This New Internet Thing, Chapter 17

Big Decision

I wrote a book. The publication date is May 29, 2024 (if you’d rather not deal with Amazon, your bookstore can also order it from the distributor Ingram Spark, or print-on-demand if they have the equipment). You can read it for free here, although it’ll be in serial form. My fond hope is that you’ll find it so compelling that you just buy the book instead of waiting 8 months to see what happens. There will be a chapter each week, 33 in all.

In Chapter 16 (the Notes are here) Cassie talks to Len about being her baby’s godfather, the only problem being that she doesn’t have one yet (and isn’t pregnant). In this one, Janet makes a momentous decision.

Reading in serial form has a long and honorable history. My cover artist sent me this “Read Like a Victorian” website. Enjoy.

========================== Big Decision ===========

Janet broke the news to Walt: she was taking her second sabbatical from 3Com, and she was going to spend it coding. Even worse, she was going to a conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts in July about this “web” stuff, at her own expense.

Walt was surprised, and not at all in a good way:

“You have six weeks off with pay, and this is what you’re doing with it?”

She detected something underneath his usual reserve there. Maybe this required a little more diplomacy. She sat down and patted the couch beside her. He sat down.

“Honey, I know I’ve been leaving you alone a lot lately, and I am sorry. I miss spending time with you, too.”

“But…?” he prompted.

“But…” she started. “But as long as you’ve known me, I’ve been a manager, right?” He nodded.

“I always thought that was what I wanted to do with my life, and I was getting pretty good at it. It’s what Dad did, too.”

“I guess you must be good. They seem to keep promoting you, anyway.”

“Yeah. I don’t do anything but act like a robot grownup, and they love it.”

Walt laughed. “Robot grownup. That’s good!”

Janet laughed, and moved her arms up and down stiffly like a robot and intoned. “Prioritize! Strategize! Incentivize!”

“Now I understand what you do all day!” he chuckled.

“So can you understand how it gets old?”

“Well, it’s a job, right? That’s why they call it ‘work’ . I mean, shit, I hate my job half the time, too.“

“How do you answer that without being self-indulgent?” she asked herself.

“What if you could make good money and not hate your job?”

Walt laughed. “Well, then you’d really have something, wouldn’t you? I haven’t figured that one out yet!”

She still didn’t know what to say. Finally, he spoke again:

“So you think giving up everything you’ve worked for is going to make things better?”

“I don’t know, honey. I really don’t.”

She didn’t want to make some sappy speech that would just sound stupid later. Finally, Walt said,

“Well, what if you just go away somewhere by yourself for a week or two and think things over? I could shut down for a while and join you later if you want.”

She leaned on his shoulder. “Hmm, that does sound nice,” thinking, “Sometimes winning the argument isn’t the most important thing.”

That weekend, she didn’t do any coding. They went on a hike at Windy Hill with Bernie. In his younger days, he showed more interest in other dogs, but now that he was older, he was pretty indifferent to them. At least half the people they met wanted to pet him, though, which Bernie loved. The weather was beautiful, but what else was new? The hills were still green from the rain.

When they were eating their lunch, she asked him, “What did you want to be when you were a kid? I think you told me once.”

He thought about it and said, “An astronaut! Or sometimes a fireman. How about you?”

“Well, I didn’t see myself as a mom, that’s for sure.”

“No?”

“Nah. I looked up to my dad. I didn’t look up to Mom.”

Walt thought back to when he met her. He had to admit, she did seem a little stiff.

“It’s hard for me to judge. I only met her that one time. She was a little cold, I’d have to say.”

Janet laughed. “You think? The stories I could tell.”

Walt thought there was probably more, so he just waited.

“There was one Christmas… well, I could always tell which one of them bought which present for me. I got a chemistry set, and a brand new dress. Not hard to figure those out.”

“That was nice of Betty to get you that chemistry set! How did she know that was what you wanted?” Walt ducked as she pretended to hit him.

“Then one time, there was a summer weekend class on astronomy, I wanted to go, and she told me that it was just for boys. Dad took me anyway.”

“And were you the only girl?”

“Well, yeah, but I was used to that!” He laughed.

“Do you think your dad really wanted a boy?”

“Maybe. But he never made me feel that way.”

Walt had just spent the weekend with Len a few weeks ago. “Speaking of Len: did you know he’s starting a little business up there, instead of fishing?”

“I guess I sorta knew that. How’s he doing, do you think?”

“I don’t know, I think he’s itching to get back in the saddle again, but I don’t know as what. He seems to be involved with ferreting out some shady bookkeeping, from what I can tell. Some big time crime up there! I had no idea.”

This made Janet pause.

“Shady dealings: he always used to tell these stories about the bad guys he caught, before he worked at Chrysler.”

“I never heard those. What was he, a cop or something?”

“No, no. He was an auditor, but I guess he liked it when there were embezzlers to catch!”

Walt smiled again. “A second career for Dad. Good for him. Maybe he should move down here!”

Janet looked alarmed at that idea. “It’s so expensive here. What would he do for money?” 

“You wouldn’t want him to live with us, I guess?”

“God, no. He’d go nuts. He’s used to living by himself, since I went to college.” She was imagining him hanging around the house and giving her career advice.

Walt was pensive. “Yeah, I guess I can see that. He is kinda independent.”

She agreed. The thought of Dad wanting to go back to work again was a new worry for her. She’d only ever known him as an auto company guy in an auto town.

Her second sabbatical came around and she did stay home coding. Walt didn’t say anything about it. She went off to the Web conference in Cambridge in July, and found it incredibly exciting. She got to meet Tim Berners-Lee

which gave her some serious bragging rights for a long time. She met other people who were doing the same thing she was, namely, a Web browser for Windows, and they spent endless hours comparing approaches. When there was nothing interesting going on at the conference, she went down to the MIT campus and revisited places she’d lived or had classes.

How did she imagine her career 20 years ago? She walked by the building where she and Ken had their first “date,” a Computer Science talk that made them feel self-consciously nerdy even at the time. But CS was exciting back then. 

All she could think of as a goal then was being the head of a big data center, “having your own shop” as they called it. This didn’t really appeal to her even at the time, but there didn’t seem to be anything else to aim for. Amazingly enough, now she had it, more or less. What was so great about it? You never got to do anything really interesting, and you dealt with stupid people all day long. 

Computers were still the preserve of big business or aerospace back then. There were a lot of computer companies in the Boston area, the “Route 128” companies: like Digital Equipment and Data General, but going to California seemed more appealing. She and Ken both got jobs in the defense industry in the LA area; Janet at TRW and Ken at Hughes Aircraft. She threw herself into learning about satellite communications, and Ken became a PDP-10 systems programmer.

The LA area was dominated by defense companies, not entertainment — at least when you got out of the Beverly Hills - West LA - Santa Monica area. Ken and Janet didn’t know anyone who worked in movies, TV, or music; everyone was at TRW, Northrup, Hughes, Rockwell, or General Dynamics. Ken saw nothing at all wrong with that, and fully intended to make his life in aerospace. When she went to work on the Xerox Star instead and didn’t want to have kids with him… that’s where it all went south. 

Ken was remarried now with two kids, climbing the Hughes management ladder, and she was up here in Silicon Valley. She hadn’t spoken to him in years. Her new husband, Walt, had no connection with high tech at all, and maybe that was what she liked about him. He loved her and supported her, and unlike Ken, he never pretended to have an authoritative opinion about her work.

She knew people her age who’d gotten into some startup that had IPO’ed, and now they were millionaires, probably. Most of them didn’t flaunt it, at least around her, but she always felt like she’d missed out somewhere. When you join a startup, you work insanely hard and suffer the naked rivalries and unbearable claustrophobia of being around the same people all day every day. Dan Markunas had told her about the one he was in and it sounded horrible, and it was the same for Matt Feingold with GO. Was it even worth it? She could be a VP of Engineering of one of those if she wanted to be, but a job like that was even worse than hers. 

Janet hated having to sell, whether it was selling a job to a candidate or a new service to the executive team. In a startup, that would be practically all she did: recruit a team, convince dubious engineers that your idea was going to work; talk to venture capitalists and get them to fund you; meet reporters and nudge them to write good stuff about you and not your competitors. All the time, it was giving the same spiel over and over.

She’d always been a middle manager and mercifully free of most of that. But startups don’t have middle managers! There’s one person in charge of all the engineers: the VP.

When engineers talked about being in a startup, they always made it seem so romantic: “No bureaucracy! Everyone is pulling in the same direction! No legacy code to deal with — you can start with a clean slate and do it right!” They were all so naive about it.

Walt and she had talked about that once. He thought it didn’t sound like a bad deal, really — you still got your normal salary, and maybe you’d get rich! But he wasn’t enthused about never seeing her because she was always working, and now he was getting a little sense of what that would be like.

Still, the enthusiasm that people seemed to have for the Internet! The “mature” execs at 3Com made fun of it: “Hey, they’re just a bunch of kids.” But now here she was in the middle of it, and it wasn’t just networking geeks anymore. The Internet had always been restricted to government and research, but now it was officially OK to use it for commercial purposes. Dad seemed to think he knew better than all the 3Com execs that this thing was going to be huge! He spent his time trying to figure out how to invest in it.

Dad didn’t have access to the Silicon Valley way to “invest”: go to work in it. You got stock at $0.25 a share or something like that, and if it went public at $15, bang! You were rich. Your “risk” wasn’t really the money you sunk into it; it was the two or three or four years you spent working there when you could have been somewhere better. And, of course, the much higher level of effort demanded of you. Most people like Dad or Walt didn’t have the opportunity to do something like that.

Dad was so easy to thrill: she just had to tell him how many people she had under her. She just knew he bragged about his big executive daughter in Silicon Valley every chance he got. If she actually became a CEO sometime, he might die of happiness. To him, getting rich meant becoming a VP and making serious money on salary and stock options. A low-level or even middle-level person had no chance at that. But you still might get status: a nice office with your name on the door, a reserved parking spot, a chance to eat in the executive cafeteria. That was Dad’s world at Chrysler.

She realized that being a programmer again had a lot going for it: she’d have a much easier time getting hired in one of those startups than she would as a manager. And most of all, as the conference made clear: it was way more fun. Dad and Walt wouldn’t understand it at all, though.

Shortly after the plane reached cruising altitude, she’d made up her mind: she was going to tell 3Com management she wanted to be an engineer. If she was going to get hired at a startup as a programmer, it wouldn’t be good enough to say, “I’ve been doing it in my spare time.” That didn’t count.  She had to be doing it for a living.

She couldn’t even say she wanted to be an engineer again, because she’d never been one there. What would they say and where would they put her? She had to figure that out. It had to be something that would sell her to the next company. Even if 3Com knew perfectly well what she was doing and why, she had enough credibility from eight years there that they had to let her.

She especially looked forward to talking to all these “women in tech” activist groups that always came and asked her what it was like to “crash through the glass ceiling.” She’d say, “it sucks up there. I went back down.”

OK, everything was settled, then! Janet slept very well on the rest of the flight home.

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