Before I accepted an invitation to come back to LI to resume the AI work I had left in 1988, I was working for a company whose VP was a stand-up comic in some previous life. The intranet had a home-page picture of Pat Sajak morphing into him with a BSEG on his face. People in my group used to toss nerf balls from one cubicle to another, and one night after work, a handful of us got together for a jam session. The project supervisor gave us rewards like an afternoon at Dave & Buster's for a collective job well done. (There were also stock-option rewards, but I left before they were vested.) I've lost contact with those people since shortly after I left in 1998, and in the meantime, the company (CMSI) has been bought out by First American. Judging by the boring website, my failure to find anyone I knew in their phone directory, and the fact that they refuse unsolicited résumés and refer people to wade through Monster to find nonexistent jobs, my guess is that the new owners are of the blue meanie persuasion and I'm better off looking elsewhere, especially at my age. Can anybody suggest some progressive companies in the B-W corridor that hire on the basis of diverse experience, ability, and teachability, rather than a laundry list of specific skills that are as apt to be held by a hack (look at all the COBOL and RPG "gurus") as by a hacker (a hacker—not a cracker!) who understands programming at both low and high levels?
Oops! I guess I didn't mention Maryland in my post after all, so the "B-W" may have been a little cryptic (although probably not for residents): "Baltimore-Washington"
