These mugs were swag for our J937 Memory Tester team at Teradyne.   Each system was $500K+ and we shipped over 200.  I also worked on L200 circuit board testers.  Teradyne is where I discovered software and the Internet and changed my career.  I tried to do a lateral shift into software (Teradyne was actually a pretty decent company) but my manager stone-walled me for several months.   I kept emailing him and he finally did a one-to-one meeting and his exact quote was,

"If you were going to accomplish that, you'd have done it already".

I'm 29 years old and this guy tells me I'm all washed up in life?  Seriously?

Five years later my software was running on 4,000 laptops in 40 US State agencies, Canada, Mexico and the Marinas Islands (I didn't even know where they were).

Then during the 2008-2009 recession, recruiters said that my career was over, I was too old and I wouldn't get a software job again.   True, my selection of jobs was suckier but I had senior architect contracts and was offered permanent roles at a few.  And I did write some serious software in 2011 and 2014-2019.

Now it's 2021 and apparently I'm too old to "do math".  :)

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