My early adventures in the Internet Job-space taught me several lessons:
- If a company has a bad business plan, don't work for it.
- Keep my mouth shut.
- Never bump a RAID cable.
- Never be afraid.
In the spring of 1995, I landed my first out-of-college job with a young Internet startup. The prerequisites were brief, to the point, and a complete mystery: Internet Experience. I met the president, Dix Dooley, at the local greasy spoon; we sized each other over while we waited for our watered down beers. Sparse words were spoken between us and I withdrew my resume from a tattered college satchel, once destined for a year of secondary education studies. I deposited the quaint paragraph-long resume on the molded plastic table. Of the three lines of text in the comprising my computer-related education, two words were highlighted: Internet Experience. He offered me a job on the spot.
Dix Dooley was one of those visionaries who would have made billions on the Internet boom if he had waited another year. Like all other Internet startups, business-sense was as overrated as it was optional, which was a good thing because Dix had none. But he had an idea that would start a prairie fire and bring in millions of dollars, or cost millions; one of the two.
In those days, startup companies knew no high-class commercial real estate, but anything that didn't resemble a garage was a good sign. Since my new employer was operating out of the offices of another business, our hours were, on average, four to midnight. Although technically a garage, the office was large enough to resemble a renovated storage shed, and had a wall separating a back storage room. In retrospect, I suppose our office was actually a sublet garage.
Part of my time was spent fielding angry customer support questions from irate customers. They would storm in and assume I worked for Dix Dooley's other business, and harange the staff until we became fed up and pretended to do something helpful. It did make me feel a tad uneasy attempting to correct shipments that never reached their destination. It was bad enough that the company subletting garage space to us lost the shipment. Since the customer didn't know where their shipment went either, we could only apologize for sending their merchandise to some random spot on the map, and we would write down the destination of the customer's choice, and then deposit the note in the stack of previous customer complaints.
It's important to point out the fact that zero business sense was exuded in the main office.
After becoming annoyed with the irate customers, I would casually inform them that I was an employee for an unrelated Internet company, and would then have to spend another half hour explaining what an Internet was. Half the time, customers thought we were lying and just making up some cock-and-bull story about this"Internet" thing. Given the locale, I'm sure many of the customers became confused by all the syllables in"Internet".
Our little startup assembled a cracker-jack team: Germ Foster, Crumb Jones, Jenga Vermuth, and Dim. Our overseer was some chain-smoking gas station attendant dude, and since I can't remember his pithy name, I'll simply refer to him as Chain-smoking Attendant Dude. That seems appropriate.
At first, things seemed normal. We collected our minimum wage and went home.
Perhaps that requires more explanation. In the beginning, we had one computer with Windows 3.1, an additional window manager loaded on top of it that we were forbidden from changing, a 28.8 modem, an AOL account, and 4 people. The concept of any kind of development software other than notepad had yet to be discovered. That, and we had absolutely no clue what we were supposed to be doing.
Like I said, we collected minimum wage and went home.
Dix Dooley and Chain-smoking Attendant Dude eventually revealed their grand plan to us, and spent days outlining a program that would revolutionize the Internet, and in the process, make them millionaires. The difference between the marketing requirements and the actual design specification was night and day. In Internet terms, the software was a B2B Marketing Database that maximizes product placement and increases corporate visibility by creating a symbiotic relationship with related companies. Under the covers, it was pretty absurd.
First, the actual product design boiled down to: advertise for free on the Internet. Second, the actual advertising was getting a Web Page link on another company's Web Site. Third, all of the data for the database was nothing more than a bad copy of results gleaned from a popular search engine using Yellow Pages keywords. The data wasn't even in a database, but instead crammed into a flat file. Fourth, the only real programming that I ever saw was some hack script Crumb Jones wrote in Perl pull email addresses from those web pages, and another hack script to remove duplicate entries from a list.
We didn't exactly work full time on this project.
As our highly trained team of Internet Engineers began to realize just how badly we had miscalculated the viability of our current employer, Jenga Vermouth and Dim started talking more and more about how they looked forward to collecting their unemployment checks again, and Crumb and Germ spent more time working on their sophomore school assignments and less time at the office.
That left Dix, Chain-smoking Attendant Dude, and me, to work out the finer details. Such as when exactly I would get paid for spending the last month on a project that I suddenly realized was a complete and utter sham.
My ultimate realization was that I was the only one who wanted and needed a real job, and the little Internet Company That Wouldn't didn't come close to qualifying.
On my last day "at work", I drove a set of data I had been working on for a month up to the office and handed it off. I asked when I might receive compensation for the work. Dix just laughed. I cringed. I guess I wasn't exactly fired. I just wasn't employed anymore.
At that time, I learned an important lesson: If a company has a bad business plan, don't work for it.
Parents1, Me 0.
It was a complete gambit that led me to my next job, a much more real-life assignment, though just as sordid.
Now that I had"Internet Experience", plus had been employed for an"Internet Company", I applied for a job as a graphics designer. Not being experienced with salary negotiation, the owners dropped my compensation by about $400 a month in the first five minutes (-$1.50 per hour) of my first day, and I quickly learned another valuable lesson: 2) Keep my mouth shut.
I wasn't sure how I would pull off the graphic design requirement as I had no experience in that area, but I thought I'd give it a go. After all, I was "Experienced".
On my first day, I was lead into a closet that contained a server, was told the phone company would be in the next few days, and I should probably get the intranet setup. Needless to say, three months later, the micro-intranet of three computers was still flaky, but the T-1 connection was chugging along.
As I had yet to create and computer graphics, I became amazed at how fluid the definition of graphic design could be.
In January of 1996, I learned lesson #3: Never bump a RAID cable. The sequence of events went something as follows. The primary server was connected to a RAID array (a bunch of hard drives), and I had accidentally bumped the cable connecting the server and the array. I quickly uttered several foul expletives. I continued cursing for the next week as I re-entered a lot of data that was lost because the RAID array had to be rebuilt, and in my adolescence, I had not backed up my previous work.
Eventually I was so mired in development and network management, that is was impossible to spend much time on small office management, and customer sales and support. My methods would have been a lot different if I had been running the company.
Working for a micro company is like owning your own business in that you do all of the work, and are responsible for everything. The exceptions are that you don't front the money, don't keep anything you make for the company, and everything you do is subject to the whims of the owners.
From January 1996 through July 1996, I created numerous Web Sites. Not one still exists. They might still be around if they had been designed for real customers. Instead, they were designed as favors for the clients of the owner's other businesses, or businesses in the same office building. It was pretty ridiculous because both the owners and the other companies were milking the embryonic company, and, at the same time, wondering why this "Internet" thing wasn't making them any money.
I stayed on through February of 1998. When I received a job offer, one of the "clients" across the hall threw a temper tantrum that their Internet service made available through my company would affect all of their customers once I was gone. Part of the tantrum included a few choice insults that, for a time, really irritated me.
Through those first two and a half years of working in the "Internet Job-space", I learned a lot about "Internet Experience". I learned a lot about myself, too.
But, most importantly, I learned another lesson: never be afraid ... to tell a childish client who wants the world for a dollar that they can go f*** themselves.