MaKe Believe press and whatwereyouthinking Inc proudly present “Mr. Chandran in the 21st Century” a joyous threnody in 3 parts a veritable magnum opus , New York Times says “What can we say”
In Part One we learnt almost nothing. Thus it only makes sense that I write about Part two.
Part Two: Going to California (2005-2009 )
By early 2005 it was clear to me that my job at that time was running its course . Since I still believed that software developers changed the world ( sometimes twice in a day ) and clearly the thing for me to do was to achieve even greater levels of meaningful impact I did the only thing possible—I went to work On Vista ( in all fairness to me it was still called Longhorn at that time , had I known it would eventually become Vista… :-) )
Just for the record if you have ever been er um lucky ( you heard me ) enough to own a Vista laptop and then you had to connect to a wireless network then the charming little wizard thingy that got you there would be me . Now that that is behind us..
So I’m at work one day( in early 2006) listening to “going to California” by (who else ) Led Zep when I get an email from an ex-softie who is apparently heading up a team in Intuit and they are doing some fabulously exciting amazing new cutting edge stuff. It sounded awesome although a little probing confirmed that yeah it was still tax software but not the regular boring 1040 or Schedule K1 boring fuddy-duddy stuff but the new improved amazingly flavoured taxtacular stuff . Well I mean how could I say no to that.
Moving to California and thusly out of the ‘soft was probably one of the hardest decisions' I have made , for all its fault Microsoft is an amazing amazing company and it definitely made me a much much better developer and gave me a look at the challenges involved in shipping real software to millions of users There is a famous quote “A one in a million bug at MSFT means by end of day tomorrow “ and that is so true. It really is an incredible ride and I would recommend it everyone ( unless you are doing anything else of course :- )). But apart from that there's Seattle.
its kind of hard to describe but I love the Pacific northwest and at the time I knew we would miss it but hey CALIFORNIA YEAH !!
Also sometime after I left so did BrianV ( rumour has it his new compensation package was slightly different than mine ) so I guess I was way ahead of the curve
Ok I am going to keep the California thing short except to say i) I HATED IT and ii) I HATED IT .
apart from everything else having to pay a 10% state income tax really sticks in my craw when nothing fucking works in that state. if wanted to be taxed to the bone and get no govt services why I could have just stayed back in India
A couple of really important things did happen while I was there though. It turned out that, EVEN IF you hire nekkid cheerleaders to come to the office everyday and massage you , tax software was about as exciting as watching paint dry and just to be clear Intuit did not hire the cheerleaders and there were fairly clear that they weren't going to expense them either so in 2007 I switched jobs again and joined a startup
By early 2009 we were so fed up of San Diego and wanted to come back to Seattle so badly that in June of 09 I convinced my boss to let me work remotely from Seattle and we moved back ( loud cheering) Cannot explain how thrilled I am to be back
In late 2009 it was obvious my startup was running out of cash to the point where they could no longer afford me , and then I did something which is still not fully sinking in – I decided to go to work for myself and you know exploit cheap labour back in India etc. It turned out Intuit was good for something after all I incorporated etc etc
But that boys and girls will be all nicely rounded of in Part 3
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