Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

As I was preparing for my trip to New York City a little over a week ago one thing I considered was, Gosh, how long has it been since I've been to NYC? I used to travel there every month or two for work. Back then I knew things like which trains to take to/from each of the area airports to various locations such as Midtown, Downtown, and Jersey City. For the trip a week ago I had to pull up maps to double check. And the reason was because the last time I was in NYC, frequently, was... 2012.

Oh, I've been to New York a few times since 2012. Like, three times, I think. 😅 Not really a lot. And the last time I was there, in 2021, was just passing through as I flew to JFK, picked up a rental car, drove out to Westchester County, and drove back 3 days later to return the car and fly out.

Thinking about how I used to travel to New York frequently brought back memories of a pivotal moment, a time when I had a revelation while standing on a train platform.

This was even further back than 2012. It was back in 2007, I believe. Late February 2007. It was cold. I was reminded of this again when I landed in NYC eight nights ago and it was cold out— though not as cold as this memorable night 18 years ago.

I remember the night being cold because I was standing on a platform waiting for a train late the night I arrived. You don't realize how cold it is outside until you stand in it, in the open, for 10+ minutes. Not only was the air cold, but the wind was gusty. It felt like it blew right through me, stripping my warmth out from beneath my jacket.

As I stood on that train platform, in the bitter cold, I remember thinking to myself, "I'm standing here [in this sub-freezing cold] to earn money to pay the mortgage on a home where it was 72° today." I don't think I need to prompt you with, "Do you see what's wrong with this picture?"

It was a revelatory moment because the bitter cold was both literal and metaphorical. The literal meaning was obvious. The metaphor of bitter cold is was that I was working my heart out in an environment where I felt undervalued, not listened to, and poorly treated.

In that moment I decided I would insist on a better environment. No, that didn't mean "Refuse to go to New York in the winter." 😅 It meant advocating for myself at work. Though it did also mean insisting on a bit more comfort when traveling for business. For example, on last week's trip to NYC, when it was cold on Sunday night I hailed an Uber instead of waiting for buses and trains in the cold.

Yesterday I started writing about metrics. Specifically, using metrics on people in the workplace. It's become a fact of modern life that we're constantly measured in what we do at work. So much of what we do is already managed through computer software, and modern computer software makes it trivial to collect— and report— metrics. But the challenge is that while metrics are historically easy to get, they're no easier than ever before to understand. And it turns out few people in business really understand them.

One big failure of metrics in business I saw was in my sales organization several years ago. A quantity metric without a corresponding quality metric is useless.

Here's what happened: The manager of business development representatives (BDRs) hired a hot-shot BDR, "Missy". Missy was way more successful in booking meetings for field sales reps than any other BDR. Booking those meetings was the job of a BDR. And she wasn't just a little better than the rest.... She blew them out of the water. She booked three times as many meetings as the next best rep on the team, a skilled and thorough person who'd been doing it for years.

Ah, but there was a catch.

The catch was that Missy's success record was basically bullshit. The meetings she booked were low quality. Half the time the prospective customer wouldn't even show up. Half of them time when they did show up, the field team was able to disqualify them in the first 5 minutes. Missy was supposed to be asking those basic qualification questions. She wasn't. She was making ridiculous promises to anyone who said they were okay taking a meeting with us, because she got paid on scheduling the meeting. She got paid even if it was a bullshit meeting.

Missy's boss, and her boss's boss, only looked at the metric of "How many meetings were booked". They didn't even have a metric for "What's the quality of these meetings?" While my team wasted time sitting in Missy's bullshit meetings, Missy got big bonuses and won accolades. A quantity metric without a corresponding quality metric is useless.

By the way, this idea isn't novel. One of the first workplace metrics I ever encountered was typing speed. It's measured in Words Per Minute (wpm). And there's a standardized definition of a word. It's 5 characters. But you can't just type sloppily to get a higher score on typing tests, because there's a penalty for mistakes. Every mistyped character is a 2 wpm penalty. Right there: a quality metric corresponding to a quantity metric. Leaders in modernizing the workplace understood that 70+ years ago. Yet it's a surprise to most business leaders today.

Yesterday I wrote about how my upcoming two+ week vacation will be the longest vacation from work I've taken. I suppose I should put an asterisk next to that claim. I actually took 3 weeks off from work once before. The asterisk is because it technically wasn't vacation time. It was a sabbatical.

20+ years ago I worked at a big company where sabbatical was one of the benefits. Sabbatical was 6 weeks of paid time off awarded every 4 years. Having 6 weeks off was close to incomprehensible to me at the time, plus Hawk had nowhere near that amount of time off available, so I split my sabbatical into two chunks of 3 weeks each, as company policy allowed.

The first week of those 3 weeks I actually had vacation with Hawk. We traveled together and did some backpacking. Then the next 2 weeks I spent on moving house. We'd just bought a new place! I spent a week cleaning up & packing up the old place for move out, then a week unpacking & arranging in the new place. Overall it was time well spent. But what happened next wasn't good.

In the US there's a broad misgiving about taking long vacations from work. "If you're gone too long, they'll realize they don't need you," the sentiment goes. Indeed, I came back from sabbatical— half a sabbatical— just to be laid off a week or two later. Yup, I had just demonstrated that I wasn't critical path to my company! 😰😱🤯

Let's hope a mere two weeks away from work hits the sweet spot of being long enough for overseas trip but not so long my company decides my employment is no longer consequential to them.

An exchange in the comments on a recent post mentioning weather got me thinking more about how long periods of cold, gloomy weather weigh on a person's spirits. That in turn got me thinking about when such gloom has influenced a major decision. In effect, When has the weather changed your mind about something? ...And I don't mean just, "Gosh, I'm going to stop being in this bad weather." I'm talking about a decision that's a lot larger than the weather itself, but where weather played an informative role or perhaps was a tipping point.

One example that comes to mind for me is when I changed my mind about work-life balance.

Set your wayback machine for this one to 2007, Feb/March-ish. I had been working in sales, enterprise software sales, for a few years at that point. I was helping my company grow and I was traveling all over the US to do it. I was helping develop new territories in the Midwest and Northeast. So lots of trips to Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Boston— places where winter is long and crummy.

Work travel was still somewhat new to me. I mean, it was and it wasn't. I'd been doing it for almost 3 years so I'd gotten really good at it. But I was new enough at it that I was still figuring out where to set limits. In those 3 years my travel had gone from 20% to 50% to north of 70%.

At the 50% level travel was already cutting into my weeknights activities such as socializing with friends. At 70% it was killing my weekends. Even if I wasn't traveling on the weekend— and I tried to avoid Saturday/Sunday travel for work, though it wasn't always possible— traveling that much had me so tired that a lot of the time I just wanted to stay home and relax on the weekend. That hurt my biggest leisure activity, the one I share with my spouse: hiking. She was already registering her concern about it. I was concerned about it myself, too. But I hadn't yet acted to change anything.

Then a moment of epiphany arrived.

I remember I was on a train platform in New York City. I'd come in on a subway train from JFK Airport to NY Penn Station. I then walked two long blocks from the 32nd & 8th side of Penn Station to the PATH train station at 33rd & 6th, where I'd take the PATH train to New Jersey and walk one block to a hotel. Flying to JFK and transiting through NYC made more sense than flying to EWR on that trip because of price and availability for a non-stop flight. Anyway, I was on the PATH train station. It was nighttime, maybe 10pm, and it was cold. Cold and windy. The cold wind swept right along the platforms.

"Why am I doing this?" I asked myself reflexively. It's my job, of course, was the answer. I amended the question. "Why am I here, working late nights in the cold, to pay a mortgage on a house where it was pleasant and 70° today?"

Understand this was not merely, "Wah! I don't like cold weather!" I get that we all make sacrifices for work. That's the reason it's called work. The epiphany here was not simply that the conditions were tough but that they were tougher than I was getting credit for. They were tough— on me— and nobody else at my company cared. I resolved two things that night. 1) I would speak more forcefully for myself, pushing back against overly tough travel demands. 2) I would seek to find ways to have my business travel not only not wreck my life but actually help it.

As I'm flying to Detroit today I'm also traveling down Memory Lane. That's because when I started traveling regularly for work back in the mid 00s my first trip was to Detroit. (Yeah, I know, lucky me. 😂) What's changed about travel, particularly air travel, between then and now? Here are Five Things:

1) Driving to the airport. In the mid 00s I began nearly every air trip by driving to the airport— driving my own car, parking it in an airport lot or 3rd party lot nearby, and riding a shuttle to the terminal. Taking a taxi both ways was as expensive as parking for 3-4 days, and taking a taxi to the airport generally meant 30+ minutes of wasted time as the taxi dispatchers could never accurately predict when a driver would be available or how many times he would take wrong turns driving to the address. It was still several years before ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft were created. Nowadays I almost never park a car at the airport. Lyft and Uber are cheaper than parking fees, and their modern technology makes it easy and quick to get curb-to-curb service.

2) Air stairs at SJC Terminal 3. Back in the mid 00s SJC Airport was still a bit of a fossil. The original terminal, renumbered Terminal 3, was an older, ground-floor level building. It didn't have jet bridges. Boarding a jet meant walking outside across the tarmac and then ascending stairs to the aircraft's hatch. It was primitive... but also special. Who else boarded/disembarked by air stairs? The President, the Queen, the Beatles. I'd always pause at the top and imagine waving to the cameras.

3) Newspapers and magazines. Back in the mid 00s I'd try to always have a newspaper and a magazine or two to read while sitting in the terminal and aboard the aircraft. Although I had a laptop computer, airport wifi wasn't yet a thing. ...And when it did start becoming more common in airports a few years later it generally pay-per-use. Ubiquitous free wifi was still years off.

4) Jets were not full. In the mid 00s travel was still in recession in the aftermath of the Dot Com implosion and 9/11. As a flyer that meant usually the center seat in a three-across row would be empty. Through most of the teens flights went out full or pretty much full. There was another travel recession in 2020 due to Coronavirus, of course, but since last year jets have been flying full most places I go.

5) Renting a car. I almost always rented a car on business trips. Similar to item 1, taxis were not a reasonable way to get around, nor was commuter rail, except in a few major cities. And even when I traveled to major cities, it was rare that I was working or staying downtown. Most of the time I was at IT campuses out in the suburbs.

My company has been changing its security policies. We're implementing Okta integration for more and more of our internal applications. Okta is a SAML tool; see the remarkably lucid SAML explained in Plan English if you're curious to learn more.

The upside of using Okta (or another SAML tool) is that it provides common password access across disparate applications. For example, I now use Okta to authenticate once and then I have access to my Google Suite tools (email/calendar/Drive), Salesforce, Zoom, etc. without having to manage dozens of passwords and go through separate authentication challenges.

The downside is in the specifics of our policy. For one, we are using 2FA (two-factor authentication). In addition to entering a password I must use an app on my phone to get a rotating passcode. It's one of those 6-digit numbers that changes every 30 seconds. It's a nuisance to open my phone— when I'm using my company computer— open an app— I don't let it run constantly because it's a battery pig— and type the number in to my computer before it expires.

That nuisance would be minor if it were once a day. And that's problem two: it's not. Our policy is the authentication expires after 8 hours. I presume that's because that's supposed to be a workday. Who designed this, the French? The last time I had workdays of exactly 8 hours (or less) was when I worked part-time, in a restaurant, in my teens. Every professional or semi-professional job I've had spans more than 8 hours a day... if only because there's a break for lunch in the middle!

Worse, the integration is currently flaky. Many applications don't recognize the Okta session I authenticate from other apps. So I'm having to do the goddamn lookup-a-new-2FA-code thing repeatedly during the day— which was the whole fucking point NOT to do!

But even when that's smoother out there's still the 8 hour thing. Guess what I'll be doing a lot less of? Yup, checking email on nights and weekends. You want security Mr. Employer? Yup, you'll have a more secure system because I'll use it less.

Update: A mix of good news/bad news, but mostly good news:

1. The 2FA app is actually easy to use in conjunction with the login page on my computer. Okta smoothed out some UX defects that every previous app I've used for this suffered.
2. The company soon increased the 8 hour window to 10 hours. That means I rarely have to reauth during a workday.
3. The company set it so we basically never have to reauth to check email on our mobile devices. That seems like a huge security hole... though I imagine they realized the alternative was an end to virtually all after-hours work.

My 6-week odyssey with getting laid off from a job years ago culminated in The Day of Truth (previous entry). The actual moment of truth was surprisingly brief. But the... denouement... lasted the rest of the day.

Moving Out

After receiving formal notice of my termination in a morning meeting with my new boss— who both met me and fired me in the space of one short meeting!— I went back to my office to pack my things. Several of my colleagues were packing, too. A few of them had also gotten notice first thing in the morning. Of course, the funny thing was they actually knew five weeks earlier. That's the whole rub of this story: many of us on my team knew in advance. But people on other teams couldn't know we knew. We had to act outwardly like we didn't. That meant no packing up our offices ahead of time.

Packing up my office went quickly. I'd been there a short time, less than a year, so my "things" were two shelves of technical books and one box worth of personal mementos. Some of my colleagues had been there for 6-8 years, though. Their "things" were... basically their whole offices, minus the furniture and the computer. Back then people's offices looked lived in, often like college student dorm rooms but with way more expensive hardware. And a $300 nameplate next to the door.

The Aftermath

The nonchalance I'd practiced the 5 weeks leading up to that day cracked when it was finally real. I wasn't the only one. For my colleagues who'd been laid off, it was the end of an era. We loved what the company was even as we were frustrated with what it had become. But ironically the people hit hardest by the cuts were two of my colleagues who were not laid off.

• "Kelly" was a young software developer, less than a year out of undergrad. His degree wasn't a strong one so landing this job at a storied tech company was the best thing that happened to him in his life. Moreover, the team had welcomed him in (he was a hard worker) and his boss, "Bert" had spent quality time with him to map out a career growth path. Kelly was so happy. His visible excitement just coming to work every day lifted the spirits of us around him. But with the layoff his cheer became visible despair. His project was gone, his boss was gone, his career path was likely gone, and the whole company was seen as circling the drain. He was still employed but everything had just disintegrated around him.
• "Bert" was a sharp senior engineer with a few successful new product launches under his belt. He'd been newly minted as a manager— a position he actually didn't want but took as a defensive play to steer the project away from interference by his arch-nemesis, "Fabio", a goofball middle-manager at the company who'd reached lifer status. With that project canceled and more than half the department being laid off, Bert assumed he'd be dismissed, too. He wasn't. Instead he was retained and reassigned, with no management duties, reporting to Fabio. Bert was pissed. He submitted his resignation hours later.

There was actually one person laid off from our division who took it hard. It was a person who didn't see the ax coming. Fabio.

Fabio, my new boss as of 9am that morning and new ex-boss as of 9:05am, called me back to his office at 4pm. When I saw him for the second time that day his face was flushed as if he'd been struggling not to cry. Probably from having to fire people all day, I figured. But there was more. "I've just learned that I've been laid off, too," he explained.

At least there's some karmic justice in the world.

Recently I've been writing about a situation years ago when my work teammates and I slacked for 5 weeks knowing a layoff was coming. As I noted, though, not all of us knew we'd be laid off. I was one of the people for whom it could go either way.

During the weeks my team slacked waiting for the ax to fall, other teams were abuzz with speculation and worry about who'd be whacked. "Watch for where there's a big conference room booked solid all month and the windows are taped over," was a common item of rumor around the company. "If you see that in your building, it means there'll be a lot of layoffs there." 

While others were busy trying to read the tea leaves, I was in the unusual situation of being able to arrange the tea leaves... at least for myself. My department had a combination of hardware and software engineers. The hardware project was being canceled and, with it, everyone who was a hardware engineer was being laid off. Software people would likely be reassigned. I was actually a software person— but one with strong (if high level) understanding of hardware design. That left managers above the two on my team uncertain about what my skillset actually was. So they asked me.

Now, when they asked me, "Are you more hardware or software?" I knew the reality of that question was, "Should we lay you off or reassign you?" I had already considered which side of the falling ax I wanted to be on. I had been excited to join the company for the particular project and the particular team I worked on. With that project and at least half the team getting whacked the prospect of continued employment there was frankly uninspiring. I opted for getting laid off. That didn't mean I misrepresented my work, though. I explained to Management I was a software engineer but had worked exclusively on improving the hardware architecture and developing software drivers for it.

"Hmm," they collectively responded. My answer wasn't the strict is-you-is-or-is-you-ain't answer they were looking for. That meant they didn't know whether to lay me off or retain me. And it meant for all I behaved as though I were being laid off I didn't know for sure, either, until the Day of Truth.

Next: The Day of Truth....

A recent discussion elsenet about bosses who expect you to work after firing you reminded me of a situation I faced several years ago. This was sort of the reverse of that, though. Teammates and I enjoyed a semi-vacation because we knew we were getting laid off weeks before it was official.

I was working at a major company, a name brand absolutely everyone would recognize. I won't name it here. Though the company has had many successful years in its history, the time when I was there was... not the best. Our market share was dwindling as we delivered new products that were only incremental improvements in an otherwise competitive market.

We had some revolutionary products... well, revolutionary product ideas... in development but couldn't deliver them due to a combination of technical complexity and weak leadership. Weak leaders were fearful of investing the money necessary to bring them the products in development to fruition. One of those products was a game-changer that had been been promised for so long without being finished that it had become something of a joke, both internally and externally.

With market share dwindling, profits dwindling, and stock price dwindling, the company decided on a layoff. A big layoff. 30% of the workforce.

Six Weeks?

The company announced this huge layoff well in advance of the details of who would be laid off. Final determination of which employees were being whacked would take 6 weeks. At the time that delay seemed crazy to me, though as I've gained experience with the business world I've seen it's par for the course.

Standard or not, the delay was demoralizing. The impending huge layoff cast a pall over much of the company. Teams were wondering, "Are we going to be hit? How badly?"

Not my team, though. Our boss found out early in the cycle that our project was being canceled, and told us. She told us that one portion of the team would definitely be laid off and the other portion was TBD. I was in the TBD half. Either we'd get laid off, too, or reassigned to another department— under managers we thought were doofuses. 😨 So all of us took the mindset of "We're out of here in 5 weeks," and we acted accordingly.

Continued in Part 2: It was like an in-office vacation!