Busy Day 1 at SKO. Half-Shrugging it Off.
Feb. 10th, 2026 08:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerSan Diego SKO travelog #2
Intercontinental Hotel · Mon, 9 Feb 2026. 10:30pm.
It's been a busy Day 1 here in San Diego. After my mid-morning flight landed I hot-footed it to Encinitas, in north San Diego County, to met colleagues and a customer for lunch. Then, after a good lunch meeting we colleagues hot-footed it back to downtown San Diego for our afternoon training sessions.
The drive out to Encinitas (I took Lyft) reminded me of another ride I'd taken from SAN airport to Encinitas. That was a few years ago when Hawk and I traveled 500 miles (each way!) to buy a car. The dealership was in Encinitas, near where I met folks for lunch today. That dealership has since moved up the road to Carlsbad, so not 100% a trip along memory lane today.
Back in San Diego I skipped hotel check-in and went straight to a meeting room, as the introductory session had already started. It seemed like that was the CRO spending 30 minutes talking through the agenda, shown in outline form on a screen, so I probably didn't miss much by arriving 22 minutes late. One of his main messages anyway was assuring us SEs that they're going to hire us a new manager soon. Yay, a new manager. I've been here 8.5 years and you expect me to be happy that you're working to hire an outsider to tell me how to do my job? Plus, it's not even 3 weeks after they fired the last outsider they hired to manage us. And he was actually a great manager, IMO. They didn't even wait two weeks after pretending to "eliminate his position" to let the CRO hire in someone he likes. And who is likely in the EU, where the CRO is. ...Where, of course, they couldn't have pulled this stunt on an EU employee (calling his position a redundancy, terminating him with almost no severance, then almost immediately rehiring) because the EU has real labor rights. Fuck these smug, self-serving clowns.
Following that we spent 3.5 hours doing some deeper-dive training on a few topics of interest to us technical folks in sales. (The sales team was split into two tracks yesterday, SEs in one and AEs in the other.) It was less organized than I would have preferred; one of the key presenters was basically winging it. But it was open and addressed our questions.
There's a saying, "In order to learn, you must first realize you do not know." By that rubric I am ready to learn, because there were several moments today in training when I realized that for how much I do know about our products and the space they fit into, there are also lots of things I don't know. Yet. It's going to be an uphill learning process as we've moving in to different technologies than I've used in the past in my career, particularly modern AI.
But at the same time my anxiousness about having so much to learn was tempered by the knowledge I'm a short-timer. If I really am leaving in... *checks date*... less than four weeks and tendering my resignation at the end of next week, none of this is actually relevant to me. And if I do stay on a few more months, I don't have to go deep into the new material to have a reasonable glide path out. It's better than these smug, self-serving clowns deserve. ...But I wouldn't be doing it for the execs, who are the clowns. I'd be doing it for my honest, hard-working coworkers.
Speaking of coworkers, it was a good, low-key reception with colleagues at the reception this evening. Thankfully they didn't want to "talk shop" too much because my heart is only half in it. They want my strategy on a six-month long campaign to sell a complex product? Sure, I'm happy to talk, but I don't expect to be here for six months to actually deliver on it.
And speaking of departures, late in the evening I checked with one of my colleagues about why another colleague, "Sam", wasn't there. Did she have flight trouble? I asked. Health trouble? Nope, it turns out she quit just recently. She's going to our most direct competitor. That's a double loss to us because she was smart, creative, and a very hard worker. But it also helped validate for me my decision to leave. And it made me wonder if soon enough of us will have left this team that the whole sales organization will fall apart... or at least be in a shambles for 6 months, struggling to rebuild. While I feel bad for my IC colleagues who'll be struggling... Fuck these smug, self-serving management clowns.
Intercontinental Hotel · Mon, 9 Feb 2026. 10:30pm.
It's been a busy Day 1 here in San Diego. After my mid-morning flight landed I hot-footed it to Encinitas, in north San Diego County, to met colleagues and a customer for lunch. Then, after a good lunch meeting we colleagues hot-footed it back to downtown San Diego for our afternoon training sessions.
The drive out to Encinitas (I took Lyft) reminded me of another ride I'd taken from SAN airport to Encinitas. That was a few years ago when Hawk and I traveled 500 miles (each way!) to buy a car. The dealership was in Encinitas, near where I met folks for lunch today. That dealership has since moved up the road to Carlsbad, so not 100% a trip along memory lane today.
Back in San Diego I skipped hotel check-in and went straight to a meeting room, as the introductory session had already started. It seemed like that was the CRO spending 30 minutes talking through the agenda, shown in outline form on a screen, so I probably didn't miss much by arriving 22 minutes late. One of his main messages anyway was assuring us SEs that they're going to hire us a new manager soon. Yay, a new manager. I've been here 8.5 years and you expect me to be happy that you're working to hire an outsider to tell me how to do my job? Plus, it's not even 3 weeks after they fired the last outsider they hired to manage us. And he was actually a great manager, IMO. They didn't even wait two weeks after pretending to "eliminate his position" to let the CRO hire in someone he likes. And who is likely in the EU, where the CRO is. ...Where, of course, they couldn't have pulled this stunt on an EU employee (calling his position a redundancy, terminating him with almost no severance, then almost immediately rehiring) because the EU has real labor rights. Fuck these smug, self-serving clowns.
Following that we spent 3.5 hours doing some deeper-dive training on a few topics of interest to us technical folks in sales. (The sales team was split into two tracks yesterday, SEs in one and AEs in the other.) It was less organized than I would have preferred; one of the key presenters was basically winging it. But it was open and addressed our questions.
There's a saying, "In order to learn, you must first realize you do not know." By that rubric I am ready to learn, because there were several moments today in training when I realized that for how much I do know about our products and the space they fit into, there are also lots of things I don't know. Yet. It's going to be an uphill learning process as we've moving in to different technologies than I've used in the past in my career, particularly modern AI.
But at the same time my anxiousness about having so much to learn was tempered by the knowledge I'm a short-timer. If I really am leaving in... *checks date*... less than four weeks and tendering my resignation at the end of next week, none of this is actually relevant to me. And if I do stay on a few more months, I don't have to go deep into the new material to have a reasonable glide path out. It's better than these smug, self-serving clowns deserve. ...But I wouldn't be doing it for the execs, who are the clowns. I'd be doing it for my honest, hard-working coworkers.
Speaking of coworkers, it was a good, low-key reception with colleagues at the reception this evening. Thankfully they didn't want to "talk shop" too much because my heart is only half in it. They want my strategy on a six-month long campaign to sell a complex product? Sure, I'm happy to talk, but I don't expect to be here for six months to actually deliver on it.
And speaking of departures, late in the evening I checked with one of my colleagues about why another colleague, "Sam", wasn't there. Did she have flight trouble? I asked. Health trouble? Nope, it turns out she quit just recently. She's going to our most direct competitor. That's a double loss to us because she was smart, creative, and a very hard worker. But it also helped validate for me my decision to leave. And it made me wonder if soon enough of us will have left this team that the whole sales organization will fall apart... or at least be in a shambles for 6 months, struggling to rebuild. While I feel bad for my IC colleagues who'll be struggling... Fuck these smug, self-serving management clowns.
