johnmaconline

We filed into the funeral parlor, knowing but not yet believing our fate.

Emotions are running hot. This is the morning after the leak, and the execs don’t yet know it, but the leak strategy has backfired. 

The tension manifests itself differently in each of us. I can’t even look at them, but my friend on the silicon design team hasn’t broken eye contact since we passed through the door. He’s shooting lasers. Around the room, grown-ass men can’t sit still in their seats. 

Just waiting their turn.

The beginning went according to the familiar project funeral script — gotta cut costs.

“Blah, blah, blah…synergies…blah, blah, blah…core focus…blah, blah, blah strength alignment…blah, blah, blah…”

“Now, we’d like to open it up to questions.”

I was crazed and hopping mad, but I had little courage at this time in my career (and life). I was never the guy to open his mouth. I was too afraid. But I couldn’t let this go. Could I form the words? Could I find the courage?

Luckily, I didn’t have to. My colleague opened the floodgates.

“Mr. [VP], you told us what was happening but never said why, specifically. Why (on earth) are you cancelling this project?”

I assume these guys are good at reading a room; reading this one wasn’t hard. Mr. VP found a sacrifice.

“Sure, I’ll hand it over to Mr. [Lieutentant], who’s more familiar with the details.“

“Thank you, [VP]. We are canceling this program for two big reasons…” 

Word has gotten out.

It always does in these situations. Barry tells me, I tell Doug, and so on. The executives usually leak it on purpose so that the catharsis can begin before the official word comes down. It’s an executive strategy to soften the blow. 

Unfortunately, me and many of my colleagues in this band of pirates have been to this rodeo before. That’s the tech industry. Most of us have a professional past littered with the carcasses of projects that could have been, should have been, or never had a chance.

We know the feeling. Its resignation tinged with a dash of regret and a sprinkle of mourning. And then we move on. A bit like when your favorite Uncle passed on when you were 12. It hurts; you mourn and will remember him nostalgically, but you move on. 

And let’s face it, as engineers, we’re the guys in the ditch with the shovels or 20 feet up in the bucket with the rubber-handled tools. We’re the doers. We make little rocks out of big rocks. We don’t get a say, but why should we? What do we know of the market, balance sheets, or quarterly reports?

But do you know what engineers do know and do care about? 

Making stuff. Making great stuff. 

All we want is to make something that somebody else cares about. Maybe once in your life, you realize the dream of making something truly great. Those opportunities don’t come around every day. 

Official project (or division or company) funeral services follow a familiar script. The leader stands up front and talks about regret, how it’s not our fault, and how we’re gonna come out of this stronger and better. They wax eloquent with buzzwords like synergies, core focus, and alignment like they mean anything to the guys with the hammers and lunch pails. 

But the vibe today at this funeral service is very different. The leak didn’t smooth out the edges. The pirates are angry. 

Because this funeral isn’t for a favorite Uncle. You just murdered our precious baby girl.

We’re gonna say our piece. 

And though we may not have insight into the board room, the handshake agreements, or whose bonus is at risk, we know, sure as shit, that Gladys’s New Shoes is worth making. We know this one is great and will make a difference. For many of us, maybe all of us, this will be our professional legacy. 

Mutiny is at hand.

“You’re joking, right?”

“I wish I was. I’ve been fighting for the last two weeks. They won’t listen. They’re doing it. They’re gonna kill the project. They’ll announce it tomorrow. I felt you should know.”

“How? Why?”

“They [the mobile phone division execs] just lost [their biggest phone customer]. They’re cutting everything so that when they announce the loss to the street, they’ll have something to soften the blow.”

“But this is THE FIX!!??”

“Of course, but they don’t see it that way. Our division’s name is ‘mobile phones’ and this isn’t a mobile phone.” (ah, the fear-driven, short-sightedness rears its ugly head)

“Won’t the street see that we’re gonna make it up on iPod?”

“Apple won’t let us tell them.”

And so here we sat as the early-evening sun flooded the cafeteria with a pall that matched our emotions. I could see he was drained. I had just found out, but he had been living this nightmare for two weeks and had fought the good fight. 

But it was over. 

We stayed for a while as he patiently played therapist while I bitched and moaned, swang from anger to sadness, and started to come to grips with reality. My dream project, the one that intersected my geeky fan-boy past with the impending tech cultural shift of our future, was over. And I had no say in the matter. 

Gladys’s New Shoes had just been run over by a bus full of fearful executives afraid of getting scolded for what they lost rather than being excited and confident about the possibilities of what could be.

“Oh, please, mommy, don’t be mad at me!”

I walked back to my desk in zombie mode and sank into my seat. As I stared at nothing, the lead silicon engineer popped in and said, “Hey, man, did you see that [the VP of the division] just invited us to an all-hands for the New Shoes team? I wonder what’s up?”

“Sorry, man. We just got invited to our funeral.” 

Gladys’s New Shoes were to be the first generation iPod Nano and the first iPod with Video.

Both cutting edge and groundbreaking. Statistically speaking, you probably owned one of them.

In our lab, we have some of the (extremely confidential) new bits and pieces Gladys has shared with us. I’m using them, experimenting, and figuring out how the CPU we’re making is gonna allow them to sing and dance for 24 hours on a single charge.

We’re a year or so into this whirlwind, and I’ve been to Cupertino a couple times. One Infinite Loop and De Anza 8 — where the history of my geeky youth was made. Now I’ve walked the hallways, sat in the rooms, and even scratched out a few of my own markings on whiteboards.

I can’t believe my good fortune.

Every time I show up, I get my ass kicked. They rake me over the coals. But it’s like having David Goggins as your personal trainer. He’s gonna kick your ass. You’re gonna be a dishrag and gonna wanna quit. And then tomorrow, you’re stronger.

At the end of each day’s struggle session, we go somewhere in Santa Clara county, eat sushi, smash a few beers, and talk about conquering the world.

With every fiber in my being, I know this is how great stuff is made.

It’s towards the end of a nondescript day in our office near Allentown, PA. I’m at my desk when the chief engineer of our team walks up and says, “Follow me.”

I’m not alarmed or concerned because this happens a lot. He and I have spent hours on his whiteboard working through the unending pile of hard stuff.

But we don’t go to his office. Instead, he leads me into the empty cafeteria. I can still remember the orange-ish hue of the late-day sun pouring through the large glass windows, casting its early evening glare throughout.

I take a seat, and he sits across from me. OK, now it’s weird.

I know him and his British mannerisms well. We’ve been through some shit on other projects, and certainly on this one. We have an informal manner to our relationship — friends in addition to colleagues. This seems kinda formal.

At first, he doesn’t say anything. He just kind of sighs and blinks. I can read the resignation.

And then I know. This can’t actually be happening.

I joined the cult in 1984.

I was excited to work on Gladys’s New Shoes because I’d been in the cult already for 20 years. I saw the super bowl commercial like millions of others, and then I got to touch one in person. I was hooked.

The look, smell, feel of the keys, and this new-fangled thing called a mouse. It was magical. 

In high school in 1984, the Mac was a cool and interesting curiosity kept at arm’s length because I didn’t have one. But Penn State changed all that.

At Penn State, we had rooms full of Macintosh SE’s stationed throughout the campus. Rooms full of IBM PCs also existed, but the Mac labs were for the cool kids. Who in their right mind would want to use some ugly greyish, multi-box, wires-everywhere, DOS-based PC over the slick point-and-click beauty of the Mac SE?

“Hey man, we got a paper due tomorrow. I’m heading to the Willard Lab to get in line. You comin?” 

I was on team Steve. I grumbled when he got fired, monkeyed around with NeXT, and cheered when he came back. 

As I jumped into the New Shoes project, my favorite Mac of all time was sitting in my kitchen (yes, the kitchen) — the iMac G4, looking like a desk lamp with a beautiful 15″ flat-panel display and ice-white hemispherical base. It was a beautiful addition to the kitchen decor. 

Then came the iPod. Like with the first Mac I touched, it instantly hooked me. When I held that smooth, shiny deck of cards and spun the click-wheel under my thumb, I knew this was my thing. I bought one as a “gift for my wife.” Wink, wink. 

And now I was lucky enough to be working on the next generation.

The engineering team is rolling.

Apple, famously, and to their credit, is hard on their partners and suppliers. But not in the “we’re gonna grind you up and toss you to the wind so we get ahead” way. 

I’ve had the misfortune of working with those customers. They abuse you on price, time, and effort to lever their competitors and undercut them by pennies. They chew you up, spit you out, and think nothing of it. As a supplier, you can’t succeed. You’re better off without their money. 

No, Apple is tough because they do care. They care deeply about what they’re making — the thing that has their name on it. They want it to be awesome. And to make it awesome, they hold themselves and their partners accountable. They demand excellence. You’re in the fire when you work with Apple, but it’s a cleansing fire. Not everybody can handle it. 

I can handle the fire. Our team can handle the fire. 

All told, we’re about 20 people inside a company of 5000. We’re like an internal startup. Not exactly outcasts, but definitely outsiders because we’re not working on the core product of our business unit, mobile phones. 

We’re a bunch of pirates. 

We’re small and energized. Innovative and agile. The executives aren’t lording over us. We’re an afterthought, which we thought was awesome. We’re working long, hard, and quite frankly, killing it. 

What’s today’s unsolvable problem? And then we solve it.

I’m exhausted, but exhausted in the way I am after finishing a triathlon. 

And we knew that at the end of this race, we’d be standing on the top step of the podium. Future Agere Systems executives will point to our team and our project and say, “That’s when we went nuclear. These 20 guys made this company.” 

We’re gonna be able to do anything we want. We had the ship, cannons, and the crazies with nothing to lose. We had the power. 

Ah, how naive I was. 

Apple builds consumer trinkets like it’s a matter of national security — all to feed the hype machine. Marketing brilliance. 

If you’re familiar with the Steve Jobs era, you know that their “one more thing” product announcements were always a self-congratulatory exercise in pretentious back-patting. 

“Scotty, engage the maximum hype generation drive!”

“I’m giving her all she’s got, Captain! She’s gonna blow!”

As such, they kept their new products’ specifications, development partners, and suppliers entirely on the down-low. As a partner (and for this project, the main partner), we had to sign NDA’s not just for normal proprietary information protection but also promising never to disclose we were working with them.

We had to create an internal code name for Apple and another for iPod as part of our contractual obligation. We were to always use these codenames, even within our office walls. 

Somebody suggested Gladys for Apple and New Shoes for the iPod. So we walked around talking about Gladys’s New Shoes. Presentations, whiteboard sessions, and documentation all referred to Gladys’s New Shoes. Imagine the blank stares and exaggerated blinks from our colleagues. 

I’ve worked under real security on very secure programs in the top-secret world. This was just funny. For what? Gladys’s New Shoes was a fitting name. 

And this level of pretend security, specifically not announcing to the street that we were involved, was part of our downfall. Because eventually, we’d be stupid enough to kick Gladys and her New Shoes right out the door.

My team single-handedly destroyed a $2B company, and then I got fired. 

This is less of a personal regret than a regret by association, and reliving it boils my blood, even today. 

It’s 2003, and I’m working at a semiconductor company called Agere Systems, which is a spinoff from the former Lucent Technologies and AT&T. We invent, design, and build the core technologies for cell phones, computers, network infrastructure, and many other electronic devices you’ve had in your pocket, in your car, or in your office.

I’ve just landed my dream gig — lead systems engineer on an exciting project. The project? It’s the big guy. The one that took the recently back-on-the-map Apple and catapulted it to the stratosphere.

“1000 songs in your pocket.”

And 2003 was the moment of dancing silhouettes with white headphones on primary background colors. Go to the gym on a Monday and see a few people with the tell-tale white headphones. Go again on Friday, and you see twice as many. Week after week. 

You don’t need special insight, marketing expertise, or anything other than a set of open eyes. Walk down the street. This shit is happening. 

This was the beginning of the Holy Growth phase for the iPod and Apple. The genesis of the changeover from cultural curiosity to planetary vernacular. The heel in the proverbial hockey stick curve. 

No matter. Even a giant in the industry with $2B in revenue can screw the pooch.

After two announced delays, we finally boarded. 

I’m fake smiling at people as I snake through the aisle full of lucky bastards up front. I hate them with all of my being. 

All the while straining my neck to catch a glimpse of seat 23D. For sure, I was giving the death stare to whoever had kicked me out. Daggers, baby. Get ready to have me think that I’ve made you uncomfortable with my death stare. 

But it was empty. And not just that seat. The entire section of rows 16 to 29 was completely absent of seated passengers. What’s going on here? I didn’t know whether to be annoyed or elated. What did this mean? I didn’t know what to feel. 

So I asked the flight attendant. She said, “Oh, this section is empty for weight distribution purposes.”

Huh? All of it? That’s bullshit!

Here’s the thing — my father was a professional pilot. I grew up in airplanes. I know this is true. My brain knows it’s a real thing. I’ve been in airplanes with him and personally witnessed him move people around for proper weight distribution. 

But I can’t get my emotions out of the way of my brain. It makes no sense. 

“Keep moving, sir. Your seat is just back there.”

When I got to 37D, I found exactly what I assumed I’d find given how this entire mess had gone so far — two people occupying seats 37D and F. My bookends. 

I thought to myself, “Oh, here we go. Fourteen more hours of this shit.” Wheels up. 

And then an angel appeared.

“Sir, now that we’re airborne, we can redistribute the weight. Would you be interested in changing seats?”

Uh, would I? All I know is that within ten seconds, I was back in that aisle, being led to a new and promised land. I don’t remember standing up. I probably left some of my crap in my old seat. I’m sure I stepped on the person next to me. 

“Sir, take your pick. You’re welcome to just about any seat in this section.”

So I chose. Really, there was only one choice. 

I sat my ass right down in seat 23D and contemplated the fourteen hours of relative bliss ahead. 

I was that guy. 

You know the one. The one you hate. The one you and your people shake their heads at. You see him at the restaurant, sometimes at the doctor’s office, and always at the DMV. And today, my fellow humans saw him at the airport in Doha. 

“What’s the deal with that guy?”

And then, suddenly, I had a moment of clarity and calm amid my temper tantrum. 

It didn’t come from bullshit, fake optimism like “making lemonade from lemons” or “smiling on the outside so my inside will believe it.” I couldn’t possibly have conjured any of that. 

But somehow, I stumbled on a moment of mindful awareness of my presence in that time and space and gratefulness for being. I’m in freakin Doha, Qatar. That’s kinda cool.

Yup, the old me also thinks that sounds nuts. Was I chemically altered?

An actual calm came over me as I paced in the corner behind the gate seating. I saw the light bulb. I took a seat.

I’d be lying if I said that now all was well, but at least I could sit and breathe.

But this was a brief respite. The pressure was about to build again.