Day 96

Not doing so hot today. Things got off to a rocky start when I got woken up at 5:30 by one our dogs. Jasper, the older of the two, decided he needed to bark at something. As is most often the case, it was at nothing, just some figment of his dog imagination that once again put him into a barking frenzy. Of course I've been awake ever since. Dumb dog. 

I spent the day researching how our new product works. I do this by going into a non-production instance of the application and tinkering with different settings, configurations, and processes. The point of the exercise is to learn more about the application's capabilities so I can show prospective clients how it works and what it can do for them. While I enjoy meeting new people and talking to them about ETI and our products, I am burned out. I've been with ETI almost 18 years and am ready to move on to other things. My urge to leave, however, is being overridden by greed. (Apologies if I've gone down this road before. Feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph if that's the case.) There is a distinct possibility that ETI will be sold within the next 8 to 12 months. If that happens and I'm still here I should receive a decent payout. Not enough to retire, but enough to be able to walk away from ETI without another job already lined up. So I just have to find the resolve to keep going for another few months. 

Through the lens of hindsight, it's clear that I should have left the company in 2017. That was such a bad year. A couple of years prior, our largest customer - a national telephone company - announced plans to purchase the customers and network assets from another, even larger telephone company that was not our customer. The acquisition was huge in terms of dollars (billions), subscribers (several million) and complexity (a lot of new stuff required). Given the nature of what our software does, ETI and our product were in the critical path of this project. For the next 14 months, we worked tirelessly preparing our product for what was to be the largest 'flash cut' in telecom history - the point at which control over all these subscribers and the network components that support them would be handed from company A (the seller) to company B (the buyer), our customer. While we were being handsomely compensated for the work, it was a grueling schedule with many 14 hour days and many weeks with no day off. And that was just to get ready for the cut over. At the time this was happening, all of ETI's engineering resources reported to me. I was handling all the requirements gathering, much of the solution design work, and managing the software developers in terms of helping them to prioritize their work, keeping them focused and helping to overcome obstacles when they came up. I was also responsible for keeping our customer informed of our progress on the multiple initiatives that we had underway on their behalf. 

Then came C-Day, or more technically, C-weekend. This was April of 2016. The moment of truth. It was at this point that I got to swap out my hat as head of engineering for that of head of implementation. I and several other colleagues traveled to Texas where we stayed for the next 3 weeks. These were the longest three weeks of my life. Literally. We were working 20 hours on, sometimes 24, every day for 3 weeks straight trying like hell to get everything to work the way it was supposed to now that we had gone live. The reality is that most of the things we built did work the way there were supposed to. The problem that we ran into that created most of the headaches was bad data. Because we didn't have the ability to test against live systems prior to the cut, it was next to impossible to anticipate all the ways in which the data would be an issue. As such, our application lacked resiliency; there were lots of scenarios it was not programmed to handle and it would often make a bad situation worse. So we worked around the clock to add the additional logic to deal with these scenarios while simultaneously trying to find and fix the bad data. It was an absolute meat grinder and, frankly, I don't know how I got through it. I do know that I was sleep deprived, not eating well and not in a good place mentally. It took months following the conversion to feel anything like my old self. Simply put, I was spent; completely out of gas. 

A couple of months later, my boss asked me to go to dinner with him one night after work. Sure. Glad to. During dinner he drops this bomb on me: "You suck at managing people. You will never manage people again while working at ETI." WTF? I was so gobsmacked by what he said, I didn't say anything. I just stared at him trying to process what I just heard. I remembered awhile later that during the conversion I had yelled at him about trying to be an armchair general from the safety and comfort of his office while I was in the trenches fighting like hell to keep the system up and running. I've come to realize this is what set him off and lead him to make this erroneous conclusion about my management skills. While it might appear that this is the moment where I should have packed my things and left, it wasn't. That came a few months later. 

While we did have our problems during the conversion, no one on the ETI team ever quit or gave up. We were in the trenches with our customer round the clock for weeks on end. And it did not go unnoticed. In July of 2017, several of the C-level executives flew to Atlanta to celebrate our contribution to the conversion and commitment to helping make it and them successful. We had racked up a ton of good will with the customer's senior executive management team and I was proud to have played such a pivotal role. And then with the snap of a finger, we flushed it all down the toilet. 

The customer had come back and asked us to provide them with a disaster recovery solution to our product. This amounts to having a back up system in a different city that can go on line with very short notice and little to no loss of data should anything catastrophic happen to the primary system. Given the critical nature of what our product does, this was something that should have already been in place but hey, you can only do so much at a time. As most of the dust had settled from the conversion and we had time now to focus on other things, putting this solution together wasn't going to be a problem. We had the manpower. Unfortunately, my boss, the same one who told me that I don't know how to manage people, got greedy – like Scrooge McDuck or Pharma Bro greedy – and sent off a proposal with astronomical price tag knowing full well our customer either had to pay through the nose or live without it. He refused to negotiate down on the price. That went over about as well as you would expect - total turd in a punchbowl. All that good will that we had accrued went out the window in the blink of an eye. Or in the time it takes to hit send on a email. The customer was now pissed and looking for revenge. Not only did they not buy the solution, they managed to make our lives hell for the next several months. 

This is when I should have left. It's a decision that I regret to this day. The company has never really been the same since. My old boss is gone - he left in early 2019 - but the damage was done. We didn't sell one of our products to a new customer for the next 4 years (2017 - 2021). While there does now appear to be light at the end of a dark tunnel - credit to new executive leadership  and the decision to go all in with Microsoft - it has not been much fun. It's not the people - I get along well with most of my colleagues - I have just lost the connection to ETI that I once had. I don't actively hate it, but I don't jump out of bed every day anxious to get my day started either. Again, with the benefit of hindsight, it hasn't been worth it. Looking forward, saddled with my grief, settling for "ok", for "meh", no longer feels right - it feels like a copout. Like I'm not living. 

If Damian's death taught me anything it's the importance of doing what you want to do and spending time with people that you care about and that care about you. Even better if you can combine the two.