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DOING WHAT MATTERS By Robert Ross It took an interview with the Big Man himself before Joe Linn finally said yes to Microsoft. The company had been trying to hire him and his wife, Cathy Jo Linn, for years, but they always found a reason to decline. They said no in Dallas, where they had joined the faculty at Southern Methodist University after receiving their PhDs in computer science from Vanderbilt in 1980. They said no five years later in Virginia, where they had moved to work for the Institute for Defense Analysis, a prestigious defense contractor. "Virginia was good for raising kids, and we had two by then," Cathy Jo says. "We lived 15 minutes from work, and it was an eight-to-five kind of job with no ‘administrivia.’ Plus, we had just signed up for karate classes." That’s what they told Microsoft when they visited the company’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters. "I didn’t want to move," Cathy Jo recalls. "During the interviews I wasn’t even nervous about not getting the job, because it wasn’t a job I wanted." Microsoft said fulfilling their needs would be no problem and even lined up a karate instructor for them. So Joe flew back again, meeting first with Dave Cutler, the father of Windows NT, and then with the company’s founder and CEO, Bill Gates. "He made clear to me the benefit of coming to Microsoft," Joe says. "I would be working on technology that matters to everyone right now." It was an offer he couldn’t refuse. Doing something that matters is important to Joe Linn, the son of two physicians and VU alumni, Robert and Joanne Linn, who saved lives and, as Vanderbilt faculty, taught others to do the same. As software designers at Microsoft, he and Cathy Jo helped create two of the company’s most important products – the CE handheld and Windows NT. The need to be on the cutting edge comes naturally to the Linns, who met as undergraduates majoring in the fledgling field of computer science. Cathy Jo remembers long hours in the computer lab and Joe helping her with a bug in an interpreter, an alternative to a language translator. "I think he was more interested in the bug than me," she laughs. Their courtship continued over games of foosball in the Graduate Pub, which was open to them because Tennessee had just lowered the drinking age to 18 and their professors invited them in. "Like the industry itself, the CS department was very small," Joe says. "The faculty showered attention on us and treated us like graduate students. It was a big thing to have a beer there with our professors." With only seven students in their graduating class, says Cathy Jo, "we spent a lot of time together. We still keep in touch with most of them." Later, when they taught at SMU and then at University of Southwest Louisiana, they tried to replicate their experience, but the moment had vanished. "We couldn’t give our students all of those people and that environment we’d had," Joe says. "All we had to give was ourselves." Years later, though, Microsoft offered them the next best thing – an exciting place where smart, intensely passionate people were shaping a new world. Sixteen-hour workdays came and went without notice. 
The Linn family band: Katy on drums, |
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