Bell Labs blotto

The year was 1985. I had just earned my BSCS, graduating magna cum laude; I was feeling great, the future looked bright. I did a round of on-campus interviews with AT&T Bell Labs, and got hired into the Transmission Switching Systems division. My wife gave birth to our first child, a beautiful, bouncing baby girl. My new employer relocated me from the city to the suburbs, to be closer to the office, and I felt we were on our way to the good life. Life was so G-O-O-D!! Happiness abounded. There was no limit to the potential of possibilities to learn and grow, professionally and personally. My career in high-tech was just beginning......

My immediate supervision at the Labs was an Irish gentleman, keen of mind, slow of tongue, and absolutely glacial in decision making. I fast learned that corporations have a timeline to decision making that lies somewhere between watching an ant crawl from one end of the room to another, to sitting on the kitchen barstool waiting for the coffee pot to boil. My work at the Labs was very intriguing, I felt like a kid in a candy store, so many computers, so much software and hardware, so much to learn and experience and do. I worked in the computer center, with an Amdahl 5860 mainframe running UTS 370 Unix, several AT&T 3B20-S (simplex) minicomputers, an AT&T 3B20-D (duplex: wow, a dual-processor!) minicomputer, and a Digital Equipment VAXen farm as far as the eye could see: VAX 11/780, VAX 11/782, and VAX 11/785 minicomputers, the stalwart workhorses of the minicomputer era.

All the minicomputers were running on AT&T Bell Labs System V Unix. All the source code for the Unix operating system was readily and easily accessible, even encouraged, and my officemate (a Chinese gentleman many years my senior) suggested that the best way to learn the inner workings of this famed operating system was by reading the file init.c line by line, painstakingly going over every function call and sub-routine, following all the links to system header files and other kernel and user mode modules, and reading that source code. Like I said, for a computer scientist this was like being a kid in a candy store. I sucked it all up, and read voraciously, and within months I actually thought I was getting pretty knowledgeable, and soon realized I was becoming a self-described Unix bigot......

One of the recruiting tools AT&T Bell Labs used on candidates was the OYOC benefit. For the uninitiated, OYOC was One Year On Campus, which meant that any eligible employee could apply for and receive one year's tuition in a computer science master's degree program at the univerisity of your choosing. The best part was during this one year, you would still earn a percentage of your salary (I think it was like two-thirds, or something like that). What a deal! What a company! What a country! This was great. So after six months of working hard in the Transmission Switching Systems division at AT&T Bell Labs, I hit up my immediate supervision for the OYOC benefit. The conversation went something like this.

"I'd like to apply for OYOC." I queried plaintively during one of our weekly one-on-one meetings.
"Hmmm. I think its only for eligible employees." was the response.
"Waddayamean? I'm an eligible employee aint I?" my naivetee must have been obvious.
"Well, I'm not sure, I'll have to check" my immediate supervision said, somewhat less than forcefully.
"Hey, sure, no problem, let me know." I replied eagerly.

A week later my immediate supervision informed me that I did not meet the definition of an eligible employee. I asked him why not. He looked me straight in the eyes, and very slowly and clearly enunciated that eligible employees were defined as women and minorities. Always quick on my feet, and thinking fast, I told him I was a Boston Jew married to an Hispanic Catholic, and the world didn't have too many of those, so wasn't I a minority, too? We both laughed half-heartedly, but the reality started sinking in.....

I wasn't eligible for this program, so I wouldn't be able to finish my master's degree as fast and with my employer's recruitment tool as I thought. What a disappointment! This certainly was a large contributing factor to my deciding to accept the position at this company. What a let-down to be told I wasn't an eligible employee. How could I possibly have foreseen that if I got hired I wouldn't be an eligible employee?

Lesson number one: note to self - always read the fine print. Bell Labs blotto. If they could dupe me with this, what else was I living under a mis-conception with at my employer? The honeymoon was definitely over now...... the kid gloves were off. Welcome to the workplace. Someone steeped in occidental philosophy would think "Don't get mad, get even". Someone exposed to oriental disciplines would accept the knowledge of the experience and learn from it. I chose the latter, and began contemplating next steps.