Stories from our software past

I'm leaving my job late this year.

I'd love to do an honest retrospective, but its super hard to do that publically without pissing anybody off. Its not that I don't have great things to say (I do). I just hate the faded, corporate approved google blog posts which seem to reject any rocking of boats so much that I have trouble seeing any humans between the words. I could talk about the good parts of working at Lever without the bad, but I'd feel like a shill.

Ugh, this sort of duplicitousness makes me feel soulless. Like I'm a vessel who's sole purpose is to channel corporate intent into the world. When I was a kid, I used to wonder sometimes if evil henchmen knew they worked for the bad guy. Are they evil too - so their motives are aligned? But they're treated so poorly. Or are they just doing their job, and feel like they're doing good in the world because their family has a meal on the table?

Which isn't to say that companies are evil - they just have this strange hollowness to them. Like we put a lot of smart, interesting people in the building each day and much less human comes out the other side.

And look at me being as guilty as everybody else here. Unsurprisingly, there are very few retrospectives in the software world on failed projects. I think the biggest reason is that companies don't actually know things (they're just groups of people after all). And individuals are disincentivized to express hurt and pain we feel about our corporate overlords. Making the company look bad is bad for your career.

Weirdly, we have a strange oral tradition in software instead. Instead of writing our failures on the internet, we talk about them at the pub with our mates. Trading war stories is an embedded tradition. And you hear all sorts of folk stories about different teams and different projects.

After Google Wave got cancelled, one of the engineers wrote a series of internal retrospective posts for future googlers to read. They were (of course) posted on our internal Wave servers. When I left, I wish I'd stolen a copy of them. Not intended for ourside eyes, they were very candid on what we did well and poorly. I don't know what happened to those posts - as I understand it, google's internal wave servers were shut down years ago. Even googlers probably can't find those treasured documents anymore. Sap of raw experience lost drizzling between in the cracks in our world.

As an example, one of wave's oft sighted reasons for failure was its lack of email integration. We actually had email integration early on (well before launch), but intentionally turned it off. The integration worked by emailing someone all the content of added blips. You could reply to an email and the reply would appear in the wave. Unfortunately, not all features could work like this. If I edited some content in a large wave, there was no way we could edit the old email. If I did that a lot, anybody using email is going to feel like they're missing out, and I'll just stop using wave's cool features. So we turned that email integration off.

In retrospect, a mistake. But here's the question: If wave had been successful, would that still seem like a bad move? Maybe the same things which today we sheepishly talk about as the reasons wave failed, we would instead tout as the secrets to our success. Its hard to tell.

Its easy to forget how new writing software is to our species. When was the first musician born? How long have we been building houses? Most industries are (at least) hundreds of years old. One of my friends makes dresses. She uses a sewing machine which was made about 100 years ago. Back when "Computer" was a job you could have in which you computed things. (Hillariously, it was considered a woman's job).

I bet when we'd only been building houses for 40 years, they fell down all the time.

So I promise you this: I'm going to write a retrospective of my time at Lever. (And a retrospective of whatever I do next, too). I'll write it now, and hide it somewhere. In a few years, Lever will either be big or dead - and in either case, my little insights and frustrations won't be relevant to lever anymore. And when that time comes, I'll post it for the world to read.

Please do the same. I don't want to lose more of our history.