My first job out of college was with a company called FXD/Telerate Inc. (now titled Dow Jones/Telerate Systems Inc.). Despite my low GPA and my math degree, they hired me because a large number of the engineers knew me from Berkeley and the XCF, and they felt that I was worth the risk. The "FX" in FXD/Telerate stands for "foreign exchange" - they specialized in integrated systems for monitoring exchange markets. Using a UNIX workstation as a platform, they provide a networked collection of applications which allow traders to view and analyze the current or past state of the market, so as to make decisions. These applications include a data feed page display, various "tickers", charting applications, and real-time spreadsheets.
I was hired to work on a particularly nasty project called "spreadsheet". The company had bought the source to a Lotus 1-2-3 clone, and they had added their own real-time hooks to provide a cheap but effective spreadsheet which can be used to perform calculations on real-time values, such as the current exchange rate for a particular currency. This was a good project for me to start with, because 1) it was really nasty code that no one else wanted to touch, and 2) it was a low-impact application.
After the spreadsheet project, I went on to work on a quote display program and a real-time, multi-user whiteboard project.
About three years into my work at FXD, the company's development manager was hired away to be the senior VP in charge of development at a company called Blyth Software Inc., the maker of Omnis 7, the best cross-platform client/server software on the market. Shortly after he left, he recruited my project manager away from FXD to head a UNIX port that the company wanted to do. Shortly after that, my former project manager hired me away from FXD to be the senior engineer on the project. The job was portrayed to me as being a place to start building a new empire - the company hoped to have a much larger role in the UNIX world, and the port was to be the first step.
Since I'm no longer there, it's obvious that that didn't come to be. The problem was that the company ran into financial difficulties about the time the UNIX port was finished. The port was shelved because of the financial difficulties. At the same time, the company laid off a large number of its employees, including a significant number of its engineers. They asked me to stay on, but since they had killed all promise of future UNIX work, I declined and asked them to give me severance, thank you very much.
After leaving Blyth, a head-hunter put me in touch with a company called ETAK, Inc., the foremost provider of digital map data. Because of my strong engineering background, my strong math background, and my work on the XCF XMAP project, I was an ideal candidate for them. I joined them shortly after, joining a division called Commercial Mapping. Our job is to come up with new and better ways for the company to make maps. My primary role is as a Data Translator - I am supposed to develop methods for translating any form of digital map data into any other, keeping issues such as topological consistency and accuracy in mind.