I was informed this week that my job title would be disappearing at Microsoft and that I should be looking for another job. I don’t want to get into the legality of it because I don’t think HR would allow these guys to do something so questionable that they create legal risk for the company.

I will have worked for Microsoft for 18 years in October. It has been a good job. It has paid me well, allowing me to provide for my family and myself.

It has not always been a joy. For most of my time there, I have worked with smart people and average management. There have been exceptions. Some of my direct managers have understood and valued “leadership” but this is the most glaring weakness in the poor managers. Perhaps because I think of myself as “blue collar,” I have a dim view of management. I think my view of management has more to do with working at start-ups and small companies where decisions have a clear and direct effect on everyone.

The big take-away is the more personal idea that I might be unemployed soon. So many of my work friends have been in this position or worse that I can’t really complain about that. It is a fact of life in this industry lately. I don’t fully understand it because there are so many articles about how the tech field is booming and they cannot fill the roles. Studying tech is as much of a sure thing now as it ever was.

Industries change. Knowledge becomes obsolete. That’s all rational.

What pisses me off is the callous way this has been handled. I’m angry because I work with quality folks who were doing their job. They had little to nothing to do with the management changes that are leading to re-organizing the team. Our role is Content Engineer. You can think of this as the people behind the scenes who make a web site work. Or anything that goes across the net to you. If you have get “help” in a product, a content engineer created it. The old names were “builder” or “production”.

For a long time I was a writer who worked with a builder in production to get my stuff published. I think that clarifies things. I have been a content engineer for two years and I have loved it.

Now that all content is delivered over the internet, the role requires a fair amount of new learning. Almost everyone in my team is a versatile programmer who works in scripting or the web world. You need to know back-end stuff like SQL and front-end stuff like Bootstrap or JavaScript. Some of us, are more like project leads. Some are more technical. Usually two people are paired up to design and then build whatever is needed.

The company is saying nope. Don’t need that. Don’t want that. They want to push the PM role into a bona fide PM organization. And the technical role into a bona fide software development organization. This will not work. It has been tried at least two different times in my years and it has failed and results in a bad experience for the content developers (who used to be called “writers” and “editors”).

I don’t know why it fails. It makes sense to try it. It just hasn’t worked. It turns out that the domain knowledge is more important than any manager thinks. But that’s an example of failure. That’s an example of management not really trying to understand the problem. They come in with a pre-determined way to fix things. My current skip level boss is a guy who does not have original thoughts. He applies practices that he learns about or says yes to. And that makes me angry.

I don’t feel that I should have a guaranteed paycheck. I don’t think that management should be perfect. But I do think it is a reasonable expectation to apply critical thinking and maybe ask a few questions before launching into a 2 year odyssey of misery. How do you think the people who stick around will feel about it? Even in the service of self-interest, it is a better idea to be a bit more circumspect about applying a new fad system to a largely functioning organization that is now bereft of domain knowledge and distrustful of the bosses.

Plus, by the by, if you do the research and discover that your bosses want you to implement something that you feel will not work, maybe it a reasonable thing to expect you to say no. Maybe someone in your position with your level of experience should have also developed that skill.

I am saying this: do your homework and do the right thing; and when you don’t agree with your bosses, find a way to say no or compromise. Otherwise, I’m left to think you are dumb, uninformed and lacking a backbone.

How should I feel about this? Because what I feel is anger.

Last weekend, Amy and I went paddle boarding at Lake Sammamish State Park in Issaquah. Imagine an oversize surf board that you stand up on. It is supposed to be relaxing and an interesting balance exercise. It was meh.

We rented the boards. It was the last day for rentals and a beautiful, sunny day in the 80s.

There were lots of people at the lake. And no life guards. They were part of long ago budget cuts. The park is lovely and very well used in the summer months and really all year long. Nicole and I swam a leg of the triathlon there.

Well on the return trip I saw a kid drowning and I rescued him. Thirty years or so since I was an official life guard in our little town. In all that time, this is the second time I ever saw anyone pulled from the water who seriously might have drown. Most of the time, if you rescued someone, it was a baby/toddler whose mom turned her back. No harm, no neglect, just a little distraction and the kid falls over. So you pick him or her up. The only real rescue I saw was by Brian Scannell, who rescued a young lady while I watched.

On both occasions, and you read about this and it is hard to comprehend, the drowning people do not struggle, do not thrash, do not yell for help. They look like they are trying to swim or tread water and they just go under. When I pulled the kid onto the paddle board, he took 10 seconds to catch his breath. He asked me if he could stand up and I said no. Then he let go and tried to swim to shore again approximately 10 more yards to safety.

He went under in what I would describe as earnest vertical dog paddle. His feet sank and then he went under. So I grabbed his wrist and pulled him up again. Cough, cough. I told him to hold on and paddled a bit closer. By now, his friends had came out to him; we were maybe 10 feet from where he could stand, and he let go and tried again, only tobegin to fail again. His friend said, “grab my neck,” and I thought uh oh. But they managed the 10 feet.

In fact, by reaching for the neck and just changing his balance in the water an elongating his vessel and relaxing, he started to float in what Total Immersion calls superman glide. He was easily towed the last few feet, stood up, ran to the shore as if nothing had happened.

The weird part, and I’ve read stories like this in the paper before, the kid would have drown in a sea of people. No one was noticing it. Why? Because it is silent and looks similar to a lot of bad swimming. The kid was in complete denial himself that he was drowning. But it was clear to me, that he was out of gas and I could see him trying and sinking. He wasn’t panicking, he was trying to swim and failing.

When you go snorkeling, the leader tells you that the signal to say your ok is to touch your hands to your head. I get it now. You can’t do that if you are in distress. You will either sink trying, or you will not be willing to let your hand stop doing what they are doing, desperately trying to keep you afloat. That is all the indication a trained person needs to see you are in trouble from a distance away.

After the incident, a lady walked up to me as we returned the boards. She asked, “was he ok?” I wasn’t sure what to say because I had no idea if she was a curious bystander, his mom, or what. She was calm though. So I said, “he said he was but no. He was in distress.” She said, “Well thanks. I’m responsible for them. He probably just bit off too much and is embarrassed. They all walked out the sand bar and then decided to swim back. Thanks so much.”

I looked down at her leg in a cast and her crutches and said, “yeah, that’s exactly what happened.”

I thought, “ya know there is no life guard right? the ‘responsible person’ should not be prevented from going in the water by, ya know, a cast and crutches. Or maybe should not let the kids do something that risky.”

I said, “yah, sure. I was right there.”

And really that’s all it was. I was nearby and I saw the signs and just reacted. He might have made it.

This kid was the runt in a group of 10, 11, and 12 year olds. He just wasn’t really capable of doing this. Had he had lessons, he might have known to roll on his back and stop struggling. Or do the side stroke or breast stroke. It was a perfect example of failing to understand that fighting the water is not the solution.

I knew exactly what had happened. We had paddled by these kids or kids just like them and something in my brain said, hmmmmm. It is exactly the kind of thing we would have yelled at kids to not do back in Oxford. When I saw the kids at the sandbar I thought, “I bet kids try to swim back from here.”

I was really glad to think that we taught our kids to swim. They had so many lessons and are so water savvy. But you can just over-estimate your ability. I was also glad I took swimming lessons (thanks Mom) and became a life guard. Boy was that a great summer job. Even at Carbuncle Pond, the puddle.

I took a walk by myself tonight. It was about 8:00. The sun was setting. By the time I arrived back my house, it was dark. Not perfectly dark but headlights were needed.
It was 77F. Perfect.
I had no music in my ears, no podcasts. Other folks were out walking. Kids were being gathered up at the playground and shooed home by parents who were contemplating how to avoid a long drawn-out bedtime.
I realized that I didn’t grow up here. I knew that of course but there is little to remind me of that fact day to day. But this evening everything entered my senses like it was new. It didn’t spark any recollections of my childhood until I forced myself to think of it.
Back east, we had idyllic nights too. More humid with a kind of hum in the air that is absent from the Northwest. Night here is a gentle void that sweeps over you. Back home it was more like an opening of restaurant for dinner. Prep is done and the stations are stocked. Everyone is ready and the customers start to come in.
You notice the mosquitos. Once you spray on the repellant then you notice the frogs. Eventually the fireflies lit-up the night, at the margins of the grass, where the swamp meets the field or the woods, by the shores of the river or any small pond. It’s a kind of nervous energy in contrast.
This is what is deep in my consciousness. It is is not replaceable. Even now, as I walk through my new reality, my reality for the past 20 years, I find it slightly foreign. Dusk arrives as it must, everyday. And today,it was beautiful in its way. I could have walked and walked and walked.
Here I was, thoroughly present in this experience. I wasn’t pining for anything. I wasn’t wistful.
There was briefly a faint sub-sonic echo. I wondered what is going through everyone’s mind. My mind was whispering, “did you hear that?” but to whom? Turned out to be nothing out of the ordinary. I am still soaking it in.