.. vim: set syntax=rst nosmartindent spell spelllang=en_us: ##################### Me, Sergei, and Clark ##################### Part one ++++++++ I'm at a series of dreary office jobs, each with different creepy and unpleasant aspects. Going from one to the next. Like at one job, I'm a consultant and I run a report for a big company listing employees, ranked by how much that employee's family cost the health plan. I was burned out and overworked. One day I started thinking about why as company might want that report. All the reports I ran were ultimately financial. And I was in sales meetings with clients. I knew what they were hiring us for. It was because we said we could help them save money on health care costs. Big companies, like ones with a thousand employees maybe, they self-insure, meaning that when somebody gets sick, the firm pays for the medical care themselves. I started thinking why the HR departments wanted to know this. You might think HIPPAA protects you from this. It might, depending on how you read the law. Americans with Disabilities Act might. This all flashed through my mind. That's what caused me to quit that job. Still, I love programming. There's something really intoxicating about the moment when shit works. It's like when I used to repair my old van in high school. That thing was almost certainly not safe to be on the road. I'd go to the junkyard, look for parts, switch them out, break something else. So that's part one... feeling disgusted with work, wishing I could do something more meaningful, but loving the moments when shit actually succeeded. Maybe at a bar with a few other people after work, we talk about the difference between hackers and 9to5ers. Then Gene (or Sergei in this text) has the idea. I say, you know what? I'm in. Part two ++++++++ I build the prototype ===================== This is me building the biz. Fighting with Sergei, slowly getting confident in my skills, and then obsessed with building a better scheduling system, because the ones I see are really complex and really ugly. I get a really big engineering high from building it. Then it works. I get a standing ovation from a room full of librarians. It starts selling ================= Then bigger companies want it and they want new features. They're big requests and they want them soon. I knock them out. This goes on for about a year and a half. We move offices. We hire another developer to help me, after three years of working solo. Even bigger sales come in. CEO wants to bring in more sales people. I'm focused on keeping up with all the new feature requests and doing them as fast as possible. I want this thing to work more than I've ever wanted anything to work. Then I start seeing they're just asking for stuff because the CEO wants it. The day to day users don't want it. One example is allowing people to fill out their preferences for what would be the ideal schedule from their point of view. Nobody wants me to do it. I do it anyway, launch it, they insist I take it out. The thing I added had made it easier to for schedulers to give people the shifts they want. There was a time they wanted a report to show people clocking in early or clocking out late when compared to their schedules. The app stopped feeling like something I made to help people with a tedious task. It started feeling like a surveillance system for managers that already had a bad relationship with its staff. I found myself shouting about some of these feature requests. And now I had a big team and we were working hard and doing great work, but the demands were unreasonable and getting worse. It dawned on me that this was unsustainable. I realize how much money we're making. I decide I want a raise. In the end, I'm faced with a choice. Make a shit ton of money, but become an asshole boss. I won't even need to work that hard. I just need to ride the people I hire to work hard, while I sit back. It starts feeling gross ======================= There's a moment however when it starts feeling gross. Like I created a monster. I realize now that workers are getting penalized for clocking out late. I called my favorite nurse after I saw her name on the report. I ask her what happened. She said she was sitting in a patient's room, lifting her back into her bed. I found out later the administrators were trying to use my late clock-out reports against workers. I added a button to the app that would hide names from the report. If the nurses clicked it, it would automatically put in an explanation and change the status for the late clock-out event to "excused". Clark called me yelling at me once when I was driving back. He said I had fucked up a major deal. Clark and I argue when I send Clarence home early ================================================= Clark comes by and wants to know where Clarence went. I said I told him. "The guy gets to the office at like 7:30 in the morning anyway. He works hard. If he leaves at 4, he beats the traffic." I remember watching Clark's face change shades. But I couldn't understand it. He was showing signs of anger! But why? "I don't think you're seeing this the same way as me. Clarence is great. He is doing really well. We'll get more out of him in the long run if we extend this kindness now. But even beyond that, it's a waste of time for him to spend an hour in the car, when he could leave earlier, and get home more quickly." Clark continues to go red. He stands up out of his desk. "I'm here until 8 PM most nights. If this is going to succeed, we can't have slackers." I think to myself how Clark's brain doesn't have to do the kind of work that us programmers do. His job is calling people and nagging them to invest. Or nagging them to refer us to new potential clients. Meanwhile Clarence and I are building something that really smart people have been trying to figure out for decades. I wonder if there are times when my face reflects my emotions. I don't know for sure. But based on how Clark looks back at me at this moment, I think he could tell. I think Clark suspects that I don't trust him any more. I don't know if I do or not. I just know I don't understand him. I don't understand his strategy. He told me the two guys he brought in as sales people were among the best he has worked with. And yet it's been four months now, and neither of them have closed anything that wasn't already in progress. All this is flashing through my mind while Clark is staring me down. Does he think my job is like his? Like it's a bunch of waiting for stuff to happen? I take a slow breath. I look past Clark and then out the window. I remember how he had already moved his stuff into this office when we moved from the warehouse where we used to work. This room could have been a nice meeting room. A shared space. But Clark took it for himself. A voice in my head says, "This guy really isn't like me!" Then I realize. This is about appearances. Cla theb Part Three ++++++++++ I'm back literally in the last job I had. I'm at lunch, listening to friends planning their own startup. I realize that it's just fun for them. They don't have a business plan. Haven't started working on lining up ads. By the end, the current job is reaching that same level of ridiculousness as before (as in, do something, then immediately undo it) but I just smile about it. I'm in a meeting with a boss, one telling us how important it is that we get all this work done. How we need to get this done. A few of the other workers are showing signs of stress. Sitting in a meeting, hearing about the next project ==================================================== I listen to the boss describe this new product. It is advertised as a digital life coach. I write down in my notebook how this is just a way to collect spending data from users and then sell that data to advertisers. I mention we are late to the game. There's numerous other big players doing this stuff, so we need to find a distinguishing reason why our product is superior. I suggest that maybe what we can do is build a version that does zero data collection. In other words, we point out how the other big products, the mint, the nerd wallet, the capital solutions, etc all collect data and then sell it to advertisers. "How about we make a product that doesn't work like that. All the customer's data is never collected and then used to sell ads. That could be our gimmick?" I said all this, full well knowing it wasn't going to work. But I wasn't prepared for the next step. The marketing folks loved the idea of emphasizing privacy. So they took that idea and added it to the promotional materials. But you know what? It was a straight up lie. We did the exact same thing. If anyone read through the 15000-word long terms of service document, they'd see we did indicate we would do the exact same thing.