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 tomblin lost job




From: ab401@freenet.carleton.ca (Paul Tomblin)
Subject: Re: Run! It's the Delphioids!
Date: Sun, 9 Jan 1994 21:45:40 GMT

flaps@dgp.toronto.edu (Alan J Rosenthal) writes: >ab401@freenet.carleton.ca (Paul Tomblin) writes:
>>Of course, having lost a job at least *partly* due to something I said on the
>>net, I'm a lot more careful about what I say when posting from my office
>>account.

>TXT! TXT! (chant requesting further information in text form)
>ah well, perhaps the story's not as exciting as it sounds. Like if he posted
>trade secrets or like that. But perhaps he said his boss was an asshole!
>Enquiring minds want to know!

Ok, due to popular request (I've gotten tired of typing this story to everbody who sends me email)

I used to work for a GIS company (now defunct). While working for that GIS company, I spend about 6 months in Britian, working at a customer site. (I bet some of you with long memories were wondering why I was not posting much for 6 months two years ago) One of the things I was involved in was trying to get some data from another company's GIS system into our GIS system. I looked, and found that the menu had an option to create files in the appropriate format. So I tried it, and found that the files were almost, but not entirely, unlike the format they were supposed to be in. I figured I must be doing something wrong, since I remember when that other company was developing that translater, they borrowed a couple of people from our company to work on it. So I tried asking the tech support people at the other company. No response. We worked around the problem by converting their data to DXF format, and using our DXF translator, but some information was lost along the way.

When I got back from the UK, I posted a query on comp.infosystems.gis, which is a gateway to the BITNET mailing list GIS-L. I asked what I was doing wrong, because "the files I got when I tried it were total shit. Totally unusable, and not even close to valid <file format> format." Some BOZO from IBM spotted the post, and highlighting *just* those two sentences (and not the bit where I explained that I thought I was doing something wrong", and faxed it to the presidents of both my company and the other company. Since my company and the other one were involved with IBM in a joint bid on a big contract, IBM had some clout in this matter (and the president of my company was a spineless weenie). My manager and the president of my company gave me 2 hours to come up with some action plan to save my job. I went down the hall to grovel to the president of the other company, with a written apology, and sort of smoothed things over.

The funny thing is that I talked to one of the developers on that system later, and he said "yeah, we know it's a piece of shit. We're removing the menu item on the next release"!

A year or so later, my company was on the skids, and for that quarter's round of layoffs (they were having a "Black Thursday" layoffs at the end of each quarter), decided they needed to cut 3 of the 6 senior developers (along with 30 other people). So guess who's name came on top?

Paul "not that I'm bitter - THOSE BASTARDS!" Tomblin


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