11962 Work Days

And so today, the 11th of April 2023, is my last day of full-time work aka retirement. I thought I'd share my internal email with the rest of you I may have worked with over the past 46 years.

I think I have had a reasonable career with some achievements scattered along the way because when you spend 46 years making bets on tech you've got to hit the jackpot at least once.

I would like to share?some events that had an influence on me during that time. (If you are rolling your eyes at this point you can stop reading)

Event 1: The Queue

In 1975 I was supposed to enroll in Civil Engineering at the NSW Institute of Technology, but when I got there, the queue for that degree was enormous, so I spotted a much shorter queue for Computing Science and here I am today. As a 17 year old I had no concern about the consequence of my actions, but it turned out OK. Some of you might agree with me that life is a series of sliding door moments, you take opportunities as they come (make a bet), and here was a classic example:?Do you take the left queue or the right queue?

Event 2: The Tech Jesus

My first job, mid 1977,?was at NSW State Railways as a COBOL & FORTRAN programmer (coder to some of you). As fate would have it (sliding doors), I was good at programming so I was offered a role as a?communications programmer (I was a blackbelt in RS232C pinouts). Basically the Railways wanted their mainframes (UNIVAC, IBM) to send messages to each other with homemade rudimentary protocols or using existing ones (IBM LU 6.2, X.25). In 1980 I won an achievement award to go to Melbourne to the International Telecommunication Union Conference (ITU). I met a guy who looked like Tech Jesus with long blond flowing hair and a beard to match. He was going off like a frog in a sock (excited) about some comms technology that would disrupt** everything. I had no idea what he was talking about. Several years later the penny dropped when the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet Standard was officially released.

Tech Jesus was Bob Metcalfe, the co-inventor of Ethernet. It was then I realised that this was a big deal and would transform the way we connected offices (story for another time) and that I should stick with communications technologies.

I still have the original IEEE 802.3 book.?It had more influence on me than any self-help book.?

**I don't think disrupt came into business lexicon until many years later

Event 3: The Pickle

One day around the early 1980s at my second company, CSR Limited (Sugar, Mining, Coal, Macadamia nuts, Rum, Concrete, Plasterboard, Cows) I was literally crawling around the executive floor pulling some cable when I heard the one of the secretaries (no PAs in those days) cursing. Her name was Irene Gherkin (I always forget names, but hers stuck with me) and she was in a pickle. I crawled out to see she was trying to send a message to the CSR London office using a program (app) I wrote which utilised the X.25 protocol. I don't recall exactly what she was doing wrong but I clearly remember she hissed "What would you know!!?" when I suggested how to rectify the situation. My response was to crawl back under the desk I came from but I did think later I would never speak or belittle a?work colleague like that. I like to think that holds true 99.99% of my 11962 workdays. Which leaves around 12 days I need to apologise for

Event 4: The Boardroom

One evening in the early 1990s I was called at home and told in no uncertain terms to haul my a*** to the CSR Boardroom. The PictureTel Videoconferencing system was not working and they could not hold the board meeting with London board members. They were certainly angry, not necessarily with me, but the fact it was not within their control and board members are all about control. The fix was pretty simple (Bonded 384K ISDN reset), but it was way beyond their capabilities or understanding. I learnt from this episode that some executives?(maybe even a few at Cisco) don't have the capacity or the capability to understand a lot of tech and you have to drastically simplify if you want to get your message across. Once they understood they were in control again.

I also found out what I did for a living (networking) was essential for ANY company to function.?

Event 5: The Coal Mine

Towards the end of my time at CSR (1999) I was not only responsible for a very large network (700 sites DECnet being replaced by IP) that myself a few others had designed and installed connecting PRIME, VAX & IBM AS/400 mid-range machines, but also a large cache of code I had written from IP address management to automated installation and configuration to legacy messaging and file transfer.

I was also responsible for a few people in addition to tech stuff.

I was a?fish with many hooks.

If this was what success looked like it wasn't good. I was constantly in some situation that had to be sorted out.

Then came the day of the Great** Muswellbrook Coal Mine strike.

**OK, I may have exaggerated that a bit for dramatic effect.

The entire mine went on strike because they did not get paid. I got the blame and was hauled up to Finance to explain. Why? Because I wrote the code that transferred the payroll for the mine to the bank. I recall saying surely finance needs to have controls in place to check these things which fell on deaf ears. A fish with many hooks....indeed.

So, at this point I could either shorten my lifespan by putting up with this crazy situation that I had unwittingly created or leave.

Event 6: The Bridge To Possible

Hello Cisco, September 1999. I have my wife Anne to thank for convincing me to go, but at a cost….

I went from a Director level position at CSR to a job grade 10, with a 30% cut in salary.

A really tough lesson; sometimes you have to go back, reset, to go forward.

I was happier than I'd been in a long time and it has stayed that way right to this day.

Cisco has been a great company and afforded me an enormous amount of leeway to chase disruptions and opportunities where I saw them.

I have had mostly excellent management to work on things that benefit the greater company not just the immediate group I work in.

Except for the meetings…. OMG. So. Many. Meetings. My coping mechanism? Doodles. Hundreds of them.

These three are framed in my kitchen, as strange as that may be it’s a nice reminder of times gone by and no more meetings.

I started out with punch cards and 1200bps half-duplex modems and ended up working on several patents in the area of Low Earth Orbit satellites and presentations on Quantum Computing.

In hindsight I probably have done better than I thought....

Adios. Jeff.