After My First Full Week of Being Laid Off
Hey folks! It’s schadenfreude time! (And it’s also a time for sincere sympathy—which I do appreciate with equal sincerity.) After almost ten years working IT for UCLA Healthcare, my time came to an end in a most dramatic way. This is an excerpt from my personal journal (that is so personal it can even be published here, in the rasx() context):
News helicopters swarmed in the skies around UCLA Medical Center as my furlough papers were served to me by…
That’s right! On the publicized date of Michael Jackson’s death, my show at UCLA came to an end. One question that hangs out there is, “Did you see it coming?” Here are some bullets for that one:
- I started W2 labor camping about 20 years ago as a “temp”—a temporary worker. This means I always see it coming. I tend to keep my desk pretty clean—even after working somewhere for almost 10 years. I was able to clear my cube at UCLA in seconds.
- Another labor innovation I first started to notice in the late 1990s is the formalized concept of “at will” employment. This means that in your company “it’s like family”—except that the parents can leave the children at someone else’s doorstep (with or without a basket) at any time for no coherent reason. This grants the business leaders the “liberty and freedom” to be as flexible as possible.
- I was brought on at UCLA by a guy named Ralph Bowman Jr. to help get the enterprise out of the late 1990s. I never succeeded at doing this (to my satisfaction). (Ralph Bowman Jr., by the way, left UCLA years ago.) One year (after 2009), we will be able to look at a web site like www.mednet.ucla.edu and know that it is state-of-the-art. You might want to take a look at it now and form your opinion about its technical prowess and elegant design. I would like to have left UCLA knowing that I turned this site around—it would have made a great line item on a resume (most of my work is internal to UCLA and this public-facing site would have been something to be proud of…). Even after I met with the COO, Rubin Amir, about dramatically improving www.mednet.ucla.edu, progress was still nowhere to be found.
The main (technical) problem at the heart of UCLA’s IT “challenges” is that the development group of Medical Center Computing Services (MCCS) is not a Microsoft shop by any serious metric. I was the sole, full-time Microsoft developer there for years, surrounded by Java guys. But what I found strange is that these Java guys used Windows to deploy their code on Linux servers. The UCLA Healthcare enterprise has thousands upon thousands of Windows desktops, producing little bits of “toy” data that have to cross a proprietary gulf to reach the huge “serious” data stores on mainframes or Linux boxes.
There was never any formal architectural solution to the problem of bridging this gulf. What this means is that the knowledge workers are forced into a bottleneck everyday—waiting for MCCS people to complete a myriad of data entry tasks on their behalf. This is tolerated for antiquated, provincial, cultural reasons that no official MCCS “architect” should be proud of—on the contrary: there should vocal, open declarations of shame on at least a weekly basis. To be honest, I considered my presence at UCLA the solution to this problem. IBM came with SOA and left. Microsoft consultants showed up to bring us SharePoint but we had no servers (and no populated Active Directory) waiting for them (this, by the way, was the last straw for me).
Okay the next question might be, “Dude, why didn’t you just leave!” More bullets:
- UCLA did not have an “at will” employment culture—and I am certain that contemporary Republicanism (even in the age of Barack Obama) finds this disgusting. Now, with the entire state budget of California near collapse, the ability to “terminate with extreme prejudice” is here.
- UCLA had an informal flex time schedule. This proved to be extremely important—especially when my two youngest children were toddlers. Without UCLA culture, I am almost certain I would never have been able to drive my daughter to school during “business” hours.
- UCLA has a potpourri of technologies—this is both an incoherent curse and an experimental blessing. UCLA allowed me to learn how to use the Linux OS (the Debian-based Ubuntu distro was my pick) on their dime—commercial shops usually finds ways to not inadvertently pay for such a radical change. I was also able to complete my transition from Microsoft COM to Microsoft .NET technologies without any of the consistently crazy time pressures that commercial shops have. I could test out my new skills on thousands of users for years. I have two Java console applications in use at UCLA right now. Had you asked me about my relationship to Java a little over five years ago and I would have considered it a stranger.
- I first started using laptops and virtual machines at UCLA. I find it impossible to underestimate the significance of this change. And, again, UCLA people like Julio Urquidi and William Cinnater have been invaluable colleagues that have helped me along the way in this area. What I remember from my days working in IT finance, is that personal laptops and “rogue” machines (virtual or not) were a serious security risk—so this behavior was discouraged. So many years ago, UCLA was a refreshing change for me…
- And let’s not forget the benefits—those hippie, near-socialist, UC benefits (eroding away as they are). As a contractor, I remind you, I was paying for my healthcare.But after the SharePoint fiasco mentioned earlier, the writing was on the wall for me. The lack of an architectural roadmap was going to be more of a problem for me. The 8% pay cut faced by all UCLA staff (making over 45K) was going to damage my salary history even more (because I took an effective 20K pay cut to become a perm at UCLA after being a contractor for years—this took place, by the way, around the events of 911—my contractor checks through Martin Progressive were cut in the World Trade Center).
It’s time to do something else. I’ve got less than 90 days to make a constructive change before the heavy stuff starts.