Art by 竹壹 (CHOo1NE)
In my previous article, which you can find here, I talked about the apathy of Americans not just in politics, but in everything, and prescribed a treatment by reframing radicalization as a way we can heal.
I want to conclude this series with one more short story. It's about my job.
I have a reputation at my job for making waves. I'm the guy who speaks truth to power. I have tact (usually), I know how to get people's attention, and I know how to make sure everyone in the room understands exactly how important whatever I'm talking about is. I am singlehandedly responsible for a large number of major improvements to our work environment. I, alone, made our command line builds 5x faster. I, alone, made our pipelines 10x faster. I, alone, made our Git checkouts 60x faster. This was all work that people broadly knew needed to be done. But it was never important enough to do, according to management. Everyone at the office constantly complained about how slow our tools were. I did something.
Management was skeptical of my efforts. Whenever it came time to give feedback, they were always enthusiastically supportive of my impressive results. But they always opened their remarks by warning me not to spend too much time on it. There was this tone of "Wow, this is fantastic. But you're done now, right?" When my team's productivity soared, they rewrote history and pretended they approved of what I was doing from the beginning. Classic corporate gaslighting. I let it slide, because, well. That's politics. I had been expecting it.
But I kept finding more problems affecting our productivity. Deeper problems. Existential problems. What did it matter that our builds were fast if we were still wasting months, sometimes years of dev time on cancelled projects? What was the point of writing code faster if it took weeks to get Design to tell us what we were even supposed to be building? We can only wait so fast. But addressing that required an effort that was both greater in scale and gentler in tact.
As I shared my findings with my team, it quickly became apparent that I was treading on some very well-trodden ground already. Everyone more senior than me already understood all the mechanics I was uncovering. They had worked inside this machine for decades. But they had already shipped enough products to define an entire career, so shipping one more a little bit faster didn't really change anything for them. Why learn a faster way of working if you're gonna retire in a couple years anyway? Sounds like a lot of stress and hassle (and risk) for something that doesn't really matter. There was no reason for them to care.
But as the junior on the team who was hungry for the experience of doing something that mattered, I cared. And so, as usual, I took the reins. Upper management, who made all the decisions we paid for, was basically untouchable. You never saw them. You never spoke to them. And they never spoke to you. There was a single exception to this, which was a bimonthly all-hands meeting where they would accept questions from the audience.
Now, confronting such a powerful politician in such a public space is a double-edged sword. It raises their defenses substantially, and it means you're never going to have an honest conversation. But it also means there's a fuck ton of witnesses to whatever you're about to say. And people will listen. Also, the boss is going to look bad if they fire you for speaking the truth, and I was banking on them not being willing to cross that line.
I got up in this big all-hands meeting, with hundreds of people in it, and I asked them why the fuck we keep cancelling projects, and I warned them that if we go any longer without shipping a product, this company is going to forget how to do it. Maybe we already have. I was a bit more polite than that, but I made sure my energy could be felt.
Their response doesn't matter. Nothing they say in those meetings carries any meaning. I just wanted them to hear what I had to say. And I wanted everyone else in that meeting to hear it too. My goal was not to pin them down and trap them into admitting they were making a terrible mistake. Convincing them of that would be impossible. Convincing them to admit it was double-impossible. But that wasn't the point. The point was to plant the seed of an idea in everyone's heads.
I received an outpouring of support. People from all over the company messaged me telling me how glad they were that I was raising this issue. Because it's something everyone knows is fucked up. And it's affecting everyone. Tons of people have quit over this already. I've had three managers quit in the last year. We all know why. But everyone who reached out to thank me did it privately.
Publicly, nothing happened. Nothing changed. Everyone said "Yeah, Roza makes a great point, glad we got that guy on our team" and then crawled back into their little holes of uncertainty and endlessly shifting priorities. 1 year later, as I write this article, nothing has changed. There was no show of public support, only silence. Everyone was still too afraid to say anything.
My coworkers are incredibly grateful for the work I've done. They give me all sorts of praise. They consult me on hard, interesting problems. They respect me. And they repeatedly tell me they don't know where this team would be without me. But here's the thing.
I'm an egotistical asshole. I call things out less because I'm passionate about customers or whatever and more because these working conditions annoy the SHIT out of me. I don't give a fuck if one of my coworkers can't use his obscure text editor from the 80s on our project. But if I accidentally improve support for it when I'm fixing my environment then fuckin'... fine, whatever. I don't care about these people and I barely care about this project. I'm fixing this because it makes me hate my job less. I'm fixing this because if I have to sit there for 45 minutes waiting for a build to complete so I can merge my changes and move on with my life, only to see the build fail due to a transient build system issue, AGAIN, I am going to kill myself.
I don't care if it's "valuable" or not, nor do I care about "driving impact". That is a post-hoc justification that I make up on the spot for the benefit of my boss and coworkers. It's how I justify the fact that I stopped what I was supposed to be doing for 2 weeks to do work that was never scheduled or costed (which, at Microsoft, is a form of high treason). It's how I stave off the project managers who learn of my efforts and unironically use the term "going rogue" to describe what I'm doing.
Am I the only person who can lead us out of the darkness? Am I the only person who's willing to even try holding our management accountable? I'm the only person who gives enough of a shit to fix the broken thing that literally everyone hates?
The thing is, I knew that the amount of work I could do in this area was limited. I knew there were structural problems that were beyond my grasp when I started. But I thought, maybe, if I make some improvements at home that my team can feel, they'll understand that this job doesn't have to suck. They'll see the value of investing a little time into making things a little better. And I'll have some allies when it comes time to make bigger, bolder, more meaningful changes.
Sounds nice. Doesn't work.
Turns out, when you do that, people's attitude defaults to "Oh, great, you're fixing it. Now I don't have to worry about it". You become The Guy Who Fixes Stuff and whenever anyone needs to improve a process, they just defer to you, because they have learned helplessness. I've had coworkers insist they couldn't possibly fix the build pipelines unless I teach them how it works, as if there was anyone who taught me. I can give them a link to some documentation that is shitty and incomplete, because that's all I had to work with. The rest can't be taught. They just have to do it. But management won't make them. Not as long as I'm around. And when I'm gone, they're fucked. I have no loyalty to them. They either don't realize this or don't care. And so, the way I see it, they will soon get what they deserve.
What people want is for things to change. What people don't want is to change their behavior. Sounds nice. Doesn't work.
The moral of the story, as I see it, is this. If you're waiting for someone like me to save you, you're fucked. Because I probably can't, and I definitely won't. So maybe you should do something about the things that piss you off instead of hoping someone else will figure it out, yeah?
Americans are supposed to be individualistic. I hear this complaint all the time. The problem, the reason we're so isolated, the reason corporations run rampant, the reason everything is falling apart, is because we're hyper-individualistic. We're letting society collapse as long as we get ours. But I'd like for someone to explain to me what is individualistic about waiting for someone else to come in and solve all your problems for you. Explain what makes it individualistic to see corporations taking over the government, and simply let it happen. Tell me how individualism means corporate leadership gets to be remarkably stupid and nobody is allowed to say a word about it. How individualistic is it to let a phone addiction dictate whether or not you spend time with your friends? Is it individualistic to refuse to vote? Since when is "hyper-individualism" synonymous with "giving up"?
If Americans were individualistic, we would have stopped tolerating the bullshit a long time ago. We're not collectivist or individualist in this country. Both of those things imply action. Americans are just... nothing. Idle observers of their own country. Someday, Americans will have to wake up and start acting in their own interests again. They'll have to remember what it's supposed to mean to be an American Individualist.
Until then, death to America.