In the dark ages of a little more than decade ago, I used to have a physical server in a rack in a colocation facility in Baltimore. (I had access to the rack because a paying client didn't need the whole thing, but they needed just slightly more than half a rack so a whole rack was what we had.) I started out with a Compaq DL360 that I'd bought on eBay that turned out to have a LOM board that was worth more than I'd paid for the server, and even though we had Fedora on all the client servers I wanted to see what Debian was all about so I put that on my own server1.
I don't know exactly why I'm bothering with this, but here I am bothering with it. I mean, I guess I kind of know: every now and then I bump up against an idea that doesn't really work in short form, and for a while I haven't really had a place to put those ideas. I posted a couple things to Medium over the years, and even made a long post (ahem, an “article”) on LinkedIn when I was punchy, but none of those were the right audience.
Aside from not having a place to put my more unwieldy thoughts, perhaps the bigger struggle for me is the fact I assume nobody will read them. You can add to that a ruthless tendency to delete everything and start over — or, more commonly, to delete everything and stop there. Or to delete the idea before I even start putting it down, because I don't think I'll ever be able to edit it into something I'd want people to read.
Homer Simpson has wise words for all of us: “Never try.”
Anyway, for a while now it's felt like time to have a place to put things that isn't behind somebody else's paywall. I can't say how much I'm actually going to put here, but this is now that place. I've liberated a few things I've written over the past few years from other sites and reposted them here, and if I manage to get anything past my worst critic (me), this is where I'll put it.
I don't have comments on here, but if you want to respond to this post, I'm on the fedi as fedward@distraction.party.
This article was originally posted to LinkedIn on January 16, 2020
Twenty years ago this month I started a new job, and on my first day at the office I took my first coffee break. If you're a contact of mine on here, you've probably worked with IT people a lot, and perhaps are yourself an IT person. Thus you are probably familiar with how IT people tend to feel about coffee. I mean, sometimes it's tea, or sometimes it's Mountain Dew or Jolt™ or Red Bull, but the pause from active work and maybe the hit of caffeine and/or sugar are an important part of getting focused on the task(s) at hand. I cannot stress enough just how bad that office coffee was on that first morning. That was not a good coffee break. It did not increase my productivity. On my lunch break I went to Target and bought a kettle, a coffee grinder, and a French press. I became That Guy, the guy with the coffee stuff at his desk. I take my coffee and my coffee break seriously.
This article was originally posted on Medium on May 21, 2013
Senior employees might actually be cheaper in the long run
This glass was half empty.
Prologue
In late 2002 I was laid off by a mismanaged company with a Tier 1 Internet network and one of the largest web hosting operations on the planet. It was a long time coming; more than a year prior they had started the process by laying off a good chunk of the management above me, and in subsequent rounds had given the boot to most of my peers. The company pursued a strategy of growth through acquisition, changing focus every few months. By 2002 I was a minister without portfolio, a man without a country. The people who knew what I did – frankly, who had any institutional knowledge at all – were long gone. My managers came from acquired companies, and my teammates were the leftovers from other groups similarly wracked by layoffs. By the time the inevitable reduction in force came for me, I had been reorganized into a team where my skills might have been a good fit, had the previous year not left my morale so low, my attitude so toxic.
Shortly before the layoffs, a somewhat optimistic director had managed (somehow) to convince her bosses that the endless reorganizations had left her with an entire department of strangers, and that a week of meetings and team building exercises would benefit the company. Those of us who didn't work around the San Francisco Bay booked flights across land and ocean to meet our teammates. And then the Monday before the meeting, rumors surfaced that there were to be staff cuts.
My own team was broadly distributed (I was farthest east, in DC; our westernmost colleague was in Honolulu), so our travel arrangements all required us to arrive early in order to catch the first official meeting the next Monday. We met up on Friday night in a San Francisco patio bar, where our manager chose for himself the awkward task of talking to each of us individually, to say that he hadn't been told the layoffs were coming, but he had been instructed to rank his team. He was sheepish as he told me the bad news I'd been ranked the lowest, and didn't know how to take my answer (I agreed, and admitted I hadn't been productive, because I had long since given up on caring).
The following Monday, the official team meeting began with our director's boss admitting officially to the elephant in the room. Six weeks later I was out of a job.
Homer Simpson has wise words for all of us: “Never try.”
New card? I didn't sign up for a new card.
This glass was half empty.