Work Life
| For the past two years I kept hearing about this Dave Morgan guy who graduated and was working at SGI and what a great place it was to work. I made it my mission in life to get an internship there. For a while, nothing else mattered -- not food, not sleep, not friends, not even my hair style. Lucky for me, my mentor last year was good friends with Dave Morgan and hooked me up. I was in. The Advanced Graphics Division would be my summer home. I would be helping to design the world's most powerful graphics hardware. |
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| Plus I had heard that SGI campus was the best out in Silicon Valley. The ECE professors from U of I came out to California to tour all of the silicon valley buildings to get ideas for the new ECE building they're planning. Apparently SGI headquarters was their favorite. If I was lucky enough to get a job at the coolest company, working on their coolest hardware, I wouldn't be able to work in the coolest buildings at their headquarters. Fortunately I was wrong, and my cube is just down the hall from where the CEO sits. |
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| My carefree days of hanging out at work until 2am, taking advantage of the full featured gym, playing volleyball and bocce ball with the interns, and reading in building 43's massage chair all ended on Thursday July 29th when they called a huge meeting of the entire Advanced Graphics Division. The Infinite Reality had just helped our division make a substantial profit in the previous fiscal quarter, and Bali, it's amazingly powerful successor, was being pushed toward completion by my group. |
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| The company had abandoned it's powerful MIPS processors in favor of the inelegant, less powerful, but industry standard Intel processors. They also had already announced that their powerful operating IRIX operating system was gone, in favor of industry standard Linux. Everybody seemed to "know" that the Cray business was not selling enough supercomputers, and the commodity workstations were not competitive with companies like Dell and Compaq. |
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| In the meeting, they shocked everyone with the announcement, "We've canceled Bali and are laying off half its engineers. No more will we design custom hardware, but will instead try to leverage commodity components." Suddenly working on advanced graphics at SGI blew serious chunks. On the plus side, for the last two weeks of my internship, I got to play a relatively important (for an intern) roll in defining the next generation architecture. It was than the tool support custodial work I was doing before. |
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| That day I brought a watermellon, and went to the break room to wash off my knife. A lady saw me and ran away. The first thing we all thought was, Install SETI@HOME on all the servers so we can search for extra terestrials since the servers aren't running any usefull regressions any longer." After two weeks, our sysadmin became the number 15 user in the world. Speaking of strnage creatures and sysadmins, my e-mail address for the summer was jasong@cthulhu.engr.sgi.com This is supposedly an artist's rendition of cthulhu. |
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| Last summer the company I worked for got bought out mid-way through my internship. This summer, my project got canceled and half my friends were forced to accept one of the hundreds of high paying start up's offers. Perhaps I'll look back on it in a positive light, but for now, the sour taste remains. Until I go home, I will still enjoy the exercise room, recline in my $800 ergonomic office chair, and allow my sister Nik to stand in the SGI water fountain. |
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| ... and rest in the SGI hammock, and on the SGI bean bags. |
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| .... and stand in the fountain facing the other way, toward the park that the City of Mountain View forced SGI to build as part of the deal for buying the land right next to the Amphitheater and a huge garbage dump. The Amphitheater is where I saw the Lilith Fair, and where my only regret this summer lies -- not getting my ass off the grass and walking over to see Sixpence None the Richer. |
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| And what office wouldn't be complete without a break room where employees can come together and talk about what a wonderful place it is to work. |
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| And what break room wouldn't be complete without an Espresso and Cappuccino maker. Before I came here, I hated the taste of coffee. For the first few weeks, I couldn't resist playing with the steam machine. After that, though, my disdain for the coffee taste won and I discovered how to mix my hot chocolate with the steam machine. |
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| One of the traditions for our Advanced Graphics Group was to force the new people to go up to the Prince of Wales Pub in San Mateo and endure the world's hottest hamburger. I was looking forward to proving my manhood, but on the way over, I was in a car with people who loved spicy food and knew all the names of those "killer sauces." I was scared. |
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| Needless to say, being the true man that I am, I shoved the whole hamburger down my throat and finished fastest. When I asked for another, I was warned that it hurts more coming out than it does going in, so I rethought that request. |
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