Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mindmetoo]

Per Jongno's suggestion I broke our talk of the dot.com days into an off topic post. If you've got any funny office stories from your previous life, post them here. I always contend if you think hagwons are poorly run you've never actually worked in a typical office environment. You don't know that there isn't a single sane, well run office environment on the face of the earth.

(split from http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/korea/viewtopic.php?t=16120&start=45 )

(To protect my own identity I'm not using my real name... ie my name isn't Ken.)

Right. So. At my old job at Infospace, we got shuffled around a lot. Every few months they seemed to move my desk. I was invited to follow. Once they moved me and part of the sales and support department to a warehouse. There was a small front office where they put us. This was a temporary measure. In a year we were scheduled to move as a company to several floors in a 24-floor office tower in "downtown" Bellevue, WA. Until then we were out in some Redmond light industrial mall strip.

In the warehouse we were detached, forgotten, and so out of the loop. We rarely got any work done. The one sales guy, Mitch, who wanted to do work vanished after the second day. In his words "We're sales people. This office doesn't have a fax machine or a photocopier. It would make more sense to set up my office at Kinkos!"

I never saw him again until we moved to the office tower in Bellevue. He apparently was one of the company's top salesmen. He home-officed it during the interregnum.

In our little office there was me, Travis the All American Sales Guy, Hayden the Half Korean Half Generic White Who was a Male Model/Actor/Stripper, Jeff the Lead Guitarist for Theory of Orange, and Matt the Dot.Com Millionaire.

Matt liked to break things: phones, keyboards, my Sennheiser headphones��

Travis and Hayden liked to talk all the time. They'd talk about women, sports, nipples, music. Sometimes Travis would look over my cubicle wall and start a conversation with "So, Ken, in Canada��"

Mostly Travis wanted to talk about Rush.

We got almost no work done, as mostly there was no work to do. The warehouse part had a ping poing table and a basketball net and we'd shoot hoops.

Hayden, being a model and a stripper, knew a lot of ladies. He did his best to service them all. He sometimes pulled out a stack of Polaroid pictures and showed us... pictures. Sometimes he read us erotic emails he was getting from his ladies. Who knew Korean women could write that dirty?

One day Hayden phoned one of his ladies for a casual "how ya doin'" chit chat. Unfortunately her boyfriend was at home. He picked up. I guess the boyfriend sort of had an idea his GF was playing with someone else's equipment behind his back and Hayden was her fun slide. The boyfriend, as it turned out, was named Koa and he was a Samoan wrestler.

Hayden started yelling rather loudly down the phone for Koa to cool it. He just wanted to talk to the lady. Travis, who likes to be in everyone's business, and will talk to anyone and go to the wall for any friend, grabbed the phone from his distressed friend.

I try to reconstruct the conversation as I heard and Travis reported it.

Travis: Look, buddy, don't talk to my friend that way.

Koa: Who the hell is this?

Travis: This is Travis. I'm Hayden's friend. Who the hell is this?

Koa: This is Koa!

Travis: Look Koa just chill out.

Koa: You tell your boy there that if he meets my girlfriend again I'm going to tear him apart.

Travis: Oh yeah, well you'll have to go through me buddy.

Koa: Fine! I'll bring a couple of my other Samoan wrestler buddies.

Travis: Oh yeah, well, I'll bring Ken.

Koa now pauses, trying to process this word "Ken". I mean "Samoan wrestler" should carry the emotionally threatening force of "pith you with a two by four with a cement nail in it" or "menace you with an ocelot". But Ken? Koa decides he better get more information.

Koa: Who is Ken?

Travis: Ken is from Canada!

Koa pauses again. Canada? Ken? What's it all mean? He doesn't understand but Travis, being a good sales guy, sells the idea that a Ken from Canada is any match for a posse of Samoan wrestlers. "If you're going to go toe to toe with a pack of screaming south seas grapplers, don't leave home without your Canadian Ken. Ask for one by name."

Koa: You just tell Hayden to back off my woman.

[mindmetoo]

[Mashimaro]

I wanted to buy shares when google floated but I had no money... bugger (yes I realise that it wasn't during the dot.com glory days)

[mindmetoo]

Bill Gates is a smart businessman. From day one he believed in having enough cash on hand that his business could operate for a year without income. This is actually a wise idea for any individual. Try it some time. It's amazing how free you feel and how stress free you feel about the future when you're debt free and have enough in the bank that you could live for a solid year without a penny of income.

Anyway, Gates also knew he bested IBM because IBM couldn't turn on a dime while small Microsoft could quickly adjust to new market situations. Everything needed to go through eight committees at IBM. By the time they decided on a plan, the market had changed yet again. (People in software in the '90s called it "dog years". Things seemed to change as rapidly in one year in software as they would change in seven years in, say, the auto industry.) To this end, to always be lean and mean, Gates believed Microsoft should have the bare minimum of full time employees. The bulk of his employees should be temp workers and vendors. It's costly to lay off employees. It's easy to ditch temp workers. Both full time and temps work out of Microsoft's Redmond campus. The way one distinguishes them is via their security badge color. Full time employees have a blue badge. Temp workers have a reddish-orange badge. As well, temp workers and vendors who have @microsoft.com emails have a letter and dash code before their name. It's something like: [email protected].

The "dash" gave rise to a nickname for temps. "Dash trash".

Microsoft was ultimately a fairly equitable place and dash trash had access to many of the softer company benefits like the subsidized cafeteria, the lavish company Christmas parties, summer BBQs, etc. One thing they didn't get, however, was access to the company store. Only the blue badges could buy Microsoft hardware and software at massive discounts. In Seattle, you always made sure you had one blue badge friend. A guy I used to work out with was a blue badge and he picked me up a copy of Office 2000 for $35. That normally retails for about $200.

I suspect employees were contractually barred from purchasing hardware/software for those who weren't immediate relatives but the company store mostly turned a blind eye. That blind spot sometimes turned into mote-in-god's-eye proportions. There was one guy who turned it into a business. He was reselling the software. What he was raking in a year made his $90K a year developer salary seem pitifully small. Now most people would keep quiet about this kind of stuff. But this guy was a real loud mouth. He devoted a whole web site to the boats and fast cars he bought reselling software. Eventually Microsoft caught up with him and had him arrested. He got the fame he sought. His perp walk was featured in the local media. He sure did look like the horse's ass. Everyone had a good laugh too when a year later he got killed in some accident. Loser.

Another perk red badges were denied was a window office. Microsoft was building like crazy on their campus, building for future expansion. There were a lot of half filled buildings with a lot of empty window offices. But if you were dash trash, no matter how many window officers were free, you were assigned to an internal office.

What caused the most controversy, however, was red badges could not buy company stock at a discount. This was a real cash cow for many. They way these offers work is you agree to buy, say, $2000 worth stock for that quarter. You can buy it at a 15% discount. The purchase price is the value of the share at either the start of the quarter or the end of the quarter. And here's the sweet thing. It was always which ever was lowest. Imagine at the start of Q1 the share price is $25. At the end of Q1 the price was $50. You got to buy the shares for $25 less the discount ($21.25). Naturally, if you were smart, you would sell them. So you buy $2000 at $21.25 and sell at $50, that's $4700. An instant $2700 profit. If the stock went down (why would tech stocks ever go down?), at worst you were only making a 15% profit. (The key was you were committed to buying a fixed dollar amount ahead of time. You couldn't choose to buy at the end of the quarter.)

Anyway, blue badges were making vast amounts of money this way and the red badges were only getting their salary. Some red badges began to wonder what actually separated them from full time employees. "Temp" was an odd definition when you'd been there for 5 years on contract. A group of temp workers banded together and sued for lost stock profits. A judge eventually sided with them. They made their case that they were treated like full time employees in all but name and a couple financial perks.

Microsoft paid up but they made big, big changes to their temp program. Microsoft went out of its way to make sure temps knew they were temps. Temp employees were totally barred from company events and the caf. Contracts were all for less than a year, 10 months or something. And when your contract was up, you couldn't work for Microsoft again for a year. The upshot was the old temp workers did well for themselves but the new temp workers only found their lives much, much crappier.

* * *

Microsoft's first home was in the Seattle suburb of downtown Bellevue. They worked out of a small office in a bank tower. Eventually they moved over a couple streets to their own little building, which was right next to a very greasy burger joint and was a favorite of Bill Gates. For future expansion Gates eventually decided to purchase a plot of land out in Redmond. In the '80s Redmond wasn't much more than an apple grove. Land and property tax was cheap.

Microsoft produced untold numbers of millionaires who started their own software companies and located them in the Redmond/Bellevue area. Redmond/Bellevue are separated from Seattle proper by a big lake. Two narrow bridges run over the lakes. This has created a very odd traffic pattern. Most big cities, people live in the burbs and commute INTO the city for their job. In Seattle, it's the reverse. Tech people are young and unmarried and want to live in the city. But their jobs are in the burbs. So in Seattle it's a reverse commute. Getting OUT of Seattle in the morning is horrible, made more horrible by the bridge choke points. Getting INTO Seattle after work is likewise horrible.

Traffic problems in Seattle are also made more difficult by a highway system that wasn't designed for the rapid growth. Major entrance/exit ramps to its highways are single lanes. It lacks any kind of subway/light rail system. Seattle is very anti-tax. Propositions to increase various taxes to pay for new roads or an improved public transit system get killed time and time again. Curiously those most in favor of building it are old time residents. The newcomers vote it down. The rational is "this won't get built for 5-10 years. Will I still be living here in 10 years? No. I'll be back in Michigan. So why pay now for what I won't ever use?"

However much the old timers complain, they ultimately have themselves to blame. In the early '70s the American federal government offered to build Seattle a subways system. The fed would pay 90% of the cost. Seattle would only have to pay 10%. This would mean a small tax increase. It was put to a vote. The subway was rejected. The government said "Okay. Say, Atlanta, Seattle doesn't want the pile of money. You're next on the list." Atlanta heartily agreed and built its subway.

[mindmetoo]

Silicon Valley is reasonably recession proof. Several years ago I was talking to a woman who worked in Silicon Valley most of her adult life. I was talking about the 1991 recession. "There was a recession in 1991?" she asked. Since the transistor era, Silicon Valley has always kind of plodded along, swinging between high levels of growth and crazy over heated levels of growth.

One of Silicon Valley's better known tenants is Apple. In the mid-90s Apple was laying off lots of staff. No one at Apple was too concerned about their job because a large number of Internet start ups like Netscape had moved in and there were jobs a plenty. One of the nice things about Silicon Valley during periods of higher growth is you can lose your job one day, walk a block with a sign around your neck that says "will code for $100K + options", and get hired an hour later.

So Apple was shedding staff and giving generous severance packages. Depending on time served you might get half a year or a year of pay. Now half a year's pay if you get laid off in Detroit might be little comfort if it will take you a year to find a new job, but when you get a half year's pay and can find a job in a couple days, well, wouldn't you be crazy not to beg to be laid off? Bank six months of pay, take a month holiday, and come back to 3 job offers. Sweet. Many Apple people thought about doing just that. Of course, much like Catch-22, if you're smart enough to ask to be laid off, you're probably too valuable to be laid off.

The upshot Apple created this weird work environment where people were competing with each other to appear as useless and unproductive as possible. "No, please, I'm entirely unsuited for this job."

* * *

One thing I liked about Apple way way back is they used to issue these funky developer CDs. So full of cheek. Each month the CD was given a title that was some pun on a movie or TV show and came with neat art work. I think the official idea was it was easier for developers to ask someone for a CD by a funky name like "Hexorcist" than "Oh say could you give me volume XI?" In the early 90s CD media was still pretty expensive and you might only get one developer CD for your entire company so people would have to swap CDs a lot.

Around about 1994 they stopped doing this.

[Tiger Beer]

The dot.com era. I was living in New York City during its heydey. Funny as I specifically went out to San Francisco to visit my friend working at Looksmart.com.. who knew very little about anything internet-related, but had a good job out there.

I decided I preferred Manhattan at that time.. and then in 2000 went back to Korea for another year.. to come back to the US in the Fall of 2001.. to SAN FRANCISCO.

Unfortunately everyone had lost their jobs.. the bubble had popped.. and everyone was demoted down to about two steps below to what they were before. Absolute hell trying to get a decent job in that climate at that time for me.

[mindmetoo]

[Paji eh Wong]

I remember in '99 or '00 when my roommate the geek borrowed some money off his brother for the Red Hat IPO. Made like $3000 in a few days.

Did you ever read Microserfs by Douglas Coupland?

[mindmetoo]

[John Henry]

Ah yes....Sounds like office space to me.

Hey Peter...what's.....happenin'.....

Mmmm...yeah...I'm gonna have to ask you to go ahead and move your desk down to basement B, section D.....


...my stapler.....I could burn down the building.....

[Tiger Beer]

Yeah, I read "Microserfs" by Coupland.. a few others.. one was something being naked and something.. it was great dot.tech book. Forget the name though.

By the time I got to San Francisco, one of my roommates was amazing at computers.. but never had any schooling for it. He'd been making $90,000 or something with just a H.S. education. I wonder how he is doing now, but he remained unemployed during my year as his roommate in post-dotcom San Francisco. He was still dropping money as if he had it though.. and still thinking he'd get picked up for something somewhere. He was great at what he knew though.

The biggest shock for me was housing and restaurants were so expensive and the jobs just simply weren't there.

When I was in Manhattan a few years earlier, I'd been doing presentations and similar stuff for an Investment Bank. In addition, I'd been studying all the Internet stuff - flash, dreamweaver, html, everything else. I was getting paid $25/hour in NYC doing the presentations. I was thinking I'd at least get that much in SF with the Investment Bank presentations combined with internet knowledge in SF. Didn't work out. Sad thing is they were paying "Webmasters" about $8/hour in SF in postdom era as they seemed to know anyone and everyone would willingly work there for that little money with the hope of experience. Unfortunately I couldn't.

Anyhow its a bygone era now. I also remember the craze to learn networking and getting certified for that as well. Even that doesn't seem all that worth it anymore. None of that does anymore.

One of my good friends in Manhattan, a Korean-American was getting paid to do internet design work and working in offices of Sao Paulo and Paris and somewhere in Silicon Valley and of course Manhattan. He was living a REAL good life. I went to his office in Manhattan and there was a pool table, hitech televions everywhere, bongos all over, and great SoHo location. I was so envious of him!

I was pretty content with my own job at the time though.. so wasn't willing to make any sudden shift to entry level internet-related stuff though. Funny how it seemed like things would last forever.

[mindmetoo]

[mindmetoo]

[mindmetoo]

At Infospace all the board rooms had these sweet flat panel big screen TVs. On my floor the flat panel TV went missing. Stolen. No one noticed for a while. The thief was smart in two ways.

One, he noticed all the exits on all the floor were covered by security cameras except for the door leading to the service elevator. The service elevator led directly to the shipping dock. You could move from the boardroom to the service elevator without ever passing by a camera. And while you had to badge to go up to a floor, you didn't have to badge to go back down.

Two, when he removed the TV, he placed a sign where the TV hung that said "TV removed by the Facilities Department for repair". Anyone who noticed the TV missing would assume it was coming back, allowing time for a clean get away. He might have known that security tapes were erased after two weeks. So if he showed up on a security camera accidently, the tapes would be bulk erased before anyone noticed the TV went missing.

Eventually someone wondered what was taking Facilities so long to repair the TV. He made an inquiry. "TV? No. We didn't remove any TV..." Oh oh.

I figured it was someone who was laid off but was given a few weeks of extended life at the company to finish up projects. He wasn't pleased with his severance package and thought he'd supplement it with a $2,000 TV. I wonder if it turned up on ebay.

My own department was downsized (including me, thank god) and I was given about a month's notice. I didn't steal a TV but as coworkers were pensioned off I'd go into their office and take whatever interesting things they left behind. I collected about a dozen staplers, scissors, and sharpies. I have no idea what I was going to do with all the staplers, however. I thought about working them into my stand up comedy routine. I would come on stage and place a bunch of staplers and other pilfered office supplies on the stool then announce to the audience that I had just been laid off at my $50,000 a year dot.com job. I was trying to make ends meet so I'm selling office supplies I stole from my job. Would anyone want to help me out and buy a stapler? I was selling them for $25,000 each...

I never did use that gag in my act.

* * *

Oh. Another lucky guy. I met this one coworker at an inter-office party between the suburban office and the sweet waterfront digs. The guy was telling me his life story. He had moved to Seattle in the early '90s. He was fresh out of art school and Seattle was at the height of the grunge thing. They were filming Northern Exposures here. It was the place to go to be an artist. Anyway, grunge tanked and Northern Exposures ended and he couldn't find work. He ended up bar tending at a dive bar downtown. Even that wasn't making ends meet. He put in his notice at his apartment and reserved a moving van to cart his stuff back home to Michigan or some parts. He went to work that night, one of his last times on duty. It was a Friday and they were having a band play. The band was pretty loud. Eventually some guy from the small Internet start up upstairs came down to ask him to turn the music down a little. They were pulling an all nighter. They got to talking. "Oh what's the name of your company?" "Amazon.com. We sell books online. What do you do besides bartending?" "I got my degree in art..." "Wow, we need some graphic artists. Do you want a job?" "Sure!"

We're talking Amazon.com pre-IPO days. Pre-IPO employees at my company Infospace all ended up multimillionaires. I can only imagine a pre-AMZN employee did as well. After Amazon.com he stumbled over to a portal site (go2net.com) that Infospace bought. So he found another block of options vest...

And then there was my coworker who was our main graphic artist. Kevin. I worked along side him for 4 years. He was a talented fellow, a cartoonist and pilot. He seemed to have held a lot of jobs, including being a cop for a short stint. He was hoping to be a commercial airline pilot but apparently unless you're ex-military it's very hard to get a job. The military graduates a lot of well trained pilots and airlines aren't exactly expanding.

About a week before I moved home I found out he was one of the original card artists for Magic: The Gathering. He designed about half a dozen cards for the original alpha deck. He mentioned it was the worst paying job he ever took that turned out to be the best paying job. Wizards of the Coast paid the artists a miserly up front rate for their art. Something like $50. The artists got paid in pre-IPO shares, got royalties for every card sold, and got to retain their original art. Of course he got several complimentary alpha decks.

You could imagine, at the height of the craze, what the original art for an alpha deck card would go for, especially among increasingly wealthy dot.com freaks.

I asked him how much he sold his original art work for to collectors . "Not enough and too early in the crazy," he lamented. Still the options were nothing to sneeze at.

[just because]

They are great stories but this has to be said.

You guys are a bunch of nerds