Jon Linczak

I’ll just come right out and say it: it’s been a difficult two days for me.  First was my mid-year review with my manager, next was the company Town Hall, where they announce awards for those that have done exceptionally well in the last quarter.  Both have led to disappointment.

For those that know me well, they know that my job has been a difficult one.  I manage a group of 7 people at a small but rapidly growing company, and I take my job very seriously - more so than I really should admit.  After all, it’s my responsibility to not only make sure I’m keeping projects going that are critical to the continued success of the company as a whole (which supports the livelihood of around 150 people), but to balance the extremely difficult demands with making sure people’s livelihoods aren’t consumed by their jobs.  People complain about managers all the time, but they really do have incredibly difficult, if not incredibly stressful, jobs - if they really care about what they do and who they are working for.

Yesterday, I had my mid-year review, and there were two comments that hit me hard.  One, I need to be more careful about which battles I fight, and two, even though the job right now is near impossible (as said by my manager, not myself), I shouldn’t receive an outstanding rating because not everything has gone perfectly.  My initial response to the first comment was defensive.  ”They are criticizing without bothering to understand! They’re hurting the morale of the team! We’re given impossible deadlines and we all have to work enormous hours!” It’s all true, after all.  But of course, the real problem is that he’s right - if you let emotions get in the way, you’ll never be trusted to be a leader that can weather the storm.  I followed up later, wanting to learn more, gather examples, and asked for more frequent feedback.

The other comment, not getting the highest ranking, was difficult to swallow.  After all, I’ve poured my time and energy into my job.  I frequently work in the evenings to make sure things are done for the next day, taking away time from my family and my daughter.  If the criteria to receive the highest ranking is perfection, then why make the ranking a possible option, since we know no one is perfect?  It was only until later that I found out the considered ranking was more because of comment one than anything else, and my manager and I agreed to work on it to the level of his satisfaction.

The following day, the town hall commenced.  I was really hoping this time that my team would be recognized for the enormous amount of work that we’ve been doing, especially with the recent release of the next version of our company’s flagship product. Sadly, not only did any of my team members get awarded with any recognition, but my team was left out of the teams recognized for hard work the last quarter.  Even during the time talking about the accomplishment of upgrading the company’s foundation product, my team, outside of a brief mention on the PowerPoint slide, was not even verbally mentioned for the work. It was heartbreaking.  It was as if all the time, energy and time spent away from my family and friends meant absolutely nothing.

Coming home, I spent a little time looking for some sort of relief.  Something that can tell me that what I was feeling - anger, disappointment, frustration - was justified.  What I found was this:

For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on things of the flesh, but those that live according to the Spirit set their minds on things of the Spirit.

Romans 8:5

And I realized: this entire time, all I was doing was working hard enough to gain the acceptance and recognition of my managers and my co-workers and I had been neglecting the most important thing: building a foundation of my life on Something that never changes, instead of trying to build my life on work and recognition that is forgotten and deemed of little value to those that love you the most.  After all, when you die, they aren’t going to put a note on your tombstone that he was an excellent worker.

So that’s what I want to start doing - to stop building my castle on the sand.  I choose now to build my house on the most solid and unchanging of foundations, the Rock.  It’s hard when you want to be a model Christian and demonstrate your willingness to work hard to remember that.  I’m considering this my reminder and your call for help.  If you see me going of course, give me a shove back into the right direction.

In this day and age, and the work I do, I know I shouldn’t be shocked when people from all over the world collaborate to solve a problem.  But I’m shocked anyway.

For those not in the know, my basic disappearance from the rest of the world over the last month or so was because of the tremendous project we released at work to move from an old version of our software to a newer one.  It seems simple at the surface (don’t you just run the upgrade?), but we made it all the more complicated by completely changing the architecture of the environment around 3 weeks before we had to release the changes to our clients.  It’s a long story that I won’t go into, but last weekend, when we had to release everything, minus around 7 hours of sleep, I worked around the clock.  And so did a few key individuals helping with the project, who I can’t thank enough since the design changes were really spurred on by myself.

We had a couple of key issues we needed to address after the release that our clients found.  What struck me as excited was, to figure out what was going on, we not only had multiple teams within the company reviewing and troubleshooting, but we had a consultant working remotely from Colorado, and we had our vendor from New Zealand also helping us out.  Together, we figured it out and I released that news this morning to the company.  It’s an exciting feeling knowing that people all over the world are working towards one solution.

Collaboration is an exciting thing, whether it’s online collaboration or working face-to-face together.  When working towards a common goal, the collective will always outweigh the individual.  When we have a goal to work towards, don’t ever forget that there are other people around that can help and can help you reach your goals faster.

Those who know me well know I’m not a big fan of salaried workers, especially when it’s IT- or development-related.  I’ve not done research to corroborate this, but from my personal experience, every technical job I’ve been in since I started interning in college has required extra hours to meet certain deadlines.  And it’s amazing how this doesn’t change too much from a small company just starting out to a very large company who puts a lot of attention on work/life balance initiatives.

If you’ve been following my Facebook posts, both my wife and I have posted frequently about the late hours and weekend excursions to the office for my current job.  I’m a manager of a development team, and I certainly get that with that comes a certain set of responsibilities to ensure that everything is going smoothly and we maintain the operations of the business.  Recently, however, I’ve been clocking in a good 60+ hours a week keeping up with the workload.  That’s an extra 20 hours a week I normally shouldn’t be working.  50% of my normal workload - an extra 2.5 days.  None of that is paid for by the company.

Sure, many people argue that those in salaried positions usually get paid higher (and they do) and they are compensated well through other means, like benefits (and they do).  But people in this country are forgetting what companies should be compensating for.  Companies that require this kind of workload forget the devastation it does to families: wives and husbands strain their relationships, only because they both want to spend time with each other and cannot.  If that person is a parent, they miss out on memorable and critical times in their kids’ childhoods, and often affects how their children will react in multiple social and personal scenarios for the rest of their lives.  It puts a strain on other family and friend relationships: you can’t make it to be there for a friend because you have to work late to finish that report or install that bug fix.

It also makes people forget about their real priorities.  I know a lot of people would say the following would be at the top of their list of priorities: God, self, spouse, children, family, friends.  Notice that job isn’t even in that list, yet we spend more and more time at our jobs than we do working on our biggest priorities.

Something really has to change - is it really fair for people to not only be expected and have it acceptable to work 60+ hours per week, not get any kind of monetary compensation for this, and then put such a devastating blow to their spouses, family, friends and not to mention co-workers, who could feel the backlash of a person who spent the whole night working?  I certainly don’t think so.  I believe the laws around salaried workers have to change - either find a way to compensate people monetarily for those working hours above 40 hours, or find a way to set expectations in your business so working above 40 hours each week is not necessary to maintain the stability or growth of your company.

For those that know and somehow managed to get on this blog, I used to have a blog called redarrow.  I created it back in 2004 or 2005 after some of the work I did at Hiram College, using an open-source content management system called Lenya to manage a redesign of the college’s main website.  I had asked Cameron Moll if he would graciously design the site while I did the front-end development, and the results far exceeded my expectations at the time.  From there, people had asked me to start writing about the work I had done with Lenya on the site, and the result was a series of articles that are now archived on the Apache Lenya website as a primer for getting started.

When I left, the blog pretty much died with it.  There were random posts here and there, and I tried to revive it by writing a series of articles of all the things I learned about sIFR, but not only was it ill-timed with the release of newer methods, I just never had the time personally to devote to it after getting married and focusing so much on my full-time job.  I also had high expectations for the design of my own site, and because I never liked it (I’m not a designer), it deterred me from writing.

Enter 2010: I still don’t have any extra time, especially with a beautiful baby girl born in December 2009, and as much as I’ve studied web design and design in general as much as I could, I’m still not a designer.  I also realized something: for a blog, I think content is still king and every once and a while I get the urge to write again, and I needed a platform to do it without having to spend an enormous amount of time setting it up.  So Tumblr seemed like the logical choice.

I don’t have plans to revive any of the old posts on the redarrow blog - I closed the site down several months ago and it’s going to stay that way.  And because it was a subdomain of a domain I don’t control, I won’t be able to redirect it either, so sorry internets for adding more link rot, but that’s the way it has to be.