Zero to Tesla Read online

  While I was flaming out in my job search, I got a letter in the mail from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). I had received a full scholarship to do a master’s in Engineering at any university in Canada. It was beyond anything I’d expected, but I filed away the letter and didn’t even call my father to let him know. I wanted to get a job; having to get a graduate degree was, to me, admitting failure. A couple of months later, as September approached, my father called me and asked, “So have you gotten a job yet?” I told him that I had not, and he said, “I’ve been telling you that you should get a graduate degree. It looks good, and it will help you get a job. Don’t worry about the money. I’ll pay for it. You just have to get into a good school.”

  I paused for a moment and told half the truth, “Dad, I just found out yesterday that I got an NSERC scholarship.” He knew instantly what that meant and began to congratulate me and exult in knowing his son was going to go the education route instead of being a common workingman. “Dad, don’t get so excited,” I said. “I still have to get into a school, and I think it’s too late for this year.”

  “Just apply,” he replied. “Every graduate school wants students who are NSERC funded. You’ll get in.”

  Dad was right. Two weeks later, the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver accepted me to do a master’s in electrical engineering. It was a top national school, and I was looking forward to doing well, graduating as soon as possible, and getting back to my real objective: a great job.

  ---

  When I was at UNB, I got a good engineering education, but the school was a smaller, regional university. Now, at UBC, I was at the second largest university in Canada, studying alongside some of the smartest graduate students in the country. I quickly discovered that although I did okay academically, I was never going to be a superstar against such world-class competition. During a 3D mapping project, my professor asked for a demonstration of software I wrote to map a pattern onto a sphere. I knew how to program in assembler, Fortran, Pascal, and of course BASIC, but I didn’t know the latest and greatest language, “C.” The mainframe at UBC used C, so I resorted to BASIC on a Macintosh in the computer lab. My algorithm was so slow I booted up a second Mac beside the first one so I could play Dark Castle while it did the mapping.

  The first day I did this, the computer lab supervisor, Larry, came over to me and said, “Hey, Sanjay, stop playing games. This lab is for schoolwork only.” I pointed to the other Mac and said, “I’m doing research.” He bent down and stared at the other screen for a few moments as the spinning sphere gained a diamond pattern one slow pixel at a time. He smirked and asked, “Is this for Professor Graeme’s class project?” I nodded and he laughed, gave a dismissive gesture, and walked back to his desk, saying, “Go ahead and play your game.” Larry turned out to be a second-year master’s student, and Dr. Graeme was his thesis supervisor.

  As it happened, I got a B plus on the project despite its abject inadequacy in execution because my approach was theoretically sound. But I later asked to see Larry’s submission for the same project the previous year, and I was left embarrassed at my relative incompetence.

  When I chose my Masters thesis project, I went for something sexy—military target recognition. The project would be co-sponsored by MacDonald-Dettwiler Associates (MDA), one of Canada’s leading companies in satellite imagery, and my project was to figure out how to detect and differentiate tanks from buildings in images from a new type of radar MDA had developed. As a result of the sponsorship, I had even more funding and two thesis supervisors: one academic and one corporate.

  I found the project quite challenging and, in fact, ended up with a mathematical theory of why the data in the images couldn’t be used to acquire targets with any degree of accuracy, as opposed to what MDA wanted, which was a useful military application. I presented the thesis anyway and spent several weeks using the latest mainframe-based word processing software to make it look snazzy and put all my formulae into the format used in textbooks—an impressive feat for self-publishing at the time. The resulting thesis printout was, graphically, among the best looking anyone in the department had ever seen.

  At the thesis review, there was a fight between my two thesis supervisors, Dr. Cummings (MDA), and Dr. Ito (UBC). Cummings dismissed my work, saying, “This is useless. He hasn’t come up with anything we can implement.”

  Ito replied, “Well, sometimes proving something isn’t possible is as useful as proving it is possible.”

  Cummings huffed and said, “I can’t sell a proof. He hasn’t done anything novel here—just combined some existing probability theory and applied it to a new problem.” He looked at me and said, “You’re going to have to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to make this work.”

  I started to respond, but Ito interjected. “Wait a second. This is my decision, not yours. The requirements of a master’s degree aren’t to invent a new theory or technology—that’s a PhD. The master’s requirement is just to demonstrate advanced knowledge of a subject.” The argument continued, and although Ito didn’t say it, I’d heard from faculty staff that he was impressed with the professionalism of my submission. The next day I got word that my thesis was approved. Word processing, 1; Military-Industrial Complex, 0.

  I had already been interviewing with companies while working on my thesis, and only fourteen months after not being able to find a job, I was graduating with a master’s in engineering, and I had seven full-time job offers from leading companies, including two from separate divisions of Nortel. I chose a position with Nortel in Toronto, and in March of 1988 I left the beautiful city of Vancouver to begin building a new life and career in Canada’s “Big City.”

  GET A JOB

  “Well, strip me naked, and call me Kevin!” It was a normal expression of surprise, anger, or hunger from our coworker who, surprisingly enough, was named Kevin. I was in a fun working group at Nortel with a bunch of other recent graduates, doing quality testing of software before releasing it to our telecom company customers. Having a master’s degree meant I made a slightly higher salary than everyone else, but skipping a grade and shaving a year off my master’s kept me at the same age.

  Ben* was the manager of my group. Stocky and just starting to show signs of early baldness, he wore his shirtsleeves rolled up and tie loosened, giving off a perpetually harassed aura. At thirty-five, and still a first-level manager, he was unlikely to be promoted further, but he was still the first person I had to impress to move my own career forward. When he had made me the job offer, Ben said, “I wouldn’t usually hire someone with a master’s degree, but I need someone to lead the team and really show them some engineering chops.”

  Nortel employed a lot of great engineers, including several in my own working group. Mac* and Alistair had both been with the company a year longer than me and were both highly proficient in the lab and test-bench environment in which we worked. I could learn from them, but as Ben had told me, in theory I was there to show them my own engineering chops. This was problematic, because I knew that my strengths weren’t at the core technical level. As always, I understood basic technology and could communicate well (therefore, better than 90 percent of engineers), but I was never going to make it in an environment where the people around me knew what they were doing and knew that I didn’t. I did, however, dress better than most of my peers, and I networked outside of my immediate work group whenever I could. I joined Toastmasters to improve my public speaking and even volunteered to publish a newsletter for the local engineering association.

  During my first performance review, Ben gave me a three out of four—“Met Expectations”—while both Mac and Alistair received four out of four. A three wasn’t going to get me promoted, but when I asked him what I could do better to get a four, he said, “Just keep working, you’re doing all the right things.”

  Frustrated, I asked, “Well if I’m doing all the right things, why am I not president of the
company?”

  “You just have to give it time.” He was hitting the trifecta of glib, unhelpful, and demotivating.

  Within a year, I was starting to think that if I was so good at marketing myself, how about getting a job in marketing? The problem was that getting a job in marketing at Nortel was impossible with just an engineering degree and no other experience. I thought the best way to proceed might be to repeat my previous adventure, and do it via a brand name university and a new image as a tech marketer. MBA here I come!

  I was nervous about leaving a well-paying job and my friends in Toronto, but I’d learned a valuable lesson in doing my master’s at UBC. Brand mattered. So I decided fairly quickly that I was willing to leave the city for two years.

  ---

  What’s the best MBA school in the world? Harvard! So I applied to Harvard, and as a secondary, I chose Cornell University. I reasoned that Cornell is Ivy League, so it has a great reputation in Canada, and in 1989, BusinessWeek Magazine ranked them as having the number-five MBA program in the United States. It was also only a four-hour drive from Toronto. Obviously, I’m explaining all of this because Harvard immediately rejected me. I was, however, accepted at Cornell.

  Being a Canadian going to a US school, I wasn’t going to have a scholarship to attend university; that was a first for me. I had heard, though, that Nortel Networks offered two scholarships a year to employees wanting to go to graduate school, and they’d pay the full amount even if you decided to go to the United States, where tuition was five times higher.

  As I gathered the material for my MBA application, I went into Ben’s office. “Could you give me a referral?” I smiled, trying to look charming.

  “Sure,” he said, then he hesitated. “But you don’t get to read the letter I write, right?”

  I slouched. I had once asked him, “What’s the hardest thing about being a manager?” and his reply was, “Learning to accept what your employees are capable of.” He looked at me funny when he’d said that, kind of like how he was looking at me now. Maybe a referral from Ben wasn’t such a great idea after all.

  Fortunately, I’d worked with a fellow engineer who decided to go into HR for a one-year tour of duty. He told me, “Look, most people don’t even know this award exists, and all you have to do is write a decent essay. There’s not that much competition.” So I got another manager in my division to write a reference letter and wrote a passable essay about wanting to get an MBA so I could make the world a better place. A month later I received a phone call from corporate.

  “Hello, Mr. Singhal? This is Erin, and I’ve been reviewing your application for a Nortel scholarship. Can I ask you a question?”

  “Yes, of course!” I replied enthusiastically.

  “If you’re given this scholarship, will you be returning to work at Nortel?”

  I hadn’t realized leaving was even an option, so I repeated myself. “Yes, of course!”

  The answer satisfied Erin, who then announced, “Congratulations, Mr. Singhal. Nortel will be paying for your business administration degree, along with two years of living expenses.”

  A couple of years earlier, the song “The Future’s so Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades” had made the Billboard charts, and I was humming it as I picked up the phone to call my parents and tell them the great news. I thought to myself, “Two years ago I couldn’t even get a job. I love my life. I’ve got it made.”

  EXPLORE THE WORLD A BIT

  A year before starting my MBA, in the fall of 1989, I had seen an internal posting for a temporary job in Australia, for experts in virtual private networks (VPNs). I had heard of VPNs, but that was about it. I reasoned, though, that whoever in HR was posting the job likely knew even less about it than I did, so I read up a little, added some acronyms to my resume, and managed to get an interview. By then I knew a lot of the key terms and figured I could learn the rest on the flight over if I had to. Much to my delight, I got the offer.

  In June of 1990, I flew to Melbourne, Australia, for a two-month tour of duty at Nortel’s field office there before starting my MBA. I carried a set of thick binders that explained all the operational details behind the new VPN technology, and I was looking forward to a great adventure.

  My new boss, Perry*, was in his early thirties, stood about 5’5”, wore glasses, and had great hair. Meeting me at the office, he shook my hand enthusiastically and then immediately shoved my binders and me into the lab in the back of the building. My job was to field test the new software and train a couple of engineers from our client, Telecom Australia. Since I was an “expert,” Perry said he’d pretty much leave me alone to install and test the system.

  The code itself was contained on a giant roll of magnetic tape and would be loaded into the system using a tape drive. As I hunted in the aisles for the particular equipment rack that contained the drive, I must have looked pretty distraught, because another denizen of the lab, Gord, came over and asked, “Can I help?” Gord—tall, gangly, and sucking on a lollipop—was a real engineer, the kind that could memorize insane amounts of technical specifications and recall just the right set of instructions he needed at any given juncture. Gord saw my tape roll, removed the lollipop, and said, “Last aisle,” then walked away. Thirty minutes later as I sat staring at a computer screen, Gord appeared again. He simply said, “Try a zero.” I turned back to the screen where I had been unable to start the drive and typed, “Mount 0:Load,” and suddenly the drive began spinning. Gord clapped my shoulder, said, “Back home everything starts at 1, here it starts at 0,” and then walked away again.

  Thirty minutes later, I was sitting and staring at the system administrator screen when Gord appeared again. I asked him, “Are there any hidden manuals I don’t know about?”

  In response, he stuck his hand down to me. “I’m Gord.”

  I shook his hand, and he continued. “You’re the VPN guy, right?”

  “Yeah, they sent me to install this software and teach the Telecom Australia guys how to use it, but these manuals are useless.”

  “Move over,” Gord said and then took my empty seat. “Okay, what are you trying to do?”

  I pulled out a checklist I had made, and he scanned it, saying shortly, “Okay, I can show you how to do all of this.”

  I tilted my head. “What? If you know how to do all this, then why am I here?”

  He gave me a bright smile and said, “You’re our display of commitment! We told Telecom Australia we were flying an expert in from Canada to demonstrate how committed we are to their success, and here you are! Do you know anything about VPN software?”

  “I, uh, well, um, I…” and then, noticing that he didn’t seem upset, I ended with a sheepish grin.

  He laughed and said, “Don’t worry about it. They wouldn’t have sent you here if you weren’t smart. You’ll figure it out.”

  I had studied articles on VPN and read some of the operating manuals so I could convince the powers at Nortel that I was the right person for the job, but the technology was new enough that only a few specialists like Gord could figure it out—mostly by trial and error. I wasn’t happy with being a figurehead expert, and I lost some confidence. Realizing I wasn’t that necessary, I started coming in late to the office. For some reason, nobody from Telecom Australia came looking for me to teach them how to use the software, so I just started playing video games between half-hearted sessions of reading manuals until I got sleepy.

  A couple of weeks after I started, I was shuffling around the lab when Gord stopped me and asked, “Hey, have you heard of that circadian rhythm thing?” I had no idea what he was talking about, so I shrugged, and he continued, “There’s this theory that the human body’s natural rhythm is 24.5 hours, but since we’re used to coming in to work at the same time every day, our natural rhythms get off track. I knew a guy back in Ottawa who just came in to work a little later every day to keep his rhythm on track. Is that what you’re doing?”

  I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or
not, but I was saved from having to reply by another coworker interrupting us to ask, “Coming to the pub?” Of course we turned off the lights and headed for the pub.

  ---

  Over the course of the following week, I began to come in later and later every day, initially figuring I would justify it with some variation of Gord’s circadian rhythm theory, but by the time I was coming in at 11:30 a.m., I just wondered how long it would be before somebody caught on and said something. Gord winked at me every time he saw me strolling in, but nobody else did anything but issue pub invites. My manager, Perry, was rarely around.

  On Monday of week four, I began my day at 1:00 p.m. Shortly after I’d sat down at my desk, Perry showed up behind me and tapped my shoulder. I had managed to hit the “boss” button before he could look at my screen, but the only problem was that I didn’t work with spreadsheets in my job, so the fake one that came up still made it look like I was running the office football pool instead of doing something useful.

  Perry ordered me into his office. “What time did you come in today?”

  “Uh, I’m not sure.”

  “Give me a guess.”

  I didn’t think this was going to go well, so I just decided to tell the truth and hoped that it would throw him off whatever he had planned next. I said, “I think I came in around 1:00? The client wasn’t expecting me today.” Not surprising, since the client must have realized a while ago that I knew as much about setting up VPNs as I did about delivering kangaroo babies.

  In easy hearing distance of six of my peers, Perry started in. “Singhal, you are one of the most embarrassing excuses for an employee I have ever seen! When you were sent over from Canada, I was told you were a star, that you’d raise the reputation of this office, and,” he continued, pointing at the door, “that you’d show all these other bozos how hard Canadians worked instead of going to the pub all the time! I was going to use you as a role model! Do you even know anything about virtual networks? You’re just a screwup ruining the reputation of my field office!”