjoyed my work. The 1990s were probably the best years. I worked for a large computer manufacturer as an Oracle Database consultant. I traveled around the Unites States, helping to tune performance and troubleshoot computing issues at Fortune 500 companies. I also taught performance tuning and backup and recovery courses. Twice I was “Instructor of the Year”. The work was very challenging but also rewarding. Those rewards were not necessarily in the form of benefits from you employer, but more from knowing you solved tough problems, pleased the customer, and were very good at what you did.

After 35 years, I thought the last few would be as enjoyable as the first. But, things changed and I guess I did not. The enjoyment is gone. I am an anachronism, “a thing belonging or appropriate to a period other than that in which it exists, especially a thing that is conspicuously old-fashioned”. Being fun and having a happy place with your fellow employees became more important than skills and knowledge. Nobody cares if you do things the efficient and correct way. They care about doing as little as possible while still collecting a paycheck. And somewhere along the way, I lost the ability to make a difference.