Interview

June 24, 2014

Benjamin W. Slivka: “I am very lucky because of my parents, they allowed me to leave home to seek my fortune, and I was very lucky to meet and marry my Princess Lisa.”

 

Almost 10,000 km from home and his native town, across the oceans from the USA to the Kyrgyz Republic, guest of honor – 54 years old software developer and creator of successful philosophy of management in the Microsoft, Amazon.com, and jack-of-all-trades - Benjamin W. Slivka has arrived in Bishkek City. AUCA President Andrew Wachtel invited him to join Commencement Ceremony and congratulate the Class of 2014.

 

At this solemn day of transition from a fun student life to a more independent one, Benjamin W. Slivka appeared before an audience and told about his family’s history. This is not a history of an individual American family. This is a history of the success of one American citizen not unlike Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. A history of the man whose hobby - computers and programming - became his life’s work and gave Benjamin his beloved job, happy friendly family, material security, success in life, and many journeys…

 

All the more it was interesting to listen (and we think, to read) the history from this self-made man’s own lips. But as we know, the way to the stars passes through a thorny path. The same took place with young Ben – not every goal was accomplished from the first. Ben was from a not very rich, but large and very creative family. He started at an early age and realized his “American dream” with hard work. His example shows that you can achieve anything in any field. But you will not see any results if you do not work hard. You should wish for something, work towards that aim, and don’t give up – never.

 

 This story about successful man is especially significant on the cusp of graduating students’ first steps into the completely independent adult life.

 

Creative parents

-              My father’s parents arrived in the United States in 1904 from the Ukraine, fleeing the Czar’s troops who were killing Jews. My grandfather supported his family by working as a tailor and peddling vegetables in Chicago. My father served in the US Navy in World War II, then trained as a musician and performed with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra as principal percussionist for over twenty years. My mother’s ancestors came to the United States primarily from the United Kingdom, bought land from William Penn around the year 1700 in what is now the State of Pennsylvania, and fought in the American War of Independence. My grandmother earned a Master’s degree from the University of Chicago roughly one hundred years ago and then worked as a school administrator. And my mother earned her Master’s degree in 1950 and worked as a librarian for 53 years in the United States and Austria.

 

I was born in the City of Seattle in the upper left corner of the continental United States. My parents were both busy working, and while we always had enough to eat, there wasn’t any extra money for luxuries.

 

In his free time and after he retired my father painted artistically, built furniture, made three guitars from scratch, and dabbled in electronics – building an oscilloscope and color TV from kits, and designing and building his own electronic music synthesizer.

 

My mother enjoyed cooking, canning, handicrafts, reading, and classical music. She made sure that my fraternal twin brother and my two younger sisters and I knew how to embroider, knit, crochet, macramé, sew, cook, clean the house, and do laundry.

 

Hobbies: tales, machines, and model airplanes

Since school was not particularly challenging for me, I had a lot of free time to pursue my own interests. And since cable TV, the Internet, computer games, and cell phones did not exist I spent a lot of time reading.

One of my favorite books when I was young was “Grimm’s Fairy Tales”. This collection of fantasy stories was first published three hundred years ago in Germany, and I read it cover to cover many times.

The stories I enjoyed most were about three brothers, each setting out, one after the other from home to find his fortune.

Each brother had only his wits and the clothes on his back. Each brother faced challenges and choices along the way. Invariably, the two older brothers were tripped up by their own greed, arrogance, or vanity. But when the third and youngest brother set out from home, he was kind, polite, humble, and generous. He survived the challenges, impressed the King, married the princess, and lived happily ever after.

Though I was the second of four children, I surely wanted to follow the path of that youngest brother!

I discovered the passion of my life early.

I loved building things.

By the age of six I was building cars, airplanes, fortresses, and boats out of plastic Lego bricks.

By ten, I was assembling plastic model airplanes: mostly World War II fighters and bombers.

In my early teens, when NASA was still flying manned missions to the Moon, I built fifty model rockets – most of my own design – and entered them in local competitions.

In middle school and high school, I took a lot of very practical, hands-on classes: wood shop, metal shop, home economics, typing, technical drafting, and offset press printing.

When I was twelve I bent metal and welded myself a grappling hook – every young boy’s dream!

By the time I was fourteen I knew how to use a band saw, a table saw, a drill press, a planer, many hand tools, and both an arc welder and an acetylene torch.

 

No sex, no drugs, and no rock and roll

By the time I got to high school, many of my fellow students were starting to experiment with “sex, drugs, and rock and roll.”

But I was pretty nerdy and a bit shy so I stuck to school work, reading science fiction novels and the Scientific American magazine and playing card games with my siblings and with other kids at school.

Science fiction in particular opened my mind to the possibilities of the future.

One non-fiction book that had a profound affect on my approach to life was “Your Erroneous Zones” by Wayne Dyer.  At the age of eight, I had been diagnosed with a stomach ulcer, and I remember Dr. Kaplan telling me “Ben, don’t take life so seriously.”

I read “Erroneous Zones” in high school, and Dr. Dyer stated a very simple philosophy: “You can learn from the past, and plan for the future, but you can only do in the present.  So spend your time doing.”

 

Ben’s life: studying and working

Seeking faster turn-around time, I opened my own computing account at the University of Washington.

Back then, computers were very large and very expensive – and impossibly slow compared to the smart phone in your pocket today.

I paid for my computing account by doing computer consulting for anyone who would hire me.

Most days after school, I would take the 30 minute bus ride to the UW computing center, work for several hours, and then take the 30 minute bus ride back home for dinner.

On weekends, I would spend 6-8 hours at the UW, plus the 3 hour bus commute.

Working with mainframe computer software had intrigued me, and I applied to the engineering school at Northwestern. I was accepted, and in September of 1978, I knew I liked computers, and I already knew people were willing to pay me to work with computers.

My very generous financial aid package from Northwestern required me to take out student loans and work during the summers and the school year to pay for my expenses.

During the summers I had a number of different unglamorous jobs: keypunch operator at a department store, file clerk in a law office, and stockroom clerk in a repair shop for high-volume photo printers.

Those jobs didn’t pay very much, but I learned a lot about the real world, and about what kinds of work I enjoyed.

With my CDC (Control Data Corporation) mainframe experience, I easily landed a job at the Northwestern computing center.

For ten hours a week I sat at a World War II era vintage metal desk in the hallway, helping undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty members with their computing problems.

During my four undergraduate years, I spent over 1,400 hours sitting at that hallway desk, spotting simple syntax mistakes, reading reference manuals for obscure mathematics libraries, telling callers how to configure their 110 baud modems, and giving debugging tips. I learned a great deal about people and how they interact with software.

 

What about love and family?

I was very busy my senior year: running track 15-to-20 hours per week (I “walked on” to the men’s track team, the 400 meter sprint became my event), working at the computing center 10 hours per week, finishing up my applied math and computer science degrees, and looking for a job after graduation.

But I still had time enough for love.

I bumped into Lisa at a party during new student week.

She was a freshman, and it was her third day on campus.

It was too loud at the party to talk, so we found a quiet place to sit down, and all of a sudden a thought floated down to me: “I could marry this girl!”

We quickly became inseparable, which naturally made my post-graduation planning a bit more complicated. We decided to get married. We drove down to Chicago with two school friends, got married by a judge, and drove back up to Evanston.

My dorm mates threw us a small surprise wedding reception, but it was mid-term exam time, so Lisa and I went back to our separate dorm rooms afterwards to study. What a way to spend our wedding night!

 

I wanted to make a difference in the world, but my managers kept telling me to slow down…..

Lisa and I were both taking classes; I took a job at IBM in Poughkeepsie, NY. We drove out to New York in June, 1982, and I started working at IBM.

Back then, it was the largest computer company in the world – 364,000 employees.

But after a few weeks at work, I realized that IBM was not the right place for me.

It had a very slow-moving, bureaucratic, risk-averse culture. 

I wanted to build software and make a difference in the world, but my managers kept telling me to slow down and not work so hard.

Lisa wasn’t happy at her new college, either.

So, not quite a year after arriving in New York, Lisa and I drove back to Evanston. I came back to work full-time at the Northwestern computing center to support us.

 

My first computer…

The IBM PC was starting to show up on campus, and in early 1984, Apple launched the first Macintosh. Lisa and I bought a Mac, and I still remember the excitement of finally owning my own personal computer. Based upon my experience with IBM and the Macintosh, I decided that mainframe computers and minicomputers were dead, and that the future of computing belonged to microcomputers.

 

Work in Microsoft and philosophy of management

In 1985, I got a job offer from Microsoft (it was a ten-year old, 800-person, still privately-held company). Lisa I completed our Computer Science degrees that June, and drove across the country to work for Microsoft.

In November 1985, Microsoft Windows version 1.0 was ready. During my fourteen years at Microsoft, I worked on OS/2, MS-DOS, Windows, Java, and MSN.

Some of these projects were not commercially successful, but I learned a lot from each one.

My biggest impact at Microsoft was starting the Internet Explorer team in October, 1994, and leading it through the release of IE 3.0 in August, 1996. I grew the team to 67 software developers and program managers, and I developed my management philosophy: set a clear goal, get the right people in the right jobs, push down responsibility and authority as deeply as possible, coach, and represent the customer.

For seventeen of the twenty-two months that I lead the IE team, I worked between 80 and 100 hours per week.

IE 3.0 won all the major product reviews, and our browser share zoomed from near zero to 30 percent in the twelve months after release.

During my time working on IE, our third child was born, we built a new house, and I still had time to keep up with the Wall Street Journal and The Economist. And my wife Lisa called me her “mythical husband”.

By the time I left Microsoft in 1999, I had helped the company grow to over 30,000 people and become – for a moment in time – the most valuable company in the world.

 

* * *

The secret of success from Benjamin W. Slivka

 

We met this interesting person after commencement and have a short talk with him.

-      Is this your first visit to Kyrgyzstan? Had you ever heard of the Kyrgyz Republic before?

-      Yes, this is my first visit to the Kyrgyz Republic. I learned about the Kyrgyz Republic only from American newspapers (I had read about Kyrgyz Republic especially) – that Kyrgyzstan is a poor country and corruption is flourishing. Also I have read about your great writer – Chyngyz Aitmatov.   I even had time to read his novel “The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years” (И дольше века длится день) from cover to cover.

-      So, has your opinion changed after arriving to Kyrgyzstan?

-      Yes, of course! I very much liked Bishkek –the capital of Kyrgyzstan. And I want to tell you that thd American press is mistaken. I can’t say you are such a poor country and I didn’t see any displays of corruption . I want to come back here.

-      You have met with AUCA students. What questions did they ask you? Are there any differences between American students and ours?

-      There are few differences. Your students are same like in America – they have same look, the same behavior, they ask the same questions: study or work, live with parents or leave them and go far away to find more opportunities? Your students are better than Americans, because your youth can speak 3-4 languages – Kyrgyz, Russian, English, and French, German, or other ones. This is a great advantage!

-      What would you wish, not only to graduates, but to all young people?

-      I’m very lucky because of my parents; they liked reading, studying, and working. They gave me the freedom to explore my interests, and they didn’t worry about their nerdy son spending all his time building model rockets, reading science fiction, and playing with computers. They allowed me to leave home to seek my fortune, and I was very lucky to meet and marry my Princess Lisa and prosper at Microsoft.

I hope every young person can find a beloved job in the area where he/she will work hard and find passion in life.

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