Risky business

Got fired from EMC/Avamar in 2016, just days shy of five years there. How I got there:

• Was asked to do a proof-of-concept for backup of OpenStack instances to EMC/Avamar. Was interested in OpenStack, but knew very little, so spent a couple of weeks studying the problem. Figured it would take six months to build a working proof-of-concept. In six months, I was at AT&T in Atlanta to demonstrate.

• The customer was satified, and wanted to put the demo into production. :/

• Also presented at an OpenStack conference.

• Figured it would take three folk about 18 months to build a minimum-viable-product. At this time, OpenStack had no suitable application interfaces for backup, so spent quite a while digging through the OpenStack source code to find a viable approach. (Also likely got a QEMU developer in trouble with the big storage vendors.)

• As promised, 18 months later we delivered the first OpenStack instance backup support for EMC/Avamar.

Yeh. Nailed two risky hail-mary projects.

Then I got fired.

The problem was I had twice demonstrated delivering on-time with very risky projects. This was not what management wanted. They had no risk in their other projects, so their chance of failure was near to none. The last thing they needed was a new/risky highly visible project that exposed them to chance of failure.

There was more nonsense, but that was the gist.

Big companies are weird. :)