12/06/2022 15:57:47

There is no great way to put this without a certain segment of my readers recoiling in horror, so I'm just going to say it. I'm tired of fighting for things on the job. After over 20 years of professionally being combative when I thought the situation called for it, I have resolved to turn over a new leaf.

If you've worked with me, you know how it can be at times. When the company, the team or the boss decided to go down a road that I strongly disagreed with, I pulled every ethical tactic out of the bag to try and reverse things. Sometimes I was right and sometimes I was wrong on a technical level. But looking back I now realize that the level of technical correctness is not particularly relevant.

Organizations, whether they be small product teams, whole corporations or somewhere in between have to be allowed to evolve on their own. If they aren't allowed to do this, their growth will be effectively stunted. You can't have a functional team when one member of the team insists on overriding the will of the team with a will of their own.

I am of course guilty of having spent literal years on the wrong side of this debate. It is only recently in the last year when I began to re-evaluate my relationship with work that it occurred to me that I needed to also re-evaluate my approach to work as well. This was a hard realization to come to as it basically risks invalidating years of blood, sweat and tears on my behalf. But its either that or be okay with a reality in which I no longer grow as an individual and a professional.

But of course, much like the organizations I have been part of, am currently part of and will be part of in the future, I am evolving as well. It has been a terribly slow and painful process when I look back on it, but the hard truth is that there really isn't any better way to do it. Perhaps somebody in the future will concoct some Matrix like way of implanting hard lessons directly into the primal part of our cerebral cortex that is hidden away by our shared stubbornness (aka human nature). Until that day arrives, we all have to do it the hard way.

Please consider this post my official apology to all of my past co-workers who have experienced me at my worst when it came to trying to get my way. Quite a bit of collateral damage has been left along the side of the road that I have traveled and I hope that you all will accept my deepest apologies for how I chose to make my way along it.

I am sorry.

The moral of the story here is that being right isn't enough. It can't be. You can't build a sustainable collective future based on the ambitions and will of a single individual, no matter how well intentioned or technically correct the reasons are.