The weekend went most satisfactorily - all four days of it - despite the bitter disappointment of Friday evening. The conversation about Security that night had helped to defuse the worst of his bitterness and frustration. Lester was an escapist at heart - had a reasonable comprehensive Sci-Fi library of paperbacks and was working slowly through the collection in the local municipal library, as the spirit moved him. So the chance to talk about pulling off a major subtraction of company wealth had appealed to his sense of adventure. In the final analysis, though, it was a pity he knew too much. You'd never get away with it.
They spent Sunday visiting a couple of picturesque scenic spots in the Dandenong Ranges. It was a pleasant one-hour drive in warm Spring sunshine, with the worst of the forest's dampness no longer underfoot or on every branch as you brushed it, just about gone in the sunshine. Though the Ranges never lost their greenery, they looked and smelt clean and new today, and offered a complete break from computers, technology and deadlines. So the pair did nothing significant all day, chatting with the locals who were keen to welcome the early forerunners of the season's tourist trade. They weren't old friends, but they were welcome, and the day was an excellent diversion.
Last year, bushfires had torn through a big slice of this beautiful region, but those areas were not obvious any more, and might not have existed. Even if the residents there were still fighting Insurance companies almost a year later, there was plenty of virgin territory left for the tourist. Something a little sad there: but not their problem.
The subject of computer crime didn't come up again, but one of the discussion's loose ends began to tickle at the edges of Lester's consciousness.
Monday, after Annette had, not so silently, packed up and gone to work, he let the house calm down for an hour or so, and rolled out of bed to give some consideration to breakfast. She would be home around six-thirty - normal early knock-off timetable. You waited for the peak -hour traffic to abate, and then the drive from the city fitted in well with the ABC's series of current affairs radio broadcasts.
That meant eight hours of relative freedom – or emptiness, if you looked at it that way - to get on with the job he planned. The house's old dining room was dingy and claustrophobic at best, so they'd agreed on some bright, plush wallpaper, the stuff with a furry surface that took a lot of care to hang but looked great. Over the last two weekends he'd filled all the cracks, they'd bought all the material, and two clear days was three times as long as he needed for the job.
They never used the dining room. The kitchen was much more practical as an eating area for a working couple. For recreation, though, some activities didn't fit well in the front Lounge, so they rechristened the old dining room a Study, and today was a start of the setup work.
Sizing the walls needed no deep analytical planning, and so that recurring question was allowed to come to the surface. Annette had noted how effectively he was chained to his coding pad, and he'd agreed. It looked that way, but it was the first time in ever so long that he'd stopped to think about any career considerations.
Was it all done, finished, and complete? Was he planning to work in the continuous school of Systems Programming, forever? Would he create some kind of industry record, retiring at 65 in 28 years as the oldest pro in the business? Never happen: the big IBM mainframe was on the way out, and only a few large companies held on; they were waiting for the BIG BOX to decay and fall through its own bolt holes, rather than have to re-plan all their systems. Eventually, though, it would happen.
There was a modest bank account, a little over two years of salary, which gave him some freedom, of course. The company would permit him to retire up to ten years early, as well, and his contributory Superannuation would by then be worth maybe $500,000,, he guessed idly. The current business slowdown was changing things, too - an early departure with full entitlements could be possible - but it was still about 15 years away from that sort of situation.
The work group had been arguing the pros and cons of being self employed, working under contract to a company rather than being a regular employee. That was over a lunch a couple of weeks back, and two of the specialists in Lester's group had been boasting about the tax advantages, and the flexibility of their Private Company status. Others in the group were clearly wavering.
"You've got no imagination, mate."
"Some of us are just risk-averse, and you're it."
The industry had gone that way in very large numbers over the last ten years: more than half of his programmer associates were on contract, and swore by it. One of the big influences was the increasing job mobility of programmers, the logical result of competition for scarce skills. It took an employer a year or more to develop a programmer to optimum productivity, and the result was he/she didn't get a lot of variety. It cost less, because the work was done faster, if the professional was kept in a fairly narrow job stream, the area of most familiarity.
However, it wasn't good for one's career to learn more and more about less and less. One's marketability, flexibility, access to new challenges and opportunities went downhill as the computer industry forged into new fields, in all directions at once. And it was a huge and fast-evolving industry. Accountants, Production, Sales, Marketing and Distribution people all had special needs to be met when they considered using computers - as they did, these days, in every business under the sun.
The demand for good programmers was insatiable. Australia had seen the first predictions thirty years or more ago of impending shortages at all levels of the computer professional fraternity. Those forecasts had been largely ignored, and then they had become reality. The best programmers, analysts, sales people could name their price and almost any employer would accept contract personnel as routine. For some, it was an employee’s market these days.