1998

Performance Enginering Corp.

At the end of March, I started work at Performance Engineering Corp, or just PEC, with the title of “Principal Member of the Technical Staff”.  PEC was a small company of less than hundred people that did mostly government contracts.  PEC focused mainly on highly technical, and thus high profit margin, contracts with the government.  PEC hired me for my image and graphics experience but also because of my software development experience.  PEC had won a contract with the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) to develop an image system for the scanning, storage and searching of ATF case reports.  They had won the contract a couple of months before I started, and their technical lead had left so needed someone to head the team to finish development and install the system.  I was brought on to head the team which had two full time and two part time very junior level programmers. 
 
PEC’s office was located just off I-66 in Fairfax, which was an easy 20-minute drive from Reston, one of the reasons I chose the job. The imaging project I was hired for was about halfway done and installed in lab at PEC. The system consisted of a Unix based server running a database package, a document scanner, and several PC based user workstations, but the integration of all the various components had not been completed, that is what I was to lead the team to do.
 
I found the project interesting. Every year ATF investigates hundreds if not thousands of cases not only relating to alcohol, tobacco and firearms, but bombs, gangs, and all sorts of other such things. For each case, agents file reports on their findings, with cases often going on for months or years, there were lots of reports, all on paper. Part of the ATF investigation process was to search the report archive for anything that might relate to active cases, and they had a staff whose job it was to do the searches. People’s names, license tags, make and model of a car, firearm serial number, and many more such things. They did have a computerized database that contained information for each report that could be searched, but it only contained the basic key information pulled from the reports such as names, places, license numbers, firearm registration numbers, and so on.  They had a dozen or so women who would read each report and enter the information. For any information not entered, which was most of the report, they would have to go to the files and find the paper report.
 
The new system we were developing not only had the information their current system had, but also contained the full text of the reports and scanned images of the pages. With the new system you could not only search for the basic information, but any text in the reports and then pull up and view the actual image of the report. 
 
The basic system was assembled in the PEC lab and had several components: a Unix server that ran an Oracle database for the basic report information, a separate database that stored the full text of the reports which could be searched, a document scanner, and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software that would scan the document images and save the text of the document.  Then there were the end user PC base workstations which users could search and display the reports.  While the basic system components were in place, the individual components needed to be integrated together and the end user interface software developed. Of the two “older guys”, perhaps 25 years old, one handled the Unix parts of the system, the other the database and software development. The two programmers were both 19 and worked part time. They both were friends who had just completed home-schooled high school together. All the team were very bright but didn’t have a lot of experience.
 
The team worked well together, although very smart, the programmers were not very disciplined. The end user interface was all being developed using Microsoft Visual Basic. I had a schedule and a plan on what needed to be developed and in what order.  I would give them assignments, portions of the system, to code then check on the later in the day and find they decided to work on some other part of the system.  When I looked at the code they wrote I would cringe at how poorly it was written. The two younger part time guys had also started college so as their college workload increased, their hours at PEC decreased.  The other older, full-time programmer was sharp and a really good Visual Basic programmer, again not all that disciplined, but he listed my suggestions on how to improve his code, sometimes to the detriment of the project. I remember one time he asked me to look at some portion of the user interface he was having difficulty with, and I looked over what he was doing and made some suggestions. I checked in with him at the end of the day before I went home, and he said things were going well.  The next day he was late coming in, which was not all that unusual, he often would come in at nine or nine thirty, but that day it was closer to eleven. When I checked in with him, he said he had worked until two in the morning and had re-written a major section of the user interface. I was impressed and asked him to show it to me which he replied that it wasn’t working yet, give him another few hours. The few hours tuned into a couple of days, so much for my schedule.  In the end it probably was good that he re-wrote it as it did make it better but, in the future, I talked to him in more detail about what needed to be done before doing it.  Lessons learned as a manager.
 
It was a nice place to work, the one thing that did bother me was my office across from the coffee station which the secretary would make fresh coffee first thing in the morning. Although I don’t drink coffee, I liked the smell of fresh brew coffee in the morning as it brings back memories of waking up to the smell of Dad making coffee in the morning. At PEC they made hazelnut coffee which at first I thought was pleasant, but it has a strong artificial hazelnut smell and after several months I found it disgusting. To this day I can’t stand the smell of hazelnut coffee.

Yoga and Racquetball