Every so often, I read an article breathlessly talking about the greatness of any particular meeting process and how everyone should aspire to such a meeting culture. And it got me thinking about my career choices.

I never interviewed at Google earlier in my career because they wanted my grades. My grades undersold my abilities because of my neurodiversity. And anyone who thought they measured me accurately was probably a place I never wanted to work at. And then there was this whole class of companies founded by ex-googlers that I associate with that culture and choose not to even consider. I didn’t trust them to judge me based on deeply flawed metrics.

I never interviewed at Facebook because I saw how they had these all-night hack-a-thons, and I was about to be a dad, and I never wanted to work at a company where spending the night hacking was a requirement for my job. In particular, I knew that the people who could spend time would build social relationships that endured, and I would be formally excluded from them or have to choose not to see my kid. There were these youtube videos of the corporate culture and the hacking, and I was like – Nope, not for me. At Zynga, we introduced hack-a-thons, and folks wanted to mimic the all-night nature, and I remember throwing a temper tantrum in an exec meeting, and we agreed that they would not be all-night extravaganzas.

And so similarly, if a recruiter said ex-Facebook, I was like – probably not the kind of place where wanting to be with your family and in your bed will be a place for career growth.

I never interviewed at Amazon and had panic attacks when folks at VMware wanted to introduce Amazon-style meetings because, again, because of my neurodiversity, I knew it would exclude me. But I was always curious whether it was as bad as I thought.

Amazon came to VMware to have a meeting complete with a six-pager, and I was in the meeting because they needed my buy-in to get some technical work done. The meeting was precisely the disaster I expected. I was expected to read a print-out (I use text-to-voice) in some standard font (I use Open Dyslexic). I was expected to read this wall of text in 20 minutes (I scored in the bottom 3% of the population in reading and retaining information) and offer comments.

Did the Amazon employee ask if this works for me? No. Instead, I was expected to endure. So I did my best. What made it worse was that my other coworkers happily did this work. That was humiliating. I felt I was being denied access and treated as a semi-human being. And I realized I could never work with Amazon as a partner or an employee. And companies would copy this style, and I would be pushed out of those companies as well. And that this megalith of a corporation was about to kick me out of the tech industry. Talk about motivation to make VMware win.

And if I was in a charitable mood at the beginning of the meeting, I was livid by the time we got to my chance to talk. I was like, damn if they are this inconsiderate to partners, I can’t begin to imagine how they treat employees, and I thought – nope, not for me. They came to get my support, and their meeting structure did the wrong thing.

In the end, I was determined to ensure Amazon failed. I wanted them to fail. Because if their success meant more of these meetings, by god, I would do everything in my power to fight back.

I will observe their proposal was ridiculous, and it never went anywhere, more or less for the reasons I described in the meeting. I wasted an hour reviewing a ridiculous proposal and being humiliated.

A win, I guess?

Every so often, someone asks why it is such a big deal, and Sheri Byrne-Haber (disabled) explains it oh so well. Because those meetings are designed to make people like me less effective, I wonder if that’s the intent. But I know me, and mine are not welcome, and I will leave.

Now, I will observe that I had to grow up as well. When I got into a position of power, I, too, wanted meetings that only worked for me. And my team blew a gasket and demanded change, and so I changed begrudgingly. But it was only when I got into a shouting match with a senior executive who wanted the text, not a draining meeting, and we argued. I learned that to be inclusive, I had to accommodate his needs as much as he had to accommodate mine. So I used voice-to-text to produce documents, and he used tools to create text I could process via audio systems.

The point is that any rigid system is a rigid system. And its purpose is to force people to conform and, if that conformance doesn’t work for them, to force them out. And if you want to work with all the best and the brightest, then you need to be flexible and creative and not rely on rigid rules of how meetings must work.

Note I come to work five days a week. I like being in the office. I enjoy being around human beings. And have been leading remote teams for almost 20+ years. In that time, my groups have delivered over 10 billion dollars in actual money, many multiples of that in shareholder value.

Mr. Jassy wrote this memo to his staff, telling them why he would require everyone to come to work.

Update from Andy Jassy on return to office plans (aboutamazon.com)

So he starts with this:

It’s easier to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture when we’re in the office together most of the time and surrounded by our colleagues. It’s especially true for new people (and we’ve hired a lot of people in the pandemic); but it’s also true for people of all tenures at Amazon. When you’re in-person, people tend to be more engaged, observant, and attuned to what’s happening in the meetings and the cultural clues being communicated. 

Except if you have ADD and sitting in a meeting where you cannot sit still gets in the way. Or you are deaf, can’t hear what people are saying, and don’t have zoom translate what is being said in real-time.

For those unsure about why something happened or somebody reacted a certain way, it’s easier to ask ad-hoc questions on the way to lunch, in the elevator, or the hallway; whereas when you’re at home, you’re less likely to do so

I am surprised by this one. The emergence of technology like Slack or the DM function in Zoom has democratized communication. Finding time for a senior leader to ask them a question is tricky. And the senior leader in the elevator can walk away from you. But when you send them a message, they tend to take the time to respond because they can do so asynchronously.

In the more productive brainstorm sessions I’ve been a part of over the years, people get excited and blurt out new ideas or improvements to prior proposals, quickly advancing the seed of an idea, and leading to the broader group getting energized and feeling that it’s onto something. This rapid interjecting happens more often in-person because people feel less inhibited about jumping in or even interrupting sometimes. 

I am a cis-gendered white man at the apex of my profession, which worked for me. How many women and non-white and non-cis-gendered men have we trashed over the years because they didn’t speak up?

My first meeting back in person was the same old guys talking with all of the women and others silent.

It was so bad we had to introduce zoom to deal with the problem.

Serendipitous interactions help it, and there are more of those in-person than virtually

This one surprised me. The number of in-person interactions is an order of magnitude smaller than the interactions with people digitally. Just count the volume of people you contact over email, the number of people your email goes out to, etc. Mr. Jassy feels that is low-value communication.

Regardless, Mr. Jassy has made his choices, declared that he believes they are correct over other people’s lived experiences, and can force his employees to choose to work for Amazon or leave.

kostadis_roussos | Twitter | Linktree

I sat in a meeting the other day where someone said, “well, computer scientists are obsessed with determinism and refuse to recognize non-determinism.”

And it got me thinking, again, about something I wrote about many, many years ago (2012).

What I wrote was that the history of thought was about moving from a universe where everything was understandable to a world where everything could not be understood. And that article can be found here https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/06/04/why-would-anyone-want-to-work-for-zynga/#7846a1cb658d. There are a lot of things that I wrote that are embarrassing. I was naive. I was optimistic. And yet, I was right in echoing the thoughts of much smarter people.

Later on, I synced up with an old friend, and we wrote an essay on the limitations of human understanding. That, homo sapiens are inherently limited in their ability to understand the universe. And that limitation makes revelation, the intuition of truth without the ability to prove the truth, not a failure of reason, but an indication of its limits.

And so ten years later, I found myself giving a talk to a bunch of engineers about desired state systems.

The core of the discussion was that planning algorithms that attempted to search a state-space exhaustively were inherently flawed, if the system was exposed to unknown external inputs. When trying to change the state of such a system, if you assume you know how to go from the current state to the desired state, you are wrong because the current state is invalid at the time you made the plan.

30 years ago, I remember sitting in a class learning about planning, and recent research on machine learning, POMDP, and thinking what does this have to do with anything.

It turns out, everything.

When I started my career, I was a mercenary. I cared about the money, and the puzzle. I didn’t give a damn about what the stuff I built was used for.

My first job was at SGI, and my first bit of tech helped design stuff at Labs that were so secret that all I knew was that I couldn’t ask any questions. All I knew was that every question was, “I’m sorry we can’t tell you.”

My next job was at NetApp, where I built streaming media caches. The first use of those systems was for porn. The whole point of the internet at that time was porn. I used to find it amusing that I helped people see porn and enjoy porn.

Twenty-one years ago, porn was seen as – well – bad. And being a sex worker was seen as -bad-. And I’ve changed that point-of-view. But back then, I liked being part of the bad industry and being able to claim – like Albert Speer – my position is apolitical.

My mom would ask me what I do, and I would stare at her mischievously and tell her that I helped people.

My line was, “I am a professional. If the problem was how to build baby torture devices, and it was interesting, and the pay was good, I would do it.”

But somewhere, in the back of my head, the story of Albert Speer scared me. See, Albert Speer was the guy a whole generation of Europeans used to justify their silence and blindness in the face of the Holocaust. He was just a technocrat. A man that you could almost admire.

In my head, he was the guy that made the evil possible. He was the representative of the worst kind of human being who was the professional without whom the madmen would never have been able to kill at scale.

One thing about growing up is that you can sometimes have two contradictory thoughts in your head until revelation happens.

In my case, it was a rebirth of my Christian faith. And a realization that being that professional was wrong. That actions mattered.

But revelation and action take a long time.

And over time, I have started to make decisions and choices about who I work for, and where I work based on the principles of the leadership and their willingness to take action on things I care about.

My Christian faith makes it impossible for me to expect Saints, but it also demands that I look for better leaders.

After I left NetApp, I went to Zynga. And there, I discovered Mark Pincus, who, despite all of his flaws, showed that being a principled leader was possible. I won’t forget his decision to insist that the mafia wars design team delete a creepy scene from Mafia Wars II. There were other decisions, but that one still sticks out.

And my personal success makes it possible to take risks, that others can’t.

I don’t want to be Albert Speer.

Growing up, I couldn’t understand how people would worship that man. And the lesson I had learned was that you could have it all if you knew how to ignore the evil you helped create.

He was the consummate professional. And I could have it all if I was like him. I could be a technologist bereft of a moral compass, and have it all.

But I grew up, and in growing up, I became disgusted that I was like him, and I started to change.

In the back of my head, the fact his reputation survived galled me. It meant that amoral professionals never got their due.

It’s with great satisfaction that the latest biographies of Albert Speer, make it clear, he was evil and should have hanged. It’s with great relief, I see his reputation crumble, and the people who fell for him having their reputations crumble alongside him.

It’s 2020, and we technologists enable systems that create harm, like Facebook. Without us, Mr. Zuckerberg could not choose to allow hate to spew. Our systems allow him to make choices that are questionable at best, evil at worst.

And Mr. Zuckberg is not alone. There are others. Our personal morality can not be entirely divorced from our profession. Being a professional doesn’t absolve you from not knowing.

And if we think history will be kind, let’s remind ourselves of Albert Speer. History, was not kind.

The only rule in tech is you never, ever, ever, rage quit.

What’s rage quitting?

It’s getting so pissed off, that you walk out the door and take whatever next job you find.

Now, let me point out there are circumstances where rage quitting is the right thing to do, and that’s where there are moral and ethical lines being crossed that you can not abide. Or where someone does something that is truly horrible. I have no experience in those kinds of circumstances, and I offer no useful advice. All I can say is – do what you need to do to be safe, and talk to a labor attorney.

But if you aren’t in one of those really bad places, why is rage quitting a bad plan?

First, it’s a bad plan because your next job is probably not going to be the next job you actually want. And so you’ll be looking for another job pretty soon after that.

Second. it’s a bad plan, because the person who pushed you to rage quit, is forcing you to leave on their terms, not yours.

Third, because it puts you in a vulnerable position. A lot of very bad people can tell if you are the kind of person who will rage quit. They will exploit that, to get you to quit. They will push your buttons, and get you so angry that you will quit.

And they don’t get to run your life, you get to run your life, and surrendering that much control to them is never a good idea.

So you are angry, and furious and pissed off and want to quit, what do you do?

First, take some time off. You can take time off at work, you can take time off at home, you can find the mental space to not be angry. As Joe Beda said, don’t rage quit, rage vacation.

Once you are done with the vacation, then figure out what the right next move is. Be honest with yourself, and determine what you want. In some cases, it’s going to find another job. In other cases, its talk to your boss or his boss about the fact you wanted to rage quit, and see if a change is possible.

But figure that out.

And then go get it.

Over the years my teams have gone through waves of attrition. And typically those waves of attrition hit me like a punch to the gut, because every time they have happened, I was asked to do a dive and catch.

I was asked to try and convince someone to not take a job that they had already accepted. And that’s a tough place to be.

And it sometimes worked, but most often did not.

And even it did, they probably quit within 6 months.

And especially for senior people, their departures at critical phases of a project or business was very disruptive.

So if you get int that situation, what can you offer?

1. Offer more money

2. Offer another title

3. Offer time off

4. Offer a new project.

But the problem with these offers is that you are just buying yourself some time. Whatever underlying issues caused the person to quit will resurface after 6 months.

And what really upset me was that I was always felt they were leaving, not going. That we failed to show them the opportunity and deal with their real legitimate grievances.

So why bother? Because you get six months to figure out, on your terms, what the transition plan should be.

And that brings me to what you actually have to do.

From painful personal experience, I learned that 1×1’s are the best path to ensuring that folks are feeling connected to the organization.

The more 1×1’s you have across the org, the more people are connected to the team, the more you can deal with problems earlier rather than later.

Sometimes people leave, and that’s okay. Change is not a bad thing. But you owe it to your team for them to feel that there was a better opportunity somewhere else, and that they are not fleeing a bad place.

And so in my latest gig we mandated that our teams and leads do 1×1 and report the number of 1×1’s. And our attrition rate dropped to historic lows. Yes, part of it was the awesomeness of the Project Pacific, and our stock price, and part of it was that folks were feeling very connected to the mission as a whole.

And I am doing a lot fewer dive and catches these days….