Once upon a time, I managed to get a four month contract job for an information service company that had gone IPO. If you watched Jeopardy in the late 90s, early 2000s, you might’ve seen their advertisements as the company was called USSeearch.com. This company had an interesting history, which I will get to shortly. But I want to talk a little about the inside scoop of what ended up being one of the weirder companies I worked for.
Around mid 2000, the Dot Com bubble had become red hot and probably was at its peak. I was still relatively young and inexperienced, only having what I consider my first real professional job in the industry at the race parts company. However, as that company began experiencing rapid growth, turmoil began brewing where new people joined almost daily and the political game started to rear its ugly head. Being ignorant of such things, I mostly kept my head low as I focused on the job at hand. Unfortunately, I still wouldn’t escape unscathed as certain individuals somehow singled me out for being the one to complain to. Even though I liked my boss and a college friend who helped get me this job, I knew something was wrong.
Regardless, because I needed more money for future trips to Japan as well as my increased spending for my Lego hobby, which now expanded much further since I could obtain old sets I missed out on, I simply needed more work. I put my resume out on some job site, probably monster.com or dice.com. Within the next day, I received numerous phone calls with incredible offers that blew my mind. You’d hear things such as this place has an Olympic swimming pool or that place had some grand Christmas party.
Of course, being a pragmatist, I focused mostly on money. I wanted something part time that would just let me do some side work at night because at that point in time, I was still hungry, growing and not depleted like I would be at the end of my second journey in Japan. I ended up speaking to an internal recruiter for USSearch who gave me a pretty nice figure considering I had almost no experience. But I think what got me all the attention in the first place was my rapid ascent to “senior developer” since the other one left and I ended up cleaning up his mess at the race parts spot. The recruiter had me talk with their main guy and it seemed we gelled. However, because I was young, impressionable and idealistic still, I had loyalty to my current company and didn’t want to depart on bad terms especially after the previous fashion company had threatened me.
The recruiter ended up convincing me when he said, “The minute you’re starting to look means you’re already out the door” (paraphrased but you get the point). It was one of those poignant albeit manipulative and poisonous statements that stayed with me and made me distrust recruiters ever since. But the real thing was that they were going to offer me way more money plus overtime. When I brought it up to my CTO at the race parts company, they decided to give me more stock. But as the saying goes, anything times zero is still zero. I knew I was supremely cheap but good labor for them. However, this lowballing pretty much told me that I wasn’t really respected. So I took this job and departed the race parts company shortly thereafter.
The new company seemed slightly more professionally run at least with regards to the technical infrastructure in place. There were probably around 200 people onsite, including people handling the bulk of the due diligence calls. It was located in Playa Vista behind the Home Depot, which was unfortunate because of how there was almost no food options close by. The only things we had within walking distance was a more traditional roach coach and the tiny McDonalds embedded into the Home Depot. The Indian contractor, who had certain dietary preferences, mostly got himself a chicken burger from McDonalds every day and I would occasionally eat from the roach coach (which was a mistake because of the insane amount of grease in their food).
That said, by the time I started working at this company, I learned that the entire management staff were these South African Jews that replaced the previous heads. It was a bizarre scenario and some people joked internally that it was like an apartheid. Nonetheless, the CIO and CTO both were quite nice to me so generally speaking I had no issues for the most part. The one issue that did happen occurred because of the classic morning bug problem with mod_perl and Apache::DBI in conjunction with their Oracle database server. We had one townhall called by the CEO where we were gathered to try to figure out what the issue was. The network engineer said some nonsense and later I realized just how worthless those guys were in the tech stack. To make a long story of that short, the company gradually moved to Java when the BEA team came down and spoke to management and convinced them that their stuff would solve all their problems at a lower cost. So my job was mostly going to go away because I was more focused on mod_perl. They did offer to hire me full time but I was going to Japan and effectively killed my career in not taking them up on that offer as well as being able to transition to J2EE as it was getting hot, which forever has been my one regret in my career.
So where exactly does the dead cult part come into this story? Years later, when I worked as a CTO for this start up in Santa Monica, I was walking around outside near the 2nd street Promenade (close to my office) and some person noticed my O’Reily Perl shirt. We started chatting and I mentioned that I worked on mod_perl in a passed life whereupon he admitted to have been an early employee at USSearch. I can’t recall if this person was their CTO (because he was a CTO at this stage, which is why we partly connected) and he told me the rest of the backstory to that place.
Apparently, USSearch had been founded by the Heaven’s Gate cult group (the infamous ones that committed mass suicide) or perhaps one of their members. From what the person revealed, the original founder for USSearch had a list of CDs containing the names of people, the phone numbers, etc. which were supposed to be linked to this massive directory within the cult. Somehow they decided to put the list online which began the foundation for the company. I can’t recall if I knew about the cult part after I joined the company but I do remember being pretty shocked in hearing why that company had that recent layer of management introduced. I guess it’s one of those rare instances where the founders decided to fire themselves (nyuk nyuk)
On a side note, I don’t think it’s uncommon in the industry to find various companies started by these wingnut types. A few coworkers from my past worked at a spot in Glendale and mentioned that the company had ties to Scientology as an example. Part of me believes that’s how some companies manage to get their funds since there’s probably an ulterior motive. Of course, these days there’s so many companies that you probably don’t see as much of that anymore. But it is a fun story to tell even though I mostly witnessed this stuff 2nd hand.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.