Cleaning out my metaphorical closets.

Fourteen years can feel like eons in the technology business. The hot trend today is obsolete the next. I have chronicled these changes in my blog since 2010, when I naively founded a software-as-a-service startup, hoping to strike it rich. The business became a failure, but the blog's popularity grew, and my futile efforts to be a software entrepreneur made me a better developer and leader. Since the new year, I have improved my blog by switching from Blogspot to Ghost and migrating the posts individually. It is a tedious process of copy and paste, but it has given me a chance to look back on my growth as a writer and technology professional. Today, I want to discuss some things I discovered while cleaning my metaphorical online closets.

Looking at old blog posts is like leafing through old diaries. Sometimes, it is an exercise in nostalgia. Other times, it is cringeworthy. Once in a while, you stumble upon something that resonates over the years and reaffirms your values. If there were an easy way to migrate the blog posts from one platform to another, I would not have experienced this. It also acts as a form of reflection that helps me through the process of recovery from my last layoff.

What I have discovered are common threads that run through my work. I rebel against talented jerks and poor bosses. Microsoft has changed for the better, becoming the cool uncle of technology. Finally, the agile movement is experiencing growing pains as entrenched forces in the business community collaborate with management consultants to stifle change. These themes deserve our attention, and I will look at them individually.

Bad Bosses and Talented Jerks –

The technology profession has a tradition of gifted engineers becoming wealthy. Wealth does not translate into self-awareness, and people gifted with code often find themselves saying insensitive or offensive things to the press. It happens regularly in game development, and the brogrammer culture that grew up in Silicon Valley perpetuates this behavior.

Fortunately, people are pushing back on these trolls, and we are exposing harmful acts in one social media post and blog at a time. We will drag them into the light, their defenses a pickaxe chipping away at their remaining shreds of credibility. It is nice to see people like this get what they deserve.

Bad bosses are getting their moment in the spotlight along with talented jerks. The Peter Principle and social networks protected these people for years, but social media and the business press have gotten better at calling out deficient leadership. I have experienced leadership whose only defining characteristic was the ability to look inoffensive for twenty years. Fortunately, the Agile reformation provides empirical ways to spot and hold those individuals accountable. It also explains why some managers have entered a devil's bargain with management consulting companies, bringing me to my next topic.

Growing Pains in the Agile Community –

The biggest challenge the Agile Reformation poses to the business world is its insistence on working solutions and empiricism. It is a tremendous threat to people accustomed to command and control approaches to running a business. It also threatens the careers of people traditionally working as project managers who are more accustomed to filling reports instead of shipping working solutions. A bureaucracy will do everything to protect itself.  

Big consulting companies like McKinsey, Earnst, and Young have stepped into the breach by offering one-size-fits-all approaches to creating business agility. These approaches look good in PowerPoint decks or white papers but often ignore the people doing the work at the organization. It allows terrible managers to say that they are practicing Agile while instead being involved in numerous anti-patterns that conceal their poor leadership. At my last organization, I spent my time undoing the damage done by this process. It also creates deep fissures in the Agile movement as consultants strive to increase billing while others attempt to address concrete issues. With the increase in interest rates, big banks and insurance companies became wise to this reality, which explains why the job market for management consultants collapsed. Now, consulting companies are delaying new hires and putting people on performance plans that are a pretext for layoffs—the Agile movement fractures between those hawking products and those genuinely aiming to help. These two groups have engaged in a tug-of-war for the past three years, leaving me caught in the middle.

Microsoft is Your Cool Uncle –

When I began blogging in 2010, Steven A. Ballmer was the CEO of Microsoft. He turned the company into a cash cow. While the company's focus on innovation could be strengthened, some past products prioritized market share over user needs. Microsoft developers like myself were openly contemptuous of the company's direction and often used third-party tools to improve the Microsoft product. Ballmer hated this and fought against things like open source and decentralized solutions. His cheerleading for developers to embrace .NET at a Microsoft conference has taken on a life of its own. All the cheerleading and sweat in the world could not save his job when the iPod and the Android innovations made the company look out of touch. With a golden parachute of over 100 Billion dollars, Balmer went away to own an NBA franchise, and Satya Nadella became the new CEO.

Different from Ballmer, who came from sales and accounting, Nadella was an engineer and knew something that Ballmer did not. Developers did not want to chant and sweat; they wanted tools that made their jobs easier. Nadella began to make Microsoft more nerdy and innovative. At a development conference, he asked why developers were using a third-party tool for source control inside Microsoft and said that from that point forward, they would use Microsoft products to build their software. It was a turning point, and it was the launch of Team Foundation Services and a DevOps approach to all work at the organization. The cloud service Microsoft Azure began to compete with Amazon Web services, and the company started to adopt a more agile way of doing business. Finally, they made a big bet on Artificial Intelligence, which appears to be paying off. Microsoft listened to the development community and the enterprise technology people who were their customers, and they became more powerful.

Bringing It All Home –

Looking back over the last fourteen years, we can see these three themes dominating. I am glad to be part of these trends and look forward to seeing what happens in the next fourteen years. The only constant in this business is change, and I am grateful you have been with me every step of the way.

Until next time.