My First Boss

“OK, so we may not have the highest pay. But I can promise you two things. You’ll learn like crazy. And you’ll have the most fun.”

The Regional Manager stood up from the table. He was in full throttle, irresistible, moments from the close.

“Look out of the window. Have you ever seen any place so nice? And the people you’ve met here? Don’t you want to work with them?”

I had to admit that the village of Fairport looked sensationally beautiful that August morning, and that every person in the office who had interviewed me seemed like they were on some mind-altering enthusiasm drug.

He held out his hand.

“It should take you two days to drive up from Chapel Hill. Bill said he’d help you find an apartment. See you Monday after next then?”

I shook his hand weakly and agreed. Bewilderingly, I had accepted the lowest of my three job offers, in a town that I had seen for the first time in my life that morning. Like so many others, I had become spellbound by the warmth and bonhomie that radiated from Dave Walker’s every pore.

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The company was Sun Microsystems. It had been founded by four twenty-seven-year-olds a few years earlier and its line of Unix workstation was being bought by just about every scientific lab and industrial company in America. The organization’s biggest problem was handling the meteoric growth. It was my first job out of school, so I had no idea that this level of success was unusual for a startup. The first time I became aware that it was a big deal was when the company took out a “Thanks a Billion” ad in the Wall Street Journal on the day that it breached that revenue mark. It was at that point just six years old.

Dave had been hired to run the Upstate New York region, a 300-mile stretch from Albany to Buffalo. He spent half his time selling and the other half recruiting. Many times, they were one and the same thing. He had learned not to be surprised when a customer would say, fine, I’m going to buy twenty workstations and by the way, do you have a job opening in Ithaca?

Not that he needed the company’s success to help him recruit. People loved being around him. He had a natural empathy for others, loved hearing their stories, and in turn, was the best storyteller I have ever known. He had an uproarious laugh and an unending supply of jokes, many of them about himself.

Unlike almost everybody else I had met in my time in university, he had served his country in war. As a twenty-year-old, he had studied at the Army Defense Language Institute before deploying as a translator in the Phuoc Tuy province of Vietnam. One of his favorite stories was about talking with the locals as he walked off the plane at the US air base for the very first time. Eager to try out his new language skills, he had walked up to the drivers and introduced himself in what he thought was fluent Vietnamese. They stared at him in bewilderment, not knowing that this well-intended but unintelligible gibberish might be an attempt at their mother tongue. Finally, one of them replied, “Sorry, we don’t speak English.”

He had continued in the field as an Intelligence Officer. “A not very intelligent officer,” he’d say ruefully. He would confess to being blissfully unaware of the Cu Chi tunnels (the infamous 75-mile long complex of underground passageways in Saigon from which the Vietcong launched their Tet offensive) even as he walked over them every day.

From the stories, you would have thought he was Gomer Pyle, saved by innocence and luck as a titanic conflict raged around him. It wasn’t until many years later that I learned the truth. He had served with distinction. In addition to his Combat Infantry Badge, he had been awarded two Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts.

His modesty extended to other parts of his life as well. At first meeting, he came across as a friendly neighbor, all self-deprecation and good cheer. Underneath, though, was a ferociously smart mind. After his return from war, he had earned an undergraduate degree in math and a masters in software engineering. Later in his life, he would add an MBA for good measure.

Before joining Sun, Dave had cut his teeth at Data General and Masscomp, two of the best-regarded minicomputer companies of the time. He never stopped honing his technical knowledge in the fields of operating systems and application software. Once, when one of the best engineers in our office struggled with a piece of FORTRAN that seemed to have broken the compiler, he sat by his side, rolled up his sleeves and helped him debug the code.

He hired by gut, looking for a blend of smarts, work ethic and personality. In the early days of the field office, many of the employees came from the Grey Eagles, the legendary alumni group from Data General, who had quit their jobs to join him in his new adventure. Later, they came from local colleges – St. John Fisher, The University of Rochester, Syracuse. To a person, they were self-starters, jacks-of-all-trades. Everybody did everything.

I remember unloading equipment at the Rochester Convention Center from Saturday morning until almost midnight on Sunday. We were setting up our company booth for a trade show. Every member of the office was there - the engineers, the salespeople, the marketers, field service, even the admins. There was joking, camaraderie, and fellowship – more so than in any planned teambuilding event I have experienced since. We repaired to a diner in the early hours of Monday morning, and I don’t think any of us felt that we could have had more fun that weekend.

The office culture that Dave built was liberal, trusting and one that encouraged experimentation. Young enterprises often give a lot of leeway to their workers, and his organization took that value to the extreme. One evening, I heard a crackling noise from the space next to mine, and found that my officemate, Bill, was fiddling with a line card using a screwdriver, and had succeeded in shorting the entire circuit board and setting the machine on fire. He suffered no lasting repercussions for converting a $25,000 server into a toaster.

Another sales engineer, Richard, got onto the system administrator’s shit list for his pet project, a meticulously calculated ray-tracing of translucent orbs with multiple light sources. He had commandeered the entire office computing infrastructure every night for months in the service of a single perfect picture. Dave had difficulty keeping his smile in check when arbitrating the feud.

Sun itself was part NASA, part Animal House. Ferociously competent engineers mixed with hell-for-leather salespeople, and the result was combustible. The previous year, the company had been banned for life from a Palm Springs hotel when in the late hours of festivities after an offsite, a group of attendees had decided that the lobby piano would look better at the bottom of the pool. A subsequent meeting had been set at Newark which was judged to be a more restrained venue, but dinner had climaxed in a food fight led by the VP of Sales, who displayed a talent for marksmanship with the dinner rolls.

Dave excelled at stoking competitive fires between the various sales districts that rolled up to him. When Leslie closed a big deal with GE in Schenectady, he would have barely finished congratulating her before he was dialing the Pittsburgh District Manager to tell him that he had just been edged out of the top spot. He got such a heated race for Top Gun going between Ron and Tom, the two star sales reps in our office, that neither of them paid heed to the fact that they were already at 200 percent of their number. Each year, it seemed, he would be up on stage at Sales Club collecting an award for best performing region, highest growth, manager of the year.

The sales kickoff get-togethers at the beginning of each year were raucous affairs. At one of them in Lake Placid, after a day of presentations and planning meetings, the evening party got progressively louder and rowdier until ending with a lineup of dozens of glasses of Sambuca. When they were lit up to begin the shots, the flames rose so high that it seemed like a bonfire on the bar.

Fueled with this Dutch courage, one of the systems engineers urged some of the female staff to join him in a midnight skinny dip in the hotel pool. They allowed him to first strip down and jump into the freezing water before daintily declining. The story made its way from table to table at breakfast the next morning, and from then on, every meeting he was at would start with his being asked whether he had done anything interesting at Lake Plastered.

Watching the salespeople began to give me a case of work envy. I spent my days in frigid server rooms, surrounded by metal racks, whirring drives and almost no human contact. These people seemed to spend their lives at lunches and drinks and driving fancy cars. They seemed to have way more fun than us engineers, the people who actually made and serviced the products that they sold.

I met with Dave to complain about how unfair it all was. He listened with amusement and then invited me to switch careers. He knew of an open spot and he would set up some meetings with his reps to tell me what the life was like.

The first thing I learned that gave me pause was how much income security I would have to forego. I had not known until then that the pay was half base and half variable. The second thing that made me gulp was learning how publicly attainment numbers were shared. Quarterly achievement for every rep was shared with every employee in the region. Finally, it was stunning to hear that blowing out your numbers one year was likely to be met by…..an even higher quota the next. It was like seeing people around you glide but learning that in order to do so, you first had to have the courage to leap off a cliff.

It took me a full year to overcome my jitters. During that time, Dave sent me on the road on sales calls, ostensibly to provide technical support at meetings but in reality, for me to learn how difficult this whole business of selling really was. I developed an intimate familiarity with the state turnpike. On long drives to the Air Force Base in Utica or the Computer Science department at Troy, I would quiz my sales companions. How many phone calls before they got a meeting? Seven on an average, though Mike had once done twenty-five. Painful memory? Having to fill out 580 pages of paperwork for a government RFP response. Worst experience? A previous employer going bankrupt after the rep made her number but before they were able to pay her commission.

My final winter in Rochester, Dave learned that I had never been climbing in the Adirondacks. He proposed a weekend trip to climb Mt. Algonquin, the tallest peak in the region. Along with my fellow engineer Bill, we drove out in the evening to the town of Keene. It started to snow that night, and the next morning, the lodge-owner looked doubtfully out of the window and asked whether we were really set on summiting. Of course, we replied. Since when were we scared of a few snowflakes?

The first couple of hours were enough for me to work up a sweat, but by the time we got to five thousand feet, the drops had become rivulets pouring down my back. The wind had picked up steadily until it became a shrieking gale. Snow started falling in sheets, and by the time we gasped our way to the peak, it was coming at us horizontally. We were enveloped in a wall of white.

I am still not sure how we made it down the mountain that day. We could not see the trail at all and I wondered if this was what snow blindness felt like. We flailed wildly, slipping down what we hoped was the path, and spending more time on our backsides than on our feet. We slid down rocky slopes, got our socks soaked in an icy stream, and almost collapsed with happiness when we accidentally stumbled upon the trail head many hours later. As we careened down the road back home, our waves of laughter were underlaid with sweet relief.

That was my last adventure with him. I left the next month to begin my first sales job in Boston, helped as always by the phone calls he had made ahead of time to ease my transition. He continued rising from success to success at the company, ending in the position of VP of Worldwide Sales for its software spinoff. He left the firm fifteen years after his start, just before the dotcom bust.

We shared stories about him for years, all of us who had worked in his team. I heard that he had moved to Atlanta and that he was spending more time doing other things that he loved – spending time with his family, flying small planes, visiting the islands.

He didn’t tell many people about the cancer. I don’t think we would have believed anyway that there was anything that could make a dent on someone who was so much larger than life. When the news came last month that he had taken his last solo flight west, I sat holding my phone in shock and sorrow.

His son put up a web page to share Dave stories. I had expected to see the funny ones, but not the stories of his compassion. I had somehow thought that my experience of him was unique.

All that time ago, he had helped a nervous foreign student find his feet at his first job. He had patiently advised and guided me through a time of enormous change – my move to New York, first apartment, first car, first paycheck, a switch from engineering to sales. As the texts bloomed in profusion on my screen, I learned that he had also helped someone go back to college to finish their degree; seen someone else through a hard divorce; got someone else a job when they had been having a difficult time rejoining the workforce.

The reminiscences poured on and on, exquisite memories from people who hadn’t realized at that time what an amazing work culture he had built, and who would spend many subsequent years in a quest to recreate that sense of belonging. We were all lucky to have shared his joie de vivre.

Hail and farewell, Dave. You took up so much space in so many rooms.