A Dot-Com Job-Hopper Explains Why He Made The MoveA Dot-Com Job-Hopper Explains Why He Made The Move

Rob Moon, CIO of ViewSonic Corp., has seen the results of both staying put and jumping ship. His first job lasted 25 years. But a later job lasted just 13 months. That short stint taught him that sometimes it's better to stay where you are.

Moon, who started his tech career as a guided-missile-systems engineer for the U.S. Navy, used to be the CIO of Micros Inc., a manufacturer of point-of-sale systems for the restaurant industry. In October 1999, after five years in which he'd literally built the company's IT group from the ground up, Moon was a bit bored and increasingly conscious of the wealth piling up for Internet entrepreneurs.

He jumped at the chance to become chief operating officer of a business-to-business E-commerce company, which Moon declines to name. The company represented another opportunity to build something from scratch--and to cash in on E-commerce. "I was caught in the blinding glitter of the dot-com world," he says. "I was lured away by greed and the chance to build something."

Moon describes the promises of dot-com founders as a "gazillion dollars" within a year. He relayed this to the chairman of Micros when he quit; the chairman responded that if he were in Moon's position, he might do the same thing. Moon said he was glad to have the chairman's blessing, to which he remembers being told, "I didn't say you had my blessing. I said I understand."

It didn't take Moon long to realize that leaving Micros wasn't a good move. Nine months into his new job, the money started drying up, and Moon realized that the founders were wrong about potential sales and investor income. "I could see that everything was falling apart," he says. "I could also see that the whole dot-com thing was dying."

Moon says his mistake wasn't in joining a startup, but his reasons for doing so. "Jumping for money was not a good reason to leave," he says. In his focus on cashing in, he neglected some big parts of job happiness: working with a CEO he respected, with people who he liked and trusted, and a product he was proud of. He thinks he's found that again in computer-monitor manufacturer ViewSonic, which he joined a year ago.

Many others have lived through similar situations, an experience that Moon says he'd have been happy to do without. But he's lucky he's found ViewSonic--a company that's given him building opportunities and the financial resources to make them reality. Its IT systems were a mess when he arrived, he says, and he's been able to move the company from three different Oracle platforms to a single global system.

Moon sees a bright side to his rapid moves. Being in three senior IT positions in a relatively short period of time, he's seen different approaches to making sure, for instance, that the business takes ownership of enterprise application implementation. "I learned more by jumping around," he says. "I came here very confident in knowing what needed to be done." And he's planning to stick around long enough to get the job done.

Close this window