It didn't take me long to realize that I wanted something more than a day job working for a big company.
My first employer after college was McDonnell Douglas, an aerospace company based in St. Louis. I was a software engineer and, among other things, had the opportunity to write some cool stuff in a group called the Software Factory. After a few years, I moved from this employer of 30,000 to a small company of 100 employees.
It didn't take me long to realize that I wanted something more than a day job working for a little company.
Don't get me wrong. Working at a little company rocks. I was given many opportunities to make a difference in the life of the business.
Another thing I discovered is that I was still under another person's control. And sometimes that's not a bad thing. But what really rubbed me the wrong way is when I saw somebody making stupid decisions that I had to deal with. It's one thing to make a mistake, acknowledge it, and correct it. It's another thing to make a mistake, ignore it, and have somebody else clean up your mess.
It wasn't all that bad. At both companies, there were people who inspired me, not only with their skills and experience, but with their character and passion. They gave me opportunities, liberally sprinkled with mercy when I screwed up. But that's for another time.
So what do you do when you find yourself wanting something more? Look around for something and see what you find.
Two things found me:
- A book named Writing & Marketing Shareware by Steven Hudgik
- Borland Delphi version 1
I can't remember how I found the book, but it opened up a new world. The idea of creating software and selling it by letting people try it for free drew me in. It was something that I could do with minimal overhead. Write a product and get it into people's hands. The money would follow. Heh. In hindsight, it was never that simple. But it really was that simple.
A year or two later, a guy at work showed me the very first version of Borland Delphi. I was intrigued. I had made half-hearted attempts at using Smalltalk and IBM Visual Age. They were cumbersome tools that didn't work well with my cumbersome ideas.
With Borland Delphi, I now had what I needed to create a smallish Windows product in a reasonable timeframe.