There were 4 Koch brothers: Frederick, Charles, David and Bill (the latter two twins). Charles earned an MIT engineering degree and two graduate engineering degrees, eventually taking the helm of his dad's flagship middle-sized oil company. David joined Charles at the company and they eventually bought out their brothers' shares. Both brothers have held pro-liberty views; David, who died in 2019, had been the 1980 LP VP nominee. They have been demonized by the left for years, in part because st times they've supported tthe GOP, which has been pro-market in economic policy. I share a number of their positions; to give a simple example, I just read Charles cited Grover Cleveland and Calvin Coolidge as his favorite Presidents, and I have referenced both of them (independently) in multiple tweets over the years, particularly as Obama or Trump minions cite their hero as the best POTUS ever.
I have my own issues with the Koch brothers which has zero to do with politics. I've touched on this in passing in the blog. My career as an MIS professor prematurely ended in a recession on a one-year nonrenewable visiting professor appointment at a mid-Illinois university. My dissertation chair,among other courses, had taught courses in database; I had an emerging research interest in human factors/ergonomics (a discipline focused on fitting technology to humans in order io augment productive, satisfactory use). IBM's Structured Query Language for accessing relational (table-like) databases had intrigued me, although my dissertation didn't focus on that. My doctoral office mate, Minnie Yen, later an Alaska university professor, did with hers. I would later write a learn-by-doing SQL manual that Minnie and I would later assess using student subjects. Minnie and I had our first exposure to relational databases at UH (different classes) using an early version of Oracle on out campus IBM mainframe-compatiblr computer (Oracle then called its sqlplus interactive language UFI ("user-friendly interface"), and documentation came in 3-ring binders.) UH's Oracle DBA struggled to keep our databases up; it was so bad that our entire first-semester class had to take incomplete's. I think that experience planted the seed for a professional career as a DBA.
I had had a difficult time transitioning back to professional IT. A lot of recruiters were skeptical of being used by a professor between academic jobs; many others did not regard academic IT experience as relevant (and regarded my 8 years in academia as unemployment, with prior developer experience as stale at best) and/or had stereotypes of professors as Ivory tower types who can't function in the real business world. I had early hopes for a DBA slot, but recruiters refused to consider me without at least a year of relevant professional experience.
I finally got my foot in the door on a low-paying federal contractor position contract gig at the US EPA Chicago labs; I think my new employer lost their re-compete my second day on the job so it only lasted a few months. I had better luck at a privately-held marketing research firm, still my favorite job over my career: I even got a shot of working a few months for a Brazilian client on site. The company got bought out by Equifax. Coopers & Lybrand had been recruiting me since before the acquisition to join their ERP practice; ERP is integrated software across the organization from invoices to operations to financial statements; to someone with two graduate business degrees, it was like water to a duck. Oracle had developed an ERP alternative (eventually called E-Business Suite) to SAP's market leading suite (I also had some related exposure as an SAP Basis administrator). The Chicago practice had only a few clients, and the practice (and my job with it) was dissolved before the PWC merger. I joined Oracle Consulting's GEHC practice as a senior principal and spent the next decade mostly as an Oracle Apps (EBS) DBA consultant, including a post-Oracle stint at IBM, especially focusing on EBS upgrade and/or migration projects.
A good example was my last project for IBM, a highly (office) political, successful one involving well-known tax preparation company. IBM had a number of business units; one did principally host sourcing, something today which would be called IaaS in cloud computing. The client on the add-on front had retained Bearing Point to manage EBS, My practice, Applications on Demand, basically included application software support (e.g., similar to SaaS), with 24x7 operation with off-prime time patching by less experienced DBA's in Bangalore. This was basically a cookie cutter operation that assumed that the migrating EBS was in an Oracle standard configuration and patching compliant. Our business account guys had not done due diligence of the client's setup. BP had what I would call a "poison pill" setup. They hadn't done any patching in about 18 months. They had a nonstandard setup where standard utilities and patching didn't work. I had to engineer s square peg into a round hole. My boss found out all I had to do, knowing they weren't billing for my remediation efforts. He tried to pressure the client to patch up before migration; I knew the clients wouldn't agree to 2 outages for migration. I became the de facto project manager; I didn't even have server space a week before cutover. I had to guide client expectations.and deal with grossly incompetent OS and networking setups and a culturally cliquish environment . Two examples to make the latter point: a Bangalore DBA manager was furious at me for not spinning off enough cookie cutter work for his DBA's and would refuse to support the migrated database. Then I was working with a functional consultant over cutover weekend; I specifically told him to ensure his remote connection was working. So I'm feverishly working to transition to him by Saturday noon for checking functionality, etc. We had the weekend and Monday to resolve any issues; Tuesday they were going live. So he calls me back to tell me his remote setup isn't working, and our support group was running a skeleton crew and couldn't fix the issue until Monday. The guy is in easy driving distance to the client's Florida headquarters, and I'm telling him, "Dude, go to the client site!" "No, I don't have weekend access; they would have to call the client manager." What the hell? Did the guy do any contingency planning? "Dude, call the manager!" "No, I'm not going to do that. It'll wait until Monday." Are you kidding me? In the end, the client was thrilled with my efforts. said it was the smoothest IT project he'd ever been involved with. The IBM account manager lavished praise on the "team"'s efforts. Dude, I literally did 85% of the work on that project. I resigned shortly thereafter.
Work assignments became harder to come by, particularly after the Nasdaq meltdown and during the Great Recession. Chicago was particularly hard hit by the former. So I think the Koch situation occurred before I moved to MD in 2004, I think I read something like 150 consulting companies in the Chicago area went out of business. Clients didn't want to hire "expensive" consultants for much the same reason they didn't want to hire academics. It didn't matter I was willing to cut my salary demands. They worried about the flight risk if and when the economy recovered and my taking their "investment" in me with me. It was an employer's market. So in addition to looking for a permanent position, I was open to working on W-2 or 1099 as a subcontractor, i.e., in the latter case, self-employed.
In this one case, a recruiter from an agency presented me with an Apps DBA EBS upgrade project opportunity with client and location information obfuscated. (Recruiters are often worried a consultant might approach the client directly and cut them out of the deal.) I finally got the word that the client was a business unit of Koch Industries, and I should go ahead and set up my first week's travel arrangements to Wichita. I had a close relative who worked at Koch Industries and with his family lived in the Wichita area; I hadn't seen them for a few years and thought instead of flying home after the first week I might stay at their house. Big mistake! What I didn't know was Koch Industries had a nepotism policy that apparently includes subcontractors. Instead of embracing the circumstances, my relative started screaming at me, like I was trying to get him fired. The relative didn't know what I did for a living, never told me about the opportunity, worked in a different business unit, the recruiter never mentioned the policy, I had been selected purely based on my relevant upgrade experience.
I immediately alerted the recruiter, and all turned black. To this day, I've never heard back from the recruiter. I didn't have a fallback position and remained unemployed for a period of time living off savings. Years later the same relative would tell me that Koch Industries had eliminated their nepotism policy. Ask me if I cared. Their original rate wasn't that great. They could triple my salary and I would tell them to go to hell.
The point of this long context is to explain whatever personal misgivings I have with the Koch's or Koch Industries doesn't affect matters of principle. The current progressive discontent with the Koch's has to do with the politically correct anti-Russian business boycott in the aftermath of Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
The kerfuffle has to do with with the acquisition of Guardian Industries 5 years back. That subsidiary owns 2 glass-manufacturing facilities that employs 600 Russians. Koch Industries has refused to quiesce the operation of its facilities, saying it doesn't see the logic of throwing 600 Russians out of work and pointing out the government has vowed to confiscate closed factories and operate them for their own nefarious purposes. If anything, joining the boycott would play right into Putin's hands.
I agree with Koch Industries. As a libertarian, I (and I'm sure Charles Koch) see the invasion a violation of the non-aggression principle. We also see economic sanctions as ineffective, even counterproductive means of affecting public policy (consider the embargo of Cuba). At best, these measures harm innocent people not responsible for bad public policy.
