War on the Suits

I'm an old techie. Not quite a decade behind Steve Jobs. And software is my game.

Started coding algorithmic trading systems on the Apple II in 1981 while I was in high-school. Made lots of money trading. Lots. Wrote a book about it: Way of the Turtle.

I've built compilers, database engines, enterprise development environments, IDEs, you name it. And I've worked with some of the very best.

I retired from trading because I was bored. I wanted to create and I wanted to change the world. More money wasn't going to do that.

Awesome software just might. That was my thought then and it's my thought now.

Awesome software will change the world.

The problem is that the Assholes of Suits have plugged up the awesome in the name of profits and efficiency. Of command and control. The suits almost killed Apple until Steve kicked them out and retook the company he and Woz created. They've killed myriads through acquisition and neglect. Toxic to all who care about the craft and art of techno awesome. Suits suck.

They've crushed and strangled Silicon Valley. And venture capital doesn't venture anymore. Round about the 80s they sailed ship from their lair in Hahvaahd, Princey Town and the other Ivy's and landed in San Francisco and Sand Hill.

Suits have almost killed the internet, and they're doing their best to stick the final knives in as I write. They sucked up all the ISPs and now maintain the fiefdoms of Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner et al. They are working hard and bribing dearly to kill the very core of the neutral internet ethos.

In the name of profit and protected markets and competitive advantage, they have fucked things up, stifled innovation, and made it extremely hard for excellence to out.

They have plugged up the awesome so that most companies just produce shit.

Take Google for example. Great engineers. Total shit products. Good enough? Sort of, but total shit compared to their potential. Some great ideas come out here and there, but they lack polish and any sense of the Apple awesome that Steve delivered.

Take Gmail, for example, how many fucking times a day do I have to delete an empty draft that exists with no subject, no content, no addressee, just because I happened to tab or click into the space they provide for typing. Really guys? Seriously? WTF are you thinking over there in Google land?

Who the hell needs to save an empty draft for later?

Gee, I really want to make sure that my empty thought is preserved so I don't lose my work.

Now, to the Gmail product team, I hear you. This is not a programming problem, or an engineering problem. You've probably been trying to get time allocated to those bugs because they are embarrassing. No, this is most likely a management problem. A fucking suit problem. Eric Suit Schmidt, in particular. The suit rubbed off on Larry and Sergey and they don't even know they've still got it. They've made progress, but not enough.

Money and business models over excellence. Eric, do you even use your products? Do you not care enough to go down to the Gmail team and say: WTF guys why are we saving empty drafts? Do you even notice? No, I'm sure there's some sort of management process in place to ensure excellent delivery of market ready features in a controlled and sustainable fashion blah blah blah bullshit marketing buzzword business school diatribe...

No seriously Eric. Do you use your own products?

Don't even get me started on Google Docs, especially the replacement for Word. How many times do I apply a style to one line and the style gets applied to a line that wasn't selected? Only just about every time I use the document editor for anything other than a few paragraphs.

Good enough, but shit and free, beats awesome in the markets every time. You Google suits figured that out and the monolithic google borg suit perspective is fucking up the global software markets. No one else can build a great email client because yours is free. No one else can innovate in maps because yours if free (though maps is one of your pretty damn good products, kudos to?). Only it's not really free since you are selling your users down the river Styx of advertisement hell.

Suit fuckery.

So today, this 5th of November to remember, I declare gunpowder treason and plot against the suits. All of them everywhere, starting with tech.

Why are you so pissed off Curtis, you might ask. I will tell you why. You old suits keep infecting the newer generation who think they need to emulate you to be successful. That's fucking up progress for an entire generation, and it's actually the root cause of most of the worlds problems. Suits. Greed over good. Money over love. Business model over great products.

Enter Andale Not (aka Andela). I just left a company that I loved because I couldn't stomach working for the suit who ran it. A young, arrogant, and stupid suit named Jero Mee SohnJun (Jeremy Johnson) Jero was part of a moderate success in the education space called MeeToo (2 U). On a personal level, I really liked Jero. He really wanted to make a difference in the world by helping teach thousands of African youth to program computers. He had built a great team. But he didn't know how to manage or lead it.

Suits are fundamentally stupid. Jero had learned from the stupids. They learn rules and try to apply them everywhere. Like little kids with a hammer banging on everything they see, because hammer.

Rules are for fools unless chosen for play. Principles are what designers of awesome use. The reasons behind the rules. If you don't understand them, you need rules, and you should stay in the kiddie pool.

Jero spent all his time preparing in his head for success and completely dropped the ball on basic execution because suits are taught rules, but not reason. Some examples:

1) No W4 and payroll paperwork before paying people.

2) No insurance.

3) No contracts with employees of any kind despite the students asking for this for months because it is an expectation in Lagos. No explicit statements that work done belongs to Andela for intellectual property purposes, all standard shit, Andale Not, did not.

4) No computers for software developers more than two months after having to be convinced they come in handy when programming. So we have students working on micro notebooks with 1G memory and 11 inch screens that are running 10 to 20 different versions of Windows when we are teaching them web programming which isn't very easy on Windows. This is why everyone uses Macs or Linux machines.

Jero's solution? Chromebooks with 16G of disk space and 2G of RAM and no ability to run the software we are training for. Did he buy one and test it? No he buys 10 and then wastes a person week or two getting us to verify that yes Jero, you can't do what you wanted. Did he ask any developers before buying those Chromebooks? No, he asked his roommate who he described as a mediocre CTO. That's suit smart.

5) No fiber internet 10 weeks after the buy decision because? Even in Lagos they only took 10 days to get the fiber in once they were paid. Why 8 weeks to pay when the money was in the bank? We needed a proper accounting process? WTF? Fiber was critical for low-latency VOIP connections to customers and management in NYC, super critical to the business.

6) No meeting rooms in the Lagos offices and 50 people packed like sardines into a space suitable for perhaps 20. No wall decorations. No noise absorbing wall or floor or ceiling tiles.

Meanwhile our NYC offices overlooked Central Park at 5th Ave and 59th St. You could see the Apple store right out our 8th floor windows.

Americans > luxury

Africans > sweatshop

Curtis > pissed off

Jero > hypocrite asshole

We had free snacks and coffee machines and...

While Jero argued, literally for days, over saving $1 per student for their lunches because $4 was "way too much to spend on the fellows". This coming from a man who had never actually been to Lagos and eaten the food of which he was deciding. Dumb fucking suits.

7) 45 different types of chairs, all used, none of which would have survived the trash bin in the States. No really, 45 actual different types of chairs, I counted them. There were perhaps three or four of the same types. None of them comfortable. All of them ugly. All of them very shitty compared to the new Aeron chairs in the New York office. Can you say hypocrisy?

8) Desks (cheap shitty tables actually) where there wasn't room for a notebook next to the laptops because 10 people were sitting at a table that was designed for perhaps 4. Instructors couldn't sit next to the students. Don't even think about space for the external monitors that I asked for.

9) And talk about micro-management. That's a suit special. I, the great Jero Mee SohnJun must manage every second of your time, even though you have three times the business experience, and 100 times the domain experience. And do you have a discretionary budget? No, why would you need that?

Seriously, who even thinks to ask things like: since I'm going to be the CTO, will you let me spend a few grand on travel after we raise the $3 million in our seed round? I mean, I don't assume idiot when someone doesn't talk idiot speak. With a suit, you can never tell, I'll have to ask the dumb questions next time.

10) Sales and marketing - Hiring an awesome story teller, strategic thinker and writer as our head of sales when he doesn't know how to sell, isn't used to speaking off the top of his head on a phone, and doesn't have any sales experience in the market we are selling into.

11) Operations - Putting a 23 year old awesome young entrepreneur (Iyinoluwa Aboyeji)in charge of on-the-ground operations in Lagos when this entrepreneur hasn't been living in Lagos, doesn't like operations, isn't good at it, and then blaming him for the failures in execution. Then putting an awesome person who doesn't like operations and has no experience with startup finance or legal issues in charge of operations as COO when she really likes being in the field with students. So we've got a five level org chart in ops with a team size of perhaps six. Princey Town perfect

12) Planning and strategy - Building an entire business plan and financial model having spent a grand total of three days in Lagos, then spending three months selling the plan without having any fucking clue about the market, the operational difficulties in Lagos, or the capabilities of the team he is running. Literally trying to run the company from New York. Then not flying over when there are problems, just sitting in New York and micromanaging over the phone which was a shitty connection using Skype VOIP over an LTE wireless link using home-quality routers and wireless endpoints.

Honestly, I am really very unimpressed with the education of Princey Town. How do you educate so much that you leave zero room for basic common sense.

13) Risk management - Not realizing that the greatest risk to the company is that the students leave early because they don't like the way the company is being run, or how it treats them. Or that an executive might leave and take some of the team with him.

And Jero has $9,000 to spend on video for the launch party, but no money to film the African students, or the African co-founders. Just still pictures of Lagos. Can you say patronizing insulting and stupid? And just plain mean

I could go on but you get the point. Serious execution hackery.

But that's not primarily why I left.

It was the assholery of suitdom that did it for me. I don't work for assholes.

This 30-year-old, high on himself and his recent IPO cash flush lifestyle, gets seriously angry with me because I was a few days late on some RACI tasks assigned to the tech and training team were late. RACI, for those of you who don't know, is a methodology of sorts for deciding who needs to do what and when. Kind of like training wheels for management. You don't need it if you understand management. This was the first I had heard anyone say we were late and they were meaningless dates with no affect on the rest of the team. They were late because one of the ops guys didn't put dates on the Asana tasks so they never floated to the top. Did I miss something? Yes, but seriously unimportant compared to 98% of what we were doing.

All six tasks were done by my team within hours of learning about it. See Jero, that's how adults communicate. You want something, you ask, we deliver. No temper tantrum necessary. Much nicer that way, and we don't think you're an asshole afterward.

This happens after he gets to Lagos and sees how shitty the conditions are, something I've been telling him for weeks and warning about. No apology, just: "I'm not sure you're going to be able to manage the entire tech team if you can't get things done. I'm cancelling the hackathon you've been working all week on unless you get these 6 RACI tasks done by Wednesday." This after I had just told him they'd be done by the end of the day (a Monday). Threat unnecessary. Process over intelligence, the Princey Town way.

Seriously? What a prick move. Your first mention of something is a threat?

Do you have any fucking idea who I am? Who I have worked with in tech? How little tolerance I have for young punk assholery? How many people who have worked for me or with me that could run circles around your piss poor management style?

But it's not really Jero's fault. He's just a young and stupid who bought the religion of the suits who trained him. To be pitied. Probably bullied during youth because he was poor and went to Princeton Day School where poor was not the norm. That's where the anger comes from. Probably bullied because his dad is a great guy who runs a non-profit in Trenton helping disadvantaged youths and not a rich guy, while his Princey Town peers were Princey Town rich. (his dad is also a Princey Town grad, helps on the legacy admission don't it).

Suits. I've done with them.

War on the suits. It is time for war.

This time I'm going to inoculate against them. How you ask? Simple. No money advantages. That keeps the suits away.

I'm forming a new company, a competitor to Andale Not, called Wazobia (which means Unity in Nigeria).

We're going to do what Andale didn't except faster and better and done.

Just a taste of our style: We will have more women programmers than men, by at least one. We will have way more minorities than white men. We will reverse the bullshit diversity of suit-based tech staffing. There will be no assholes.

It will be a global programming cooperative. Only one membership type, full membership. We will each earn the same share. No room for suit equity fuckery.

Oh, we'll get paid plenty because awesome programmers always do, and because we'll be sharing the portions the suits normally suck for them them and theirs. Those profits and obscene equity stakes.

Not at Wazobia.

So do you want to work with the best? Want to help train a new generation to be even better? Love to work in teams? Love to do the impossible? Tired of suits and management bullshit?

Join Wazobia.

The membership fee is one day's wage at your normal pay rate to be paid in BTC at the following address:

D0euAl_waZSeNDMuNeY2DeMAdReSSiZUREeDOnDREd?

Honor code, you send the BTC, tell us how much you sent and we'll take your word for it that this is one day's wage for you, that way it's the same price no matter where you live or how much privilege you didn't earn.

Send the notice of BTC transfer and 500 to 700 words each on:

1) Why you want to be awesome and what you've done to show it.

2) The best designs you've seen and why they are awesome. Be specific.

3) What you will do to make the world better.

To: [email protected]

If we don't accept you, we'll return the membership fee, so please include a return Bitcoin address.

Oh, and don't forget. We like to have fun. That's what life is all about.