In the summer of 1999 I got to attend a get-together of Adaptec Software sales people and partners in Seville, Spain. I don’t remember the names of most of these people (except for Big John Heckethorn) but I do remember that we all had a lot of fun, particularly with a treasure hunt involving teams in jeeps cruising around the hills. There was also flamenco dancing.
(Some of) What I did at TVBLOB
Found an old piece of video that reminded me of some of the fun and challenging things I did at TVBLOB, Fabrizio Caffarelli’s second startup, including:
- Software interface and interaction design: Developed feature requests into step-by-step schematics of UI states and behaviors , worked with engineers to ensure correct and coherent implementation, worked with marketing and graphics team on graphic look-and-feel. Edited UI language directly in Java resource files (via Eclipse). Tested and refined usability, general testing.
- Customer support process: designed custom web applications and SalesForce materials and processes to integrate with company’s custom back-end systems.
- Managed, wrote, edited, and translated technical documentation for TVBLOB’s software and hardware. Provided technical input, copy editing, and translation for marketing and other materials. As part of documentation, I also did instructional videos like the above.
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Fuck-you money
In 2004, I attended a talk by Margaret Heffernan at a business women’s club in Milan. She was launching her then new book, The Naked Truth, and one of the key lessons she shared was that we all should be striving to earn “walk-away money” – the amount of money you’d need to safely walk away from any job or situation, while still being able to support yourself for as long as needed.
“Walk-away money” is the polite phrase; it’s also called “fuck-you money.”
Another term for it is freedom.
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Doing it tough: California lockdown 2020
Translation for my non-Aussie readers: “Doing it tough” is an Australian expression that roughly means “to do something that is hard” (sometimes willingly, sometimes not), as in: “Melbourne has been doing it tough with lockdowns.”
The Gregg-Straughan household also knows a thing or two about doing hard lockdown: we did it for eight months last year. We as a family started sheltering in place before it was in any way required where we lived (the California Bay Area), because I have pre-existing conditions that probably make me more likely both to catch and to die from the COVID. I still have close ties to Italy, so I was aware early on how dangerous this virus was.
So was my daughter – she was lobbying her university in New York to switch to online learning weeks before they finally decided to. Later, when things got truly horrific in New York, the dean apologized to her for not having taken her concerns seriously earlier!
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Remote work: In any multinational, someone is always remote
There is and always has been an element of remote work in every multinational corporation (even small ones). When a company is globally distributed, its employees are rarely or never all in the same place at the same time.
People learn to deal with this. It means strange hours sometimes, and in the past meant travel (though that is now difficult). Remote collaboration can always be done better, and we all have more to learn and invent about this way of working, but many businesses have for decades been working effectively with far-flung colleagues (some of my Sun Microsystems colleagues spoke about managing globally distributed teams at GHC 2009). Somehow, teams do manage to thrive and innovate across international borders.
Continue reading Remote work: In any multinational, someone is always remote
