Re: BSDCon 2003 (fwd)

[Joe Greenseid <jgreen@thunderlizards.net>]

> Sounds like some of the arrogance I was just referencing. Boing!
> Ball's in your court!

Heh.  Ok, I'll be a little more descriptive in my reply this time...

> Explanation: not only do they not pay diddly

For anyone who interviews for a position here, this is made abundantly
clear.  Because almost all of NCSA's funding comes from various grants,
mostly through NSF, there isn't a lot of money.  It's a lot like working
in academia.  They also try to make up for the lack of money in
"intangible" benefits.  Everyone gets 5 weeks of vacation, you get like 5
weeks of sick days (yeah, not very impressive, but still kind of cool),
you can take classes at the university for free -- taking free classes in
one of the top 5 CS programs in the country isn't a bad thing.  These are
just a few examples...

> but things like Mosaic were done without the knowledge of management,

Ok, this is not true.  The work that went into Mosaic had been going on
for a while, it just took the specific project that Marc Andreesen was
working on to decide that it might all be put together in a certain way to
make a graphical web browser.  And from what I've heard (some friends and
I here decided at one point to try to track down the real story behind
Mosaic, b/c there are a lot of rumors and urban legends around here about
it), management was actually presented with the project, and was proposed
as something that could be extremely valuable, but management rejected it.  
Then after Marc left and went on to rewrite it and turn it into what we
know it became, people got mad and started covering their ass so that it
didn't happen again -- there are a lot of hoops now for licensing that
have to be jumped through with any project now.  

As for taking credit, most of the original work was done in various
projects here, the rewrite came after a rough version was created at NCSA.  
BTW, on an aside, Marc Andreesen wasn't even an employee here, he was just
a grad student who had the foresight to see that this was a really really
cool thing (graphical web browsing).

> They definitely foster the "MicroSerf" culture,

MicroSerf culture?  Are you serious?  I was told when I interviewed that
part of the tradeoff for them not being able to pay a lot of money is they
don't expect people to kill themselves working here.  As long as the work
gets done, they don't expect insane hours, or set insane deadlines.  I get
in around 8:30, and leave between 4:30 and 5 pm.  Every day.  3 days a
week, I take 2 hour lunches, and go to play basketball at the gym with my
manager and his manager.  On basketball days, we still get in at 8:30/9,
and leave at 4:30/5.  I've never worked on a weekend, I don't think I've
ever been in the office before 8 a.m., and never left after 6 pm.  People
know that they can come in a little late or leave a little early for
things like doctors appts, getting their car fixed, whatever, and won't
have to do stupid stuff like spend half a personal or vacation day or
whatever.  It's very laid back.

There always seems to be a lot of work, but the whole NSF grant thing
means that it's a lot like government work, so deadlines are not life or
death for the company.  It'll get done eventually, and everyone knows
that.

I'm not going to say that I love everything about NCSA, I have some
problems with it (that I won't get into).  I also won't dispute anything
you said about east central Illinois -- it's not like this place is a
cultural hub of the central US or anything.  I just disagreed with the
statements above that I responded to -- your specific gripes with NCSA
are, from my experiences, not really true at all.

And I don't think that my saying you're talking out of your ass is
arrogance, I think you making broad, sweeping statements and sounding a
lot like you don't know what you're talking about could be, though.
					--Joe



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