Probably my biggest claim to fame while at Compaq was that while debugging code that I wrote that interacted with NVRAM, I inadvertently welded my power cable to my motherboard. But I did learn some things as well.

Tell the truth and take responsibility

Our release process was that for every disk that we shipped, we filled out a form, gave it to the release lab, they would write up what they are doing, and we would sign off on it.

I filled out the paperwork for the Owner Registration Diskette and was careful to indicate that the disk should be read/write (otherwise, we couldn’t save the information to the disk). As every other disk that we produced at the time was read-only, the release manager assumed it was a mistake and changed the instructions to read-only. I reviewed the change, but not carefully enough.

The result was bad! Customers spent 30 minutes filling out the survey, and then at the end they’d get an error that the results couldn’t be written. People were mad, and it was a black eye for Compaq.

An emergency meeting was held, and it was filled with a bunch of important people that I didn’t know. One guy slammed his fist on the table and said that he just wanted to know who to blame for this. I spoke up and said that I was at least partly to blame – that while I filled out the original paperwork correctly, I obviously did not review the final paper work as carefully as I should have.

The room was shocked and silent. Finally, somebody said that it didn’t really matter who was to blame and then we moved on to discuss solutions. Several people contacted my boss and told them how impressed they were by me and how I focused on responsibility and solutions. It ended up being a huge net-positive for my reputation.

Technology moves fast and it’s hard/impossible to keep up

While in school, I was constantly in learning mode and I generally learned the latest stuff. I was hungry.

Then I got a job that kept me really busy, but didn’t immediately require me to keep up with the what was happening in the industry. Windows went from being a niche product to a very popular product, but I never really focused on learning the Windows architecture or programming model.

Likewise, C++ and object-oriented programming started becoming mainstream, but we weren’t focusing on them.

When the layoffs started, I realized that while I was ahead of the curve a few years ago, I was currently behind in several ways (and had a lot of catching up to do).

I was/am a workaholic

This is not a good thing, but I realized that I was happy working longer hours than most of the people around me. I really realized that I stood out when somebody sent out a “Top 10 signs of the apocalypse” list and #2 on the list was “Scott MacDonald gets a life.”

Meyers-Briggs says I am an ENTJ

This isn’t super relevant, but Compaq did a Myers-Briggs exercise and apparently I’m either a natural leader or a huge jerk (definitely the last one).