This New Internet Thing, Chapter 7

Cassie Moves Up

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 6 Matt Finegold got hired at GO Corp., a hot startup that his wife had pushed him to join. She was desperate to get rich, which is what you’re supposed to do in Silicon Valley. Now we shift to Cassie Decker, a 30-ish manager in 3Com’s internal network department, Dan Markunas (who is me, sort of), and Janet, whom Cassie works for. Cassie’s been happy there, but she’s starting to reassess her entire life, starting with work.

Another handwriting startup of the time, Momenta, is covered here. I’ll have a lot more to say about them in the Notes on Chapter 7 post. The part about the Momenta Maxims all beginning with “P” is all true.

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

========= Cassie Moves Up =========

It was January 1991. Cassie Decker had been working for Janet for over five years now. She’d been promoted to manager and had three people under her.

Matt had left months ago, and now Cassie was really depressed. Everyone she knew was either gone, transferred, or moved up the management chain so far that you couldn’t really talk to them anymore. She was at that stage of a job where all your old friends are gone, a whole bunch of new people have joined, and you feel like a stranger there. It was definitely time to move on.

But move on to what? Had she really gotten all she could get from 3Com? Now she could interview as, basically, “a manager of Support.” That seemed kinda blah. Even if she couldn’t become an Engineer overnight, maybe she could transfer to something at least a little more technical and build up her resume. 

Finally she hit on it: Quality Assurance! You don’t have to be a great engineer to get that job, and in fact, if you were, you wouldn’t want it. She resolved to have a chat with Hope Stinson, the manager of software QA. Hope had always seemed a little too political for Cassie’s tastes, but maybe that would be OK for a short-term job. She was the sort of person whom nothing stuck to, a Teflon manager. Cassie had to admire that, in a perverse way. A product goes out that’s embarrassing for its bugginess, and Hope always manages to shift the blame to the schedule not giving them enough time. Or she didn’t have the proper resources to put on that product. It’s never her group’s fault for not finding the bugs or raising a flag.

She had lunch with Hope, who was ecstatic to find someone she already knew and who knew 3Com’s products. So they agreed Cassie was going to be the QA manager for some of the higher-level products, like the new network management product that Dan was working on.

Hope and Janet were always carefully and elaborately formal with each other, like all the managers at 3Com, so this was sweet for Hope: she was stealing one of Janet’s best people. She made sure to be extra-nice to Janet to rub it in, in fact Janet thought she was almost sickeningly nice. 

When Cassie talked it over with Janet, who had already heard, Janet was genuinely happy for her. She had always thought Cassie was someone to nurture, so if this was what she wanted to do, hey, nothing lasts forever. They agreed that Cassie would recommend someone to replace her from her own group, if she thought one of them was ready to lead the group.

When the announcement came out officially, Cassie thought, “OK, one problem down. Farzad, you’re next.” She went looking for a new apartment, since kicking her boyfriend out of the one they shared would be too awkward.

* * *

Dan’s group had layoffs, but Dan escaped. Apparently his transplant from email had worked and he was blooming in the new location. Cassie knew in advance that this bloodletting was happening, but there was nothing she could do about it. Life goes on.

Shortly after that, in March 1991, he quit anyway. He was going to work at Oracle, of all places, not on the database but in their networking group. It sounded like a desperation move to Cassie, but she wished him well. He told her that Patrick, the Marketing VP said to him, “Oracle? Are you nuts?” The previous year, Oracle had had “irregularities” in their accounting, the stock had crashed, and some financial analysts were ready to count them out permanently. But apparently Dan knew the VP he’d be working for and wasn’t worried about their future, or so he said.

She consoled herself with, “Well, at least I have a different job now, even if everyone I used to know is leaving!”

She moved out on Farzad. He took it pretty hard. She thought, “Yeah, but I bet your parents were, like, ‘Finally! You’ll find a nice Muslim girl now.’ “ She hadn’t really dated much since that. Her church had a Singles group, but none of those guys interested her much.

Her mom was relieved, too. She never thought Cassie should marry an Iranian guy, and especially not have Muslim children. But now that she was single again and past thirty, she was getting anxious about the grandchildren thing. Cassie’s sister and brother were both married already, but neither had kids yet. When she went to church, she’d see the toddler care room outside the church, and get twinges of “I want one of those!”

Her new job seemed to involve a lot of going to Engineering meetings as the QA representative, and saying, “We don’t have the resources for that.” Or being silent. It was rare that she had anything much to say, unless a product had actually been completed and turned over to QA.

Normally, the engineers and product managers plus top management initiated and defined products. Sometimes it came entirely from top management, like the Microsoft deal on LAN Manager. Other times it was more bottom-up, like Dan’s new email system. In either case, the “chartering” of a product team was what made it a real product. The product team had to include a tech writer, someone from QA, and of course engineering and marketing representatives. Usually the writer & QA person are afterthoughts, and of course they viewed that as a snub.

Hope, as the overall QA manager, compensated for this lack of technical status by wielding political power. When products were being discussed, she was always there, tuning into the interpersonal dynamics and figuring out who held the real power, regardless of what the org chart said. Being on Hope’s bad side was a very bad career move.

Nonetheless, she would always say at big meetings, ritualistically, “We need to be involved from the very beginning of the project!” Cassie would nod her head dutifully, although she wondered what she could possibly contribute at that stage. She didn’t realize, yet, that what Hope really meant was, “We should be able to prevent the product before it even gets started.” 

Cassie’s direct reports were all assigned to various projects and charged with writing Test Plans, which she reviewed. She found that to be an excellent opportunity to learn more networking. She could read their design specifications, compare them to the test plans, talk to the engineers, and generally pick up the lingo. She wished she could actually run the tests, but that wasn’t her job, damn it. Still, the bug reports were educational.

Hope had one favorite underling, Jeffrey, whom she often went to lunch with. Jeffrey had figured out that succeeding at QA was not about product quality; it was about product prevention. Hope was teaching him.

One day in the summer, Mike, a guy she and Janet both knew slightly, called her. He had left to join a startup called Momenta, and apparently it wasn’t going too well. They’d both be happy to hire him again if that was what he was angling for, so they agreed to meet him for lunch. They met in the 3Com cafe, since he certainly knew the way to Headquarters and Janet and Cassie didn’t have to drive anywhere.

There really weren’t too many startups right now. Microsoft was devouring everything, and everyone knew that if you had any kind of interesting company, their minions would approach you with an offer to “work together.” That meant, “give us all your technology, and maybe we’ll issue a press release about how great you are. Or maybe we’ll just buy you out. Or build it ourselves.” It was like Don Corleone’s men making you an offer. Politely.

Momenta had attracted a lot of attention and a lot of venture capital for a “handheld computer” and they were very snooty about which people they would hire. Cassie had called their number and apparently she didn’t make the cut. Janet and Cassie were dying to hear whatever Mike was willing to tell them. It didn’t seem to them like computer technology was far enough advanced that you could build anything useful, but hey, you never know.

Mike looked vaguely disoriented, like he was on a weekend pass from prison and he dreaded having to go back inside on Monday. He talked about the Company Culture at Momenta, and it really did sound like those C’s were capitalized. All the founders had worked at other Valley companies and hated the bureaucratic, secretive, competitive culture that many of them had. So they had jointly resolved, in weekend meetings, to be different and better. The “weekend” part was intentionally inconvenient, and the people who’d been to one would talk about it like a religious cult’s retreat. 

They used the word “teamwork” so often that Mike thought they must have a keyboard macro on everyone’s computer so you could get it with one keystroke. There was a set of precepts called the Momenta Maxims, which all began with ‘P’: People, Process, Productivity, Performance, and Perspective. When you joined, you had to sign a plaque with the Maxims, in front of the whole company. People joked that you used to have to kneel to do this, but that was just an urban legend.

Furthermore, there were precepts for how to have a good meeting: start on time, listen to and respect all points of view, reach a consensus, and end on time. These were encased in a plastic icon that was present in every meeting room. If you thought someone was disobeying one of the precepts, you could pick up the icon and wave it at him or her.

Janet had heard enough, and finally asked, 

“So, with all this happy-happy, what are you actually building? Or can you talk about it?”

Mike talked about his work like it was already in the past, even though he was still doing it.

“I’m working on one aspect of the handwriting recognition software, with the stylus. That’s actually one of the reasons I want to get out: that stuff will never work!”

He hadn’t actually said he wanted to get out, but that was pretty obvious by now.

Cassie said,

“Really? I’ve heard of those systems, but I’ve never tried one.”

“Yeah, don’t. It’s never going to work, and in fact, we now have a keyboard only because one guy managed to beat that into everyone’s head. They hate him for it, too.”

Janet laughed. “Sounds about right. That’s got to be a hard problem!”

“You think?” he said, sardonically.

Cassie said, “I don’t know if you knew Matt Finegold or not?”

“Vaguely.”

“Anyhow, he’s at GO Corp., which I guess is one of your competitors. I haven’t talked to him lately.”

“Oh, yeah, we know about them. Also General Magic, and Apple with their handheld thingie. Everyone’s trying to do this.”

Janet said, “Are any of them succeeding at it?”

“That’s the big secret. I don’t see how, myself.”

They talked about what Mike would do if he came back to 3Com. It was finally settled that he could work in Cassie’s group.

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