On Failure

I wrote a long journal entry yesterday about my feelings being laid off from Nordstrom. It was fueled by a LinkedIn post related to the mass tech layoffs that occurred recently particularly the ones by Twitter and Meta, in which the author said, If you've been laid-off, realize that is a failure of the company you were working for, not you. It made me think of Robin Williams as the therapist in "Good Will Hunting" telling Will, "It's not your fault. It's not your fault." I must have watched that clip two-dozen times in the days following being laid off in an effort to make myself believe it wasn't my fault the way things ended there. I am just beginning now to really believe that.

Without going into the details I did in the blog post, I am realizing that what led me to being let go after almost seven years of doing the best I could do in that job, was not my fault at all. If you know me at all, you know I read a lot. (My brother argues that listening to audiobooks shouldn't count towards my book count, but he's wrong.) I read everything I can get my hands on including a lot of managerial-type books, and I had realized before that what was going on within my organization at Nordstrom contradicted so much of what I read, even those books that my vice president herself had given us to read. You can't tout radical candor, which according to the author of Radical Candor, Kim Scott, is equal parts "Challenge Directly" and "Care Personally", if you avoid any sort of direct challenge and do not care personally for those you support. In his book Drive, Daniel Pink lays out the three elements of drive, of personal motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. If you give your subordinates no autonomy, no chance at any sort of mastery in their work, and provide no vision, no purpose for the work is it any wonder that they might feel disengaged from that work?

When I was let go I initially felt like the biggest failure. My self-esteem was already not good and had been further ground down by months of doing all I could to keep projects on track and keep improving while my team was slashed in half and never receiving any sort of encouragement from my superiors. I also did not have the tools for self-compassion and was not using the tools I had learned previously to help deal with the situation. That was a tough lesson for me and one I will not need to learn again.

Some company is going to give me that shot, is going to give me that autonomy, allow me opportunities and encourage me to master my skills, and provide a clear purpose for the work we do. And I'm going to do incredible things for that company and for the team I get to work with.

Check on Your Managers! We are Not Okay!

In dealing with my current issues I have had to turn to my social support system, the friends and family who love me and care about me. I can barely get out of bed in the morning let alone schedule doctor's appointments and job interviews and get myself to therapy. I've been really encouraged, though, by the people who have reached out, and I want to turn a sad story into a success story.

As I think I this support system what stands out is how much I have isolated myself over the past several years. It certainly is no coincidence that this corresponds to the Covid pandemic and working from home. However, I think it began even earlier when I moved into a management role. I feel like the manager role can intrinsically be a lonely one if measures are not taken. As I said in an earlier post, I believe the measures are there in work I have already done in therapy and in DBT, but they can be easily forgotten if not regularly practiced. I intend to write more here about those DBT skills and how they relate to work in order to do my own practice of them and maybe to help some others out there.

I was thinking on how I have not made new friends in several years. When I was out drinking and carousing with my engineering peers, it was easier to get past my own social anxiety, have fun, and make friends. Some of those friendships even stuck. When I moved into a management role, though, I certainly was not going to do any carousing, and I really limited how much drinking I would do, already knowing my propensity to overindulge at times. I did not want anyone I supported to see me inebriated. It became even more difficult when I gave up drinking as I could not get past the social anxiety enough to open up to people. 

Now I know all other managers out there are not depressive alcoholics with severe social anxiety, but I do believe that in that manager role you have fewer work peers and those peers you do have are incredibly busy. I think back on the halcyon days of playing foosball or ping-pong at work! Now, no one has that kind of time anymore even when we were still all in the office. I regret now not reaching out to my manager peers at Nordstrom socially more.

I will also say, it was nice, especially in an environment where I was getting no feedback back from my boss, to hear from someone I was supporting as a manager, "Hey, I know it can be a rough job, but I think you're doing a great job." My team and those people I worked with every day - those are the people who knew what kind of job I did and that feedback was very motivating, inspiring. 

So, today's lesson is if your manager is doing a good job, let them know it. It can otherwise be a very thankless job at times. Despite the provocative title, your manager is probably really okay but will appreciate it nonetheless.

Seen Better Days

**** Trigger Warning for Suicidal Ideation ****

I'm back. It's been a bit of a long layoff for me from writing. I want to dive right back in, and I really want to make better use of my blogs and hopefully get to some interesting things, but for the moment, I need to get this out of the way so that you all have some context of where I am.

When we last talked I was probably still gainfully employed by Nordstrom. Apparently more for my gain than for theirs because I was let go the day after Florida got clobbered with Hurricane Ian. I think that maybe I will expand on that a bit further later. In fact, I believe I already have something written out that I was waiting to post. Technically, my last day is November first, and I would rather not jeopardize the last few days I have on the payroll.

So, being in a hurricane (okay, technically it was just a tropical storm at that point when it passed directly over Cape Canaveral with its 60mph+ sustained winds) was one of the least exciting things to happen in the past month. I created a little tempest of my very own. Looking back now I can say that I lost track of the things that are really important and forgot a lot of the therapy that had helped me so much over the previous two years. I only saw myself.

I would love to apologize to each and every person that I know and especially the ones I have hurt. Having a major depressive disorder and being an alcoholic are not things that people should need to apologize for any more than people getting cancer. However, even people with cancer can, and do, make hurtful decisions to others and for those decisions I consciously and willfully made that hurt others, I will apologize for and make amends.

First of all, I am safe now. As safe as anyone else who needs to drive the streets and highways of the Denver metro area. Secondly, I had another suicide attempt. I won't go into details now. Was it serious? I didn't hurl myself in front of a train, but I wanted to die. I was frustrated at just how difficult it was. I was also very, very drunk.

There was a jug of wine in our outside refrigerator that had been there for a very long time. Several years I think. I had been eyeing it. I knew, I knew, I knew, that if I tapped into that in the time that I did with Jen out of town and feeling the way that I did about my life, there would be a very good chance that I would not come out of it alive. And then I poured myself a drink from it.

To be frank, I wanted people at Nordstrom who had made the decision to let me go to hurt. That's why I did what I did. There are other factors that made me not happy with life, primarily generalized depression. I want to apologize to those people at Nordstrom, but again, I'm not going to apologize for being sick. There were things before that I wish had gone different and I apologize for not speaking up about that. I hope, though, that there is some sort of impression that I left with them and with my friends in the Thrive ERG that can help make a difference in the lives of Nordstrom employees who suffer from mental health issues. Erik Nordstrom, if you are reading (because that's what CEO's do. They read personal blogs all day.), please help lead the charge on improving the mental health of your employees!

I'm not living at home. Jen needs her space to sort through being hurt by me, by those conscious decisions I made as well as those depression made for me, as do I for myself to get better. My brother has been awesome in hosting me and in balancing my need to get out and be engaged in life and work as well as letting me convalesce.

I'm in an outpatient treatment for mental/behavioral health now. I've been through this three times already, and my very first night of this go-round I was just amazed at all the stuff that I had learned previously but had neglected to continue practicing. Like going to the gym for our physical health (something I need to start doing again!), we need to be practicing and exercising our mental health on a regular basis.

I'm writing this on Wednesday 10/26, and I am probably going to save publishing it until Monday 10/31 or Tuesday 11/1. I have an interview that I did with Amazon Web Services and the decision is set to be made next Monday. I would not want this post to affect that either way. And I suppose if I wait until 11/1 then Nordstrom can't let me go for cause either. It's sort of shitty that I have to hold my tongue on the internet for those reasons, but this is the age we live in.

--- Writing again later ---

I got too close to a good friend and ended up ruining that friendship and endangering my marriage. People have asked why. The truth is I don't know. I don't have a good answer for Jen nor anyone else. The only other thing that I want to say on the subject is that I miss my friend, very much, but I know she wants the best for me. What is best for me right now is to concentrate on my marriage. I also want to apologize for breaking my promise to her that I wouldn't hurt myself while she was out of the country. What can I say? I'm a liar.

I've hurt Jen too many times. She deserves better. She deserves someone who always puts her first and then her boys. I haven't done that. Of course I want the best for her, and I thought I could give that. But I have been selfish. I put myself ahead of her and at times put my job ahead of her. And I am so, so sorry for that. I hope she will want to keep me in her life forever. 

I did not get the AWS job. I am okay with that. It was not the right job for me, though I did all I could given the circumstances to come away with that job offer. I have several better things in the works. One of them is going to find out that I am the perfect fit for them.  

There are better days ahead. 

I've Never Been to the Galapagos

 I just got done with an inspiring Leadership Open Space virtual conference with my colleagues at Nordstrom. One of the topics that came up is How do we continue or transfer the Nordstrom culture to a new working environment post-pandemic?

Nordstrom has a culture that in my view is heavily influenced by two principles. First, if you know or have read anything about Nordstrom culture and certainly if you are one of our loyal customers, you know that Nordstrom culture starts with how we treat our customers in the store. Our store employees are truly customer obsessed. The second principle is that as large as Nordstrom is, it is still a family business. The Nordstroms sit on the board, are key stockholders, and hold chief officer roles. More than that, though, they have a genuine care for us as employees just as when their great-grandfather began the store. My first meeting as a Nordstrom manager was with all the other engineering managers, over 200 of us, in a ballroom in the Four Seasons in Seattle overlooking the sound. Blake Nordstrom reminisced about how that meeting had been previously held as a barbecue at his home and lamented a bit that it couldn't still be that way. (The Four Seasons doesn't suck, though.)

Like other corporations, Nordstrom is beginning to think about what the workplace will look like post-pandemic. I believe it is certain to say that we are not all going back to our prairie dog villages of cubicles in big office buildings. As a manager, I am looking to fill open developer positions and am not just looking local to Denver here. I already support contractors in every timezone in the U.S. not to mention in India, and don't see a reason to change that. My belief is that many companies will adopt some sort of hybrid solution with employees "hot desking" (a number of employees co-sharing a group of desks) and making use of conference rooms for meetings where collaboration is especially effective, but otherwise working remotely. 

Like I said, Nordstrom has a very specific culture. A culture unlike other places I've worked. With our group being in Denver and Nordstrom HQ in Seattle, we used to have engineers go out to Seattle almost expressly so they could get a better sense of what the Nordstrom corporate culture is. Now that kind of travel is no more, and likely won't be again. Plus  with even many in Seattle contemplating working remotely and with us finding tech talent in other areas of the country, the question put forward today was, how do we continue that culture in the future? We had a breakout session on this topic, and after 45 minutes the surprising answer I think we came to is "We don't." We don't continue this same culture; we evolve it. We keep what is good, we throw out what just won't work anymore, and we evolve the rest to fit our new environment.

I sort of joked with my Seattle counterparts that part of the Nordstrom culture, being an outsider from a corporate perspective, is wandering around downtown Seattle trying to figure out in which building you are supposed to be meeting someone. The buildings are One, 805, 864, and 865. One is easy: That's the flagship store and there are offices above that. 805, 864, and 865 are not addresses. Those are "store numbers" as well. You would think that at the very least 864 would be next to 865, but you would be wrong! 865 is next to 805, and 804 is a good fifteen minute walk away. (Twenty if you are going in the other direction because it is uphill!) I mean, how are we ever going to replicate that sense of frustration that every Nordstrom employee must have realizing they are in the wrong building for a meeting starting NOW?!

I think we go back to the essence and the principles that made Blake wish he could invite us all back to his place. We start with being customer obsessed. As internal service providers and as people managers we recognize that being customer obsessed means being obsessed with making sure that our store employees can do their very best job and that our digital storefront performs its very best. Then we continue to treat each other as family as we've tried to manage staying close to our own families through this time. We get creative in including them even when we can't all be together. We take time out to check in on each other. We recognize that sometimes we are just going to have some bad days, and that is okay. 

There WILL be a new environment coming whether it is this summer or fall and we need to evolve with that changing environment.

Juneteenth

I am reminded today, June 19th --Juneteenth, Freedom Day -- of the visit that Jen and I made to the Whitney Plantation when we went to New Orleans. It is a trip I would recommend anyone visiting New Orleans should make. In fact, I'd recommend it as the focus of a trip that every American should make. 

It isn't a trip to be made lightly. National Geographic compares it to making a trip to Auschwitz . I would imagine that the contemplation of any human being treated as less than human is going to evoke similar emotions in anyone with a shred of empathy. For as much reading and learning of slavery we have had in schools, it doesn't prepare you for the gut punch of seeing a price list of people.

There is, I think, this myth that we white Americans like to hold onto that slave owners actually treated their slaves relatively humanely, and that it was really only some particularly cruel owners that treated them badly. After all, a dead slave was no good to the owner, right? The truth that one learns at Whitney is that in almost every case, slave owners simply treated slaves as a commodity, cogs in a wheel of a machine that, in Louisiana, was used to turn sugar cane into sugar, a grueling and particularly dangerous process. Yes, while plantation owners did not want their machinery to wear out early, they were horribly practical in the life-expectancy of those cogs. People did not live long while working the cane fields, a handful of years maybe, ten to twelve at most. The phrase "being sold down the river" came from the slave experience of being sold down into the cane fields of Louisiana from cotton plantations further north. 

I compared the entire explanation of slave ownership by our guide at Whitney to my experience owning a car: I don't want to treat my car poorly. I'm really pretty fond of my 2012 Ford Fusion. It was a pretty dear investment. At eight years old, though, I know it's getting to the end of its lifespan. I know I'll move on and get something else in a couple years. To think, even now, that this is how plantation owners felt about people, and that I could conjure up such a comparison now, quite literally nauseates me.

I was very impressed with our guide at Whitney. A young black man, he gave us what I believe was really the unvarnished truth and a horrible sense of what it was like to live at Whitney. There was no need to embellish the awful facts. They were laid out before you like the price list I mentioned or the tiny slave quarters or the "hot box" chamber mentioned in the National Geographic article. Stands of the sugar cane with its razor-like leaves were right there, and the treeline past the fields that led away into the swamps that would beckon slaves to freedom or death, either way escape from their condition, still stands out there. 

This is the story of my slave benefactor at Whitney, Chris Franklin. I say benefactor because Mr. Franklin paid a very costly price in order to provide me a single afternoon of education. I am very grateful. Reading that story, one might say, "It wasn't all THAT bad. They even got extra potatoes and egg nog at Christmas." Then you compare that to Mr. Franklin's impression of how well he felt the master kept his hounds. Slaves were treated no better than dogs. The master was fine to marry off a couple because he knew it meant additional litters of slaves for him.

None of us are free until all of us are free. That is a great sentiment to carry forth today. In a literal sense I'm sure we are all appalled at the idea of a man, woman, or child being manacled in an iron box on a hundred degree day. We have a ways to go to stamp out ignorance and injustice still, however. The focus, of late, has been on the police profession. The police do have the ability to use force that is immediately apparent. However, discrimination still pervades every industry in America. It is still apparent in the retail industry, for example. For, as progressive a company as Nordstrom is, I am still reminded that only two years ago black teens looking to buy clothes for prom were racially profiled by Rack employees. Even so, I believe that the discrimination in the legal, medical, and especially the media is as damaging, if not more so, than by police.

So we need to look at ourselves and our own sense of humanity. My religion is built on empathy and loving-kindness. In just writing that I am reminded also that I am a sinner. I need to practice.

Divided We Die of Typhus

I woke up this morning needing a pep talk. With no Knute Rockne there nor drill sergeant, I turned to myself for some inspiration. I didn't exactly find a Rockne speech in me. I was able to remind myself that our current situation is not normal, nor is it the "new normal". The current situation is not normal, yet we try as try might to seek "normal". For work, even though people are all working remotely, even though they are all dealing with their personal issues regarding dealing with the virus, we are still asking teams to deliver as if things are normal.

So I reminded myself that this is not the new normal and thought I'd pass on that message to my team at work. I also thought I'd try and enhance my inspirational message with some historical inspiration. Where in time, besides the oft-cited Spanish Flue Pandemic, were people cooped up for months at a time. Valley Forge came to mind. They were cooped up there for an entire winter, right? That must have been like three whole months, right? 

So, like I do, I looked up what I could about Valley Forge. They weren't there three months. The Continental Army was camped out there for six months! Dec. 19, 1777 - June 19, 1778. Okay, granted, they could leave their huts -- And it's a good thing they could since an entire squad of twelve enlisted soldiers typically shared a stone hut, sometimes with wives and children as well. Also, the winter wasn't as bad then as we were made to believe in elementary school. (Apparently the winter encampment two years later in Jockey Hollow was much worse and was the root for the myth of the horrible Valley Forge winter.) Still they suffered typhus, typhoid fever, dysentery, influenza, pneumonia, and smallpox (because a group of the soldiers had not been inoculated the year before when General Washington ordered it), not to mention the starvation. (Yesterday, I ordered DoorDash from one of the local Mexican restaurants.) About 1000 of the 12,000 soldiers encamped there did not survive the winter. About 8% mortality.

Anyway, it could be worse... I guess. It wasn't exactly the inspirational message that I was looking for, so I decided to play it. Plus, what did those men have to look forward to? America lost almost every major battle for the next several years until Nathanael Greene took the fight to the Southern theater. 

There is a battle to come for us, probably many. For Nordstrom there is going to be a much smaller pool of higher-end retail shoppers. We're going to be battling other retailers for those customers. For us as a nation there is going to be a battle of words over how and when to come out of this mess and get the economy going again. For many of us individually it is going to be a struggle just trying to get back to normal, to find jobs again, to restart some semblance of a social life, to just get back to a routine. One thing that I think this pandemic has shown us is that we accomplish much more when we can work together rather than apart. The phrase, "United we stand; divided we fall," comes to mind -- something to keep in mind.

Been a While

It's been a while since I posted here. Lots has happened. I'm in a new job at Nordstrom. Jen's in a new job at Southwest. The Broncos even won a Super Bowl since I last wrote. You would have thought I would have posted a bunch about that. I should have. I'm regretting having been away. 

When I post here I want to post things that others will find interesting. Maybe I should pay attention to those things that I find interesting, because it is times like now that I sort of wonder what I've really been thinking about through last fall and the past winter. Ah well, life springs anew.

What I'd love to do is detail some of the cool things we're doing here at Nordstrom regarding creating software solutions in the cloud, Amazon's AWS to be specific. In the past, the posts here that got the most attention were those regarding Wix. I think that is because I was doing things using Wix that hadn't previously been very well documented before. Not that I documented a whole lot that was new. However, I figured every small problem that I had to scratch out meant someone else would run into it at sometime or another. So I blogged about it.

I'd love to do the same with the AWS things we are doing. We're doing things with AWS that I'm sure not many other people are already doing (in the relative sense), particularly because much of what we are doing is still using Windows and Microsoft tools. (The documentation for using AWS with PowerShell is particularly lacking.) In fact, I will be blogging about it, but most of the details I will be keeping from public eyes, so I'm not sure just how useful it will be outside of Nordstrom. Still, if you are interested in particulars, hit me up, and maybe I'll be able to share.

Jen and I started watching season one of Mr. Robot, and it has me even more paranoid about cyber-security than when I was programming election software. I don't want to give too many details about how we're building an application knowing there are people out there who are after whatever tidbit of information they can get in order to hack credit cards. Not that I don't think what we are creating is secure. It is; perhaps overly so. But no use in giving out information that isn't necessary.

All I'm saying is that I'm dying to blog about these things, but they will necessarily be in rather general terms.