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Introduction: This post contains three anecdotes and a snappy conclusion. Without further ado, here is…
Anecdote #1: Many years ago, in a country far, far away, I made a good living for a while teaching courses about Windows NT. In itself that is kinda weird, because I don’t like Windows at all, but there was good and easy money to be made. It was the 1990s and Windows NT was on a roll, with many organizations either establishing a corporate internal network for the first time or replacing things like Novell Netware (which I did like) or Microsoft’s PC Lan Manager (which nobody liked).
There was a sharp increase in demand for people who could be trusted to install, configure, and troubleshoot Windows NT systems and Microsoft expertly filled that gap with an educational effort that included authorized training centers and a system of certification. I myself held quite a few Microsoft certificates because the training institutes that I worked for liked it if their educators held the certificates that they were training their students to qualify for.
In one of these training gigs, I was part of a program that was run by the Dutch Bureau of Labor that sought to get unemployed people with a technical background a degree in Windows NT, and then unleash them onto a job market that was hungry for Microsoft Certified Systems engineers (MCSE; also jokingly expanded as: Must Consult Someone Experienced). I typically start my classes with a round of introductions and in that particular gig, one of the students explained that he used to work for a well known German company and that he used to be a customer support engineer for their proprietary mini-computer and operating system.
Here follows a historical note for our younger readers: In the time before the dominance of Windows and Linux, there were many manufacturers that made and sold “mini-computers” based on proprietary architectures and featuring proprietary operating systems. The word “mini-computer” does not relate to something like the Raspberry Pi; instead, it was a class of computers that sat between personal computers (a.k.a. microcomputers) and mainframes. There was a flourishing market for these mini-computers, but demands for compatibility between platforms first reduced the field to a small handful of manufacturers supporting some form of Unix (Hewlett-Packard, Sun, IBM) and then eventually to an even smaller field where the vast majority of machines use X86 processors and run Windows, or Linux.
Cue hate mail from the ARM people (book tip).
My student’s employer had been caught up in that platform reduction and their customers migrated from the proprietary mini computer platform to a so-called “open system” (meaning: a Unix system from one of the major vendors).
Fun historical fact: Even Microsoft was somewhat afraid that “open systems” might become a big thing, so the first versions of Windows NT shipped with a POSIX subsystem.
As the number of customers that still used the proprietary mini-computer dwindled, fewer and fewer people knew anything about it. At one point, my student was the only person left in the entire world who still knew something about this system and consequently he had a hell of a fun time traveling all around and providing onsite support to the last remaining customers. Great gig, until the last customer switched off their system, at which time my student turned into someone who knew everything about a system that nobody was using. Eventually he got laid off and couldn’t find a job because of his lack of relevant knowledge. Finally, he ended up in my class where he was retrained to be a Microsoft Certified System Engineer.
Anecdote #2: Many years ago, in a country far, far away, I was working for a big tech company in a remote office and was asked to do some career coaching for a few people who were working on products that they cared deeply about, but for which they seemed to get little traction in the rest of the company. During the initial conversations with these folks, I investigated what it was exactly what they were working on and it turned out that they were in the “Emerging Markets” division that was tasked with building products and services that would make sense in developing countries. This division was the love child of a local vice president who was himself from a country that was fast developing but which still had many citizens living in poverty. Wonderful mission. Worthwhile mission too. But, here was the problem: Nobody else in the company cared about that mission; hence the lack of traction.
I thought for about two seconds and gave my career advice: Get the hell out of here and work on something that the company cares about. This advice was met with surprise, horror, and disbelief. Clearly, I hadn’t understood the mission; this was very important, the people in these developing countries really needed products targeted to them because they were faced with all sorts of technological disadvantages in terms of computing power and network bandwidth. And really, the company did care about it; every time they talked about their mission to someone, that someone said that they cared, deeply.
For the avid reader of this article series, the problem is obvious. Of course everyone said that they cared. In our image and brand centered world which pays extreme attention to what is said and how things look (superficially), you cannot say that you don’t care about something like this. But, saying you care about something is incredibly cheap. Actually, it is mostly free. The Internet is full of people who shout from the rooftops how much they care about things. Apparently we live in a very “care full” world. But I don’t care what you say, I care about what you do. And for the emerging market division, nothing was done. They did not get time with senior executives to pitch their products, they did not get attention at the company-wide all-hands, they did not get lots of headcount and budget. They were, in essence, a small group of people in a remote office working on something that did not move the bottom line.
The people I was trying to help were having none of it and they steadfastly stayed the course. Six months later, a reorg came and the Emerging Markets division was disbanded, with people and projects distributed to other divisions (that the company apparently did care about) where the people were eventually reassigned and the projects canceled.
Anecdote #3: Many years ago, in a country far, far, away, I was active in promotion committees and helping people prepare for the promotion process (reading tip).
Side note: Did you notice how the last few years of tech layoffs and the current massive uncertainty about hiring in the time of AI, have made “promotion” completely go away as a topic of discussion?
I was approached by the manager of an internal IT team to have a chat with one of their reports who had attempted promotion to staff level and who had just been rejected for the second time. Could I maybe help them figure out what was going wrong and help them? I met with the manager’s report, looked over their promotion packet and gave my advice: Move to another team. When asked why, I explained: “You are doing good work and it is probably worthy of promotion, but nobody cares about your team. One of the grave injustices of our profession is that there are teams that do important but internally focused work that is not valued as much as some work that other teams are doing, which is broadly similar in volume and scope, but that is directly supporting some externally facing product.”
The report thought about it for five seconds, agreed, and so we schemed a bit to get them transferred to a team that was doing critical work in support of the company’s main products and services. When the manager who had approached me originally found out that this report was leaving, they approached me and asked me what the hell we had been up to in these coaching sessions. For their edification I repeated my explanation and the next thing I heard from them is that they had moved to another team too. The report was promoted in the next round.
Bonus anecdote: One of the most cut-throat environments I ever worked in was in the financial industry in the City of London. I had been consulting with banks in the Netherlands for a while and they were, by and large, friendly environments with people who had been there for decades and where it was still possible to imagine you had a job for life. London on the other hand was completely different. People were let go left and right, colleagues were constantly trying to one up each other, and there was zero loyalty to anything or anyone. Everybody was looking out for number one all the time.
I was working on a project on behalf of the Dutch parent bank to get some services going in the field of cross-border payments. At one point I noticed one of my English colleagues involved in some side projects that seemed not to be related with our main mission. When I asked him what he was up to, he freely admitted that he was building an “escape pod”, a side project that he might be able to convert to a full time role if our project got canned. At the time I thought he was very cynical, but now I see him as a visionary and most definitely as a corporate survivor.
Conclusion: The conclusion is simple: There might be honor in going down with a sinking ship or staying aboard one that is making lots of water, but apart from a warm feeling you don’t get anything in return other than wet feet and a potentially invigorating bout of physical exercise in the form of swimming to shore, with a life vest if you are lucky.
The thing to remember is that even good companies can be remarkably dysfunctional at times and, much like the wider universe, they do not exist for your comfort or convenience. Through no fault of your own, you might end up in a place that, all things considered, does not offer the best opportunities for a fruitful career. You might like the work, you might like your colleagues, you might believe in the mission, but in order to be successful, you need to do things that are valued by the executives.
You might like the boat you are in, but make sure you leave it before it starts making water.
