ADC 2018 Lightning Talk : I feel bad about this, but so should they

Another transcript. The thing that came across in the talk that doesn’t translate to cold text is that this whole experience was amusing. My audience got it. The identity of the company is known to a few people, and I want it to remain discreet. First, I’m not in this business to embarrass people. Second, I’d quite like the choice about where and how I make a living to remain at least partly in my hands. Nevertheless, a true story this good cannot be passed up. While my treatment looks fairly shoddy, I don’t suspect malice: merely the usual consequence of happenstance meeting poor governance.

Update: With my own permission, here is a recording from a phone on the stage. You might still need the transcript. I had exactly five minutes, which is why the pace is pretty quick.

Can you smell that? Must’ve left a bridge in the oven. My topic at last year’s session needed to be handled carefully, so I read from a script. Here we go again.

In April, I resigned from ROLI to pursue a more intentionally fragmented career. My reasons aside, ROLI enters this talk only because the day after I gave my notice, I received an email from California. That coincidence begins this story.

The weeks that followed included hours of transatlantic phone calls, some easy, some hard. I spoke to ‘audio-famous’ people. The kind who have Wikipedia pages that they didn’t write themselves. These people had achieved a lot in their careers, before taking a corporate vow of silence and retreating from the world.

In June, arrangements were made to fly me to San Francisco, on the promise that I was about to meet a team of great people. I asked about those people. That information (even how many of them I’d meet) was classified.

To paraphrase, however, my brain contained something they might want to borrow. What this might be was a mystery then and remains a mystery now. They told me next to nothing and — joy of joys — gave me nothing to sign.

At the first of what turned out to be eight interviews, the opening question I was asked was ‘Would you please leave the building and come back in 45 minutes?’ This set the tone. The original itinerary was filleted to a fine mist. I was passed from hand to hand and back again, parked periodically on the sofa in reception to improve my acquaintance with their armed security guards.

The project coming together in the building around me was clearly a vast skunkworks, and I tried to piece together the details. I asked questions, naturally: What united cinematic colorists and a recently-acquired spatial audio company? Why was a famously expensive headquarters, ten or so blocks away, missing them? Why the hell, with all this talent on tap, would you fly a man over 5,000 miles only to do so little with him? That information was classified.

One of my interviewers was a co-founder and former CTO of a company that you’ve definitely heard of. On LinkedIn, his job title is now just a dash. I’ve been interviewed by a person who makes a living as a pregnant pause.

He played Bad Cop. Treating my lack of big corporate experience as a calculated affront to his dignity, one of his opening questions is why my career at ROLI had run in reverse. That’s harsh but actually fair: I’d prepared more than one answer to that one on the plane over. Five years after playing a central role getting the first few products out of the door, and four job title changes later, nobody really knew what I was doing there anymore, least of all me.

I didn’t tell him, although it’s true, that I was really after his job as a punctuation character.

Underscoring even those interviews that went well was a familiar note of crisis. Behind the scenes, phenomenal rank was being pulled. I quietly added some marginal notes to the chapter plan of my ‘narcissism in tech’ book.

Pencil sketch: The well of technology is looking somewhat dry in recent years. For want of a better plan, everything’s now driven by engagement data. Big tech is researching the psychological equivalent of crack cocaine while waiting to see if its competitors have a better idea. Little VC-backed companies have a similar problem. With no dependable long-term trends, a long term plan cannot be made to stick, so they grab the first thing they can, just like everyone else. What I saw in California taught me that this pattern extends as high and as wide as the eye can see.

For my entertainment, one of the smarter corners of one of the world’s wealthiest companies was candidly panicking its arse off about the kind of capital it would find down the side of an old armchair. You don’t stay rich by not speculating, but a pet project like this is always bait for executives to meddle.

As my first day in California drew to a close, I got to hang out with ten of my would-be colleagues: this started well, but went on until somewhat past 4am London time. My peripheral vision had started to fade. They were all called Steve. I ached from the mouth up and was numb from the chin down.

Halfway through the second day, I was told the job title I was interviewing for. I learned that I was in the frame because I’d spoken well at a conference some years previously. Not for the first time, I was genuinely impressed that any company had the capacity to review notes going back so far, but was no less confused about the action they had taken as a consequence.

And then, when I got home, nothing. My wife fretted about the possible change of continent while I periodically poked at the anthill across the pond. Four weeks later, I was informed that Bad Cop had the casting vote and I was out of the running for a position I hadn’t even applied for. Not to worry, though: they were scratching around for other opportunities.

In truth, I think I was used as a rubber duck. My purpose there was as an object that they could talk to to rescue their project. A friend of mine, insisting from the start that I should dodge this bullet, showed me a page from a tech-leaks website. There I found a plausible explanation, in the public domain, about what they were doing. It accounted for all of the people I’d met.

One morning, nearly two months after my trip, I awoke to a weirdly terse email from the person who’d first made contact: ‘I’m sorry but our plans do not include you’.

But by then, of course, the feeling was fucking mutual.

 

3 thoughts on “ADC 2018 Lightning Talk : I feel bad about this, but so should they”

  1. I listened to your talk on Thanksgiving, an American celebration about killing millions of turkeys, and a recalling an historic event some 350 years ago. At that time, a group of native Americans invited a caravan of poor white Europeans to dinner to feast on the bounty of the Americas. Sometime shortly afterward, the white guests killed the hosts, waging a war of oppression until the present day. I am so pleased, Dr Supper, you were refused admission to the American club – the world is a better place, your ideas, solutions will, no doubt, find a steady hold in a universe not fixed on absurdity. Well done, Sir.

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