I enjoyed reading this article. It reminds me of something that happened to me.

After working on unix and dos for about two years, I left the company because I was constantly running behind the facts and fixing things for programmers who were at that company before me and therefore were regarded "more senior". They kept on going without consulting me and I was the one fixing their problems.

I then came to work for a small company that created apps for the Mac. Going from C to object-oriented Pascal. Learning each of the managers and not having the standard c-libraries and rewriting existing code for MacApp, boy, was that a transistion. The Mac compared to nothing I knew about unix, vax, system/36 or anything I had done in the past.

I had a contract for six months and after four months I was told that I wasn't productive enough. That most of that had to do with the equipment I had (no kidding: restart took 20 minutes, loading MPW another 15. A compile and link about an hour. One crash and the cycle started again; and I still was on schedule) was something they didn't want to hear. From my job interview, they expected more. My contract would end two months later and I knew I needed to look elsewhere.

I got my next job at another company that created apps for the Mac. The first day, after meeting with several coleages and after lunch, I got to our department. my boss told me that he did not have my workspace ready, but I could use his office and his Mac to get acquainted with their software; he would be in meetings. They had a license for source code from another company and I needed to study that. My boss gave me a list with ten bugs and told me to look into them.

I admit, I was really going to show I was every bit as good as I had told them I was (and I believed I was). At about four, my boss came back into the office and asked me how things were going.

Me: "I am not done yet".

Boss: *silence*

Me: "Well, I found and fixed the first eight problems. I also found bug nine, but it is too much work to fix now. I think I found bug ten and I have a solution. I will be able to get it fixed today. As I see it, I will have fixed bug nine before noon tomorrow".

Boss *shakes his head*: "Let me see if I get this straight. We have this source and we add to it and we fix things. Every now and then, there is a bug that keeps eluding us. We keep track of those on a list. I thought it would be a good idea to give you that list, so you would have a reason to look around in the source. You are telling me that in the four short hours that you have been working at it, that you fixed eight and have the two remainding bugs fixed before noon tomorrow?"

He stands up, walks to the door, shaking his head. Before leaving he turns around and says: "I don't think you will have a difficult time getting through the trial weeks. Welcome to the company".

Soon after that, the company underwent some restructuring. A new department was created: product development and I was one of two in that department. My task was indeed to look for anything happening outside the company and to give advice when major modifications would be made to any of the products that we have.