I worked as a software engineer for Forte/Genesys in Carlsbad, CA for almost 11 years (from 1990 to 2001). We sometimes referred to it as "the happiest place on earth"... but mostly we were kidding :-).
During the course of my eleven years there, the company changed names several times.
We started as Forté , a small telecommunications company that, among other
things, created 3DPC (a great screen saver) and Agent (the Email/News client of the Gods, IMHO!).
Forté
was bought by Genesys, who temporarily changed the company name to Adante
before they realized how incredibly stupid that was. After just
long enough to print new stationary and business cards for everyone, they decided that we should be called Genesys after all.
Later, Genesys was bought by Alcatel (or as I prefer to call it now that
I don't work there anymore - AlcaHELL). So in eleven years, I went from working for
a tiny start-up company with about 30 employees to a huge company with 130,000 employees worldwide.
Subsequently, the product Agent and the name Forté were
sold back to some of the original founders of Forté. Check out their site -- and if you've never tried Agent --
try it... you'll like it!
Here's a picture of the Agent Team, from the good old days at Forte:
It was time. The place was sucking the life out of me.
After taking a year to recover my sanity and my energy, I've realized that
for me, there really is no joy to be found any more in that profession. So, on to something new...
Robin and I both quit at more-or-less the same time. Here's some pictures of the
goodbye party they threw for us.
Here's some more pictures of folks
in their "native environments (e.g. hard
at work at their desks!)
Alcatel lays off 20,000 employees!
Just a few days after my final day, there was a huge layoff at work. Alcatel laid off about
20% of the Genesys employees. As part of that, they decided to shut down the Carlsbad office.
About half the people were asked to leave the building that day. The developers
were asked to stay on through the end of the year as a transition team. Everyone
got nice little severance packages to tide them over. Doesn't my timing suck??
In the eleven years I worked there, I obviously wore many hats. In the years just before I left, I was working on the desktop application for a product called the Internet Contact Center (ICC). It's main purpose in life is to allow customers to initiate contact with a company via the company's web site. The request is processed by some *very* complicated routing algorithms, and then routed to the desktop of an available "agent" who is qualified to handle the request. The customer may request an email response... a live chat... or a return phone call (among other things). When the request is routed to the agent's desktop, the agent will either respond via email, begin chatting via the keyboard, or be connected via phone to the customer (depending on the type of request). Yawn!