jducoeur

Time for that end-of-year tradition, taking stock of where I am now. This is kind of a diary entry, but I've been posting infrequently enough that much of it is probably news to most folks. This will be a pretty long braindump, but hopefully informative. Comments welcome -- it sometimes feels a little lonely around here nowadays.

Job

Not to bury the lede: remember my ruminations last month about how I wasn't fitting into Big Corporate Life perfectly? When I wrote that, I already knew I was on my way out the door. My manager knew, but she asked me not to announce it until four weeks out, lest I be too much of a lame duck for too long. (And she was right: while I got a colossal amount done those last few weeks, it wasn't easy to maintain motivation.)

Anyway, I'm no longer with Slack/Salesforce. My last day of work was the 18th, and my technical last day of employment is tomorrow -- I'm starting to pack up my laptop to ship it back.

It's kind of a pity: Slack was a pretty great company, and my team are uniformly great folks. But I just wasn't being as effective as either I or the company wanted me to be, mostly because succeeding at a senior level in a really large company calls for different skills than doing so at a small company, and those aren't skills I'm all that practiced in.

(I was great at the programming, of course. But once you're up to a really senior level half the job is about communication, and that's just plain harder at a really big firm.)

It's not entirely tragic -- Slack is slowly getting more deeply absorbed into Salesforce, and necessarily becoming more corporate in the process, which isn't really my ideal world.

And Salesforce is absolutely all-in on AI ("Agentforce" is the hot buzzword these days) -- I'm by no means as anti-AI as many of my friends, but I'm also not especially passionate about it. IMO the current situation is very, very similar to the Dotcom Bubble, circa 1999. I believe there's some real potential, and some companies will hit very big, but most are over-committing, there's an enormous amount of Dumb Money chasing anything with the word "AI" in its pitch, and I believe we're likely to see a massive crash in the next few years, with similarly huge layoffs. Having lived through the last big bubble, I don't necessarily need to focus excessively on this one.

Anyway, I'm going to be in the job market again in a couple of months, looking for a smaller company (ideally an early-stage startup) that is looking for a strong backend tech lead and preferably open to pure-FP Scala as its stack. (Happy to blather about why I firmly believe it's the best current stack for anybody who is actually serious about building something that will scale well.)

But first...

Sabbatical

It's been 12 years since I last took a break, and I could use a little time to get my head together and recover from the burnout. So I'm officially setting Q1 aside as a sabbatical.

That's specifically not a vacation, mind. Kate is still working full-time, and it would (quite reasonably) annoy the snot out of her if I was just sitting on my ass all day.

But I'm going to take the time to focus on the many, many neglected personal projects that have built up. The list is as long as my arm (yes, there's a checklist), ranging from working on our overfilled basement to outlining some missing public documentation for Typelevel to getting our financial plans in order. (We're gradually approaching retirement, and I suspect there's a stock market crash coming in the middle of next year, so it's time for readjustments.)

Above all, the highest-priority project is getting Querki back on a decent footing. For complicated technical reasons, it is still running on an antique version of Scala, and its dependencies are unbelieveably out of date. It's time to pull the tablecloth out from under the running system, change the way it works under the hood, and get it to the point where I can begin seriously moving the project forward again. (In particular, get it to the point where developing it is fun again.)

Social

Part of the sabbatical, but worth calling out: even more than usual, I'm looking for opportunities to get together with my friends. That can be board games, dinners out, club activities, whatever -- the point is to reconnect socially, because I've been feeling a measure of loneliness lately, and that's likely to get worse with the cold weather.

Of course, we're also about to start Crazy Season -- the period when a lot of High Impact Social happens in quick succession. (Arisia, Birka, Intercon, etc) But that's not the same thing: while I love those huge events, I often find myself lost in the crowd, so they don't necessarily alleviate the loneliness. So smaller get-togethers are still super-important.

Socials

And speaking of "social", it's worth reviewing my current social media presence. People here aren't necessarily on all of these, but connecting is welcome if you are.

• Dreamwidth -- obviously, I'm still here to some degree, but also obviously I'm not posting as much. With the rise of microblogging, I've tended to focus my DW usage more for long-form posts, where I have more to say and am willing to spend the time thinking about what I'm going to say. Over the years I've become a bit less comfortable posting brief hot takes and links here; those are winding up in the places below.
• Mastodon has become my primary home for the time being, at https://social.coop/@jducoeur. I post way more frequently there: retooting multiple times a day on average, and tooting my own thoughts pretty often. I don't know if it's ever going to be the biggest social media outlet, but IMO it's the healthiest. I read a lot of feeds there (enough that I can't keep up with all of them), and I'm happy to connect to folks there. (And if you'd like help getting started there, I'm happy to provide advice.)
• I have two accounts on Bluesky. My "real" Bluesky account is https://bsky.app/profile/jducoeur.bsky.social, but that's mostly reposts -- I rarely do main posts there. More important is the Bluesky bridge of my Mastodon account, which copies all of my Mastodon posts -- if you are only on Bluesky and want to follow me, that's the one that is more worth connecting to. Note that I only read Bluesky very erratically: since I mainly read Mastodon, I primarily follow accounts that are bridged to there, checking in on Bluesky itself mainly when I'm out and reading on my phone.
• Quite recently, I set myself up on Bookwyrm, which is basically the Fediverse version of Goodreads, at https://bookwyrm.social/user/jducoeur. That's still an experiment, but I'm trying to at least record, and often review or comment on, the interesting graphic novels and audiobooks I'm reading. (I read relatively little text these days, but Libro.fm has enabled me to get back into audiobooks without feeding the voracious maw of Amazon and its abuses.)
• Finally, it's worth noting that I'm on LinkedIn at (as usual) jducoeur. I do not follow the feed there (I find the idea of LI as a social network just daft), but I do use it as my Rolodex. With me planning to look for a job in a couple of months that's going to become more important, so I encourage folks who know me reasonably well to link to me there.

Health

Finally, if I'm going to do an honest braindump of my current state, it's worth talking a little about health.

I'm approaching a Big Round Birthday, and while there's a measure of "yay" to that, it's also faintly depressing. I'm feeling my age, and beginning to grapple with why and what to do about that. I think there's going to be another big post (possibly within the next few days) on that topic.

More immediately, I am slowly being driven spare by reflux issues.

I've had problems with reflux my entire adult life, mind, starting shortly after college. Esophageal reflux made me absolutely nuts for the better part of ten years, thinking something was deeply wrong with me, until I got a new doctor with a clue who realized what the problem was and pointed me in the direction of Omeprazole. I've been on and off of that ever since, which isn't great, but at least it was under control.

But ever since my last bout of Covid (just about a year ago now), I've been fighting laryngeal reflux, which is new for me. (Aside from a few months of it last year, after my previous Covid, which is why I have a nasty suspicion of a connection.) The symptoms are totally different: burping, a bit of a cough, some raspiness in my voice, sometimes "cottonmouth" and/or a touch of sore throat in the morning. It's just inconvenient, rather than painful, but it's not a great thing to have ongoing for long periods -- it's undoubtedly doing subtle long-term damage.

Nothing has yet succeeded in controlling that. The Omeprazole keeps the acid from eating away at my innards too much, but clearly haven't fixed the underlying problem. I picked up a Medcline pillow a while back, but it isn't obvious that it's helping all that much, and my sleep with it is only so-so.

So that's a constant, low-level stressor. And just to add to that, there is some confusion, because the problem seems to lessen when I travel, and I can't figure out why: on the road I tend to be dealing with worse pillows and mattresses, and not obviously any better foods. It's a puzzle, and distracting to say the least.

Finally, yes, I'm still on Ozempic, although still at a minimal dose. I'll likely raise that a notch at some point, to knock myself down out of the pre-diabetic range and get my weight back to something a bit more appropriate, but I'd love to fix the reflux first, before making more changes.

Conclusion

So overall, life is decent, but not perfect -- nothing awful, but lots of stuff to grapple with and try to improve.

How are you all doing? Please feel free to opine about any of the above -- conversation is what makes DW most fun, and I've monologued enough here...

Let's finish up the trilogy with a proper diary entry, shall we?

No shit, there we were, in the middle of Manhattan. Why Manhattan? Let's back up.

A month or so ago, we were told that there was going to be an all-hands get-together for Troops in New York City. This was a big deal, and rather exciting: the company went all-remote at the beginning of the pandemic, with the result that many of us had never met each other. (Thor was literally the only one I had met in-person to date -- I hadn't even met Patrick, who had been a frequent co-worker of mine at Rally and then followed me over to Troops.)

But beyond telling us that it would be in "early May", they were notably vague about when this gathering would take place; as time passed, this got increasingly odd. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I pinged the CTO about my growing unhappiness about this -- he told me that everyone in the company was stressed about it, but we were dependent upon "external parties" for the final schedule, so we couldn't formally plan it yet.

That set off my radar in a big way, and occasioned several days of me thinking about it. That got even stronger when the plans did begin to firm up: we were all going to meet mid-day on Monday the 9th, in front of the fountain in Bryant Park in Manhattan, and then we would be escorted to a location-to-be-announced for the rest of the day. Uh, huh.

Somewhere around Wednesday the 4th I wound up talking through my reasoning with Kate. While there are a lot of possible explanations, the most obvious "external parties" would be that we're being acquired, and the timing depends on the acquiring company. And thinking further, the most obvious acquiring company (see previous entry) was Salesforce.

"Well," saith Kate, "are there Salesforce offices in Manhattan?"

So we pulled up Google Maps, and determined that the answer was yes. In fact, there is a "Salesforce Tower" in Manhattan -- across the street from the fountain in Bryant Park. That pretty much set my expectations.

The trip down to Manhattan on Sunday was pleasant enough. I decided to drive -- in principle the train would have been better, but getting to South Station is still a mild hassle and we're still in the middle of a covid surge right now. Hopefully in future years we'll have a little less plague, and the Green Line extension will make the train too convenient to pass up.

Sunday night was a trip. I decided to take the opportunity to actually go to an actual movie theater -- it feels almost transgressive at this point, but this trip was going to involve enough covid risk that the movie wouldn't be adding an awful lot on top of that.

(The movie was Everything Everywhere All at Once -- I may write a proper review, but suffice it to say, it is every bit as brilliant and bizarre as everyone is saying. Highly recommended.)

Wandering around the city was a real highlight, though. I had forgotten that Broadway had been mostly turned into a pedestrian thoroughfare -- walking up it is just plain odd, much less eating a gyro at a table in the middle of the street. But it was pleasant and uncrowded, and I poked my head into a few shops. (Including one of the random dispensaries that have cropped up all over NYC, and picked up a few caramels to see if I like them.)

After the movie, I continued uptown to Times Square, which was almost surreal. It is still the case that Times Square at 10pm on a Sunday night is more crowded than almost anywhere in Boston ever is. I tried not to get too deeply enmeshed in the crowds, but the people-watching was wonderful, and I scored a slice of Junior's cheesecake for dessert in my hotel room. All told, it was a wonderfully normal, high-energy evening.

Monday, mid-day, as planned, as all rendezvoused in Bryant Park, to get the announcement that (surprise, surprise) we were being acquired. The only nuance that I had missed is that we are being purchased by Slack, which is part of Salesforce.

So the off-site business meeting turned out to mostly be a party. We were escorted into Salesforce Tower, taken up to the 21st floor, and handed champagne as part of an open bar. There was a good fireside chat with our CEO and our new boss from Slack, with a bit of Q&A, but it was mostly hanging out, chatting, and finally getting to socialize properly with each other.

That set the tone for the rest of the day. From there, most of us heading over to the hotel's rooftop bar, for more drinks and socializing, and thence to Ilili, a delightful Lebanese restaurant where they had reserved a private room for Troops. (A nice thing about a 30-person company: we can all sit at a single long dinner table together.) Dinner was faboo: they had much of Ilili's menu served out family-style, so we could try loads of different things, all of them excellent.

After that, several of us headed over to another hotel bar; finally, after that broke up, a few of us (including one of the legendary members of the company, who had left a year or so ago) wound up at a pub near the hotel.

All in all, it was a great day, albeit a sodden one: I probably had seven drinks over the course of twelve hours, which is more than I've had in years.

Which was fine, but meant that I was exhausted and slightly hung-over the following morning, when everything got down to brass tacks. We all rendezvoused back at Salesforce Tower, to receive our verbal offers and the initial briefings of what to expect from the acquisition.

I can't go into too much detail, but I'm nervously excited by the whole thing. After the disappointing merger with Optum (and, ten years earlier, the experience of Memento being acquired by FIS), I'll admit to some trepidation. That said, the vibe of this deal is way better. It's very clear why they want us, and how we would fit into the company. Slack has a reputation of being a generally good employer, and it appears that being acquired by Salesforce hasn't wrecked that.

And really -- Slack is in some ways an almost weirdly good fit for me, personally. I've been saying for decades that, insofar as I have a professional speciality, it is "productive online conversational systems", and while that isn't precisely what Troops does (we're more about notifications than conversation), I suspect that I might well find loads of cool things to do at Slack.

So far, there aren't any red flags. The benefits at Slack seem to be even better than the quite-good ones at Troops (and miles better than what Optum was offering), and I'm getting a significant raise out of the deal.

So, fingers crossed. I really want this to work out well, and it looks like there is good reason to believe that it will.

The drive home was uneventful, although I was pretty bleary-eyed by the time I arrived back in Somerville.

The postscript of the story is exactly what I suspected it would be: one of my co-workers tested positive on Thursday. So I'm in watchful-waiting mode for a few days, testing regularly and mostly keeping at home. If I'm still testing negative on Monday afternoon, I'll probably let myself go do social (but masked) activities again.

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...

I should remember to diarize successes, so...

Yesterday was a big presentation at work. Basically entirely self-driven: I'm talking up a particular technology (Akka), so I figured I'd better do an introductory talk on the subject to educate everybody on the topic. Me being me, I publicized it to the entire engineering organization, nation-wide, and got a hundred-some-odd attendees.

My presentation style has evolved a lot over the past five years. I used to do the same turgid PowerPoint bullet lists as everyone else, but that always sucked, as was driven home to the community some years ago by this cartoon: ( Cut for violence to kittens )

The trend in tech presentations lately, though, has been really concise, fast, focused little slides that you flip through as you go.

So yesterday? 135 slides -- a new record for me, by a fair margin. Took a fair while to write and edit, but I managed to slide in at 56 minutes (right about as planned), and folks seem to have gotten a lot out of it, so yay. That's probably approaching as fast as I can talk, but I could probably manage even more slides in a talk that had less code and more visuals.

(Disclaimer: a fair number of those slides are really flipbook animations. It might well be possible to accomplish the same effects in fewer slides with a more sophisticated knowledge of Google Slides. The point, though, is to keep the visuals moving.)

Also, kudos to The Noun Project, land of All The Icons. I maintain a professional account there specifically for presentations like this -- there's nothing like being able to grab icons of dragons and swords to use as metaphors for slaying old programming problems to liven up a talk, or showing ActorSystems as communities of people sending letters around. (And sometimes dying when Exceptions happen.) If you ever need to do professional presentations, it's a really helpful library to have available.

• Make the effort to make your resume look adequately professional.


• Don't brag, don't inflate, don't fill it with puffery -- keep it real, honest, modest and limited to things you're prepared to talk enthusiastically and knowledgably about.