Surviving in Corporate America

I survived in corporate America for almost seven years. I was at Leviton Manufacturing for six months, AT&T for six years and Consolidated Edison for four months. It wasn’t easy.

First of all, let’s look at AT&T. I got that job based on a solid business education and computer literacy. I have both undergraduate and graduate degrees in business and I studied computer programming too.

My GPA in graduate school, the Boston University/Ben Gurion University of the Negev Joint Program was 3.73. So obviously, I didn’t fall asleep in college. I also finished the program in 11 months. So I didn’t dilly dally over it.

I took 14 business courses as an undergraduate student at Long Island University’s CW Post College and I received 12 A’s and 2 B pluses. Again my GPA was very high. I also took art and music appreciation and received A’s in those courses. My GPA at LIU was 3.94. So I had a good track record.

I still had a hard time finding work though. I thought employers would be throwing themselves at my feet based upon my scholarship but that didn’t turn out to be the case. The so-called real world turned out to be a crucible that tested me out to the max.

It took me about two years after I graduated with my Master of Science in Management degree to find work at all and I was afraid of dying on the street. Not to mention how New York State Higher Education Services was coming after me to pay back my student loans as soon as they tracked me down when I got a telephone installed in my apartment.

I’ll let you in on a big secret. Sometimes, people passed copies of exams to me and I used them several times (three times in fact) to get good grades on a test. I also had a computer program passed to me at COPE Institute where I studied computers before being hired by AT&T.

My sister always told me, “When you go on a job interview, lie, lie, lie or you’ll get nothing.” And my sister worked for some of the big placement agencies in NYC like Alberta Smyth. I took her advice. I had to, but there was a trade off. I’ll explain the trade off via an episode of the Simpson’s.

Bart Simpson, cheated on an IQ test and based on that he wound up in a class for accelerated students. He was out of his league. It took a while for him to get out of the mess he was in, as it did for me.

My first boss at AT&T told me, “I know you know calculus, statistics, et al, but I can’t figure out why you can’t write and debug computer programs well.” The truth is I was useless to AT&T for almost a year.

My psychometric tests administered by my Jr. High school pointed out that when it comes to clerical speed and accuracy, I’m only 30th percentile. So much for dealing with data rich files.

One thing I will tell you is that the boss I referred to above bragged about how she made it up the ladder without a college education. It was too bad for AT&T that they promoted her. Every system designed under her had to be redesigned by someone else and the system I had, AM04, was a useless piece of junk that we threw in the garbage pail. Let me explain the l latter:

AM04’s outputs didn’t look like the outputs of any similar system. Based upon statistics, if a system gives results that don’t match comparable systems, it can’t be accurate. AM04 cost 1.5 million dollars a year and it was in existence for 8 years before I killed it. And I knew what I was doing and my boss at the time didn’t.

One thing I can tell you is by quoting Rabbi Shea Hecht of Chabad Lubavitch. He told me, “Even if you’re not good in learning, friendship is very important.” I’ve found this to be true.

My first boss at AT&T gave me work to do in the VM operating system and in PL/I. I couldn’t finish it alone. Someone in the company decided to bail me out and he actually wrote my project for me until I learned this system and language well enough to fly on my own. Later on I became known as very proficient in these technologies. It’s a matter of a learning curve.

I also made friends with someone in my first group, the late Tom Donahue who was a town councilman in Clinton, NJ. Tom helped me debug my code. He also got in between my first boss and myself so I didn’t get bounced out of AT&T. Luckily, by the second year, I had work to do that I could handle so I lasted five more years there.

I want to mention Tom here because he got killed not long after he got married. He had everything to live for and he really was a great guy. He had many friends.

Tom tripped and hit his head in his new home and he died from the injury. He was a young man and he couldn’t have been much more than 35 years old. I knew his widow as she also worked for AT&T. She was an analyst. It was really a shame and I’m dedicating this piece to him. Tom, you are sorely missed.

At Con Ed I was given a project of automating two systems and making an interface that would join the two of them together. I was hired by one boss, but soon after I was in the company, there was a shakeup and I wound up with a new boss and he kept jumping in to help me refine my code and he helped in speeding up the process of finishing the project.

He also told me to handle the system differently than I was handling it. I was bent on replacing a woman’s job function so I analyzed how she worked and I was writing the interface based on how she worked but there were about 30 other people who also worked on that system and they handled it all differently.

The new boss told me that we needed a new system because the old one was “too dirty.” That was the way he put it.

Now let’s talk about Leviton Manufacturing. Leviton is the world’s largest manufacturer of electric switches and circuits. My father’s ex-boss pulled the strings to get me in the company as he was friends with Harold Leviton the owner.

The fact is, I did nothing for six months until they fired me giving me the good advice to go to college and that would help my thinking skills. I’ve found corporate America to be very lenient with me but those days are over, I’m afraid.

To survive these days, you’ll need to be able to give a solid product or service to the firms. You’ll also need to be able to submit yourself to a boss.

And I’ll give you two pieces of advice:

1. Don’t get yourself in the middle of anyone else’s problems with a superior and
2. Don’t help anyone else unless your boss knows your helping that person

I’ll explain the above too. My last boss at AT&T used to make crazy faces at one of his main workers. I put myself in the middle of it and got burned. Also, based on that, I decided not to work closely with the boss and I got downsized as a result.

Also, I was helping out a contractor and he told me that the only reason he could finish his project was due to my bopping down his cubicle all the time. My boss either didn’t know about it or didn’t care and it didn’t help me out when it came my time to be axed.

Also, one of the analysts on the last system I was on, WIS, laughed in my face as ;he was talking about “right sizing WIS”. Be rest assured that with the down sizing of about 233 thousand people since I was bounced out of AT&T he and all the people who gave me grief also probably wound up in the trash can

I went to a school in Brooklyn looking for advice. They gave me a psychometric test and I got all but two questions right. The counselor told me, “You’re a genius. Your problem is that you’re not smart for yourself. It’s whatever the boss wants.”