After five years of working retail I decided I had my fill. I only had a year of college complete but knew I could find a programming job anyway. In the late 90s if you could spell "HTML" you were hired. I didn't want to quit going to school though. I knew I'd need the degree for whenever the madness died down. So I went to the head of the Computer Science department to see if he knew anyone looking for students part-time. Sure enough, he had two former students looking for any help they could get.. well, any help that would work for less than the ridiculous amounts programmers were commanding at the time. I called both of them and had interviews within a week.
The first place was plant that printed junk mail. They were looking for C programmers for embedded systems. It wasn't exactly what I wanted to do but would have taken it if not for the visit to TSI Software..
TSI Software was a small software company at the time, they just had their IPO six months prior and still operated like the single-owner business they'd always been. They had ~300 employees total, the Bannockburn office was home to ~40-50 of them. This location housed a few functions:
- Development of their EDI software packages – Trading Parter PC and OnCall EDI
- Regional training center for their entire suite of products
- Manufacturing and shipping department (which was much smaller than it sounds)
- Some portion of the sales, professional services, and customer support staff