Interesting side note though. I always thought it would never happen. My being hired to work for these people. Especially when, years previous, I vowed I would never work for the "Evil Borg Empire" (as in those who innovate little, but absorb others greatly).
At the time, though, Kathleen and I were pretty hard up. She was not yet old enough for pension eligibility, or SSI income, and I still did not have enough "SSI points" either. She couldn't work because of her back problems, and medication issues because of her Epilepsi. I was having more difficulty getting work because I was finally starting to show my age; not helped by the fact that I also become quite fed up with still coloring my hair; which I did for quite awhile in the bizz to not at least seem old.
I can't remember if Nytech called me up, or if I just saw the listing and sent in a resume, but they did get back to me saying that Microsoft was interested in an interview. This had to be back in either late 2012, or early 2013, or late 2013, and early 2014, I don't recall exactly (though I did work over a year for them in total), but being made economically desperate, I swallowed my pride, did some interview cramming (for all of the dumb, usual programming tests they like to give you, as well as the current buzzwords you always needed, to at least sound like you knew what you were talking about), and then went in for the full eight hour ordeal.
It was with two different electrical, and signals engineers. Each had about four hours with me to go over technical competency, and design philosophy. but also this big picture of how much of a critical application this was going to be because, and they both emphasized this: they were just generating tons of test data, from a host of clever new mobile designs, that would need a true enterprise capable reporting system for all stakeholders to be able access, from anywhere. And on top of that, they had one very demanding kind of report spec, needing to be delivered; one that demand doing T-SQL pivots on a very wide range of devices, within a huge range of testing regimens; all on a troyka of new, automated, and very, very expensive, testing machines housed in the higher security lab, of the also higher security Mobile Group (above ordinary Microsoft Employees) area that occupied most of the top floor of Studio A. All of which meant a Windows Communications Foundation app that could do dynamic T-SQL pivots on the fly, from a very flexible database, set up to handle changing expansion.
Oddly enough, I had been wanting to do an ultimate, very thin client, enterprise master control app, for quite a while, but could find no client willing to take the project on. I wanted to do that because of my previous frustration with doing something very similar, years before, for Providence, and Swedish hospitals, for their partnership, Health Services Northwest, only then, I had to do it with With Windows DCOM, and not with WCF because they hadn't invented it yet. I got the DCOM thing to work for H.S.N., but only with great frustration, and dogged effort. This new opportunity was like getting a blank slate from design heaven. These guys just gave me an empty server box and told ne to have at doing whatever I thought would work. And boy did I. I wrote the "Starfire Application" for Microsoft, which I can say, with no modesty at all, was something quite awesome. Because it did everything they wanted it to do, and then some. For any enterprise application, let alone a reporting one.
The thing was, there wasn't any real testing data. Never had been, and never was going to be. They were in fact, in my opinion, trying to set me up as their "old guy who couldn't possibly get this done," in any time soon, in any case, "patsy". A dodge, if you will, to blow smoke up the butts of higher ups, so as to explain why they had no reporting data coming out from all op the effort that had been expended to date so far. And that was because the entire Mobile Group, at least as it was manifested by Studio A, was without any sense of real vision, or effective leadership. An operation best described as rudderless, directionless, and with no effective, clear, leadership at all. Something that finally became obvious to me after the fourth or fifth month of them making excuses as to why they couldn't get me security clearance to go into the real inner sanctum of the Mobile Group (once I was in, the joke, amongst Nytech employees was that the security wasn't to keep secrets in, but to keep the level of abject failure secret from getting out). And it was only their great shock at my making the damn thing work within about six months, and the need for more than the token, test data, that they had originally put together to create at least something for me to base my design on, and maybe even embarrassment, that made them finally give me clearance. And I do mean shock, and comically so, when the guy I had the most contact with saw the Excel Workbook get created, with not only the pivot displayed properly, but with embedded VBA code providing hot key functionality to do detail data queries of whatever row of aggregated test data a user might want to see, and then have that delivered to a new page in the report Workbook.
As anyone who has tempted for Microsoft knows, they aren't usually very nice about cutting the cord. You inevitably lose personal stuff, and it just happens, often, out of the blue, as it were. I get some satisfaction, though, in remembering that the software I wrote for them was worth way more than any phone design they had been trying to contemplate... Ok, mostly because my app worked, and they didn't have much of anything that was working, all that well, but still, it was a good piece of software; something that might have been useful who know where else in the company. The thing is, though, they undoubtedly trashed that too when they closed my server down (because why would they want to keep anything given to them from a mere temp guy). What a waste. Of my time, and theirs.
That experience turned out to be the final straw that broke my ability to withstand the BS of Capitalism. The whole not "living the change that you wish to see in the world" was bothering me a lot as well, but you get way too used to the toys, and status, the money brings, don't you. Maybe the two emotions together was what was enough to finally get me on the path I am on now.
Why The Windows Phone Failed So Spectacularly
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