The whole contract work was not for me. It felt too detached, and it was back to where I started. That never feels like progress. DEC was slowly going out of business, and I now had over 10 years of experience. It was time for a big move to see what I can do and add some growth.

The move was to a big city, Boston. This is something I never expected; it was so far away from what I ever imagined. I mean, these were adults in suits. Yes, that was the first big thing, and I was not only in a tech space but now moving into tech with a big financial company, Fidelity Investments, in a big city, Boston—a small fish in a big pond. Yes, I was a bit scared shitless.

The commute was not new, since I went to Boston all the time to see pro sporting events, but it is entirely different in rush hour, in a suit, and to work. I learned pretty quickly that driving in traffic sucked, and this is probably where I got in the habit of leaving early to avoid it.

Everything was new: going from real engineering-type environments to a technology culture in the heart of the financial area to a major financial company was a culture shock. There were all professionals in suits, not your typical engineer in shorts, sleeping or resting under his desk to concentrate. Yes, that did happen at DEC.

The suit thing didn’t last long; the culture was shifting toward business casual. My job was to take the massive amount of code that ran the fund processing system and create all the build files, as I had been doing. Same work that I liked on a massive scale, which controlled the system that prices all the mutual funds in the paper. That was the Fidelity division I was in. Mutual funds were published in the paper every day, and the data could never be wrong. Never. One day, when they were off, the SEC called; two days off in a row, the SEC visited, and people were asked to find new careers. Yes, this was pressure, and it was big. This was not a joke. The funny part, I loved it. It was a great group of people. While I was writing the tools to build all the code, I was also maintaining it in the old platform, all on VAX/VMS systems. One Friday a month, we stayed until midnight since that was the best time to install the new code. We did not process funds on the weekends, and we bought dinner for everybody, literally hundreds of dollars in food. Another cool perk! The funny part is that people who had nothing to do with the installation stayed to eat.

This was my first real job outside a computer firm, where you had not only technology people but people with advanced degrees in business, finance, and banking. Fidelity was my second of three stops over 40 years, and it was fantastic. I stayed in the Boston location for a few years. Next up will be moving around in Fidelity and a bit of the culture.

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