Hazy Candy Coated Memories
Over ten years ago, I began a job at a dot-com company that was in the business of providing study resources and related information for people preparing to take IT certification exams. It was a small, but growing office staffed by a group of bright, dynamic people who were interested in succeeding by finding ways to help other people succeed. The business model was initially based on advertising revenue driven by site traffic, downloads, and subscriptions to email publications similar to the very newsletter you are currently reading.
The study resources were not based on “braindumps”, regurgitated exam questions memorized (or outright stolen) by nefarious characters looking to help exam takers beat the system. The study guides and articles were written by industry professionals who based the content on the knowledge domains provided by the certification vendors themselves.
The people in our office wanted to assist these exam takers, but still maintain the integrity of the process itself. It sounds pretentious, but that’s how it was. Many of us held one or more certifications, and we didn’t want to cheapen them by providing bottom feeder cheat sheets.
Goofy memory: it was the first job I’d had where I received my own box of business cards. And, seeing my name and job title on a cool and professional looking business card was a total rush. It represented a validation of the long hours and dollars I had spent on training in order to transition from a dead-end retail drone existence to an IT career path. My business card was a statement of arrival, and (so I thought at the time) a totem ensuring future success.
It was 2000. Eleven years ago. Stone the bloody crows.
Three years later, I was let go in the first serious wave of “corporate restructuring”. The dot-com bubble had long since burst, and every new quarterly strategy to spin what content and ideas we had into gold had failed to produce enough revenue to keep our group together.
Actually, there is more to it than that, a hell of a lot more, but the full story of how that company melted down into a fetid pool of toxic waste would take a lot of digital pages to tell, and it wouldn’t be a particularly interesting story at that. Some of you probably have your own stories which are very similar to mine. In the end, the pressure of those panicky times conspired to bring a lot of good people down.
But…
I’ll now say this: that company could have survived. It could have endured, weathering the nearly perfect storm of the dot-com collapse until the right circumstances came around for it to get to its feet again and began to walk, and maybe even jog. In the end, it came down to a couple of people who decided it was time to carve open the goose to get what few nuggets they could out of it. And so a great team (and an amazing user community), were irrevocably thrown away.
I know in my heart that we could have survived, because the folks that publish this newsletter have survived. They lived through the same times, but they made good decisions and retained good people, and they endured the same storm that took so many ships down. They survived while maintaining their integrity and quality and poise.
(And no, I wasn’t asked/coerced/bribed for the plug; it comes from a sincere desire to offer recognition to people who deserve it, and who I respect.)
The shape of IT certification has changed since I first encountered it in the late 1990’s. It has emerged from the white heat of the IT gold rush as something more relevant, more mature, and more representative of what it was meant to be all along: an objective system for proving specialized technical knowledge. Like so many of us, IT certification survived the dot-com era, and is better for it.
As for that failed company… my time there left me with some bittersweet reminiscences, some friends who I still call friends today, and an indelible memory of what a group of bright, creative people can achieve in the face of staggering adversity. That long ago day in 2000 was the beginning of a career that has now spanned over a decade, and it serves as a difficult but valuable reminder of how every experience contains its worth in wisdom.
And, to certain people from that long ago place and time: I haven’t forgotten. I haven’t forgotten your faces. I haven’t forgotten your names. I haven’t forgotten what you did, and how you did it.
I. Haven’t. Forgotten. ANYTHING.
A.J. Axline
Binary Nation
The study resources were not based on “braindumps”, regurgitated exam questions memorized (or outright stolen) by nefarious characters looking to help exam takers beat the system. The study guides and articles were written by industry professionals who based the content on the knowledge domains provided by the certification vendors themselves.
The people in our office wanted to assist these exam takers, but still maintain the integrity of the process itself. It sounds pretentious, but that’s how it was. Many of us held one or more certifications, and we didn’t want to cheapen them by providing bottom feeder cheat sheets.
Goofy memory: it was the first job I’d had where I received my own box of business cards. And, seeing my name and job title on a cool and professional looking business card was a total rush. It represented a validation of the long hours and dollars I had spent on training in order to transition from a dead-end retail drone existence to an IT career path. My business card was a statement of arrival, and (so I thought at the time) a totem ensuring future success.
It was 2000. Eleven years ago. Stone the bloody crows.
Three years later, I was let go in the first serious wave of “corporate restructuring”. The dot-com bubble had long since burst, and every new quarterly strategy to spin what content and ideas we had into gold had failed to produce enough revenue to keep our group together.
Actually, there is more to it than that, a hell of a lot more, but the full story of how that company melted down into a fetid pool of toxic waste would take a lot of digital pages to tell, and it wouldn’t be a particularly interesting story at that. Some of you probably have your own stories which are very similar to mine. In the end, the pressure of those panicky times conspired to bring a lot of good people down.
But…
I’ll now say this: that company could have survived. It could have endured, weathering the nearly perfect storm of the dot-com collapse until the right circumstances came around for it to get to its feet again and began to walk, and maybe even jog. In the end, it came down to a couple of people who decided it was time to carve open the goose to get what few nuggets they could out of it. And so a great team (and an amazing user community), were irrevocably thrown away.
I know in my heart that we could have survived, because the folks that publish this newsletter have survived. They lived through the same times, but they made good decisions and retained good people, and they endured the same storm that took so many ships down. They survived while maintaining their integrity and quality and poise.
(And no, I wasn’t asked/coerced/bribed for the plug; it comes from a sincere desire to offer recognition to people who deserve it, and who I respect.)
The shape of IT certification has changed since I first encountered it in the late 1990’s. It has emerged from the white heat of the IT gold rush as something more relevant, more mature, and more representative of what it was meant to be all along: an objective system for proving specialized technical knowledge. Like so many of us, IT certification survived the dot-com era, and is better for it.
As for that failed company… my time there left me with some bittersweet reminiscences, some friends who I still call friends today, and an indelible memory of what a group of bright, creative people can achieve in the face of staggering adversity. That long ago day in 2000 was the beginning of a career that has now spanned over a decade, and it serves as a difficult but valuable reminder of how every experience contains its worth in wisdom.
And, to certain people from that long ago place and time: I haven’t forgotten. I haven’t forgotten your faces. I haven’t forgotten your names. I haven’t forgotten what you did, and how you did it.
I. Haven’t. Forgotten. ANYTHING.
A.J. Axline
Binary Nation
