EVENT
My Summer Temp Job at Tektronix and Learning to Write
- At age 15 (1976/1977), I was already doing professional contract coding for Superior Software Services and Washington County IED, making $30 an hour.
- After graduating high school early at age 16 in January 1978, I moved in with my uncle in Beaverton. My uncle was friends with a second-level manager at Tektronix and arranged an introduction, landing me a summer temp job in May/June 1978.
- Ironically, the role was as a technical writer, which forced me to learn the art of professional writing directly on the job.
- I was mentored in book and corporate organization by Lyle Settle, and learned the details of technical editing from Jack Falk.
- I excelled in this role and stayed for four years, quickly migrating from a temp to a permanent salaried position—becoming the youngest salaried employee and highest paid minor at Tektronix.
- After four years as a tech writer, I transitioned internally into a Programming position under a software manager at Tektronix, realizing that technical writing and software engineering were fundamentally the same: both are about expressing complex logic clearly in a formal medium.
- During my time at Tektronix, I became highly experienced with TROFF formatting.
- Later on, Steve Talbott took my custom Tektronix TROFF macros and brought them to Tim O'Reilly. O'Reilly loved them and adopted them as their in-house formatting macros, which were subsequently used to publish almost every classic O'Reilly "animal" book!
- See Landing at Tektronix at Age 16 Through Uncle's Introduction and Gladstone Childhood, FOCAL on Lined Paper, and the Early Career Arc.
What links here
These facts are as Randal recalls them, but much time has passed for most of this. If you find a factual error, please email realmerlyn@gmail.com.