Why I never looked for changing jobs?

I am 60 year old and worked in one company for 18 years and working here for last 17 years.

Previous employment:

I joined a Public Sector in Bangalore in Dec 1981. I love Power stations and which company is better than this company ? I was excited.

Hated the posting, but, tried innovating

But, I was posted in Material Planning department, which was a desk job. I requested HR department to post me in Erection and commissioning which is my passion. They refused. And the frustration began. I felt like quitting. Then I realised that I can do something to streamline the terrible clerical process. In early Eighties, I never heard of computers in Manufacturing environment. So tried planning in a systematic way as defined by company and added value by calculating future requirements and taking care of advanced planning.

Look for Automation

I wanted to see how we can reduce manual work. As the company had an ICIM main frame which was mainly used for Finance application. I did not know any programming and I joined a training institute for learning COBOL. Tried my hand in computerising the work by writing code in the coding sheets and getting punch cards ( guys, do you know those? :-)

And then, the punch cards were a pain. For every bug in the program, we need to fill another coding sheet which is converted into punch card by a vendor and we need to wait for 3-4 days. I lost patience and frustration was setting in.

Perseverance Pays !

Seeing my enthusiasm, IT department gave me a newly introduced ICIM Quattro a stand alone system where we can connect 4 computers as interconnected system. We connected my computer to a computer in Stores using ARCNET ( heard of it? We didn't know LAN then). Using this computer, we could work on DBase. Later we moved to FoxPro and created Material Requirement planning and started issuing material from Stores to Production electronically ( never heard MRP, MRP II).

While I was busy developing computer based systems for material planning, IT department started working on distributed computer based systems in Purchase department, Marketing departments, stores and all other departments. By 1989, the whole company was running on computerised systems over Local Area Network( never heard of ERP !) .

In 1996-97, we were introduced to something called Apache, Gopher and apparently it is called Internet :-)

What kept me going ?

1. Though salary was low, it was sufficient to manage family.
2. Was too busy trying to improve my own working environment by improving processes and later automation.
3. Was excited to help others in automation
4. Company allowed us to try different things. Ofcourse if it succeeds bosses get credit and if it fails it would be my mistake. I knew it. And I still tried as it used to give kick when we see some productivity improvement plan is working.
5. We had lot of freedom.
6. We had good allocation of funds to automate and every day some vendor would come and educate us, which helped us to know what is latest in the market.
7. I kept looking for opportunity to improve productivity and even got 18 productivity awards

Why I left after 18 years, though I loved the company?

As I fell in love with Internet, I started developing websites and as a hobby, I developed a website for my children's school, which was shown to the school. Instead of accepting my proposal they got inspired and went ahead and made their website. I then launched my own website, which got quite popular . One of the Ex-students of the school was impressed with me and pulled me out after 6 months of my resistance. I opted to move out as

1. Entire company wide automation was running well and not much automation was required.
2. We could implement smaller productive things ,but, I wanted ERP, which was not happening.( I left the company in 1999 and SAP was implemented in 2003-04, I think)
3. I launched a website for our Division in Bangalore by paying money for Domain registration from my pocket. I informed Corporate office but was warned for not taking approval. This site was pulled down and the same had come up 3 or 4 years. This discouraged to a large extent to try something Larger I wanted to do on Internet.

PS: More reasons to stay than quit !