It was a constant battle with management, because they kept selling things that we couldn't deliver.

God do I ever identify with this. Before the Re-Org Of Doom a couple years back I used to beg my boss to invite me to those meetings just so that somebody would be there to raise a hand and say "PLEASE DO NOT PUT TECHNICAL DELIVERY DETAILS IN THE CONTRACT WITHOUT CONFIRMING WITH ME THAT THE SPECS YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT ACTUALLY EXIST."

I managed to create the category of pre-sales technical support, and tried to institute a process of not selling anything that hadn't been sanity checked by a tech, but that only worked for the "normal" salespeople. Management was allowed to sell anything they wanted. And I was told I just didn't understand business and entrepreneurship (wonder why I have an awful vision of what it would take to be in charge of other people's paycheques? It's precisely this nine years of my life), and should keep my trap shut.

It gave me a really weird sense of limitations, and even 10 years later I'm still surprised by developers who shrug and say "Okay. We can do that."

It's funny (only in the way that's not) how abusive work situations leave their mark.

It took me a long time to realise I'd probably had more bad bosses than average, and that I wasn't necessarily going to get this (good) rug pulled out from underneath my feet at any moment. I'm good at what I do, and good bosses can see that.

Unrelatedly, who is the primary market for iPod projectors? Woot has that on sale for $199 right now, but it used to be $499. I don't get that..

Yeah, I got sucked into the rabbit hole of those stories.

I was fortunate in that I had pretty good bosses in tech. At my first company I backed into the coding job from the user side. First I was a user with query access. Then I was the in house compadre to the consultant. He shaped my career, man, he taught me to code. Let me read all his code, and this was back in the pre-object days, so there was a lot to read. Well-documented, cleanly formatted code. A beauty.

Anyway, he sucked me in and got me hired over to IT, where the boss & I spent days coding side by side. Management could code up to the level under the board of directors. I enjoyed that work and I was good at it because I came from the user side and knew all the jacked up ways the data was getting generated and used, but could translate that to the coders.

The gaming company had good bosses too, but my direct supervisor believed that people could only be good at writing or coding and knew I was good at writing, so I didn't get much coding.

And then at Boeing I was a consultant, so I had no one over me who understood anything technical at all, but they didn't expect to. And all my coworkers were hardware guys. So truthfully I slacked at that job some because I could and no one knew what I was doing. But the customers were satisfied. It's just that had I been more ambitious, they could have been really happy. But talk about internal data wonkiness; take a huge corporation like that where it's so big I can't join my husband for lunch on the same campus, and imagine what that looks like on the servers.

I imagine it's traveling presenters, mostly, for that projector. Mine was worth thousands when we got it (also from Boeing; they were liquidating) but is massive. Today's technology could fit in this one's lenscap. But I still haul it around, because I need to project stuff.

Are people really doing presentations on iPods? Or is it just a transport medium?

Hm. I dunno. For videos, for sure it's possible.

I mean, I use my projector as our regular tv, and I've got an hdmi cable dangling off it that I plug my phone into periodically.

Are people really doing presentations on iPods?

This makes me picture people doing iPod presentations by listening to their iPods while dancing behind a scrim, to replicate those old iPod ads....

Now I want to invent various interpretive dances that relate to specific business strategies, but I suppose I should do some work instead.

Ah, videos. I hadn't thought of that. It could be nice and creepy for Skype and Facetime.