Part 1 of “Before I Go”, a career retrospective.
In the summer of 1986, I walked into a building in Industry, California that looked nothing like a college campus. There was no quad or clock tower, only an office park with classrooms. I was 18, just out of high school, and almost certainly the youngest person in the room.
Most of my classmates at DeVry University were older and embarking on a second career in technology. They had work history, rent, families. I had a scholarship that covered tuition and fees, a commute from Norwalk, and a conviction that I wanted to work with computers that I’d been carrying since I first heard Majel Barrett’s voice coming out of the Enterprise computer.
The scholarship wasn’t automatic. I applied, submitted an essay along with my SAT score, and DeVry eventually announced I was the winner. My high school wasn’t pleased. Their preference was a traditional four-year university, and a for-profit technical school didn’t fit the picture they had in mind. I understood the concern, but I wasn’t interested in a picture. I wanted to write code.
DeVry’s structure was unusual. Every student in the Computer Information Systems program followed the same fixed schedule. We stayed in the same room all day; the professors rotated in. The curriculum covered mainframe tools like COBOL, CICS, IMS, and JCL, alongside courses in financial accounting, business writing, psychology, economics, public speaking, and a senior project. Faculty were required to have real-world industry experience, not just academic credentials. That distinction mattered more than I understood at the time.
My first trimester brought Professor Chang, who taught Pascal. He was brilliant and difficult to follow, and he taught by making you figure things out rather than by giving you answers. His accent was strong enough that the whole class struggled to keep up, which led to one of the more memorable moments of that first trimester. He was explaining bit manipulation — how a byte has eight bits, and how a byte can be divided into two halves. He kept referring to each half by its technical name, but what came out of his mouth, in that accent, sounded unmistakably like ‘nipple.’ Nobody said anything for a while. Finally, one of the more outspoken students asked him to write the word on the board so we could make sure we had the spelling right. He wrote “nybble.” The room collectively exhaled. He noticed our reaction, asked what he had been saying, and when we told him, he spent a few moments practicing the correct pronunciation — nibble, nibble, nibble — before it dawned on him what we had been hearing for the past several minutes. He was genuinely embarrassed. We thought he was great. What I took from his approach, beyond that moment, was a habit of mind: when you hit a wall, your job is to reason through it, not wait for someone to open a door.
I completed eight trimesters in roughly three years and graduated Summa Cum Laude. The practical curriculum turned out to be a significant advantage that I didn’t fully appreciate until I hit the workforce.
DeVry’s placement office found me my first job. Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach hired me as an Engineer in Quality Systems at $28,000 a year paid weekly. I chose it over other offers because the commute from Norwalk to Long Beach didn’t require freeway driving. That’s the kind of logic that makes perfect sense at 22.
Douglas ran on an IBM VM/SP mainframe, and the setup was unlike anything I’d encountered at DeVry. Each user got their own virtual machine running CMS on IBM’s VM/SP OS, which functioned as a personal workstation at a time when personal workstations weren’t yet a real concept. We used REXX for scripting, ISPF panels for screens, SQL/DS for data management, and GML/SCRIPT for documentation. The company also ran PROFS, IBM’s office system, which handled corporate email, messaging, and calendaring across the organization. It was a complete, production-grade technology stack that predated the tools most people associate with that era by close to a decade.
My work was building administrative database applications that supported the quality assurance function. One of these tracked airworthiness directives which are FAA safety mandates that manufacturers were required to compile and deliver with each aircraft. Without a complete set, the plane couldn’t be handed over to the customer. If the system failed, a finished aircraft sat on the tarmac. That’s the weight the work carried.
Every morning I walked through the manufacturing floor to get to my desk. Twenty-five minutes past MD-80s and MD-11s. The physical scale of a commercial aircraft when you’re standing next to one is nothing like seeing it from an airport gate. I watched landing gear tests on planes lifted off the floor on hydraulic jacks. The MD-11 tail stabilizers were too large for the hangar and had to be installed outside. I wore Douglas t-shirts on flights and got attention from flight attendants who wanted to know what I did for the company. One of those conversations led to a date that ended in complete disaster, but that’s a separate story.
Then the layoff came.
I knew it was coming. That didn’t make it better. My manager arrived with an envelope, worked through a checklist, walked me to the door, and took my badge. Under California EDD rules, a layoff of that scale required six weeks’ notice, but they released me from duties after two weeks with pay continuing for the remainder. I called DeVry’s placement office. The same office that found me Douglas now found me LA County.
But first, a brief detour. While waiting for the County offer to come through, I took a job at a small software distribution company in Culver City. The owner had a vision of building the Nordstrom’s of software. It was twelve people, a long commute, rigid lunch rules, and an expectation that you’d stay late without asking questions. I had already interviewed at the County during my first week there. When the County offer finally arrived in late September, I gave my notice and served two of the best weeks of my working life. I came in when I felt like it, left when I was done, and genuinely did not care about much of anything. I didn’t understand at the time how precisely that feeling would echo something I’d feel 36 years later, but that’s getting ahead of the story.
I arrived at LA County’s Internal Services Department as an Assistant Programmer Analyst in 1990. I was part of a large training cohort, about 30 to 40 people in my group, with three groups total recruited from outside. Most of them were fresh from Cal State schools, trained in UNIX and theoretical computer science. I already knew COBOL, JCL, and IMS cold. Much of the training was redundant. The pay was $34,000 a year, more than Douglas. The commute from Norwalk to Downey was short.
What I found at my desk was a different story.
The County ran IBM 3270 terminals, massive machines with heavy keyboards. At Douglas I had been working in a virtual machine environment that gave every user the computing experience of a personal workstation. The County 3270 was a significant step backwards from everything I’d just left, and the difference hit me the first week.
The colleague in the adjacent cubicle had arrived in the first training cohort, a few months before me. Her terminal happened to be located on the desk I’d been assigned which, when you think about it, made it legitimately hers before I ever showed up. She would come to my desk to use it, and I’d wander the building looking for an open machine, or sit in a shared terminal room with about 15 workstations and most of the department competing for time on them.
Nobody at the County seemed to find this surprising.
There’s a version of this story where I’m the hero of it — the hotshot who showed up knowing more than his colleagues and had to endure conditions unworthy of his abilities. That’s not the story. The terminal situation was just a symptom of something structural. Government IT in 1990 was constrained by budget, procurement timelines, and a set of priorities that had nothing to do with giving any individual employee the best tools. I would spend the next three decades learning how those constraints work, where they come from, and why they’re harder to change than they look.
That’s the subject of a different article.
The question I keep returning to about those early years is simpler: what do you do with an advantage you didn’t ask for? DeVry gave me a running start. Douglas confirmed it was real. The County reset the clock, at least tactically.
What you do, it turns out, is show up anyway. You learn the environment you’re actually in, not the one you were expecting. And you wait for the work to start meaning something.
For me, that wait took sixteen years. But that’s also a different article.