Stage 4 Buttstuff

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a year ago · Adam Yuret

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This past year has been crazy hectic with a very contentious divorce, trying to keep my kids engaged in healthy activities so my writing has fallen off a cliff. I want to do more writing but thought maybe it’s a good idea to experiment with short form video content. Tik Tok seems more informal and I feel less pressured to create a studio and incur overhead so this is my first attempt. Let me know what you think!

(one announcement reads like a partnership, the other like an acquisition)

Lots of people are reacting to the Agile Alliance “Strategic Partnership” with the Project Management Institute (PMI), especially resurrecting the old “Agile is dead!” tropes.

A lot of people draw a false dichotomy between “Agile” and traditional “Project Management,” and the PMI is the favored boogieman of agilists the world over as the monolithic certifying body of PMP-carrying project managers.

The fact of that matter is that no agile framework or methodology ever completely displaced traditional project management. In actuality, the exact opposite has been happening for the last decade.

Look no further than the recent spates of mass layoffs. Companies like Capital One and Starbucks have been yeeting agile coaches and scrum masters for at least 8 years. When I worked at the hereditary oligarchy of Nordstrom, you weren’t permitted to say “The A Word” anywhere in the HQ after a typical an predictably failed effort to SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework for the (e)nterprise) the org there.

None of these organizations ever came close to achieving even a semblance of agility, not due to the many flaws of the frameworks or approaches but to the recalcitrant leadership, which demands mutually exclusive maximum governance and maximum speed. Of course, they require this with minimal accountability for executive leadership.

This is really where the PMI/PMPs shine. When you want maximum governance but wish to minimize leadership accountability, you build what’s called a ‘PMO’ or “Project Management Orifice” where an army of certified PMPs run around frantically trying to make people go faster and hit deadlines. They are the people who inject the scope for the unaccountable leaders.

They become the bottleneck of all decision-making as they yank people hither and yon, allocation them like “resources” ensuring that 15% of engineer Catherine is working on Projects A, D, F and R while her other 85% is shared across 19 absolution mission-critical initiatives. The Project Manager goes and tells people when the project has been scuttled and replaced by 9 other projects. They also absorb the blame when things predictably go wrong.

While these organizations I mentioned are throwing away all the people trying to strive for greater clarity (which comes dangerously close to looking like accountability for leadership) they’re doubling down on their PMOs. Project Manager roles ballooning as the cross-functional efficiency agilists hit the bricks.

Power is the one thing we’re never allowed to address in these efforts. Power has gravity, and it sucks everything into itself. In this “strategic partnership,” the Agile Alliance is not the black hole. Their acquisition allows the PMI to continue their branding efforts and be the source of all project management, Agile or otherwise.

It’s a smart move for the PMI and a survival move for the Agile Alliance. Like the great corporate consolidations we’re seeing, it’s a logical next step. When someone says “agile,” they can say, “Yeah, I’m agile; I have my PMP!”

Ultimately though, like Agile itself, this sucking in of the alliance isn’t going to have any meaningful impact on the world of work. Like all the agile initiatives that wound up being window-dressing on the battalions of project managers who are now relabeled “Agile Project Managers,” it’ll simply lend the veneer of change to the immovable status quo.

A decision by the National Labor Relations Board on Wednesday said Schultz’s statement was an unlawful, coercive threat.”

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/03/business/howard-schultz-starbucks-labor-law/index.html

This kind of tone-deaf nonsense pervades the psychopaths running retail enterprises.

When the fashion retail hereditary oligarchs selected the Travelweb CTO to turn the technology organization around, he started by hiring all his favorite inexperienced junior directors from Travelweb and creating VP-level roles for them.

He created new VP roles and vacated existing VP roles through convenient resignations to “spend time with family.” When a VP or higher announces they’re “taking time to be with family,” this means they were fired.

We must never allow the ruling class to experience the shame and judgment they subject labor to without a second thought by firing them. We must always protect the shareholders, the oligarchs, and the board by never admitting that they made a bad hire at the executive level. After all, we know they’re in charge because they’re so bright and have so much merit.

He passed over many highly qualified, long-tenured, and capable in-house professionals to hire mostly men with no experience in retail or the executive-level roles he was unilaterally bequeathing them. When a director approached him and mistook his “open door policy” for an actual open door policy and told him many people were feeling like nepotism and cronyism were impacting them unfairly, he reportedly responded with, “I’ll hire whoever the fuck I want.”

Whoops, I guess we better close that door then.

This new CTO loved doing his all-hands meetings on video. This was way before Covid, so it was unorthodox. He liked to be seated at a large desk or table and be broadcast across the company. These meetings were reminiscent of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’ long, meandering state-televised bloviations.

More like this tho

“MORBO HATES BEING CHALLENGED BY THE LABORERS HE ABUSES!”

One of the corporate platitudes put forth as “values” was “Here to win,” which is as meaningless a platitude as any others on the list.

During one particular all-hands bloviation on gender pay equity issues within the technology organization, he presented with the female chief human resources officer.

She did the masterful job of an obsequious HR professional protecting and defending the oligarchs. She addressed some of the valid problematic, contentious concerns raised by employees by rigorously reframing and defending this abusive buffoon.

She was explaining how much he cares about gender pay equity and how committed he was to transparency and fairness when he interrupted her mid-sentence.

He.

Interrupted.

Her.

Midsentence.

In a meeting about gender pay equity.

A meeting triggered by the nepotistic, unfair, and male-biased hiring and promotion practices of his new administration.

To say what, you ask?

What inspiring words did he have to offer the women being underpaid and abused by his leadership practices?

”If you don’t believe you can be winners here, don’t be here.”

People asked me if I thought he meant women should not be there. I could only honestly answer that, given the topic of the meeting was “gender pay equity” and given that he chose to interrupt the female chief of HR to make that statement, it stands to reason that must be what he meant. At a very minimum, he was not concerned about how context would color his statement.

One would think someone with authority over 2500 or so technologists at a multi-billion dollar enterprise would have even a tiny clue how to speak to humans or how to avoid looking like an absolute garbage person. especially given the ubiquitous hiring and retention problems the organization had in light of its abysmal reputation in local tech circles.

These people at the top of the corporate enterprise wield massive, largely unchecked power over labor. They do so very often with total impunity.

HR knew this man was a disaster, but given the high turnover rate in the CTO position, it was more important to “make it work” for the sake of the stock price and saving face for the grandchildren of the founders who happened to have the most merit and ran the company.

When the game is rigged, what “here to win” actually means is “don’t complain about the abuses you’re suffering at the hands of psychopathic oligarchs.” just shut up and do what you’re told. Ladies, this goes for you, especially.

Juneteenth is the day we celebrate the emancipation of legally enslaved people in the United States.

People who criticize my recommendations for worker cooperatives and corporate structures where the labor force makes strategic and distributive decisions democratically like to say how terrible communism is and how unregulated capitalism magically creates fairness and equity.

Many seem unwilling to acknowledge that the enslavement of millions of people in the United States was legal and intentional under ungoverned capitalism.

In fact, when the 13th Amendment was ratified, an exception was included.

https://www.naacpldf.org/13th-amendment-emancipation/

That amendment leaves an exception that criminals can be enslaved. Unsurprisingly, former slaves started being arrested for various trumped-up crimes and then sold to their former plantations by the justice system, often for a nice profit. Even today, African Americans are overrepresented in prisons.

There’s an excellent documentary on the subject that would make educational Juneteenth viewing.

So, leaving aside that the total abolition of slavery wasn’t codified into law and that there’s an exception for “criminals,” we need to reckon with the fact that while slavery existed before capitalism, capitalism happily embraced it as a desirable and legal means of procuring labor.

It’s time we had a more nuanced conversation beyond “everything, but laissez-faire capitalism is authoritarian gulags!” there are many alternatives, such as worker-owned cooperatives.

We need to recognize that the purpose of capital markets is to serve the society in which they operate. Any measure of the “economy” that doesn’t prioritize the well-being of all the people is a bullshit measure.

I don’t want to hear about “productivity” numbers unless they include the number of people in those systems who are living in poverty, have food insecurity, and lack healthcare.

Today, take some time to reckon with the legacy of our country’s shameful past. Ask yourself how those systems continue to harm people and what you can do to improve this country today.

I leave you with an economics professor’s quite humorous and succinct take on socialism.

Leaving aside that the methodologies for these comparisons are dubious, at best, the fact is nobody’s measuring anything that matters. There’s plenty of bullshit about operational outputs (i.e., on-time, on budget, delivery of some garbage), but, as is always the case with even the agiles, outcomes for both business and customers are entirely overlooked.

The problem with the Agile Manifesto

Let’s go over the Agile manifesto quatrain, which, on its surface, is hard to argue.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools:

Following rules (processes) or subordinating your system to using a specific toolset in software development for the sake of doing so itself is foolish. Processes and tools that aid in the interactions of individuals to make better customer and business decisions are great.

Working software over comprehensive documentation:

If our product is software, and that’s all these 17 men were discussing, software, then wasting time manufacturing documentation isn’t useful. Documenting within the code, such as writing code that’s self-documenting and explains its purpose, is great. Documentation of a software system that’s not yet been built is usually an exercise in futility as the specification is outdated the minute an engineer figures out something has to be done in a manner different from what’s been documented, and seldom do those changes end up being retroactively updated in any static document.

Customer Collaboration over contract negotiation:

Talking to your customers as you solve their problems and discover hurdles and opportunities in how you can or should solve them is far more useful than translating a customer’s half-baked idea into a contract with every possible caveat and risk highlighted. Contracts suffer similarly to how documentation goes wrong.

Responding to change over following a plan:

Did Von Moltke mean, “Planning is all bad, and you should never do it?” of course, he didn’t. But many agilists mistake the part of the quatrain to mean all planning is bad. See the #NoEstimates yahoos with their “It is in doing the work that we discover the work to be done” silliness. Planning is valuable, but sticking to a plan once reality has set in is foolish. I’ve always taught that’s what this means, and it’s been most unpopular with PMO executives.

Agile is just the latest in an unending series of well-intentioned process improvement approaches to collide with stage 4 metastatic capitalism.

At its core, Scrum is about creating strong, collaborative, self-organizing teams, reducing batch size to manage risk, and communicating directly with customers while visualizing work.

At its core, Kanban is just visualizing work while managing flow through limiting work in progress.

Both systems require empowering the people closest to the work and the customer, just as Lean, Total Quality Management, and other process improvement approaches from the last century have tried.

Ultimately, these approaches want people to pay attention and to stop allowing incoherent, politically motivated psychopathic executives to remove agency and purpose from the people ostensibly being paid to do the good work the organization claims to have hired them to do.

Why doesn’t any of it work then?

It’s easy to point at consultancies and blame them because they seem to come in and do all the worst things. Twisting the well-meaning intentions of these approaches into something more palatable to the ruling executives and less compatible with the values originally espoused. However, those consultancies are a symptom of the larger problem of authoritarian rule. More cooperatively structured companies would be somewhat less compatible with individual autocrats gathering power and making decisions for everyone.

It ultimately comes down to authority, power, and control.

Let’s look at the righthand column of this manifesto and why it’s so hard to escape.

Processes and Tools:

Individuals and interactions are harder to command than processes and tools are, and most of the wasteful processes and tools that are so popular and harmful are attempts to automate the reporting and, therefore, centralize control of those individuals and their interactions. Can anybody say “You didn’t log every hour in Jira?!” I knew we could.

Comprehensive Documentation:

“Comprehensive documentation” generally means' a bunch of garbage nobody’s ever going to read that’s wrong the day it was written,’ but it also means a degree of performative control for the PMO and, by extension, the leaders. We can at least pretend to have been tracking or reading these specifications, and if something doesn’t work later, we can use the documentation as a cudgel against teams.

Also, nobody, even the manifesto, can seem to define what the shit “Working Software” actually means. So on the flipside of the coin you get development-focused leaders saying “We don’t need to know what the business wants, we’ll just crap out a lot of code behind feature flags and then tell you what our unbridled brilliance hath wrought!”

Contract negotiation:

It is much easier to control because allowing engineers to actually speak to a customer cuts out the middle. Again, it’s entirely about control.

Every time I meet someone who loves Extreme Programming (XP) and tells me how amazing it was to do it somewhere, I always ask how they did the part where the customer is actively involved in the development process, and the answer is always, “Oh, we didn’t do that part.”

Except for the one hilarious executive (who did not support XP practices in his organization) who had some weird tick: Every time anyone said “XP” within his earshot, he’d inexplicably tell everyone, “I love XP. I even paired with Richard Stallman one time.”

Following a plan:

Obviously, the main reason you’d not want to follow a plan is when it’s failed to survive its first encounter with the enemy’s main force. Still, suppose you’re a psychopathic WW1 aristocrat commanding battalions of colonists in the trenches. In that case, you demand they follow the plan and go over the top no matter how many are mowed down.

Agile hasn’t failed; it was dead on arrival, just like Lean and other well-meaning processes that came before it.

I remember John Shook, president of the Lean Enterprise Institute and a really great guy whom I respect immensely, giving an amazing talk at a conference in New Jersey, where I also spoke. He told the story of bringing the Toyota Production System back from Japan and helping NUMMI adopt its practices. He explained how they’d been massively successful in a short period of time. I’ll never forget how he ended that talk.

”We were sure this would be everywhere in no time….and we’re still trying.”

Lean has fallen victim to the same problems. These days, you cannot even say the word “Lean” without someone adding a “Six Sigma” to the end. And few things are less aligned with actual lean principles than the dogmatic control framework that is Six Sigma.

The problem isn’t that we don’t know how to do work or even knowledge work well. Plenty of proven effective theories have been put into practice with great success. The problem is corporations, especially large ones, become authoritarian organisms entirely driven to enrich the few executives at the top. Everything else becomes, at best, secondary.

Until organizations change their structure and become more egalitarian, all frameworks that encourage transparency, autonomy, and coherence will fail in those organizations. This is also why the unnamed alternative process being implied in these ridiculous “agile failed 258% more than <amorphous thing we didn’t even bother to make up>” articles also doesn’t “succeed” a lot of enterprise success is luck.

Product-market fit, investment capital, right place, and right time contribute far more meaningfully than any process framework. As such, enterprises who’ve enjoyed all that great luck are often run by performative psychopaths who come in, pretend to change a bunch of stuff, and then leave with millions in compensation protected from any scrutiny whatsoever. The toxicity of stock market speculation protects many of these execs because boards of directors can never admit they made a bad call at the C-level lest confidence wanes and overinflated stock values plummet.

I’m not saying Agile helped or harmed these enterprises; I’m saying it doesn’t matter all that much. I’m not interested in hearing nonsense about “failed” projects until we define what a successful one even means.

Anyway, my .02c on this ridiculous recurring “Agile fails all the time” nonsense.

The Problem

We cannot discuss the problem of layoffs without addressing the underlying issue of the power disparity between capital and labor.

There are some prevalent myths about the way employer/employee relationships function. I can only speak to these myths as they pertain to the local governance structures in which I operate: Oregon and Washington state. Both of these are “at-will” employment states.

At-will employment means either party can terminate the employment contract at will and without cause.

An employee can quit without notice or giving cause, and an employer can terminate an employee's employment at will and without cause.

Given that there are generally more people seeking employment than there are employers seeking employees, this alone creates an imbalance of power.

The disparity is even greater when employers don’t lose their income and health insurance when an employee quits.

Many people believe there’s such a thing as “wrongful termination” and that organizations are legally obligated to implement progressive disciplinary action or at least create a paper trail to justify the termination of an “underperforming” employee and prove there was no illegal or unfair bias, but none of that is true.

When I was fired, quite angrily, by the petty, little, inept tyrant VP of Supply Chain Technology “without cause” at the Seattle-based fashion retail hereditary oligarchy, I’d never even been given a verbal reprimand, much less any email paper trail or performance-improvement plan. Upon researching my options, I found that no such protections exist; there aren’t even civil penalties for companies that decide to fire you on a whim “without cause” because we’re in an at-will employment state.

In fact, one time, when I mentioned collective bargaining causing compensation to be federally protected speech, my director casually said, “Oh? I didn’t know that. Anyway, they just won’t say that’s why they’re firing you.”

At-will employment isn’t. (“That’s a nice family you’ve got there, be a shame if something happened to them.”)

Without social safety nets, there’s no such thing as voluntary employment. Can I quit my job anytime I want? Sure, I can. What happens to me if I do that?

• I lose my income.

• I lose my health insurance.

• I become less valuable in the marketplace as nobody wants to hire unemployed people.

• I am presumed to be of lower moral character or at least of lower labor value. (which is the same thing in our culture).

• I begin to erode my savings/retirement and am in grave danger of total financial or even physical ruin if I or one of my children become very ill.

These all amount to a gun to the head of every worker in Washington state.

Without a right to not work, all work is compulsory.

How can we reign in these out-of-control executives?

Before going down my list, I want to say that we must end at-will employment laws. While employers can fire anyone they want without cause, none of our meager labor protections exist. Will they make up some BS to justify firing people they don’t like? Sure, they will, but if we have laws protecting employees, those made-up cases will amount to fraud, and there will be resources for victims when a company commits fraud.

A policy platform for labor rights

I propose the following governing constraints on employers:

1. Cost-cutting initiatives that impact workers must coincide with a provable case in which profits are down, and costs represent an existential threat to the organization.

2. Cost-cutting initiatives must impact top senior executive staff before lower and mid-level employees and disproportionately more than they affect lower and mid-level employees.

3. Layoffs must only be performed in times of provable need. If you do a layoff, you lose all your bonuses, dividends, and stock buybacks for 3 years. This includes golden parachutes. If you quit during that three-year period, there are no parting bonuses as you’re locked out due to having performed the layoff.

4. Executive performance in public corporations must be measured and made public. The stock market is a farce that’s easily manipulated, so executive performance measures must be meaningful operational, customer-value, and employee-retention-oriented ones. No “The stock went up, so good job, Edmond” nonsense.

Societal measures for establishing a beneficial “right not to work.”

1. Universal Healthcare (Should not be controversial and should be self-explanatory. Don’t @ me; I’m not interested in hearing why you think my children deserve to be broke because their father’s cancer made him briefly less profitable to Unify Consulting Inc.)

2. Universal Basic Income. Yes, controversial but every experiment in UBI showed a societal benefit and no loss of productivity. The fact is that productivity has grown massively in the last 50 years, but we’re working harder and longer hours than ever with fewer rights and a smaller percentage of our own marginal product than ever. Keynes said this would happen but would result in people working fewer hours, but he didn’t foresee the rise of the American billionaire. We currently have a record number of these.

3. Universal Basic Job. Our underfunded local, state, and federal government has many jobs in every imaginable field that it struggles to fund and staff. If I could decide not to work for some inept tech-bro douche who’d just been handed the keys to a large supply chain tech org by his bros despite having no expertise and the maturity of a petulant toddler and go do some good for my state or country applying my expertise for a thriving wage, I’d have left instantly.

4. No more liability protections for privately owned corporations. If you want the “meritocracy” you’re so confident you’ve earned, stop hiding behind the government you don’t want regulating you when you destroy the environment, defraud investors, or abuse your employees. You wanna be "free,” then when you do harm, you lose your personal wealth. If you want corporate liability protections, become a worker-owned and governed co-operative. Employees will decide the levels of risk, damage to the environment, and, most importantly, the distribution of marginal product through the organization.

Without these constraints on power, we’ll never have the healthy markets capitalism pretends to offer. We need to stop these people from leveraging their existing wealth supremacy power and using it to destroy the fabric of our society for their personal gain.

I know lots of conservatives will start mewling, “But how will we pay for it?!” and the answer is by raising the minimum corporate tax rate to Eisenhower levels and taxing the wealth of our over 800 billionaires. All of this spending would create a healthier distribution of resources, empowering lower and middle-income people to grow the economy and likely result in double-digit GDP growth. Everyone but the people hoarding a thousand lifetimes worth of wealth would benefit from this in myriad ways, and even those billionaires would only suffer from being slightly less insanely rich.

Also, check out Stephanie Kelton’s great book about deficit spending for more about funding our private sector with government deficits.

There is plenty of data and evidence-based research showing the harm that layoffs cause to business outcomes and, more importantly, employee mental and physical health.

Jeffrey Pfeffer wrote an excellent book that touches on layoffs called “Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance–And What We Can Do About It” and he talks about these effects.

He cites research on the deleterious health effects on laid off employees.

I recently heard two excuses for layoffs casually offered:

1. Companies hired too much and during the uncertainty of the markets in 2023 realized they needed to have more cash on hand so laid off employees.

2. Companies wanted to build everything they could want but realized in 2023 they needed to be more focused in their product strategies requiring them to lay off employees.

To address the first of these two claims…

Many companies are realizing record profits, paying record bonuses and dividends to their shareholders and buying back obscene amounts of stock (A practice that was illegal stock price manipulation until 1982 when Regan’s FTC did them some nice deregulation)

Google laid off twelve-thousand employees, that means in the US those employees lost their health insurance as well as their jobs. Unless they paid exhoribtant COBRA premiums or were fortunate enough to get to pay pretty high prices on their state marketplace.

That same year, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) bought back sixty-billion dollars worth of stock. That’s five-million dollars for every employee who’s family lost their health insurance and livelihood.

Just in case I wasn’t clear, stock buybacks aren’t keeping cash, they’re manipulation of stock values to enrich executives and wealthy shareholders.

My case against option number two is that it implies companies suddenly became strategically coherent and began to limit the amount of investments they pursue with their employee capacity. I don’t know anyone in an enterprise who experienced a reduction in workload after a layoff. They’re essentially just told to work harder and be thankful to still have a job. This sounds like 19th century railroad tyrants to me.

As a consultant I’ve been fired many many times. As Michael Tardiff once said “We show up fired, we just don’t know yet why.” and he was absolutely right.

But despite surviving eight rounds of layoffs at WebTrends and Subsequently NetIQ I haven’t ever been laid off in my entire career until January 20th 2023.

Unify Consulting was the best employer I’d had, largely thanks to some of the early leaders I worked for there, and, for better or worse, as long as you brought in revenue, they left you alone.

While I was there, I had a pretty steady stream of happy clients and even sold some engagements. I had hired on hoping to build a higher-end strategic product consulting practice but quickly realized senior executive leadership was not interested in this.

Still, having started in January of 2020, it was the perfect place to land for the pandemic. I was able to make some progress, and some things went well. I generally avoided the executives at clients and, in doing so, managed to stay safe, leading teams of coaches and focusing on product management.

In November of 2021, I was diagnosed with stage four colorectal cancer with extensive metastasis to every part of my liver. This is a terminal diagnosis, and after briefly considering assisted suicide to prevent the financial ruin of my family, I decided to enter aggressive treatment.

My work performance diminished somewhat during chemotherapy, but I was generally able to satisfy clients and keep doing my job. I had a couple of shocking (to myself) instances of missing a meeting or a sales call before I realized chemotherapy and the stresses of a collapsing marriage and a terminal diagnosis have significant impacts on my cognitive function, especially memory.

Just before my extensive eight-hour open abdominal surgery to remove fourteen inches of sigmoid colon, a segment of my liver, and the ablation of twelve calcified tumors on every side of my liver, I was transferred to a delightful new client. This client had extensive needs, and I struggled to meet them during surgical recovery. I had thought I could recover from surgery and still serve my client, but I was wrong. I took periodic family medical leave to cover my time when I was out of paid time off, but ultimately, I decided to leave the client and save a good friend and colleague from a long stint on the paid bench so I could recover while on FMLA. To be clear, while the management at Unify assured people not to fear being on the paid bench because it caused staffing shortages when consultants would find other jobs for fear of being laid off while on the paid bench, their tone and behavior made it clear that the paid bench was a firing line. I suspect the paid bench is essentially over today after such extensive layoffs from that bench.

After a while, I tried to get back to billing clients, so I agreed to come off FMLA, which put my employment at risk since I was no longer legally protected from layoff. Unify struggled to find leads for me and was opposed to allowing consultants to participate in the sales process, so it started to look like their tolerance for paying me not to work was waning.

In retrospect, I should have filed a long-term disability claim the week it seemed likely I’d be laid off. Still, instead, when the man who’d shed actual tears over my terminal cancer informed me, “Today is your last day working for Unify Consulting,” I naively asked, “Oh, well, is there any chance I could file for LTD instead since I still have stage four colon cancer and was only available to layoff due to trying to bill clients for Unify?” I watched the blood run out of his face as the HR, sorry “people team” representative lizard, coldly and almost angrily, said, “No, you are no longer employed by Unify and are therefore no longer eligible for any of your Unify benefits.”

I am proud of some of the work I did with Unify including remaining profitable during 36 weeks of the most brutal triple-chemo available to colorectal cancer sufferers and I never expected to get any consideration for that when the layoff hammer dropped. Still worthy to point out that I received no such consideration.

Unify made over a hundred million dollars in 2023. I was approved for permanent federal Social Security Disability in less than forty-eight hours. Instead of a six-figure LTD claim, my boys and I get around thirty-two thousand dollars a year in federal SSDI, an amount of money that makes me too well-off to qualify for Medicare, so I have to spend twelve thousand dollars a year for garbage marketplace health insurance for my family.

I was never under any delusion that my value to Unify was anything but my ability to generate revenue by extracting capital from clients. However, I had hoped that “consultant first” would at least give me a second thought about filing a disability claim. I was wrong, and I would not make that mistake again if I had the opportunity.

Luckily, I had some retirement set aside, and given that I’m never going to see sixty-five, I can take time off and supplement my disability to afford to make some final memories with my boys for them to keep long after I’m gone.

I would likely not have outlived my finances if I’d been able to file a disability claim against my corporate policy, but there’s no telling if I’ll be able to outlive them anyway; it’s certainly a concern that will have to resolve in the next couple of years one way or another. I’m not allowing myself to stress about it; worrying about capital is pre-cancer me.

Without major changes to labor laws and social safety nets companies will continue to harm families whenever it’s profitable for them to do so.

If you ever wonder whether employers care about you, remember, even when you have terminal cancer, it’s still “just business” and “nothing personal.” last I checked, Unify’s senior leadership team are all still gainfully employed.

https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2024/05/07/money-wealth-democracy-capitalism?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

This week, I am traveling for a conference on optimizing work processes. I realize that many more people are reading this substack than I’d assumed, and indeed, I need to just write more often instead of nursing five draft posts endlessly.

At this conference on better working methods, the subject of power structures and their outsized impact on preserving the status quo seems to recur in my hallway conversations.

I’ve been heartened and surprised by the amount of welcome I’ve experienced from these folks about some of my “crazy” socialist ideas and that many others are starting to think similarly about changing the economic system.

Without getting into too much detail, a person in a hallway conversation became quite frustrated about our critique of capitalism and, when pressed, offered his definition of the socialism he’s opposed to …

”Everyone working together for the greater good.”

Nice, not wrong in principle, but he became livid when he was asked what was so harmful about that.

I am inspired to dive more into these things and write more but wanted to share this excellent article about wealth supremacy and the systems that preserve and create these problems.

Some concepts of things we can try to combat these systems would be…

1. Tie the maximum wage to the minimum wage. If you want to pay your CEO 10 billion dollars, you’re going to have to pay a percentage to the lowest-paid employee.

2. No more liability protection for corporations other than worker-owned co-operative B corps. Liability protections were intended to be a contract between society and industry that the corporation would be a good steward of the land and community in exchange for liability protections. Since they all seem to love their bootstraps these days and their libertarian personal freedom, let’s go ahead and say you, as a private corporation, are free to take all those risks you love to justify your outsized compensation. You’re a “risk taker,” eh? Risk your personal property. If you want the government to shield you from liability, turn over ownership and governance to your employees.

3. No more dividends, executive bonuses, hiring, or stock buybacks within four years of a layoff. If you want to justify layoffs by claiming they’re for maintaining “cash on hand” for uncertain market conditions, go ahead and keep that cash on hand; there is no cash out for you or anyone else.

   
   

”We’re a family.”

“We hire the best people and trust them to do the best work.”

When I worked in the fashion retail hereditary oligarchy and the new, wholly inexperienced and unqualified by every measure VP of Supply Chain tech arrived, his first action was to demote my boss and fire one other director. Despite a very uncomfortable first conversation, he divulged this to me because he wanted me to act as a spy and tell him secrets. Of course, he had no idea that leading with an abrasive and transactional approach in the first 30 minutes of meeting a person might impact their willingness to trust him. The only faster way to disseminate information in an organization than saying, “Don’t tell anyone, this is a secret,” is to be an absolute muppet and treat someone you just met like garbage before saying so.

The following morning, I discussed these “secrets” with my closest confidant on the leadership team. I trusted him completely, and it was immediately apparent that we all had an existential risk of having to work for this absolute potato.

Just a couple short weeks later Mr Potato texted me that he’d be late for our weekly 1:1. He texted me this when he was already five minutes late and I was sitting in the room waiting for him to arrive. I’m sure he gets big mad when his lessers leave him waiting because of professionalism or whatever.

He walked in twenty minutes late for our thirty-minute 1:1 meeting and said

Potato: This won’t take long. I will put (demote) you under (the person he hand-picked from his last job), and she will teach you how to be a Technical Program Manager.

Me: Okay then.

Potato: How do you feel about that?

Me: I have feelings coherent with being demoted, and after the recent HR debacle that changed my pay scale, my feelings are coherent with two subsequent unearned and unjustified demotions. In short, I feel similar feelings as the ones I suspect you’d have if I told you I would put you under <person> so you could learn an entry-level role.

Potato: What should I do instead?

Me: You should promote me to the role for which I was hired.

Potato: Can you explain the role and how it should function?

Me: I could if we had time, but you’ve used up the ten minutes you allowed for our thirty-minute meeting. Perhaps we could start on time next time you plan on demoting me?

Potato: Okay, fair; why don’t you write up the JD, and we’ll review it at our next 1:1

Just like that I’d George Constaza'd my demotion.

Seinfeld fans might remember the episode in which George tries to break up with his girlfriend, who refuses. He is flummoxed and has no response. This is how the VP Potato responded.

I was glad I did this because he sent an email announcing the demotions and firing a few days later. That email was immediately leaked to Geekwire. I was happy my name wasn’t on Geekwire announcing my demotion to an entry-level role, especially one the “director” he hand-picked was poorly suited to teach me, given she had considerably less expertise than I did.

I was not the leak, but I immediately knew who the leak probably was.

A leader should know his organization and who the players are. An actual leader would have built rapport with his inherited leadership team to avoid such embarrassing outcomes.

Potato was livid about this leak. He railed to me in our shared office.

Potato: These leaks are immature and unprofessional; I want to know who leaked that email, and these leaks must stop!

Me: Yeah, employer brand is important, especially with new leadership. I think it’s reasonable to expect leaks, and instead of being angry when truthful things leak out that embarrass us, we might choose to focus on doing things we’re proud to have leaked. We missed our hiring goal last year by over ten engineers. We have an obvious morale and employer-brand problem. I’ve been working on addressing it for some time now. Maybe we can work on it together?

Potato: This childish bullshit must stop immediately.

So, yeah, he wasn’t keen. But the fact is, even if it’s not as egregious as a Geekwire front-page story, towns are small. Labor talks to each other, and that fashion retailer in particular was already suffering from one of the worst reputations in the technology enterprise in Seattle.

Nepotistically hiring mean-spirited, inept, authoritarian potatoes who don’t know their asses from how Cloudwatch Factors into things doesn’t improve an employer's reputation.

I remember a leadership offsite wherein the SVP who hired his best potato announced that he and senior executives knew we had a reputational problem. They knew that the primary retailer had a rating of 4.6 on Glassdoor and that the retailer’s tech org had a dismal rating of 1.6.

SVP: We could consolidate the two and have a higher average rating, but we’re committed to doing it right.

A few months later, SVP’s bro was hired in the CTO role, and he instantly began announcing we’d no longer have separate “<retail> tech” branding. Unsurprisingly, the “<retailer> Tech” entry quickly disappeared. I guess they did it “right” after all.

Ultimately, as long as we eschew accountability for executives and allow a revolving door and reputational protection for them in service of protecting the stock price, these problems will persist. The reputation of the transient senior executives is more important than the organization's reputation as an employer. If the purpose of the corporation were shareholder or customer value, there would actually be some accountability for these muppets. Still, that's unlikely to happen until labor wrests power back from the plutocrats and hereditary oligarchs.

Many of my favorite people from the complexity community were there, and it was nice to reacquaint myself with them after not seeing them for many years. I was honored to speak at a conference where Alicia presented in NYC in 2014, and I met her in person. She’s a lovely person who can explain complex subjects in an approachable and engaging way.

The talk was great; Alicia is a fantastic speaker who dives deeply into complexity science. The things she discusses are not entry-level, and I enjoyed getting extra nerdy.

Ultimately, as I enjoyed this deep dive into interdependent constraints, I was saddened because these are the things high-level decision-makers in organizations should think about and learn. Instead, senior vice presidents worry about which text editor a given programmer prefers or whether they like tabs or spaces more.

The fact of the matter is complexity is a huge factor in managing organizations filled with people. Too many leaders get where they are by being the confident sociopath in the room. If you are presented with a difficult challenge and you start to ask questions like “What do we think is driving this behavior?” or “In what ways are the systems designed to produce this outcome?” you are immediately shouted down by some psycho who yells “This is clearly because so-and-so is a lazy asshole and needs to be fired!” or “Are we considering how Cloudwatch factors into this?!”

In a coherent world, that buffoon would be laughed out of the room, but too often, that buffoon is the “HiPPO” or a representative of the “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion,” and even if anyone in the room is knowledgable enough to challenge them, it’d be a career-limiting move to do so.

When I was hired as Chief of Staff at the supply chain technology division of a fashion retail hereditary oligarchy, one of the first things I did with the leadership team, I was ostensibly a member of was to lead a half-day leadership workshop.

The final exercise was a complexity-informed problem-solving categorization approach. We applied the Cynefin model to understand some of our supply chain’s hairiest problems and develop appropriate response categories.

We identified a specific, actionable problem and agreed to pursue context-appropriate countermeasures and measure what the expected vs. actual results of those interventions would be later.

In this organization, you’re not allowed to refer to your boss as your boss or say that you “report to” your boss; you have to pretend there’s an inverted pyramid organizational hierarchy wherein this person “supports you” even though, in practice, they usually “support” you by denigrating you, uncritically relaying vague unactionable feedback and reprimanding you without seeking to understand your experience.

The senior director, who “supported” me in all the manners listed above, came into my office after the session to give me feedback.

”It’s clear to me you’re very good at that. You clearly know what you’re talking about and are quite expert at running that workshop. But, as an engineer, I find it really hard to sit through that kind of stuff.”

I refrained, despite how much I’d been informed about the incredibly high psychological safety of the inverted pyramid in which I was currently being “supported,” from saying what I wanted to say.

”What a pity; I’d hoped you were a Sr. Director because we have 160 engineers and only one Senior Director.”

We never actually followed through on the problem we agreed to solve, and this poor, suffering engineer with a senior director title led no subsequent action.

In fact, the most common response I got from some very capable and sharp engineering managers on the leadership team was that they’d love to solve those problems. They understand what we need to do, but they also know senior leadership always shuts down such efforts and that I am essentially in a Quixotic role.

I once admitted to a close friend and director who advocated for hiring me there that I felt ashamed over how things ultimately turned out, and they said….

“Don’t feel bad; I said when we decided to hire you that you were the best possible person for the job and you would never be permitted to do anything.”

That’s where we seem to be in enterprise technology leadership: a bunch of “engineers” with nary a leader to be found.

This is never, ever how I see sprint commitments or forecasts implemented in the enterprise.

For background, in Scrum, there’s a concept of ‘sprint commitment.’ In a nutshell, the most common way sprint commitment is used by management is to have a team decide how much work to accept into an iteration.

A better way to manage sprint commitments is to frame this commitment not as an agreement to deliver a number of work items but to commit to focusing on an agreed-upon sprint goal or product goal.

I’ll cover first the former, then the latter:

Disclaimer: Legend has it the framers of the Scrumses Guideses realized the word “commitment” was causing some strife and changed the wording to “forecast.” Whether or not this happened, I have literally never encountered anyone really implementing a different way of thinking to commitment. Teams get abused just as hard for failing to deliver a “forecast” as they do for failing to deliver a “commitment,” but I wanted to put this disclaimer in to head off all the CSMs and CSTs who might feel compelled to ‘educate’ me on this mythology.

Sprint Commitment as Promise of Effort

The most popular kind of sprint commitment is where the team gets together in a miserable 4-hour planning meeting and agrees to deliver a subjective amount of ‘work’ in the timebox of the sprint (usually two weeks because of no reason). usually, the team is herded into a room and forced to give made-up numbers to estimate how long each work item will take. Often, this is the first time the team has seen this work they’re estimating, and they’re quite desperate to leave this meeting. To end the meeting quickly, the team finds out what numbers they need to say to reduce any further discussion.

In theory, the team works only on the deliverables they committed to pooping out in the two weeks.

When the team doesn’t deliver everything they were compelled to promise during planning, they have what’s often called “spillover” from one sprint to the next.

I could write a book on all the ridiculous ways this spillover is managed and all the silly consternation that results from said spillover, but that’s not what this piece is about.

Sprint Commitment as Commitment to a Goal

(source: Scrum Guide 2024)

The other kind of sprint commitment is much more useful. It’s the kind I advocated and trained for, and it’s a commitment to set a goal for the sprint and focus efforts only on that goal.

In theory, the team is aware of the product objective of the work they’re doing and can identify an iteration’s worth of experiments or deliverables to best progress toward that goal.

This would mean they don’t work on anything that isn’t part of progressing that goal during the iteration. That means even if something comes up that is part of the product strategy but outside the scope of the committed two-week increment of that goal, the teams don’t work on it.

Product Owner as Single Front Door to the Team

The teams are usually meant to work with a “Product Owner” on all of these things. I could write another book about why the “Product Owner” as usually manifested is a terrible idea, but also, outside the scope of this piece about the bullshittery of sprint commitments. The Product Owner's role is its own specific bullshittery deserving of special attention.

The most useful concept of a product owner is as a single front door to the team. Operationally, the product owner ensures the backlogs for a given iteration remain fixed. Any work that needs to come in must be in service to the sprint goal, and if it’s additive, something else must come out since a team estimated how much they could do, so, adding more work displaces the highest priority agreed-upon work.

What if someone with more positional authority than the Product Owner wants something from the team that’s not part of the sprint goal?

Well, firstly, a cabbage usually has more positional authority than a Product Owner, but unfortunately, it’s usually a Vice President interrupting the sprint.

What’s supposed to happen if the sprint goal has been obviated or rendered obsolete? The Product Owner is meant to terminate the sprint or cancel it.

What this means is the teams immediately stop working toward the sprint goal and enter another miserable four-hour planning meeting (seriously, the guide suggests 2 hours of planning per week of sprint), which makes some sense if we’re working in “committed” iterations and don’t want to waste our time working on stuff that’s not important enough to finish anymore.

(source: Scrum Guide 2024)

I’ve been doing this since 2008, and I’ve never seen a single sprint canceled. The most common calendar-based dysfunction I’ve encountered at nearly every large enterprise has been an insistence on having “synced ceremony cadences,” meaning every team must go through every ceremony at the same time and date.

This sucks in particular for ScrumMasters and Product Owners, who often are responsible for multiple teams and have to fly all over the place, literally and figuratively.

Intake Governance is Essential to Maximizing Flow-efficiency and Predictability

Figuring out what we can get done in a given time can be useful, but not for the reasons leaders often desire.

By ensuring the team is working at a sustainable pace we minimize the cognitive load on their brains thus ensuring they can think more effectively increasing quality of product through quality of life for the brain.

Having a semi-consistent understanding of throughput allows for better decisions to be made sooner regarding investments and capacity growth.

Why it’s Bullshit

Firstly, predicting how many work items can be completed in a period of time is simple. You can easily calculate the average throughput of a team and cut it in half. Then there’s nearly no chance they’ll miss their commitment. You could employ a simple Monte Carlo simulator like the free spreadsheet-based one offered by FocusedObjective that I’ve used to massively predictable success everywhere it hadn’t yet been banned by a cabbage or a VP.

Using statistical methods to forecast throughput capacity not only allows you to model the results of decisions made before the chickens of those decisions come home to roost but they also are a powerful tool for understanding the actual causes of delay or sprint spillover and implement countermeasures.

If predictable delivery was a goal of the leadership they’d never allow work to enter the team and interrupt that committed sprint (goal or volume) but boy howdy does the sprint explode the second a VP decided he wants something else.

Remember, when I say the sprint “explodes,” I don’t mean it’s canceled by the Product Owner, I mean the work committed to in planning ceases to be the commitment, and whatever the positional authority wants just gets jammed in on top of it. Don’t worry. The team still gets beat up for spilling over and “failing” to deliver their commitment. The executives never experience any repudiation for choosing to blow off the process they were previously so very aggressively in favor of forcing the teams to adhere to “by the book” and “to the letter” they’re just fine. In fact often, based on how politically visible, I mean important, the interruption, executives will even actually disband the scrum team or poach the engineers they like the most to form “Tiger Teams” or some silly marshall metaphor “SWAT team” to work on the new whim.

One of my favorite common occurrences is seeing leaders demand a “100% Say:Do ratio” or “100% Commitment: Delivery ratio” without adhering to any of the agreed-upon rules to help teams deliver that to which they were coerced to commit.

One such Director didn’t even bat an eye when the team informed her that they’d committed to 100 points, delivered 110 points, and therefore reported to having been “110% accurate!”

Fundamentally, Scrum is most popular for its more paternalistic interpretations. By forcing teams to promise something, we can flog them when they predictably do not. Usually, the promise was coerced in the first place, and no real data was used to ground the prediction.

Executives who espouse the most strident Scrum beliefs and loudly stamp their feet, demanding teams show maximum “commitment” and “predictability” are often the first ones to abandon all pretense when doing so becomes politically convenient. 

I’ve heard of various metrics, such as turnover and satisfaction surveys, but when he asked, my answer was simple, and I realized it was complete.

“Agency” is what I said. Teams want agency. People feel happiest when they understand the purpose of their work and are permitted to use their expertise however they see fit.

I actually said, “VPs don’t want happy teams because the answer is ‘agency,’ and watch how quickly the VP shoots that concept down.”

I often hear Tonianne De Maria (Author of the excellent Shingo Prize-winning book “Personal Kanban” talk about how it’s a well-known fact that in neuroscience, removing agency from a person can trigger the release of cortisol or the fight or flight drug.

Many leaders instantly bristle at this concept of allowing labor to decide their work, but I suspect the reason is that, as leaders, they’re terrible at creating strategic clarity. You may remember from a previous post that strategic clarity and empiricism are pretty harmful to the authority of the authoritarian leader who uses fiat as their primary method of leadership.

So, let’s start by talking about a concept in the agile framework of Scrum.

Self-organizing teams

I’ve heard various ways to reframe the concept of a self-organizing team into definitions better suited for the authoritarian leadership styles preferred by our current oligarchy. I feel like the first time someone said “self-organizing team” to a VP, the VP lost his mind, and that person instantly started fumbling over themselves trying to keep their job.

“Self-organizing isn’t self-managing”

“Self-organizing isn’t self-directed.”

“Self-organizing just means they get to decide how, but never the what.”

and a bunch of other ridiculous nonsense.

Self-organizing means self-managed and self-directed.

The fundamental concept is that given clarity of purpose, people will organize themselves to the optimal outcomes. In fact, when working with technical workers, the leaders are typically farther removed from the technology as well as the customer, so the decisions they force on their knowledge workers are usually worse than the ones those workers would have made themselves. These workers know that, and being forced to do wrong, stupid shit makes them hate their bosses and their jobs.

Given the small number of sociopaths in the general population, this concept is sound. It eschews extrinsic motivation for intrinsic motivation. If we’re all in a rowboat and care about getting where we want to go, we’ll all pull in the same direction. If we’re all in a rowboat, have no idea what a rowboat is, and think we’re here to do the highest jumping jacks, we’ll lose the rowing race.

But leaders too often ignore empirical evidence and assume people aren’t motivated. Sometimes, they’re not; after years of being abused by horrible bosses and being told just to shut up and do things they know to be wrong, people develop learned helplessness. If you punish and shame people for mistakes or, worse yet, “mistakes” wherein you miscommunicate because you’re bad at it, people will react by protecting themselves. This learned helplessness usually takes the form of order-taking.

“Just tell me exactly what you want me to do.” Even the fiat manager hates this because the fiat manager often can’t or doesn’t want to spend their whole life defining every tiny step that needs to be taken.

Ultimately, the issue of team happiness is a loser not because it can’t be achieved; it can quite easily be achieved, but simply because leaders don’t want to achieve it. They don’t want to let go of power and allow workers to choose their work.

This is because of the relationship between private employers (i.e., oligarchs) and labor (paid workers). Suppose you restructured the organization into a more socialistic democratic worker cooperative. In that case, you’d suddenly no longer have all the incoherence and waste that goes into preserving power and hoarding profits for a tiny percentage of people at the top.

Richard Wolff (professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst) talks about a definition of socialism that sounds remarkably like self-organizing teams.

One of his definitions of socialism is the seizure of the management of the enterprise by labor. Instead of a board of directors and a tiny number of very powerful men deciding how to direct the efforts and resources of the enterprise, the workforce decides this.

This is my preferred definition of socialism. I know people will breathlessly rush to criticize me for advocating for gulags and authoritarian government-controlled communism, but those people are uninformed and/or disingenuous.

When we organize democratically, we make very different decisions. Efficiency and clarity of purpose become important to maximizing the return on our investments. A workforce is highly unlikely to decide to allocate a massive amount of their excess product to a few powerful men at the top. The profits of their labors are more evenly distributed meritocratically across the organization.

I strongly believe that crony capitalism is the reason we can’t have self-organizing teams. When I was at the fashion retail hereditary oligarchy, there was a revolving door in the CTO role. Every new CTO who appeared was certain he was much smarter than all the “losers” in this retail technology space, and they were slumming it. As such, they hired their bros into roles for which they were objectively unqualified.

Making a director of a small software team in a travel web company the VP of a national supply chain technology organization despite having literally never been a VP, never led an org of anywhere near 160 people, and never having had any supply chain expertise whatsoever is management malpractice. But, given the nature of the centralized authoritarian system, nobody can question it. Not least the lowly plebes who work there.

(an inside joke about one of many ridiculous non-sequiturs this “VP” uttered)

When some poor naive leader informed the CTO that people with long tenure and considerable domain expertise were being told they could not be promoted because there was no “business justification for a new director role,” then watched as very junior leaders from that CTO’s travel web alma mater were hired into VP roles that didn’t previously exist, it was causing feelings of nepotism and resentment, he responded with the ever egalitarian “I’ll hire whoever the fuck I want.”

When there are no labor rights and an at-will employment state, this is what you get—baldfaced, frankly ugly abuses of power.

He’s long gone, as are all his bros he brought in, but they’ve been very well compensated, and they’ve gotten the biggest gift of all. One of them got to be “Chief Product Officer” despite never having even been a product manager in his career, nobody seemed to care he had 100% turnover within a year of assuming that role. The other bros got to soak in a couple of years as “Vice Presidents,” which will open doors for them to be destructive at countless other organizations. Nobody can call them out by name for fear of being sued. The organization itself can’t call out what unmitigated disasters they were for fear that the shareholders would lose confidence in the hereditary oligarchs and sell their shares. They operate with impunity and without any accountability whatsoever.

Until we change the fundamental economic system and adopt labor rights and worker co-ops, all our attempts at “team happiness” are performative at best.

I’ll start with a story of my early career in pizza delivery.

As a teenager in Eugene, I was a delivery driver for a Little Caesar’s Pizza in Eugene, Oregon, run by a very unscrupulous family.

I experienced various abuses, including flagrant wage theft when I was informed after running the store without management from opening to closing for 37 days in a row my hourly wage would be paid out in straight time for well over 80 hours and a meager 10 or 15 hours would be paid out at the legally mandated time-and-a-half overtime rate.

The son who inherited this pizza empire from his father (bootstraps, amirite?) waved my objections off with, “You just don’t understand accounting,” before he chided me for coming in 4% over expectations on my food cost. I pointed out to him that I had no training in managing food costs whatsoever, and I hoped his wife and he had a lovely vacation in Tahoe while I ran their store for them as a delivery driver for minimum wage.

I didn’t feel I had the power to argue about my stolen wages since I needed to keep my job to pay my $200 monthly rent.

Months later, when a manager I was training offered me a dial to the safe so I could help him by making the Monday deposit, I said I’d only agree if the dial were handed to me personally by the owner or his son. The manager, who was suffering from lymphoma at the time, said the owners would not agree to me having a dial to the safe, but he would not tell them if I didn’t.

I refused the offer and said I’d not accept that responsibility unless it were knowingly bestowed upon me by the owners.

Months later, I appeared to open the store, and the regional manager was already there. She angrily demanded my store key, informed me that I was being fired for poor performance, handed me my final check, and escorted me out the front door.

Shortly thereafter, one of my team informed me that the owner’s son had to work my shifts, and when asked by my regular customers about my absence, he told them that he’d fired me for stealing.

I later found out that the manager who tried to give me a dial to the safe was stealing from the drop, and even though I refused the dial, he told the owners that I’d accepted it. Unfortunately for him, he kept stealing after I was gone, and it became evident I wasn’t the culprit.

I won’t go into more details about what went down next, but I can tell you that 17-year-old me walked into my apartment, signed my entire check over to my roommate for my final month of rent, and gave my 30-day notice of homelessness. The check was exactly $200.

I had no food, and I had no source of income. I was already hungry.

One evening at a friend’s house, she asked if anyone wanted this bag of steel-cut dry oats. I raised my hand.

I grew up destitute and have been on my own since I was 16. I’ve stared into the abyss of hunger, and that’s informed my worldview on money for most of my adult life.

When I started my consultancy, I had a call with Dale Emery, a successful consultant, to ask for his advice. He said, “You took that sailing trip with your wife, so I am confident you’ll be a successful consultant since it tells me you can go long periods without money.”

No one wants to hear this when they’re changing careers, but he was spot on. It’s the advice I give others who ask me about “going independent.”

During my 13-year consulting business, I lived a fairly austere lifestyle. My then-wife was obsessed with buying a house in Seattle, which, these days, costs a million bucks. We didn’t want to amass debt, so we saved aggressively.

The consulting business is marked by periods of feast and famine. In my experience, famine was the far more common condition. I began to view money as optionality. When you have money, you have options; when you don’t, you have none.

I used to describe it as analogous to living where there’s a treadmill moving away from my family, and on the treadmill, some distance away, was Abraham Maslow with an axe running at a full sprint toward my family. If he ever got to us, he’d axe us all to death. Billing clients sped the treadmill up, but not billing slowed it down.

This and my wife’s million-dollar ambition made for fear-based living.

If we could only weather the draughts, maximize retirement contributions and 401ks, and save as much as possible, we might later be able to provide that stable home for the boys. It was a miserable way to live. I have so many stories of executive psychopaths abusing me without me walking out because I felt I had no choice.

When I wasn’t billing a client, I applied for every job. Every entry-level Scrum Master job, every project, product, or portfolio manager role. I’d built an amazing global network of brilliant colleagues whom I still consider some of my closest friends and spoken at dozens of conferences in three countries on how to do these things.

I got roborejected almost exclusively, and the tiny percentage of callbacks I got resulted in nearly 0 interviews. I’ve had maybe five job interviews over those 13 years, and they often went well at the line level. Still, then I’d be deemed overqualified and escalated for a director-level role where I’d have to interview with some psychopath who hated me the moment I walked in the door. Naturally, I could no longer pursue the entry-level role for which I’d applied and interviewed well.

I had crippling self-doubt and was always fearful of what the future would hold. I have no meaningful credentials I can use to prove my competence, just loads of people who were impressed by me but had no power to hire me. I used to joke, “My superpower is I can impress the hell out of agile coaches and people who don’t have any ability to hire me.” It's not a very profitable superpower.

Anyway, flash forward to being diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic colon cancer. With two oncologists apologizing to me, “I’m sorry, your cancer is diffuse and inoperable, being stage 4, there are no treatments that are curative in nature.”

Staring down the barrel is a 15% probability of living five years and a 50/50 shot at 32 months, I was relieved. I didn’t have to worry about my long-term prospects anymore. My boys would finally be okay, thanks to my life insurance, decent retirement savings, and social security. I could breathe a sigh of relief. My then-wife disagreed at the time, but that’s a different story for a different time.

While saving for the future and fearfully pushing Maslow’s axe away, I realized my boys were getting older every year. I was afraid of how they would eat and be housed but now I realized this futile march towards housing debt and house-poverty combined with unstable income was costing my boys their best lives. More importantly, I was teaching them to make life decisions out of fear and not enjoy their lives in the present.

There’s a slight chance I’ll live longer than the retirement savings I’m spending through now, but that my boys will be adults soon is a guarantee, and I’ll never get these years back.

I wish my soon-to-be ex-wife could have seen things as clearly as I now do, and she could be part of our lives of love, adventure, and joy, but that was not meant to be.

Ultimately, getting what is tantamount to a death sentence was the biggest relief of my life. I no longer worry about how I’ll retire at 65. I don’t stress out about how I’ll build the next stage of my career. Living this final 3-5ish year chunk of life is liberating. I am now focused on being an example of a balanced existence to my sons.

Don’t live for the hoarding of capital, make decisions that consider the wellbeing of your community and choose a life of service. Enjoy your life while you still have it because next year is not guaranteed.

The next stage of my career will be service. I started this substack because people who are still on the treadmill can’t speak about the current inequities that are causing these kinds of fearful lives. We can’t openly discuss the wage theft, corporate abuses, and intentional inequities driving sickness, death, and poverty.

I want my boys to remember that our most valuable resource is each other and that love and care are the most important things always. Give love and care fearlessly; if you aren’t receiving love and care from your people, find people who appreciate you and love you for who you are. Life is quite short, and I’d rather die broke than die, regretting not having shown my sons how to actually live.