Tom Wellbaum:
CLASS OF 1987
Marshall High SchoolClass of 1987
Portland, OR
Tom's Story
Workplace
My first job was as a co-op student working for IBM in hot and humid Boca Raton, Florida after my junior year in college. I worked on electro magnetic compatibility testing for the PS2 computers as a test engineer. I mostly did a lot of programming, automating the test equipment and antennas. Sound interesting? No. Well that's why I didn't become a test engineer. My best memories there were hanging out with my roommate and exploring southern Florida.
My second job was working at Amdahl designing IBM compatible mainframes in the exciting city of Sunnyvale, California. Sunnvayle is like Beaverton, except without all the brightt lights and glitter. I worked as an ASIC designer on clock and encryption chips. This was probably the most exciting period of my life since I was living in San Francisco at the time and I was meeting a lot of new people and every experience was new. And no, I wasn't living in the Castro and visiting any bath houses, not that there's anything wrong with that.
My third job was working at Synopsys as a Field Applications Engineer in exciting Mountain View, California. It's hard to tell the difference between Mountain View and Sunnyvale or any of the other towns in Silicon Valley by the way. This job was a lot of fun since I got to work with a lot of different people working at other companies helping them solve problems. Also at the end of the year the company sent us engineers on cool trips to Hawaii, Thailand, Aspen, and other places for meeting our sales quotas. Maybe this was more important than the silly non-sense of helping those other engineers. I was just making that stuff up to sound good. My fondest memory was making another engineer cry, but that's what he gets for going against the VHDL coding standards.
My fourth company was...Expand for more
working at Stratacom designing ASICs for an ATM core switch. This was a lot of fun because I got to develop the design methodology and lead the ASIC vendor. I ended up leaving this company to go back to work for Synopsys. This was a big mistake since Stratacom was later acquired by Cisco and I left over a million dollars of options on the table. I guess you win some and you lose some. I mostly lost some.
My fifth company was working for Synopsys again, but this time in exciting Beaverton, Oregon. I worked mostly at Intel during this stretch of time. The best part was being close to my familiy and friends from high school again. Once I got enough of that, you can't have too much of a good thing, it was time to move back to Silicon Valley.
With some convincing from my former Stratacom manager, I went back to work at Stratacom which was now a part of Cisco in beautiful San Jose mostly known for that catchy tune from the 70's. I worked there designing ATM related ASIC chips as a full time consultant. After about a year, my manager took off to form a start-up called Lightera which I quickly joined as one of the first employees. This was the best time I ever had working at a company since I was there from the very beginning. All the people there were great and our product CoreDirector ended up being a hit with the customers. We were later acquired by a company called Ciena during the optical boom years. I worked there as a design engineer and manager for five years until the end of the boom (tear in my eye).
Anyhoo, to make a long story short, I left Ciena and I'm currently working for another start-up company called Infinera designing ASICs for yet another optical networking box. Not sure where this company will go, but I hope someday to move back to Oregon and dampness.
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