That’s what it feels like when I get pulled in to clean things up when someone’s been sloppy. The damage has already been done. Nothing I can do about that. But someone’s got to manage the fallout.

But why would someone take a 40+% pay cut by choice? That time must be more valuable than money. There are plenty of reasons besides laziness why this might be true. 

It’s not that people don’t care, they just don’t know what to do about it. And the job still needs to get done.

She couldn’t control the mayhem upstream, but somehow she was the one apologizing.  “Have you ever heard of a ‘blameless post-mortem’?” I asked. It’s a concept that I learned from software companies. When a bug causes a major incident, the review isn’t about a bad line of code but the whole causal chain.

Being the only nontechnical person at a tech company always felt like being the office dog - I understood more than people thought, but didn't have the language or typing skills to do anything about it.

What started as a step back became a growth hack. When it came time to brand my service, I knew exactly what I was good at, where there was a gap, and what people would pay for.