When I quit my first full-time employment in a start-up, after my own one, it was because I felt start-ups disguised the struggles for power under a hood of coolness and artificial problems.
I joined consulting to be outside of power structures, and tackle real problems (as real as it gets in corporations). Accenture Digital was inspiring, and t-shaped/widened my horizons - more than once. It allowed me to thrive in technology, strategy, product prototyping, Agile, design thinking and to trust liberal arts. I will always remember the learnings in those years: All the opportunities I had to meet great, diverse, truly interesting people across the globe, to learn about dozens of domains, to build digital-first, mobile-first, offline-first products, omni-chanel SPA, Microservices with vertical slices, API management and EAI, or CQRS systems. In short I am grateful to have been inspired and had the chance to inspire others.
Really building stuff around existing problems is what makes technology consulting so amazing. Seeing what you’ve built in the wild, changing the way an industry runs. Building a team around a problem, changing their perspective, and mine. Unlearning is just as important a skill as learning. We are constantly developing, iterating, behaviours, patterns and principles of good systems, including its human actors. These principles always come with a drawback, outweigh by the advantages. Microservices might manifest team separation and can lead to incoherent style in end-user product experience. Event systems enforce eventual consistency, and not every organization is ready for probabilistic thinking. Containers can degrade security (and with it privacy) to a part of commerical opt-in dependency-hell rather than reliable infrastructure; Design Thinking either glosses over faster horses or fakes ownership because agencies just rebrand; Patterns sometimes promote solutions that only look good on paper; CI, Lean and Feedback prefer simplistic, biased, measurable KPI’s over long term goals. OSS, Agile and DevOps can establish a status-quo burn-out treadmill of minor, over-hyped, pseudo-improvements, and holocracy could build a cast system; Opinionated often just means tribal or elitist (for lack of a better word); competing API, AI and Cloud standards with unexplainable, magic automation and integration can cement vendor lock-in; Cross-vendor services are still not solved, maybe due to academic REST and DDD being inherently anti-evolution with their focus on a Xanadu-ideal, fixed state. And simplicity does never illustrate success, while complexity does. Not everyone wants to hear those drawbacks, and few openly make the tradeoffs. Most want to hear the innovative, the disruptive, which sometimes simply excludes the best option for the largest group.
Really building stuff around existing problems is what makes technology consulting so amazing. Seeing what you’ve built in the wild, changing the way an industry runs. Building a team around a problem, changing their perspective, and mine. Unlearning is just as important a skill as learning. We are constantly developing, iterating, behaviours, patterns and principles of good systems, including its human actors. These principles always come with a drawback, outweigh by the advantages. Microservices might manifest team separation and can lead to incoherent style in end-user product experience. Event systems enforce eventual consistency, and not every organization is ready for probabilistic thinking. Containers can degrade security (and with it privacy) to a part of commerical opt-in dependency-hell rather than reliable infrastructure; Design Thinking either glosses over faster horses or fakes ownership because agencies just rebrand; Patterns sometimes promote solutions that only look good on paper; CI, Lean and Feedback prefer simplistic, biased, measurable KPI’s over long term goals. OSS, Agile and DevOps can establish a status-quo burn-out treadmill of minor, over-hyped, pseudo-improvements, and holocracy could build a cast system; Opinionated often just means tribal or elitist (for lack of a better word); competing API, AI and Cloud standards with unexplainable, magic automation and integration can cement vendor lock-in; Cross-vendor services are still not solved, maybe due to academic REST and DDD being inherently anti-evolution with their focus on a Xanadu-ideal, fixed state. And simplicity does never illustrate success, while complexity does. Not everyone wants to hear those drawbacks, and few openly make the tradeoffs. Most want to hear the innovative, the disruptive, which sometimes simply excludes the best option for the largest group.
In addition, the problem with the typical project organization is that it takes a lot of effort to not disguise debt with another layer but actually change the underlying problem (a post on this is coming up). I always enjoyed this challenge, and I had the pleasure of being on many projects which achieved this, and turned into real, strong products. But kickstarting this "digital transformation" every so often started to nag on my belief in actual progress.
An unfortunate side effect of the project and OSS “publishing” treadmill seems communal wisdom is often discouraged in favour of new marketing slang. Or, like Maciej puts it:
"This is not the first time an enthusiastic group of nerds has decided to treat the rest of the world as a science experiment. Earlier attempts to create a rationalist Utopia failed for interesting reasons, and since we bought those lessons at a great price, it would be a shame not to learn them"
Sometimes it feels through lean and measurability the Peter Principle and pop-culture power struggles in the form of Deutungshoheit have eventually arrived in what used to be an idealistic geek world of IT, pushing practitioners from actual consulting into meta- and consult-speak. If software indeed eats the world, it seems to prefer junk food. To avoid this trap I took a step back on conference talks and wrote an obscure book. But I am interested in historical patterns, across disciplines, which is hard to communicate. The nagging feeling stayed.
So I decided it’s time to move away from a project into a product organization. I wanted to feel out of my comfort zone again, but still contribute to technology. A few of my considerations which company to join, in no specific order, were:
- It should be first class in building delightful products with end-user impact, where good design is a strategic asset. Not just gadgets. I see technology simply as a tool to materialize curiosity.
- Many traditional enterprises consider themselves digital companies now and like to use “disruptive” technologies, but I haven’t seen many who actually care. Mostly it's a hedging strategy. I want to work in a real digital enterprise, maybe on intelligent and intuitive products (e.g. what I often miss in AI and technology as a whole is the capacity to trace the intent “why did you do that”?)
- It should be first class in technology. I am more of an operational excellence person, so I don't care if it's boring technology, as long as there is a clear rationale and it makes a real impact. In short: An engineering mindset.
- It should see information and technology as a narrative. Over the years I’ve got more and more interested in systems of systems, the polytechnic, involving people, and believe the role of an Architect is to enable strategic, uncertain, but fair, critique and decisions within the team.
- It should have a strong and clear vision, not only building products but aligning those products to a long term goal. However, I would prefer that goal to be ethical, not to wipe out the middle class, centralize means of production and distribution, or make everyone dumber (Note: This was written before the US election, there would be much more to say on this in hindsight).
- While I believe my strength is to be a good tech lead and manager, and I enjoy building teams, I’d prefer less hierarchical organization (ever wondered that squad is a military term?), rather a swarm - what I liked about consulting. I’d prefer a strongly influencing, not necessarily managing position and a slightly slower, maybe even less visionary, but more humane company.
- It should be global, distributed and diverse. Living in many places, working with people from all kinds of backgrounds has enriched my life more than anything else. I have enough startup experience to not believe fast-moving (hierarchical) unicorns necessarily make better corporate citizens. Hence I prefer truly multinational, larger organizations. I like foxes, not hedgehogs.
- And finally, for now I want to stay in Asia, with its multiplicity an ideal model for the ever more complex and uncertain systems in his world, the opposite of the power structures I encountered in the past. Someday I might want to leave corporate world, and work on the grass roots. Asia is the best place to keep this door open.
Google’s 10 things always resonated with me. They maintain a hive-mind culture based on research while at least sometimes trying to improve the world (yes, I know Silicon Valley). I am continuously impressed which brilliant people work there, and the degree of freedom they have. Let’s see if I can meet a few and learn.
