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
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