Doug Ross @ Journal

When the Lawyers Come Around

My friend Pete recently changed jobs, leaving IBM's Workplace team. He's the flighty type, as his new role at Kubi Software will be his third job in twenty years.

At IBM, Pete was a senior technical lead responsible for various aspects of the Notes/Domino product offering. And when he left, he blogged a few closing thoughts on his IBM career: what attracted him to IBM (a perceived career path for technical folks) and why he ended up leaving the organization (perhaps that the technical career path wasn't quite as he'd envisioned).

In any event, after reading these posts (and pointing a few of my compadres to them), I was going to write a post about technical career paths and how they should (but seldom do) work.

Lo and behold, the posts were gone. When I emailed Pete about them, he told me about the phone call and email he'd received. Something to the effect: please don't disclose our proprietary and confidential information including opinions on our development process. So Pete obliged and pulled the two entries related to IBM.

In my opinion, there wasn't anything a bit proprietary and confidential in the posts. Just some honest impressions regarding IBM's management approach and how the technical career path could have functioned. In my opinion, IBM senior management should spend more time grokking unvarnished impressions from talented senior staff... and less time quashing criticism. But that's just me.

Update: Pete writes, "...one factual error - it was my previous post about the interview question..." that turned out to be an issue. Nonetheless, I'll stand by my impression regarding senior management.

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As an aside, a brief foray onto the Kubi website indicates: (a) that they sell email workflow and collaboration software (definitely an interesting area); and (b) they secured $8 million in venture funding (which means they must be executing diligently on their product and marketing roadmap). Sometimes I really miss Massachusetts.