While working at Oracle and Ingres, I heard many good things about a company five minutes from where I lived in Pleasanton, and out of curiosity I paid them a brief visit to find out what was so great about this company.  I was already happy working at Oracle and taking graduate level studies in Computer Science at Stanford, and I had no intention of changing jobs.

However, Dezi White worked hard to convince me that PeopleSoft was a better place to work.  I would not buy it at first.  Oracle was interesting, and it had great educational benefits as well.  But, Dezi kept hammering away at the fact that it was closer to home, that I would have more time with the family, and that the work environment was more interesting technology wise with great career potential.  And, it was very people oriented.

Dezi was able to increase the offer and I caved.  And, as much as I loved Oracle and still do, I’m glad I made the move because I did indeed get into more diverse technology in addition to staying up with database technologies from various vendors.  And, the job was two miles or five minutes from home.

At PeopleSoft, I would go through extensive training, both formal and informal.  Where I had been trained in Tuxedo development before, I would now be trained in the administration side of Tuxedo, and in addition, I would undergo training specific to PeopleSoft becoming one of the lead application server technical support folks in addition to being a Unix lead.    When we lost our VMS person, I ended up becoming a VMS lead, though with much fear and trembling.

After working as a staff analyst, a few senior members came together to form a software architecture team where we would be trained in Motive and programming in Java and Javascript, and we were tasked with architecting PeopleSoft’s e-support environment and integrating it with Vantive.    Although Motive was primarily designed to allow remote diagnostics on a single workstation, PeopleSoft’s environment was much more complex and involved a multi-tiered environment with database servers, application servers, process schedulers, web servers, and workstations, all of which needed to be configured properly to communicate and maintain optimal reliability and performance.  There were configuration files, registry values, and log files that needed to be parsed and read and compared between machines, and all this had to be done securely for the remote customers’ enterprise level environments.

Before we got into this work, I also spent some time in technical support becoming trained in installations and upgrades, performing test installations and upgrades, and helping to support customers going through those processes.  But, I never focused on this area enough to gain any real expertise or fluency in it until several years later in 2005 when I would work for a contractor for IBM’s Applications on Demand (AOD) organization in Cupertino.   There, my old friend, Mariam, from PeopleSoft, would help bring back memories on doing migrations, upgrades, and debugging technical problems, and my strong background in Unix administration helped me come up to speed quickly on the PIA environment, performance tuning, and such, and although the whole application server environment had gone through some serious changes, things I had forgotten began to come back.  So, when the Change Assistant came out, although it had many bugs, I was able to catch onto installing it, configuring it, and using it, and working around the bugs.

And, the SQL performance tuning would help me late when I would have to architect and develop pharmacy encounters in PL/SQL and various languages linked to Oracle — Perl, PHP, etc.

Socially, PeopleSoft was a great experience, and many of us developed friendships we will never forget as long as we live.  I was surprised to learn recently that many of the people I worked with there still remembered an incident I had forgotten about where our hamsters got out of the cage at home and chewed through our refrigerator line while we were on vacation for a few days, and we came home to a swamped carpet, damaged floors, and damaged walls.

I remember our baseball shirts we all received with our employee numbers on them.  I was somewhere in the 3600’s I think.  We all remember the Raving Daves, which was a company retro rock band made up of mostly baby boomers and the young side of generation X’s.  The band did not sound great, but we all had fond memories of the barbeques, the Christmas parties including at least one at the Auto Museum.  And, Dave was not at all aloof or isolated as so many CEOs are, but rather he seemed to make it a point to get to know each employee on a friendly, first name basis.

If I had to name my favorite work place, I would have a hard time doing it, but I would have no trouble saying that PeopleSoft was definitely one of those places at the top.  I would not hesitate to go back to work for them again, and the chance to work with my old coworkers would be something I would especially cherish.  Nancy Kato, Naomi Dickey, Dave Brown, Henry Ramirez, Andrew Pogonoski, Mariam Samaie, Danny Nguyen, Thach Nguyen, Ron Mobley, Dave Wilson, Krystal Nguyen and so many come to mind immediately, but I feel ashamed to mention them because of all the really great friends and coworkers there I miss but didn’t happen to come to mind immediatly.  Anyway, I think very highly of all the people I mentioned here and miss them.

I was a little sad to see PeopleSoft acquired by Oracle as they really did have two distinct cultures.  Oracle seemed to be more intense — perhaps a burnout place for some people while envigorating for some crazy people like me who like intense challenges.  I never got to know Larry Ellison.  Some tell me that was a good thing because many people are intimidated or irritated and bothered by him and his competitiveness and drive to be the best in everything.  Personally, I am not bothered by it and to some extent I can relate having had some struggles with being overly competitive and proud in the past myself.  It was a trait I had to reign in as a Christian.  So, in a way, I sometimes come off as a type A personality disguised behind a type B facade.  Or maybe I only think people see me as laid back.  That is, except when they catch me working on something until 10 or midnight, but at least it is not 2 1/2 days straight without sleep as before.

In a sense I needed the great technical environment of PeopleSoft and the calm, people oriented environment as well.  I was happy to spend time taking online courses in people management, project management, time management, and one thing I forgot to mention was the part after finishing the first phase of the e-support project.

We got to go to New Orleans!  At the PeopleSoft conference in New Orleans, our team put together training and demonstrations of the new e-support technology and took turns giving these presentations.  But, before that, two of us stepped into the role of trainers and developed a curriculum and formal training for the technical support folks to train them how to use the e-support system in supporting customers.

For me, these presentations were a special treat as I had often enjoyed going to the white board to answer a person’s technical questions and finding people starting to gather until I had a small informal class.  I love training people.  I love helping people succeed and reach their potential.   So, naturally, PeopleSoft was an ideal place for me to work.