Missives from the 6th Floor

I've been casually looking for the next thing for about six months - ever since I was asked to step into a direct management role and agreed under protest. I told my manager, whom I consider a friend first and colleague second, that I was taking the position to help him and the organization, but that management wasn't (and isn't) my aspiration, so he should consider it a temporary thing and start looking for my replacement.

In recent weeks my casual search has become more intense, and as I type this, I have an offer from one company , strong interest from another , an offer of an offer from a start-up , and active conversations with two others . I expect in the next week or so I'll make a decision and pull the rip cord.

As an aside, I've realized recently that I don't dislike management per-se -- I dislike management in a schizophrenic organization that can't decide what it wants to do, and doesn't resource it's teams to a level commensurate with expectations. But that's a different story...

This story is about my reasons for leaving Real, and is sort of a prototype resignation letter. I suspect it'll ramble a bit as I'm still trying to organize my thoughts - not only to write my resignation, but also to prepare for a likely "audience" with the CEO . I've learned by painful experience that you don't go into that sort of conversation unprepared - 'cause preparation is really all you control about the event.

I work for a guy who I've known for a number of years, but had never worked for prior to joining Real. He, in turn, works for a guy who I've known for a decade, with whom I worked at Disney, worked with again at the remains of Checkout.COM, and chose to work with again at Real. I hold both of these fellows in the highest regard, even if I don't always agree with their decisions, and I trust them to do their best to protect their people and generally do the right thing.

I work with a handful of very sharp people, though as a percentage of the thousand person company, I'd say the rightmost tail of the bell-curve contains precious few folks, and more and more of them are leaving weekly. To paraphrase Mark Twain - it's not that there are too many idiots, it's that the smart people aren't distributed right. Only in this case, we could use a couple fewer idiots, too.

The organization seems to believe - as do many - that good decisions are made at the top, and that managements job is to make sure that the rank-and-file execute on the decisions made at the top. The decision making horizon is short - typically not past next quarters financials - and while staring at your feet makes it less likely that you stumble, it also makes it very difficult to pick a point on the horizon and make consistent progress toward it.

Sun Tzu said "strategy without tactics are the long road to victory, and tactics without strategy are the noise before defeat" - and we've got plenty of tactical smarts, but precious little strategy - at least precious little that's detectable from the trenches.

Real is organized into vertical business units, and I work on one of only two horizontal technical teams in the company. Both platform engineering and the technical operations teams suffer from the multiple-master problem - we try to serve many stakeholders, with too few resources, and end up making no one happy.

If Real had a bounded and stable set of "top priorities" our job might be tractable, but every time we go through a planning process and establish a prioritization, some X factor emerges. Like the proverbial bright shiny object it attracts the full attention of the executive team (which often means the CEO), and the planning, prioritization, and focus go out the window, leaving only a scramble in their wake.

The conclusion that the executive team seems to have reached, without really engaging in a dialog, is that a horizontal platform team is never going to work in this environment, and should be split up. That directive hasn't been come down yet, but I think it's coming. I see their argument, and don't necessarily disagree, though I don't see how the alternative (competitive evolution) is compatible with an organization who's first constraint is resources (i.e. financial). Evolution is hugely wasteful - it only produces good results in the long term - there's lots of dead ends and u-turns along the way.

We (the platform team) are always "the road-block" to some business unit making it's numbers, or releasing a project on time, and lately we're even being cast as the reason that external partners are unhappy and refusing to do additional business with the company. Of course, when we go to the well and ask to be resourced appropriately so we can accomplish whats expected, our requests are slashed, or refused outright.

The answer is always "do more with less," and all the while we're beat up in meetings by stakeholders who can't really describe what they want us to build, but don't have the talent/resources to build it themselves.

We ask for resources and time to revamp aging systems that have incredible ongoing operational costs, and the answer is typically "no," because those projects don't directly contribute to the bottom line. Out of the other side of their mouths, however, our stakeholders constantly complain about the limitations these legacy systems place on them, and point at inflexibility and preventing them from making their revenue targets.

In essence, we're always on the defensive, always trying to do too much at once, and never doing any of it well. This short term fixation isn't new - and it's manifested in the design of many of the legacy systems, which translates to systems that are fragile, and require massive amounts of human care and feeding.

I came to Real believing that I could help move the company into a new mode, where systems were designed with an eye toward the future, where there was a technology vision that was longer than 3 months and a quarterly earnings report, I've decided that I was wrong.

But really, all that is just ancillary. My real reason for leaving is that I don't like the role I'm in, and looking back over the last 18 months, I've never really found a role in the organization I did like. What I want is to have day-to-day direct technical contribution to a product or project with continuity. In other words, I want to work on projects measured in months, and I want to actually build things again - not just tell others how to build them.

One of my colleagues manages to do both, and I'm somewhat in awe - I've never been able to balance my "principal engineer" and "development manager" responsibilities and leave enough time to be an "individual contributor" on the side. I've worked on just about every product Real offers, but never for more than a couple weeks, and typically only when things were broken and there were fires to put out.

So now I have to wrap up the ongoing conversations and make a decision about what I want to do next.

The trouble is, I've never known what I want to do when I grow up - I don't have (and have never had) a grand plan, I just try to make locally intelligent decisions and hope they lead me to a "good" result.

My time at Real, for example, was a positive experience overall - I met several good people with whom I hope to stay friends, and even if nothing else good had come of it, that makes it worth the price of admission.