Turning tricks

Following on Wednesday’s post, I can report that there was a wide spectrum of participation in Halloween costuming yesterday at the office.

In keeping with the Harry Potter theme, a number of people dressed in Hogwarts regalia. A few superheroes—or villains, maybe; I’m afraid I get a little confused. Two Harley Quinns, but no Jokers. Some people just put on a mask or cat or mouse ears and called it quits.

My manager hauled out his dinner jacket. With his stubble and untied black tie, he declared he came as “last night’s bad decisions”.

And I ratted and sprayed my hair (which drove me mad all day), slapped on weird eye makeup and put on some swag from a conference two years ago:

Yes, I was a mad scientist.

Well, there was a costume contest, with folks voting on three categories: best group (six people in ordinary dress but with bad passwords hanging around their necks—like “password1”, “666666” and “admin”), most creative (someone with a metallic mask/helmet jobber; I could not tell you what he was, but he couldn’t drink beer at the happy hour) and blow me if I didn’t win “funniest costume”.

I seriously didn’t think I was in the running, but there was actually a prize:

It’s an Amazon gift card. Unspecified amount, but if it’s enough to cover the cost of the hairspray and ratting comb, I’m happy.

And when I got home yesterday, I washed my hair, used a fistful of conditioner on it and very carefully combed it out.

Boo, y’all.

STOP PRESS: The gift card is for $50. Huh.

Strange creatures

Apparently, Halloween is a big deal at my current employer. Not in the sense that the IT department at my old job made it: populating an atrium with ghouls and skeletons, and splattering blood and bodies in the server room is impressive. But we don’t have that kind of space, and you wouldn’t want to block off any of the kitchens; don’t want to come between devs and their coffee or Red Bulls.

Monday the SVP worked her way around the two floors we occupy, strongarming people by reminding them that this year’s theme is Harry Potter, and that—while a costume isn’t mandatory…

She did the same again Tuesday at the weekly business unit call.

Story is that last year someone came as Horton. As in Horton Hears a Who.

My plan is to do a variant on my mad scientist schtick.

I spent last evening watching YouTube videos on how to make your hair look like you stuck your finger in a light socket. I frankly don’t know how I’m going to make it through the day with my hair ratted and hairsprayed. But I do not want to get on the bad side of the SVP. 

She’s coming as Professor Snape.

Peeling away

Some time ago I was playing around with the close-up filters on my camera (they’re cheaper than a macro lens), and I noticed that the cucumber peel I’d dumped in the old cottage cheese tub to take out to the garden had kind of wilted into an interesting shape.

You may not find it amusing, but I kinda do.

(And yes: I do need a lot more practice with the filters.)

Getting colder

So, evidently there’s another Frozen movie. I know this because a couple of weeks ago I went to Target and this was the first thing I saw walking in:

You know what this means, right?

Time to let it go.

Gratitude Monday: getting it done

Comparisons are odious, but I’m going to make one anyhow. At my previous employer, nothing happened in a timely fashion. Unless your time scale is geological.

One example: I sent our CLO an almost entirely-boilerplate non-disclosure agreement (the boilerplate being hers, with the addition only of vendor names and brief insertions relating to the statement of work) for approval. Two weeks passed, with multiple emails and voicemails to her; I was just about to stand in her office door when she called to say she saw “nothing wrong” with it.

I get it—she’s both CLO and CFO; she has a lot on her plate. But that makes her a bottleneck in some very important areas, and two weeks for any kind of response is just beyond the beyond.

But it’s symptomatic of an organizational culture that sees no reason to rush about anything. And it explains its lack of appetite for innovation of any sort. (Also contributes to the mindset of my ex-colleague’s “oh, there’s no point in setting deadlines; we never meet them.”)

Well, those people and that mindset wouldn’t make it past the first 45 minutes at my current company. I’m copied on emails about bugs and customer issues; there are at least ten to 20 of those a day. And they get immediate attention—the engineering director looks at the issue and responds; it’s either fixed or it’s put in the backlog. Some of the more complicated issues generate long email threads between engineering, product management, customer support and others. They take this stuff seriously.

And somehow they’ve inspired me to do the same. I have to say that it’s annoying as spit to have your train of thought interrupted by some customer who can’t log in to the portal or has found a bug. But that’s part of the job—the job I love.

Wednesday, we got an email from a sales engineer in Europe who used to have full access to the portal, but now doesn’t, and he had to give a customer demo today, which requires all bells and whistles. We figured out that he has two types of account profiles—the one that used to give him full access and the one that doesn’t, which now appears to be the operating account. I hesitated to authorize a third account, while the other two are swirling about, but: customer demo.

Eventually we logged the issue (which I’ve found in some other accounts) and I sent an email to the provisioning group to give the guy specific access entitlements. I didn’t hear anything back on Thursday, and by Friday I was getting worried. Around 1700 I IM’d the engineering director to ask if the Service Desk works over the weekend, because the SE needs access. He wasn’t sure, but suggested I could call their number and get someone to provision while I was on the phone.

I did that and Service Desk did it (guy said they were going to get to it that day anyhow, but I’d marked my Wednesday request high importance and used the word urgent in the text; I am not really impressed with their understanding of urgent) and I emailed the SE asking him to check over the weekend that he had full access; if he had any problems, I’d check emails and get on it. Well, he emailed me on Saturday to say everything was fine, and I did a happy dance.

I swear I have never been so excited about a customer demo in my career.

And I am grateful to be working in an organization that is both mission-driven and gets stuck in to get things done.

Going dark

One of the products I manage involves data from (among other places) the Deep Web and the Dark Web. For the unfamiliar, the former basically comprises sites that aren’t indexed by web searches—so they could be perfectly legit, but behind a login. The Dark Web (a subset of the Deep Web), on the other hand, can’t be reached via Safari or Firefox; you need specialized browsers, like Tor. And once you get there, it’s basically a cesspit of illegality and depravity.

The Dark Web is where you can find, buy and sell hacked data, stolen credit card numbers, social security and other national ID numbers, weapons, drugs and a lot of things I don’t want to think about. It’s 8Chan on PCP.

I spent an hour or two on my product the other day, looking around some of the information that’s been pulled from various Dark sites. Let me emphasize that I was not on the Dark Web, I was just looking at various emails, forums, paste site data (where hacking code can be found) and miscellanea. The small snippets I saw were enough to make me want to shower with a steam hose and steel wool.

I commented “that Dark Web is one crazy-ass place” to two of my colleagues, both of whom have spent time in certifiable hellholes collecting combat pay. They both assured me that it’s no place they want to return. One told me that some sites fend off lurkers (who don’t have the right password) by running images of things he wouldn’t even describe.

People, man—there is no bottom.

Getting away

One of the attractions for my current job is the unlimited vacation policy. This is a shiny-glittery thing many tech companies dangle in front of workers, like foosball tables and snack rooms full of snacks.

Quite a number of these organizations thereupon turn around and make it impossible for employees to actually take time off; they deflect disappointed reactions by chirping, “But foosball!” It’s been six weeks since I started, and I wanted to get the scoop from my manager, so at yesterday’s 1:1 with him, I asked what “unlimited PTO” looks like in our group.

It turns out that the SVP who had a 30-minute meeting to welcome me to the business division is so adamant about people taking time off work that she made it one of the metrics for her direct reports that they take vacation. Our VP took five weeks last year.

Well, I told my manager that my idea of holiday involves a trans-oceanic flight, so my vacations typically are around one to two weeks. He told me that as long as I give him advance notice, that’s okay by him.

I do not want to find myself in the position of going years without a break and then suddenly having to plan a three-week getaway, like I did last year. Or just forgetting to take vacation. My manager agreed.

So—which should I do first? South Africa/Botswana or Japan/Korea? And then there’s Slovenia. And Norway… Hmm.

Another commute

Last Wednesday afternoon, during a break in an all-day meeting, I looked out a window to discover it was pissing down rain outside. Ordinarily that wouldn’t bother me, but I’d walked to work that day and hadn’t yet got round to putting a folding umbrella in my tote bag.

Throughout the afternoon it showed no signs of abating, so I was not looking forward to the walk home. But sometime after 1700, when the meeting broke up, the skies had cleared and it was dry (except for puddles) on the way home.

I made sure that the umbrella went into the bag that evening, because if I don’t do a thing in the moment, I’ll forget about it and find myself in a Groundhog Day of repeated mistakes.

Well, I was grateful for that yesterday, because sometime in the afternoon grey skies turned to rainy skies, and it was still coming down by the time I pulled the plug on the day.

But I had my umbrella, so all was well. Except for the puddles.

P.S. Interestingly, the tree that blew down across the path last Thursday is still there. Neither Fairfax County, Reston Association nor Boston Properties (whoever’s responsible for that area) has bothered to clear it. Huh.

Breaking up

Oh, my ears and whiskers—the whole recruiting system!

I’ve noticed that, since I started my new job last month, I’ve suddenly become more attractive to recruiters. Real recruiters, I mean, not the Bangalore-based contract spammers who tout sysadmin or dev jobs in various places 1500 miles away from me.

No, these are in-house recruiters for actual product management jobs. Although some are 2500 miles from me. (I turned down a technical product manager job in Los Altos, California, last week by saying I didn’t meet their criteria. The recruiter came back with another TPM opening in Baltimore. She said their VP of Product personally said he wanted me to apply because I’m such a good match. I’m not.)

The one that cracked me up, however, was from another infosec company. I applied for a product marketing manager job with them in [checks notes] June. And I had an internal referral, which is supposed to mean you get more attention that tossing your résumé in over the transom. It was in Boston, but still worth a shot.

Aside from the system-generated “we’ve received your application” email, I heard nothing. Until last week, when a human recruiter emailed to set up a time to talk about the position.

Well, after laughing some, I replied thanking her for reaching out, but said that in the intervening time I’d accepted another position. I did not specify where it was. She thanked me and it was too bad the timing wasn’t right (yeah, hon—like it took four months to fire up your email?) and we should stay in touch. Yeah, whatever.

But yesterday I got a system-generated email from their applicant tracking system (ATS) saying that they’d decided to pursue other candidates that would make the most immediate impact for the business needs.

Dudes—you did not fire me; I quit.

Gratitude Monday: planning

In my post last week about anomalies in Lean Cuisine product offerings, I mentioned I was looking for a quick-and-dirty solution to dinner on nights when I get home from work too tired to do the whole put-it-together schtick. That earned me some stick on Facebook: a friend admonished, “Tsk, tsk. Don’t you have the cooking skills to make stuff in advance? You control the ingredients, it’s more nutritious and it’s a lot cheaper.”

Me: “That requires planning.”

LQ: “Yes…and???”

Well, she did have a point. And we’re getting autumnal weather—cooler and, yesterday, wetter, which cries out for comfort food. So on a whim, during my Saturday shop I picked up ingredients for cottage pie. Yesterday I made up a batch (complete with Keith Richards's flourishes) and portioned it out into five servings. I had one last night and popped four of them into the freezer.

So today I’m grateful that LQ poked me into planning at least a few “emergency provisions” meals. I’ll be even more grateful on the nights I need them.