Bad Reviews, Prayers, and Roller Coasters

(Note to the reader: the real names of my friends are not used herein)

It was the night of our 10th anniversary. It should have been a happy occasion,

It wasn’t.

I was depressed. Really depressed.

Earlier that day, my boss and I had met for my yearly review. For the second year in a row, he had said, “Listen, Gerald. There is simply nowhere left to go in your career as a technologist here. You need to face this and embrace becoming a telco executive.” (“Telco’ is short for telephone company.)

With almost 8 years under my belt at Southwestern Bell (SWB), I could not have been less interested in that career path.

I was (and am) an engineer at heart, who loves building great products and teams. The team I had begun at SWB had achieved much - not only in building software well ahead of the industry but also in terms of monetary benefit to our company. We had saved over $50 million on a single government-mandated project, and, based on that success, our work had become a key enabler of our CEO’s desire to pursue an aggressive strategy of acquiring other phone companies, ultimately including AT&T.

I had naively thought (hoped) that the value of our work would be recognized and, further, that it would validate the new, unprecedented, technology career path that had been established a couple of years earlier. It seemed obvious that success in a modern business would require great software and great engineers to create it.

(In my defense, Jeff Bezos famously stated that this same realization was why he left Wall Street and started Amazon in the mid-90s - the same timeframe that this telco story dates back to.)

But this wasn’t Amazon, and I was about to get a refresher on how little big bureaucracies care about innovation or people.

In typical corporate fashion, the executives did not connect the (to me so obvious) dots. They rewarded our innovation and $50 million cost savings by completely canceling the technology career path, and along with it, my career hopes.

The final nail in the coffin occurred shortly after when we demoed a visionary internet-based telephone (think WIFI-calling like on your cell-phone, but working back in the mid 1990s). Our leadership’s response?

They dismissively reminded us of their explicit corporate strategy tenet that stated: “Never be first at anything.”

Insert image of an Arkansas opossum going 1:1 with a big semi on I-40 here. I was not the semi.

It was not that we were unaware of the dangers of big monopoly inertia. This was a telephone company after all. But sometimes you strive hard and try to be an agent of change anyway - and successes can give you false hopes when you desperately want to believe for a better future.

Suddenly, I was maxed out in a dead-end career path and being pressured by my boss to make a career change. So, yes, that annual review put a big damper on our anniversary celebration.

But my ever-praying wife knew what to do.

She listened to me describe the situation in full detail, asking questions along the way to help me process it. (Sidenote: Is there anything better than having a friend or mate who truly practices ‘profound listening’? What an amazing blessing.)

Somewhere around midnight, Jina said, “I think we should pray about it and ask God to show us what to do.”

I think I replied with something lame like, “What if that means we have to move?” She replied, “If God wants us to move, then we should move.”

DUH. We both knew that. But knowing it and living it are two very different things.

So we prayed.

It was nothing fancy. We held hands and just talked to God. We shared how we were feeling about it all, the frustrations of so many years of hard and fruitful work for an employer who seemed ungrateful. We shared our fears about the unknown. We thanked God for each other. And, we asked Him to make it clear what we should do next.

Begin Roller Coaster ride.

Twelve hours later, I was standing in the airport waiting for a shuttle to take me to the terminal where Jina had left her car before flying to see family in Texas. A young woman approached me, and seeing the programming book I had been reading on my train ride to the airport, asked, “Are you a software developer?” I looked at her, surprised that she was speaking to me, then answered, “Yes” hoping that she would leave me alone.

She didn’t.

“Where do you work?” she asked. I replied tersely, “Southwestern Bell.” She cheerily continued, “Oh, I only know one person who works there. Do you know …”

At this point, I was thinking, “Oh, c’mon lady, what is your deal? This is ridiculous. What is your agenda here?”

The Southwestern Bell headquarters was located in two high-rise buildings in downtown St. Louis, one with 43 floors and the other about half that size. In that location alone, roughly 15,000 people worked, not to mention the many other locations spread across 6 states.

“(Do you know) … Dylan ____?” she finished.

Boom!

The conclusion of her question instantly became a

REPLACE-ALL ‘irritation’ with ‘stupefaction’

command on my mental state.

I didn’t just know Dylan. I sat beside him and worked with him daily. We were partners. I looked at her a bit dumbfounded and mumbled, “Actually, I know Dylan very well. Who are you?”

She told me her name, then followed with, “Are you familiar with the Datagate project at Southwestern Bell?”

“Uhm, yes, quite familiar. I started that project and lead it.”

She then said, “Wow, that is amazing. And, Datagate is amazing. I am from Austin and am very connected in the technology market there. If you are ever interested in moving to Austin, I can help you find a job very easily. I know people who would love to hire you based on your work on Datagate.”

At that point, my shuttle arrived. As I was about to walk away, she handed me her name and number scrawled hastily on a piece of paper with a final comment, “I’m serious about what I said. Call me if it is of interest.”.

I looked at my watch.

It had been barely 12 hours since Jina and I had prayed.

In that prayer, we had specifically asked God if we should consider moving to Austin since it would place us within driving distance of both sides of the family.

I remember wondering if the experience could have been merely a random coincidence, or was it truly an answer to our prayer? (Faith has never come easily to this highly analytical engineer.) Later that day I called Jina to tell her about it. She had zero struggles over whether this was the result of our prayer.

I did call that number, and the cheery voice from the airport assured me that she had been serious. She told me that she had already taken the liberty of following up with her husband, who worked for a tech company in Austin. And, upon hearing of me, his company had already indicated that they wanted to discuss a role with me - that I should look forward to a call soon.

Jina and I were excited.

We began discussing the possibilities seriously and also decided to begin some improvements on our 50-year-old house that we had been considering, since they would also serve us well if the time came that we needed to sell it.

At some point in those early discussions, I recall making the statement, “as long as it isn’t a consulting job or one requiring a lot of travel. Beyond that, I’m pretty open to the possibilities.”

Jina and I were easily united on this because:

• I was a builder of things and still pretty young in my career, neither qualified nor a fit for a role that consisted of telling others what to build or what they shouldn’t have built (AKA a consultant)

• Jina and I wanted to be very present with each other and our growing family. A job constantly pulling me away on trips conflicted with that.

We waited for the promised call from Austin.

Days passed. Then weeks.

No call came. As they say in the South, it was ‘crickets’.

It was disconcerting, confusing.

Meanwhile, life and work continued. It can be hard in the months (and years) of waiting not to be plagued with doubts. Even John the Baptist, known for his bold faith, reached out from his prison cell to his cousin, Jesus, to ask if he was truly “the one”.

Waiting is hard.

Waiting with confidence? Harder.

We didn’t fully realize it then, but this story had begun well before Jina and I tuned in on the night of our prayer. We would eventually realize that my disappointing review had served, in part, to focus our attention on a story that was already in progress.

To explain that, allow me to wind the clock backwards a bit.

I had been working at the telephone company for almost 8 years, most of that time building the software mentioned above as ‘Datagate’, which had become a valuable asset.

As part of my role, I enjoyed the privilege of speaking about our work at industry conferences. Outside our company, our work garnered considerable interest. People in other businesses were keen to understand the what and how of our (unusual) success using a home-grown technology, especially given our size and the fact that we were not a software vendor.

This was especially true the year before my depressing review, mostly due to being several years into our efforts and having begun to see some big payoffs.

One of the individuals I met during those still-hopeful days was a consultant named Darren.

Darren described himself thus:

“I surf in Microsoft’s wake. They create these over-complicated technologies that require a lot of explanation. I teach mere mortals how to understand and use their tech.”

Darren was himself a brilliant technologist who, before branching out as a consultant, had worked for one of the first companies to build supercomputers.

I hired him to teach a class at Southwestern Bell on a new technology called ActiveX (for you fellow computer jocks reading along, this was originally OLE, then ActiveX, then COM, then MTS, then COM+, then COR, then …). Microsoft had recently released ActiveX, and knowing that it overlapped somewhat with our in-house technology, I hired Darren to bring us up to speed on it.

Due to the breadth of his knowledge of the industry overall (versus just Microsoft), I also paid for an additional day of his time to allow my team to share an in-depth presentation on our proprietary software (the aforementioned ‘Datagate’), with the specific instruction,

“Be brutal. Shoot holes in our architecture. Help us see what we have done wrong or missed. We are too close to it to be objective at this point.”

That investment ultimately resulted in Darren volunteering to write a strategy paper for the senior leadership at Southwestern Bell - a paper in which he informed them how unique and ahead of the industry our internal solution truly was. The paper also pointed out that no alternative solution could be purchased that would run on the large variety of computers that Southwestern Bell had running across the company.

(The telephone companies of the time were sometimes described as “museums of computing” - with one of everything. The reason we had named our project ‘Datagate’ was because it opened up gateways to share data between all of those disparate computer systems.)

It was a fun time in my career.

We were doing meaningful technical work that was making a significant difference, and it was being recognized - utopia for an engineer with a penchant for business like me.

For sure, our work and results mattered, but Darren’s external validation was timely.

Having such a high-dollar consultant extol our work with words like “way ahead of the industry and your competition” was huge. Indeed, it was partly these successes that led to the establishment of the short-lived “technology career path” in which I had been invited to participate as a charter member.

We never saw the poison-tipped arrow coming.

If you’ve ever been a part of an exciting uprising bent on making big changes within a massive organization, then you probably know exactly which poison arrow I mean:

The dreaded reorg.

The visionary president we reported to, who understood the value of our work, was successful in his role - so successful that he got promoted to his next big role in the telephone company monopoly.

On the day of his promotion, we lost both our enthusiastic leader and our ‘air cover’ in one fell swoop. Suddenly, we found ourselves reporting to a newcomer who was an ‘old school’ telephone company executive. One of his first actions was to cancel the technology career path.

After years of hard work and success, all it took was one corporate reorg to find myself sitting in that “your career path has been canceled” review discussion, followed by our 10th anniversary prayer asking, “What now, God?”

But, here’s the deal:

What to me felt like the tree being axed was not that at all.

It was a pruning of the tree. Not that pruning isn’t painful.

It often is.

Shortly after Jina and I prayed, asking for guidance on our future, Darren, the consultant, called to inform me that he would be passing through town for other business and wanted to meet for lunch. At that lunch, he got right to the point.

“I’ve been thinking about you, and I want to recommend you for a job. I know you are having fun here and doing impressive work that is appreciated, but I don’t think you belong here. You should be working for a software vendor where your work will have more impact and be rewarded/appreciated.”

Cue Gerald with his mouth hanging wide open.

Darren had no idea how things had changed for me or that we had prayed. I gave him an update.

He replied “I don’t share your worldview, but no matter. The latest developments prove my point. You don’t belong here. If you agree, I want to recommend you for a job at Microsoft. I know many high-ranking people there. I’m sure I can get you into an interview loop.”

I was blown away and, if I’m honest, a bit unnerved.

This was not how Jina and I envisioned this potential move.

A move to the West Coast versus somewhere closer (hopefully Austin or Dallas) was not on our radar.

That said, we knew that living out her statement of faith,“If God wants us to move, then we should move”, included letting go of any personal agenda for how our prayer might get answered. I’m pretty sure moving out of Ur was not how Abraham saw his life going either.

A lot more happened over the next couple of months. Because of his generous recommendation, I was invited to interview at Microsoft, ultimately for three different teams. Two of them offered me a job. I was also offered a CTO position by a San Francisco-based company that reached out unsolicited based on conference presentations I had done.

And that expected call from Austin?

Nothing.

It just kept not happening, even after I followed up twice more with cheery airport woman. Every time we spoke, she assured me the opportunity was real and apologized for the delays, which she also did not understand.

So we prayed about the opportunities that did come.

• Which, if any, should we accept?
• Should we keep waiting for the promised call from Austin, especially given this was where both sides of our families wanted us to land?

Moving to the West Coast would assuredly limit the amount of time we could spend with family. What was the right call?

We struggled with it. A lot.

Our families were not excited (to say the least) about us moving to the West Coast. So, the day my mom called me to say, “Your father and I have been praying about it. We think that you should take the job at Microsoft if they offer it.”, it was a big shock.

We did not see that coming.

Parents never want their kids to move far away. As a parent, I completely relate.

Add to that ‘The Very Idea!’ of moving out of “The South”.

On that topic, I’ll just say, IYKYK. (translation for the texting impaired - “If you know, you know.”)

Shortly after my parents’ unexpected blessing, I got “the call” from Microsoft. I was at work and unable to talk freely in the open cubicles and listening ears, so I went downstairs to use a more private phone.

Microsoft called twice. This was the second call.

The first call and offer I had declined because it was inconsistent with my interview. But on this call, the role and offer had been corrected and matched what Jina and I felt we needed to hear. I accepted it and took the elevator back upstairs.

I felt a mix of relief and elation. Finally! We were getting our answer.

The only thing weird about it all was the complete silence from Austin, given that this whole roller coaster seemed to have begun with that unlikely encounter.

You know that feeling that you get when you realize something weighty is about to happen?

Yeah.

As I arrived at my desk, I had one of those feelings.

I felt it the moment I saw the little light on my desk phone indicating that someone had left me a voicemail. It wasn’t particularly unlikely to have a voicemail. But, somehow I just knew something big was happening. I could feel it with an unnatural certainty. Those of you who have walked with God more than a few miles probably know exactly the feeling to which I refer.

I listened to the voicemail and thought, “NO WAY! God, what are you doing?”

Yep, you guessed it. The guy from Austin, whom I had been waiting to hear from for over 3 months, had finally called - at the exact moment I was downstairs accepting an offer from Microsoft.

So, back down the elevator I went to that same private phone to return his call. I was shaking my head on that elevator ride, saying things like, “Really, God? Is this seriously happening? Why now? What are you doing?”

I dialed the phone. The voice on the other end opened with, “Hey, Gerald. I apologize for taking so long to call. I’ve been meaning to call for weeks and am finally getting around to it.” Followed by, “We have an exciting opening for a traveling consultant role that I would like to discuss with you.

A “Traveling Consultant” role.

My comment to Jina, dating back to the time of our roller-coaster-starting prayer, had been “as long as it isn’t a consulting job or one requiring a lot of travel.”

His offer combined both non-negotiable job descriptions into a single “Not just no, but (you know the rest) NO” role that required zero consideration.

I laughed out loud and said, “Listen, I appreciate you calling, but we don’t need to waste each other’s time here. I have zero interest in that sort of role.” Then we both politely exited the call.

The long-awaited call had lasted less than a minute!

But, I walked away from that phone, marveling at both the timing of his call and the (beautiful) clarity it had provided. The conversation going back up the elevator was, “Okay, God, I get it. You do not want us in Austin.”

I was learning anew, and personally, a lesson that I had previously only experienced vicariously via my study of scripture:

When praying for guidance, the timing of things that happen can matter immensely.

Keep praying and pay attention!

Oh, and about that odd Austin connection:

• The original encounter with cheery airport woman
• Her unlikely knowledge of both my work and my partner
• Her pushy offer to facilitate my entry into the Austin tech market
• The promised-soon and ever-delayed call
• The crazy timing of the Austin call when it finally occurred - 3 months delayed and at the exact moment I was on the phone accepting the Microsoft job
• The two-word job description that was the perfect “definitely not that” match

Living through those details, then sharing them with our families, convinced us all that it was 100% not in God’s plan for our little family to move to Texas, as had been discussed and hoped for for over 10 years. Note that I did not say that folks were particularly happy about that turn of events. ;)

Had all of that not happened, there would have been questions and, likely, some resentment over a decision to move to Seattle.

What a huge blessing to be given such a definitive answer that sidestepped potential second-guessing and unpleasantness with those we hold so dear.

In addition to that blessing, the encounter with cheery airport lady also:

• Jumpstarted home improvements needed to sell our house. (And not a moment too soon, as I have recorded in a separate blog post.)
• Gave us peace and courage for the roller coaster ride that we were boarding - and full confidence that it was God who had put us on that roller coaster versus actions of our own

Lesson learned?

Among others, one valuable takeaway was this:

Some answers to prayers are initially confusing.

When that happens, don’t jump off. Just hang on for the ride.

We don’t need to understand it all as it happens, as long as God does.

That is why it is called “faith”.

-Gerald (thus far)