My (or Other) Rickover Stories
It seems that readers seem to like some of my more autobiographical posts. I myself think my story is interesting if just for its quirkiness. When I was going to high school, I never had heard of a database administrator (which has been my reinvented career since leaving academia in the middle of a 90's recession, after a 1-year temporary appointment at ISU without a job offer. I was in the academic job market for another 2-3 years); I did get a few campus visits (expenses-paid job interviews, where you usually give a guest lecture, typically related to your research), but no offers. I did get one from a Louisiana college in 1994, which I would have accepted except that it had been delayed and in the interim I got my first solid job offer from a private IT services company (which 3 years later would be sold to Equifax). The idea to reinvent myself as a DBA was largely based on some graduate database courses I took at UH. The university had Oracle RDBMS v. 2 installed on an IBM-compatible mainframe, but the college staffer DBA had issues keeping the database up, to the point that our entire class took an incomplete because the downtime made it impossible to complete our final database projects. While in academia I had bought a copy of Oracle v. 5 for the PC, which I think was marketed for $200. I eventually got my first Oracle DBA opportunity on an EPA contract in Chicago. But it didn't last long because my employer literally lost its recompete contract my second day on the job. That didn't mean I lost my job immediately but it would only last for a few months.I did my campus visit in the spring; I had thought it went well, but I recall a highly unusual student team interview, where this young woman of color aggressively asked me about my employer contacts in the private sector. I tried to dodge the question; as a junior faculty member, I had been working on tenure, not consulting, and had few professional contacts. Whatever contacts I had didn't help during my hiatus from academia. My prospective department chair seemed upbeat; I was expecting feedback within 2 weeks, no response to follow-up queries. (It wouldn't be until several weeks later. It's not clear what happened; other interview and/or university bureaucracy in getting an offer finalized.) In the meanwhile, I got an unusual interview from a local company maybe a 20-minute drive away. I think the Internet driving directions were misleading, and I didn't make the appointed time, probably getting there 10-15 minutes late. Almost invariably, you show up late, and you can forget getting an offer. It worked out, although they made a bargain basement offer, far less than I had made as a professor (but they would end up raising my salary over 50% within 2 years).
The college ended up extending an offer maybe 5 or 6 weeks into the new job, and to be honest, I was a little bit frustrated with the new job because they deferred my first DBA assignment, having me do some development (programming) work. (From my perspective, once you prove to be an unusually gifted programmer like I am, you get typecast.) My boss--and the technical co-founder of the company--was a developer who got up early in the morning working on creating computer games. He loved having a gifted developer working for him; why would you want to do DBA work when development was far cooler? There was some drama later when the CEO co-founder assigned me to some Citibank Indonesia project, which led to my boss' promoting in the interim a female developer to the new DBA spot (the company's lead DBA had been overextended, and we weren't hitting some deliverables). The new "DBA"/developer and I didn't get along, because basically she was ignoring our customer priorities and focusing on the project she had been working on as a developer. It turns out my boss and his wife socialized with the developer and her spouse, and my boss basically got ticked off at me on a personal basis. When she left for a six-figure offer downtown as a consultant (I feel sorry for the employer), he initially refused to give me the slot after the Citibank project and tried to do an external hire. The external hire fell through because of the prospective employee's father had died, and he decided to take over the family business. I had already been promised by the CEO to put me into an alternative team DBA slot, but my boss finally put me into the slot. I was basically the DBA he always wanted but never realized he needed. I'm basically a natural administrator; I took over a disorganized unit and made it highly organized, efficient and effective. The company VP wanted me to get exploding disk storage costs under control and institute controls. Developers grumbled over stripped DBA privileges, but management was thrilled with my results. I had no direct control over other DBAs, but the company sent them to me for training. I was able to do things their higher-paid DBA consultants didn't know how to do.
Unfortunately, somehow the developers, many of them mainframe programmers, saw me as management's ax man; the company had a very expensive mainframe they wanted to get rid of; they were transitioning applications off the mainframe to comparably inexpensive Sun Microsystems, with payback within 6 months. So the fear was that these workers thought, given their obsoleted mainframe skills, the company would fire them (via me), and we would hire bright Unix-savvy engineers fresh out of college to replace them. In fact, I knew the top managers of the company, and I knew they were far more concerned about losing the developers' industry background and experience; they were committed to retraining. But however these false rumors took hold, a number of them threatened to quit if I was named to a managerial position over them. In fact, to that point, I had never worked with any of them.
My boss was basically tired of the various social trappings of being a co-owner (i.e., cocktail parties with clients, etc.) and wanted to get back to a more focused tech managerial role. In fact, he had openly said that I and an account manager were the two best hires he ever made (the account manager had relieved him of having to interface with clients). He resigned to join a company that the CEO, his business partner, regarded as a competitor. His last few days were surreal; he shut himself into his office, windows covered. There were rumors of lawsuits. He later told me he wanted to bring me with him to his new company, but his company exit agreement forbade him. He recommended me as his replacement, which is like the kiss of death. Plus, I would later hear about the threat of developers to quit if I was named. There's more to the story, but I eventually joined our rapidly growing new business unit (with contracts with Southwestern Bell and Credicard in South America), where my best friend in the company served as a senior developer and project manager.
At any rate, I felt bad over turning down the Louisiana university's offer; I had gotten a personal letter from the department chair which I read some time later (like weeks or months). She somehow had take my rejection of the offer personally, like she must have done something to offend me. It was heartbreaking. I loved the idea of working with Annie. There was just one thing she did wrong: she didn't keep in touch after the visit. I had also gone on other campus visits where the college never got in touch with me after the visit (I don't even think I got a form letter rejection from, e.g., Alabama-Huntsville). If I had known, say, they had selected me and were pushing an offer through approvals, I probably have taken myself off the market (which I did do for the first 2-3 weeks after the visit). Why not quit the new job given the fact I loved being an academic? This was my first solid job as a perm employee vs consultant/contractor since leaving academia. Professional IT recruiters were very skeptical of the worthiness of academic IT experience (beyond entry-level jobs) and felt I wanted to use their companies as a refuge until the academia job market improved. I felt a year or two of solid IT work would leave me in a better position in the event I returned to academia and didn't win tenure.
Going back to when I first went to college: I originally thought of teaching high school and/or becoming a priest, like my maternal uncle. Well, my uncle was a diocesan priest; I was thinking more of joining a teaching order in the Church like the Jesuits or Oblates. I was head of the local altar boys at the south Texas AFB; I used to serve at the 6 AM morning mass before school. The base chaplain gave me his hardbound edition of St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica.
Despite my superior academic record in high school (I would graduate valedictorian), almost no colleges seemed to pursue me. My folks, my Mom a homemaker and my Dad struggling to raise a family of 7 children on an NCO's meager salary (at the time), were in no position to help financially. I had been saving roughly $30 a month on my paper route of about 90 subscribers (Saturday was my only day off), but that was a drop in the bucket for college. I remember worrying about having to spend money to send my SAT and ACT scores to other colleges beyond the 3 or so you were given to send your scores to. So there was a lot of uncertainty about gaining admission plus paying for school. I don't recall completing a number of applications or getting rejection letters, but I didn't apply to any name schools because (without a big financial aid package) I couldn't afford to attend.
OLL pulled a brilliant marketing move at the time, at least given my uncertainty and desire for closure at the time. They sent me a letter accepting me for admission; there was also the promise of a financial aid package (which may have been in a follow-up). Quite frankly, I didn't know anything about Our Lady of the Lake. But there were a lot of things to like. As I've mentioned before, I was thinking of becoming a priest, and this was a good Catholic college. They have an excellent teacher education program, and I was also thinking of teaching in a high school as a profession. Moreover, it was reasonably near where my family lived at the time, maybe a 2.5 hour bus drive away. I landed a Presidential scholarship which handled my tuition and I got a work/study arrangement which mostly covered my other living expenses. (I did have to take out a $1600 loan, which was much higher in today's dollars.)
The priesthood ambition quickly faded. I contacted the Jesuits early on, and I recall one of them coming to interview me in a dorm lounge, but there was no follow-up. Plus I had started dating (keep in mind I was 16 at the beginning and I was 19 when I graduated, so the coeds were generally older than me; I had not dated in high school. No car. In fact, my Dad had gotten a notice of how his insurance rates would skyrocket, so I wouldn't get my license until I joined the Navy (there were not BOQ's in Orlando, so I had to live off base). So I did date some, mostly one girl who eventually left to join a religious (Catholic Pentecostal) commune in the Dallas area, and our dates were things like going to a nearby taco stand off campus. But enough for me to question my necessary commitment to lifelong celibacy as a priest.
The high school teaching faded probably by my second semester. I remember being obsessed with getting into a philosophy class on metaphysics. Several students warned me the only spots available were with Sr. Morkovsky "and she doesn't give out A's". I was like, "I don't care." My academic adviser was my math department chair (my declared major). She was determined that I was going to take "History of Art": to hell with that! We had an impassioned debate, and I was so angry I walked out on her. Not the smartest move to piss off one of your major field's chair. Some time later I went back to apologize, and she laughed about it, saying that she had been so impassioned in what she was saying she didn't even realize I wasn't there until maybe 10 minutes after I left. Yes, I did enroll in the course (and got my A and many more) and fell in love with philosophy, which remains my true love.
I think it wasn't until I was in college before I had considered becoming a professor. And it was fairly clear that my prospect of getting a job with a philosophy PhD was bleak. I had a very good GPA in a school few others graduated Summa Cum Laude. One of the mathematics faculty introduced me to a recruiter who basically offered me a full scholarship in their doctoral program in southwestern Louisiana. I will always wonder what might have been, but for some reason going to a name college like UT some 75 miles away seemed to be a preferred alternative for my dream of being professor.
I got off to a bad start at the University of Texas, not because of academics but politics. I was assigned as a calculus teaching assistant to this visiting East European professor from Ohio State. We as teaching assistants conducted calculus word problem lab multiple sections twice a week. This professor had very idiosyncratic grading processes: he would give out 4 problem exams. You could drop one of the questions: 3 right an A, 2 right a B, 1 right a C. But regardless, to earn an A, you also had to ace an oral exam at the end of the semester to get your A. We TA's (Jeff and I) had no clue what types of questions would appear on his exams. A couple of anecdotes: one week he offered to lend me one of his books (over 100 pages long, filled with long equations) for the weekend. Yeah, no! In an incident I may have mentioned in past posts. He started writing without comment some 7 blackboards full of equations (students just jotting down everything down everything he wrote mechanically). At the end of the seventh board, he suddenly became very confused. He turned to me sheepishly and asked, "Do you know where I was going with all this?" I shook my head no. Not to mention his accent and pronunciation made things hard to follow--like "nature-ul"numbers and "recip(e)-RO-culls".
Students were pissed off, although apparently none of them went to the department chair. We as TA's felt the brunt of the discontent. My best student, a coed, literally threw her completed exam into my face leaving the room. Towards the final weeks of the semester, Jeff took the initiative and said we need to do an intervention with the professor. I reluctantly agree. We went to the professor's office, and Jeff motioned for me to start. I broke the news as gently as I could, and you could tell the professor was visibly shocked. He turned to Jeff and asked him if this was true. And then in a swerve unlike anything I've seen in pro wrestling events, Jeff said, "Well, you are always going to have a few students complain in any class, but I'm seeing nothing more than the usual who are going to complain, no matter who's teaching the course." This was a blatant lie; I didn't tape-record the conversation, but he's the one who had come to me citing his student's complaints. To this day, I don't know why Jeff turned the tables on me, but now the professor was obsessed with revenge on me as his lying enemy. He started stalking me. He followed me into my graduate real analysis class and started badmouthing me to the professor. I'm called into a meeting with the math department chair's office, and I'm read the riot act, being reminded I'm low man on the totem pole, there would be serious consequences to any future incidents with this or other professors, blah, blah, blah. I was well-aware I would have to drop out of the program without a graduate stipend.
This was really the beginning of the end of my goal of earning a doctorate at UT. There are a few other details, but bottom line, when it came time for stipend renewals for the following year, I was left off the list. That basically meant I had to salvage my Master's degree. I barely had enough money to make it through my thesis the next spring; a number theory professor offered me a part-time job as a grader. I had to borrow $500 from my maternal grandfather to get the thesis typed and printed.My Mom had suggested it, but my grandfather was still fuming over an incident when I was in 6th grade. One of my brothers had done something to tick me off, and I was chasing after him. My grandfather told me to stop or I wasn't to get any of his money for college: he wasn't my parent, and I basically told him what he could do with his money. My maternal uncle, the priest, smoothed things over, and I got the loan. A complimentary copy of my thesis was in the mail when we got the word that my grandfather had passed.
It's possible that I may not have gotten to candidacy even with a stipend. The University of Texas saw a glut of mathematicians on the market, and their graduating PhDs were't gong to name schools but regional schools like Central Missouri State. So they were doing their part to limit their outflow by increasing the number of exams (6) needed to achieve candidacy. I knew one married couple in the department where the wife qualified but her husband fell short by one exam.
I really hadn't thought about what to do after I left UT. Since my Dad was in the USAF, I checked out employment possibilities there. They were targeting me as a potential meteorologist; if selected, I would next go to the graduate program of A&M. Now to explain they had something like a selection pool and you had to have something like 75% of the ballots supporting you. The recruiters assured me, I would be selected but I wasn't. I was told that it wasn't unusual because they're focusing mostly on pilots for the first round, but for sure I would be selected the next round: they have to pick me then or else lose me for 6 months before I become eligible again. I got passed over in the second round.
The economy was in a recession when Carter came to office in 1977. My prospects seemed bleak. I sent out copies of my resumes to community colleges. That went nowhere. I was now kicking myself for minoring in my first love, philosophy, vs. computer science, like everyone else. I even resurrected the idea of becoming a high school teacher, but I needed financial aid to go back and earn my teaching credentials. But the law required if your parents listed you as a dependent in the prior year, you had to get a Family Financial Statement. I was pissed; look, I had been paying my own expenses since I was 16+. But even worse, my brother was enrolled and his FFS was on file. The bureaucrat said we can't violate "his" privacy--I'm going to need to get my own copy.
My folks refuse, claiming they wanted no responsibility of enabling my becoming a "professional student". I'm now seriously pissed and telling them I want in writing they are no longer claiming me as a dependent.
I'm getting no breaks. I get thrown out of the UT placement center for not being a currently registered student. (And UT doesn't understand why I'm not a contributing alumnus...)
Someone mentioned to me the possibility of the Navy needing mathematicians. So I explored the option. It turned out that Admiral Rickover, the "Father of the Nuclear Navy", took pride in telling Congress he personally interviewed every officer candidate in his program. He was a bit of a control freak, including not wanting contractors staffing his Nuclear Power School in Orlando but officers subject to his authority. Instructors, mostly new advanced degree graduates, were hired to single 4-year terms, not in the regular Navy but reserve officers. (It was so heavily structured that, say, a nuclear principles class might expand on material covered in their calculus lecture last period; if a math instructor called in sick, another instructor would seamlessly deliver that day's lecture material.)
The admiral's interviews were notoriously idiosyncratic. My candidacy smoothly progressed. Well, I had to take 2 trips to San Antonio for my physical, because the doctor claimed I had too much ear wax for him to check my eardrums. (This is actually a good way of explaining what being in the military is like.) So I fly up from Texas to join other candidates in that day's batch of interviews. And I've done a ton of interviews over my career, but nothing like this. We are given diagrams leading to the admiral's office, protocols of behavior (i.e., who not to talk to, where to stand, etc.)
I'm not sure what to expect: is he going to quiz me on advanced math? So my time comes and I take the specified position standing at attention in front of his desk. I'm not prepared for the first thing out of his mouth (paraphrased"
"What the hell are you wearing?"
(I don't recall being briefed on a dress code. I'm wearing a nice turtleneck, slacks. I think I'm tastefully dressed and look sharp. To be frank, I hadn't been to many job interviews before and didn't know the de facto standard for wearing a suit.)
"What's the matter with you? How dare you come here without a suit, shirt and tie? Don't you have any common sense?"
I say that I don't own a decent suit and tie, that I've been on a tight budget.
"COULDN'T YOU BORROW ONE? Go away; I'm done with you."
I'm literally in a state of shock. As a military brat, I knew that the military is anal-retentive about appearance; they will freak out over an unpolished belt buckle or a spot on a shirt. I'm kicking myself for not anticipating this point. Had I blown the job offer over what I wore? It was a long plane ride back to Austin.
Long story short. I did get the offer. Maybe he wanted to test my reaction to adverse circumstances. My Navy experience is another story.
But during the lead up to the interview. I heard a lot of Rickover stories. This is my favorite:
An applicant comes before the admiral for his interview.
Rickover demands that the applicant to do something to make him angry. The applicant takes the framed photo of Mrs. Rickover off his desk and stomps his foot through it.
The story ends with the admiral having to be physically restrained from attacking the applicant. No word on whether the applicant was hired, but he did achieve what the admiral asked for.
I'll conclude this post remembering a TV news clip later during the Carter Administration. Rickover is there with Carter, and Rickover told the Commander-in-Chief where to stand; Carter meekly complied. I had to laugh: classic Rickover.
