Charles Stross's Blog, page 131

How I got here in the end, part eight: the third startup death march begins

The life of an IT industry contractor is an unstable one. There are approximately 250 working days in the 365 day business year, once you subtract weekends, public holidays, 20 vacation days, and allow a couple of weeks for time off being sick. If you're a contractor, the general rule of thumb (in a regular business climate — not a recession) is that you can expect to work for 100 days a year (and you're going to spend those days working like a dog, not slacking or polishing your skills). So you

The story so far

This bio thing is running on longer than I expected (and there are at least two episodes to go), so here are some handy links to the story so far:

How I got here in the end: Part One

How I got here in the end: Part Two

Part Three: But we upgrade to COBOL next year!

Part Four: my first startup death march

Part Five: Things can only get better

Part Six: my second startup death march

Part Seven: bubbling freelance

It's going to take me a while to write up the next installment, because that's the one about

How I got here in the end, part seven: bubbling freelance

In general, having your employer go tits-up at the end of the month without a pay packet in sight is a Bad Experience. I couldn't, in all honesty recommend it ... but if it's going to happen, it's best that it happens in the middle of a tech bubble that you're part of.

Here's what happened to me between the collapse of FMA Ltd and the formation of Datacash Ltd ...

How I got here in the end, part six: the second startup death march

... Or: how usenet got me a job.

The world wide web is not the internet. The internet actually predates the web by more than two decades; I've been online with a connection to the net pretty much continuously since late 1989, except for a nine-month outage between university and the job at SCO. And since late 1991 I've had access to usenet. Usenet — the vast distributed discussion system — is but a shadow of its former self, largely killed by spam and ignorance ... but back in the day it was whe

How I got here in the end, part five: "things can only get better!"

I spent nearly three and a half years working on technical documentation for a UNIX vendor during the early 90s. Along the way, I learned Perl (against orders), accidentally provoked the invention of the robots.txt file, was the token Departmental Hippie, and finally jumped ship when the company ran aground on the jagged rocky reefs of the Dilbert Continent. At one time, that particular company was an extremely cool place to work. But today, it lingers on in popular memories only because of the

How I got here in the end, part four: the first startup death march

I did not take the job with the three-piece suits and the mainframe farm. Instead, I had a stroke of luck and found something much more interesting daaahn sarf, just outside the M25. As a side-effect, it launched me on a four to five year diversion into a career as a technical author and showed me what real programmers are capable of. Here's what I remember ...

How I got here in the end, part three: " ... But we upgrade to COBOL next year!"

In early 1988 I bought a small apartment. I sold it in early 1989, for a big enough profit to put myself back into university in order to escape a Fate Worse Than Death — the kind of career Leonard Cohen was singing about in "First we take Manhattan."

There was colateral damage, of course. As you can imagine, the kind of property bubble that funds career breaks for some breaks careers for others. I just barely hung on to my mortgage repayments during Nigel Lawson's infamous inflationary "blip"; b

Holiday snaps

Okay, because some of you asked for them, here's one of my holiday snaps:

How I got here in the end: part two

(Previously: Part One)

I taught myself to type on a manual portable typewriter, aged 12. By age 16, the typewriter died — the keys began snapping from metal fatigue. (I am not making this up.) After much whining and kvetching, my parents bought me ... a new manual typewriter. This was in 1980. Home computers were showing up in shop windows and magazine adverts, but at home we had a black and white TV and a record player.

This is the story of how I missed the first wave of the home computing revolu

How I got here in the end: part one

I'm still grappling with "The Fuller Memorandum" — or not, right now, because I'm recovering from the previously-mentioned head cold and in my experience, editing with a cold results in dumb mistakes — and the dilemma of what to write in this blog. I mean, I could draw your attention to the fact that I've just received my author copies of the hardcover edition(s) of "Wireless" and the UK paperback of "Saturn's Children", which means both of 'em are on their way from the publisher's warehouse to