The next job (about two months after I finished the job at the hospital) was at Bluesun, a financial company with around 40 employees. HR found my RESUME on Indeed, and they were looking for exactly what I knew best: an expert in SQL Server, and wanted me to start the next day if possible. I signed a 3-month contract and started the next day, a Thursday. The payment was better than my previous contract, but about half what a senior IT contractor gets. Their problem was urgent; the system's performance was so bad that they said "hurray" during peak hours when a transaction went through the system. Their programming team determined the problem was in the database server, but they didn't know more. I had a USB flash drive that, over the years, I added scripts to determine weak points in a database. On the first day there, my scripts determined the cause: their server had too little internal memory, and they didn't set the split between how much memory the database engine should take and how much for the operating system. So, SQL was grabbing all the memory, and there was nothing left for the OS, which had to use virtual memory on disk, maybe 1000 times slower than internal memory (external memory was on spinning disks - today that technology is expired). The first solution was to set the memory correctly, but it didn't help much, there was still too little memory. What was I to do? I could find myself out of contract in a week. I felt very embarrassed not to tell them (prolonging the investigation time as much as possible) because they were waiting with breathless for the expert's verdict. I told them that I would give them a first assessment the following Monday. That Monday, my conscience was stronger then the benefits of not telling them yet. I told them the whole solution, showing them the graphs of the data captured by my scripts during the four days from Thursday when I was hired until Monday. I told them to buy the maximum memory the server would support, which was about 4x what they had at the time. The company decided to go with me, and the upgrade would take place in 3 weeks. In the meantime, I analyzed their procedures, but the system was so slow that my changes would not have helped at all. I had to wait until they added the memory, as we agreed, and then see how much those changes I worked on would help. It took about a month for them to buy the memory and have their network administrator add it to the system. The app started going so fast that they thought the system wasn't processing the transactions. They quickly clarified that everything was fine. A party was held where refreshments of all kinds were served, cakes, sweets, and fruits in abundance, and colleagues and bosses competed to praise me. One of the two owners (the one on technical issues) was my direct boss. I had my office in the cubicle next to him, discreet and quiet, no one could see what was on my screen. I told him that in the second half of the contract, I would increase the performance of the system even more. Even though all transactions were going through quickly, there were still procedures that took 5-10 seconds (which meant a user was waiting on those screens for 5-10 seconds to go to the next screen). I told him I would try to get them all under one second. He agreed and seemed pleased, although it didn't mean much to him. Since Christmas was approaching, I told him that I would wait two or three days to see if anything else appeared after adding the memory; then, I wanted to have a 10 days off, my wife suggested a Caraibean vacation. He agreed. I had a huge surprise on the way back. My office was moved in the middle of the road. In front of my desk were those going to the cafeteria, and behind me was all the traffic of employees going from one office to another. My former place was given to someone who was promoted to manager. I don't have a lot of pride (at least I think so), but I felt terribly offended. And I was caught at a bad time, as the plan was to start looking for a new job upon my return. So, I swallowed my pride and went ahead with what I promised, increasing the performance of the stored procedures. I think my boss was happy with what I did, apparently, some users expressed satisfaction that the application was fast. The 3 months have passed, but I haven't found a new job. The rescue came from my boss (if I can call it rescue). He told me that in a week or two, they were releasing a new module with heavy activity in the database and they wanted me to be around. We verbally agreed to a one-month extension. The module was launched after 3 weeks with no issues. In that month, two placement agencies found me a possible job, the interviews followed the very week after the end of the contract. My boss asked me if I wanted to stay another month, but I refused. The priority was to seriously prepare for the 2 interviews, which meant getting as much information as possible about the two companies and preparing my mouthpiece, that is (knowingly) telling them why I would love to work for them (bla, bla, bla to get the job). Do you think a job for a big company could solve the job-seeking problem? Nah. https://www.eliademoldovan.com/blog/jobs-in-canada-episode-13-scotiabank Where it all started: https://www.eliademoldovan.com/blog/immigration-to-canada-episode-1
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Sunnybrook
The problems with finding a new job were much bigger than I thought. I was over 60, and that was a barrier. Who hires someone who, from day one, is thinking about retirement? It wasn’t my case, but that was the point. And you could easily guess my age when it was written in my RESUME that I graduated from university in 1980. I took this information out, but too late, my RESUME was already posted on all job-seeking sites. Then, the first interview question would have been, “Why did you leave your previous job?” Whatever I said didn’t sound right; who is crazy about leaving a job when they are only a few years away from retirement? And there was something else. I was unemployed. At all the other interview jobs so far, I was still working, and I said that I was interested in their projects, it’s convenient to reach them from home, and things like that. I didn’t have that leverage either. Three months passed, and nothing came of it, not even an interview. I had to change something. I read all kinds of articles, and it seems the solution was to try working as a consultant. With the experience I had, there were quite a few small and medium-sized companies that needed help quickly to solve a problem. With a contract of a few months, an expert could fix the problem, then goodbye. So, I incorporated a company, posted my RESUME on Indeed (a job search site), and sent it to a few placement agencies. Consultants are paid 30-40 percent more than full-time employees, and you can deduct expenses from your taxes. Dream big until life kicks you in the but. Those agencies interviewed me immediately, but there was another problem: I had no experience as a consultant. That pissed me off. Once in front of the computer, what matters is what you know, not what is written on a piece of paper. Anyway, a month after I had my company, I went to an interview where I signed a 3-month contract with the possibility of extension. The pay was very low, about a third of what I got at my last full-time job, but hey, it was my first consultant job, I had to start all over again. The job was at Sunnybrook Hospital, one of the largest hospitals in Canada. A team of kidney researchers had an IT team of 4 people (one of whom was the boss and didn’t do technical work). I was hired to finish a project where the developer left just before the implementation. The project was to gather data from other hospitals and medical clinics that provided information on patients with kidney problems. The database at Sunnybrook was SQL Server, so no problem. But all the data at data providers was coming from another kind of database engine, MySQL, which I had never worked with. MySQL is free, it made sense, I know that hospitals and medical clinics don’t have money. MySQL is not that powerful, but it is enough to store an acceptable volume of data; at least that was the case back then. Anyway, all I needed to know about MySQL was to connect and extract the data from there. It was 2015, and everything you needed to know was on the Internet. It only took me 2-3 days to understand enough about MySQL to understand what the developer before me did and continue to finish the project. I modified the program a little (very well done, by the way), because the programmer who left forgot some test values, which I replaced with variables to specify the source where the data comes from. About a month after I signed up, data started coming in on external USB sticks. In two weeks, I imported everything, and that project was finished, I waited for the next assignment. The boss invited me to the hospital cafeteria to celebrate the successful completion of the data transfer. There I found out that he ended my contract, saying he thanked me but had nothing more to give me work. As compensation for the rest of the contract, he paid for my coffee. I think everything was planned from the beginning, hand in hand with the placement agency. He wouldn’t have found anyone for the money they offered, such a low pay for a 6-week contract. So the man made me understand that I had to take my bag and go home. There was nothing in the contract for such a situation, so I did the following: I took my bag and went home. Once bad times started, the problems keep coming. https://www.eliademoldovan.com/blog/jobs-in-canada-episode-12-bluesun Where it all started: https://www.eliademoldovan.com/blog/immigration-to-canada-episode-1 Changepoint part 2
I had been at Changepoint for 4 years, I was 59 and thought I would retire from here. But my world turned upside down one day at 10 a.m. when we were summoned to a meeting at the company cafeteria. The company had around 90 employees. Sixty or so were in the cafeteria, the rest in the meeting room. Everybody in the boardroom were sent home, and those in the cafeteria were told that the company had been sold and we were chosen to stay. As an idea, this was not a disaster; it is known that in any company if you carefully choose 30% of the employees and fire them, the company can move on without repercussions. The 20/80 rule is the same all over the world, that is, 20% of the employees do 80% of the work, and you have to know who those 20% are and don’t touch them. The bad news was that the new owner was a “hedge funds” company. Most of the world’s billionaires are hedge fund managers. And they are also the most hated businesspeople in the world. The main way to make money is to buy companies at the water line and make a lot of money by destroying them. You may be wondering how that’s possible, but it’s possible, and now I know how it’s done, but when I left, I signed a non-disclosure document that forbids me from saying what happened there. The one hired as the transition president was a guy from the USA. His main quality was how to lie believably: “We cut everything that needed to be cut; from now on, we are profitable, and we will all increase in value and salaries, blah, blah blah.” I didn’t believe a word he said, his eyes squinted mockingly when he spoke. But I wanted to stay until the end. The reason was that I wanted to receive the severance package. The law stated that when the employment contract is terminated due to company policy (not fired, which is different), employees receive 2 more weeks’ wages for each year worked, and those with managerial positions 3 weeks for each year worked (where I also belonged ). But if the employees could prove they were very useful, one more week was added for each year worked. That was a strange legal provision and difficult to prove, so these things were cleared up in court. Most of the time, the judges ruled in favor of the employees. In our case, the chance of winning against the new owner was even higher because it was a “hedge fund” that everybody hates. So, I expected 4 weeks’ salary for every year worked. In the first wave of layoffs, they gave the legal minimum but were immediately sued by some employees. The employees won, and the donkeys learned their lesson. After a few months, the president of Changepoint that we had before the transition left, taking a big paycheck due to her collaboration. Just a few days before the transaction, he told us what a bright future we have thanks to the running projects (the one with Dell was in first place). Of course, she knew what would come, but the only thing that interested her was to leave with pockets full. I never liked her. A few months later, the vice president with whom I was in those technical meetings described in the previous post also resigned. The man has always been a gentleman to me. Although quiet and reserved, whenever we met at the company cafeteria, he would come over to chat (only a few sentences) about this and that. What I expected happened a year and a half later: 60 percent lost their jobs, and I was among them. I must admit that in the market economy, “hedge funds” also have a role. Some companies are wiped off the face of the earth by these people, and others appear in their place, starting with modern, more effective strategies and technologies. Those professionals who want to survive must continuously adapt their knowledge to stand a chance of being hired by new companies. Well, progress requires effort. Although I knew what was coming, I was hoping to be in the group chosen tgo stay. It didn’t happen, and I felt like it was kicked in the but. I was already 60 by that time. I signed the agreement with the company for 5 months, three days and a half pay (they calculated to the minute those four weeks pay for every year worked). I didn’t want to go to court to ask for more. I’ve never been before a judge, and I thought I’d find a job in 5 months. I had no idea how significant this 60-year barrier was; I was no longer the one playing the music. My delicate situation with jobs for the next few years begins with the next post. I was 60 and did not need headaches with my job finding. Well, fate decided otherwise. https://www.eliademoldovan.com/blog/jobs-in-canada-episode-11-sunnybrook Where it all started: https://www.eliademoldovan.com/blog/immigration-to-canada-episode-1 Changepoint part 1
Real professionals worked at Changepoint. I learned a lot here, although I thought I had nothing more to add to my knowledge of SQL Server. I worked as the head of the DBA team. Their main product was Changepoint, an application used to control the business of various. Among the important customers were Dell, major financial companies (Mastercard, Sun Life), and even Microsoft was a Changepoint customer. I took it upon myself to check the code developers wrote in Transact SQL (the database language) and modify them to obtain increased performance. Another role was to check what the other DBAs were doing. The most prestigious part was technical support level 4, which was rarely reached; probably in the five and a half years I worked there, I was needed 7 or 8 times. Level 1 was the help desk who answered the phone, level 2 was the technical support team, level 3 was a few developers who knew the app inside out, and I was level 4, mostly because when the problems were severe, they were always in databases - and I also had experience as a developer. In those few interventions of mine (when we were connecting to a server at the client), the company’s vice president was also participating. He was careful that I didn’t say anything that would compromise the company (he would have kicked me under the table - it never happened). He wanted to be present mainly because no troubleshooting level was higher than 4. So he had to know that it was no longer a quick technical solution, only a political one (I’m talking about company policy), and that involved talking to executives at the client about how to modify the application in that segment to satisfy the client. Well, that never happened, I managed to solve them all. I also attended a few meetings where the company wanted to sign contracts with certain clients, and those projects were mainly database projects. I remember a project with Dell where a Changepoint team traveled to the USA to the Dell headquarters to discuss their requirements and proposed solutions. The Dell software team were Brazilians from a small town south of Brazil who also came to the USA for the meeting. The meeting seemed somewhat at a standstill. Two Brazilians exchanged some words in Portuguese (which I didn’t understand), but I nodded, smiling as I understood. They looked at me. I know some words in Spanish (even a few in Portuguese) as I have traveled a lot in South America and have tried to learn some phrases and words. Sometimes, I exchange learned phrases with my wife here and there to have fun and remember what we’ve been through. “Tudo bem” (everything’s all right in Portuguese) is one of them. So “Tudo bem” came out of my mouth involuntarily, and then I said in Spanish, “I understand a little Brazilian and Spanish”. They asked me how I knew Portuguese and Spanish, which was greatly exaggerated, and I continued in English. I told them that I traveled to South America, and even a year ago, I was in the Amazon jungle in Manaus, Brazil. They really liked to hear their country being talked about nicely (who doesn’t?). They asked me how I learned Spanish. I told them the truth: I had a Mexican colleague who, finding out that I was interested in Spanish, only spoke to me in Spanish when we saw each other occasionally in the company but insisted on teaching me, especially tricky (ugly?) sentences. The Brazilians wanted me to tell them a stupid thing I learned from the Mexican. I said, "Me gustan las chicas con mucha carne y grandes tetas." I won’t translate because it’s rude to the ladies, but it was 100% true, the Mexican told me that a few times, I think he had an obsession. All the Brazilians burst into laughter. The atmosphere immediately relaxed. I don’t know if that helped us sign the contract (several million dollars), but it helped me greatly when the project started. Only I worked on the project on behalf of Changepoint, and for Dell it was my casual friends, the Brazilians. I must mention that those Brazilians were good professionals, I was impressed. The project was brilliantly done. It was a project to transactionally replicate the Changepoint database, with the goal of automatically switching Dell applications to the replica if the primary database went down. In the next post I will describe the embarrassing way I left Changepoint. https://www.eliademoldovan.com/blog/jobs-in-canada-episode-10 Where it all started: https://www.eliademoldovan.com/blog/immigration-to-canada-episode-1 My next stop after TMC was Ingenium, a company of architects. At Ingenium, there were a lot of Romanians, architects, structural engineers, construction engineers, installation engineers, in sales, and IT. The most important project then was Burj Khalifa Dubai, the tallest building in the world. I didn’t work directly on that project, only tangentially. Many architectural firms worked on the Burj Khalifa Dubai project. A US company made the design. Ingenium hired other architect companies or construction companies to build the tower, sort of a management company. When I worked there, we celebrated reaching the 100th floor. A few years later (I was no longer working at Ingenium), I also visited Dubai and saw the city from the 124th floor, where the whole floor was organized for this purpose - for tourists. My boss at Ingenium was Stephen Maclean. His grandfather had the successful magazine Maclean’s, which he sold and got rich. Maclean’s kid (Stephen’s father) was a kind of bum whose only concern was spending his daddy’s fortune. Stephen told me that he had nothing left of his grandfather’s fortune, so he had to work a 9 to 5 job all his life. Stephen was a difficult, irascible, and suspicious man. The others shunned him, but I got along well with him; we were the same age. Two years later, Stephen died of throat cancer. A few months later, an email out of the blue offered me a position at a software company, Changepoint. They saw my RESUME on Indeed, a job search site. I resigned from Ingenium and joined Changepoint, the end of a period of prosperity and the beginning of some troubles. https://www.eliademoldovan.com/blog/jobs-in-canada-episode-9 Where it all started: https://www.eliademoldovan.com/blog/immigration-to-canada-episode-1 Rich people own many companies. They close the ones that aren’t doing well and grow the profitable ones. I was working at one of the small-medium companies, Chariots (41 employees) owned by a billionaire (John Francis) or at least a multi-millionaire. It took 2 years for the company to become profitable, but it didn’t happen. It was 1999. The company was just a website (Chariots.ca) that sold new cars online, doing a deal with the stores that sold new cars. He fired 21 people. The site was working, the application was already written, he didn’t need all of us anyway.
I was a manager in the database maintenance team. Even though only 20 of us left, the company wasn’t profitable and he laid off 11 more, 9 left. A few months later, John decided to shut it down altogether, and he wanted to interview all 9 of the remaining employees to see if he needed them at one of his other companies. I knew he lost some money with the company, probably a pittance for his money. He asked me, “What do you think about how things are going in the company?” John was not very technical, and I knew that people like him think differently than other people. I had to say something to show that I understood what was going on and was available for any opening. I said a quote, “Did you lose money? You haven’t lost anything. Have you lost your honor? You lost something. Have you lost hope? You lost everything.” The man liked it. He fired everyone but 2 people, my boss, the director, to sort out the business side before closing the company, and me. I had to automate all the channels through which we received data from the car shops. After I did that, the site was running as if the company was still going strong, even though it was closed since data on its web pages was refreshed daily. John hired me at his parent company as a database administrator. The company was Trader Media Corporation (better known as Autotrader) - for the province of Ontario only, because the TMC brand is all over the world, and he wasn’t that big… One day, to the amazement of my colleagues who froze, John came to my office, pulled up a chair, and wanted to talk. No big deal. I knew he wasn’t technical, and he hired me in a technical position without asking anyone. I was somewhat intrigued. I asked him why he hired me. He told me, “I saw a value in you, and in my company, every value finds its place.” Bang! He suggested we go to lunch, and I declined because I’ve never felt comfortable around people with too much power. I think I was a fool. He put me on a team that had to move his entire business online. Four years later, he sold that company for $430 million. The calculation was like this: the sales value was 10 times the profit per year. He was spending 90 million a year with the company and had over 130 million in revenue. He sold it on time. In two years, the value of the company reached a fraction of the sales value due to online competition. The new owner changed the management, and I didn’t really get along with my new boss (in my opinion he was a jerk) so I resigned from there as well. In my new post it would be a job where I had to deal with architects. https://www.eliademoldovan.com/blog/jobs-in-canada-episode-8 Where it all started: https://www.eliademoldovan.com/blog/immigration-to-canada-episode-1 It was pretty easy to find my first job in Toronto. The company that hired me was looking for a Delphi developer, and that’s what I was good at. I’m not going to say the name of the “company” because I don’t know who will read the post, and I don’t want trouble because I won’t say nice things about their business. It was a company with tens of thousands of employees worldwide, and the owners became billionaires by manipulating the world market. They had thousands of customers spread all over the world. Customers who called on their services saw their sales volume increase. That’s because they had to follow the instructions of the “company”, which asked them to do business with other clients of theirs, and that’s how the money wheel turned, the clients growing and expanding the circle, the company grew like an octopus. These people did not create anything useful and got rich by expanding the circle of their relationships. I know how businesses run in Canada. Each office had its own application. They expanded so quickly that they did not have time to make a unique application to be deployed everywhere. I was hired to develop an application to manage transactions in a unified way for all the offices in Canada. It seems complicated, but it wasn’t. The app I wrote had a single big button in the middle of the screen that said “Start”. At 6 p.m., an employee pressed that button. The application would connect to all offices in Canada, collect the data from local databases, put them together, and deposit them in a server in the USA, from where another application (from their headquarters) would retrieve it and dump the transactions in a bank. I added a panel at the bottom of the screen where the app displayed what it’s doing, i.e., where it’s connected, the number of transactions, how many were submitted, and how many were rejected. That wasn’t mandatory, but I thought that showed that the app was working, it didn’t freeze. The app would run for an hour or two before it finished the job. At the end, the panel would turn green, write “DONE” on it, and showed on the screen the current day, the time the job started and the time it finished, the total number of transactions resolved, and the rejected ones (most often the number of rejected was zero). Also all that data e=was kept in a file. There was still a lot of work to do because the data around Canada was in all kinds of databases (Access, Interbase, SQL Server or text files for UNIX servers). One day, we had a meeting where we were told that the head office in the USA asked the Canadians to consolidate all the databases in SQL Server servers. They were looking for a volunteer to take on this project. Scaffolding was so complicated due to the diversity of media and database engines at the time that it could be a neck-breaking project. I saw this as an opportunity to grow my status as an expert by taking a step into database administration. DBAs (database administrators) are better paid, not because their job is more complicated than a developer, but because of the responsibility: companies leave their data only in good hands because those companies that lose their data go bankrupt. Everything we see on the screens of computers, tablets, cell phones, and billboards on the street comes from a database. If the databases go down, everything stops. I went to my boss and offered to take over the project on the condition that after I finished, he would change my status from developer to DBA. He accepted and sent me to a one-month course in SQL Server. I took that course and then paid for (from my pocket) 4 Microsoft exams to become a Microsoft Certified DBA. The exams were tough; I failed one and had to repeat it. By the way: only a certain percentage of the participants could pass the Microsoft exams, there was no fixed passing grade (as far as I understood), and I had to compete with Indians and Chinese who exchanged information with each other to prepare for the exam. They became so expert that they were learning all the answers to all possible questions by heart. I wonder how the hell it was easier to memorize thousands of answers instead of understanding how the SQL Server engine works. Anyway, I ended up getting my Microsoft certificate. A few years later, Microsoft took steps to combat the phenomenon of external echo learning, but I don’t know exactly how. I did the database consolidation project well, but the boss still treated me like a developer who knew more about SQL Server. I asked him to raise my salary, as I had not had a raise in the year and a half that I had been with them, and I had increased responsibilities. He increased my salary by $1000 a year, well below the inflation rate, so my pay went down in terms of market value. I resigned, looking for a DBA position as my next job. I kept in touch with a colleague. We are still friends today. He told me my boss was fired a month after I left. In his opinion, the main reason was that I resigned - they didn’t have an immediate solution for a DBA, and the people who took over the integration project made by me were still learning what was there, and I was nowhere near explaining it to them. Next post is about starting as a DBA, back to a small company. Working for a billionaire: https://www.eliademoldovan.com/blog/jobs-in-canada-episode-7 Where it all started: https://www.eliademoldovan.com/blog/immigration-to-canada-episode-1 I will continue my journey in Canada, namely how I found my second job. It was an adventure, and I think it’s worth telling.
As described in prior posts my first job. My instinct told me that I had to look for another place. I still didn’t know French well and didn’t practice English because I worked for a French-speaking company. Before my first job, I lost many interviews because I didn’t know what to do when I couldn’t remember a word in French or English. Even at interviews in French, replacing a word with the English version was no problem; many practiced it, willingly or out of necessity; this combination was called Franglish. My problem was when I didn’t know the word in either language. Looking for the in the ceiling was a disaster. Trying to get around it with lots of other words was even worse because I was confusing everyone, including me, who forgot where I started. The idea was to speak with conviction and confidence and my mouth to run like diarrhea. My strategy was to say the word in Romanian with a French ending (both French and Romanian are of Latin origin). If a word in a sentence did not fit, the interviewer would correct it in his mind, or ask “isn’t this?” and he would say the word, and I would hurry to say, “Yes, yes” and repeat the sentence with the word suggested by the interviewer. So that was the strategy, which backfired strangely in the next interview. So, I sent out RESUMES. I received a call from a company looking for a Delphi developer (which I became an expert in) for a project managing iron ore loading onto ships at the Sept Iles seaport in northern Quebec. The building where the company was located was only two blocks away from the building where I worked. So that the boss wouldn’t find out that I was going to the interview, I asked him to schedule me at lunchtime. They agreed to noon and told me that the interviewer’s name was Jean-Francois. I showed up for the interview (the company’s name was Novasys), but the secretary told me that Jean-Francois was out to get a sandwich and he’d be back in 5-10 minutes. Then he invited me to wait in the meeting room. At one point, a man in his 50s who saw me through the glass door, waiting, entered. He holds out his hand and says in French, “I’m Mario, the president of Novasys.” I jumped like a spring, shook his hand firmly, and roared like thunder, “And I’m Eliade, and I came for the project with...” But I couldn’t remember how to say boats in either French or English, so I applied the solution for moments of catastrophe - the Romanian word with a French ending, “vapeurs”. My problem was that “vapeurs” is a valid French word and means vapors (steams) in no way boats. In the clearest French, my sentence meant, “And I’m Eliade, and I came for the steam project.” I saw Mario’s jaw drop and his eyes bulge like a frog’s. Enter Jean-Francois. Mario waved him authoritatively out of the room, then went out and closed the door. I could see them discussing through the glass door of the meeting room. After the chat ended, Jean-Francois accompanied me in the meeting room. He started asking me questions about the weather, how Romania is, and if I settled in Montreal, but no technical questions. In my mind, he was acting like I was crazy and had to be careful. At one point, Jean-Francois said to me, “Let’s stop this nonsense. Mario told me to hire you.” That’s how I started at Novasys. I found out the mystery shortly after hiring. Novasys had 54 employees and was Mario’s company. He made his wife vice president. They were negotiating with a potential customer about a project where a computerized system had to control steam pressure in a boiler. Only he and his wife knew about that project. Mario thought that the client sent me and hiring me was a guarantee that he would get the project. I wonder how Mario’s eyes bulged when he told the client “I hired your man” and they told him they didn’t send anyone. And that project did not materialize. Mario didn’t fire me anyway, and I did a good job on that project with the boats loading iron at Sept Iles. I really stood out. The others were good developers, but they were in a gang, all Quebecois, they didn’t contradict each other even if the solution was worth discussing. I would wake up, a naïve Romanian, saying, “it doesn’t work like that,” and most of the time, the discussion that started would come up with a better solution. I resigned two years later to move to Toronto. Mario was devastated by my decision (I am not kidding), and told me he wanted to open an office in Toronto to get me back. I said yes, but that didn’t happen. In fact, Mario had to sell the company after the “boats” project because he couldn’t find any project good enough to pay the salaries. With Novasys started a good period with jobs, but later on it turned nasty. Next post would be about my first job in Toronto. https://www.eliademoldovan.com/blog/jobs-in-canada-episode-6 Where it all started: https://www.eliademoldovan.com/blog/immigration-to-canada-episode-1 Today, I will finish talking about my first job.
When I handed Louis the notice of resignation, he was upset but invited me to have lunch together. I found out how little he cared for himself. Almost all the money went to the company or paying off debts. The two associates took over the reins, with the adventurous Bruno pulling the strings in the company and the other guy handling new contracts, ditching the two Englishmen (the marketing guys) because they were asking monstrously much money for their services. Louis’s health no longer allowed him thrills. Louis told me that he would double my salary if I stayed with him in the company, but I did not back down, I had already signed the employment documents at the new company. On leaving, I asked Bruno for a written recommendation in English, which he gave me, and it was very flattering. It helped me get my first job in Toronto when we moved there. A few years later, Louis’ company was sold, swallowed by a super-conglomerate, and the application I worked on ended up being one of the thousands of applications such a multinational has. And probably no one remembers what its originator, Louis, went through with heart attacks, the emotions he went through when he was on the verge of bankruptcy, day and night, connected to the problems that came one after another. I remember Louis because it was my first job. With the money left, Louis was able to retire, but not as he deserved. I think it would have turned out much better for him if he had remained a clerk at the hospital. As for me, I worked for 14 companies until I retired in August 2022, and I witnessed many other events that define the world of “wild capitalism” where, as everyone knows, there are no feelings, only interests. Things got even more interesting with my new job, starting a reasonable period before hard times came my way. I will talk about them all. Soon. About JOB 2 next time. Sometimes tricks play in our favour. https://www.eliademoldovan.com/blog/jobs-in-canada-episode-5 Where it all started: https://www.eliademoldovan.com/blog/immigration-to-canada-episode-1 How was my first job? I’ll start with the end, about how Louis’s company looked a year and a half after he hired me when I resigned to go to JOB 2 in Canada. The company had 11 permanent employees and two paid by the hour (those guys were paid for one hour as much as my salary for a month, and rightfully so, because they brought the business). The company had firm contracts with hospitals and doctor’s offices and a very (a whole page very) lucrative one with pharmaceutical giant Glaxo. Louis paid off his bank debt and began repaying the government the 2 million he received three years earlier. The ones who pulled him out of his shit were Lin and me, with considerable help from Lili, who did the quality control of the applications we were developing in Delphi. Tony’s C++ application slowly fell out of favor until it was no longer used, and Tony had to go. Of the 13 who worked for Louis, only 2 were Quebecois, Louis (the owner), and Lili (the secretary), who were the nicest in that museum of Italians, Irish, Eastern Europeans, and the 2 English guys (those paid monstrously well). And now about the start of work at Louis’s company, which was as clear as mud... That’s how my conversation with Lin went on my first day at work. I asked him how long he has been working in the company. “Two weeks.” Since we both had to know C++ and Delphi, my first questions could only be, “Do you know C++?” “No,” “Do you know Delphi?” “No.” “How do we tell Louis this?” I asked with wide-open eyes. I was wondering if Louis’s idea of hiring people with academic achievements (not experienced developers) was good. I had a course at a college in Montreal (that had nothing to do with C++ and Delphi) and a Chinese with a PhD in paleontology. “Shut up and do what you can,” said Lin. “For now, Louis relies on Tony’s app.” The idea was simple. We needed to transfer the data from Tony’s application (his database was Access) to the one we were supposed to use with Delphi, Interbase. Then, with the Lili’s help (who was showing us the screens from Tony’s app) do the same in Delphi without having to understand his C++ code. It was as if we had stolen his idea, but in fact, that was what was required of us. It took me a week to put a button and a textbox on the screen in which to bring data from the database by pressing the button. Once I understood how a Delphi application communicates with the database, everything started to flow like I was born with Delphi in my blood, genetically programmed to write applications. A word about Lili. She graduated from theater arts school, but she told me that she did not look for roles in theater or film because she would have had to prostitute herself for even minor roles. So, she ended up being Louis’ secretary. At the company, she proved to be very useful, not only as a secretary and quality controller but also as the voice for the spoken part of the application because the questionnaire for asthma patients could also be completed on the phone, not just on the computer. Lili had a habit that puzzled me. Every time I finished another part of the application, he would hug me (and he had a prominent chest) and I would sit stiff as a dry stick, red as a beet, because I didn’t know what to do. My foolishness amused her greatly. Anyway, Lili, Lin, and I built a solid application. With the signing of new contracts, the team increased with technical support, new developers, and analysts who knew the medical environment and told us exactly what needed to be done. Louis was moved to tears, and his hands shook as he put his hand to the keyboard. Sometimes he would pull me aside, put his hands on his bald head, and say in a trembling voice, “I don’t know if I can handle this phenomenal growth.” Louis wanted us to be friends. He invited me to his house and told me to bring my oldest boy, 12 years old because he also had a boy of the same age. But my boy solved the visiting problem in less than an hour when he punched Louis’ boy in the mouth. On the way home, my boy told me that Louis’s boy deserved to be punched for being cocky and arogant. The visits stopped, but Louis spoiled me by raising my salary every few months. However, the starting salary was very low, just a little above the living wage, as was welfare. At some point, Louis hired Bruno to help him manage the company. Bruno was an adventurer, smart, ambitious, knew administration, business, programming, and had a lot of money. He put enough money on Louis’ table with the deal to be partners. I got on well with Bruno, but I didn’t know what was in his head. A short time later, another business partner appeared, who had previously been a vice president at a multinational. I understood that it was time to leave, and I will explain in the next post why, and what happened in the end with Louis’s company. How did my first job end: https://www.eliademoldovan.com/blog/jobs-in-canada-episode-4 Where it all started: https://www.eliademoldovan.com/blog/immigration-to-canada-episode-1 |
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