Brings back memories. Retired from Navy mid nineties in WA State, went back to school for Design/Coding Programming Degree. This was when the Tech World was red hot and everyone was having an IPO, Microsoft Millionaires throwing money at everything. Head hunters hanging out on the college campuses begging anyone enrolled in CS degrees to quit school and waving huge sign on bonuses. If you could spell COMPUTER you get git a high paying job in 5 minutes. It was truly the Wild West.

I graduated, went to work for MS at the main Redmond Campus. Each tower building was like wagon wheels stacked on each other. In the center was a giant 7 / 11 except everything was free and foosball tables (where my boss always was). The spokes were everyone’s offices, the walls to the hall were glass and my name was already painted on the door my first day of the job. Everyone had a couch in their office (I would soon understand why), they would come by everyday to pick up/deliver your free laundry, dinner was always catered by some fantastic restaurants (free), if you needed a reference book just call a number, it was brought to you in a manner of minutes, there was a centralized room where you picked out whatever PC and related gear you wanted. Man I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

The day was divided into three or more builds consisting of furious coding (much of it spaghetti code to fix bugs discovered on last testing cycle) then it would be handed over to tester’s to compile and find bugs. The testers & programmers would alternately be sleeping on their couch, eating hoes hoes or playing foosball depending on who had the code. I started noticing that everyone’s eyes were always bloodshot and they shuffled around like listless zombies. There was a saying going around, “If you don’t show up on Saturday, don’t bother coming in Sunday!” It didn’t take long for me to realize it was not a joke.

I had a friend there I went to school with, he was a walking brain and he quickly became one of the Golden Hair Gods of Redmond. He made the mistake of calling in one day, I think it was a family emergency. When he came back the next day I could not believe the difference in how he was treated. No one talked to him, it was like he was not even there. He had been shunned!

My friend soon quit as I did too. I had a family that had seen very little of me during my time in the Navy and just didn’t want to spend my life like that. The Tech Bubble soon popped and things really changed after that.