X Sabbatical - Available After: Fill & Download for Free

I was laid off in March 1997, part of then-CEO Gil Amelio's last gasp before the reascendance of Steve Jobs to the throne as "iCEO" (NeXT was acquired in late 1996), when Apple Stock (AAPL) was trading around $13/share, and everyone (outside the company) was asking, "will Apple survive?"I have a belief that I could have stayed, if I had wanted to: call over to the Rhapsody group (they made OS X) and ask, "could you use a UNIX systems programmer (BSD a specialty) with 14 years of experience?"I did not test my belief - I was so ready to leave.I had spent most of my time at Apple trying to convince the company (mainly, the management - the engineers knew it was coming on fast) that The Internet was going to be a very, very big deal ... and I failed (see also my answer to Why didn't the original Macintosh (128K) have Ethernet?). The market finally whacked them upside the head (hard) in 1995: that year, the Internet was in every booth at Macworld Expo SF ... except one. That's when Apple management changed from dismissive to panicked.The group I was hired into in July 1988, Engineering Computer Operations (ECO), did manage to set a lot of Internet stuff right on the operational side:We renumbered the entire company from "picked out of the air" IP Addresses to net 17, assigned to us upon request by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) (R.I.P., Jon Postel).I made Internet E-mail, and by extension the other (mostly AppleTalk-based) E-mail systems inside Apple talk to each other (we bought Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) gateways for the AppleTalk-based systems (e.g. QuickMail, Microsoft Mail), which were proprietary and couldn't talk to each other!). I wrote & operated the AppleLink/Internet E-mail gateway.I wrote the IP filtering rules for our Cisco (company) Routers (networking) to form a Firewall to keep the skr1pt k1dd13s out of the Apple Engineering Network, while setting up a structure for Macs inside the network to reach out directly to the Internet.We set up the first ftp.apple.com and the software distribution people put new Mac OS Classic releases (and other nominally free Apple software & utilities) on it.We set up the first www.apple.com (running on a Mac IIfx under Mac OS Classic, and an HTTP server called "MacHTTP").I participated in Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working groups & attended the meetings to work on protocol standards, both for the Internet community at large, and with an eye towards Apple's (and Apple customers') needs, particularly in the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) working group.I set up apple.com (then a DEC VAX-8650 running 4.3 Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) UNIX) as a stratum 1 (WWVB reference clock attached) Network Time Protocol (NTP) server, a forerunner of time.apple.com which supports all Internet-connected Macs world-wide in keeping and telling good (correct) time.ECO was also in charge of Apple's Cray X-MP/48 supercomputer. A fun toy to play with - see my answer to What does it feel like to operate a supercomputer?By the fall of 1993, I had been working a stupid number of hours with little vacation for five years, and I was horribly burned out. Before Apple, no organization I'd worked for had managed to completely absorb my time & energy. I recall a hallway conversation with my manager (we were shorthanded that day) in which both of us were unfailingly polite, saying all the right things, and both of us got increasingly annoyed with each other (I don't recall what the conversation was about). We both walked away from each other before it blew up.It was clear that I badly needed a break, and because I'd maxed out my accumulated vacation time (six weeks), and had an "Apple sabbatical" coming (every five years, six weeks off in a block), I took the first calendar quarter of 1994 off. Among other things, I went to see the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway (good fun, that).Unfortunately, in February 1994 while I was away, there was a reorg that screwed me: my group got transferred out of Apple Engineering and into IS&T (the corporate IT department, pronounced "isn't", as in "isn't networking", "isn't services"). The one place we'd always told every manager above us that we didn't want to be. The group broke up over the next year or two - good ECO people found other places to be, some inside Apple, some elsewhere (a lot of my coworkers went on to General Magic; cf. GENERAL MAGIC, One The Most Influential Tech Companies You’ve Never Heard Of).The timing of that reorg was really bad for Apple as a company, too: our group was gearing up to make the Internet generally available throughout the Engineering Network (not just in little pieces), with the goal that everyone should be using it all the time so that when it came time to make our own software products for the Internet, there would be a general base of experience with it, and good design decisions would (hopefully) result. We were going to throw the switch after I returned from sabbatical in March.When ECO was reorg'd into IS&T, the IS&T weenies took one look at that plan, and put the kibosh on it. "AAaahhhh! We can't do that! The Internet is full of evil Hackers! Insecurity! SCARY!"Then came the MacWorld Expo in January 1995 ... as I mentioned. One result of the subsequent panic was the "Apple Internet Connection Kit" (AICK), which was a hastily cobbled together suite of third party Mac OS applications ... but it was something Apple could ship, and say, "see? We 'do' Internet, too!"After I got back from my sabbatical, with the help of my (soon to be former) manager, I escaped IS&T back into the Advanced Technology Group (ATG), where ECO had been when I first joined it in 1988. I kinda twiddled my thumbs for two years (though I did have a hand in AICK ... and e•World).Then Apple decided to get really serious about the Internet in summer 1996: Larry Tesler formed the "AppleNet" division, and I transferred into it to be (for lack of a better title) "official standards guy" (really, merely a formalization of something I'd already been doing at the IETF for many years). That lasted about six months, during which time NeXT Inc. got acquired.Then the AppleNet division was nuked in the March 1997 layoff.I had a good time at Apple, and I learned a lot. I was at Apple, as one acquaintance put it, "during the interregnum between the reigns of Steve." Things might have been different had I stayed - it's hard to know. It's clear to me that Steve Jobs did a masterful turn-around job, and he really "got" the Internet (though some of what he did in his last year or two creeped me out a little - Apple was trying (along with everyone else it seems) to "watch over your shoulder" (gather surveillance data) as you use your computer and the Internet, though rather less than Google and Facebook).Tim Cook's 2014-2019 statements about Apple’s commitment to Privacy give me great hope of a change of direction & policy. The question is whether that policy direction will survive him (it should - they seem to be positioning Privacy as an important part of Apple’s Product Value Proposition & Product Differentiation, and backing out of that brand promise would likely cost them very dearly). For many good reasons, I don’t trust “the cloud”, including iCloud.I left Apple because:I'd kinda had it with the politics of the place.I was getting a really good layoff package (the last good one, as it happens - Steve Jobs ended that shortly afterwards).I had some other means.

I worked for a media company in London in the late 90s and was very friendly with a girl who worked there. I took a 6 month sabbatical and went off travelling around Asia, in those days email was barely available on the backpacker circuit but we were able to keep in touch periodically with people back home.Anyway I struck up a friendly email relationship with this girl and we’d chat back and forth. One day I realised I was missing her and thought “now’s my chance to move things beyond the colleague level” and I signed off one of my emails with a “xxx”. She then replied and signed off with… “Kind regards”. No “x” not even one.I took this as a big snub, went back into “colleague” mode and didn’t try anything so brazen again. Deflated, I sowed my oats around the backpacker circuit and put this girl to the back of my mind.18 years after returning from my travels this girl and I have been together for 16 years, married for 14 years and have three beautiful children, a Labrador and a cat.Moral of of the story: don’t live your life by the “xxx”.

I was Student Director of the professional association in my graduate field 10 years ago and talked with hundreds of graduate students over my four years. There are so, so many reasons why a dissertation in the social sciences and humanities takes so long. Here are just a few situations I came across:Grad student needs to start teaching as an adjunct to bring in an income for their family. It is really easy to put the needs of his students (who need a new lecture prepared for them for TOMORROW and papers graded over the weekend) in front of his own work (which is yet another rewrite of a chapter he is already tired of thinking about). For many people, it is easy to put work you are getting paid to do ahead of the long-term investment you are making in your own career advancement. This is especially the case for full-time adjunct teaching (5 classes) that can net the student a whopping $15-20k/year (but it's better than nothing, right?).Student is writing a comparative anthropological study of pilgrimage in country A & country B. The first part of the research is finished but she is now told that it is no longer safe to go to the area of country B she needs to go to to conduct interviews. She must now either 1) completely reenvision her dissertation, 2) start from scratch and choose a country C to use as a comparison (which may or may not be possible), 3) wait for the political situation to calm down so she can travel to country B or 4) quit her PhD program and move on with her life, doing something else. Decisions 1, 2 & 3 all can add years to the dissertation process.Committee member X reviews a chapter and says, "This needs to be more specific and less abstract. I can't okay this chapter as it is written." Grad student does the rewrite. Then committee member Y says, "You are cluttering this up with so much unnecessary detail. Where is the big picture? Where is the theory? I can't sign off on this chapter until you refocus upon the larger implications of your argument." Basically, X says "More A, less B" while Y says, "More B, less A". Irreconcilable differences. And often it has to do with longstanding disagreements between X & Y rather than the dissertation chapter at all. No one warned the grad student before they formed their committee that X & Y can't stand each other and will never agree.Student's primary adviser wants to sign off on all chapters before they are sent to other committee members for review. She takes 2 months to review the chapter and get it back to him. She, of course, has revisions she wants them to incorporate. Student makes revisions and returns the chapter to her. She repeats the process. Finally, on the third draft (6 months later), she signs off. Then, the student sends the chapter to the other two committee members, one of whom is now on a year-long sabbatical. He says he will review it when he comes back to the campus in 9 months.Graduate student gets into the 4th chapter of a 5 chapter dissertation when VIP scholar Q in the field issues a book that challenges previous thinking about the subject the graduate student is writing about. The scholar's book gets accolades and wins lots of awards. Committee chair tells the student, "We can't okay this dissertation now without you taking into account the new discoveries that Q has made that will influence your interpretation of the data. What you need to do is to rewrite the first 3 chapters subtly taking account Q's argument, foreshadowing their conclusions and deftly weaving it throughout your introductory chapters." Yeah, that'll just take a couple of days.I could give at least two dozen more real-life examples. But the primary problems I came across were 1) a lack of money required the student to focus on a job instead of their dissertation (especially common with female students), 2) an incompatibility between committee members and a weak committee chair who won't try to reconcile these differences and 3) a lack of communication or timely review of chapter drafts by committee members. I knew one university assistant dean who spent a fair amount of time just chasing down professors after they had taken over a year to review and okay 1 (ONE!) chapter for a student's dissertation. This was not uncommon.The only graduate program I was familiar with where these problems weren't major issues was one where the entire faculty (all of them, not just the assistant professors) met annually and went over the status of every single student in the program. If there were problems between committee members, they were addressed in those meetings. If a professor was clearly slacking off, they were held accountable.The issues involving faculty attitudes and behavior are clearly not in the power of the individual graduate student to address and it is appropriate for the department to work together to help their students get through the dissertation process. Unfortunately, I didn't hear of this happening in most graduate programs.For example, in the graduate program where I received my first Masters degree, they accepted 21 students the year I entered and only 4 made it all of the way through to graduate with a PhD. Attrition for students who are ABD (all degree requirements completed except for the dissertation) is frequently quoted to be over 50%. That is the drop-off rate for students who were accepted into the program and completed all of the coursework, all of the necessary language exams and along with their comprehensive/subject area examinations. At times, even the dissertation was completed and the committee would not agree it was time to schedule a dissertation defense.Given the investment of time and money students put into a Ph.D program, I think this is an enormously tragic and wasteful process. I know students who put over $100K into their graduate education and came away with nothing but outrageous student loan bills. The process is badly in need of some standardization so as not to mislead students or financially drain their available resources without providing them anything tangible.