… This is the third in a series of posts about how I ended up where I am today.
The way I got the printing company job tells you something about how things worked back then. After Punch and Programming shut down, some of the customers they’d left stranded reached out to me directly. One of them was a printing company who needed software fixed that I’d originally built in my previous role. I went in, fixed it, and they showed me around.
The place was fascinating. They had everything from state-of-the-art equipment to machines older than I was. And then they showed me a book. Written by a priest, sometime in the 1920s if I remember right, it described in detail how a particular printing machine worked and how it could be constructed. They asked if the machine could be recreated as software.
I said it could. They loaned me the book to do just that.
The Priest’s Machine
My friend Ambrose Clarke and I built it. In fairness, Ambrose did the heavy lifting of recreating the machine’s logic in code. He was a brilliant programmer and that was a serious piece of work. My area was taking his output and converting it into PostScript, the language that professional printing machines understood. The two halves had to talk to each other perfectly or the output would be garbage.
We got paid for the work and at the time we thought it was an insane amount of money. Looking back, it was a pittance for what we delivered. But we didn’t know that yet.
They offered me a full-time job afterwards. I named a salary that felt ambitious to me. They accepted immediately, which should have been a clue. I was getting myself for almost nothing and they knew it.
Hochgeschwindigkeitslaserdrucker
The printing company had a lot of machinery, but two high-speed laser printers stand out.
The first was from the 1970s. You had to flip switches in sequence to boot it up. It stored printing data on magnetic tape. The manuals were in German, and every other sentence seemed to contain the word “Hochgeschwindigkeitslaserdrucker” repeated endlessly. Building anything printable on it was a slow, painful process of switch-flipping and tape-writing.
I figured out a way to get a PC to write the magnetic tapes to the exact specification the hardware expected. You could take a simple text file, run it through my software, and get WYSIWYG mail merge output on this 1970s beast. That one change made the machine genuinely useful to the business.
The second machine was more modern and could handle graphics. Handwriting-style output instead of just print. I built another application for that one too, same idea. Text and images in, professional print-ready output out.
I had a healthy respect for how two of the CEOs ran the business, Pierce and Jean. They were smart operators. But I was building core tools for the company and being paid as though I was an intern.
“You’re Not Qualified for the Job You Have”
When I eventually asked for a pay rise, they refused. Their reasoning was that I wasn’t qualified for the role I was already doing. That I was already doing it didn’t seem to factor in.
My younger self, instead of pushing back, enrolled in a two-year City and Guilds course in C programming and Unix. I passed with distinction. They doubled my salary.
I can’t stress enough that “doubled” still meant very little. The factory workers assumed I was rolling in money because “computer programmer” was a hot job title in the early ’90s. The truth is they were earning three or four times what I was.
But I still didn’t fully understand that. I was learning constantly, working on interesting problems, and assumed that was the deal. You do good work, you get to keep doing it. Nobody sat me down and explained what the market actually paid.
“Show Them the Software I Created”
The moment I can trace the turning point to happened during a customer visit. One of the CEOs was showing some visitors around and said, “Simon, can you please show these gentlemen the software I created.”
I was annoyed enough to say it out loud. “You created it, you can show them.” And I started to walk off.
The customers laughed. The CEO corrected himself and said I’d written it.
After they left he came back to talk to me. He wasn’t angry, and I don’t remember the full conversation. What stuck was one line: “Simon, those guys are in your area and get paid three times what you do, but don’t even know half of what you do.”
I think he meant it as a compliment. I didn’t take it that way.
California, Almost
Some time later, a US company that built software for printing hardware came to visit. They saw what I’d built and were blown away. A few weeks after they left, they offered me a job in California.
I said yes.
Getting a work visa for the US as a non-citizen is time-consuming and expensive for the sponsoring company. They went through the whole process anyway. Months of paperwork proving I had specialised knowledge they couldn’t source locally. Eventually everything was approved. Flights booked. Ready to go.
Then the US company went out of business.
One of the CEOs at my current company asked if I wanted to stay. But we weren’t leaving on good terms by that point. I’d already trained two replacements for my work and had no appetite to go backwards.
Since I had the flights booked and a good relationship with the people I’d met in the States, I went over for a month as a holiday instead. While I was there, another company expressed interest in hiring me. I went for the interview. It was surreal. They asked if I’d ever been to Mexico, then started explaining where I could hop the border to sort out my visa situation. I walked out of that one fairly quickly.
I came home to Ireland, unemployed again. The CEO’s comment should have been a wake-up call. The US offer should have told me something about what I was worth. But honestly, I didn’t connect those dots for a long time. I just knew I needed a job.
This is the third in a series of posts about how I ended up where I am today. Next: mass-mailing CVs to every company in the Yellow Pages, and the IBM interview that changed everything.