Another strange set of circumstances surrounded that deal. But before getting there, I'll have to give my reasoning for the selection. I figured that if I was to leave a full time position to do something else, it better have been super-cool, or well-paying. The first two interviews were based entirely on personal references, as I mentioned, so that things were pretty informal.

The Power gig would have been full time, I think. It was a position under my first lead at Apple Quality, Ray Ocol. He was looking for someone who could work closely with Engineering on their new NuBus-PCI bridge called StarGate, and he figured that I had the QA and technical background to do just that. I had a hours-long interview there at Power, and came away feeling like everyone there had a bad attitude. The salary they presented me was about 10% more than I was making with Truevision, but they were privately held, so there was always a chance that I could cash in on some stock options when they went out. [Who knew...]

Next it was off to Netcom, where my friend from Truevision, Tyler, had a friend who had been there since the beginning. Netcom was my first ISP out of college, and I was still using them, and I knew they had grown very quickly, so I figured that perhaps it would be cool. And it probably would have been, since it would have included travel around the country and it most certainly would have included working around a serious piece of networking infrastructure (since Netcom was sprouting up POP's all over the place). But then it occurred to me that the position was in a group of two people, and those two people would have pagers that could go off at any moment indicating trouble somewhere on the vast Netcom network, and that travel might be at a moment's notice. The salary was anything but impressive, and the company had already gone public, leaving me with no real gain in any direction.

The third option, and the one I ended up taking, was an interesting series of events. At some point toward the end of my tenure at Truevision, I bought a Newton 100 on fire-sale, and found it to be pretty cool. So cool, in fact, that I wanted to work there to learn more about it. So I looked through my personal database of names (now conveniently-located on the Newton) and found Linda Adams working there (remember her from my first interview with Apple Quality?). I called her up, and sent her my resume moments later for her to pass around.

At the same time, a representative from Oxford and Associates, another prolific contract agency in Silly Valley, called me up asking for a current resume (it seems that I had interviewed with them while at Apple in hopes of drumming up something more technical, and they never stop calling you after that first contact). I told the guy I wanted something in the Newton group, and he told me he would get back to me.

Now, here's the rub. My resume arrived at the Newton Group via Oxford and into the hands of a group manager. My resume also went from Linda into the hands of one of that manager's reports. It seems that that latter team lead gave the manager my name to set up an interview while he was to be out for a week, and the manager contacted Oxford to bring me in for a talk. We talked, and they were interested.

But, who gets credit for it? Well, as it turns out, since Linda had my resume from the fax machine in the department, which date-stamped it, she was able to show that she had the resume submitted before Oxford did. Oxford still wanted to lay claim to me, but at a higher gouge-rate, while Apple's preferred contract agency, ADIA (with whom I had worked the first time through the big produce circus) had a lower markup with the volume discount. After many phone calls and power plays (which I was able to stay out of, thank goodness), I ended up working for ADIA and the Newton Group. [Oxford still calls me every month or so]

While in the Newton Group, I was working on a QA team that was testing the new C++ development kit for the Newt. That was actually pretty interesting, since I was able to learn a whole lot about new Newton technologies (like the now-infamous eMate300 and the MessagePad2000) and some of the inner workings. I learned NewtonScript, which is actually pretty cool, and I got my friend Jim Krupocki hired to work with me.

Then, a funny set of things happened. First, the moral in the Newton group was not high when I got there, and it continued to slip the whole time I was there. Then, there was the eventual attrition, which made the moral even worse.

The cake was taken, however, when my manager told me that I was spending too much time talking to people and not enough time allowing them to complete their work. It seems that he felt I was working much faster than everyone else, and that my resulting free time was distracting to others. I checked with the two people I chatted with most frequently, and they wholly disagreed with this position. Needless to say, I was a little peeved.

The final blow was dealt after a meeting with one of the system software engineers who was describing the patching mechanism used to fix bugs in the Newton ROMs once they were shipped. I asked why a certain system of fix-dependency checking was not in place (an example of which I made up within my question) and he told me that no one had time to work on such a plan. I went home that night and drafted my plan, sending it to him, the manager of the group (the one who got my resume from Oxford) and another cool guy in our group, Ken Blackman. I never heard back from the engineer guy, and the manager told me I was too motivated.

I think I lasted maybe another month, or less. I had an opportunity to get into a whole different arena doing some cool things at a startup company that was based in Germany and France. I figured that this would finally be the change that would yield success. Walter Smith left for Microsoft at about that time (he is the creator of Newton Script) and so I figured it was a good indication that things would get worse before they got better. I grabbed my chute and waved good-bye as I bailed out of the Newton Group.