The Job Thing, Part 1: Rally and Optum

[jducoeur]

Soooo -- looking back, I haven't talked at all about work for the past eight months. That's probably been a mistake, because boy, my work life has been complicated. Let's break the story down into three posts, for the three major phases. This is basically a trilogy of diary entries, bringing us from a year ago, up to present day.

When last we left our hero, he was working at Rally Health, and largely enjoying it. Rally was pretty huge by the standards I'm used to -- my first employer of more than about 300 employees -- but still small fry in the grand scheme of things. The tech stack was solid; the people were pretty great; maybe most importantly, the community and culture were really excellent.

(I started at Rally as a consultant, and jumped ship after about a year to join them full-time. When I was interviewing, they asked, "Why do you want to work here?" My answer was, "You've gotten to 1500 employees, and don't suck. I want to see how you manage that.")

Sometime early last year, they announced that Rally would be folded into its much-larger parent company, Optum. (Which is itself part of the gigantic monolith, United HealthGroup.) That caused a lot of consternation, including people panicking about layoffs. I initially dismissed most of those concerns, on the grounds that Rally was a primary engine of innovation for Optum, and to a non-trivial degree for UHG as a whole. Surely they wouldn't strangle the goose that laid the golden eggs?

By the late summer, though, I was starting to get nervous. It was clear that Optum's benefits weren't as good as Rally's, and I didn't love the answers I was getting on that front. The response to losing our unlimited PTO was, "Oh, we just don't track the PTO for engineers. But no, we refuse to write that de facto policy down anywhere." That did nothing to soothe my lawful-good heart, and the implied inequity of it burned.

Then the attrition started. Some of it was just natural, but certain highly-placed people who I considered "Rally lifers" suddenly left, which I took to be a bad sign. So for the first time in a long time, I started actually responding to the recruiter emails.

I did a few interviews, but as usual, the really interesting one came via networking. Thor, a member of the Boston Scala group, who I'd worked with on ScalaBridge a while back, pinged me because he had just joined a little company called Troops, and might I be interested in chatting?

I'll talk more about Troops next post, but suffice it to say, yeah -- it was up my alley, and the timing was impeccable. So I wound up interviewing during our trip to Hawaii last fall (with Kate rolling her eyes about that a little bit, but she understood the situation). It all looked good, so Troops and I were making encouraging noises at each other, with me asking for about six weeks' transition time.

Then I got back from vacation, during which the merger had happened. I'll avoid going into the details, but suffice it to say, I was deeply unimpressed by Optum. The benefits were mediocre; the internal politics were more corporately nasty; perhaps most importantly, the level of general competence just wasn't there. I was used to Rally, which had an ethos of hiring great folks into all groups and giving them lots of room to build high-quality stuff; it really hurt when I kept stumbling across Optum internal systems that just plain didn't work right.

It was a worse environment in all ways, with no salary bump. It hurt to leave my team (who I really liked a lot), but they just plain weren't paying me enough to put up with that nonsense. So I wrote back to Troops and said, more or less, "I've changed my mind. Give me an offer now, and I'll put in my two weeks' notice."

So: Rally Health, RIP. It's a real pity -- as a wholly-owned subsidiary, Rally was a really great workplace, and it still presumably has that great tech stack. But Optum feels much more corporate, which isn't my scene. So, on to something better...