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Thrill to the horror of indifferent phone companies!
I'm open to opportunities. Feel free to email if you have an offer or potential opportunity for me.
I currently work for the technology department of a national resort chain based in Orlando, FL.
<Spendocrat> where do you work vsync?
<vsync> wego systems
<Spendocrat> what kind of place I mean
<Spendocrat> ahh
<vsync> vertical portal blah
<vsync> in java
<tokage_> we're not sure what vsync's company does really
<h2odragon> neither are they
<vsync> we went to a meeting and got a Vision Statement
<vsync> it was the funniest
<transiit> I thought vsync was involved in a large and poorly concealed pyramid scheme. =)
I worked at Wego Systems, a vertical portal company in Redwood City, California.
Good times, good times… I miss the startup environment quite a bit. Despite the incoherencies which cropped up, as happens everywhere, it was amazing what I took for granted there. Things like coworkers knowing what each other does, widespread desire for the success of the company, and a bare minimum of literacy (let alone technical literacy) are nowhere near as widespread as working in that environment might lead one to believe.
Despite the snarky title, the IP, along with some former managers and coworkers of mine, has been reborn and is doing nicely. I've even heard from a friend of mine that features I wrote are still being used in the product, and even used as a base for extensions. Which is nice.
I used to work at Sun Microsystems as a programmer in the SoftDist group, which distributes software throughout the entire Sun intranet. At the time I left, I think its name had been changed to "GSO/WebDist Technology Initiative" or something equally opaque. Everyone still calls it SoftDist, of course.
I wrote a paper, "Early Binding in Java Considered Harmful". I was told that this behavior is correct and documented in the Java specs, and it is, which doesn't make it any less wrong. Why Java, which does so much at runtime, would make it impossible to use constants in any sort of component-based manner is beyond me, but Java's never been known for keeping its paradigms consistent.
Most of the stuff I did is either highly proprietary or of no interest to the community. I did write a few things that I was able to release, after begging the appropriate attorneys for weeks. My last project was a splash screen application written in Lisp and designed for flexibility. I also released a Java package (with one class!) which I used in my servlets.
The last thing I wrote here when I was still working at Sun was: "The big thing that drives me nuts about my job right now is the many layers of red tape. Everything has to be triple-approved and examined and cross-checked, and nothing ever gets done. No one wants to take responsibility for anything."
Sadly, that was my last impression of the company. SPLASH? After putting in tremendous amounts of work into it, getting it just right according to different people's varying desires, they said "Never mind. We should have just opened up an xterm and printed out some text." Incidentally, this was after I implemented a number of other Sun-specific features that aren't included in the main package. The last thing I got to do with my servlets was kludge in a subset of already existing features to allow people in high places to keep themselves from having to make informed decisions at any cost. And don't get me started on iPlanet.
In fairness, it wasn't all bad. I had a fairly nice job, and when I left, my existing position would have lead me to some very interesting work, and they were offering me my pick among a number of other good positions. But it had just gotten too painful. I think the thing was that I had grown up respecting Sun. I would read books about various companies and about the great atmosphere Sun had, where everyone was laid-back and great innovation occured, and I dreamed of the day when I would be a Great and Respected Scientist with his own Sun workstation, because those were powerful.
It's always a sad thing when reality falls short of one's expectations, and this was no different. People in decision-making positions were routinely unaware of technological advancements that had occured in the last 10 or 20 years. Empire-building had taken precedence over Getting Things Done.
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Last modified: Sat Aug 4 01:24:49 MDT 2001