What’s it really like to work at Chicago startups and tech companies? Blue Sky’s Inside Job lets people on the ground tell us in their own words.
August Wasilowski, 38, senior software engineer in research and development at InContext Solutions with a specialty in virtual reality
I’ve always been a nerd. I wrote my first computer program in the fourth grade on an Apple II. It was a Dungeons & Dragons character sheet generator. This is back in the day when we would print out the code on paper to debug the code.
I would read magazines and copy code from magazines and books and stuff like that. And I played the heck out of Oregon Trail.
At InContext, we’re a company that does virtual retail simulations, and our clients are retailers and manufacturers of consumer packaged goods. Our clients can see their 3-D modeled products on a shelf, and they can drag and drop their products on their shelves all around the store.
So being on the research and development team, we’re trying to figure out what we can do in VR and how we can make a virtual reality a product for our clients, eventually. I’m working on things like speech recognition and using artificial intelligence to understand what someone is saying, and that is in support of VR.
I was born in Minneapolis, but I moved to Elgin when I was around 4. I went to four different colleges. I started off in musical theater, because that’s where all the girls were. I switched majors to English. Then I did graphic design and a little bit of 3-D modeling. I went to college for nine years. I don’t have a college degree. I don’t even have an associate’s degree. I have a high school diploma.
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Throughout this whole time, I was writing programs and software and games and stuff for myself.
Working at Best Buy, I made a website called Mygeekdom.com, which doesn’t exist anymore. I talked about nerdy things and funny things. I made a lot of George Bush fart jokes. It was not highbrow, at all. But it was in the July 2003 of Popular Science magazine as one of the top five science blogs.
In 2005, I got a job at Orbital Grid Consulting. They did all the data networks and custom software for the Chicago Department of Aviation at O’Hare and Midway. I’d make websites for them. I made a FOIA tracker. Actually, my software is still running at the airport. In the cellphone lot, there’s a display showing all the arrivals coming into O’Hare. That’s my software. And that was a pain in the butt to make that.
I quit that job to start a restaurant in Kentucky with some of my friends. It was American food: burgers, burritos and beer. It was called the Red River Rockhouse. We were rock climbers, and we went down to Kentucky a lot to go climb. I was there for a year, and I was like, “Screw this, this is too much work. I want to go back to sitting down for a living. I want to go back to air conditioning.”
I worked for another company, and they did property taxes for banks. I was a software engineer and wrote all their back-end web services. That job turned out to suck, and I got fired from that job because I hurt somebody’s feelings. So the day I got fired, I had my box of my possessions, and I walked over here to InContext, and I had a job interview. I wanted to get a job as fast as possible just to prove to them they made a mistake in firing me. And four weeks later, I was working here.
I was so frustrated at the culture of my last job. I knew this place was a hip place to work, and they didn’t make people work more than 45 hours a week or whatever. Here, things are much more relaxed. There are a lot of really smart and talented people here. We don’t hire dummies, and if we do, they don’t last very long.
In January, we have a kickoff event, and then we go play WhirlyBall or drinking and bowling. We had a Family Day, and everyone brought their families and their kids, and we had games and coloring, and we had the kids play video games, too. There’s the kegerator, which I can’t stress enough that it’s my favorite part of the office.
I can talk to the CEO of the company and have a beer with him, and if he wants something from me, I can tell him no, and I have no fear. It’s really refreshing. It’s really supportive. If you need something, you can usually get it, as long as it’s reasonable. We really try hard to make sure everyone here is supported with whatever they need, and that nobody’s worked too hard.
As told to freelance reporter Erin Chan Ding. Stories are edited for length and clarity.