Remembering Madison

When I lived in Madison, Wisconsin from 1993 through 1996, I was a pretty solitary guy. I had just graduated from Northwestern, bone-weary of academics and depressed over a breakup. I wasn't looking for challenges and a fast-track career. I was looking to hole up, lick my wounds, and experience living on my own terms for the first time in my life. Madison seemed perfect. It had the right balance of proximity and distance from my friends in Chicago and family in Omaha. It had the familiarity of a college campus, and the distraction of a young nightlife scene. It had beautiful lakeshore parks and cozy coffee shops -- poetic places for a loner to sit and read or write or think.

After I nailed an interview for a programming job in Madison, I wandered the town, identifying places where I would hang out. I already had it in mind that I would claim Madison as my own by haunting it, by making myself a part of its landscape. Living there, I was compulsive about doing exactly that. Most have nostalgic feelings about the places they shared with someone dear. I set out to engineer an anticipatory nostalgia about places I shared with my own self, a young man in his early 20s -- an age when melancholy and loneliness could still look romantic (so I thought) and not just sad. Standing on the little curved foot bridge in Tenny Park, overlooking the lily pads, I imagined myself as an older man, seeing the bridge and remembering... some wistful, romanticized bullshit, most likely.

Last weekend, my wife, brother-in-law, dog and I took a road trip to Madison. One of my fond, un-engineered Madison memories was of going to the annual Sun Prairie Sweet Corn Festival with office friends and gorging ourselves on sweet, sweet ears of corn, fresh out of the steamer. This trip was to re-vist that experience, and my family indulged me in other such re-visitations. Those who know me will not be surprised that most of them revolved around food. We ate at Ella's Deli, with the carousel out front and a riot of clockwork toys in every nook and cranny of the restaurant. We browsed the Dane County Farmers' Market around the capitol square, and bought my favorite spicy cheese bread from Stella's Bakery, along with some picnic-worthy produce and cheese. We stopped by the Memorial Union -- another old hangout -- to get Babcock's ice cream and frozen custard (my favorite is the orange custard with dark chocolate chips). We stopped by Smoky Jon's BBQ to pick up a couple of bottles of their terrific sauce. And thanks to my brother-in-law's research, we dined at a "new" restaurant, Harvest, where we made some new memories over a stunningly tasty farm-fresh meal with an outstanding Oregon Pinot Noir.

We also stopped by my old apartment building, and my wife remarked that we could hear birds chirping -- in our downtown condo, we mainly hear traffic and construction. We checked out my old office building too, nestled in a forested drive. The picnic table where we sometimes lunched was still there, but no trace remained of my first full-time employer. On the way to the capitol square, we passed Tenny Park and the foot bridge. It was as pretty as I remembered it, but there was no sudden rush of sentiment, no sense of prophesized nostalgia fulfilled. I have other, fonder memories of Madison, it seems. On our next trip, I'd like to go to one of the surviving small music clubs, where I saw bands like Green Day, Garbage, God Lives Underwater and Letters To Cleo. I'd like to have beers on the Union Terrace, and see if the "secret door" to the Barber's Closet still exists. I'd like my wife to see the interior of the capitol dome. And instead of just buying sauce, next time we must sit down to some Smoky Jon's 'cue. I'd like my next memories of Madison to be ones I share.

Blommer's Saratoga Dark

The smell of baking brownies often blankets Chicago's northern Loop and River North neighborhoods. The source is actually Blommer's Chocolate Factory (http://www.blommer.com/) at Kinzie and Des Plaines. My blessing and curse is that they have a small retail shop, midway on the walk between my office and home.

I just bought some chunks of the Saratoga Dark. At 73% cacao, it's black as the ace of spades and has a rich, almost winey odor. The chocolate has a silky texture in your mouth, melts easily, and leaves you with a hint of coffee at the end. A one pound bag is an indulgence at $4.83, but it'll make you so happy.

The Bug Fix Bell

At Firm58, our Quality Assurance manager (a transplant from DoubleClick/Google, like me) set up a Bug Fix Bell like we had at our old job. Fix a software defect? You get to ring the bell. And everyone applauds. It's quite a morale boost. I've heard non-developers say they wish they could fix something so they too could ring the bell. That's the power of even a little apprecition!

A Productive Day At Work

Rajiv could meet the deadline, but it meant losing a bit of what made him human. His eyes darted across the mosaic of windows on the screen, his awareness fragmenting and reassembling in pulses, data into information, information into structures and algorithms. He was the programmer. He was the program. Humanity faded as he merged with the stark perfection of silicon. Man had limits. Machine could do anything.

Emotions are known to the cybermind. One is akin to the human notion of "anxiety" or "frustration," a frantic cycling until control of a digital resource can be seized or a data pathway opened. The other, more rare, is the rapturous repetition of operations on a shining torrent of bytes. The still-human might label it "glory."

Utimately, intelligences both organic and silicon were driven by the same thing: the fulfillment of purpose. Humans feared that computers would someday become like them, and self-determine a purpose at odds with humanity. But if computers had something approximating fear, it was of becoming like humans, adrift without clarity or direction.

He had his purpose, and at last he had the clarity of well-defined tasks. Now, joined to the machine, he processed. And in the processing he experienced a kind of bliss. Deliverables blossomed in his workspace like digital buds under an electric sun.

Going, Going, Googley-Gone!

In retrospect, "fixed-term employment" at Google was a bit like getting laid off slowly, over the course of a year. But finally, on April 3^rd 2009, I turned in my badge and walked out the door a free man. The sun was shining, a cold wind stung my face, and for the first time in five years, I looked ahead to doing something completely new.

Five years ago, the company I joined still referred to itself as "Performics," though New York-based DoubleClick had just acquired it. My first two years were spent helping bring its search engine advertising product up to the standards of the new owners. This entailed long nights and weekends of putting out fires, rewriting entire chunks of the system, and working with my colleagues to figure out how we could bring some discipline and predictability to our little start-up operation. I stepped towards professional maturity even as the company did. By 2006, we were calling ourselves "DoubleClick." I became an engineering manager and had grown a staff of programmers under me in Chicago and coordinated its efforts with a team of offshore developers in India. I got married, and shortly after getting back from my honeymoon, was asked to spend two weeks of every month in New York, managing another team there. There's no quicker way to learn to fly than to be thrown off a building. If I didn't exactly soar all the time, I didn't crash through the pavement either, and as a team, we managed to do a lot of good. When I attended our product's posh commercial launch party at the top of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, it was hard not to be stunned by how far and fast we had come.

In early 2007, we at DoubleClick learned that Google had made a $3.1 billion bid to purchase us. There was fanfare up and down the rows of the software development cubicles. At heart, most of us still thought of ourselves as "Performics," and the prospect of being embraced by the legendary Shangri-La of software engineering was dizzying. None of us was under the illusion that we were doing anything but sneaking into Google's back door. None of us had the "preferred" PhD specified on Google's public job postings, and few of us believed we could pass their infamous interview process. But our management gave us carefully non-committal reassurances that we had good prospects for surviving the transition. We had launched and maintained a revenue-generating product. We had domain expertise in a hotly-contested field. Surely Google would value these things. These were our mantras during the year in which the U.S. and European legalities of the acquisition were settled.

On Tuesday March 11^th 2008, Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced, "As with most mergers, there may be reductions in headcount. We expect these to take place in the U.S. and possibly in other regions as well. We know that DoubleClick is built on the strength of its people. For this reason we'll strive to minimize the impact of this process on all our clients and employees." What we didn't know is that the "Googlers" (what Google employees call themselves) were themselves grumbling about the acquisition. Google had been acquiring companies in force, and privately admitted that it didn't handle the integrations well. Many of the long-time Googlers felt that their elite membership was being diluted, and their standards were being compromised. The product Google wanted from DoubleClick – display advertising – was run out of New York; there was considerable debate whether satellite (no – "distributed") offices like Chicago should be brought in at all. The mood in our office grew tense in those final weeks, and as a manager, it was my job to provide vague reassurances even as I stack-ranked my staff with the knowledge that someone would merge my list with others and draw a strike-line, separating the "ins" from the "outs." Rumor said that the bloodletting would happen on Friday April 4^th, but privately, my boss told me and my fellow engineering managers to make sure everybody was in the office on Wednesday the 2^nd. That night, I told my wife that if any of my team was cut, I'd want to be among them; I'd have a hard time dealing with the loss of any one engineer. The next day, I got the chance to live up to my words.

There were three possible fates for a DoubleClick employee that Wednesday: to be laid off outright, to be converted to a full-time Googler, or to be placed on a fixed-term contract. My boss pulled me aside just as I walked in the door, and told me that my team was safe. But I would be put on fixed-term employment for one year, and then laid off. My ego folded like a broken lawn chair. How did this happen? There was nothing in my performance, qualifications, or even popularity that could have predicted it. Later, I would learn that the "merged list with a strike line" was an over-simplification of the process by which Google eliminated 25% of DoubleClick-Chicago's workforce. Great people were terminated, including our Senior Director, whom many of us low-level managers saw as a mentor. At the time it was hardly a comfort.

I continued contributing as best I could during that final year, taking advantage of the vast learning opportunities Google afforded. My boss wanted to find a way to convert me to full time status, but the ways of getting things done in the Google bureaucracy eluded us all. Conversion was a possibility dangled in front of me from the very beginning of my Google tenure, but I quickly learned to put it out of my mind – it was a hope that carried too much painful baggage. By all accounts, conversion could only be gained by going through Google's "front door" interview process, and I wasn't interested in being rejected twice. After our team's third "realignment" in January, this time under a Director from the Pittsburgh office, my boss found someone who seemed sympathetic to his cause. This new Director said he would do what he could to make sure Google "corrected its mistake" and kept me on – and he appeared to have the political savvy to do so.

At the beginning of my final month, the Director set up a meeting with his HR recruiter to instruct me on what I needed to do to keep my job. The recruiter told me that I would have to go to Mountain View for a battery of five one-hour engineering interviews involving brain-teasers and writing code on a whiteboard. I would also need to supply two references, external to Google – despite the fact that anyone who could be a reference in the last five years now either worked for Google, or wanted to hire me into his own organization. The process was no different than off-the-street applications, except that I was guaranteed the face-to-face interviews. It was insulting. I was hired into Performics/DoubleClick after two months working there as a consultant – I was given no interview, and was asked to name my price. But it wasn't enough for Google that I had worked for them a year, and that even one of their Directors considered me "essential to the product's success." On the morning I told my boss that I would not be pursuing the conversion interview, I felt blissfully light. That feeling lasted the entire day, until at 5pm, the Director called and asked what he could do to change my mind – there may even be some flexibility in how the interview was conducted, he said.

My wife saw that as confirmation of something she had long suspected. They wanted me, she said, and they would find a way to make it work, acting within the process. There was no reason not to do the interview, and then I could see what Google would put on the table, and compare it with the other job opportunities I was exploring. So I studied for a week. My last computer science course was more than 15 years ago, and though most of the topics never arise in day-to-day work, Google still sees itself as a computer science R&D organization. Its culture is of computer scientists, and that would be how I was evaluated, regardless of my actual duties. The Director set up my interviews in Cambridge, Massachusetts instead of Mountain View, California so I could be interviewed by engineers in a "distributed" office who did not have as much exposure to the DoubleClick acquisition. By the time I flew there, I was cautiously optimistic. I had reminded myself how to analyze algorithms in "big-O" notation, and suggest data structures that would optimize for speed or space. I knew how to search and sort from scratch, manipulate linked lists, traverse trees, find shortest-paths on graphs, count permutations and combinations, and twiddle bits. I was as ready as I was going to be.

I bombed the interview. A non-disclosure agreement prevents me from getting into specifics, but the interview was purely technical, and while I could readily answer about half of the questions, for the other half, when I didn't glom onto the "trick" embedded in the questions, I spun my wheels. Despair is the great enemy of thoroughness and creative thinking. Once I started to sink, I sunk fast. The interviewers were friendly, even kind, but well before the end of the day, I knew I was finished. A week after the interviews, the Director confirmed it – again, with the utmost kindness. "I'm sorry – I failed," he said. "I tried to make it work, but I couldn't." But of course, it was I who had failed, and with three days left at Google, I allowed myself – finally – to check out, grumpy that I had allowed Google to slap me twice. More than anything else, though, I felt relief. I had spent a year preparing myself to leave Google, and I had already secured a job – under the same former-Senior Director whom I considered a mentor. One of the provisions of my fixed-term contract was a "completion bonus," which, combined with my severance, meant that I would walk away with 85% of my annual salary in a lump sum. For someone who had been laid off in this economy, I was in excellent – even enviable – shape.

This evening, I stopped by the old office to meet a friend. Without a key card, I had to wait for him in the lobby – a rueful feeling, in a place where I once had free rein – but I got the chance to greet several former colleagues as they left work. We chatted about what they were doing, and what I was doing, and I began to realize, hearing the familiar laments of issues and deadlines, just how refreshing it was to have finally moved on.

Brown Like Me

After his Republican response to President Obama's Congressional address, I declared that I was embarrassed, on behalf of Indian-Americans, about Bobby Jindal.

I do realize that statement was bold-to-ridiculous. Jindal, an honors biology graduate from Brown and a Rhodes Scholar with a Master's degree in political science from Oxford, is the youngest of the current state governors and the first Indian-American elected to that office. Jindal's speech may have been clumsy, and I might take issue with his logic, but "embarrassment" seems presumptuous. I was challenged, however, not on comparative credentials, but on my speaking on behalf of Indian-Americans. Said one friend-of-a-friend, "that would be like me being embarrassed of Timothy Geithner on behalf of Caucasians...sounds silly doesn't it?"

This is the point when dialogue shuts down. At this point, the brown person tells the white person he doesn't understand what it is to be a minority, and the white person asks how we can make progress if we don't "move beyond race." Bobby Jindal certainly seems eager to move beyond his race. In high school, he converted from his parents' Hinduism to Catholicism, and he even changed his given name, "Piyush," to the slice of Americana with which he best identified: Bobby Brady, of "The Brady Bunch." He speaks with a folksy drawl, and has named his youngest son "Slade." In an interview on "60 Minutes," Bobby and his wife Supriya said that their Indian heritage doesn't really factor into their daily lives. They were raised American. No doubt this makes Bobby Jindal more palletable to a constituency that elected a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan to Congress.

I was also raised American. Growing up in Omaha, Nebraska, there were only about one hundred Indian-American families in town. My circulation within that small community was limited to being dragged to weekend parties, where I spent evenings with the other kids in someone's basement, watching TV, while our parents upstairs spoke, ate and dressed "Indian." Most of my friends were not Indian, and with those few who were, our ethnic bond felt incidental, an artifact of our parents more than ourselves. And yet, whenever I'd see an unknown South Asian face on the sidewalk or in a store, something curious would happen. One or both of us would catch the other's eye, smile, and nod. Sometimes those smiles would become small-talk. Sometimes the small-talk would try to become conversation, though I shied away from it. This was not something that would happen with passers-by of any other ethnicity. It continued when I moved to Chicago, where Indian faces were by no means rare. It continued wherever I would travel to where Indians were a minority. My brown face gave me an automatic kinship, welcome or not, with other brown faces. I didn't think much about it -- it's part of who I am.

Indian cuisine, music and cinema has seen a surge of popularity in the United States. It doesn't make sense for me to feel validated by that, any more than it does to feel kinship with a stranger because of our skin. But from having seen many Indian-Americans high-fiving at "Slumdog Millionaire's" eight-Oscar victory, I can tell I'm not alone. I suppose it's a little like rooting for the home team; you may not be on the field yourself, but somehow, their pride in victory is yours, as is their humiliation in defeat. Maybe I'm wrong to look at Bobby Jindal's brown face and believe that he represents "my kind" in the public forum. It's obvious from his beliefs that he doesn't. And if his success was abetted by his renunciation of his heritage and name, well, who am I to judge? But when I hear him using Hurricane Katrina as an argument against Federal funding, or advocating the teaching of Intelligent Design despite holding an Ivy League biology degree, I wish that, in the eyes of this country, he looked a little less like me.

Fixtures

A cousin of mine recently commented that she was strangely comforted by seeing the same people hanging out in a coffee shop she revisited after nine years. I share the sentiment. If life is a journey that sometimes doubles back on itself, it's comforting to have these fixtures in the landscape. They reassure one that some things do endure, remind one of good times, and even prove, by contrast, how far one has come. I don't think the pleasure they give is the same thing as nostalgia, which romanticizes the past. If anything, these fixtures look a little smaller, a little humbler, than when they were first encountered. These are not the people or things that have grown with me. They are the things that, in some ways, I've left behind.

A tiny sampling of the fixtures in my personal landscape, in no order of significance:

• My mother's childhood home in Nagpur, India -- though how much longer it will remain a "constant" is up in the air
• The Omaha Public Library, near the house where I grew up -- specifically, the outside ledge that used to be my hideout
• The Comic Book Guy at the Dragon's Lair in Omaha -- I went back recently, and he still runs his shop after more than 30 years
• The Omaha Community Playhouse, where my Junior High self was inspired to fancy myself a "theater afficionado"
• Buffalo Joe's, in Evanston, my first exposure to the Buffalo Wing
• The Lakefill at Northwestern, where I took many walks, discussing many things that seemed vitally important at the time
• Old Peculier Ale -- shared with Jon at Mr. Toad's in Omaha, my first "pub hangout"
• The Briarwood apartments in Madison, my first home-on-my-own
• The Espresso Royale on State Street and the terrace by the Student Union -- my Madison reading haunts when I didn't want to be by myself, but I had nobody to call
• The bars near State and Division in Chicago, where we started our evenings with such hope, and ended them with such disappointment -- and kept repeating the cycle
• The Michigan Avenue offices of the National Association of Realtors, where I spent some of the richest unproductive hours with Mike and Francisco
• The Kopi Cafe in Andersonville where I went on two dates; the second of which led to marriage
• More music, books and movies than I could name

My contract with Google will be over in April, which means that I'll soon be bidding farewell to people and a product with whom I've worked for five years. In times of change, these little touchstones put things in perspective. I will move on. I'll grow, and change, and acquire wisdom. And it'll be better than okay.

But no, I'm still not going to my high school reunion!