Moving back in with the parents

I have a friend who went back to work for a large company after the small company he had worked at for a while folded. He described the experience as akin to moving back in with parents after a first, failed fledge.

Now I know what he meant.

The parents re-decorated and moved the furniture while you were away, causing you a few bruised shins in the night as you stagger back in after tipping a few pints with your mates at the pub. But what's most jarring is how their behavior has changed.

Especially towards you.

You're no longer the child to be doted upon and enveloped with a warm embrace, but an interloper and an irritant. They lash out at you when you harmlessly suggest they stop shuffling around in their slippers over the throw rugs, lest they fall and break a hip.

And your brothers and sisters who hadn't yet left home? A curious mix of derision and awe, stirred with whispered fears that mom and dad are going downhill faster than you knew, since you weren't around to watch it happen.

And so, I find myself back at Microsoft again, after the sinking economy sucked my startup down into the vortex where so many entrepreneur's hopes go: irreversible negative cash flow.

Ironically, failure has its rewards. In my case, dramatically reduced responsibilities compared to startup-land and managing a team vs. being an IC like my first go-round. Though as I'm finding, being part of the management class I railed against previously is causing me to question my sanity at times and actively worry that I'm falling to the mean of Microsoft management instead of helping to lift it up.

Hopefully you'll help me figure that out, because if I thought things were bad before in Microsoft management-land, they appear to be even worse now.

But before we delve back into the Microsoft management corpus for vivisection, I will preempt a couple of questions.

Why come back to Microsoft and re-animate this blog?

For the first part, it was a path of low resistance and I have bills to pay. For the second part, to help keep my sanity.

Constructive critique of the Microsoft work experience seems to be ebbing as of late and with silly decisions inside the company seeming to accelerate, I need a place to put the stupid.

And Bill knows, Microsoft seems to be generating more stupid per manager than ever before.

Take stack-ranking, for example...