Software Engineer for Microsoft
He brought his natural intelligence, professional curiosity and gentle pranks to his life and career, earning several technology patents for his appreciative employer.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
Richard Shupak (RC) was born in Philadelphia and grew up in its Pennsylvania suburbs. His family had founded a pickle products company in the early 1900s after their arrival in the U.S. from Russia.
CHILDHOOD
RC liked to play pranks on his siblings when he was young, but he loved them deeply along with his family’s many cats. “He would do anything for anybody in his life,” said his sister Ellen. “He was one of a kind.”
While exposed to the pickle business during his childhood, RC’s intellect and curiosity led to finding challenges beyond the family’s food products business.
EDUCATION
After graduating from Germantown Academy at the top of his academic class, with a near-perfect score in the SAT plus earning National Merit Scholarship semi-finalist status, RC earned a Bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.
FIRST ADULT JOB NEVER A BINDING CAREER COMMITMENT
Among RC’s young adult jobs was working at an aquarium.
His first post college job, utilizing his academic background in technology, was with Sperry Corp.
EARNING A JOB INTERVIEW LEADING TO A CAREER
An early computer enthusiast, RC has said that he earned an interview with the technology giant, Microsoft, after sending “so many” suggestions on how to improve their OS/2 operating system he had purchased.
After being hired by Microsoft, RC became one of the company’s top quality-control engineers and problem solvers. As he noted, “What’s important to me isn’t being the first guy to think of something. It’s more the charge I get from figuring it out in the first place. My ideas come mostly in response to a problem.”
RC worked on MS-DOS, Visual Basic, and other programming languages at Microsoft and, ever the prankster, would sometimes insert his initials into a code when two of the bytes could be anything.
Hailed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and other executives as one of the company’s most prolific software engineers from 1988 to 2012, RC helped develop the revolutionary ‘QuickBASIC’ computer programming language and other tools that optimized computer code and related software.
RC was an expert programming troubleshooter, and as a result, Microsoft was awarded several patents on his inventions, including one in 2011 called “Safe and Efficient Allocation of Memory” that, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, “inhibits malware from identifying the location of the executable image.”
CHALLENGE – PERFORMANCE SUGGESTIONS TO CO-WORKERS
Not all of RC’s colleagues initially appreciated his ability to uncover bugs in their work, said RC, but they usually changed their attitudes when it “came back to haunt us” after they ignored him.
“Making a nuisance of myself is not officially part of my job description,” said RC. “It’s more like a hobby.”
CAREER SATISFACTION
RC’s skills were so extraordinary that Bill Gates once described him as the ‘special sauce’ of Microsoft.
He was generous, adventurous, and curious.
RC valued education, voluntarily helping family and friends afford tuition and other expenses associated with self-improvement. “Richard was a unique and kind man who showed generosity in other people’s times of need without fail,” a friend said.
He conceded he was a procrastinator when it came to responding to company emails at Microsoft but remained so interested in computer programming that he felt obligated to alert other companies with which he interacted later when he noticed vulnerabilities in their software systems.
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This career story is based on several sources including an obituary written by Gary Miles, published by The Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper on November 7, 2023 plus internet research.
