| The
Working Life... a retrospective insight |
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http://www.lante.com
The
Lanza Story|
The most recent of my working adventures brings me to a small dot com consulting company called Lante. Originally sold to me as, "the High Impact Business Builders", we are now the "from concept to launch to value - at internet speed" company. The question I get most is, "So exactly what do you do?" and "How do you manage those hours?" hehehe... Well the answer to those questions are: I code, and I'm special. What does my company do? Well... We build eMarkets... huh? Exactly. Some of you (my CSA peeps might remember me at the 2000 Chinese New Years Banquet) well that was the night the company went IPO, and I had come straight from a company celebration... hehehe... well if you want to know why I drink these days, check out our stock on the NASDAQ... ticker LNTE. |
Direct Network Access
http://www.dnai.com
"Thank
you for calling DNAI how may I direct your call?..."
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"My ISP, My JOB, My LIFE?" - hardly, but for a while I did work quite a few hours... for me at least. I know that every company says and likes to believe that it's people are devoted and give some assemblence of a fuck about the company. But in truth, as far as most companies are concerned the people only care about "face time" and getting their paychecks so that they can go on living their lives. Now at DNAI, the people actually did care. People who could be making more money at big companies, who knew a hell of a lot more about computers than me (and that's saying a lot) stayed and worked long hours to boot. People who weren't scheduled to work would come by the office to hang out, and a large percentage of the company would interact with each other during none business hours... w/out any subsidy by the company... Was I so devoted, no, but that was probably b/c I was a part-timer and had a relatively busy life outside of work... also I was a phone monkey... I think this UserFriendly cartoon depicts my job pretty accurately:
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Xilinx
http://www.xilinx.com
yum...Xilinx
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I had a summer internship a Xilinx after my sophmore year of college... What can I say about Xilinx? The leader in their field, shown by the history of their stock and the attitude of the people there. Very cool place to work and very cool people to work with. The only problem was that it was way the hell down in South San Jose and the commute was killing me. And how did I land job like this? I mean for a company that made FPGAs of all things... Well I was sitting at home one day when a guy from Xilinx called to speak with my roomate Son about a internship position. I at the time had enrolled in Session C (summer school). I picked up the phone (Son wasn't home) and ended up chatting with the guy. I asked him what the position entailed and yada-yada-yada and he asked me if I cared for an interview. I figured why not and before I knew it I had a job. Looking back I think it's funny, I had the job fall in my lap, everyone there loved me, they offered me a job at the end of the summer, and to pay for finishing my undergrad (not at Cal though) and to pay for my grad school... and I declined... why? b/c at that time I was still med school bound, and my parents would kill me if I didn't finish my degree at Cal. Even funnier, they offered me about as much as I make at my current job after my first raise... HA! |
Disneyland
http://www.disney.com
"Would
you like Meat or Marinara Sauce?"
| my humble beginnings... Disneyland... and before you all start thinking how cool it must have been, let me say one thing. FOOD SERVICE. Yes believe it or not, I had a job that involved manual labor. How was it? Well, not a bad first job for a high school kid at the time... it paid $5.25 which was pretty good for those sort of jobs at the time (I think minimum wage back then was $4.50 or so). What did I do? I served food... When did I know it was time to quit? When they tried getting me to start busing tables... that's how my real fear of manual labor labor came about... I was surrounded by football player sized guys who could balance a dish tray containing leftover beverages and 6-7 tables worth of dishes in one hand and hold the stupid stand thing in the other. I on the other hand could barely carry 5 tables worth with no liquids... What did I learn? Nabil <> physical work. It's funny at the same time I was tutoring a kid in AP Computer Science and was making $20/hr... and yet I continued to work there. Boy I was stupid back then. (Although a lot of hot girls came to/worked at Disneyland). =Þ |
