Start & Run a Rural Computer Consultant Business. John D. Deans

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СКАЧАТЬ run home for dinner and then back up to work to take great computer courses offered by my employer on the Plato Learning Network.

      They had a whole curriculum for computer hardware and software that was free to all employees. I ate these courses up, taking as many as I could … topics covering programming languages, hardware trouble-shooting, and software design. After six months and with more than 20 completed courses behind me, a light went on in my head: I really dig this computer thing!

      Just after my one-year anniversary with CDC, my boss offered me a promotion to billing processing operator. This was an awesome opportunity offered to me, given than two of my other workmates had been in the process control room longer than I had. Dad told me it was because of all the late-night course work I had done, which was all logged and reported to management on a monthly basis. Odds are he was right about that, just like he was all the other times.

      Those late-night courses continued to pay off for me because over the next year, I used what I had learned to streamline CDC’s bill-processing system. I was so successful in this that I managed to get the whole process down from ten hours a day to only two.

      For some reason, I kept this accomplishment quiet for a few months. This allowed me the time to create extra reports with color graphs showing the billing activity, which the managers loved. It also allowed me to sneak out of work early (quite often) to surf in Galveston during storm season, which was the only time the waves were rideable.

      The weekday surfing is what got me caught. Noticing the tan skin and sun-bleached blond hair, my boss checked up on my processing logs and found that I had optimized my job-processing time down to less than part-time hours. He called me in to meet with him and two other managers in his office, and I thought I was fired. I confessed my prime-time surfing escapades, highlighting all the extra graphs and timely billing reports, and hoped not to get slammed too hard.

      Instead, they told me to move my stuff to the customer service department. They were promoting me to Systems Analyst, along with giving me a substantial raise!

      Holy cow! I made Systems Analyst in two years, right out of high school!

      During that last year at CDC, I spent most of my time working user problems over the phone at a desk in customer service. It was a good learning experience, but it got old real fast, yapping on the phone all day and not having my hands on the hardware and hacking out software.

      This was back in 1984, and the oil industry was hurting in Houston. Since I was still watching the billing processes, I happened to notice a significant downturn in mainframe time-sharing services, which were CDC’s bread and butter.

      My girlfriend’s best friend got me in for an interview at J. S. Nolan and Associates in West Houston. After a few weeks of pursuing it, I got the job, and left CDC just before they started laying off people.

      J. S. Nolan was a group of a dozen or so PhDs who had developed an oil reservoir simulation program and made millions marketing it all over the world. My new job was to manage Nolan’s in-house VAX/VMS computers, and port the massive 150,000-line Fortran program onto every scientific mainframe and minicomputer made. This was the ultimate learning opportunity, since the first thing Nolan did was send me to Intel and later to Convex to learn the Unix operating system.

      The three years I spent with Nolan gave me tons of experience in programming, computer management, hardware troubleshooting, and software debugging techniques. Porting the program was basically taking a nine-track tape of source code, loading it up on the mainframe, creating the JCL to run the jobs, compiling the code, linking all the binary libraries, and utilizing the proprietary capabilities of the mainframe. These capabilities included double precision, vectorization, and parallelization on supercomputers such as Cray, IBM, CDC, Convex, Intel Hypercube, and many others. I was also exposed to the first version of Ethernet 802.3 10Base5 over thick wire coax cabling, which was my first real local area networking experience.

      The last year got rough after J. S. Nolan sold out to Dresser and the bean counters took over. As with CDC, I could see the writing on the wall, and started looking for a new position.

      In 1987, an opportunity came along with CogniSeis Development, who offered me a job as manager of computer operations. This consisted of managing seven people and more than thirty medium-to-large computers and mainframes. The good thing is that I was in management and making more than $40K a year; the bad thing was that during that next year, I went through both a divorce and the death of my father.

      The six prior years had been nothing but bits and bytes, with all issues black and white. There was no gray in my world back then. Management was entirely new to me, and I was just a babe in the woods. Right off the bat, I had two hardware guys and four computer operators reporting to me, while we all supported approximately 200 users working on VT100 terminals connected to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX/VMS mainframe computers, along with 50-plus smaller Unix-based computers and workstations.

      Over my fours years at CogniSeis, my divorce was finalized, I buried my dad, dated and broke up with multiple girlfriends, and actually started being a dad to my young son, who was with me for the standard visitation periods doled out by Texas law. After paying off the five-figure debt from the divorce and finally moving out of my sister’s place, I was able to buy a small but nice home in Bellaire, which is a small city within Houston.

      In 1991, my nephew had freshly returned from his Air Force service in Saudi Arabia during Desert Shield and Storm. We celebrated by going to Hawaii and surfing for seven days and drinking for seven nights. When I got back, I had a call on my answering machine to contact a Michael Holthouse, who wanted to interview me for a position with a new company he was starting, called Paranet.

      The meeting with Holthouse’s right-hand man, Steve Ough, went great as far as technical interviews go, and then it was onto Holthouse himself and things got interesting. He explained to me that the goal of Paranet (with just seven employees at the time) was to hire IT experts, get support contacts, and grow as fast as possible. With a five- to seven-year time frame, his plan was to either sell Paranet or go public with it and take a big payoff for himself and the start-up team, of which I would be a critical member — if I joined up now. He scribbled out a $55K salary with a possible if not probable end payout of over $2,000,000 if we hit our objectives.

      This rocked my world! By this time, I had it made at CogniSeis, with a great crew that kept all the systems running well. I had it easy and smooth with a decent salary of $47K, working less than 40 hours a week at a location less than four miles from my home. Choosing a start-up company over the safe, secure, and happy environment that had nurtured me over the past four years was a hard decision.

      But there was one thing in Paranet’s favor: my fear that in five years, I would regret not having recognized this chance as the opportunity it was. After a weekend of deep thought, talks with friends, and several glasses of wine, I accepted Paranet’s offer the next Monday.

      The Paranet Days

      I’m detailing my time at Paranet because it was a turning point in my life, one that allowed me to later make another major life-changing decision — landing me in my current career as a rural computer consultant.

      The first year at Paranet was frantic, exciting, exhausting, and even debilitating. Going from a single-role internal IT support person to an external billable consultant was a major change, and it took all my effort, knowledge, and creative articulation (otherwise know as B.S.). I had spent the past ten years as overhead, never as the core of the business. Starting in May of 1991 at Paranet, I was a designated moneymaker and the primary focus of the company.

      Mike Holthouse, СКАЧАТЬ