Hello and welcome to my world (Otherwise known as hell...).
A brief introduction: my name is John Becker and I am a former electrical engineer and computer hardware designer as well as a part time programmer/app writer. (I have one game in the Apple App Store…yeah!...) I am 59 years old and have Bachelor degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics as well as a Masters in Computer Information Services with 25 years of active hardware design or verification experience across more than two dozen products.
I am currently (mostly) unemployable at a level commensurate with my years of experience and the reasons go way beyond capability and skill.
The short story is basically simple, but not quite so short. Way back in 1996 I was railroaded by two crappy, dishonest managers -- you know -- the "recklessly ambitious, overly ambitious, stupidly ambitious, pieces of human filth managers" we've all run into on occasion.
I was hired for my Ethernet and LAN expertise. When deciding what kind of Ethernet product we would need, my experience told me to do "Product Proposal 1", but these two idiots were infatuated with "Product Proposal 2", which, as I pointed out to them, might look good in pictures and glossy marketing pamphlets, but would woefully under perform and cause more problems than it would solve. In the end, I lost the argument.
So I did their product. Six months or so of massive OT and fretting went by when the other shoe dropped, and it was looking like these two managerial morons were about to be forced into taking some uncomfortable credit for an under performing piece of crap product. To solve their problem, they made me go back and do "Product Proposal 1" and to do it in less than two weeks. Yep, real smart...two weeks. I was working 80 hours plus per week to get it done, literally sleeping in my cube. On the day this "board of salvation" finally arrived I also found myself in a "disagreement" with my brand new baby-ass, twit manager. He told me he wanted everything plus the moon from me and I told him to shove it. (A little advice to managers working with 80 hour per week employees who you have doing your "salvation" product all day and all night -- don't rattle their cages, you stupid fucks.) Right after that skirmish, I used the company email to contact a friend and asked him if he had any available work. I knew this email would be read by the two imbecilic managers after my little spat with shithead, but it didn't have the effect I had counted on. (Ooops!)
They decided to fire me instead. I was surprised they did that, though I really shouldn't have been if I had thought the situation through. I basically gave them a "reason" to fire me when I challenged them with that last email. I basically said I'm ready to quit if they didn't back off, and they took it as a real threat. I was just kidding, but these two morons weren't going to take any chances. But the most important reason was how handy I could be as a scapegoat to them. (I said they were sneaky shits.) They had their "salvation" board safely in their hands that very day, and by "firing" me could (and as I found out later -- did) make me the scapegoat on all that was wrong with the first card, second card, and all that came after that.
And there were other reasons to indicate this was a dirty trick by those two. My new manager was also demoted that same day for some unknown reason. Plus the human resources person told me I had to come in the next day and give an exit interview. WTF??? She said if I did, they would drop the "termination" charges and a make my exit one of "voluntary resignation". WTF??? again. When I came in for the exit interview, I was only asked one question...just one, stupid, simple, question: was I really gonna quit? I was originally going to say quite truthfully "no", but I reconsidered and thought I would be better off just quiting that shit hole outright so I said "yes" and left.
I spent most of my time (a little more than two years) after that seeking doctors advice for some very troubling vision problems I was suffering from, and every now and then I'd also look for work. I happened to interview with a prick from Network Systems I've already dubbed "BMOC". I didn't get the job, but the prick picked up a fourth-hand, politically skewed story from my old managers from my former company. Of course, this was the story that featured their scapegoating.
That prick would remember that miserable, lie-soaked story for the next eight years, when I would spot him working at my then new company, StorageTek. Even though I avoided him like the plague he more or less resembled, it didn't stop “BMOC” from repeating this heavily slanted and skewed story as if it was gospel truth and the totality of who I am -- a bum hardware designer.
But if my managers at StorageTek were decent people, they could have exposed "BMOCs" lunacy and revealed just how much bullshit there was in his story by simply cross examining him and directly approaching me about it. Evidently, StorageTek's management was too stupid to do that. (There is also a very, very remote chance it was someone else, but highly unlikely.)
But this information, all from way back in 1996, was used by the witless pigs of StorageTek leadership to sideline my participation in any real design work, which basically led to my career death. They bowed to it to completely and totally destroyed my identity (I mean DESTROYED it all!) as a HW designer while turning me into some bizarre “HW Helper Engineer” -- in this case a type of programmer with no HW experience whatsoever and no job future any where in the world.
That was just the beginning, as this story isn't just about me and it isn't the whole story anymore. Senior management wanted two new job requisitions dropped that lower management had requested as it was manning up for a new product design cycle. But to get these requisitions justified, lower management had to falsify the profiles of nearly everyone in the department in order to create those two vacancies, which of course was a big, big secret. The third level manager became suspicious something was not right, and asked everyone in the department to send in their own, personally written, profiles directly to him. In response, lower management got permission from most of the other engineers to do their profiles and sent in a pack of lies. I figured this little stunt out and confronted my first level manager with it. He told me he had also done my profile, completely without my permission of course. I told him to go fuck himself and left his office. I should have turned him in like I originally thought I should have, but of course and I now regret that more than anything I've ever done (or in this case -- not done.) I decided to get a new job and quit instead, just shut up about it all this and keep looking for my salvation.
I did not know it at the time, but I had just planted the seeds for my blacklisting. (Yes, blacklisting.) My managers had become paranoid and afraid I would squeal on them, especially if I ever went to another company. They were just as afraid I'd could do it while I was still working at StorageTek/Sun Microsystems, but since I hadn't, they seemed to hold off and wait. Problem was my "official profile" was the kind a third level manager would love to lay off. All he needed was a reason to do that, and he got it less than a year later, when StorgeTek/Sun Microsystems failed earnings late April of 2008.
They canceled the product and planned extensive layoffs. When I was considered, my forged profile spoke of my lack of skills in hardware design -- all of it lies, but the third level manager didn't know that and my shit-for-brains managers weren't going to correct him on it. As for me, it was actually nice to get out of another shit hole and I appreciated the lay off with it's paid time off.
I went back to trying find a job soon afterward. I remember endlessly applying for work, one job after another. Nothing. I even went back to school to get a masters degree in Computer Information Systems. Didn't do a thing for my job search. Then, in my sixth year of unemployment, I applied for a job as a contract player for an east coast company called CTG while they contracted me out to a company called Ricoh. Few months in my manager was impressed with my work enough to hire me permanently, but I needed to "win" over the job from all the other public applicants first. So I applied and waited.
About this time I ran across some news articles about blacklisting. (Hey! Just to get this out of the way, did you know they blacklist in the front range? They do and lots of it!) So I asked my manager if he ever got my job application. He said "no". He then went to find it, and he found it safely in the hands of the executive aides who ran the application SW. When I asked him if I had been blacklisted he said nothing. Nothing. He just stewed and grunted. I knew. For the last seven years, a couple of fairies have been halting my re-entry back into the job market. Goddamn bastards. (And Ricoh never did hire me, even though my manager really wanted me. Why? Because I had been blacklisted and when one participates in this unethical activity, you "honor and obey" the wishes of all the other companies; you do not go off on your own.)
There is more to this story -- a lot more. But you'll have to read on in the more complete chapters.
As you may have guessed, this is something of a cathartic narrative - a chance to yell my story from the highest mountaintop (which today is the Internet) and hopefully bring me and my family some peace of mind. A chance to reassign the blame and poor judgment on those who really deserve it. A chance to examine the underground practice of blacklisting where your name proceeds your resume which then gets shredded even before someone has a chance to look at it or you yourself are essentially slandered. I hope this narrative makes a difference to the honest people who execute both their personal and professional lives with integrity.
The short story is basically simple, but not quite so short. Way back in 1996 I was railroaded by two crappy, dishonest managers -- you know -- the "recklessly ambitious, overly ambitious, stupidly ambitious, pieces of human filth managers" we've all run into on occasion.
I was hired for my Ethernet and LAN expertise. When deciding what kind of Ethernet product we would need, my experience told me to do "Product Proposal 1", but these two idiots were infatuated with "Product Proposal 2", which, as I pointed out to them, might look good in pictures and glossy marketing pamphlets, but would woefully under perform and cause more problems than it would solve. In the end, I lost the argument.
So I did their product. Six months or so of massive OT and fretting went by when the other shoe dropped, and it was looking like these two managerial morons were about to be forced into taking some uncomfortable credit for an under performing piece of crap product. To solve their problem, they made me go back and do "Product Proposal 1" and to do it in less than two weeks. Yep, real smart...two weeks. I was working 80 hours plus per week to get it done, literally sleeping in my cube. On the day this "board of salvation" finally arrived I also found myself in a "disagreement" with my brand new baby-ass, twit manager. He told me he wanted everything plus the moon from me and I told him to shove it. (A little advice to managers working with 80 hour per week employees who you have doing your "salvation" product all day and all night -- don't rattle their cages, you stupid fucks.) Right after that skirmish, I used the company email to contact a friend and asked him if he had any available work. I knew this email would be read by the two imbecilic managers after my little spat with shithead, but it didn't have the effect I had counted on. (Ooops!)
They decided to fire me instead. I was surprised they did that, though I really shouldn't have been if I had thought the situation through. I basically gave them a "reason" to fire me when I challenged them with that last email. I basically said I'm ready to quit if they didn't back off, and they took it as a real threat. I was just kidding, but these two morons weren't going to take any chances. But the most important reason was how handy I could be as a scapegoat to them. (I said they were sneaky shits.) They had their "salvation" board safely in their hands that very day, and by "firing" me could (and as I found out later -- did) make me the scapegoat on all that was wrong with the first card, second card, and all that came after that.
And there were other reasons to indicate this was a dirty trick by those two. My new manager was also demoted that same day for some unknown reason. Plus the human resources person told me I had to come in the next day and give an exit interview. WTF??? She said if I did, they would drop the "termination" charges and a make my exit one of "voluntary resignation". WTF??? again. When I came in for the exit interview, I was only asked one question...just one, stupid, simple, question: was I really gonna quit? I was originally going to say quite truthfully "no", but I reconsidered and thought I would be better off just quiting that shit hole outright so I said "yes" and left.
I spent most of my time (a little more than two years) after that seeking doctors advice for some very troubling vision problems I was suffering from, and every now and then I'd also look for work. I happened to interview with a prick from Network Systems I've already dubbed "BMOC". I didn't get the job, but the prick picked up a fourth-hand, politically skewed story from my old managers from my former company. Of course, this was the story that featured their scapegoating.
That prick would remember that miserable, lie-soaked story for the next eight years, when I would spot him working at my then new company, StorageTek. Even though I avoided him like the plague he more or less resembled, it didn't stop “BMOC” from repeating this heavily slanted and skewed story as if it was gospel truth and the totality of who I am -- a bum hardware designer.
But if my managers at StorageTek were decent people, they could have exposed "BMOCs" lunacy and revealed just how much bullshit there was in his story by simply cross examining him and directly approaching me about it. Evidently, StorageTek's management was too stupid to do that. (There is also a very, very remote chance it was someone else, but highly unlikely.)
But this information, all from way back in 1996, was used by the witless pigs of StorageTek leadership to sideline my participation in any real design work, which basically led to my career death. They bowed to it to completely and totally destroyed my identity (I mean DESTROYED it all!) as a HW designer while turning me into some bizarre “HW Helper Engineer” -- in this case a type of programmer with no HW experience whatsoever and no job future any where in the world.
That was just the beginning, as this story isn't just about me and it isn't the whole story anymore. Senior management wanted two new job requisitions dropped that lower management had requested as it was manning up for a new product design cycle. But to get these requisitions justified, lower management had to falsify the profiles of nearly everyone in the department in order to create those two vacancies, which of course was a big, big secret. The third level manager became suspicious something was not right, and asked everyone in the department to send in their own, personally written, profiles directly to him. In response, lower management got permission from most of the other engineers to do their profiles and sent in a pack of lies. I figured this little stunt out and confronted my first level manager with it. He told me he had also done my profile, completely without my permission of course. I told him to go fuck himself and left his office. I should have turned him in like I originally thought I should have, but of course and I now regret that more than anything I've ever done (or in this case -- not done.) I decided to get a new job and quit instead, just shut up about it all this and keep looking for my salvation.
I did not know it at the time, but I had just planted the seeds for my blacklisting. (Yes, blacklisting.) My managers had become paranoid and afraid I would squeal on them, especially if I ever went to another company. They were just as afraid I'd could do it while I was still working at StorageTek/Sun Microsystems, but since I hadn't, they seemed to hold off and wait. Problem was my "official profile" was the kind a third level manager would love to lay off. All he needed was a reason to do that, and he got it less than a year later, when StorgeTek/Sun Microsystems failed earnings late April of 2008.
They canceled the product and planned extensive layoffs. When I was considered, my forged profile spoke of my lack of skills in hardware design -- all of it lies, but the third level manager didn't know that and my shit-for-brains managers weren't going to correct him on it. As for me, it was actually nice to get out of another shit hole and I appreciated the lay off with it's paid time off.
I went back to trying find a job soon afterward. I remember endlessly applying for work, one job after another. Nothing. I even went back to school to get a masters degree in Computer Information Systems. Didn't do a thing for my job search. Then, in my sixth year of unemployment, I applied for a job as a contract player for an east coast company called CTG while they contracted me out to a company called Ricoh. Few months in my manager was impressed with my work enough to hire me permanently, but I needed to "win" over the job from all the other public applicants first. So I applied and waited.
About this time I ran across some news articles about blacklisting. (Hey! Just to get this out of the way, did you know they blacklist in the front range? They do and lots of it!) So I asked my manager if he ever got my job application. He said "no". He then went to find it, and he found it safely in the hands of the executive aides who ran the application SW. When I asked him if I had been blacklisted he said nothing. Nothing. He just stewed and grunted. I knew. For the last seven years, a couple of fairies have been halting my re-entry back into the job market. Goddamn bastards. (And Ricoh never did hire me, even though my manager really wanted me. Why? Because I had been blacklisted and when one participates in this unethical activity, you "honor and obey" the wishes of all the other companies; you do not go off on your own.)
There is more to this story -- a lot more. But you'll have to read on in the more complete chapters.
As you may have guessed, this is something of a cathartic narrative - a chance to yell my story from the highest mountaintop (which today is the Internet) and hopefully bring me and my family some peace of mind. A chance to reassign the blame and poor judgment on those who really deserve it. A chance to examine the underground practice of blacklisting where your name proceeds your resume which then gets shredded even before someone has a chance to look at it or you yourself are essentially slandered. I hope this narrative makes a difference to the honest people who execute both their personal and professional lives with integrity.
This story has many technical angles and is best understood by fellow computer hardware designers though I’ll do my best to make it, or at least some of it, understandable to lay people when I can.
I tend to use the phrase “mentally retarded” a lot. I don’t mean to disparage those with real cognitive challenges, but rather to identify those in engineering who are “technologically retarded” or stupid. I know just way to many people who fit this bill.
These stories start way back in 1993 and continue to the present. The reason all this is so detailed is because I needed to cover every "if, and, or but" that somebody critical of the contents could throw at it. You know, those idiots (or is it morons?) who believe the corporate world is a rock solid, mistake free, perfectly accurate rater of peoples skills and talents -- well it ain't. I need to show many of you the warts, flaws, and greed of the corporate world and I need a detailed narrative to defend that idea.
When I began this, there was a proliferation of profanity growing among my words; sort of a way to better help me express myself as I am not the best nor most confident writer. I have now "toned" that down a bit -- not totally, but much less than when I started.
Companies I refer to, such as Netstar, Ascend, StorageTek and Sun Microsystems have largely gone extinct, existing mostly as name tags on some other companies products, if they exist in any form at all. Companies that do still exist, such as Oracle, Lockheed Martin or Seagate, are only incidental to this narrative and I have nothing against them.
The next four "chapters" explain my design experience over the last 27 years and does it in detail. I feel I need to do it in this way in order to always have a response to those nay-sayers who feel they're sure that some part of my story is untrue. The next set of chapters, however, better illustrate my feelings towards the corporate beast and the amount of raw stupidity that lies within the walls of corporate America; it's where I get a chance to have some fun...
If any of you are interested in the real names of these individuals, who I refer to in pseudonyms, please send me a list of those you are specifically interested in and I'll send you their real names, toot sweet. :)
Go ahead....read on....I dare you.
These stories start way back in 1993 and continue to the present. The reason all this is so detailed is because I needed to cover every "if, and, or but" that somebody critical of the contents could throw at it. You know, those idiots (or is it morons?) who believe the corporate world is a rock solid, mistake free, perfectly accurate rater of peoples skills and talents -- well it ain't. I need to show many of you the warts, flaws, and greed of the corporate world and I need a detailed narrative to defend that idea.
When I began this, there was a proliferation of profanity growing among my words; sort of a way to better help me express myself as I am not the best nor most confident writer. I have now "toned" that down a bit -- not totally, but much less than when I started.
Companies I refer to, such as Netstar, Ascend, StorageTek and Sun Microsystems have largely gone extinct, existing mostly as name tags on some other companies products, if they exist in any form at all. Companies that do still exist, such as Oracle, Lockheed Martin or Seagate, are only incidental to this narrative and I have nothing against them.
The next four "chapters" explain my design experience over the last 27 years and does it in detail. I feel I need to do it in this way in order to always have a response to those nay-sayers who feel they're sure that some part of my story is untrue. The next set of chapters, however, better illustrate my feelings towards the corporate beast and the amount of raw stupidity that lies within the walls of corporate America; it's where I get a chance to have some fun...
If any of you are interested in the real names of these individuals, who I refer to in pseudonyms, please send me a list of those you are specifically interested in and I'll send you their real names, toot sweet. :)
Go ahead....read on....I dare you.
Making Money on the Move - Work-to-Earn Money
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