After 911 (Sept 2001) many businesses suffered as the economy sank. IRI was already in some business trouble versus its competitors before that, but this made it much worse. Everyone could see that we were in for some significant layoff, although we didn’t know exactly when or how bad it might be.
In mid-2001 I was “offered” a different role in IRI — still a VP, but as an “Internal technical consultant.” There were two reasons for this — 1) The poor business results caused the board of directors to toss out some senior management (including the brilliant founder, Gian Fulgoni) and replace them with their old cronies. To some of these stodgy managers, I was a “threat” because I was outspoken and known to be very innovative. 2) Although never confirmed, I believe that they were preparing for the layoffs that they knew would be coming, and it would be easier to retain a lower-paid younger worker in charge of the Unix groups, and would be easier to “justify” laying off an older manager in a “consultant” role.
Be that as it may, I accepted the change, because it actually allowed me to do more of the sorts of things I was interested in. I spent more time expanding and enhancing the EDT product, and also took a lead role in charting a course for replacing IRI’s “Load balancer” — software to move batch jobs around to various servers to make best use of the total computing power. We had a legacy load balancer that was no longer supported and did a poor job. I was charged with finding a new product and working out the migration path. After sourcing the best product, I worked with the software vendor to make a number of changes that I was able to demonstrate would vastly improve their product, changes that they actually implemented.
Small anecdote: When we were still about two months away from making the load balancer move, we suddenly had a serious failure of the old existing product, and it was significantly hurting the business. Since a young guy was now in charge of the Unix systems, I left it to him to solve the problem. He poked around a bit and declared that it was not able to be fixed, and that we needed to move to the new system. Senior management asked me if we could switch, and I told them we were not ready to make that move yet, still waiting on some of the software vendor’s changes and full testing. So there was a meeting with the group president (the same one who did my second interview and hired me). At the meeting, when it was strongly stated that the current system couldn’t be fixed, he looked at me and asked me directly if I agreed with that opinion. I said I did not; it seemed to me that whatever the problem was could be discovered and corrected, allowing us the time to get the new system ready. My answer infuriated the new guys, but the president simply asked me “How long do you think it would take to get it fixed?” Not knowing anything about the problems, I replied “48 hours.” I remember there were chuckles and a few gasps — they had already been dealing with it for over a week. I simply trusted my diagnostic skills and felt that I could do it. They gave me the green light to take over, and I locked myself away in my office and started examining the system, logs, files… anything that might give me a clue. I got to a point where my intuition told me that there must be corruption in a certain key file, and further, that if I removed it, the software should re-build it. I had no proof of this, just a strong technical intuition. So I removed the file and fired up the system — and we were back in business. Total time: about 12 hours, much to the astonishment of many (and the chagrin of those who said it couldn’t be done.)
By January 2022 the company did its first massive round of layoffs — between 150-200 people, many middle managers. I was one of them. Over the next year, they laid off many more, and outsourced all the computer work to India. They then took the company private (had been traded), and within another year they were a shadow of what they had been. When I joined IRI they had about 55% of their market; that steadily dwindled staring in 2001, and today they are less that 15%.
I’ve attached a couple of documents just as an example of the complexity of the projects I was leading, and maybe to show off my communications skills (I was known at IRI to be excellent in both written and verbal presentation skills. Several times I addressed groups of 20-50 people to present and explain a new technology project… the teacher in me I guess.)