In a prior post I mentioned my co-op experience at IBM. When I completed those 8 months they told me that they would be offering me a job in May 83 and did I want to interview for another department. I told them I would… so in the fall they brought me back to Poughkeepsie… well actually I drove down the thruway in my car and stayed at the Holiday Inn.

The next day I drove to the 416 building and met the recruiter from IBM. Her name was Pat O’Malley and she told me that they had a busy day for me. I would talk to people in building 8 (local information technology), and to people in Myers Corners lab (software development). I spent the morning with 2-3 interviews with people in IT systems that ran IMS (a hierarchical database), in IT systems support, and I think internal application development on some kind of inventory tracking system. I had lunch with my old team and Charlie Daniele my boss during my co-op. Then a woman came to pick me up and drive me to Myers Corners, I remember her name was Corinne and she had very long nails and drove a Mercedes. In Myers Corners I met with Dave Duffrin to talk about high availability and something called HARP (or Availability Manager – AVM), I spoke to a guy in JES3 development (named Gary) and a guy in JES system test. The System test guy told me that the job sucked and I would hate it.

At the end of the day Corinne took me back to bldg 416 and I met with Pat who asked me about my expenses… and I said pretty much just a half tank of gas. Like $10. She handed me $60 bucks and told me to stop on the way back and get a nice steak. She asked which job I liked and I really wanted the job with Dave Duffrin. They paid me in cash before I left the site! This was huge for a college student.

But a few weeks later they told me that they filled Dave Duffrins job… but Charlie Daniele my manager on co-op who had met with me had offered a job. I talked to him and he said just work for me for a year and then I will let you transfer anywhere in IBM.

Later that year I interviewed with Shared Medical Systems,in King of Pussia PA where they wrote software for hospitals in SNOBOL, Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena California where they wrote in Fortan 2, and somewhere else that escapes me… and for each of these you had to spend money to go on the interview and wait to be reimbursed. For JPL a government agency it took 5 months and at that time I was in for like $900… This is just really hard when you don’t have any steady income. In any case I took the job with IBM.

IBM was hiring like crazy back then 50-100 people a week. You could kind of name your job. This was to end a few years later. The day I started they did your initial paperwork in the cafeteria where like 100 people are doing the same thing. You have to sign a paper saying you have no ideas prior to IBM and that anything you think of from this point forward is IBM’s property not yours.

People say we had to take a programming test (called the IPAT), I don’t recall ever doing that at IBM. I might have done one with Shared Medical Systems. I also only had a bachelors degree and it wasn’t in computer science… it was in Biology. A few years later IBM wouldn’t have considered hiring me without a computer science degree. IBM had a great program where they would pay for you to get advanced degrees and I got a Masters in Computer Science via night school a few years after I started at IBM. I didn’t get any kind of raise or anything… but it made me feel a little more like a legitimate programmer.

When I started in May of 1983 Pat O’Malley didn’t tell me I had to ask to keep my badge number and my co-op time could be added to my years of service. Years later I tried many times to fix that to no avail. She did tell me to start May 30th so that I would have an additional vacation day that first year.

Lastly, turns out the person who got the job with Dave Duffrin was none other than Tom Rosamilia who later was a Senior Vice President of IBM (I am sure he had many more titles) Tom and I were ‘table mates’ in EPE – experienced programmer education, my first IBM programming class. This was where I met several people who worked at Myers Corners lab on MVS.