2023-03-07. Jane Says (She's Done with Microsoft)

Hey Rich, you wanted to tell me a story about somebody?

I do. And I'm gonna have, uh, a two for one advice on the other end of it.

Oh, you think we'll be able to extrapolate some advice from the story?

Two

I'm

not one for two distinct

Let's get, let's do some advice in my friend.

My name is Jane.

Okay.

I am

great. Good.

I'm a qa, uh, analyst,

quality Assurance analyst.

A QAA at Microsoft.

Ooh, okay. Wow.

And I do QA and I'm a. I'm young and I'm ambitious, and I do QA and I do good job of it. But then I realize something. I realized that the usability of the QA tools at Microsoft sucked.

Oh, you were inside of these tools all day and you went, I need to, these need to be better.

I'm like, how many people use these? Oh, about 40,000 engineers.

engineers. Oh my God. Yeah.

Went to my boss and I said, can I quote unquote, leave this role and let me recruit a small team? A

ui

ux person, a product manager, and a couple of engineers.

Let, let me be your boss, Jane. I admire your initiative.

Give six months.

all right?

And I'm gonna, I wanna create better tools. I wanna, first, I wanna spend, oh, gimme 12 months.

Okay? Okay.

You're very nice

Scope's already

you. So

it's Microsoft. What do you want?

I wanna spend four months studying how people test software at Microsoft. And then I wanna learn from that and then come up with, frankly, Uh, a vs. Code plugin, that's gonna make life a lot easier and frankly be, make everyone a lot more efficient.

All right, well, our mission and our mandate is to help developers. So, Jane, you seem like you really want to get this going, and I got the budget over here and let's make it happen. I'm gonna get outta your way,

Stan. Thank you so much.

Not a problem.

Uh, off we go. I cherry picked a few people. I pitched it on the internal job board at Microsoft. Got a u I UX person, got a product manager. There's me and a couple of engineers.

It's amazing that that software worked that well.

It took two months a post-it

The SQL server disaster that they use in health. Uh, okay.

Got the team together. I called it the QA Tiger.

Team ra,

and off we went. We studied how people work. I, my, my, my, um, instincts were correct. Okay. Everybody had the same pain. Everyone had the same issues.

Ja Jane, this is a lot of detail.

We came up with a beautiful new plugin. We wanted to de deploy it across the org and we set up, I wanna set up a series of training sessions and guess what happened next.

what happened, Jane, this sounds great. Sounds like you did a great job.

I went to the Bing team. I went to the Microsoft Edge team. I went to the Office 365 team.

man.

I went to about a dozen teams at Microsoft SharePoint. What's SharePoint?

Isn't that what Yeah, I know. So, okay.

Yeah. Onward. I went to the Microsoft Dynamics team, and

Flight Simulator. I

gotta be honest, it was a bummer. It was

buy-in. No buy-in.

I out of about a dozen teams, two, let me even do the training.

Oh, they didn't want your people to use this. They didn't want it. No,

No, no. Nobody said Don't use it. They're like, just send us the tool, add it to the plug-in library

Oof.

at Visual Studio. Like, can I put it publicly? No, this is internal Microsoft asset. So I put it on the internal plug-in library.

Oh, huge. Just a, like a hot air balloon crashing into the ground. Just hugely deflating.

And I made the business case. My boss is a QA manager, so he didn't care about the fact that this actually translates into money and say could save thousands of man hours for

Microsoft. Awesome. You just wasted a whole team for a year, Jane. You failed terribly. Not

just that. I loved my job for that period of time. I'm sad of how it ended.

Oh, you liked leading the team and building the thing

Uh, that, that was a, that was a byproduct of the fact that I was doing something that felt impactful in a very big place potentially.

But now nothing's happening.

Not only is nothing happening, but that feeling of rejection of disinterest in what I've been doing was kind of, I'm not a political person

now you have nothing to show for a whole year.

My boss said, don't worry about it, Jane, come back to.

work.

Okay. Come back

Jim. Back to

You done good? Yeah, come

back. Nice try.

Nice try. And I have to tell you, my relationship with my job changed fundamentally after

that. Got depressing.

It got depressing. Might be too strong a word. I work at Microsoft. I'm doing good.

is true. They, they actually treat their, I mean, it's, you know,

it's a good job.

color of m and m you want,

there's on campus dry cleaning, right? I'm doing fine, but

just the word campus is always a tell

my passion. Uh, the idea of having passion behind what I was doing made me happy to go to work every day.

were excited to lead product. You thought that was great.

didn't care if it made millions in value for Microsoft. That wasn't the point. The point is I got to see something become real and they, I credit to my boss for giving me the chance to go do it.

He'll probably get fired for that too, but that's okay. Let's, we'll just keep rolling here.

On the other side of it, I'm a little ashamed as I'm looking back now. This is a few years ago. Yeah. Um, I became kind of short in meetings.

Sure.

I kind of assumed the worst of everyone.

Well, this company sucks. It wouldn't get behind you and your idea. When

someone really cheery, showed up, kind of waving the Microsoft flag, I kind of hated them out of the.

gate. Ah, well, I mean, they'll smash your dreams. Why? Why have anything? Yeah.

Um, I was unhappy. Sure. And you could say, well, understand your perspective. There's work and then there's life. And your life isn't just about work and blah. But look, I wake up, I have breakfast and I go to work and I come home and I have dinner. It's, most of my waking hours are at this job. And I'm in a place where nothing I do matters.

Yeah, that's sounds like working at a giant tech company in 2023. Jane, I don't know what to tell you.

Um, I wish I, I'm not a schmoozer, okay. I don't try to butter up the right people to get a promotion. Okay. Uh, I thought this was a place that would recognize my passion and reward me for it, but it wasn't, and now I don't care about Microsoft.

Well, Jane, this is very normal. Very, very, very normal. You put your neck out, you say, I'm gonna do this. It's gonna be great. I'm real excited. And then I, I think this is actually kind of one of the worst things about giant orgs. Is they can absorb an unbelievable amount of failure. And so

designed to

Amanda, if you were a startup and you'd done that, it would be like, well, that sucked, and then you'd be depressed for a little while. Yeah. But you'd have to go get another job and reboot your life and you'd find a different context. Yes. If you were a mid-size company, oof, they probably wouldn't let you do it in the first place cuz they don't need all those tools. Let's all calm 'em down and just get our jobs done.

like investment portfolios. They expect a certain percentage of the portfolio to fail.

It's surreal, you and I, when we go and talk to big company people, and this is the fundamental difference I think between you and me and them, is we really still feel failure.

It's absolutely a necessary ingredient for

It's, it's existential and wired for us. And we were talking to people at a giant company the other day and they were just sort of like, yeah, that one's not so good. And it like not so good is pretty like a large team and things are falling apart and you're just

hundreds of millions of dollars pissed away.

cats. Right.

I wanna turn this into advice. This one's gonna be airtight,

Paul. All right. Let's do

advice for both sides of this story.

Okay. Jane.

Jane, Jane,

Uh, the

easy advice is once you put everything into it and you tried, if you are respected, you probably can try again. Don't just fall into the job.

That's true. You don't have to give up. You don't get to go do the next one right away.

You don't get to do the next one right away. And of course, there's the option that I'm gonna throw out there, though. I know a lot of people, there's too much at stake. They've got unvested stock, blah, blah, blah, is leave, leave to a different setting. If you're that entrepreneurial and you wanna play,

let me,

go play

let me throw a Compromise Solution in cuz I, I think that you, you tend to see things like this, a little black.

and white.

If I'm Jane, this is what I'm gonna tell Jane to do. Okay? Go back to your job for a couple of months. Now you need to fi you've, you've gained valuable experience. You worked really hard, it didn't work out. Admit and acknowledge that, and then go find a team to connect to, or a part of your org under your boss.

There's job boards inside of those giant organizations,

go, go, go. Take a step back and take a learning step. Go do something where the next time you do it, you'd be more likely to succeed.

Have coffee with a lot of

People respect that move. Yes. Your next move has to be something where people go like, well, yeah, that screwed up, but I really respect her because she's taking what she's learned and she's trying to move forward. And I, I respect the ambition, right? You gotta show that, and then I think you really have a chance that the next thing you do now, does that suck? Does that take three years to get to the next big thing?

Yes, potentially

it does, but if you want that sweet, sweet, giant corporate governance, nurturing, swaddling, yeah. It's gonna take three years. Yeah. It's just gonna cost you otherwise go to a smaller or, or go start something by yourself.

I wanna share a reality for Jane.

Okay. Uh,

people in large org structures, this kind of applies to everything except for like democratic government. People defend the status quo, and what you're gonna find

oh yeah, in government, they never defend the status quo.

The blockers are oftentimes put up by people. More, less intelligent and more tired than you?

Well, you know, there's a great line actually in government, which is, and other people said this too, which.

is

Don't knock down the fence until you know why the fence was put up in the first place.

Great quote.

It's just,

It, it is, it is affecting change in a large place is hard. And the truth is a lot of the times it's a terrible feeling when you're pitching this thing that's gonna get them 10% more productivity and nobody in the room

cares. Hold on a minute. The architecture of the giant organization is built. Insulated itself against an enormous amount of failure. Exactly. And it's built to create irrelevance in human beings. Absolutely.

That's how

by design.

that's how the broader being can survive

See the, the issue that you could argue that the issue. Jane was facing was that she found this temporary zone where she was able to believe in her own importance and significance to the organization where the organization wasn't paying much attention cuz she was off on an expedition.

Agreed. Again, credit to her boss. He let her, he let her give it a go.

Yeah. But she comes back and people reject it. Okay. That's not a failure. That's the organization behaving as

designed. That's exactly, it's not rejection by the way. It's disinterest. The opposite of love is not hate. It's disinterest.

Uh, you know, the, the tricky thing in these roles over and over again, and you and I are going back and talking to very large organizations again, and we're starting to, to, uh, you know, with the work that we do, um,

this is

I now know in my heart, but it took a long time to understand. It might take them three weeks to reply to an email. And you know why? Because you, even though your world is very important, your world and the thing that you're trying to do with them represents 5% of the portfolio.

Or two. Or two. Yeah.

And, and therefore, no matter how great the meeting was and how well everybody's getting along, two, 2%, yeah. It's 2%.

Um,

But you do feel when you're Jane and you feel like you're actually Mo, I'm gonna move things. I like the people here and I'm gonna move things in a good direction.

Let's leave it with one last piece of advice, which is sales advice. All of this is sales. Yes. When you go into a room and persuade people to do something they wouldn't otherwise do, and that could be a department across the campus, it's just.

sales.

the number one rule of sales is understand the setting and priorities of the audience you're going into.

Well, this is why as an agency we were often successful, partly was we could actually deliver software that was good. Yeah. Okay. But the other thing that we would do is, especially with high level clients, as very, very early in the relationship, we would start to craft the story they had to tell inside of the organization about the software.

Well, even before that, yes, we did do that, but even before that, we were just there to observe. We would say very little that first meeting, because we wanted to understand the setting they were in. The context. They were thinking about things, how their priority. Sometimes you could tell they were so overwhelmed by something else, but they were told to go take the meeting with us.

us.

That was a, a tell. It was like, I'm here now because my boss said to do this with you. Yeah. And you could tell their heads were elsewhere.

Look, technology is nothing without a story.

is nothing. Sorry.

this, this is, it's, it's, it's not a Silicon Valley truism, but it is a New York City tru.

Let's flip over to the employer. I'm gonna give that boss, employer manager. One quick piece of advice.

Go for it.

it. If you happen to have someone that is passionate about something, uh, Jane's boss gave her a green light. But if it doesn't work out, you have a passionate person in front of you who wants to affect change. You could put them anywhere. You could oftentimes say, I trust you. I like you, you're motivated. Help me do a thing.

See, the hard part though is when the failure hits, your instinct is to just kind of like limit the blast radius and maybe protect that person and try to kind of get it under the rug. Yeah. And you're kind of saying like, Hey, you know what? Yeah. Uh,

I guess what I'm getting at this is an after Jane's thing fell through.

Yeah.

I'm getting at is like you can. You could hire someone and just realize they are a tornado. They're really looking to do stuff. They just want to do stuff. They want whatever they do to have a meaningful impact. And what I've found in my experience is when you recruit that person to something they didn't even know existed, some secret project over here, they were all in. That is a personality type. And you, if you have it, it's gold. It really is

I have it. I can get excited about anything.

you are. Well, it's a little dis You are ready to join Any cult that is, um, aligns with what you're trying to

get done. It, it's something I know about myself and so I avoid, I avoid just about everything because it's a

One of the most talented engineers I ever worked with at my old agency, I pitched him coming on to work with me, uh, somewhere else, and he looked me straight in the eyes and he is like, I'm very lucky. I, I'm gonna pick what I actually care about and go work on.

Yeah.

he went to Reddit and he became a senior person at Reddit cuz he loved Reddit at that time.

That's tricky.

we don't have to get into that. Um, but he was very self-aware in knowing that he was gonna do a better job because he cared and actually had. A, a real passion for something someone could say to you, you know what? I want to work on climate. I care about it. I will do whatever. I'm not gonna be picky. I just want to join that cause and bring my skills to bear in that space. If you see that, and they don't even have to tell you what they wanna do.

Promotion. No, I get it.

who wants to ship stuff, right? Jump on it like as an employer, don't waste that per, like, that person is gonna get dejected if they get shot down again and they'll leave. So take advantage of it. That's the person that works hard. You don't have to tell them about how hard they're working ever cuz they like it. They like what they're doing.

right. There was,

that was like a half dozen pieces of advice here

just gleaming advice nuggets

oozing out of the sides of your podcast

the California streams in 1849, Um,

I'm proud of you, Paul, as we close this podcast out. We didn't sound like grumpy old men telling everybody to work harder.

No, I look, humans

comp, it's more complicated

Humans are gonna do what they do.

They're gonna do what they do. Alright,

that's it. Z Ford Advisors. Check us [email protected] or send an email to [email protected]. Rich, what's our handle on Twitter?

If you're on Twitter at Ziti Ford.

That's right.

The ziti comes before the Ford.

That was a, that was a thoughtful discussion. We'll talk about that later. Alright. Bye everybody. Bye everybody. Have a

a great day.