Being a Linux non-conversant person myself at that time, I needed to get a bunch of Linux talents--which were few and far between then--for my new company...fast!
So I managed to break into the web site of UC Irvine's Computer Science Department, and found some web pages created by its more innovative-minded students, and saw this young man (no photo though, back in those days when there was no Facebook or MySpace, and people didn't "over-share" who they were), with GPA 4.0, Torrey Searle, and I solicited him, to come out and have a "campus interview" with me right at the UCI campus cafeteria.
Torrey was a typical nerdy looking young lad, with a lean body frame and a grave pair of glasses on his freckled face, but courteous and slow speaking. When I suggested he come working for me, he said he'd like to but his parents would kill him if he dared not finish the school first (he was in his senior year). So I asked if he could recommend anybody else that he knew was as good as he, and he told me he had actually been working with a group of young Linux prodigies like himself for a while to come up with some chat-room software (called "Everybuddy") for the Linux community, and gave me their names.
Torrey was a typical nerdy looking young lad, with a lean body frame and a grave pair of glasses on his freckled face, but courteous and slow speaking. When I suggested he come working for me, he said he'd like to but his parents would kill him if he dared not finish the school first (he was in his senior year). So I asked if he could recommend anybody else that he knew was as good as he, and he told me he had actually been working with a group of young Linux prodigies like himself for a while to come up with some chat-room software (called "Everybuddy") for the Linux community, and gave me their names.
And I went on to recruit them, one by one, to work for me in the next couple of months. I did it all online, using instant messaging chat for the first time in my life, gave them job offers, (again, without even seeing their pictures), and moved them all to California (I didn't believe in telecommuting, as some of them suggested they would like to do) from all over the country (North Carolina, Alabama, Oklahoma...).
Rob and Jeramey were the first two to arrive. They were even younger than Torrey, around 19 or 20, and had been freelancing with their Linux programming skills for fun and for occasional jobs since their teens, without ever attending college. (Why bother, Rob said).
Rob had a great, warm, but boyishly shy personality, who'd rather talk to you about his home folks and girl friends than technical stuff. And he talked (online-chatted) with his girl friend a lot about me too--this funky Asian boss who moved him all the way from the East Coast country side to a posh new high tech office park in Southern California. I enjoyed chatting and even joking with him (I called him my "whipping boy" who would be held responsible for any wrong-doings in the office) occasionally and even met his lovely young girl friend when she came visiting him from the East Coast later.
Rob had a great, warm, but boyishly shy personality, who'd rather talk to you about his home folks and girl friends than technical stuff. And he talked (online-chatted) with his girl friend a lot about me too--this funky Asian boss who moved him all the way from the East Coast country side to a posh new high tech office park in Southern California. I enjoyed chatting and even joking with him (I called him my "whipping boy" who would be held responsible for any wrong-doings in the office) occasionally and even met his lovely young girl friend when she came visiting him from the East Coast later.
Jim was a smart boy, about as young as Rob and Jeramey, going to school at Oklahoma State University, but "negotiated" with me to offer him "sign-up" bonus, on top of the generous offer I gave everybody already. He was also a crazy wild kid, with some disciplinary issues. Holing himself up in his cubicle behind piles of empty Dr. Peppers (For some reason, these kids all drank Dr. Pepper, no Coke. It's almost like a rebel statement of their time: Coke was evil, just like Microsoft, who was a monopoly and tried to crush the open source Linux platform they loved), he came in late, with sleazy eyes, and wrote code at wee hours or who knew when. One crazy thing he did, after he moved down here from Oklahoma, was to bid and buy a 1969 Chevy Corvette through eBay. The car arrived, he went to pick it up at the pier in Long Beach, and started driving, until he found out the transmission gear wouldn't allow him to downshift, and finally stopped after it ran out of gas. He found a phone booth and called his roommate Rob to pick him up, but could not tell where he was, and could not speak a single word of Spanish in that Mexican part of town. Finally a policeman saw him and told him where he was so Rob could come and pick him up. He then spent twice the money fixing the car than what he paid for it, and said he enjoyed it quite a bit.
Jared was the total opposite of Jim. About the same age as Jim and Torrey, he was at Auburn University of Alabama for the last year of his Computer Science degree, but decided to take my offer and quit school to come to California because he believed this was a once-in-a-life-time opportunity he didn't want to miss. He was very bright, but also very disciplined, and kept a Bible in his car that he read every day. I very quickly promoted him to be a project leader, then system architect, and treated him like my de facto right hand man for the whole software development and brought him with me when talking business with strategic partners. He married his college sweet heart--a beautiful Southern belle--before he came, and they had a baby girl the second year he worked here, that me and my wife visited at the hospital right after its delivery.
Not that he'd been a lap dog employee just because I treated him nice enough. Nope. He's young and boisterous and had full sense of what's right and wrong that he was not afraid to express. I remember one day it was an election day, and he asked everyone the moment they came in the office whether they had done their citizen duty of voting or not. When he caught me not having done so, he urged me to do it soon. And there were a couple times when I did something management wise he felt strongly about, he let me know in ways that made my stomach turn!
Torrey finally joined us after he graduated from UCI the next year. By then I had total of 10 software engineers: Besides the Everybuddy gang, Patrick was a Canadian from Montreal with Mohawk hair cut and black leather jacket who rode his motor bike to work every day; Drew was a local talent whose off-work passion was to be a US marshal bounty-hunter; Rick was a black young man I recruited from Virginia who was probably not as sharp as Jared talent wise but had same great work ethics and mature sense of responsibility that I promoted him to be my second project leader; Ed was another black kid from Virginia that Rick recommended and I hired; Mat was an Auburn graduate referred by Jared; Mike was another Linux wiz kid from North Carolina referred by Rob; Andrew was a UCI graduate who I found through Torrey and was the only Asian boy I hired for the software group.
I let go of Jeramey early on, a couple of months after I hired him, because he was slacking up and did not perform--I later heard he was crying at night because he felt he couldn't handle the pressure of the jobs I asked of them. I also had to let Jim go, after he pulled off yet another crazy stunt of his: One weekend he drove all the way back to Oklahoma, just to see his girl friend there, and did not show up for work until one week later. I did hire him back for a short contract job later, though, to write the device driver for our product.
I also had a hardware department of two, one sales/marketing person, and one accounting girl. So on this tiny boat of 15 we rocked: We defined the product, wrote the code, made the boards, assembled the system, did the shows, talked the business, stressful and frustrating at times, but mostly exciting and optimistic, for about one year and a half.
Then the bubble burst. The VC cut back their funding, then withdrew it altogether. I had to lay off 2/3 of the people in August 2001, then completely shut it down by the end of 2001.
I didn't keep tracks of my boys afterwards, until Rob reached me through LinkedIn last year: He is now working for a company developing video software for the deaf while toying some ideas of his own; Jared is now manager of a major business analytics software company; and Torrey has been working for an international telecom company in Belgium for years...
Now I wonder: Is Torrey still so skinny looking (He mused and talked a lot but ate very little, we used to tease him that we'd have to force-feed him); Who's Rob's current girl friend; How's Jared's baby--now must be 12-year-old girl--look like; Does Jim still have those sleepy eyes and drink 10 cans of Dr. Pepper a day; Pat still wearing his Mohawk hairstyle and riding his bike? How's Jeramey doing these days...
Maybe one day I'll just click my mouse and start chatting with them online again.
"I quite literally moved across the country to work for Dave. He ... somehow managed to wrangle all of us young developers into producing something excellent." -- Rob's comment on me on LinkedIn... "somehow" and "wrangle" being the operative words.
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