I've left Microsoft, hopefully forever. If it's not forever, I will have failed utterly. Write it down.
The reasons are myriad, but the most Stank-worthy was a realization I had about two years ago. I was in a meeting where one talentless middle-manager was publicly masturbating another. Their leadership was a demonstrable disaster, yet here they were, congratulating one another for utterly wrecking something that had worked before their arrival, in front of a room full of people who knew it. We smiled tersely as the vacuous platitudes went a-flying, although in the managers' defense, they were intellectually incapable of recognizing their statements as platitudes. In fact, their gleeful obtuseness in the face of all evidence was oddly familiar. I couldn't put my finger on it. And then in my head, I substituted one line of dialogue for each of theirs:
"Heckuva job, Brownie."From that point forward, I would hear little else in meetings.
"Heckuva job, Brownie."Suddenly, something that had been gnawing at me for years made sense. Gone is the results-oriented company of my youth, which I didn't much care for but which at least shipped products, some of them even good. In its stead is an oozing behemoth where talk is the only deliverable that matters. Stupid, stupid doubletalk.
Where Wall Street sees a hopelessly flat stock, I see something more deeply personal. That stock price is a monument to Brownie's efforts. He's everywhere at Microsoft now, parroting mindless slogans about big bets, visibility, delighting the customer, and innovation. Brownie runs budgets, teams, products. Brownie is in charge. One cannot subsist on a steady diet of brownies alone, and it shows. Microsoft is malnourished. Scurvy and rickets are laying roots.
Meanwhile, I have eight years left on my mortgage, and I don't see the Brownie-era Microsoft being able to sustain the current level of employment for nearly that long. So I have avoided the mad rush to the Superdome and left town on my own timetable. But after a steady diet of brownies, am I too fat and weak to survive?