My job history... Background: Lear Developments created the Instrument Division in Grand Rapids, MI. Lear and Siegler merged, creating the LSi conglomerate.

My job history... Background: Lear Developments created the Instrument Division in Grand Rapids, MI. Lear and Siegler merged, creating the LSi conglomerate. The Instrument Division in GR spun off another division in Zeeland, MI that made the "Mailmobile", an automatic guided vehicle (AGV) that followed a phosphorescent "trail" on the floor. While I was in college I worked there and hired on full time after graduating. While I was there, that division was sold to Bell & Howell, then Litton. There was a lull in business (layoffs, no interesting projects, y'know), so I quit and went to work at the mother division, which was still part of LSi. They had fun stuff to work on. A couple of years after hiring on, LSi was bought by an investment company (Forestmann Little) and the Instrument Division was sold to Smiths Industries. It remained SI[1] for about 15 years. About three years ago, the avionics portion of Smiths was sold to GE. Bill Lear was an entrepreneur, big time. Thinking back, while I signed on several years after Bill Lear was kicked out of LSi, the entrepreneurial spirit was still alive there. We were creating novel interesting products (e.g. the first solid state crash survivable flight data recorders). As time went on, the division became less entrepreneurial and more enterprisal (to coin a word ;-). The Dilbert Moment[2] was when the VP of engineering called a meeting of all the engineering departments and told all of us that we weren't going to be writing software or designing hardware any more. Instead, we were going to be a Tier 1 Systems House. [1] Side note, my buddies registered si.com, which Smiths ultimately sold to Sports Illustrated at a pretty nice profit. My buddies didn't even get a "thank you." :-/ [2] One of my favorite Dilbert comic strips: 1. PHB, pointing to PPT slide: "We'll save money by outsourcing our I.T. function." 2. PHB, pointing to PPT slide: "Then we'll save more money by replacing our outsourcing with fulltime employees!" 3. Wally: "When it's time for us to panic, will there be a warning sound, or was that it?"