Mild Mild West

This is a rambling, long post, very stream of consciousness and grumpy and somewhat off the thread of telephony most of the time.  But it will jump the story from 2010 to the end of 2021.  Be warned.

We left off last time in the summer of my discontent.  Laid off during the great recession caused… to put blame straight where it belongs… by the very rich being unhappy at getting too small of a return on their billions… found me unemployed in middle-age. I was also in a Silicon Valley that had left behind its amateur roots and was insisting on degrees far in excess of the needs for many positions… all the better to claim they cannot fill positions without more H1-B visas being issued.  So I was feeling pretty down.

I ran into old friends and former co-workers, all likewise laid off, and most more qualified than me at almost everything, at EDD workshops and outplacement seminars, all with a mild air of desperation about them as the Obama administration handed out money via “quantitative easing” to the same billionaires who caused the crisis… the same billionaires who get irate if you give a poor child a free meal at school… while the unemployed hung out on their meager weekly check.  Here in California that was, and remains, $450 a week.  A lot when I was 22, that was not much at age 45 with a wife and child at home, a mortgage to pay, and having just spent a chunk of change updating the kitchen.

Even my writing… I kept the blog going… seems a bit more complaint ridden than usual, which is saying something for me.  Looking back at July 2010 I was mostly bitching over and over about Blizzard’s Real ID plan, and idea so obviously bad that even they realized it in the end.  Angry Wilhelm is angry.

In the midst of sending out resumes and cover letters and entering them in my ever growing spreadsheet tracking responses… which was a big fat 1 in 30 over the course of the first 120 entries… a friend called up.  I had worked with him back at Global Village when he was a fresh college graduate, and then again at Edify.  He had moved on to another company, Tuvox, with some other former Edify people to try and… well, make an integrated development environment for simplifying the creation of speech apps… which was what Edify had been about… only this time focused on VXML.

I have written about the broken promise of VXML previously.  See links at the end of the post.

I may have, in the past, glossed over what a bad idea making an easy to use integrated development environment for speech apps is.  The Tuvox app would be my 5th such app, depending on whether or not you count and IDE built on top of another IDE to simplify the development of specific sub-genres of speech apps, like the voice banking app I mentioned last time around.

Maybe “bad idea” is too strong.  They were all generally good tools in their own way, that simplified and sped up speech app development.  The problem is that “real” developers don’t want something easy, they want something that they can type code into, and any attempt to put a layer, be it GUI or keywords or pseudo code, between them and the actual output makes them bristle and stomp their feet and pout.  They want to use that code snippet they found on Stack Overflow dammit.

So, basically there isn’t a real, professionally oriented market out there for such development environments, which inevitably leads any company that makes one to have to form a professional services department to use the tool to build apps for customers who do not have any developers at all.

Which is what Tuvox ended up doing.  But then somebody at a company called West went out looking for something to help bootstrap them into VXML, as they were writing all their apps in some home brew code environment that literally just used Notepad.  So they bought Tuvox for the IDE… and maybe the customers… certainly that Tuvox had customers so brought revenue to the table didn’t hurt… to make their IDE the default development environment for speech apps going forward.

I’ll cut to the chase and tell you that it didn’t work out.  The devs would rather write raw VXML in Notepad that use any sort of fancy keyword based short cut.  Also, that West really wanted their devs to use the app seems dubious given the at best temperate support it got once it arrived.

West at the same time bought an Australian company called Holly Connects that had a VXML “voice browser,” which is the term used for an IVR that uses VXML to drive calls.  I was signed up due to my dubious experience with VXML certification to do the testing effort to get the Tuvox IDE to work with Holly, something that should have probably taken six months, but which I spun out into an 11 year engagement, largely based on the fact that West had a bunch of specific requirements for the IDE that we had to work through. That was the first few years of reasons why developers didn’t adopt it.  We had to fix all those problems!

We needed to migrate the server side from Windows Server to Linux, change up how builds were move from environment to environment, add in some new VXML options, change the underlying database from MySQL to Postgres, and a few dozen other things I’ve forgotten.

So I got to stick around.  I started as a contractor… which I hated, but beggars can’t be choosers and I needed a paycheck… and eventually was hired on as a regular employee.  The IDE carried on for a while, and was still in use when I was laid off, but only because there were some apps still on it.  I was working on yet another simplified IDE for creating voice apps at that point, based on an even dumber premise, but I’ll get to that.

There isn’t a lot interesting about the app at this point.  The company was the interesting bit.

I rant a lot about mergers and acquisitions, and I think with good reason, because I have been up front and center during quite a few such transactions which always leaves almost everybody worse off, save for a few beneficiaries.  Wall Street has license to make literally anything worse for everybody so long as they can at least pretend shareholder value was marginally inflated.

Before I get to West, I want to make clear my opinion that mergers and acquisitions are never beneficial in any of the ways promised.  They nearly always harm the customers, reduce market competition, reduce employee headcount, and end up with the whole ecosystem around both companies suffering.

Mergers and acquisitions are done for two reasons, one for each side of the deal.

The first is on the buyers side, which is to make the line go up.  If a public company is not performing to Wall Street’s expectations, one sure fire way to fix that is to acquire a competitor.  Any competitor will do, so long as they bring in some money.  When you acquire another company, with stock if possible, and certainly as little cash as you can manage, for accounting purposes it is a revenue and balance sheet neutral transaction.  You have traded something of value, cash and stock, for something assumed to be of equal value, the other company.  The company you buy is always assumed to be worth exactly what you paid for it unless something is drastically wrong.

That valuation may change later, but in the moment it is always an equal trade, so any revenue from the company acquired automatically boosts that of the acquiring company.  We saw that, as an example, with the Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard.  Revenue was up for XBox thanks to Candy Crush Saga and WoW and Call of Duty.  Instant win, line successfully made to go up!

Maybe you might want the customers of the acquired company or some asset or technology, but it is always to make the line go up.  Then you make it go up further by laying off all redundant staff, chopping everything to the bone, and maybe discontinuing products that compete with products you already had in order to force customers to adopt yours, which is a sales boost too!

The second is on the selling side, because there has to be a buyer and a seller.  The seller is selling not to make the line go up for their company… the line might even be going down, or threatening to go down… but to cash out.  The seller side of an acquisition is almost always driven by somebody wanting to get paid.  Nobody sells because they think the two companies will be stronger or in a better market position or will serve customers better or any of the press release bullshit.  That is always, 100% lies.  It is always because some major investor wants to get paid.  The actual future of the company does not enter into it.  It doesn’t matter if it is a good, profitable business that might continue to run and generate revenue for decades, it must be destroyed if a major shareholder wants their money out for some reason.

Edify was sold to S1 to cash out VCs.  Edify was sold again to Intervoice to cash out more investors.  Intervoice was sold to Convergys to appease the board of directors.  Tuvox, which had a tidy, stable business, was sold to West to cash somebody out.  Out in the world, every acquisition it like that.  T-Mobile buys Sprint, somebody wants to cash out.  VMware buys Pivotal Labs, somebody (Michael Dell) wants to cash out.  Broadcom buys VMware, somebody wants to cash out.  Broadcom, on the business to business front, is an awful company that nobody should do business with if they have any other option, being a latter day IBM in letting customers down… and I wasn’t a fan of VMware honestly… but who cares, somebody wanted to cash out.

The fact that West actually wanted to use the Tuvox tech was somewhat incidental, an excuse to make the purchase.  The actual purchase included revenue, so made the line go up.  That was the goal.  Likewise with Holly.  They had customers and revenue and the line went up.

Which brings me around to West as a company.  Founded back in the 80s in Omaha, Nebraska, its first big success was doing the back end and routing for the Psychic Hotline and other 976 numbers of that era.  (Maybe I should have done a post about those.  The Simpsons did an episode about them at one point!)  They got into other lines, did call centers and all sorts of other things eventually.  But after initial success West ended up being an acquisition company.  The tale of West is the tale of completing acquisitions to achieve success… to make the line go up.

West was a mediocre company, it stood out in no way, save for the fact that it went public (and later went private then went public again then was bought and brought private again) and then kept revenues going up by buying a couple companies a year.

One of the reasons I mock people like Lars Wingefors, the idiot running the Embarrassment Group, is that these yokels in Omaha… not one visionary or Silicon Valley wunderkind in the bunch, just a bunch of stolid, work a day, mid-westerners getting stuff done… essentially ran an acquisition Ponzi scheme for about 20 of the 30 years the company was independent, just piling on new companies, adding their revenue to the total, so that shareholders were, if not jumping for joy, at least saw the line going up a bit every year.

I know the Wikipedia article on the company is shy some acquisitions, but just going down the list over the years gives you a sense of what they were up to.  They knew how to acquire companies, spent the minimum amount of time and effort assimilating them into the whole, then continued to roll on like some Katamari Damacy ball of disparate telephony concerns held together by little more than that they reported to the same executive staff and board of directors and all used the same payroll method.

They were good at finding companies that had investors who wanted to cash out.  That was the business model.  All the myriad little businesses, they just had to keep ticking, either making more money or cutting costs, all in service of the line going up.  West was a prime example of a company that wasn’t about making anything in particular.  It was just there to make money and keep investors happy by increasing shareholder value.  They were not overtly evil.  They were, as a company, actually kind of pleasant.  I worked with people who had been there since they graduated from college.  Compared to the asshattery of Intervoice or S1 or the duplicity of Nuasis or the crass disregard of Convergys, West wasn’t a bad place.  Kind of dumb at times, and always looking to save a dime… I worked in three different buildings and finally from home, each move a cost cutting measure… but they kept the whole thing going.

It was less a unified corporation than a bunch of independent companies flying in loose formation and held together by administrative functions like HR and payroll.  Occasionally the company would try to unify something, like getting us all to use the same JIRA instance… or at least be on the same JIRA plan… but mostly everybody flew on and kept to their spot in formation.  It was a semi-benevolent Computer Associates model. (CA would acquire companies, pare them to the absolute bone, raise support pricing for customers, and milk each buy for all it was worth.  West was never that dedicated to being assholes.)

The problem was that each group was more focused on budget than growth, of making the line go up through cost cutting rather than expanding markets.  The whole “you need money to make money” thing, investing in new things, was largely absent.  Leadership was administrative, able to act as a caretaker but not at all poised to lead the company into new markets.  Entropy was out largest issue.  But what do you expect with a few dozen companies that focused on different areas.  We had an asset management group… a repo depot company… that focused on buying and reselling office furniture bought from bankruptcies and then sold to startups.

To counteract that, more companies had to be purchased which only increased the problem.  The line cannot go up forever.  You have to do something that resets the line.

And so, part way through my tenure, West was acquired by a capital management group… because, again, somebody at West wanted to cash out.  Whether they wanted to cash out because they were afraid the music would stop and the party would end or because they wanted to put it all into Bitcoin, I have no idea.  But, as noted, nobody sells unless the want to cash out.

Jerry Yang had huge offers for Yahoo, Google would have made him rich beyond… well, probably now outdated dreams of avarice…  but he didn’t want to cash out. (And he was widely reviled at the time for not selling out as it would have increased shareholder value.)  However, he was also a founder, and founders sometimes still care about their creations.  Any CEO who isn’t a founder should be considered a mercenary, somebody given a sinecure because they have VC or Wall Street friends or management hair or can lie convincingly.  If non-founder CEO stands up in front of the company and says he cares about the product or the customers or (big red flag) says the company is like a family, that person will sell you out the moment it is in their best interest regardless of the outcome.  But even founders get tired and cash out eventually.  Edify had a founder CEO and he screwed us over to get his and went on to work for the VCs he helped sell us out.

West ended up being bought by what I would call a second tier capital management group, one whose strategy seemed to be to look at was Berkshire Hathaway was doing and then try to do the same.  BH bought a real estate company, they bought one.  BH bought a regional confectioner, they bought one.  BH bought a telecom concern, they bought… us.

West, was of course, a capital management wet dream, a host of companies to divide up, peel off, and either sell or bring public.  They could spent a decade on West, make a real meal of buffing up bits and pieces, making them shiny yet hollow, and selling them off.  One way or another, they would cash out.  But first they had to do the prep work.

Right off the bat they changed the name of the company.  West didn’t have a tech vibe, and probably had a bit of a dowdy reputation in whatever circles even bothered to discuss it.  They went with Intrado, the name of one of the companies West bought back in 2006 and which, coincidentally, was once an Edify customer that I did some work with around their warning system products for nuclear power plants and oil refiners, an auto-dialer to let you know to shelter in place of evacuate immediately depending on the level of disaster and the priorities of the purchasing entity… do they want to save everybody or would they like the locals to shelter in place and not jam up the roads while the execs flee for safety.

That is just my cynicism talking on that one.  I worked on the auto-dialer aspect and had no insight into actual use and planning of the systems.

Then there was a re-org… about as non-nonsensical as every past re-org because how do you even organize a pile of disparate companies… a few early, easy sell-offs to competitors (line went up for somebody else, capital management got a small cash out)… and then it was time for the big plan.  For many of us, it was going to be buzzword time as we would become an agile cloud based concern.

My group was going to… oh, you can see this coming can’t you… here it is… make an easy to use integrated development environment to make the development of voice apps easy.  Only, this time in the cloud.  Also… and this is another constantly recycled and very flawed idea I may not have mentioned… it was going to be presented to customers “as is” and we were absolutely not going to do special, one-off customization for big clients and blah blah blah.

Have I covered the lack of demand for an easy to use IDE for speech app creation sufficiently so far?  I think so.

Meanwhile, the “take it or leave it” philosophy for enterprise apps falls apart the very second the sales team thinks their bonuses might be in jeopardy because a potential deal hinges (in their mind) on a feature we don’t have.  A considerable portion of my career has involved doing features for specific deals.  There was an Edify release that I referred to as the “Toys R Us” release because it had features just for that deal and they were the only ones to ever use it. (And I think that deal fell through in the end, which is often how it goes.)  I have been around when we have mutated the core of an entire product line to meet the needs of a single customer… though that is usually because the product has no customers yet and sales was desperate to close

By this point, I didn’t even blink at the prospect.  You get a bad rep if you’re always saying “we tried that before and it didn’t work” or if you even ask “so how is this going to be different than the last attempt?” so I gave up on that, feeling fine just going along to see if the person driving whatever the new plan is had anything new that might alter the outcome of if they just had to come up with something that sounded good and were content to figure out the details later.

The latter.  It is, 90% of the time, the latter.  Nobody has a plan.  Or if they have a plan it is more of a concept of a plan, some high level ideas.  Or if they have thought about the plan and maybe have some details, they haven’t attempted in any way to validate their ideas against what others have done.  Or they’ve let their nephew, who just got their MBA, work up a plan so detached from reality that it boggles the mind.  But when the CEO or the CTO or the director of engineering gets up and has a broad strokes vision and a goal, they are bullshitting you.  They don’t understand the actual problem, or if they do they can’t change it and have been told there job is to sell the idea and figure it out later.

At one point, mid-career, when I was a manager and hiring fresh out of college devs rather than anybody more senior because “we didn’t want some other company’s bad habits,” thus perpetuating the situation that has come back to bite me ever since, I would occasionally get one of these fresh faced devs to confide in my during their monthly one on one that they were worried that there was something WRONG with the company, that people were agreeing to nonsense or making crazy demands or telling customers that we did things or had features that maybe existed in some notes on a white board in a conference room and would tell me they were very worried about this and wondered how long we could survive like this.

At that point I was experienced enough… and had gone through that “how can we possibly be so fucked up?” portion of my career… to break the news to them that all software companies were like this.  Maybe not all to the same degree.  Some were worse at one thing and better at another.  But it was all an act.  To work in Silicon Valley for even a few years is to know why “fake it until you make it” is the unofficial motto of the place.  And that attitude, that we’ll just do this now and figure out the consequences later, has bound up not just tech, but anything VCs and Wall Street touch because the only consequence they care about is getting paid… you know, cashing out.  So the idea that somebody like Elon Musk, who has half-assed his way through his entire career, who is the CEO of multiple companies while shit posting on Twitter all day and playing Diablo IV all night… which tells you exactly what a sinecure a CEO position actually is… is going to give advice on how the government should be run… well, that should make you very scared, because the end goal of all his type is to get paid… to cash out… and to screw over everybody else.

So I went along with the plan.  I did training on Google Cloud, I did all our SAFe Agile classes, I asked questions, followed up, did my work, drove meetings, learned to use Miro, and was often the only person to even pretend to be paying attention during some ceremonies like retro and planning sessions.

All of which still ended up with me getting laid off during the holidays in 2021.  Companies love to lay people off during the holidays.  They want that off their books in the current calendar year but are too lazy to get it done early.  My position, along with many others… most filled by people over age 50… crazy coincidence there… were eliminated.   Sure, a 20 something dev with a master’s degree in computer science on an H1-B visa was put into a position so similar that I had to hand off all my tasks to them… the only surprise in that was that they didn’t just drive us all out the door with a stick like most layoffs.  They actually gave us notice and expected us to prep our replacements.  That they bungled picking my replacement so I got about half a day to hand off was not my fault.  And I wished my replacement well.  I had worked with them before.  They were, no doubt, going to do a better job than I.  Win for the company… but there I was, unemployed again.

I got my severance and my accrued vacation and a subscription to an outplacement service that did a decent job helping me update my resume and then went through all the usual routines about how to get a job… a job working for an outplacement service, because that is all the people who work there have any real, practical experience doing.

I was now in my mid-50s and without a lot of hope.  I had been, during my whole tenure at West… the company, after I left, sold the group that held the name Intrado and so had to change its name back to West… some capital management genius in action… quietly but persistently looking for a “real” job, as the whole gig seemed pretty temporary when I started.

I went on a lot of interviews over those eleven years.  My cell phone went from an oddity I kept around for emergencies to my real contact number so I could go outside or into a conference room to do a phone screen.  I am honestly surprised I got as much response as I did.  Silicon Valley must have been desperate again.  But I lacked the all important degree in computer science, now a base level requirement for everybody besides the receptionist in many companies, and I wasn’t obviously an expert on anything.

My career has always involved being more of a generalist and picking up whatever needed to be done rather than being the best, or even very good, at one thing in particular.  I ran standup.  I groomed the backlog and was the gatekeeper for acceptance criteria on our JIRA board.  I was the enforcer for the project manager and product owner because I was in a technical position but not a developer.  I wrote an automated script suite in Postman to test our API.  I knew enough SQL to validate things in the database.  I always ran our web apps with dev tools open and knew enough to write decent steps to reproduce with the right snippets when it came to bugs.  And, somehow, I always managed to find the most bizarro world bugs that got past the devs and their unit and build tests, usually entirely by accident, and almost always because I would be bored and start wondering about possible end user scenarios we might come across.

I have run into any number of people who think of QA as little better than monkeys or who think banging on the keyboard is a good way to test or that any test case not documented in advance and automated is below notice.  It is listening to customers, watching how customers use the app, and learning from that which informs a lot of what I do.  Unfortunately, it is a rather D20 sort of process, where I can spend all day going down such paths and not finding anything, then will roll a 20 and find the not entirely improbably path through the product that crashes the server.

So it goes.  It is tough to get that across on a resume and the great wall of HR wouldn’t care if you could.  Customer focus is a buzzword, not a vocation and not one any public company really cares about, press releases and corporate visions aside.  You have to match the HR keywords, meet their criteria matrix, and pass the glance test for recruiter, HR, management, and so on to be considered… unless you know somebody on the inside.  And even that doesn’t always help.

So where does one go when Silicon Valley is clearly done with you?  Again, I look at LinkedIn and saw profiles of people my age, former coworkers on my contact list, who were much better at various still valid technologies who retired or went to work at Best Buy or found some niche job that just keeps the mortgage paid.  Who hires a “not even a has been because that requires you to have been” with a background in telephone technology that is mostly tech trivia these days?

Next up, the final chapter in this tale that has meandered well off of the goal of telephony and has become an old man ranting about the valley.  Spoiler: I do, in fact, find a job!