After reading “Code Girls”, parts of it really hit home. While we were involved in the Cold War, not World War II, some things seemed eerily similar. I was not a cryppie, as the lingo of the time called folks, but I did provide IT support and quickly learned many of their techniques, some of which I recognized from the book. Maybe a bit more of a surprise was that while women didn’t make up as a large portion of the workforce as in WWII, they were still the majority in our largest organization when I started. However compared to what people would expect; there wasn't any major contractor support, except for cleaning and food service when I started.
During this time, I had a chance to learn a lot, but I was like others, intimidated by parts of the culture, and was happy to stay on the sidelines. However, by the end of the Cold War, I felt like I was a full member, even if I wasn't fully sure of what.
The end of the Gulf War and Cold War caused many changes. Chief of them was the formation of Z Group, which consolidated all the cryypie elements. However, I drifted more into IT support, which I basically stayed in from 1992 through 2008, by which I needed a new office badly.
In retrospect, the addition of contractors was one of the biggest changes even if our organization had the least in the agency, we still had many. While actually being a Professional Services Contractor wasn't as sexy as many believe; your additional pay was often little more than your pension; and the job was often used more as a launch pad for people transiting to or from a regular government job, whose early retirement age was hard to ignore for many.
My job during this time was rather interesting. Our small team initally only had one full-time system admin, with two of us doing it part time, including me. I would have been happy to stay as a developer, but my management kept adding more IT items to my menu and I seemed to enjoy it. In time as my development projects finished, I became more of a system administrator. I continued this dual role at least until the mid-90s. During the early part of this period, my management sent me and another person part-time to a group that was going to standardize graphical interfaces in the agency. We quickly named ourselves the “GUI Police” and that turned into probably the most work I would do. The only advantage for me was upper management wanted to keep the guide unclassified, so I was able to show my family some of what I actually did. After a short rest stop in my original office, I ended up on a high-visibility diversity tour working on new technology just as the World Wide Web exploded. I had experimented with both Gopher and the WWW earlier, but I didn't have time to set up much (and one thing I always tried to remember was that Gopher seemed to be more realistic for us, reminding me that I could make technical mistakes) Though I never gave up, and as our research group developed a better prototype; I was probably the fourth group/person to use that during our Christmas downtime; as compiling Mosaic for Solaris was a non-trivial exercise.
This was a real changing point for my career since I initially thought I wanted to go back to programming; but I had many options, including a chance to move into management. Even after 9 months, it wasn't clear what my best option was, but I probably felt some imposter syndrome as well as one of the first times that my body was holding me back. I probably should have talked with my management more and moved out of daily technical work, but I really didn't want to make what would have been a tough decision; I ended up surprising my old office by attempting to go back to that organization. Alas, there had been a reorg and I was moved into a newly formed system admin branch. Initially after I asked, they moved me into my old programming branch, but I found many changes, and after updating my initial code for the first times in years, I was really looking for something different, as the new big project in the organization, seemed to be a dead end in reality. I didn't realize that at the time, but I felt like I had moved to a higher level of understanding of systems and software and could easily see flaws in the plans. In a stroke of luck, I ended up being a late replacement for an in-house class for our new computer workstations one Friday morning. It turned into a fun day and changed my focus back into systems. Though getting back to doing system administration to a newly created replacement administration, full-time, took a while, but I ended moving to a new organization to manage our corporate services, while I had no programing for the first time. My new management turned out to be great in facilitating this change.
I had found an organization that I really fit into. There was a steady stream of work to keep the current systems updated, as they had been allowed to become outdated; along with new machines to work on. While setting up our web infrastructure was supposed to be my main charge; and I was able to work with management to get things prepared when the technology was ready and we had the free time, but basically I was stuck waiting for parts of that technology to mature. My main project eventually turned into developing the infrastructure needed for our first wide-scale adoption of 64-bit workstations. There was a small group of us that had a chance to get rid of years of desktop cruft while updating our overall environment. We sort of realized this was going to be a once in lifetime opportunity, so we threw ourselves into it with a lot of gusto. In addition, I was changed to get our other software more up-to-date and organized. With Y2K starting to make an appearance; that also became a priority. Eventually most of us were redirected to the Y2K effort. Given how busy we were, I remember having to actually finish installing patches on some of our widely used minor servers after the freeze started; which required additional paperwork on top of the actual work. I actually took a short trip back to Las Vegas to celebrate our success on what I thought was the freeze. I had taken a book on HP-UX, hoping I would have time to learn more about that operating system, but in reality we continued to have work keeping systems runing and up-to-date. We finally set the freeze before Christmas and I was able to go home and have a well-deserved Christmas celebration with my family. Though I actually got a severe cold during th and spent the the big day sleeping in bed. Luckily we actually didn’t have any major problems (I remember writing minor code to just fix three open-source programs) and we were able to move on to new work soon enough. I still had a corporate role during this time and probably my favorite time when I got to explain the rising use of open-source software to our CIO staff.
We had multiple retirements in our management chain during that winter and my informal agreement with Z Group management on steps I should do next for our the web initiative went up in smoke. Instead of a multi-step plan, new management wanted to just do everything in one step. Not surprising this quickly turned into a hurry up and wait exercise. Even my new local management focused just on keeping the keeping the current systems running, which caused additional clashes. I had a good chance to leave this toxic environment and go back into programming and I should have taken it, but I thought I could survive it better. With little to show for my work, I was finally moved to the team that was tasked to do planning and workstation development for the larger organization, later that year. It was painful to disengage as they lacked enough of the correct people and I remember having to train multiple people on parts of my old job. Despite having way too many disruptions, I was able to keep up doing some useful work, as we made some progress with our infrastructure. We moved to a new building with great parking which provided some relief from all the usual nightmares. I moved to a later work schedule which was closer to my capabilities by then. Though in typical government fashion, our main lab was moved into a different building than we were in. However, we took up little space in a building that was open 7x24, which was useful.
As part of the larger changes going on in the world, by 2001, there was pressure to consolidate much of IT into a separate vendor to update the infrastructure. While I was not directly affected, still working in an offspring of the Z Group, it was going to change my work. Our management made available a small stipend for those who stayed after the chaos of thepast few months. Given everything going on, I planned a quiet week hanging out with my family in Las Vegas. I heard the official RiF(reduction-in-force—laying off people) announcement just before I left for Las Vegas. Absorbing the changes, especially of people leaving, affected the enjoyment of my vacation. Of course a few days after I got to Las Vegas and started to somewhat de-stress, 9/11 happened. Being stuck in the early Internet Age, just trying to get back to Maryland became my biggest task. While I was scheduled to fly back on Thursday, I finally got out on a red-eye flight on Sunday. In was of those twists of faith, I was stopped in Houston, when I was finally able to call into my organization at work. After that, my nickname became, for a while, Houston, as in 'Houston, We Have a problem”, for any "6 Million Dollar Man" fan. Meanwhile, I went back to work to a bunch of mid-shifts as we moved to a 7-24 hour office schedule, for what seemed the longest time.
While the RiF was quickly canceled, work continued on creating our new vendor organization, called Eagle Allince, though better known as Evil Appliance. Personally, my energy was in decline and I spent my time just hanging on in just a few years; in retrospect, management have played a strange role, not really finding anything useful for me to do; while also letting me to focus on my retirement, way too early. I will always say that only having around 12-16 of real work to do a week was one of the hardest things I ever had to do. My self-confidence was shot and despite multiple attempts, I never found anything useful.