Here I try to answer many of the questions that come up regarding me and my experience.  Consider it a FAQ of sorts.

Tell me about your Microsoft Certified Professional  Developer credential
The new Microsoft certifications are more specialized than before. Where the MCAD (see below) certified competency in a broad range of  technologies, the new certifications focus in on particular classes of technology. My current MCPD credential certifies a specialization in Windows (WinForms) development. Other MCPD certifications specify a focus in Web (WebForms) development or Enterprise Applications Development.
 
Microsoft says:

The certification was awarded for passing a four-hour proctored exam on development using WinForms with .Net 2.0 including data access (ADO.NET) and the deployment and maintenance of the finished product (ClickOnce™ deployment and Microsoft Installation packages.)

Tell me about your Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist credential
The new Microsoft certifications are more specialized than before. Where the MCAD (see below) certified competency in a broad range of  technologies, the new certifications focus in on particular classes of technology. My current MCTS credential certifies a specialization in Windows (WinForms) development using .Net 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 -- now, that's specialized!

Microsoft says:

Tell me about your Microsoft Certified Application Developer for .Net credential
MCAD for .Net is granted for completing three proctored exams dealing with development of web applications, Windows applications and web services using the .Net technologies. I came into the program with about a year's experience in programming with .Net and still learned quite a  bit. The requirements for this credential are a proper subset of the requirements for Microsoft Certified Solution Developer for .Net, which I am currently pursuing, but it's a nice interim certification to get along the way.

Tell me about your Microsoft Certified Professional credential
MCP is granted for completing a proctored exam in the Microsoft Certified Professional program. This certification was a side-effect of working toward my Microsoft Certified Solution Developer for .Net credential.

I notice your job title for EDS was "Information Specialist" was that a software engineering job?
Yes, it was. EDS (Electronic Data Systems -- Ross Perot's old company) does not use the Software Engineer job title.

Do you have any UNIX experience?
It's here and there in the resume. Though I'm primarily a Windows developer, I have a somewhat yellowed certificate declaring me a systems programmer for BSD UNIX. I often end up dealing with one UNIX or another (e.g. Solaris, Linux) in projects. I wouldn't be happy in a job that was UNIX-only, but I can deal with it as a part of a Windows programming job.

Do you have any Java experience?
I've taken courses in Java but have not used it in a product. I do have experience using Javascript on web pages.

Why don't you list the month you started/ended work at a given company?
Mostly because I don't remember the month information for all my jobs, so I don't list it for any. I know it makes it confusing if you're trying to figure out if I worked at Xerox for a year or two years. But it's a talking point; if it's not clear and you care about it,  ask me. (I was a Xerox for 18 months.)

Give me an example of what you call "project rescue."
Project Rescue is a term I coined to describe a scenario I often get hired into. Generally, there is a project that's "95% complete" and has been for a number of months. Usually, there's a deadline of some sort looming. Sometimes key people have left and taken their experience with them. My job is to get the project back on track and out the door on time.

Specific example: The GenRad "Viper Vision" project was developing a device to inspect printed circuit boards using a CCD camera. The software was a year late when I was hired to bring it to completion. The code could not be compiled in release mode. There were frequent, mysterious crashes, performance was bad. The project was being done by people who were subject matter experts in machine vision and testing, but they were not able to get the project completed. Old management had been fired and new management had committed to demonstrate the product at a show in four months. The team was in disarray, with some members not working at all because they were feeling exploited. There was a sense that the project was doomed. Senior members of the team had fled to other projects to avoid being associated with the failure.

On arrival, I started educating myself in the workspace of the project. It was immediately clear that the code was technically sound, but not well integrated. My first priority for my own work was to develop a release-mode build of the code that we could all then work from. I used SoftIce and Bounds Checker to get the crashes diagnosed and TrueTime to measure performance and pass the bottleneck information along for improvement. 

My priority for the team was to get them back into working order. It's my personal belief that engineers will never let a project go until they have a new one to work on, so I helped get a new project started then motivated my team to finish the old project so they could go work on the new one.

The project was ready for demonstration at the show and shipped its first copy a week later. 

Which project makes you most proud?
That would be working for Xerox Imaging Systems on a product called Bookwise. I'm proud of it on two different levels: it was technically very challenging and it was a project that made a positive difference in people's lives.

The project was to develop software that would assist dyslexics with reading. The basic thrust of the software was that it could take text that came from any number of sources, including our own scanners that used Xerox's TextBridge OCR software to convert scanned images to text, and display it in a window where we would highlight a word, phrase or sentence (user selectable) and use a text-to-speech synthesizer to speak the highlighted text. We'd skim the highlight through the text simultaneously speaking the text to the user. By using multiple pathways, we could increase a dyslexic's reading comprehension by two grade levels. (Frankly, I found it helped me read boring corporate e-mail, too.)

Technically, there were a lot of challenges. Not just the integration of multiple text sources to multiple speech synthesizers, but also we had to speech-enable the entire Windows UI. The user could set every menu, every tooltip, etc. to "speak." We also had an integrated dictionary and thesaurus that could be used to look up any word on the screen -- even words in the definition of the word they just looked up.

I did the UI speech and dictionary end of it, and lead a small team that did the application UI and scanner handling.  The team varied in size over the course of the project from two to five depending on what was going on.

Total project time from initial requirements until the product went into QA was about 18 months. At that point, Xerox decided to sell the division and I was identified as excess, since my project had just delivered....

Which company did you like the best and why?
I can't pick just one, but I can keep it down to two. I started out in computer operations for a company called First Data Corporation in Waltham Mass. One of the most amazing things about this company, besides them giving me a chance, was that they believed in training. (Yeah, lots of companies claim to.) More than that, they believed after training you for your current job, they should train you for your next job and make the path to that job very clear and attainable. That has stayed with me for my entire career. I have always made a point of having a good mix of junior and senior people in my teams and attempt to train people for their next job and move them along. It's part of the reason I can get a project delivered so fast -- everyone is excited to be doing something new or looking forward to getting to that next assignment.

My second favorite company was GenRad. They were an old-line company with a strong history of careful engineering. They were one of the few places I've been that really believed in  cooperation rather than competition. It was the perfect place for me to use my strategy of building teams with members that had different skill sets rather than being carbon copies of each other. By having people with differing skills, the team's coverage is wider and a few motivated people can do the work of many. I had always believed that was true, but GenRad gave me the chance to try it out.

Since Digital, you don't seem to have stayed anyplace too long. Why is that?
Let me answer the hidden part of the question first: I've never voluntarily left a company without completing a project, nor will I do that to you. I've never been let go for performance reasons.

As to the question itself, I believe it's an artifact of the economy. A large percentage of the companies I've worked for have been acquired by other companies. I get laid-off in the downsizing that follows. I suppose the fact that I'm often hired into projects that are in trouble means that I'm often hired by companies that are in trouble. At any rate, I never seem to be working for the company that does the acquiring.

An interesting example of this is the two entries for GenRad and Teradyne. I worked for GenRad for two years and then took the job with EDS because my wife was relocated to Albuquerque. When the job in Albuquerque ended, I called my old boss from GenRad and he hired me back. Except Teradyne bought GenRad, so I was working for the same people for a total of four years, but it looks like two short stints at separate companies.

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