The Festivus Airing of Grievances
It’s bad form to roast former employers. Everyone should post their magnanimous platitudes on LinkedIn and move on.
However, without struggle there is no growth. Many of Cooptimize’s policies were born out of our collective frustrations with past employers.
I won’t let Joel off the hook. I have failed. I have been an arrogant ass. I am an arrogant ass. I am the villain in other people’s stories.
The unnamed people in these stories are actually all good humans. At work, our humanity is artificially limited by the systems we inherit and create.
We can do better.
January (2019, 2022) – Who Is In Charge Around Here
At Cooptimize? All of us. None of us. There are no lines drawn. No one has the authority to order another employee to do something – you ask like a polite human.
I know people love to poke holes in this kind of system. It can’t scale! People aren’t held accountable! Nothing will get done!
Hierarchies can’t scale either. Every layer adds inefficiency and bureaucracy.
The sa.global acquisition of Dynamic Consulting was a fascinating look at everything wrong with corporate hierarchies.
There was an existing sa.global US/Canada entity operationally merging with the Dynamic Consulting firm. Now I’m no expert at mergers1. I would think at a consulting firm the first order of business would be to review every client project and spend some time reviewing any immediate improvements that could be made. At the same time, make sure employees are doing ok.
😂 No.
First order of business – hierarchy! What will the new roles, titles, and responsibilities be. For managers. The fancy titles came out. The revolutionary org chart where “we put the managers on the bottom because we support you” was presented with great reverence.
Aaaaaaand a lot of people bailed2.
Then there was the other time I worked for sa.global.
That was my first taste into how painful hierarchies are. There was always some “Center of Excellence” or “Important People Call” or “People in Multiple Countries With Overlapping Responsibilities”.
Never would these groups have a defined Domain, Roles, and Timeline3. More of a “talk amongst yourselves and pretend you have power to decide things” philosophy.
It’s interesting to look back knowing what I know now. A democratic structure wouldn’t have fixed all the structural problems, but it would have at least forced us to deal with problems.
February (2003 – 2022) – 💩TO4, One of the Many Unbenefits at…
Keystone RV: 2 Weeks Use It Or Lose It
I mostly lost it. I think I may have taken a total of 2 weeks off over 3 years. Gross.
Greenlight / hso.global:5 3 Weeks Off, Including Sick Time.
This hit hard the first time I was sick and knocked out for a week. Got back and asked “where do I code my time?” “Under paid time off.” That’s when I learned instead of recovering from illness, work instead!
After 10 years I negotiated 5 weeks off because I was so burnt out, but I had to take reduced compensation. Was a no brainer trade off and also stupid.
“If you don’t want to burn out, make less money.”
Dynamics Consulting: Unlimited6 Time Off Within Reason
Within whose reason? I believe I was told it means “around 4 weeks”. THEN MAKE YOUR STUPID FUCKING POLICY 4 WEEKS.
Unlimited 💩TO means you’ve given every manager the right to create their own policy. Super.
sa.global: 4 or 5 Weeks?
I can’t recall the number of weeks because I was trying to escape as fast as I could.
First came the 💩TO merger email. “We are going to switch from Unlimited to Accrued. You will Accrue 40 hours in Q1 minus what you used in Q1 {blah blah very long}.” That equals zero. You want us to go from unlimited to zero balance7? Also you can’t do math?
Then came the Presentation of Great 💩TO Clarification in February 2022. That fucking PowerPoint. Seven pages of rules and approvals and footnotes and infantilizing adults.
Joel: Christmas week is mandatory PTO? What if there’s a client go live?
🤡: Yeah if there’s something critical you might have to work.
Joel: Ok so it’s not mandatory.
🤡: No it’s mandatory. We want everyone to take that week off.
Joel: UNLESS THERE’S CLIENT WORK. Will you tell clients no go-lives at Christmas?
🤡: No. There’s always exceptions. We have to serve our clients.
Joel: 🤯🤬🤦🏻♂️🖕
A few days later…
Terri (Wife): You seem like you’re about to pop. I looked for flights we could fly to Florida tomorrow.
Joel: Let’s just go. Drive. Now.
Terri & Joel: 🚗💨💨💨😎
Cooptimize:
- 4-Day Work Weeks
- 5 Weeks + 2 Hours8 PTO
- Sick time up to one contiguous week + Short term disability paid benefit
It’s pretty good. What I care about is whether a working schedule is sustainable for a whole career. People need breaks from work to reboot.
March (2004) – You Know You’ve Done It Right If You Make Her Cry
To my everlasting shame, I did.
It was a meeting to tell a subordinate “they weren’t doing good enough”. Unfortunately, the culture at Keystone RV was one of anger, fear, and greed. Not a great place to learn how to be an empathetic human.
That being said, I should have done better. She later told me after I left that she was going through a health crisis at the time. Which I could have learned, had I asked.
According to my poorly researched statistics, over 50% of people will experience a major negative stressful life event every year. Add to that major happy life events, and you begin to see that a majority of workers have something big happening in any given year.
This isn’t something I feel I’ve ever solved. When a colleague is not producing their typical output, my default emotions are anger and frustration, not understanding.
It’s a lot easier to make up stories than find out the truth.
April (2020) – You Sit On A Throne of Lies
When I was interviewing for Dynamic Consulting it sounded great:
- Five practices (BC, F&O, CRM, Power Platform, and Microsoft 365), run mostly autonomously by a Practice Manager but collaborating.
- Plenty of Power BI work and no problem acquiring good customers
- “No plans” to sell the company9
It was…not that.
It turned out autonomously actually means “CEO will introduce massive random changes every month.”
Customer acquisition would be a slog. Collaboration was disincentivized by the compensation structure and via responsibility without actual power. Easier to keep work inside a practice.
One customer was literally verbally abusive to a colleague and no action was taken10. Unbelievable.
Another colleague was treated like shit AFTER they left.
And of course they did sell the company to sa.global. Which…fine, whatever. It’s capitalism you can do what you want. But to not give me the heads up that the company’s situation had changed was bullshit.
Why not give us a heads up? Money. The company is worth more with more existing consultants and revenue11. It’s a lie of omission for personal gain. Very noble.
May (1998) – You’re Fired
It was an ice cream shop job. Busy Bee. A Rensselaer institution. Now a dog groomer.
But instead of being honest with me and saying “this will be a temporary position”, they lied to me. What is the point of lying to a kid? If they would have told me the truth, I could have planned accordingly and lined up another job.
In fairness I sucked at making cones. But still. Be honest.
June (2005) – Rage Quitting
At Keystone RV, we had a problem12. Physical inventory was off because some inventory tags weren’t entered into the spreadsheet.
Now…this kind of problem is what they call the “swiss cheese” mistake in airline industries. A process has all kinds of double checks to prevent mistakes – but sometimes something sneaks through the holes in the cheese. And then there is a fiery plane crash killing everyone OR your inventory accrual has a 1% variance.
Anyways – I was brought before the CFO, Controller, and VP of HR and told all the ways I had fucked up and it was unacceptable I did not come in on a Saturday to…watch other people re-audit all the inventory tags. Oddly I wasn’t fired they just wanted three people there to really hammer this home.
I was already unhappy with a lot of life struggles. This was the breaking point.
Fortunately my sister was working there at the time. She gave me some sage advice.
“If you’re not happy, just leave. You may go bankrupt. You may lose your house and car. But I can guarantee you’ll have food and a place to live.”
That seemed good enough for me! Packed up my shit and left.
“You’re right. This isn’t going to work out.”
July (1998) – Stupid Capitalism and Corn Sex
I worked for my brother one summer, doing detassling. That’s where the tassles are removed from the female corn so it can have corn sex with the male corn. And the female corn produces baby corn that you plant the following year to grow…better corn.
It was my first introduction to labor unfairness. He was paid by the job and I was paid by the hour. We did an identical amount of work. We did identical jobs. We worked equally hard. There was no management required.
But he kept the surplus value of my labor. We both knew it wasn’t fair and that I had no power to change it.
Why? Because capitalism!
August (1999) – I Just Need a Beer
One of my summer jobs in college was Shovel Boy. Repairing field tile13 in Northwest Indiana.
On the way back from a jobsite, the guy who is driving me around reaches behind the seat of his truck and says “man I just need a beer.” And proceeds to literally drink and drive.
How exactly do you fire the boss’s alcoholic son as a 19 year old who doesn’t know shit?
Later that summer he passed out while operating the backhoe and nearly crushed my leg. I don’t think that incident was sent to OSHA.
Remember kids: Business owners take all the risk, not employees.
September (2005) – Becoming the Thing they Hated
When I started at Greenlight BTS, two of the founders had previously worked at BKD. They would tell stories that could fill up an identical blog of their own: bad managers, overworked employees, and unrealistic expectations.
This place would be different.
And it was! The vibe was good. There were many talented people, some of whom are still working together today. Frankly a lot of that OG talent should go make their own consulting firm.14
However, the founders developed the same system they hated. They built a company with different classes of humans: Owners vs Employees, Managers vs Subordinates, and Voters vs “Givers of Input”.
I sometimes wonder if they would all make the same choice today. None of those managers ever reached out to me since I left to chat about worker coops15, so I guess that’s my answer.
October (2019) – Mommy and Daddy Are Getting a Divorce
The Greenlight company had been in a partnership with sa.global since around 2008. And between 2017 – 2019 they were working towards “ONE sa.global”. A fancy way of saying “maybe if we have common ownership and voting we can stop arguing over the dumbest shit.”
But when they were in the final contract stages, they hit a speed bump. A decade of problems surfaced. Divorce. Press releases full of lies. Remarriage. A little bird told me they still talk shit about each other.
The irony is that none of the fighters in this Pointless Thunderdome can recognize that all the issues they had with each other ARE EXACTLY THE SAME as how they currently treat workers. Workers have no vote. Workers have no ownership stake. The rewards for hard work aren’t shared equitably. There’s no path to “upper management”16 for non-owners.
Eventually the owners will retire, private equity money will buy them out, consultants will be overworked for short-term profits, talented workers will leave, projects will be a mess, and they will get acquired. This is the beautiful circle of life for all professional services firms.
It might be funny if it wasn’t so absurd.
Ok it’s a little funny. But mostly it makes me sad.
November (2019) – He Stood Up. Also, Grenades.
I had put together a global meeting at TWO sa.global to talk through product development strategy. In the meeting, we were talking about the future of Dynamics and the Power Platform.
One of my colleagues stood up and said some of the most inflammatory comments I’ve ever heard from a colleague.
“Based on testing I’ve done, I’m not sure about the performance of high transaction volumes on Dataverse.”
😶
Now I know this is a bunch of nerd talk. Let’s just say it doesn’t rank on my Top 1000 mean things to say to another person. In fact it’s a pretty well known challenge with that technology.
But then my other colleague, who thought he should be in charge of this entire group, absolutely flipped his shit. It was anger like instead of “Dataverse performance” he heard “I had sex with your wife”17. Suddenly the adults were forced to spend dozens of collective hours trying to mediate and unwind a mess instead of collaborating productively.
At the end of the week, I got an email written by one manager but sent by another manager.18 Neither manager was present or knew about the drama happening.
They proceeded to mangersplain to all of us “what the number one priority needs to be for the next three months”. Not consulting with us. Not talking to us. Telling us to change everything we’d spent a week planning!
Managers love grenades. It makes them feel all warm and managery.
You know what I love? Consent.
December (2024) – Joel Roasting On an Open Fire
At the end of last year Cooptimize had huge data migration go-live the weekend before Christmas.
Now I had hinted to my colleagues and my family that it was going to be weekend work. But I really didn’t set the expectation of how much work it could take.
So I was kind of an ass. To everyone. Because my colleagues weren’t meeting my unspoken expectations and my family was getting upset and I was working too much.
Sorry y’all. Trying to do better.
Footnotes
- I am somewhat of an expert at failed mergers. ↩︎
- I was buying a house and I couldn’t bail until closing. Ugh. ↩︎
- Yes, this exists. https://www.sociocracyforall.org/sociocracy/ ↩︎
- I pronounce this “poo TEE oh”. ↩︎
- “hso.global” = Stupid mergers mean I don’t know how to talk about which company was responsible for these decisions. “The legal entity acquired by HSO but when I worked there partially owned by sa.global.” Plus all the management still hates each other which makes it hilarious to put their names together.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hso-acquires-saglobal-inc-and-their-360-solutions-group-301212648.html
https://www.saglobal.com/en-us/about-us/news/2020/saglobal-is-delighted-to-let-you-know-that-we-have-not-been-acquired.html ↩︎ - “Unlimited” in this context means “not unlimited”. Words no longer have meaning. ↩︎
- At Cooptimize, employees start with 1 week PTO. How could we implement a policy so extreme? Because I didn’t want to start at zero. ↩︎
- We add 2 hours so it’s divisible by 24 payroll periods without repeating decimals. Ever see your paycheck and you earned 8.3333333 or 6.6666666 hours of PTO? Gross. ↩︎
- I literally asked. “Are you going to sell to sa.global? It’s an obvious fit and I don’t want to be here if you are.” ↩︎
- Cooptimize will fire a customer’s ass so fast for unaddressed abusive behavior. It’s literally in our services agreement. I’d rather shovel shit than deal with assholes. ↩︎
- I have no idea why a consulting firm is worth more if everyone is going to quit after a sale. Baffling. ↩︎
- It’s worth noting this wasn’t a “caused us to lose money” problem – it was a “numbers aren’t perfect” problem. ↩︎
- There are a series of drainage tiles throughout all those cornfields in Indiana. Otherwise the place would be a swamp. ↩︎
- Seriously what are y’all still doing there? Make a worker cooperative and keep 100% of the value of your labor. I’ll help you get started. ↩︎
- Or to congratulate me and Eric on Cooptimize. Ouch. ↩︎
- I threw up in my mouth writing this phrase. ↩︎
- https://youtu.be/3ORCIEqgbWo ↩︎
- Send your own shitty emails. Fucking c’mon. At least put your name on it. ↩︎
Joel Leichty 
Viva!
(do people still comment on blogs anymore?)
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