Daniel Ford

Yesterday was my last day working as a Computer Scientist for IBM Research in California.  I worked for nineteen years at the Almaden Research Center in San Jose; this is the lab that brought us the magnetic disk drive, relational databases and the SQL database query language.  It was a pretty cool place to work, and I had the privilege to meet and work with some amazing people.  The culture there was a bit different from the rest of IBM and it allowed a great deal of freedom to innovate and to work in many different areas.  I think that is why I remained at the lab for so long, it was just so interesting.

I decided to leave because I really wanted to do something different than work for a big corporation the rest of my life.  I don’t know exactly what that will be yet, but I know that if I don’t change something, that’s exactly what will happen, change is a good thing.  There’s nothing particularly wrong with working for a big company, and there are actually several benefits.  One thing I noticed was that, with a few exceptions, that the management ranks were filled with mostly reasonable people who had good people skills.  This comes from the “filtering” process that big organizations seem to have in selecting management.   On the other hand, life in a big organization is a bit like swimming inside a glacier; technically, you’re immersed in a large body of water, but, somehow, progress, in any direction, is slow.