The job title of Systems Engineer in the rest of IBM was distinctly different than the FSD version. In the rest of the IBM world outside of FSD. a Systems Engineer was basically a Technical Sales role, complementing the Marketing Reps (who were non-technical salesman). In a typical non-FSD IBM Branch Office, new SEs would go through this standard training regimen, intended to indoctrinate one into the ways of Big Blue.
In 1985, somebody had the brilliant idea in FSD to institute a Pilot Program in which selected FSD System Engineers would go through the same education that commercial Branch Office SEs did. I am not sure of the motivation for this – FSD was like a completely different animal than the rest of IBM – a completely different culture – like I said before, FSD was weird.
So I got pegged to be part of this pilot. In the old days, IBM was basically a cult (I am not using that term in a pejorative manner BTW and isn’t that word in the news quite a bit these days! Sorry, but when it comes to consistent comedic gold, it is tough to top Evangelicals) .
But there was very a well-defined culture in IBM then and this education was intended to provide the base upon which one would learn the IBM Way.
There were three distinct education sessions in this curriculum:
- Intro to Marketing. There was nothing remotely technical about this class. You could have been selling widgets instead of computers. This class focused on how to ask leading questions of customers in a Sell Cycle and how to properly use visual aids like Flip Charts (this was the 80s after all). From my group in FSD, there were 5 or 6 of us that attended this session. This was an eight day class in June, 1985.
- Large Systems Marketing was where you learned the IBM product set – Big Iron – the hardware and software associated with the IBM S/370 architecture (mainframes, MVS, communications controllers, all of that stuff). For this class, our management only elected to send me and my colleague Stacy. This was a two week long class in October, 1985.
- Large Systems Implementation. Finally some technical stuff. This was hands-on – you basically learned how to roll out large systems. This was a three week long class in December, 1985 – I was the only one from this Pilot that attended this one.
Each class had around 35 - 40 attendees from IBM Branch Offices all over the country, plus us misfits from FSD. The classes were held in the IBM Education Center in Irving TX (which is a suburb of Dallas). That whole part of Dallas was just booming in ‘85 – they had just started building out Las Colinas.
IBM rented out the Chaparal Creek Apartments for the students. At the time, this was an upscale apartment complex on North O’Connor Blvd in Irving for the attendees at these classes. You would be assigned to a suite with two or three other members of your class (with a single rental car between your suitemates). You had a nice per-diem for meals and IBM handled all the other expenses. While we did have private bedrooms, it was still a pretty interesting social dynamic – getting tossed in with three strangers for two and three weeks at a time. Not unlike meeting your freshman roommate in college – three different times. MTV’s Real World – The IBM Edition?
While the accommodations were top-notch, these weren’t working vacations. These classes entailed multiple weeks of prep (for us, back in Gaithersburg) that you had to do before flying to Dallas. Once you got there, homework assignments took the better part of every night and the weekends. There were multiple tests and quizzes. Hell, everything was graded (demos, tests, recorded presentations, labs). It was all pretty intense and you were ranked and competing against your other classmates. Of course, these grades and rankings were sent back to your management chain after completing the class. Oh, and the first day of each class, there was a crucial test to determine whether you had done your prep work.
The FSD Misfits were warned ahead-of-time about how intense this was going to be – and we did fine, but there was definitely a culture clash. Most of our classmates were from the commercial side of IBM and worked in Branch Offices. Their terminology was foreign to us FSDers, and ours to theirs. When we tried to explain what we did in Federal Systems, those folks would look at us as if we worked for another company.
For the students from the standard IBM Branch Office, their performance at these classes would in large part determine their performance rating for their job that year as well as the general arc of their career – they were allocated lots of time back at the Branch Office for prepping just for the classes and many seemed to be really stressed out about the whole ordeal.
For the second class in October, I arrived late from DFW via cab on Sunday night (class started on Monday morning) and rolled into the apartments around 9:30 PM. My two roommates were the Martin Brothers, who worked together in one of the Los Angeles Branch Offices. They weren’t really brothers. Ron Martin had a really interesting background – he was black, early 40s, and had spent 15 years before joining IBM teaching Mathematics in the Chicago Hood and coaching wrestling. Really interesting cat with lots of unique life experiences before he joined IBM. Pete Martin was white and lived in Pasadena. They were quite the Odd Couple.
The Martin Brothers were studying for the next day’s test when I arrived. After the perfunctory greeting and get-to-know-you chit chat, I thought I would have some fun. I sort of feigned ignorance and asked them “So do we have some sort of test tomorrow?” Ron and Pete looked at me with this sort of “I have no idea what the hell FSD is but this homeboy is going to get destroyed in this class.”
I was actually prepared for the test and the class. I think I scored second highest on the LSM class in October and was the top performer in the LSI class in December. Ron and Pete probably thought I was winging it on natural talent – hardly.
So I was doing well in these classes, but actually had no intention of following this career path. I was playing with house money. When I got back to Gaithersburg the week before Christmas vacation, news of my performance at these classes had reached my Second Line Manager at the time, Doug H. Doug had come to FSD from an IBM Branch Office – apparently this was a big deal to him and I got a meeting invite to chat with Doug about my experiences.
I figured I would kill two birds with one stone. I took this opportunity to tell Doug that, while I appreciated being part of this pilot, I really wasn’t interested (at all) in this job of Systems Engineer that I had been doing. I told Doug that I would appreciate it if he could help me move to a peer department that was creating some software to help with configuration management and cost proposal of the DOD projects we were bidding.
Doug gazed at me with this incredulous look and spent the better part of 30 minutes trying to convince me of the opportunity in Systems Engineering that I was throwing away – for software. It was like he couldn’t reconcile this notion of job satisfaction and enjoyment with the concept of ladder climbing and career advancement.
I stuck to my guns though and got an agreement to be able to transfer to that software development team by 2Q 1986. So, I guess you could say that I was on the IBM “fast track” for all of about 6.5 hours.
