further ranting about the software industry in general and Openwave in particular
This past Thursday morning I had my Openwave exit interview with Karen T. in HR, who was a really nice and thoughtful person, which then made me sad, though not surprised, that it was in fact the very first time that anyone in the Openwave administration, or really anyone besides my immediate managers, had asked for my opinion with anything other than a canned "click here" survey. (Note to self: when I run a 1,500 person company, I will not try to gather feedback using stupid insta-survey tools, I will mandate that my HR people randomly give in-depth confidential interviews with my staff and anonymously summarize the feedback.)
The cheat sheet of questions centers around the exiting employee's attitude towards the company, his/her immediate manager, and the company's executive leadership. So here are some excerpts of what I said.
Overall, I rate Openwave well above average in terms of work environment, salary + benefits, interesting work, being given the tools to do the job, etc. My attitude towards executive management and the company's corporate administration (meaning above division G.M. level) was always more or less indifferent - it appeared to be basically a holding company for the two or three divisions, and my loyalty or dissent was always focused on divisional management. (I don't see any big problem with this, except to the extent that the company pretends otherwise.) Corporate communication ranged from the benign to the amusing, with a disproportionate focus on quarterly results that were of interest to almost nobody in the engineering organization.
Which brings me to one of my more general rants: in a large software organization, the quarterly financial results are so disconnected from the day-to-day work of the engineering organization that congratulating the team on a great quarter (or moping about a bad one) is utterly meaningless to the engineering team. At best, it's a reflection of the value of work that was done one, two or possibly five years ago. Engineers are by nature and trade focused on the next product, which may be shipping next quarter or next year or even the year after, and unless the financial situation is so bad that the next release gets shitcanned, we just don't care. (Note: this from somebody who avidly reads financial statements, knows how to dissect a balance sheet, and is married to a controller who lives and breathes numbers. It's not that it's not important, just that it's not day-to-day relevant or motivating.) Good corporate communications focused on motivating an engineering team highlight the following: (1) market intelligence; (2) technology trends; and (3) product priorities, emphasis, investment. Investment, investment, investment. For as 10-Q stupid as the typical engineer might be, he or she has a nose for what projects are getting funded, trust me. And for as much as we berate and belittle the "marketing dweebs" for their PowerPoints, the one source of information that we cannot live without is the thoughtfully presented synthesis of market, competitive and customer data that informs whether or product will ever ship in quantity or be of use to anyone at all.
Ok, sorry, I got carried away there. Back to the exit interview. You may want to refer back to this post for the next part (Openwave DPG is presently doing #2, #4 and #6 on the list, which appears to be preventing anyone from doing thinking related to #1). For the next part of the interview, we talked about morale and the specific situation in the division. Probably due to the combination of digesting a large acquisition, the understandable soul-searching that follows a long and exhausting push related to a major release, and the transition through three division leaders in the space of nine months, there's a certain lack of direction which is surely the biggest contributor to overall shitty morale. (Add to that the departure of a number of high profile, well respected members of the team late last year.) To paraphrase another departing engineer, there's a sense that the company is not willing to invest enough internally to foster innovating, and leans instead towards acquiring rather than building innovation.
Which brings me to my next rant: the most stable, well funded, sanely organized projects that I've been a part of have always been in startups, whether venture-funded or not. The popular perception of startups being unpredictable and risky is nonsense: Openwave beats any of the 5 startups I've been involved on the unpredictable/risky/unstable axis by a mile. Startups are simple: you're given X million dollars up front or Y hundred thousand in existing revenue to play with, at the end of which you are expected to deliver a product. You multiply heads by about $200k fully loaded cost and figure out how long until you run out of money. If the product has launched and is showing promise of selling when you're approaching the money time, then all is cool. Otherwise, it's time to find a new job. The rules are crystal clear.
The related part of this rant is the build vs. buy bit: why does it make sense for an established company to spend $20m or $60m or even $100m acquiring something that it could have built for $2m or $6m or at most $10m? Part of the answer is that the established company is unable to take the VC-like risk on an unproven innovation when similar monies can be spent on incremental improvements with identifiable returns. But another big part is related to those darn quarterly results again: those acquisitions get accounted for as goodwill instead of R&D expense. Nevertheless, it still seems backwards to me - as I pointed out in my original post, what better place to innovate that in an environment that has the institutional knowledge, market expertise and customer connections to build a better product instead of making the same mistakes all over again.
In short, I still don't get it. I guess that's why I'm embarking on startup #5 :)
The cheat sheet of questions centers around the exiting employee's attitude towards the company, his/her immediate manager, and the company's executive leadership. So here are some excerpts of what I said.
Overall, I rate Openwave well above average in terms of work environment, salary + benefits, interesting work, being given the tools to do the job, etc. My attitude towards executive management and the company's corporate administration (meaning above division G.M. level) was always more or less indifferent - it appeared to be basically a holding company for the two or three divisions, and my loyalty or dissent was always focused on divisional management. (I don't see any big problem with this, except to the extent that the company pretends otherwise.) Corporate communication ranged from the benign to the amusing, with a disproportionate focus on quarterly results that were of interest to almost nobody in the engineering organization.
Which brings me to one of my more general rants: in a large software organization, the quarterly financial results are so disconnected from the day-to-day work of the engineering organization that congratulating the team on a great quarter (or moping about a bad one) is utterly meaningless to the engineering team. At best, it's a reflection of the value of work that was done one, two or possibly five years ago. Engineers are by nature and trade focused on the next product, which may be shipping next quarter or next year or even the year after, and unless the financial situation is so bad that the next release gets shitcanned, we just don't care. (Note: this from somebody who avidly reads financial statements, knows how to dissect a balance sheet, and is married to a controller who lives and breathes numbers. It's not that it's not important, just that it's not day-to-day relevant or motivating.) Good corporate communications focused on motivating an engineering team highlight the following: (1) market intelligence; (2) technology trends; and (3) product priorities, emphasis, investment. Investment, investment, investment. For as 10-Q stupid as the typical engineer might be, he or she has a nose for what projects are getting funded, trust me. And for as much as we berate and belittle the "marketing dweebs" for their PowerPoints, the one source of information that we cannot live without is the thoughtfully presented synthesis of market, competitive and customer data that informs whether or product will ever ship in quantity or be of use to anyone at all.
Ok, sorry, I got carried away there. Back to the exit interview. You may want to refer back to this post for the next part (Openwave DPG is presently doing #2, #4 and #6 on the list, which appears to be preventing anyone from doing thinking related to #1). For the next part of the interview, we talked about morale and the specific situation in the division. Probably due to the combination of digesting a large acquisition, the understandable soul-searching that follows a long and exhausting push related to a major release, and the transition through three division leaders in the space of nine months, there's a certain lack of direction which is surely the biggest contributor to overall shitty morale. (Add to that the departure of a number of high profile, well respected members of the team late last year.) To paraphrase another departing engineer, there's a sense that the company is not willing to invest enough internally to foster innovating, and leans instead towards acquiring rather than building innovation.
Which brings me to my next rant: the most stable, well funded, sanely organized projects that I've been a part of have always been in startups, whether venture-funded or not. The popular perception of startups being unpredictable and risky is nonsense: Openwave beats any of the 5 startups I've been involved on the unpredictable/risky/unstable axis by a mile. Startups are simple: you're given X million dollars up front or Y hundred thousand in existing revenue to play with, at the end of which you are expected to deliver a product. You multiply heads by about $200k fully loaded cost and figure out how long until you run out of money. If the product has launched and is showing promise of selling when you're approaching the money time, then all is cool. Otherwise, it's time to find a new job. The rules are crystal clear.
The related part of this rant is the build vs. buy bit: why does it make sense for an established company to spend $20m or $60m or even $100m acquiring something that it could have built for $2m or $6m or at most $10m? Part of the answer is that the established company is unable to take the VC-like risk on an unproven innovation when similar monies can be spent on incremental improvements with identifiable returns. But another big part is related to those darn quarterly results again: those acquisitions get accounted for as goodwill instead of R&D expense. Nevertheless, it still seems backwards to me - as I pointed out in my original post, what better place to innovate that in an environment that has the institutional knowledge, market expertise and customer connections to build a better product instead of making the same mistakes all over again.
In short, I still don't get it. I guess that's why I'm embarking on startup #5 :)