Letter to my future self 2022 edition

Reading my earlier “letter to my future self” from 2016 is interesting, because it still holds true, irrespective of how the pandemic changed the workplace: I wanted to work on delightful products with end-user impact, intelligent and intuitive products with a strong and clear vision. First class in technology, with information and technology as a “narrative”, meaning culture, and with a strong focus on operational excellence. Back then the SRE book had just not been released so it was hard to explain to classic “architects” what my role would be, yet I was keen to learn how to run things at scale. I wanted to be part of a global, distributed and diverse organization, a “swarm” with a focus on Asia, what I liked about consulting, not a manager.

All of that, and more, came true and I am grateful to Google for giving me this opportunity. I learned more about product development and excellence, customer empathy, tech leadership, reliability and eventually SRE than I ever expected - from the most brilliant and humble people I ever met. I was lucky to work on one the largest scalable, concurrent and low latency systems in the industry, diving deep into (data) observability and machine learning. Helping migrate some of them to Spanner I built up experience to help launch Cloud Spanner in Asia, and with that move from product technology management to strategic cloud engineering. I was again lucky to help integrate and migrate real-time streaming systems and data warehouses, and improve products like BigQuery, Dataflow / Beam and Kubernetes / Cloud Run. The only thing I couldn’t avoid was becoming a tech lead manager again - but I love building up teams and so I focused a lot on creating coaching, scaling (security and scoping), hiring, onboarding and culture programs, with a special focus on inclusion of diverse backgrounds and community and student outreach to make tech legible.

But much of tech is turning to a state of feudal subscription-ication - yet worse every company is a tech company, and every tech company a fintech company. Apple probably being the best example of become a platform and eventually a bank by forcing users with iron fist over their and their families “private” data into subscriptions, and reduced interoperability across services. Other examples of this are Amazon also becoming a bank for instance with empty order emails, or generally restricted access to books and scientific papers only to per-publisher subscription, iPhone’s and Google Drive’s intransparent and broken file sync, headphones that automatically open Apple Music or the general unavailability of non-blockbuster movies, music and podcasts unless you subscribe to “plus” streaming services. Having said that, this reliance on lock-in subscriptions is only a side effect of the positive trend of easier direct payments and sponsoring, of the democratization of platforms. But the lock-in side is a slippery slope to censorship or worse, given many services also reserve the right to remove or forward data without appeal. 10 years after the financial crisis some of tech turned into a gold rush machine, partially because governments and media learned to use it to their advantage (reference) - and push the subscription = privacy fallacy in an attempt to preserve failing business models and power structures, against democratization. 

Mirroring the consumer market and the trend to become banks (after all SaaS negative churn aka "ramp" is the same as modelling a fixed income structured product), many cloud providers (except e.g. Cloudflare) are entering a new phase of “moving up the value chain”: Specific, packaged industry solutions and digital transformation (“marketing slang” as I called it in my old post, but also in the transformation to subscription sense) are the new spearheads, not technology, or technological products and platforms. The platforms are not enablers anymore but outsourcers - and to turn this around quickly hire and acquire outsourcers. Enabling or disrupting technology is often left to the new, fast, product startups, especially in the data and collaboration space. Each cloud provider still has their traditional strength, like developer and user integration, ease of use, hybrid scalability, security, data analytics, regional resiliency or legacy integration through flexibility and versatility in paradigms - but the overlap has become so large that enterprise SaaS deals are decided on a strategic level and lock-in is considered a feature of shared fate and long customer lifetime value. Not even security, trust, cost or reliability incidents can break those long-term financial, often business strategy, ties.

Yet despite all the FinOps, procurement departments, especially the ones of the failed business models from above, still don't know how to play this smartly - which leads to large, fixed deals. Like a virus those reduce the agile and experimental culture of the affected tech firms and introduce a zero-sum-game mindset. And with larger deals larger teams have to be constantly fed. Some providers start taking shortcuts, others in the market place consider to follow pace, away from technological progress. Almost 6 years ago that’s why I left Accenture Digital, who were early, innovative and still strong in this market. Now I decided to leave Google for the same reason, to once again move back from manager to “swarm” and from strategy to product and technology with a clear user focus vision and narrative.


So, nothing changed - really. Well, the pandemic did its part and so I became more interested in real, multi-national remote work, meaning a culture around strong operating principles that fosters global collaboration around a basket of enabling products, not only platforms, and has a non-zero-sum mindset. That takes Asia seriously, doesn't have a California-centered image of the world and doesn't only have the best opportunities in select physical locations. It so happens that Stripe was long on my radar for that.

 

I like the spirit of making an inherently messy and complex world legible and democratized. In particular real user focus, and a writing culture specifically without that marketing slang but instead rigorous, long-term thinking. Incidentally, I actually worked on quite a few payment systems before, from FX to mobile terminals. If the world and tech already changes to payments and subscriptions, at least I can try to make them better, more democratized and more open for everyone. I also want them less invasive (No, I don’t want to set up a PayPal account dear dark pattern, and why does Apple share my Apple e-mail with merchants on Pay?), more interoperable and resilient, but most importantly inclusive of people with less money than tech elites, and people outside the US, especially Asia. This user focus combined with strong developer architecture is what I find interesting. I am happy to admit that I bought almost all issues of Increment and almost all Stripe press books anyways before.

Joining Stripe Singapore as an integration engineer I’d be delighted to make this role more visible and publish more on it - who knows, maybe it’s the next SRE?

Note: As I am starting a new job I will publish 2 backdated articles (first one here and second one here) in a rough state so I don't get too biased / informed by my new role.