I tried to explain to the HR person that came in to prep for my exit from that job. I wore about six different hats.

You need a programmer, a system administrator, a database administrator, a technical manager, a help desk person and the programmer better know C, Perl, all the Unix command line possibilities as they are in shell scripts all over the place, oh, and this is a new multiprocessor Unix system that is way new cheap desktop technology and is prone to failure. So you better be able to handle the rolling oracle backup system that I created before Oracle had it. There are 30 users right down the hall from you and will walk into your office to try to distract you. They are all nice people. You have to kick them out nicely. Unless there is a real request to be dealt with. You will never have a moment of free time if you don't know how to manage it. There is a once a month production that goes for three straight days. You better be available the entire time. The system will call you if there is a problem. You better be willing to carry the beeper 24 by 7. And don't expect any support from corporate because they don't know s*** about this system and they told me I was on my own when I created it and my boss was fine with that.

She laughed at me. I knew the end was near when that happened.

My boss fought for this system.

I had a mediocre assistant that had been forced upon me at that point so she was going to be in charge when I left. And she was no programmer and a piss poor junior admin. But there was no smoking guns to fire her. She spent 90% of her time writing her unpublished novel. I was not allowed to fire her.

They closed that division about a year after I left. Either I timed it perfectly or there was technical problems after I left.

After that point I spent a couple years building a system and then hiring and managing other programmers. I kept writing my own systems and handing them off to other programmers.

I spent an enormous amount of time recruiting. I visited classes and user groups and interacted with hundreds of people as I handed out my card and tried to attract the best and the brightest. My best perl programmer was an English major in college. And his last name was Pearl. He was born into it. He was tossed at me via a recruiter and his resume was absolutely no mach for the job. But on interview it was obvious and over the years he amazed me again and again. He was one of many.

I also had my failures. So I became very careful.

Bottom line is I never tried to embed and I always try to hire smarter than me.

So everything I wrote had to be easily understood by any programmer that I was willing to hire. And I didn't code obscure to be fancy. But occasionally you have to do table driven regular expressions in closures and that s*** goes wild.