Life in the Boy's Dorm: My Career at Sun Microsystems

I was there in building 5. I played hockey with Scott and Steve (srk@sun.com, I was lm@sun.com, to this day the best email address I've ever had.) Guy Harris was there, he's why I went to Sun. He left to go to Auspex but since Auspex licensed Sun's source he kept coming back. John Pope and I worked late, Guy pounded on the door of building 5, we let him in so he could fix stuff. I still have memories of Guy going "shit, they haven't fixed this? Losers. Checkin." Guy committed changes to Suns code long after he was not employed by Sun.

Scooter used to come into our building around 7pm and tell us how we were going to rule the world. He got up on the conference table and he stood there and made us believe. How many CEO's are around at 7pm?

When that other guy was put in, some web guy, I was bummed. Scooter really loved Sun, he cared a lot.

Considering that you were the reason that Bonwick came to Sun and Bonwick was the reason I came to Sun, I guess that makes me a descendant of sort of Guy Harris...

Also, not sure if you saw it or not, but I gave you a shout-out in my history of SunOS/Solaris/OpenSolaris/illumos[1]. I'm sure I got some of the history slightly wrong from that era (it did, after all, predate me at Sun), so accept my apologies in advance...

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc

Holy crap, you got my wife cheering you. Thanks a lot from me and her Bryan. Great shout out.

Very cool talk too. You should continue to talk about how the kernel team ruled.

"Bob Coe once told me he did not have to interview the candidates for his Administrative Assistant position. I should simply ask each candidate to link her hands behind her head with her elbows pointing forward and walk toward the wall. If her elbows were the first part of her anatomy to touch the wall, she was eliminated from candidacy. All applicants whose breasts touched first, he would interview."

--classy; Good read for the afternoon coffee.

That made me viscerally sick.

So it caused you to be physically ill, such as lightheadedness or vomiting?

Why is that so hard to believe? Some people do feel ill when reading about vile and disgusting circumstances and situations.

Yeah, fun times at start ups, unless you are a woman. Why are we celebrating this bullshit again?

Highlighting, not celebrating

Reminiscing.

>Why is that so hard to believe? Some people do feel ill when reading about vile and disgusting circumstances and situations.

If you're such a wilting flower that rude talk from 25 years ago makes you physically sick you'll never amount to much in life.

Why is that so hard to believe?

I dunno. I know it's a common literary device, but it's never actually happened to me or anyone I know.

I objected to the original comment because it seemed like exaggeration, which suggests bandwagon jumping for bandwagon jumping's sake, which isn't healthy for the greater issue.

World's second oldest joke.

Yep. I heard it first in the '80s from a guy in the civil service who'd been telling it for forty years.

Part 2 is here: http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/life-in-boys...

Snipers aimed at engineers? Really?

The Secretary of the Department of Commerce came to visit us at a previous job. He had his own armed security guys that followed him around, and I'm sure HR passed all our social security numbers to them for background checks ahead of time.

The best part was his speech was how off-shoring was Good for America. Which went over like a lead balloon, as you might guess.

I remember my mom telling me stories about Sun's glory days, and me thinking that it seemed sort of unbelievable that any workplace would be as wild as she described. Interesting to see a lot of the same sort of stories being told here and more. She was there from 1988 to 2008. I wonder what the Solaris, mysql, and Java teams are like now that it's run by The Evil Empire.

A great deal smaller, I imagine. :P

> When I went on my first interview at Sun, I thought it made office furniture. The ad had said it was a maker of "workstations", so I thought it was like Hay cubicles. I did not know a thing about high-tech or computers. I lucked into one of the all-time best gigs.

I had a good chuckle at that. Reminded me of this interview from "The IT Crowd" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuPolrd9yuo

She gets bullied like crazy and she says its her best job. Tbh, I think this speaks a lot about our current generation women than Hers. I mean just compare the things she had to go through compared to the current generation...

I have no idea what you mean, could you be more specific?

I believe the point is that while the current generation whines about any sort of adversity, earlier generations sucked it up and enjoyed the challenge.

"Back in my day we built our heat equation solvers on punched cards, and had to manually draw the resulting graph based on the output. Nowadays you whippersnappers complain when scipy doesn't have a built in heat equation solver, and you are forced to manually write conjugate gradient."

Maybe that was the point but it is a pretty lousy one. The ones that stayed and thrived may have 'sucked it up and enjoyed the challenge' but how many bright capable people hated it and were made miserable or left (perhaps the whole industry or even the workforce).

while the current generation whines about any sort of adversity, earlier generations sucked it up and enjoyed the challenge.

Or... we could reverse which side we're being charitable to:

while the current generation more often demands appropriate behavior, earlier generations just "sucked it up" because they wouldn't have had establishment support if they had spoken up. Millions of female/minority employees with tremendous potential (and the companies that could have employed/promoted them) lost out.

The principle of charity means applying a charitable interpretation to whoever's argument you are attempting to understand, which is what I did.

As a result, I correctly interpreted his argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6096457

You did not.

I wasn't taking exception with your interpretation but with the argument itself.

I was on my mobile, but yes this is what I meant

Calling it a "challenge" is charitable. A "challenge" is a complex engineering problem that yields rewards for solving it. What is described in the article is a "roadblock" or "meaningless bullshit"--stuff that doesn't make you better for having dealt with it and stuff you shouldn't have to deal with as an employee.

E.g. if you've got a boss you dumps his or her marital problems on you, dealing with that isn't a "challenge."

Perhaps, but look at what she accomplished.

Our generation also works with companies that deal out untold amounts of abuse. Microsoft, Apple, Sun, Amazon; all have numerous stories of abuse by leadership and down the pipe. People suck it up and deal or they leave.

The level of sexism and misogyny in this post is incredible. Hiring women for breast size. Making sexual harassment problems "go away".

Pretty fucking disgusting.

What's wrong about the "go away" thing? What is the appropriate solution in your opinion - death row for the offender?

No one's advocating such measures. The "go away" implies that the claim was repressed, instead of fairly considered.

It implies the claim was withdrawn. It may be that it was repressed, but it also might be the person who made the claim in reality just wanted an apology or for things to stop, and that she managed to sort things out. A lot of the time personnel conflicts escalate because the two sides don't know how to resolve it between themselves, and a good HR person can make the problem go away simply by facilitating communication.

Now, if she really did make it "go away" by repressing a valid claim, then that's quite disgusting, but without more details we don't know whether or not this was anything bad. There's enough other icky behaviour described there's no reason to jump to conclusions about the rest.

Or just being held accountable for their actions.

Who says they weren't?

For better or worse, HR exists to protect the company. Making problems go away is what they do.

It's not in the post, it was in the company.

You should read part three for better context: http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/life-in-bo...

What a nightmare.

Having trouble getting past this part of her bio: "and counsel to anyone who employs Millennials." Really? Are they that bad? I've had nothing but good experiences and nothing, I repeast, nothing like any of the other supposed experiences the media seems to go on about. Seriously, they don't run up credit card debt like my parents or my friends do.

It's classic generation gap bullshit, just like always.

Oh man, the kids these days!

I'm generation X myself and I well remember all the crap our generation got growing up. How we were dumber than the last generation, less ambitious, lacked principles and morals, etc. And yet if you look at reality you see that gen-x has caused a revolution in business with an explosion in startups, freelancing, independent projects, innovation, etc. (just look at kickstarter, for example). And they've been far more pragmatic and humane about issues such as gay marriage, LGBT acceptance, race relations, and drug use (e.g. ending the war on drugs) than even the baby boomers and far more than the "greatest generation".

Additionally, through my friend group and volunteering I have a lot of interaction with "millenials" and as far as I can tell the hype about them is vastly overwrought. Sure there are some who are demanding, but that's true of all cross-sections of humanity, whether by age or any other metric. There are just as many who are hard working, ambitious, generous, and so forth.

Also, I'd like to point out how much of a raw deal a lot of millenials are getting. When I went to college in the mid to late '90s it was possible for my middle class parents to pay tuition to a very good state University out of pocket without incurring any significant economic hardship. Today that's almost impossible, acquiring a college degree is not only much more necessary these days it's also far more expensive, and very difficult for most folks to do so without going into significant debt. Add on to that the horrific state of the job market today, especially for people just entering it without experience. And it's not a whole lot better at the high end either. It used to be that in the tech world you could ride a rising company's growth as a fairly late employee and working for only maybe a decade or so would net you enough savings just from stock and stock options to allow you to retire fairly rich. Now the market is very different and employee compensation is different and that sort of thing just isn't the norm any longer. You can make a damned good living, but you don't have the life and career options that were possible in the past. Which means that a lot of the most talented folks are forced to take on a lot more risk in order to acquire the same sorts of rewards. Which is good and bad but it's certainly not easier.

It's a joke.

Perhaps a half-joke, since if you poke at a millenial, you risk getting a defensive, whiny, humorless diatribe in response.

For the record, I am a millenial.

>I'm generation X myself and I well remember all the crap our generation got growing up. How we were dumber than the last generation, less ambitious, lacked principles and morals, etc.

Are you kidding? We had it easy. I can remember people saying "Thank God you aren't baby boomers. We're sick of those narcissists."

You're right about the millenials being screwed by the university system, though. There's a whole generation of college grads who'll be paying off student loans well into middle age.

Here's a nice response to all the millenial baiting out there:

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2013/images/07/09/bors-millenni...

Really enjoyed reading that. Just got through the first two.

Here's a list of the links for anyone who wants to read em all. (reverse order)

http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/life-in-boys...

http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-boys...

http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-boys...

http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/life-in-boys...

Thanks! Man ... I wish I was there in those glory days. Heck, I wish I was anywhere in Silicon Valley in 94-95.

Are there places in the valley that still feel the same?

They Valley is so much better now. There's no comparison. The fun stuff is just starting now.

> The Valley is so much better now. There's no comparison.

How so? What's different? What's better?

I'm speechless.

She calls it the best gig ever, and bully for her, but that doesn't sound like such a great workplace to me.

I didn't have the same experiences as her (at all) but on my first day at Sun, circa 1990, I was given an OS tape, a 3/260 and a cardboard box full of VME cards (some functional) and was expected to get it onto the network and get X11 installed... Never having had to do that kind of thing before, it took me almost a week to boot.

You got a 3/260 on your first day? Lucky! I got a Sun i386, but quickly replaced it with a 3/260, and then, eventually, a Sparcstation.

I built SWAN out of 3/260s as routers. Those were good machines. :-)

I (jthomp@sun.com, aka "net.god") was in tears. Those were good times.

Why are specific words highlighted in the post? I'm seeing words like "McNealy", "CEO's", etc. highlighted.

Each of those words has a CSS class called 'goog-spellcheck-word'. It appears that the content from this article was copied out of a WYSYWIG editor, and those CSS tags were copied as well.

He's letting us read what his spellchecker thinks about his article.

  <span class="goog-spellcheck-word" style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% yellow;">McNealy</span>

She :)

Thanks for these articles! As a youngster, Sun always was "that Java company", but having testimonies of it as a young and innovative company is great.

I'm a bit disappointed about the title still as it makes it bait for "women are mistreated by IT men, which is why they don't go to IT anymore". Sure, some people are not respectful (they will always exist), but your account shows that the few that were never stopped you from belonging to (and being seen by all as a key member of) a great IT company.

If I don't leave this post now, I'll lose my morning reading the entire series!

I know the feeling. Fortunately I was compiling a massive report, so I didn't lose as much productive time as I could have.

Well worth reading the whole thing though.