There have been days—moments really—that I count among the best of my life thus far; the birth of my children, for example. But as for living in a time-period of all that I have to compare, I would not trade any other time for what I have right now! I am that happy philosophically, physically, psychologically, and spiritually.
I am at a stage in my life where I finally feel as happy by myself as I do with another. They are different kinds of happiness, yes; equal kinds of happiness, though. That’s an important distinction. After having been married for the better part of 30 years and now divorced, I see the advantages of being on my own in ways that are different in type but no less numerous or less profound.
I honestly feel more prepared to be in a relationship now than any other point in my life because I am just as willing to be alone. I am perfectly capable of fulfilling my needs such that I will not be putting an abiding, and frankly unfair, burden on the object of my affections. We each will be happy alone and are not codependent wrt happiness but are instead sharing our happiness with each other.
I have so much joy that I would love for it to overflow into the life of someone I adore. I am fundamentally happy and do not need anyone else to be so, but I would like someone to share it with, and I would love to bask in what they have to share as well.
I am unafraid of being alone but I am also unafraid of being open and getting hurt too…
People can be timid and cynically afraid of romantic relationships… I fully understand whence this comes; a heartache can be a pain that lingers long. I—personally—would rather fully embrace the magic of the moment by daring to dream breathtakingly.
Ultimately you have to know yourself and your own tolerances. Are you a good swimmer? Because for this aging mariner the listless lingering ache of agonizing doubt I’d forever feel for not having both feet firmly in that boat would haunt me so much more than ending up having to swim back to shore yet again, no matter how cold and dark that water might be.
I’ll make it to dry land—like I always have—but doing the splits while the voyage of a lifetime floats away with me stuck on this stupid sandbar is not how my story goes.
Know your heart, your limits; be safe, be sane, but…
I joined interclick, in South Florida, on July 2012; roughly 7 months after they were bought by Yahoo. It was very much a career defining moment. Before joining the acquired start-up I had worked at a number of companies that needed a programmer in the same way companies need an accountant. Working at interclick meant working as a programmer, with programmers, and for programmers—they were a technology company that lived or died by the quality of the systems they engineered.
I knew that interclick was recently purchased by Yahoo; I like Yahoo. In fact, the first website I ever went to was yahoo.com. In 1996 I created a website for the company I worked for. Of course I added it to Yahoo’s hierarchical officious oracle. I followed its takeoff and watched it soaring into the clouds as one of the world’s first Internet successes. I learned from Yahoo’s Douglas Crockford, checked out YUI, and, from the runway tarmac, celebrated with them when Microsoft failed at its attempt to hijack them.
But I had a boarding-pass for interclick, a start-up in Florida. When I accepted the offer to board with the most skilled people I had yet interviewed with, I was told that we’d remain in Florida and we would remain isolated. Judging by Yahoo’s flight path at that time that was fine with me.
Yahoo’s interim CEO, Ross Levinsohn, had it all plotted out. He was going to veer sharply and make Yahoo a media company and not a technology company and interclick was a part of that path. We were going to get a portion of the advertising and operate independently. Throw off cargo; gain lift. This plan was canceled the moment Marissa Mayer was made captain. It also was the moment that I boarded the Yahoo plane and started to believe that it could fly high again. It started a desire to see Yahoo become the greatest turnaround in the history of the Internet.
Marissa wanted all Yahoos to come work at Yahoo headquarters in the Bay Area. So the EVP of advertising, Scott Burke, came out and gave us a choice—get a very generous severance package, or move to Silicon Valley. This was exciting to me. It was like asking a musician if he wanted to live in Nashville. So, even though many of the elves left middle earth and started a new company called mParticle, I packed up and ventured west to do what I could to make Yahoo great again.
Asking people to be on-site, local to their team, and under one roof, sounds draconian in the twenty-first century. I found being able to walk a short distance—to speak face-to-face with a colleague—to be a nearly sure-fire way to resolve misunderstanding. I found it to be the case so often that I am convinced that the less than 200 people affected by the no-remote work policy should be looked at in light of the gains. It’s also a great benefit when a serendipitous encounter with another employee results in a deployable solution.
Marissa also brought us up to first class to enjoy free food. When your team is embroiled in a project, breaking for lunch in as many different directions as there are teammates is deleterious. Free food sounds like frivolous largess; it’s not. Keeping a team focused and on task while eating food continues the context. The number of times we took the path of least resistance to the cafeteria because the food is free and fantastic is innumerable. And, none of us would deny that many a solution was hatched around the table.
She instituted quarterly performance ratings (QPR). The over two thousand performance related terminations weren’t head-scratchers. Many were misaligned with goals that were clearly stated, announced, reiterated, and even wall poster'ed all over the campus. Employees should not have been caught by surprise. At Yahoo, if your peer informed QPR was at achieves or higher, you could freely change teams each quarter. If you did nothing to justify an improved peer rating, and were thus marooned on a stalled project, my heart goes out to you; but I also understand the business decision being made.
Speaking of QPR; yes, at first there were target percentages for each quintile. Having already changed board members, executives, directors, and managers, the remaining focus, for roughly a year, was on individual contributors. Yahoo was on a decline for many a year, and poaching by all of the big names in the Bay Area was brutal. Marissa rightly surmised that there were people at Yahoo that needed to move on to a better alignment; for the good of both parties. The QPR system no longer has targeted percentages for the bottom two quintiles.
None of these ameliorations can capture the excitement, energy, and sense of purpose that has enlivened the campus. The transformation that I’ve experienced over the last two years of being in Sunnyvale has been inspiring. There is a palatable sense that we are on the verge of a momentous turnabout. No internet company of that size has ever lost monthly active users in those numbers without nose-diving into oblivion. I am rooting for Yahoo; a turnaround would be glorious. In the minds of the employees that I’ve spoken to, given the time needed, it is an all but forgone conclusion that Yahoo will soar to new heights on the internet.
Did you noticed that ominous parenthetical? That’s the stickler—given the time needed. Technology stocks are growth stocks, and the principle portion of Yahoo’s profits are from rapidly deteriorating desktop display ad revenue. This is not a unique problem for Yahoo either. The world’s gone mobile-mad and even Google is feeling the turbulence. The beleaguered Yahoo has generated/acquired its way into much mobile profit; just not enough for wealth appetent stockholders who are calling for deep layoffs.
Being an over forty community college dropout this alarms me. Being a husband and father of two—the head of a single income family—this frightens me. It made me pay closer attention to the invitations I get to interview at other Bay Area companies. If I had a computer science degree from a recognizable institution, was single and without children, I’d ride this plane yodeling all the way. I’d do it because I still think Marissa can save the company I’ve grown to love.
Working at Yahoo feels like working as a programmer, with programmers, and for… majority stockholders—a technology company that lives or dies by the impatient demands of a market hungry for returns and little else.
If you are entertaining an offer for a position at Yahoo, or are thinking of applying, the opportunity is immense. It is a risk/reward proposition that careers are made of. There is a phenomenal chance that she’ll get it done in time. I, however, need to disembark. I will have to go back to rooting for Yahoo from the safety of a different flight path.
