I recently retired (maybe…). It’s either an early retirement, or a few months off before I look for a new ‘couple year’ job. I’m not yet 65, but I walked away from my job because it was problematic — and I needed a break. Below are the factors that led me to quit.
COMPANY
I was working for Salesforce — a well-known ‘tech company’ that really was very different from typical tech companies. A typical tech company (Salesforce is the ninth tech company I’ve worked for) has a high percentage of tech workers (engineers, etc) and focuses on developing products. Neither of these are true of Salesforce.
Tech Workers
Less than 10% of Salesforce employees are tech workers (engineering) — crazy. This means that most directional decisions for the company (and contributing groups) are made by non-tech employees. It could be that the existing Salesforce products are 100% complete/solid, and that the only existing effort needed today is selling/supporting these products. If this were really the case, then Salesforce has 10 times the number of employees it needs.
Process
The other weirdness about Salesforce is the focus on ‘how’ to do things. Every year, every employee has to produce a very detailed document on what they will do that year. This document is reviewed/approved by the employee’s manager, and made available to those that the employee works with.
Plus, the employees need to take a dozen online classes — essentially the same ones every year. Also requiring scores of hours of time. Classes like: how to talk about Salesforce, etc.
Further, there are recurring presentations (every other month ish) from each group, on the details of what they are planning to accomplish over the next handful of months, and their confidence on success.
Overall, I probably spent 20%? 25%? of my time on process, rather than just turning the crank and getting things done.
ROLE
I worked at Salesforce for a little more than 6 years — in 4 or 5 different roles. Some were great, some not. Without going into the contrast between all my roles, the one that inspired me to part ways with the company was my last role, which I’ll summarize below.
My job role for the past few decades across multiple tech companies has been project/program manager — which means that I own getting things done (e.g., producing products). I’ve been very successful in this role across many companies, including all of my previous roles at Salesforce.
To accomplish my job, I need to communicate and enforce the needed development processes. In my last role at Salesforce, the group managers that I was supporting wouldn’t follow the processes I needed from them. Some examples:
- Coordination – To stay connected and aligned on what needs to get done, I normally run a weekly meeting with the group managers where we share progress and agree on what needs to happen over the next week. The managers of the org I was supporting told me that they didn’t want to meet weekly. Also, some managers ducked out of the infrequent coordination meeting midway through, or didn’t even attend — making it even more difficult to stay aligned.
- Tracking – I created a list of active items, and updated progress status daily. Ideally, the group managers should frequently look at this list, add/remove items as needed, update status, etc. They rarely looked at the list — pretty much only at the infrequent coordination meetings.
I was working 50-60 hours a week trying to make things happen but, because the management I was supporting wasn’t doing needed actions — we weren’t necessarily focused on the right things, and weren’t accurately tracking progress.
This all came to a head when one of the VPs I was supporting complained to my management that I wasn’t doing a good job. Rather than connecting with me on the ‘real’ situation, my management believed the VP, and created a detailed list of ‘improvement’ items I needed to do. I started chipping away at the list, but it was unnecessary items that were taking even more of my time.
MY HEAD
The other overlay was — I was very stressed (and depressed — even though I didn’t know this at the time). I was working long hours, crabby to my wife, and still getting beaten up by the work groups I was supporting.
My wife and I were regularly chatting with a couples counselor — who suggested that I may be ‘on the spectrum’ (be autistic). I read about being ‘on the spectrum’ and honestly thought that this could be true of me. I was subsequently tested for autism and ADHD — and they concluded that neither of these were true of me (those with these conditions are not broadly functional, like I am) — BUT, they concluded that I was depressed, and would benefit from anti-depression medication. I’m now taking this medication, and feel a lot better.
DEPARTURE
My long hours and distress, plus other companies regularly reaching out to me to work for them, led me to quit my job at Salesforce. It wasn’t worth the unhappiness. (It’s interesting that the person in my same role with this same group quit the company a year ago — likely for the same reasons.) I did put together very structured guidance on what went wrong, and how to (potentially) make the right things happen — for the next person taking over my role.
I’ve now been away for two months, have gotten past much of my depression, and am generally in a better place. I still need a bit more recovery, but things are definitely better than they were when I was working.
Maybe I’ll stay retired. Maybe I’ll find a job in a few months with a more-sensible tech company.
I’ll figure it out.