
Life in the Boy's Dorm: My Career at Sun Microsystems - casca
http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/life-in-boys-dorm-my-career-at-sun.html
======
luckydude
I was there in building 5. I played hockey with Scott and Steve (srk@sun.com,
I was lm@sun.com, to this day the best email address I've ever had.) Guy
Harris was there, he's why I went to Sun. He left to go to Auspex but since
Auspex licensed Sun's source he kept coming back. John Pope and I worked late,
Guy pounded on the door of building 5, we let him in so he could fix stuff. I
still have memories of Guy going "shit, they haven't fixed this? Losers.
Checkin." Guy committed changes to Suns code long after he was not employed by
Sun.

Scooter used to come into our building around 7pm and tell us how we were
going to rule the world. He got up on the conference table and he stood there
and made us believe. How many CEO's are around at 7pm?

When that other guy was put in, some web guy, I was bummed. Scooter really
loved Sun, he cared a lot.

~~~
bcantrill
Considering that you were the reason that Bonwick came to Sun and Bonwick was
the reason I came to Sun, I guess that makes me a descendant of sort of Guy
Harris...

Also, not sure if you saw it or not, but I gave you a shout-out in my history
of SunOS/Solaris/OpenSolaris/illumos[1]. I'm sure I got some of the history
slightly wrong from that era (it did, after all, predate me at Sun), so accept
my apologies in advance...

[1]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc)

~~~
luckydude
Holy crap, you got my wife cheering you. Thanks a lot from me and her Bryan.
Great shout out.

Very cool talk too. You should continue to talk about how the kernel team
ruled.

------
rob-alarcon
"Bob Coe once told me he did not have to interview the candidates for his
Administrative Assistant position. I should simply ask each candidate to link
her hands behind her head with her elbows pointing forward and walk toward the
wall. If her elbows were the first part of her anatomy to touch the wall, she
was eliminated from candidacy. All applicants whose breasts touched first, he
would interview."

\--classy; Good read for the afternoon coffee.

~~~
mahmud
That made me viscerally sick.

~~~
sliverstorm
So it caused you to be physically ill, such as lightheadedness or vomiting?

~~~
chris_wot
Why is that so hard to believe? Some people do feel ill when reading about
vile and disgusting circumstances and situations.

Yeah, fun times at start ups, unless you are a woman. Why are we celebrating
this bullshit again?

~~~
easytiger
Highlighting, not celebrating

~~~
peterwwillis
Reminiscing.

------
jmduke
Part 2 is here: [http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_30.html)

~~~
datalus
Snipers aimed at engineers? Really?

~~~
chiph
The Secretary of the Department of Commerce came to visit us at a previous
job. He had his own armed security guys that followed him around, and I'm sure
HR passed all our social security numbers to them for background checks ahead
of time.

The best part was his speech was how off-shoring was Good for America. Which
went over like a lead balloon, as you might guess.

------
christopheraden
I remember my mom telling me stories about Sun's glory days, and me thinking
that it seemed sort of unbelievable that any workplace would be as wild as she
described. Interesting to see a lot of the same sort of stories being told
here and more. She was there from 1988 to 2008. I wonder what the Solaris,
mysql, and Java teams are like now that it's run by The Evil Empire.

~~~
angersock
A great deal smaller, I imagine. :P

------
booop
> When I went on my first interview at Sun, I thought it made office
> furniture. The ad had said it was a maker of "workstations", so I thought it
> was like Hay cubicles. I did not know a thing about high-tech or computers.
> I lucked into one of the all-time best gigs.

I had a good chuckle at that. Reminded me of this interview from "The IT
Crowd" \-
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuPolrd9yuo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuPolrd9yuo)

------
general_failure
She gets bullied like crazy and she says its her best job. Tbh, I think this
speaks a lot about our current generation women than Hers. I mean just compare
the things she had to go through compared to the current generation...

~~~
InclinedPlane
I have no idea what you mean, could you be more specific?

~~~
yummyfajitas
I believe the point is that while the current generation whines about any sort
of adversity, earlier generations sucked it up and enjoyed the challenge.

"Back in my day we built our heat equation solvers on punched cards, and had
to manually draw the resulting graph based on the output. Nowadays you
whippersnappers complain when scipy doesn't have a built in heat equation
solver, and you are forced to manually write conjugate gradient."

~~~
glhaynes
_while the current generation whines about any sort of adversity, earlier
generations sucked it up and enjoyed the challenge._

Or... we could reverse which side we're being charitable to:

 _while the current generation more often demands appropriate behavior,
earlier generations just "sucked it up" because they wouldn't have had
establishment support if they had spoken up. Millions of female/minority
employees with tremendous potential (and the companies that could have
employed/promoted them) lost out._

~~~
yummyfajitas
The principle of charity means applying a charitable interpretation to
whoever's argument you are attempting to understand, which is what I did.

As a result, I correctly interpreted his argument:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6096457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6096457)

You did not.

~~~
glhaynes
I wasn't taking exception with your interpretation but with the argument
itself.

------
chris_wot
The level of sexism and misogyny in this post is incredible. Hiring women for
breast size. Making sexual harassment problems "go away".

Pretty fucking disgusting.

~~~
Tichy
What's wrong about the "go away" thing? What is the appropriate solution in
your opinion - death row for the offender?

~~~
diyang
No one's advocating such measures. The "go away" implies that the claim was
repressed, instead of fairly considered.

~~~
vidarh
It implies the claim was withdrawn. It _may_ be that it was repressed, but it
also might be the person who made the claim in reality just wanted an apology
or for things to stop, and that she managed to sort things out. A lot of the
time personnel conflicts escalate because the two sides don't know how to
resolve it between themselves, and a good HR person can make the problem go
away simply by facilitating communication.

Now, if she really _did_ make it "go away" by repressing a valid claim, then
that's quite disgusting, but without more details we don't know whether or not
this was anything bad. There's enough other icky behaviour described there's
no reason to jump to conclusions about the rest.

------
wheaties
Having trouble getting past this part of her bio: "and counsel to anyone who
employs Millennials." Really? Are they that bad? I've had nothing but good
experiences and nothing, I repeast, nothing like any of the other supposed
experiences the media seems to go on about. Seriously, they don't run up
credit card debt like my parents or my friends do.

~~~
InclinedPlane
It's classic generation gap bullshit, just like always.

Oh man, the kids these days!

I'm generation X myself and I well remember all the crap our generation got
growing up. How we were dumber than the last generation, less ambitious,
lacked principles and morals, etc. And yet if you look at reality you see that
gen-x has caused a revolution in business with an explosion in startups,
freelancing, independent projects, innovation, etc. (just look at kickstarter,
for example). And they've been far more pragmatic and humane about issues such
as gay marriage, LGBT acceptance, race relations, and drug use (e.g. ending
the war on drugs) than even the baby boomers and far more than the "greatest
generation".

Additionally, through my friend group and volunteering I have a lot of
interaction with "millenials" and as far as I can tell the hype about them is
vastly overwrought. Sure there are some who are demanding, but that's true of
all cross-sections of humanity, whether by age or any other metric. There are
just as many who are hard working, ambitious, generous, and so forth.

Also, I'd like to point out how much of a raw deal a lot of millenials are
getting. When I went to college in the mid to late '90s it was possible for my
middle class parents to pay tuition to a very good state University out of
pocket without incurring any significant economic hardship. Today that's
almost impossible, acquiring a college degree is not only much more necessary
these days it's also far more expensive, and very difficult for most folks to
do so without going into significant debt. Add on to that the horrific state
of the job market today, especially for people just entering it without
experience. And it's not a whole lot better at the high end either. It used to
be that in the tech world you could ride a rising company's growth as a fairly
late employee and working for only maybe a decade or so would net you enough
savings just from stock and stock options to allow you to retire fairly rich.
Now the market is very different and employee compensation is different and
that sort of thing just isn't the norm any longer. You can make a damned good
living, but you don't have the life and career options that were possible in
the past. Which means that a lot of the most talented folks are forced to take
on a lot more risk in order to acquire the same sorts of rewards. Which is
good and bad but it's certainly not easier.

~~~
freyr
It's a joke.

Perhaps a half-joke, since if you poke at a millenial, you risk getting a
defensive, whiny, humorless diatribe in response.

For the record, I am a millenial.

------
Aaronneyer
Really enjoyed reading that. Just got through the first two.

Here's a list of the links for anyone who wants to read em all. (reverse
order)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_25.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_20.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_18.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_24.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_23.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_21.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_18.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_17.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_16.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_8100.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_14.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_12.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_11.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_06.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_05.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_26.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_25.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_24.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_23.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_19.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_13.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_12.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_11.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_06.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_09.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_07.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_03.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_30.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun_29.html)

[http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/life-in-
boys...](http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/life-in-boys-dorm-my-
career-at-sun.html)

~~~
throwaway1979
Thanks! Man ... I wish I was there in those glory days. Heck, I wish I was
anywhere in Silicon Valley in 94-95.

Are there places in the valley that still feel the same?

~~~
pmarca
They Valley is so much better now. There's no comparison. The fun stuff is
just starting now.

~~~
hglaser
> The Valley is so much better now. There's no comparison.

How so? What's different? What's better?

------
badman_ting
She calls it the best gig ever, and bully for her, but that doesn't sound like
such a great workplace to me.

~~~
salgernon
I didn't have the same experiences as her (at all) but on my first day at Sun,
circa 1990, I was given an OS tape, a 3/260 and a cardboard box full of VME
cards (some functional) and was expected to get it onto the network and get
X11 installed... Never having had to do that kind of thing before, it took me
almost a week to boot.

~~~
gonzo
You got a 3/260 on your first day? Lucky! I got a Sun i386, but quickly
replaced it with a 3/260, and then, eventually, a Sparcstation.

I built SWAN out of 3/260s as routers. Those were good machines. :-)

------
gonzo
I (jthomp@sun.com, aka "net.god") was in tears. Those were good times.

------
andrewchoi
Why are specific words highlighted in the post? I'm seeing words like
"McNealy", "CEO's", etc. highlighted.

~~~
anonymoushn
He's letting us read what his spellchecker thinks about his article.

    
    
      <span class="goog-spellcheck-word" style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% yellow;">McNealy</span>

~~~
kposehn
She :)

------
joshguthrie
Thanks for these articles! As a youngster, Sun always was "that Java company",
but having testimonies of it as a young and innovative company is great.

I'm a bit disappointed about the title still as it makes it bait for "women
are mistreated by IT men, which is why they don't go to IT anymore". Sure,
some people are not respectful (they will always exist), but your account
shows that the few that were never stopped you from belonging to (and being
seen by all as a key member of) a great IT company.

------
mathattack
If I don't leave this post now, I'll lose my morning reading the entire
series!

~~~
disgruntledphd2
I know the feeling. Fortunately I was compiling a massive report, so I didn't
lose as much productive time as I could have.

Well worth reading the whole thing though.

