Interlude and Transition #1

After a few years at Sony, things were really heating up in the high-tech field in general and in the Silicon Valley in particular. It was a boom time for the economy, too. I now had 15 years of experience at 3 major league players in the high-tech field. So I decided to be adventuresome, step out of my comfort zone and be a risk taker. Opportunities abounded for me. In fairly quick succession, I became a director of software engineering at a multinational company (made my first business trip to Paris, way cool!), then VP of product development at an internet music appliance startup company (precursor of the iTunes business, we were a five years ahead of the market), and finally VP of engineering at a B2B ecommerce startup company. With dizzying speed I had accomplished my career objective, and was having so much fun and hard work developing software, hardware, and systems products with talented staff at a breakneck pace.

Looking back in 20/20 hindsight, I guess I knew in the back of my mind that it couldn't last forever. What goes up, must come down as the Newtonian physicists always like to remind us. And so it was with the tech-fueled boom times at the turn of the last century. Everything seemed to fall like a house of cards - venture capital money dried up, the economy slowed into a recession, and hundreds of thousands of displaced engineers started showing up on the unemployment roles.....

So what did I do? I did what any self-respecting, experienced, degreed computer scientist would do in troubled economic times - I went to work for Microsoft! When I first arrived at Microsoft, it was an awesome place to work. Cool projects, cool people, and a cool work environment - life didn't get any better than this! I was on cloud nine, having the time of my life. For the first couple of years there, I kept wondering why I hadn't sought out Microsoft as an employer earlier in my career. Life was good.