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Early in my career, was at GE in scientific/engineering software. The unit shrank, and I got laid off. While still on my accrued vacation, sent some resumes a

by graycat 11y ago

Early in my career, was at GE in scientific/engineering software. The unit shrank, and I got laid off. While still on my accrued vacation, sent some resumes and in two weeks went on seven interviews and got five offers. Took the best offer, again in scientific/engineering software, with a nice raise and the next year another nice raise. Soon I was making in annual salary six times what a new, high end Camaro cost. My wife was in her Ph.D. program in essentially mathematical sociology, and my career was getting much better. I went for a Ph.D., and got it in some applied math, stochastic optimal control with some algorithms, software, etc. My wife also got her Ph.D. That was the good news. After my Ph.D., my career was totally shot. I was nearly unemployable at anything except academics which I did not want -- I wanted make money, support my wife and myself, buy a house, have and support kids, etc. The academics paid less than I was making before my Ph.D. Also my marriage was ruined: The stress of her Ph.D. work threw my wife (Valedictorian, PBK, Summa Cum Laude, Woodrow Wilson) into a clinical depression. She never recovered, and her body was found floating in a lake near her family farm where she was visiting trying to recover. Finally I ended up at the IBM Watson lab in artificial intelligence. I invented some algorithms, wrote software, worked with high end customers, published some papers, and then IBM lost $16 billion in three years, went from 405,000 employees down to 209,000, and the Watson lab went from 4500 down to 1500 with 500 of those temporary, and I was out of work. The guy who walked me out the door was immediately demoted out of management. The guy two levels up, with a corner office, 55 people, a budget, a secretary, was reorganized to have one more level of management between himself and the CEO, given a six month performance plan, and then demoted out of management. Actually at IBM, due to the costs of commuting, housing, etc., I lost money. IBM never paid me enough to live and commute, certainly not nearly enough to buy a house and support a family. I saved money even in graduate school; at IBM I lost. Out of IBM, I was absolutely, totally, permanently unemployable for, as far as I could tell, anything at all, anything, at least anything that would pay enough to live and commute to work. I sent 1000 resume copies and got back silence or nothing. Period. I'm a native born US citizen and have held security clearances as high as Secret. I've never been arrested or charged with crime except for minor traffic violations. I've never been in court. Never used illegal drugs or made illegal use of legal drugs. Never been intoxicated. Am in good health. I have proven high aptitude, interest, and accomplishments in STEM fields. I've written a lot of significant software. Yet, I was treated like I had a felony conviction. But I could still do applied math and write software. I was good at several programming languages, TCP/IP, lots of applications, etc. And I'd had enough experience in business to see how it worked. So, I thought of a problem that maybe nearly every Internet user would like to have solved, derived some math for the first good solution, drew out an architecture, fast, reliable, and scalable, for the software and server farm to present the solution to users via a Web site, and started writing the software, on Windows in .NET, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, etc. with Visual Basic .NET. As of last Friday, I got all the planned software running. So, I have a few, small revisions, and then will load some initial data, give a critical review, do alpha and beta tests, load some more initial data, plug together a server, get Windows Server and SQL Server from the Microsoft BizSpark program, go live, get publicity, run ads, and hopefully get users and revenue. Advice: ASAP do not be an employee. Instead, start, own, and run a business. Technology can be a big advantage, but for technical topics, except for just a hobby, say, mathematical physics, learn what you need when you need it for your business and otherwise strongly minimize the effort you expend on learning, say, C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Jquery, .NET, Web frameworks, C#, Python, Ruby, etc. For the business, get some barriers to entry. One of the very best approaches to business is just something with a strong geographical barrier to entry. So, if work hard and smart, actually can do okay, say, support family, get kids through college, have a good retirement, by doing well running a few fast food restaurants, a few gas and convenience stores, having lots of crews mowing grass, running a big truck, little truck business, say, in auto parts, plumbing supplies, electrical supplies, other industrial supplies, running a good, local building materials company, being a manufacturer's representative, running several pizza shops, a popular Italian red sauce, family restaurant, an auto repair shop, etc. With such a business, when the kids are old enough, can also get the wife and kids involved, which can solve lots of serious problems and be just terrific for the family. The business education and career start the kids get helping in the family business easily can be much better than any Harvard or Stanford MBA. A simple and not wrong way to look at STEM field Ph.D. degrees is as a US Federal Government supported labor supply for highly speculative, leading edge parts of US national security and not so much for anything else. Indeed, when my career was doing well, mostly I was around DC working on US DoD projects. Mostly the US commercial world just deeply, profoundly, bitterly hates and despises the high end STEM work done mostly for US national security. Only for a short time just before I went for a Ph.D. did I have money enough to buy a house, but then I didn't. Since then I've never had money enough to buy a house and, thus, haven't. And, after our Ph.D. degrees, my wife and I were never in a position to have kids, so I never had any. I owe my brother's widow a major chunk of change. If my startup works, then I'll be able to pay back my brother's widow plus a lot, buy a house, etc. Mostly I recommend, stay the heck out of technology. With some high irony, there's a movie Stand and Deliver about teaching calculus to high school students in a poor, Hispanic area of Los Angeles. The idea is that calculus can be their ticket out of poverty. Some of the evidence the teacher gives for the value of calculus is to tour some Los Angeles area aero-space firms -- right, US DoD again. At one point, a girl in the calculus class is torn between working hard on calculus or working in the successful, family Mexican restaurant of her parents. So, the calculus teacher goes to the restaurant, talks to the owners and parents of the girl, and claims that calculus will help their daughter. I know calculus, advanced calculus, mathematical analysis well beyond, and many important applications. I've studied calculus, taught it, applied it, and published original research in it. I know calculus. On the claim of the calculus teacher, that is, calculus compared with the restaurant, I call BS. Total upchuckable, delusional, wacko BS. For that girl, on average, working in the successful, family Mexican restaurant run by her parents and, thus, learning the family business, was by far, a wide margin, much, much better for her education, career, and life than anything reasonable from calculus. The girl's parents were fully correct. The calculus teacher was nuts. In particular, the US Federal Government doesn't grant H1B visas for workers in successful, family Mexican restaurants in Los Angeles but does strongly fund US college education in STEM fields. In a STEM field, are essentially working in a market run by the US DoD and funded by the US Congress mostly only for US national security. So, it's very much not a free market. Indeed, for a while the US NSF had economists analyzing how many immigrants the US should fund in STEM field graduate programs to keep down the labor cost to the US DoD. It's a managed market, a rigged game. For a career, you are better off running a family restaurant or any of a long list of other ordinary business opportunities. But, if you are in technology, then maybe you can do a project, sell it off for a nice bundle, enough for you and your family to be fixed for life -- if so, then go for it.

selimthegrim 11y ago
Thank you for sharing this; my condolences on your wife. As someone staring down many of the same barrels, it is food for thought.
- graycat 11y ago
  Yes, losing my wife and being unable to buy a house or have kids and then getting fired for no reason was a bummer. A broad lesson: ASAP don't be an employee and, instead, start and run own business. Actually, working your way up to running, say, four fast food restaurants can be just fine. Yes, I omitted: The guy at IBM "two levels up" basically just hated me, for no good reason if only because we'd nearly never spoken or interacted at all. I was told to do some publishable research. Okay, I had some ideas. I thought that the lab should do the core research for valuable, new products, but getting close to a new product was essentially forbidden. So, instead, just to publish, that was plenty easy enough. So I did the research and wrote it up as an internal working paper. Then the Watson lab claimed that the paper was not publishable. Of course, out of IBM, I submitted the paper for publication, and it was accepted without revision by the first journal to which I submitted, Information Sciences. It's a nice paper. IBM's claim that the paper was not publishable was incompetent or a lie. But the guy two levels up who hated me for no reason did get me out of the company. It cost him his corner office, secretary, budget, etc., but he got me out. There's more that's nasty, but let's not get into all of that. Basically, IBM just didn't care about their employees, didn't have much idea what to do with them, and didn't much want them. In more detail, a lot of middle management didn't much care, and top management was unsuccessful in having middle management care. For someone who can actually be productive, running their own business is likely a much better path. If a person is working for a company that doesn't know what the heck to do with them, and/or really doesn't much know what to do that's good at all, then tough for there to be a reason for the company to pay the person enough to be responsible as a husband and father. Instead, the company is perfectly willing to have the employee waste their life and, then, fire them. For competition from big companies, likely they don't want to have people who could do good work; for such people, the company would likely block the people from doing good work; and a person who did good work anyway would stand a good chance of getting fired. Net, if are running own business and doing something good, then don't worry much about competition from big companies. This is a very old story.

by graycat 11y ago

selimthegrim 11y ago

Thank you for sharing this; my condolences on your wife. As someone staring down many of the same barrels, it is food for thought.

graycat 11y ago
Yes, losing my wife and being unable to buy a house or have kids and then getting fired for no reason was a bummer. A broad lesson: ASAP don't be an employee and, instead, start and run own business. Actually, working your way up to running, say, four fast food restaurants can be just fine. Yes, I omitted: The guy at IBM "two levels up" basically just hated me, for no good reason if only because we'd nearly never spoken or interacted at all. I was told to do some publishable research. Okay, I had some ideas. I thought that the lab should do the core research for valuable, new products, but getting close to a new product was essentially forbidden. So, instead, just to publish, that was plenty easy enough. So I did the research and wrote it up as an internal working paper. Then the Watson lab claimed that the paper was not publishable. Of course, out of IBM, I submitted the paper for publication, and it was accepted without revision by the first journal to which I submitted, Information Sciences. It's a nice paper. IBM's claim that the paper was not publishable was incompetent or a lie. But the guy two levels up who hated me for no reason did get me out of the company. It cost him his corner office, secretary, budget, etc., but he got me out. There's more that's nasty, but let's not get into all of that. Basically, IBM just didn't care about their employees, didn't have much idea what to do with them, and didn't much want them. In more detail, a lot of middle management didn't much care, and top management was unsuccessful in having middle management care. For someone who can actually be productive, running their own business is likely a much better path. If a person is working for a company that doesn't know what the heck to do with them, and/or really doesn't much know what to do that's good at all, then tough for there to be a reason for the company to pay the person enough to be responsible as a husband and father. Instead, the company is perfectly willing to have the employee waste their life and, then, fire them. For competition from big companies, likely they don't want to have people who could do good work; for such people, the company would likely block the people from doing good work; and a person who did good work anyway would stand a good chance of getting fired. Net, if are running own business and doing something good, then don't worry much about competition from big companies. This is a very old story.