Dinner on an M-Class Planet

This week I started a new manager on my team. We worked with each other at Puppet—I promoted him to management on my IT services team—and the mission I had on my way out of Puppet, to the extent I was allowed to have a mission by our acquirers, was to help him and his folks make the transition to a private-equity-backed midwestern software concern.

I'm turning over a year at the place I landed. When I look up and look around, I realize how much of an adjustment I had to make. The first several months there were pretty hard. I didn't have a network, I was constantly reminded that there were perceptions about my new team (to either validate and address or put down), and the culture was very, very different. I wanted to do more than my team knew how to do.

It has improved a lot. "Pre-IPO tech company" is just going to mean some things, and I guess the trick is understanding that each place has Chosen the Form of the Destructor in its own way.

One useful thought exercise I picked up a few months in was to imagine when I had come in at Puppet—somewhere around 100 people—then think forward to where I was at five years later, and how I perceived people coming in about that time.

The place was sort of on fire, culturally. The old guard/new people thing was in full effect.   Attrition was ramping. There was that whole thing where people arrive, sort of burst into flame on contact, and leave angry or ugly-crying. Or arrive, take their best shot, and quietly leave without much apparent emotion because what the hell were they supposed to do in an environment like that other than be grateful that their résumé was pretty current? I had long since abandoned the thing I had done consistently until Puppet tipped over into doubling headcount year-over-year, which was try to know every face, every name, and every role.

But other people stuck around, and some of the ones I didn't give very good odds eventually adapted and I'd develop a sense of comfort with them that made it feel as if they'd always been there.

So at my new place, when I'd be feeling sort of low and unsure of myself, I'd remember that I had probably seemed closed off and untrusting to people when I'd been a person of tenure. I stopped taking it personally. I remembered what it had felt like after Puppet's first RIF—this place had its first big one the week I was interviewing—and how wary the old guard had become, because "the maturation process" involves a lot of unwelcome change delivered by an increasing volume of strangers.

I adopted the phrase "trust is a process, not a destination." I resolved myself to the idea, beautifully put by my first pod neighbor at Puppet, that you don't get a protagonist pass.

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So last night I had dinner with the new manager, the manager on my team who was there when I arrived, and one of our senior folks who's also here in Portland. Three of us knew each other from years together at Puppet. Two of us had worked together before even that. So it was a mix of older and newer, more familiar and less familiar. The conversation drifted around, and I realized how many stories I'd started to collect with that person I've only known a year that required backstory and explication for the others around the table. Not one of the old guard, no longer "one of the new people." 

I'm enjoying the prospect of working with someone I know well. Someone you can do "no-look" passes with now and then. And I've learned to enjoy the challenges of arriving somewhere with a lot of patterns and habits I can only challenge one at a time, or just choose to accept, or learn from. 

"Trust is a process, not a destination." 

"Don't ask if they're right; ask how they're right."