What's the worse job you ever had?

SixPapaCharlie

SixPapaCharlie

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Was going to share a story about being a cook. I was a cook all through high school and college but then Realized those weren't the worst.

So about 8 years ago I was 30-ish and have my first kid on the way. I am working for a large company as "Sr. Manager of application development" cool title, corner office, looking right out at DFW airport.

We were having a layoff. I wasn't affected but I had to cut a guy (first time was hard) So I get to thinking, I am going to find a different gig. I got a kid on the way and we are having a layoff. Not good. I put my resume out and a couple days later, I get a call and it was the job to end all jobs.

Managing a development team converting 1000s of clinics from paper to electronic medical records. Small Startup with tons of growth potential. I interview and the CEO paints a picture far too good to be true. He goes on and on about his ideas, plans, clients, cashflow, spewes unheard of benefits to me. Interview was amazing. This guy could sell snow to Eskimos. The interview went really well. And he wanted to hire me. I said "Let me interview with the developers first. I would like to meet my team"

The next day I go into a board room and 5 or 6 developers are there and they are all a little Fresh out of college looking but I asses their technical prowess as best I can and then I ask straight out "Is this guy legit?" they seem to agree that he has this great plan and he is an amazing leader, all good news. They leave, CEO comes in, makes me an offer. First time anyone offered me six figures. I hesitated and he saw so he goes "Ya know what. I don't normally do this but I can tell you might be having second thoughts. We are a very small company and our insurance is pretty steep. I really want you and just to show you, I am going to pick up the cost of your health insurance.

"Alright I'm in" I said. He painted this great picture an I am about to have a baby and it is going to cost me nothing

Day 1:
I come in and call in the development team for a meeting and they don't look all that chipper.

One of them closes the door. They were quiet and looking at one another for a bit then one starts
"Um sir, so there is something you need to know.
There was no real way to communicate this when you were interviewing with us. "

WTF?

"So um bob (fake CEO name) kinda says a lot of things but they are not all really true.
He talks about these big plans but none of it is real"

SERIOUSLY WTF?

"He will get a project going and just when it is ready for delivery, he will just up and decide to cancel it. "

Another one chimes in

"Between you and us, he is sort of bat$h!t crazy"

The 2nd week I was there, My computer went missing during lunch. I asked a developer. "Do you know anything about my computer?

"So there was a hiccup on the server and it went down for about an hour. Bob thinks maybe you caused it.
He said he wanted to make sure you were not a spy sent over from EDS to steal his secrets.
He has been on your computer and took it into his office to look at it"

I took an extended lunch break so he could get my computer back where it belongs. I came back and everything was "normal"

Bob must have felt guilty or something because out of the blue, he "rewards" my efforts with a new flat panel TV.

Total bizarro world. I was there 9 months, the whole time looking for another gig and sometimes we would randomly find keyloggers on our PCs

Bob did weird things.
One day my team was working on a project and he comes in (in hindsight I am thinking coked up) he says "I will give each of you 5000 if you finish this project by the end of the week."

There were like 2 months left on the project. This was just a totally looney suggestion.

Bob thought highly of himself:
One day he went on vacation and he actually said "I want you to think of me like Jesus. While I am away work like I am here with you and if you have an issue ask yourself: What would Bob do?"

He would randomly fire people for no reason but he was sort of a wimp. If his office door was closed we knew someone was getting fired. But his wife was sort of unofficially employed by the company and her job was to fire people so he wouldn't have to have face to face conflict.

Was by far the worst job I ever had. He paid me well especially for only being 30, and I just finished watching a show on the TV he gave me. He has since gone out of business and started another company in Austin Texas.

Biggest take away is what everyone knows. If it seems too good to be true, it prob..... No, if it seems too good to be true, get up and leave.

I secretly hope to see Bobs resume come across my desk one day just so I can interview him.

What was the worst gig you ever had?
 
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I worked for a newspaper in the California high desert that outsourced its printing to some LA printer. A truck would arrive late at night and we would spend very late at night and the early morning hours folding, tying and delivering the papers across city streets and rough desert terrain.

I had it out with the manager one night and was provided with my final pay the next morning. Never looked back. Only job in my life I've ever been fired from. Good riddance Valley Register. Hope you choke on a chicken bone.
 
jesse said:
Geeksquad.
Click to expand...

Seriously?

You drove to peoples' houses and removed all the adult related viruses all the while the husband is saying "I don't know how that got on there"

You have to have some good stories from that gig.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
Seriously?

You drove to peoples' houses and removed all the adult related viruses all the while the husband is saying "I don't know how that got on there"

You have to have some good stories from that gig.
Click to expand...

I was too young at the time to do the in home stuff (car insurance reasons). I started working for them full-time (in store) when I was 16 and parted ways with them when I was 18.

Customers were constantly flipping out on us - I had someone literally throw an eMachine (remember them) tower over the counter at me once. The next day he showed up asking for it back. Actual death threats from customers was basically a weekly occurrence. I had more than one person tell me they were going to kill me in the parking lot. It was *AMAZING* how upset people would get about their electronic devices failing (almost always just full of their porn viruses).

The reason customers were so upset, was mostly because the "sales person" that always sold them the computer would sell them ridiculously overpriced warranties promising it'd cover everything under the sun. The reality was that it didn't cover software what-so-ever so they'd have to shell out a few hundred for us to sort out their spyware/virus infested machines.

This was all during the worst part of spyware and viruses (Windows XP).

I guess looking back all of the customer BS wasn't the worst part. The worst part was that absolutely nobody managing people at Best Buy that I ever met had any business managing anyone. Just a bunch of high school dropouts with huge egos making 50 cents more per hour than you thinking they own you. (I can make fun of high school dropouts, since I am one).
 
Dishwasher at one particular place. First day they handed me a paper hat. At the end of the night, after cleaning and mopping, I tossed it in the trash. One of the other guys asked me if I just quit.

"Why?"
"You threw away your hat."
"Yeah? So? I'll get a clean one tomorrow."
"No. It has to last until the end of the week!"
"???"
 
If you missed my 'lib' origins rant, I was a tire changer, and a tire grinder/bander/recapper in Socal as a teen. Sometimes we had to wait an extra two weeks for pay, and when it came the checks were kinda light.

I got a gash on my forehead that never healed. Broke my right forefinger twice, got kicked in the teeth by an angry co-worker(when I woke up, he got payed back), and worked in a smelly, hot, noisy, smoky shytehole for a few years.

I did not earn 'six figures', I did not take long lunch breaks. I did not have a corp laptop, or big screen TV, or an office overlooking a major airport.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
Snip...

I come in and call in the development team for a meeting and they don't look all that chipper.

One of them closes the door. They were quiet and looking at one another for a bit then one starts
"Um sir, so there is something you need to know.
There was no real way to communicate this when you were interviewing with us. "

WTF?

"So um bob (fake CEO name) kinda says a lot of things but they are not all really true.
He talks about these big plans but none of it is real"

Snip...
Click to expand...

This really needs to be submitted the The Daily WTF.
http://thedailywtf.com/Default.aspx
 
docmirror said:
If you missed my 'lib' origins rant, I was a tire changer, and a tire grinder/bander/recapper in Socal as a teen. Sometimes we had to wait an extra two weeks for pay, and when it came the checks were kinda light.

I got a gash on my forehead that never healed. Broke my right forefinger twice, got kicked in the teeth by an angry co-worker(when I woke up, he got payed back), and worked in a smelly, hot, noisy, smoky shytehole for a few years.

I did not earn 'six figures', I did not take long lunch breaks. I did not have a corp laptop, or big screen TV, or an office overlooking a major airport.
Click to expand...

As A teen, I had some $h!t jobs. Busboy was the nastiest.
My mom put a box on the front porch of our house and required me to keep my boots, shirt, and hat in that box. They stunk so bad they were not allowed in the house.

And that was 10X better than the job in my original post.
 
In high school, boxboy at Safeway, aka Slaveway.

Minimum wage, verbal abuse, unpaid overtime, no breaks and on top of that, I had to join the Retail Clerk's Union. Soured me on unions for the rest of my life.
 
****ty jobs? chores at home when I was a kid, cleaning the cow barn daily, we had lots of cows to milk, and clean up after.

No pay.
 
Working for a type-a narcissistic megalomaniac from the upper crust of aristocratic India. He employed enough of the middle class From India that he thought all of us Anglos automatically owed him the same deference with no need to earn our respect.
 
Pressure washing out the backs of garbage trucks when I was a teen. At least they gave me a pair of goggles to keep blowback chucks out of my eyes. I may even have decided at that time to be a pilot when I got older so I didn't have to do such lousy jobs.
 
AggieMike88 said:
Working for a type-a narcissistic megalomaniac from the upper crust of aristocratic India. He employed enough of the middle class From India that he thought all of us Anglos automatically owed him the same deference with no need to earn our respect.
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HAHAHA!
That is so perfectly worded.
 
My almost worst job was washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant. I busted my tail that first night, burned my hands pretty good, too. That place was really busy, so I had to grab plates plates right out of the washer without letting them cool first. At the end of the night I was really thinking of quitting. While I was mopping the kitchen, the owners set up a table in the middle of the kitchen, and the whole extended family came downstairs from the apartment above and settled in for a family meal (the younger kids brought their homework with them). I finished up and was about to leave when one of the guys aked what I wanted for dinner, he fixed me up a nice take out box. That was my tip every night. They treated me pretty well. Even though it was a brutal job, it really turned out all right to work for someone who cared.
 
My worst job was working at a commercial paint store, while I went to college. We use to batch 300 gallons of paint in a vat with a boat oar (hucking 5 gallons over your head at a time). Some of this stuff was pretty nasty and I would have to run out for air every few minutes. I am sure some of the solvents I used to clean the tanks will come back to haunt me in my old age. Then I had to deliver it in a box van throughout the L.A. area; sometimes 10 hours a day in L.A. traffic. And my boss was big guy (former college linebacker who put on some weight after an injury) who would just go off on you in his loudest voice if he was having a bad day. He would appologize later, but the whole thing really sucked. The only good part was they were flexible with my college schedule.
 
Teaching English in the Republic of Georgia during the winter when we taught by candlelight (no electricity) and the room temperature was a few degrees below freezing.
 
Picking up trash with one of those "poker" sticks at a huge corporate picnic (thousands of employees). Folks would just dump stuff on the grass right in front of me. Just one very long day, and I swore I'd never do it again. I think I was 19 or 20 at the time, and pretty much lost all hope for humanity that day...

A close second was the summer I spent in "Level C" protective gear (yellow tyvek and full-face respirator) bailing benzene out of groundwater wells, following a 4,000 gallon benzene leak at a pharma plant a stone's throw from a river.
 
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The residential end of I.T. tech support. What a horror show -- especially during the KaZaa era. I took the jobs because, hey, it was money; but it was like the technology equivalent of cleaning cesspools.

And then there were the customers, who didn't understand that they couldn't keep downloading "free" music or other stuff from anonymous sources without hosing their systems. They had this odd idea that they were somehow entitled to all the music (or whatever) that they wanted -- without having to pay for it -- and would go ballistic when I removed the file-sharing or other software that had opened the door to the problems in the first place.

But it did make for a steady revenue stream.

-Rich
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
As A teen, I had some $h!t jobs. .
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Yeah. Worked one summer for a local amusement park, my job was to clean up the picnic pavillion areas and bathrooms. Those areas were used mostly by local unions for summer outings.

Nothing like going into an un-airconditioned outdoor bathroom on a 90*F day to clean up all the ****, vomit, p!ss, and stale beer. It was enough to gag a maggot. OH, and you usually found those in there as well and a billion flys buzzing around your head.

It was lovely. It took me about three weeks to find my next gig then I was gone.
 
Finished high school 6 months early. Needed a job to pay for aviation fix. Worked at a sporting goods store in stock room. Manager was a fishing buddy of owner. Had a sign above his desk that said "Make it Happen". Stock room was a disaster. Got it organized. One day he calls me in to his office, told me to clean the "rectal powder" out of the men's and women's washrooms. Next day he wants me to pick up inventory at the local bus terminal. Told him I didn't have a car. After a long tirade telling me how useless I was since I didn't have a car, he told me to take his. It was a Datsun pickup. Stick. So I did. Learned how to drive stick that day. His gears and clutch were never the same. Guys name was Lloyd.
 
DesertNomad said:
Teaching English in the Republic of Georgia during the winter when we taught by candlelight (no electricity) and the room temperature was a few degrees below freezing.
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When were you there? I was assigned to the embassy in Tbilisi for a little over a year. And I do remember the power outages, but we had a generator at our house. We used to have "friends" that were Peace Corps, and let them abuse our guest shower when they came back to civilization.
 
asgcpa said:
Finished high school 6 months early. Needed a job to pay for aviation fix. Worked at a sporting goods store in stock room. Manager was a fishing buddy of owner. Had a sign above his desk that said "Make it Happen". Stock room was a disaster. Got it organized. One day he calls me in to his office, told me to clean the "rectal powder" out of the men's and women's washrooms. Next day he wants me to pick up inventory at the local bus terminal. Told him I didn't have a car. After a long tirade telling me how useless I was since I didn't have a car, he told me to take his. It was a Datsun pickup. Stick. So I did. Learned how to drive stick that day. His gears and clutch were never the same. Guys name was Lloyd.
Click to expand...

That is awesome.
(Lloyd gears part... not the rest)
 
Had a lot of jobs since jr. high. Bucking hay, busboy/dishwasher, cook, grocery store. Then worked at Wal-Mart during high school and college. Worst job ever, by far. Had to come in Friday nights to see what the schedule would be for the next week (Sat-Fri) because they wouldn't post it until Friday night and wouldn't give it out over the phone. If you were scheduled 8-5 and you came in and it was slow you were sent home and told to come back for the noon rush. If it was slow then you were sent home and told to come back for the 4pm rush. Almost no holidays off. And I've told the story before of the store manager being mad about something and thinking I did it, came over yelling at me and poked me in the chest while my buddy (the guilty one) is dying with laughter around the corner. Today someone would be left with a dangling finger, but back then I was young, needed the job and didn't know any better.
 
In my early years they were all bad jobs, but they were jobs when many couldn't find one.My worst one was a toss up between two that only lasted one day each. The first was at a sawmill. I could tell immediately I was going to lose either limbs or hearing or both quickly. The second one day wonder was as a laborer at a power plant construction site unloading bundles of 1"x50' rebar off of flatbed trailers.One man on each end hooking on a crane to unload them,set the bundle on the ground until the trailer's empty, then break open a bundle and spread it out so the iron workers place them.Well those big rebars were so tangled together, bent, and twisted it was impossible to do it quickly. I had a Forman shouting in my ear like a Drill Sargent. Finally I told him he could do it himself, just keep the few dollars I earned and forget I was ever there. Take This Job and Shove It hadn't been released yet or that's what I would have told him. That six hours was probably my briefest employment.
 
Hey - it's nice that you guys could tell the boss to pizz off and quit after a few days, or even hours. I worked in that tire plant from 14-17. Four years. If I never see another tire again in my life I'll be happy.

The weird thing is, I can still change a tire on a car rim by hand with a few simple tools. It's come in handy once in a while, but I really hate doing it.
 
I started working when I was 12 at a BBQ restaurant, I've built barb wire fence in the summer in Texas, worked construction and turned wrenches on aircraft. None of these were "bad" jobs, physical, yes, but at the end of the day you could always see what you accomplished.

The absolute worst job I ever had was running a call center for a regional cell phone company. The pay was good, but over the two years that I worked there I probably had to fire 60-80 people for various things. That sucked, plus we had an on site client that was in constant conflict with our management and would demand things of or sales team then not deliver on the bonuses promised. I was glad when I got rif'd.
 
My dad used to tell the story of working on a bean picking crew. He lasted a half a day and when he got home his dad told him he didn't earn enough money to pay for the soap he needed to get clean.
 
I never had a "bad" job like Jesse's Geeksquad gig. So, on the background of great jobs the worst job I ever had was working at Sun Microsystems in Menlo Park, California. My paper employer was Metabyte, a body shop: they scoured the world for bodies, imported them on H-1B visas, and shopped them out to big companies as contractors.

Metabyte were very good for the business they were in: completely above board. It always makes me cringe when I read the propaganda about H-1B workers stealing American jobs. What a load of bull excrement. Metabyte charged the companies $160/hr in 1997, and yet it was pretty tough to find bodies, so companies paid that easily. They observed the requirements about sourcing in the local market first as well. It's just that on the raise of dot-com boom there was just a huge need in people who could do the work.

They were quite fair to me, too. They promised to sponsor my Green Card, and they did, although I imagine there would not be any consequences for them to renege on it. I know Sun did that to people who they hired directly.

Still, while I was under sponsorship, I could not quit. So, I had to pay my dues at Sun. It was back when it was run by a woman named Kathleen H., who only cared about the number of reports in her department and nothing else. Since the metastasic growth that Kathleen craved was not possible to accomplish organically, she went on a shopping spree, buying companies left and right just to pad numbers. A little later, someone wrote about Carly Florina's disastrous merger: "she has demonstrated that women every bit as good as men -- at senseless, megalomaniacal empire-building". It would apply to Kathleen and other executives perfectly.

Down below, it worked thus. The freshly-acquired company received management attention and development of existing products and projects was canned. Then, they would fail to deliver, but it mattered not, because by that time management bought another company and the cycle repeated.

What it meant for me personally is that I was assigned from one dead-end project to another, and I never produced anything in 3 years I worked there. It was pure waste and it was hugely demoralizing for being a cog in a giant fraud machine, being professional and doing the best job possible, while knowing that none of it mattered. They probably spent half a million on my services. No wonder Sun imploded soon after I left.

It was also melancholic to look at the fall of the empire. I went in right after Dave Banks left to co-found Brokade. That guy was a genius, and essentially single-handedly engineered Sun Storage Array. He designed mechanics, electrics, boards, chips (!), and main and SOC firmware, and FCode for adapters, and SunOS drivers. The only thing he outsourced was the volume manager and host-based RAID, which bootstrapped Veritas Software.

The team coasted on Dave's momentum for a few years, crumbling. It was just painful to watch. The chip guys took SOC (the Fibre Channel chip) and adapted it from SBus to PCI. Since they weren't at Dave's level, they could not rearchitect it properly. Instead, they left the SOC core as it was and added streaming buffers to adapt to the PCI master/slave head, which they sourced elsewhere IIRC. Result was a chip with 5 (FIVE) clock domains. They baked the chip, but when turned on, it plainly didn't work and nobody knew why. By that time the empire saw it easier just close down in-house chip design and source from QLogic.

Anyone who was anything in that group eventually packed up and left, led by George Cameron and founded a storage start-up 3PAR Data. I interviewed with them when I received my Green Card and got an offer, but went to Red Hat instead and that was the end of that story.

I am sure that all the people who ruined Sun went on to new cushy slots in CxO suites.
 
zaitcev said:
I never had a "bad" job like Jesse's Geeksquad gig. So, on the background of great jobs the worst job I ever had was working at Sun Microsystems in Menlo Park, California.

I am sure that all the people who ruined Sun went on to new cushy slots in CxO suites.
Click to expand...

Hey! I worked at Sun in the salad days too. Man that was great feeding frenzy for a while. How about the debacle with the SPARC chip when clocked up to 400MHz? I can't remember how many thousands of SPARC procs we ate during those two years. All for the want of a properly designed decoupling cap on the cache mem. Sigh,,,

I worked for a complete tool as well. He was a yes man with one face, and a complete barnyard pig with the face that he showed his team. He could go from brown-nose to der Fuhrer in seconds.

What a carve up. And Sun could have been soooooooo great. If only they had teamed with Oracle when they went to release the next get multi-core sparc chip. But no, they wanted platform independence, silly wabbit. :rofl:
 
Pinsetter or pinboy in a bowling alley when I was eleven, 1954

We set five and ten pins, each kid had two alleys. No racks, you jumped into the pit, put the ball on the return rails, picked up all the pins, stepped on a peddle and metal pins would come up out of the alley, you set the bowling pins on them. When you took your foot off the peddle the metal pins would retract back int the alley, leaving the bowling pins in the exact perfect position.

The place was about as mile from the university. On weekends all the college boys would play five pin because they could lob the ball almost the entire aley length before it touched the alley. The real game was try to hit the pin boy. When one got hit, a big cheer went up. I think that is why they hired kids, we were fast and could get out of the pit in a second or two.

Every now and then a kid would get hauled off in an ambulance, usually a head wound or broken limb. I never got hit, but I was grazed a few times, which taught me to be more alert.

I did that for around a year, then one night I freaked out, could not stop crying. One of the kids had not shown up so two of us were setting three alleys each, I had gone into some sort of autofunction mode, I could not stop moving. so they fired me. Kids were lined up for those jobs.

In those days I think it was more about selling beer than selling alley time.

I've hated bowling alleys ever since, can't even stand the smell of them.

-John
 
So that's what happened to Sun hardware…. I had wondered about that.

We bought a SunFire server to run our telescope simulator on once upon a time. The sim ported and ran very well, but unacceptably slowly. It took images 30 seconds to generate; we needed 100 ms at the time. We almost made that spec on the previous generation of hardware. What happened? I traced the timing down to the sqrt() function, which at the time was called 2 million times per image (generating Gaussian random noise). Really. It was 100 times slower on that hardware than on any other we could find, even the crappy Ultra 5 pizza boxes we had holding up our junk piles.

So we ported the sim to Linux (byte order swap -- a big deal), made the spec 10 times over, and never looked back. At that time, I became convinced that the Stanford University Network (SUNW) had outgrown its usefulness.

I guess I've led a sheltered life. Never had a job that bad. There have been frustrations -- I had to step in to tell subcontractors how to handle coordinate systems to the level of dictating lines of code I wasn't supposed to ever see. And it seemed right before initial commissioning that nothing could get done right unless I stepped in and corrected all the algorithms (that situation has since improved substantially). Now, we get a system officially fully operational, and the President says he's mothballing it less than a week later, in the budget request. Gah. As if we built this observatory because it's going to grace the inside of a hangar until it rots?
 
MAKG1 said:
So that's what happened to Sun hardware…. I had wondered about that.

We bought a SunFire server to run our telescope simulator on once upon a time. The sim ported and ran very well, but unacceptably slowly. It took images 30 seconds to generate; we needed 100 ms at the time. We almost made that spec on the previous generation of hardware. What happened? I traced the timing down to the sqrt() function, which at the time was called 2 million times per image (generating Gaussian random noise). Really. It was 100 times slower on that hardware than on any other we could find, even the crappy Ultra 5 pizza boxes we had holding up our junk piles.
Click to expand...

Oh no, completely wrong architecture for the application. You were doing vector algebra and you were using a RISC based proc which was optimized for DB arch(Oracle or other Relational types).

What you needed back then was a IRIX based SGI platform. Those guys were the cats meow of vector based stuff. They did all the rendering for the early Pixar and other animae film, they did rendering for deep space light and sound capture, real time cloud and weather patterns around the globe. That was some hot stuff. SUN was always business modeled. We didn't do squat with vectors until the very end, and even then it was pretty poor.
 
docmirror said:
Oh no, completely wrong architecture for the application. You were doing vector algebra and you were using a RISC based proc which was optimized for DB arch(Oracle or other Relational types).

What you needed back then was a IRIX based SGI platform. Those guys were the cats meow of vector based stuff. They did all the rendering for the early Pixar and other animae film, they did rendering for deep space light and sound capture, real time cloud and weather patterns around the globe. That was some hot stuff. SUN was always business modeled. We didn't do squat with vectors until the very end, and even then it was pretty poor.
Click to expand...

I used to work in an SGI shop. The Goddard high performance folks I worked with in the late 90s were almost exclusive SGI, from the T3E on the first floor to the Octane space heater on my desk.

And we still have an Origin here (!).

But, this occurred after SGI had basically killed itself producing Windows machines with some clever architecture, at an eye-popping $5000 per seat.

This was a SunFire, one of Sun's last products before (and after) Oracle bought them. It claimed to do pipelining. It sucked. It was basically a web server and nothing else.

Quite a lot of astronomy was done on Suns "in the day." The Kuiper Airborne Observatory is still packed with moldy Sun 2s in VME crates. Sun's reason for existence in the early days was integrated networking, a really really big deal, until every $150 motherboard started coming with integrated ethernet….

The days when this kind of simulation was actually challenging on the hardware are gone. We can run on anything that doesn't suck. I even developed off a Lenovo T61p until it finally blew up 6 months ago.
 
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MAKG1 said:
This was a SunFire, one of Sun's last products before (and after) Oracle bought them. It claimed to do pipelining. It sucked. It was basically a web server and nothing else.
Click to expand...

The details were a little more complex. The E10K was the SGI machine, came onboard as part of purchase of Cray Superservers, and it was called "SunFire", while its contemporaries (E4K and E6K) made by SMCC were called something else. Before the implosion, Sun managed to produce another generation of big servers, using US III, the final big-clock/big-cache SPARC generation before massively parallel Niagara. Sun's marketing called that whole line "SunFire", just to muddy the waters, although they had little in common with E6K and SGI-inherited SunFire. Oracle bought Sun while in the middle of product run with that second SunFire.

The HPC-oriented SGI continued to flop around, but they made a big mistake staking their company on Itanium. Its first generation was unusable, only fixed by so-called "McKinley" generation that was actually developed by HP. Despite excellent vector performance of that follow-up in O3K bricks, HPC market could not carry a whole company by itself. The order of the day was to leverage consumer chips, and SGI did not have any consumer hardware off which to feed the HPC business. They went through a couple of bankrupcies and acquisitions thereafter, retaining very little of the heritage.

The most enduring legacy of the classic SGI is actually the XFS filesystem software, which continues battling Sun-derived ZFS even today in Linux and cloud space.
 
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