Category Archives: All Things Tech

The WFH Conundrum

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Privileges at work are easy to give out but hard to take back. This has been true for working from home which was absolutely necessary during Covid, but now some companies are starting to rescind those privileges for various reasons. I’ve been reading about a lot of pissed off workers who have been ordered to return to work full time “just because.”

It turns out “just because I said so” isn’t a very compelling reason for people to hop in their cars and commute two ways to work, deal with day care, and other conveniences they had when they were allowed to work from home. They want to know what changed? Why the mandate? If there’s a good reason, sure, I’ll get on board. Otherwise I would like to know what’s behind the new mandate.

My perspective on this may be a little unique on this issue. While I loved the flexibility of WFH, after 7 years I really missed some of the human interaction. Being isolated at home makes it really difficult to have work relationships in the same way they can develop with face time. At the same time I found it hard-er to get my projects done if I had to come in to the office every day. It’s often noisy and people like to interrupt me when I need to concentrate. WFH allowed me to go head down and really get some isolated time to think through technical issues without being interrupted. So can we compromise here? Yes. Yes we can.

I once had a job and a manager for about 18 months that was absolutely perfect with his WFH policy. In talking to him about it I came to the conclusion that yes, the job requirements will be best met if I utilize some face time with the developers. Whiteboard sessions were extremely valuable and the tools for doing that at the time using Teams were terrible. There wasn’t any way of getting out of coming in some of the time. Fine by me, I like having some element of human interaction anyway, so I’d be glad to come in. How much? I reckoned that I could have a nice balance of WFH and face time with developers if I was in the office about half the time, so 2-3 days a week. Done deal. The best part about it was he empowered me to select which days because it was going to depend on when I could get face time.

The key word here is empowerment. Some managers just aren’t comfortable with it, but some are. Most professionals don’t like to be micro-managed. I realize that some people take advantage of the hands off approach but I tended to reward managers that trusted me to deliver. I preferred if they checked in with me about once a week on how’s it going and then leave me alone and I will for sure try to deliver what they asked for and expected… and then some.

There’s some risk for managers to follow the empowerment path but keep in mind that there’s also risk in micro-managing professionals. We don’t like it and may seek a different role where we don’t have to spend as much time explaining what will get done vs. actually working to try to get it done.

What about accountability? Absolutely. If an employee can’t manage their time with the freedom offered then get a different employee, but don’t randomly come up with policies that are based on power trips. Policies that make it clear who is in charge and knows best. If you already know best about everything what do you need me for?

The Short Leash

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Sometimes a work related social media post will trigger a bunch of thoughts. I want to make sure that I navigate this topic thoughtfully and people understand that I get it.. there are two sides to this issue. Some companies have no other choice than to install a strict set of rules around response time for customer issues. While the post below may be on the snarky side, it does convey a good point.

Not THE reason, but one of the reasons I retired a little early from my role as a Site Reliability Engineer was because of a BRUTAL on-call schedule. Not everyone at my company viewed it the same way I did so I can only speak for myself, but being on a short leash doesn’t set well with my physical, mental or emotional well-being. I HATED PagerDuty and everything about being on-call. The job was otherwise fine. On-call, not so much.

It’s totally my fault for signing on with a company that I knew might eventually lead me to on-call responsibility. It was a choice, and a bad one. A bad one because the pluses didn’t outweigh the minuses. A bad one because my anxiety was off the charts. I’m talking having to take new meds off the charts.

In my role as an SRE I probably earned $10-$20k more than I may have in some other engineering role. For that $10-$20k I gave up my freedom to move about the cabin. The expectation was 5 minutes until hands on keyboard from being paged. I couldn’t take a walk around the block, go to the grocery store or be more than 5 minutes away from my laptop at any point for two weeks. That’s because we got assigned a week of secondary on-call where we acted as a backup to the primary on-call followed by a week of primary on-call. Did we get a ton of calls? Nope. Several in a week’s time but it wasn’t constant. It didn’t matter. I was still on a short leash and tied to my laptop. If life were to offer me one mulligan I would definitely use it to find a role that didn’t include on-call.

But Bill, you’re not a company guy then. You’re a lousy teammate!

Bullshit. At a different company I worked several off hours release deployments that kept me up until 2am and I didn’t mind it one bit. Why? Because I could plan it. I knew it was coming and the company knew that those poor souls who were up all night deserved a little bit of comp-time to compensate for the extra mile they just donated.

I personally never minded extra hours if the project I was working on was interesting. Been there, done that many times. Probably too many times.

So in keeping with the goal of addressing both sides of this issue, I get it. Sometimes there is no other choice than to use PagerDuty and enforce an on-call rotation. But I think what employers would do well to remember is to not take the intrusion of work interfering with family life for granted. For some people it’s a very impactful feature of the job.

Worker bees should think long and hard before accepting a role that has on-call. Will an extra bit of money be worth having to carry your laptop with you everywhere? Will you be checking Slack for security breaches in bed when you’re supposed to be sleeping? Will you freak out if you can find your phone in the moment because you may have missed a page? If any of these things are true then I would suggest not agreeing to take on that role in the first place. Draw a line in the sand and stick to it. Family is more important.

Maybe There Will Be a Recession?

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So you’ve been laid off. You’re in good company.

Every day for the past few weeks I’ve read posts on LinkedIn from people who have been let go who are now using their network to try to find opportunities. The sheer number of these posts isn’t surprising since Tech companies have been cutting back by tens of thousands, and in some cases more than once. I can’t recall a time it’s been this way since the early 1980’s. It’s bad.

I read with interest yesterday that the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates for the 10th consecutive quarter. Chairman Powell said he believed that there was a greater than 50% chance that a recession could be avoided. Thems pretty hollow words for Tech Workers, especially if you’re in recruiting or project management. For affected tech workers, we’ve been in a recession for almost a year.

Now the question becomes how to respond to a crummy situation.

As someone who has experienced a layoff, the thing I tried to remind myself of was that navigating your way to an actual job offer is in part timing and luck. Well, right now the timing sucks. It’s simple Econ 101. Too many headcount chasing too few jobs. That’s not your fault and there’s nothing that can be done about it in the short term. The good news is that history tells us tech will come back, and probably stronger than ever. We just don’t know when yet.

That leaves us with luck. I’ve never been too keen on relying on luck to get my mortgage paid.

So do we give up? No, of course not. But you might be best served by considering doing something different for a while to keep the bill collectors off your back. There’s no shame in changing course as life throws you curve balls. It’s should be seen as a sign of resiliency. The thought of taking a lesser title or a haircut in pay is a tough pill to swallow. I can speak to this from first hand experience. I once took a $15k whack and a lesser job to keep the money pipeline flowing. It took me a few years to get that back but at least I avoided a gap and kept the creditors at bay.

Multiple times I have seen peers not budge on potential opportunities because their pride wouldn’t let them take a non-management role or a perceived step down in any way. They hold out for the perfect opportunity and end up with nothing. I’ve seen houses lost and relationships destroyed over the inability to be flexible as the situation requires.

Another thing to consider might be that it’s possible you might actually like your alternative path better than sitting in scrum meetings and working the kanban board. A break from Remedy or JIRA might be just what the doctor ordered for your mental health.

Tech will come back and if it’s your life’s dream to work again in tech I’m sure you will, but a tech job doesn’t define you, or at least it shouldn’t. For some people I think having more of a pivot mindset could be helpful — at least in the short term. This is all about the psychology of the market right now. COVID happened. The supply chain got disrupted. Companies took a hit on their bottom line and got spooked.

It’ll change. I hope you can find something fulfilling to do that pays the bills.

3 Words for Elon

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Not surprising of course, but Twitter had another major outage yesterday followed by Elon tweeting

“Ugh. The System is so fragile. The whole thing needs to be redesigned from the bottom up.”

Who pray tell, will be doing the redesigning since what’s left of your staff is repairing leaks in your sinking ship?

Gosh, the system is fragile? No shit, Sherlock

Chasing the Certs

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Years ago I had a discussion with a friend and former Boeing colleague who had recently been hired by Microsoft as a developer. I asked him about the interview process. His reply was enlightening at the time and I ended up using bits and pieces of it to make future hires when I managed a small tools team at Xerox.

The crux of it was, they don’t care so much about what you’ve done in the past. They are more interested in knowing how you approach problems now. You get almost zero credit for having been involved in complex projects listed on your resume. In the interview process you’re more likely to be tested on how you would approach a real world problem. Getting the answer exactly right isn’t as important as how well you rise to the challenge and bring forth ideas and communicate them. I definitely saw the value in this.

This has nothing to do with coming up with “stump the developer” questions which are irritating as hell. It’s more about trying to figure out how a candidate’s mind works. When I started using the process myself I oftentimes walked away from an interview session getting a really good feel for if given a problem, the candidate can take the magic marker and start sketching out ideas vs. me having to lead the discussion from beginning to end. Very telling.

After about 30 years in the biz I realized that less and less of my formal education mattered at all to my career. By the end of 42 years I can easily say that < 1% of my BSEET degree from 1986 was in use as a Site Reliability Engineer in 2022. In addition to that I realized that I was having to reinvent myself every 5-10 years as technology changed and new roles opened up. This is a far cry from my father’s work world of teaching 8th grade math for 33 years. Math doesn’t change much from year to year unless the textbooks change. Must have been nice!

It certainly appears that the educational landscape has changed as far as employers are concerned. Nowadays you see more postings with Computer Science degree or equivalent. If I were newly unemployed or otherwise wanting to boost my resume I think I would focus on Cloud Certifications from Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. In my view these are as valuable to an employer’s immediate needs as just about anything else you’ll put on your resume.

I don’t want to discount the value of a Computer Science Degree though. While it’s true that just having that sheepskin doesn’t necessity correlate to a more valuable employee, what it does do is tell you that the candidate had the stick-to-it mindset in order to get through something very challenging to get. And that’s definitely worth a lot.

But as far as employers are concerned, I suspect they are oftentimes looking closely at skills match for the purpose of knowing “okay, how much are we going to have to teach this person?”

Focusing solely on skills-match is a huge mistake. For one thing, people lie. Putting python on your resume might check the box but it doesn’t really tell you the level of complexity of the python programs that were developed. For that you have to rely on good interview questions and even then, you might not be getting a fair comparison.

The Certifications however tell a completely different story. For one thing, it’s necessary to have spent time hands on with the services you’re being tested on. The other thing is the tests are not easy. If you pass a certification test, you’ve done some studying and learned some things that an employer can potentially use right away.

If you’re looking to get ahead these days, chase the certs.

Pass the Baton

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We humans have a tendency to believe if we exit our hard earned leadership positions that the world will fall apart yet nothing could be further from the truth.

On the work front, having been retired for almost a year I can assure you the positions I have left behind are in good hands. On the political front it’s just time to pass the baton to the younger generation and get out of the way. This applies to all political persuasions.

There are two main reasons that are driving this post. The first is, I have closely observed what kids today have to offer on a technical level and I couldn’t be more impressed. There is no shortage of talent and enthusiasm out there that should be tapped into, if only my generation would step aside. At Xerox I spent some on College Campuses recruiting grands and getting to learn about their projects and internships. The resumes are extremely impressive. Below the college level, kids as young as 9 are pumping out code on complex game projects and robotics, competing with peers using technologies we only dreamt of as kids. I have no worries that the kids can step up if they want to. The talent is there.

The second reason has more to do with politics. There’s never been a more convincing case for term limits than the current House, Senate, and Presidential leadership. I realize that at the core of governing this country with its constitution is by design a very slow change management system. That was put in as a feature, not a bug. The reason for mandatory turnover in politics isn’t complicated. New blood can cut old ties to lobby interests. The biggest reason of all though is my generation has had control of the wheel for much too long. It’s time to pass the baton to the people who will have to live in this world 40 years from now. They should be the ones having the conversation about Supreme Court justices, climate change, gun control, the national debt, and human rights… and from leadership positions.

Unmasking Musk

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Up until the acquisition of Twitter, Elon Musk was seen as this sort of eccentric guy, a little on the weird side but nonetheless a highly successful business mogul. He had to be. How else to you get to hold the title of the world’s richest man? With the Twitter purchase though, it turns out maybe the emperor has no clothes, or perhaps just enough clothes to make you want to get the guy some sunblock.

I applauded the powers that be at Twitter after the decision was made to ban Trump after the Jan. 6th insurrection. People died as a result of his recklessness. It was the right thing to do and it didn’t matter if you were an ex-president or not.

Like many others I had concerns about the buyout of Twitter by Elon. His motives seemed suspect. He claimed twitter interfered with free speech and promised to bring back open dialog. I decided to stick around and see how things unfolded. It didn’t take long at all to unmask the real Elon. He just can’t help himself. He overestimates his sense of humor and his intelligence.

The first thing I noticed was that he seemed to be running his newly acquired $44B business from tweets in full public view. It started with some push-back from Stephen King who complained about the $20 fee for being a blue-check. Keep in mind that even at $20 for every blue-check, Twitter’s revenue shortfall would be far from resolved. That’s why I was surprised when Musk replied back to King with “How about $8?” Say what? You just dropped your price by over 50% in about 2 seconds without giving it any thought. It was one of the most puzzling and impulsive things I’ve ever seen by a company leader, in real-time no less. My thoughts were wow, this is weird. I better stick around, this could be entertaining.

The next rather odd thing Elon did was retweet a conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi (82) who had been attacked in his own home by an intruder with a hammer. For some reason Elon thought it would be wise or funny or ? to propagate the lie that Mr. Pelosi’s attacker might well have been his gay lover trying to get out of the house instead of in. It was neither wise nor funny. It was careless and sick. By this time I’m getting the sense that Mr. Musk is not only impulsive but possibly a bully and immature.

The next several days we were witness to Musk getting absolutely roasted over the coals by the vast majority of users on his own platform that he just paid $44B for (well, maybe $22B of his money and $22B from the Saudis). It turns out some of his advertisers were not amused by the Paul Pelosi retweet and decided to leave. I was definitely sticking around for this. Logging in to scan the feed for the barrage of insults as the wheels were falling off added high amusement factor to my day. One can imagine if this scenario happens to any other company they are going to step back, re-evaluate the events of the day and try to lure those advertisers back. Nope, not Elon. Someone tweeted that Elon should retaliate by organizing Twitter users to boycott the advertisers for leaving. In his infinite wisdom Musk opines in a tweet that he will go “thermo-nuclear” on the advertisers for causing him loss of revenue. Really? I’m starting to think this guy doesn’t really know that much about business or is just plain dumb.

Now faced with a significant drop in advertising dollars, Musk launches in to the next project on his agenda: Fire 1/2 the employees. In 42 years in the corporate workforce I had never heard of a company axing 50% of its payroll in one knee-jerk event. That’s a real risky number to just pick out of the air. Clearly Elon is a risk taker in a big way. One thing Elon didn’t consider is that by pissing off half his workforce by unceremoniously firing them on short notice, they might not all go quietly. Witness the new nickname he got assigned by his ex-employees the day after they were given the heave-ho: Space Karen. It wouldn’t surprise me if a fair amount of Twitter source code now lives in a private Github repo. I was waffling between him being bad at business or just plain dumb and now I’m leaning more towards dumb.

Elon, unable to sense any consequences from his actions so far, then doubles down on his emperor status and starts dictating terms of employment for the remaining employees. These include a 12×7 work schedule, no more work from home and oh, pledging allegiance to Elon The Great. As it turns out, a goodly portion of the remaining employees told Musk to pound sand and went their merry way. Now he’s down to bare bones.

Having fired most of his content moderation employees, Musk is now at risk of his platform spewing hate speech to the point of getting kicked out of the Apple store, which would be the final blow for Twitter.

The internal conflagration has been very enjoyable thus far, but I felt I’ve seen about enough. Elon as a person is no longer a mystery. He’s an impulsive, arrogant, mean spirited, risk taking fool. That’s why when he announced he intended to re-instate the account of Donald Trump I deactivated my account. No need to stick around for the rest of this clown show. I can read the highlights on my next platform. Maybe Mastodon, Tribe Social or Post. Something will work out. At this point it’s just embarrassing. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

Onboarding Expectations

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I had heard stories about brutal onboarding processes at high tech companies where basically they throw you in the deep end and see if you can swim or not. They place a really high value on self-sufficiency. About the worst thing you could have a peer say is “sure, let me google that for you.” A real no hand-holding around here approach. Man-up, let’s see whatcha got. It sounded horrible and I hoped I never had to experience it. I came pretty close to missing it, but not quite.

In the 1990’s and 2000’s I managed a team of tools engineers and we had the opposite approach. We trained new hires on the tools and sometimes the class size was 1. We did it anyway. One of the biggest compliments I received (and it was from multiple people over the years) was how much they appreciated the time we took up front to familiarize them with the tools, processes and answer their noob questions. The company (Tektronix) got it. They gave me a $1M budget for my team and said “make sure my developers are happy campers.” They gave me some general direction, enough budget to be successful, and then got out of my way.

So in the twilight of my career I ended up doing a contracting stint at Venmo to be their “interrupts” engineer. I had a good idea I’d be on a short leash most of the day and that was fine, I didn’t mind that part of it as long as there were no on-call expectations. I wondered how the onboarding process would go and was disappointed to learn it was more of a throw ’em in the deep end approach.

Venmo has a rotating shift of on-call Site Reliability Engineers and my outlets for outreach were 1) contact the SRE on-call and 2) Hit up the “SRE Team” Slack channel with my questions.

There were several problems with this. First, there are a ton of things to learn starting out and the Confluence Documentation wasn’t a reliable resource for most of my questions so I didn’t have the ability to self-service the vast majority of them. Second, not all of the on-call rotation engineers were 1) available or 2) very adept at mentoring new-hires. Some were extreme introverts who seemed put out at having to answer my questions. Third, having to ask the volume of questions I had on a daily basis to the team slack channel really sucked. Having to expose one’s ignorance publicly that often is not ideal. And more often than they might care to admit, the response was crickets.

What really saved me was a few people who didn’t seem to mind being bothered with questions that I could reach out to 1/1. I tried not to over-use that chip because I didn’t want to wear out my welcome and burn other teammates out, but I had to find someone.

I can see both sides of the issue. On one hand you don’t want to set the expectation coming in that this is going to be a real hand-holding experience every time you get stumped. The other side of it is, having no help all at leads to high stress, discouragement, and the feeling that this is not a team with good collaboration skills.

So if I were managing teams again I think I’d assign each new hire a single mentor to coach them through the first few weeks. That person would be available for questions or pointers to where they could find the info, but they would be responsible for bringing a new hire up to speed. The mentor could also gage whether too many of the questions were google-able themselves and coach the new hire in that direction too if there wasn’t enough effort going into self research before asking others. But in general, some hand-holding would be available early-on.

Thoughts on… work

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Having just switched jobs, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time reflecting on my 39 year career which is pushing the 23 mile mark of this marathon, aka “the wall.”   I’ve been thinking about the highs and the lows, jobs I liked best, the ones I thrived in, the ones I didn’t.  More importantly, why?

I’ve been fortunate to work in the so called “high tech” industry at several companies that had decent pay, benefits, advancement opportunities, awesome co-workers and challenging assignments.  I don’t have too many complaints.  But after this much time and having been around the block on this bicycle more than a few times, I know very well what works for me and what doesn’t.

Just to give you the basic history, it’s been:

  • 12 years at Boeing, mostly as an engineer specializing in Flight Controls software
  • 1.5 years at a Dutch Company (Oce´ Oregon) developing printer software
  • 18 years at Tektronix/Xerox, 3 as a Tools Engineer and 15 as a Manager of a Tools group (Printer division)
  • 7 years at Cambia Healthcare doing Build/Release work, then AWS Cloud DevOps work (Healthcare websites / middleware)
  • 2 weeks at ComScore, a media measurement company doing AWS Cloud DevOps

So the industry exposure has encompassed aerospace, printers, healthcare and now media measurement.  Definitely some interesting assignments along the way.

It’s fairly standard – and I’ve always had – exempt” status at every place I’ve worked.  What that really means is that you can be required to work 60 hours and they only have to pay you for 40.  But it also comes with some flexibility that non exempt employees don’t normally get like flex time and (occasionally) comp time.

The thing about exempt status is that you have to be mindful about work-life balance or else the next thing you know, you’re living the job.  It can take over your life and not in a healthy way.  Having said that it’s fairly standard for people in the business I’m in to work 44+ hours just to show you’re putting in a little extra and not a slacker.

Dr. Katz and Uncertainty

One of the best classes I ever took as an employee of Tektronix was an all day off-site taught by Dr. Ralph Katz based on a book he had just written: The Human Side of Managing Technological Innovation.

A couple of the main points from the class had to do with managing uncertainty with your direct reports, and additionally how positive feedback can be a strong motivator.  Even the little things that amount to positive feedback.  This is backed by data from survey after survey.

Since taking the class I’ve been pretty mindful of management’s ratio of carrot vs. stick.  Dr. Katz went into great detail about successful projects where the leadership had great motivators.  That seems to happen when they can get the employees to buy in to mission and get everyone rowing in the same direction.  When I was in management I tried to keep these points in mind.

Regarding Katz’s emphasis on managing uncertainty, his main point was that uncertainty was bad.  People perform at peak levels when they know what’s ahead.  When you’re in an environment where the company is downsizing and you don’t know if you’re going to be getting a pink slip in the next round of layoffs, it’s hard to be at your highest productivity level.

The thing is, without exception, every company I’ve worked for had downsizing.  Boeing went from 80,000 employees in 1980 to 56,000 employees in 1986.  There had to have been at least 2 rounds of layoffs per year there.  Oce’ shut down after a year and a half and the whole team took severance packages.  Tektronix and Xerox had some strong runs of hiring in the 1990’s, but also several years of painful downsizing.  From 2000-2012 it seemed like a slow, steady leak until the dam finally burst.  Cambia has had a few rounds of RIFs over the years.  Normally pretty small in size, but still, it’s not like the old days when Ward Cleaver used to grab his briefcase, go off to work and pretty much work at the same job for 40 years and never worry about it.

The biggest failing I see in companies right now is that they spend exorbitant amounts of energy explaining “The Company Strategy” because they think that’s a path to get employees’ buy-in to the plan and be productive.  In most cases it’s a huge waste of time.  The reason is because once a company goes beyond about 3 layers of management, I have a harder time relating to the top level strategy issues.  Those aren’t my day to day problems.  The issues in my sphere of influence are very different.  The honest truth is, I really don’t care about the company strategy.  Maybe I should, but I don’t.  When there’s a company meeting at the VP level or beyond, and the Sr. Management Team is talking strategy, people aren’t thinking about questioning it.  What they are thinking is, this all sounds great, but… will there be more layoffs?  Do I get to keep my house?  That’s the uncertainty that’s not managed.

I realize they cannot call out a guarantee to everyone that they will have a job next month.  Very likely they don’t even know that.  But when the layoff cloud is hanging over the campus, 75% of the people who are fretting about getting pink slipped don’t need to be fretting.  And management could address this but they choose not to.

What works

Empowerment

I don’t care if the job is in high tech or not, people normally don’t like to be micromanaged.  I especially don’t.  I’ve had some great managers who got this and I feel like I’ve done some of my best work when left alone for week(s) at a time to go develop something and then deliver it by whatever the deadline is.  I don’t mind intermediate check ins every week or couple of weeks, but basically give me a task and the get out of my way and let me go do it.  Don’t treat me like if left alone, the project for sure will get screwed up.

The product matters

Aerospace had its downside at times but for sure the systems I worked on were interesting.  Flight Controls especially.  I can’t get on an airplane anymore without thinking about what all is going on with the black boxes that control the wing surfaces, the hydraulics, the fail-over systems which are dual and triple redundant, the fault reporting.  All of it.  I found it fascinating.  I also found printers and printer interpreters to be fairly interesting.  The architecture isn’t rocket science, but it’s very complex in many ways to get those dots of ink to find the right spot on a piece of moving paper.  Conversely I have to say, I did not find healthcare the least bit interesting.  I never completely understood why we had scores of development teams and the only website I was keenly aware of was regence.com.  Come to find out there’s a ton of big data processing and you have to have sites for providers and customers, etc.  It’s extremely complex for sure.  I never took the time to really understand the business because I found it boring.  Like, really boring.  I think the product does matter.

Once the engineering work was completed on the 767, Boeing held a “first flight” event at Paine Field in Everett.  When you get to watch your product take off on a flight for the first time, there’s a lot of pride in that.  (As a side note, the landing gear never retracted on first flight — oops.  Other than that, it went well).

Work life balance

I’ve always been willing to put in extra hours .. to a point.  This is just Health 101.  I’ve never worked at one of the really cutthroat places where it’s so competitive that practically every is putting in 60+ hours per week (Amazon, Microsoft, Google come to mind), but my sense of humor about extra hours goes south if it becomes expected behavior.  Sure, give me a project and a deadline.  I’ll get you there.  But if it’s a short stroke deadline don’t expect that I’m going to pull a rabbit out of my ass every time to meet your unrealistic deadline.  Stuff happens in business, sure.  Sometimes you gotta do it.  But not every time.

A Collaborative Work Environment

I’ve never been tempted to work at these startups where they put ping-pong tables everywhere and it’s hard to tell the difference between work and a country club.  Most of those places were short-lived.  I’m not there to play games, I’m there to work.  But I do really think it’s important to have a highly collaborative work environment.  Come to think of it, all of the companies I’ve worked have had this.  Some better than others, but overall I’ve worked with some exceptional engineers and learned a ton, and in most cases people have been very agreeable about mentoring new starts and helping others outside of their normal area of responsibility.

Positive Strokes

I’ve had a few situations where the sign that says “The beatings will continue until morale improves” rang a little too true.  I understand about accountability, but you have to balance that with positive strokes too or else it gets to be an emotional drain.

What doesn’t work

Micromanagement

The opposite of empowerment, the micromanager feels like he/she needs to be in on all the details of what I’m working on and wants a daily status.  I’ve even had multiple status checks within the same day.  The problem is, there’s a psychological aspect to this. Micromanagement has the opposite effect on my productivity that they are after.  When I’m empowered, I work extra because I take pride in delivering. They get extra hours from my exempt status.  If the manager is checking in on me every 15 minutes then at 5 o’clock I go log off. I’m done!

Meetings and Interruptions

Most jobs I’ve had I found myself splitting time between helping users and doing development work.  I enjoy both but the latter requires blocks of uninterrupted time.  Don’t talk to me out of one side of your mouth and tell me how important the project is and then schedule me for an endless list of bullshit meetings that I’m not needed in.  Your job is to make sure I get those blocks of uninterrupted time and if you screw that up, chances are your deadline is in jeopardy.  Project work takes concentration.  Many times it requires deep thought.  It’s frustrating to get started on your project and get your mind settled into deep thought only to be pinged unnecessarily for that TPS report.  Okay, here’s your TPS report, but now it’s going to take me 20 minutes to get back to where I was.  I’ve lost all my shells.  Some have timed out and had aliases defined.  I have to encounter all the overhead it took me to get to where I was before I was so rudely interrupted.  Not cool.

Extreme Multi Tasking

Every job I’ve had has required some level of multi tasking.  It’s pretty much a given.  It’d be great to be on a project and work only on that project, but it’s rarely the case.   But here’s the bottom line.  I can either do 3 things for you and do them pretty well, or I can take on 10 things and do them all poorly.  That is just a fact.  You decide.  So think carefully about putting me on that extra project for “political reasons — to take their excuses away” and consequently add 4 extra meetings a week to my calendar.

The Leash is too Short

Another way of describing the dreaded “on-call” assignment.  I hate on-call.  Hate it.  I understand why a business can sometimes require it, but that doesn’t make me deal with it any better.  Having to always worry about where your phone is 24/7 in case someone might call with an urgent issue really blows chips.  If you accidentally leave your phone in the kitchen and go outside and mow the lawn and then realize you’ve been away from it for a 1/2 hour — that’s a little concerning because they keep track if you’ve responded in the 15 minute required time frame.  There’s additional stress about keeping the phone charged at all times and the ring volume high enough for fear of missing a call. There are potential career consequences for missing a call. What if I’m grocery shopping, have a cart half full and the phone rings from work? Plan on leaving the cart where it is and heading home. When planning your social calendar, figured on keeping all meaningful events off of it for that week.

I found it nerve racking, annoying, and no way to live if there are choices out there.

The Bottom Line

Life is short.  I have some friends I play Fantasy Baseball with and a few of them work in sports related jobs.  One of them is a ticket coordinator for Oregon State and gets to travel with the sports teams.  I remember when he came back after 14 days in Omaha. OSU’s baseball team had just won its third College World Series, which was a real nail biter as I recall from watching it on TV.  His quote was “I’ll take life experiences over money EVERY TIME!”  He’s right.

Job Security?

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I’ve been at this high-tech gig for over 30 years now in various industries; aerospace, printers, compilers, and now health care insurance. You would think that after this long a guy could kick back a little bit and feel secure. Such is not the case.

Something changed right about when I started working in 1980, or perhaps just a bit before in the late 1970’s. Job security went the way of the hoola-hoop.

I remember growing up in the 60’s and early 70’s when people had jobs and kept them for long periods of time, and didn’t feel like they needed to be looking over their shoulders every week. Company loyalty actually existed in both directions. Pensions came with the territory instead of self-directed savings plans. That must have been nice. Work for a goodly spell, then retire comfortably.

Every single job I’ve had felt like there was a layoff just around the corner, and there usually was. Even in management. At one company I was managing a small team and we saw the outsourcing movement coming our way and I prepared myself for the eventuality that I may have to RIF a team member or two. But we never got word of the upcoming RIF. Why? Because managers were targets too! That was a humbling realization.

I’ve been laid off one time, but have had no gaps in employment due to being given 6 months notice of the pending shut-down, so I was able to line up a new employer as the job ended. It seems as though I should get some credit for the equivalent of navigating a 40′ sailboat through Deception Pass or something else really hard.

I’ve tried to explain this to people that are not in high-tech and often get blank stares. Huh? I just go to work every day and don’t worry about it too much. Oh, to be you.

If memory serves, it started with the hyperinflation economy circa the Carter Administration, but got even worse afterwards. Reagan laid the hammer down on the air-traffic controllers and showed ’em who’s boss. That was really bad news for unions which also coincides with the initial demise of the middle class.  The experiment with trickle down economics laid on more pressure to the working class and furthered the divid between the rich vs. the poor.

Then came NAFTA. Ross Perot nailed it with his “Giant sucking sound” comment. I don’t know that something like NAFTA wasn’t inevitable. I sort of doubt the United States could have gotten away with being too isolationist for very long. But man, the effects of all of this has really sucked the energy out of me. For 35 years!

Suddenly layoffs aren’t just commonplace, but expected. Constantly. Look out because the Vice Presidents are under tremendous pressure to show cost savings and productivity improvements. If your job is classified as ‘overhead’, all the worse for you. It was always best to be tied directly to some project work. Unless of course, your project were to be canceled. If you switch jobs, be prepared to start all over and prove yourself no matter how senior your job title says you are. You are replaceable, don’t kid yourself.

How many hours have I wasted worrying about being considered redundant and all the comes with it. Having to break the news to the family. Possibly losing a house and getting in a bad credit situation. Having to take a lesser job to keep putting food in the mouths of 5 people.  Having to go back to school and learn a completely new skill.  A LOT of sleepless nights.

In the 1990’s, outsourcing became the buzzword that showed up on a lot of VP’s powerpoint slides. They couldn’t just come in and propose 5% cost cutting. They were under pressure to come up with a ‘game changing’ idea. Outsourcing tech labor to India or the Far East was the trendy thing to do. Initially the numbers were hard to deny. Labor in India was about 20% of the U.S. rate. It’s since risen to closer to 50% as the global playing field levels a bit, but that’s still a big number. To make matters worse, you could expect to be asked to start looking for a new job while training your replacement. I did for a while. Then one day I just let them know that I was no longer interested in training my replacement. That turned some heads but I got away with it. Not sure how I did, but I just couldn’t train that guy for one more minute.

Meanwhile, in the good old U.S. we have extremists promoting ‘pure capitalism’ as if the human race would be best governed by the laws of Natural Selection. Every man for himself. Dog eat dog. Whatever it takes just so long as nobody’s gonna be mooching off me. The odd thing is, even during the halcyon days of the 1950’s that the pundits like to harken back on as the peak of our exceptionalism, we’ve never been a pure capitalist nation. Taxes were more than double what they are now for the top earners. Our economic policies have always been a combination of capitalism and socialism, just a matter of degree.

I wonder what it would be like to work at a job where the pace was normal and the expectations weren’t unrealistic? Every company I’ve worked for feels like someone’s hair is on fire and the schedule pressures you feel are very real. It’s hard to maintain a healthy lifestyle when you feel the need to work 60 hours a week, often through lunch, and forego your exercise routine in order to help the team meet a specific deadline. God knows you don’t want to be the one called out for holding things up in a status meeting. Anything but that.

There may be hope for future generations. The playing field has leveled quite a bit. Many companies have gone to the school of hard knocks with the outsourcing plans and many have reverted back for a variety of reasons. Some underestimated how difficult it would be to deal with the timezone differences. Others forgot to pencil in additional capital for the bandwidth required to do distributed development. In some cases it’s been the language barrier was too much to bear. 50% is a big number, but there’s a well documented downside now and more outsourcing proposals are getting met with “not-so-fast”.

I’d like to come in at 8:30 every day, always take an hour long lunch and visit with people in mostly non-work conversation, do some interesting work and then go home around 5-ish and leave my troubles behind. And not have to worry about scenarios that might wind a guy up on someone’s RIF list. Sadly, I don’t think I’ll get to experience this in my lifetime.

If you have an everyday job and don’t lay awake at night worrying about job loss frequently, then give some thanks. Well played, I envy you.