First Do No Harm

I should start by saying that pretty much everything I have to say in this post applies to pretty much every workplace I’ve been in, technology or no. I don’t intend for this to be a dig at Chef in particular, Chef customers, or any of the Chef community. Any criticism I level is meant to trigger introspection, with the intent to enlighten and improve.

Context

In the past year, things have gotten admittedly strange around here. There was a sizable kerfluffle I didn’t know how to write about in my review last year which I might cover a bit in this review, as I feel like the repercussions have grown and a lot of what I felt was valuable to me about working here has been painted in a different light.

The support organization, however, is probably doing better than at any point I can remember. We’ve steadily implemented practices and measures over the past two years which have had a clear positive impact on the work lives of the team, and I am very proud to have been part of that work.

Community-Facing Communications

I’ll alter the heading for this section to share a little bit about my own view into the ICE incident at Chef. I saw a disconnect pretty early on in my time here between the image the community had of what Chef stood for as a company, the image the large enterprise customers had, the image a number of very dedicated employees had, and the image I was getting from company leadership. Of course, there are mis-aligned perceptions among different stakeholder groups in all companies and communities, but what I saw was a company which was making the transition from a place which was highly regarded in the community as a place which Really Cared, which made noise about progressive cultural values because they believed that the company was aligned with them, and that the company was aligned with them because Really Caring was better for the community, better for business, better for the world. I remember Adam saying something to that effect at more than one ChefConf, and really believing myself that he believed it.

However, the company I was seeing once I was on the inside was a fairly normal product/service business, pursuing large enterprise customers, who largely don’t care about that stuff. Mostly, company leadership wasn’t talking about those cool progressive things as much anymore, even internally. Out in the community I was still hearing that Chef was losing its edge as kubernetes ate the world, but not that the perception had changed, and among coworkers I wasn’t hearing much understanding of the changes that we were going through, although folks were acknowledging that there were shifts happening. I think I had the first conversation with Barry (Chef’s CEO) about the disconnect I was seeing in 2018, but we chatted about it for longer in 2019. It has been an interesting experience to go through a time period where I encouraged leadership to face an impending crisis without advice or judgment as to how they should address it, only a calling-out that there was a misalignment and not addressing it would cause major issues. Then, to see those issues begin to take hold of the company internally, and finally to come to a head when one particular expression of that misalignment (Chef maintaining a contract with ICE during a period in which ICE’s Very Bad practices were Very Public) went public and some people got very angry about it. I still don’t think I have the proper distance from those incidents to extract any valuable learning, unless it is the following:

Walk Like a Duck

When you are in a position within an organization where you are somewhat empowered to act as a leader, yet hold the title of rank-and-file individual contributor, it is extremely difficult to effect change outside of local optima. I’ve held a years-long discussion with folks in the Austin TX devops community about this, and cannot help but think that the position I started with in 2012 or so has been reinforced in every job I’ve had since. I’m not saying that rank-and-file folks and middle managers shouldn’t try to effect change, or that they will never be able to. However, it will be helpful to work under the assumption that anything outside of the groups they’re in will probably require sustained invested interest from multiple members of senior leadership (or executive teams, in a large enterprise). If you’re a rank-and-file duck trying to walk like a VP driving a reorg, folks are probably going to notice that you’re quacking.

Silos

I covered this already, why’s this heading even here?

Wrap It Up, B

I think that’s it. Happy New Year, all!