I decided to take some time off. Today starts 3 months of leave from my job at Netlify, into which I’ve poured much — and not infrequently, most — of my efforts as a human since August 2016. I do not think dedication to work is virtuous, but I have done good work, and much of it, and I am trying to convince myself (as the company was easily convinced) that I deserve this break.
I’ve enjoyed most of that work, even when it was hard and even when I was growing in uncomfortable ways, which was frequent! Sometimes that enjoyment was only evident in retrospect — what my partner calls “Type 2 Fun”. But, I have few regrets about that time, and even though I took this time off to permit the type of introspection that could allow me to say “wow, I actually would much rather be doing something else to earn money”, I do not know what will happen. I do know I will go back to the company, after the break and be able to see with somewhat fresher eyes, as I plan the future of my career, which I hope will be there since there are many many things to recommend it and I heartily encourage anyone who isn’t enjoying their work to take a look at Netlify’s jobs page — and this is NOT a paid advertisement, since I asked for my leave to be unpaid. Put another way: this is Netlify giving me some space; but, we are not breaking up and I am still a major fan.
Now 16 hours past my last working moment, I am still emotionally entangled with the job. More the people, than the work. I care deeply and fiercely for my team. I care that they are treated fairly and with respect, by our customers, our colleagues, our bosses, and our world. They know I care and they appreciate it quite a lot. And I believe that by and large, my colleagues on other teams, and our bosses, also appreciate it. They certainly appreciate the results they see while collaborating with my team!
But, if you read between the lines, you can see the disconnect between the parties whose behavior I care about, and the parties whose behavior I can usefully affect; it’s heartbreaking sometimes to try to get my team what I think we need, and see that I cannot bend the world, or the customers, to my will. Or, I cannot convince our bosses or colleagues of the merits of my point of view. This failure is normal and expected in a world full of other individuals and organizations with their own goals and actions, and my own imperfect understanding of that world (topped by my myriad other shortcomings and outright mistakes). Nonetheless, it still hurts, sometimes.
The break is intended to be thorough and complete. A mental detox and relaxation, a cleansing of the palette. But all I can think about is advice for my team, last minute requests for my boss to help with, one thing I would have said differently in that last customer response, the fallout of which my colleagues will now be subjected to without me there to clean up my mess. I am struggling not to sign back in, to send more emails.
On the third hand, I believe strongly in my team. They have always been empowered to make the change they want to see — in their learning, their career path and even job duties, changing uncomfortable or inefficient process and workflow. They routinely collaborate in developing policy like how much we get paid for on-call duty and process like how we work with other teams including what we demand of them. They are aware that they can build a solution to any problem, and I am proud that we have arrived at that shared understanding and that it is so functional in our real jobs. It feels a bit dreamlike for a technical support team to get to be so empowered and self-directed, but it is real.
One past boss in a different company frequently said upon receiving constructive criticism or requests for more transparency that “this isn’t a democracy”. My work at Netlify has been my rebuttal to that philosophy — a team SHOULD BE and CAN BE a functional democracy nearly all the time, and “whenever possible” should be as broadly defined as possible. Of course, this is a business; there are some required outputs like “getting our work done in a way that doesn’t harm the company”, which we make sure to meet. (Lest you think, wow, that is really not inspiring — that isn’t our goal, just what we must exceed; the actual implemented goal/target: “getting our work done while largely enjoying it and to the strong benefit of the company.” I think it is useful though to find the minimum viable requirement to start from, when designing your own mission, though!)
So — they are on their own now, and that scares me and worries me. I am no longer around to defend, protect, advocate, encourage. Several of my staunchest allies across the company have left in the last few months and more are leaving soon. Will the remaining bridges I’ve built over the years hold for my team? The team who doesn’t always approach things the way I do, who don’t bring more than half a lifetime in multi-team software and IT roles, and the understanding of constraints and maybe most impactfully, the understanding around what is negotiable and what probably isn’t? I think that ability has given me a lot of my power to do things like run my team democratically — the fact that I collaborate well on a lot of levels and know how to pick my battles.
What I worry that I haven’t been able to do is directly codify and transmit that understanding — to the people I work with, or the people who work for me. I try my damnedest to lead by example and I think a lot of the message has been received by many. And, I think it has been received far more clearly than I personally would/could have learned from similar “just…uh…do it like this, see?” type instruction. And we do talk about it a lot, so it isn’t all just implication and inference.
I have never been the parent of a human child, but I imagine it is similar — you feel 100% responsible for their wellbeing. Yet, you can’t prescribe every situation, come up with an answer for every question in advance to be ready to be the best support. You haven’t even managed to imagine some of the questions and problems that will arise for the first time while you’re not there to advise or even see. Hard questions are the only ones I’m worried about — thank goodness the empowered team can handle 99.9+% of what they face based on experience or applying the guidelines we’ve agreed on, and focusing their own intelligence and skills to whatever comes up. But, that .1% will be a doozy — will it be a serious outage, or a required breaking change that causes massive amounts of extra work for a team that is already at capacity with the normal workload?
One of the things I think I’m supposed to realize during this break is that that is not my problem right now. I am letting go. I am finding some mental health in NOT always being worried. In relaxing into the realization that they don’t need me. They’ve got this. And then I think, that’s awesome. Time to go outside.
