I understand why I need to quit my job, finally. in Journal of life stuff

So, I finally understand why I hate my job now and I didn’t back when I first got hired. I finally managed to work out what has gotten under my skin and totally sapped out my joy. Short version, I’m being asked to be a shitty human, and I’m not ok with that. This entry will be, more or less, what I will eventually say in my goodbye email when I quit. But first, a history lesson.

When I took the job I had a clear objective. Fix things that were broken, make things better, and mostly help my boss become a good person and boss instead of the bad boss he was.

Fixing things that were broken was pretty straightforward. I knew how storage arrays worked and nobody else there did, so I jumped in and got their storage arrays configured in a way that they’d run much more reliably, faster, and with greater capacity. I began the process of updating firmware/drivers/versions of software; something that had not been done for years. I consistently pushed back and actively fought against the attitude of “making changes is a risk” with the very real reality that “fixing things proactively reduces risk”. I pushed back against being micro-managed. I pushed back against being spoken to in a condescending manner. I showed people how to respectfully, but firmly, stand up for themselves.

Making things better was the next challenge. We have good automation around testing, but not around anything but the actual job the automation does. No automation for making the templates automation needs. No documentation about exactly what must be loaded into a new template in order for it to work with automation. No/very little documentation about how the environment is set up. So I started automating things in tools that didn’t require (much) scripting skill. Ansible, mainly. And, by this time, I also started to realizing that fixing my boss would be possible, but not as possible as I originally thought. And, most importantly to the actual reasons to quit, I identified that hardware limitations were the reason we couldn’t grow meaningfully on our current hardware. That meant spending money, and later on I would learn that the problem was we had none.

The boss. Let’s call him Abe . The boss I have made progress with. Out of all his flaws, the only flaw that is truly his own is that he will lie to your face and tell you what he thinks you want to hear. He’s been a manager for 25 years, and he’s always worked for the same boss (Bill), following Bill from company to company. Bill was forced out of our company recently, and during the goodbye party Bill made the ‘joke’ that “of course Abe and I have always worked together, who else would hire you?” But it wasn’t a joke. It’s truth. Abe is a manager of IT, but doesn’t even know that Cisco makes servers, that Infrastructure as Code is a thing, that IOPS and storage capacity are different things, and that CPUs can be mostly idle but still overloaded with tasks. This man has no business being a manager in IT. Finance, or business, maybe. But not IT.

What I learned over the months was that, except for lying, Abe’s bad habits (micromanaging, condescending talk to his employees, not fighting for his people, threatening to fire his employees, failing to fix relationships, etc) all came from shitty role models. That meant they were all fixable with better examples and explanations of what to do. He’s been receptive to learning and changing. But as long as he exists in the culture that Bill and those like Bill create, he will never truly change. He can’t. He would be excommunicated from ‘the family’. And he’s had a career for 25 years because he became a party man, played the game, followed the system, and kept the old boys network intact. It’s disgusting. It’s the worst type of ‘who you know, not what you know’. And until he unplugs from it, he won’t really change. He’ll always slide back.

History lesson over, why am I leaving? Let’s take a swag at my goodbye letter.

X is my last day with BeeGees. Why am I leaving? Because I’m being asked to be a shitty person and I can’t live with that. I have been tasked, by our new CIO, to get us into the cloud. She phrased it as “see how expensive it was”, but the reality is that we’re going to cloud, and any reasons for not going to the cloud are reasons you lack perspective on why the cloud is the ideal solution. “How is that being shitty?”

If I asked you to help me sell my car, and the first thing I did was hand you a tub of bondo and sanding paper, then tell you to help me hide the cracks in the frame, engine block, and exhaust system, the correct response would be to tell me to go to hell. Everyone either has, or has known, someone who got screwed on a car by a shitty human who actively hid, lied about, or obfuscated known flaws with the vehicle. The drive to the cloud that our CIO is exactly that. She and her Crow cronies want this company sold, and they want it sold fast. Within a year or two, or they’ll leave, just like Mark (old CEO), Bill, and all the finance people have left. They’re here to get a pay day, and that’s it.

By rushing to the cloud like we are, we’re accomplishing exactly one goal: we are getting a checkbox that the CIO herself looks for. We’re trying to make ourselves look like a round object, so we fit into the expected round hole. Nevermind that the actual financials of our situation don’t make sense. The bondo and paint hide that. Whoever buys us would be shocked to see the difference between reality and what they thought they were buying. You all know Abe’s reputation for lying to your face. Where do you think he learned that?

I will not help you screw someone else over. Part of the reason I set up my life to not need a job for employment, and so that I could tolerate a year or more of unemployment, was because I never wanted my employer to have power over me. I realize many of you are not in a position where you can quit today, or in the coming weeks. But realize, their entire goal is to get this company sold to the first sucker who will buy it. And by helping them implement their changes to get us sold, you’re literally being the person helping bondo over major flaws so an unwitting buyer will get screwed. If you can find a way to stay and not help them, great. I can’t.

In a private e-mail and meeting with the new CIO I told her the best way to inspire IT and get rid of the sad was to show us how her changes would make the product we sell become more viable on the market. We need $70 million a year in revenue to break-even. We make around 40 million in revenue now. So how are her changes going to get us $30 million a year in new sales? How will going to the cloud, automating, and her other ideas get us $30 million in sales? Over any 1-2 year time period? They won’t. It’s a cash grab. That’s why I’m quitting.

Working on tools for the rule engine that make it possible to say “this file is sacred, and it’s content cannot be e-mailed, printed, faxed, pdfed, etc.” would be a huge step forward in selling. I can’t figure out how to configure our software to protect a .txt file from being e-mailed out. If I can’t figure it out, most customer’s can’t either. And the few customers we have are the ones willing to let our people figure that out. If you want mass market appeal, the tool has to be easy to use and come with good out-of-the-box defaults. It doesn’t today. We know it doesn’t today. Focus on that instead of going to the cloud.

That problem is the number one issue with sales. We have a product that protects intellectual property and digital assets. So give me a clear use-case on how I, as one person, with just a written doc, protect a PDF, text file, or source code repo with our product and prevent it from being printed, e-mailed, faxed, zipped, transmuted, or otherwise exported outside of the secure enclave. If you can make that use case work for someone who doesn’t know our product, and make it so that one person can configure that on their own with just our written guides, then you will have a way to make far more than $30 million in sales. But the Crow people don’t focus on that, because they don’t understand how possible it is. $30 million in sales to break even isn’t as flashy as being bought for whatever money they get and then watching that money get divvied up by the people at the top first and “oops, we ran out” for the people at the bottom.

If the cash-grab schemes of any of the Crow people panned out, why the fuck are they here? If you’ve made your millions, why keep working at this place? Goodbye, I’m done with this insanity. The grass is greener than it is here in most places.