Time Dilation

I had my first day back at the Bank yesterday and frankly it felt like I hadn't been away more than a month or so. Most people work from home now so I didn't see many familiar faces but the challenges and overall work situation are largely the same. A computer that we setup in our new cube even had a CD in it's drive with my handwriting on it. This CD that I burned over 18 months ago was still sitting there in that computer. Amazing. The first two emails I had in my inbox were from people asking questions about a software tool I wrote 2 years ago. That's one of the things that I missed about the Bank, that sense of history and "we've been doing this for a long time and we'll be doing it for a long time to come". Of course the sometimes glacial speed of things has it's downsides too; the laptop I got is running XP while I've been using Windows 7 for a year already.  Big deal though. Yesterday I took joy in shopping at IKEA for a bed for my son instead of staying late at work stressing about coming up with a compelling multi-gen plan (that will likely get forgotten during the next re-org anyway).

Just felt like posting this to vent a little about my experience at Microsoft and many of the reasons why I knew I wanted to leave that culture. This recent piece in the NYTimes addresses many of the internal conflicts that made the atmosphere feel stifling at times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/opinion/04brass.html?scp=1&sq=microsoft's%20creative%20destruction&st=cse . After being back at the Bank for a day and mostly just bumping into random people, I encountered as many down-to-earth, sincere people than I did in my whole year at Microsoft. Even people that I thought I trusted, I could never tell what head game they were 'trying on' that day. I learned a lot at Microsoft and did meet some great folks with whom I'm still friends and maybe I wound up with a particularly self-absorbed management team and could have found a better fit but once again, really happy to be back here.

As part of my last hurrah at the tail end of our big vacation I went skiing at Snowbird in Utah last week. Here are a few pix: