2009 is around the corner!

Well, needless to say, Paul's cashing in the favour pushed it over the edge, so I accepted Vince's offer (which was significantly less than what I was making elsewhere - less than half, actually) and told Paul that I would stay around long enough to turn the IT dept around and get the company on its own two feet from a tech standpoint, then I'd move on.  Needless to say, I ended up staying well past that.  The challenges to get the company going from the beginning were fun, and while I didn't have a lot of work that first year, I was doing a lot of planning, knowing that year two would have insane amounts of work, and I was also doubling up by still teaching over at Humber.

Well, sure enough, year two was hectic, and we built out the infrastructure that still remains now (although at this point it needs a serious overhaul as we hit some goals a good 2-3 years earlier than we expected).  But after the major planning and major work had been done, we kinda got into the support and services type rut that most IT groups can fall into.  Therein lies the trap.  For the first few years I was doing a lot of strategic planning, and doing a lot of implementations that were really interesting...but by year 3, I was starting to feel stagnant.  I started thinking it was time to pull out.  I talked a bit about this with Steve, and he actually told me some really interesting stuff that was coming down the pipe.  I stuck around, and sure enough, a lot of interesting stuff did come down the pipe in year 4.  We got that going (even though there were a lot of challenges), but I was also seeing my personal life taking a back seat to work.

Well, since my days at Blue*Spark, I've been accused of putting too much into work and not enough into personal, but this was getting to another level.  And the worst part was, after the interesting stuff was done, it was all support and service again...so the stagnant feeling was coming back.  Vince and Steve really appreciated the work I was doing, though, and all all the extra effort I was putting in, so they rewarded me regularly with things (I always did appreciate the fact that they noticed these things and didn't need me to whine about things or be a little b*tch about things so that they noticed).  What was happening outside of this, though, was that there were also people resenting the little rewards I'd get here and there.  Now, let's be clear - I never asked for, nor wanted any rewards.  In fact, whenever presented with rewards, I tended to ask that they don't give rewards to me, but instead give rewards to people on my team or people in the organization (even those who were detractors) who had worked hard.  Again, never
really pointed any of this out to anyone - I don't think you should have to.  But here's where a bit of the bitterness comes in.  A few
people at the organization took an opportunity when I was away on a short vacation to basically try and say that I was a slacker and just
faking the funk.  Well, Vince and Steve are not dumb - they knew full well that I was working my butt off...but they just weren't sure what
all that work was or what the payoff was.  Fair enough - it's tech, and they're not tech folks.  So they sat me down when I returned and asked the question.  My own lax behaviour in reporting what I was doing probably added a lot of fuel to that flame, too, but the guys knew I wasn't a slacker, and they knew that I was busting my butt.  They just wanted to make sure they had the info that would let them back me up in these situations without my having to worry about it.  Again, quite fair.  I admit I didn't take it too well (especially since I'd worked so hard and for so long - getting told that people think I'm a slacker really stung, and for those of you who knew the sort of work I was doing, you can see why it would get my goat especially bad).  Basically, I started reporting everything in, and going a bit overboard. I was literally tracking every minute of the day.  And, to top it off, the stagnant feeling was still there...and getting worse. 
Top it off with my just being burnt out by work, and dealing with some major health issues and a major personal issue (for those of you who know about the P.I. story, 'nuff said) and I was just at a point where I needed to scale back.  So I dropped back to 9-hr work days.  All of this added more fuel to the flame.

Now, Vince has known me for at least 7 or 8 years, now.  He knows I'm no slacker.  He knows I'm a hard worker, but he also knows when I've just 'turned off'.  He called me on it.  And sure enough, I told him I was not really feeling it anymore, I was burnt out, and I was dealing with a bunch of other crap, too.  He was supportive - as much as he could be - but he also said he can't afford having someone in my position who isn't 100% there.  That's completely true.  On top of this, I was always the one to say that I'd be the first to step down if I felt I wasn't a valuable part of the organization.  The problem here wasn't that I wasn't a valuable part of the organization...it's that I wasn't caring so much anymore. I still cared about 9 Story and I still cared about the fact that we were putting out some of the best animation for children you can imagine.  I just didn't care for some of the people in the organization, nor for the work I was doing.  Don't get me wrong - the people I didn't like weren't bad people.  They're hard workers and are very good at what they do.  They just were the type to be "me too" kind of folks, and if they ever saw a slight, real or perceived, they would go to ground and try their best to make sure that they shouted it from the mountaintop.  Not my kind of thing. I prefer that people are judged on their merits - not their statements.  But whatever.  The work, as I'd said, was not the stuff that was getting me jazzed anymore.  And it really occured to me that I'd more than fulfilled my promise to Paul.

About a year earlier, a friend at a company called Eidenai had set up a meeting between me and his bosses.  I thought it was more of a sales-type pitch that I was going for, but they were under the impression it was an interview.  It was an...uh...interesting meeting.  :)   But what ended up happening was the guys at Eidenai ended up making me an offer to come on board.  I was tempted, as this was around the first period where I was feeling stagnant, but like I said above - Steve had pointed out some really interesting stuff that was coming down the pipe.  I turned them down.

Well, a year later, I was in the same boat, and Eidenai had never let up with saying they wanted me on-board.  With a year's worth of coaxing from that side, plus the changes at 9 Story that were leaving me feeling like I'd stayed long past my reasons to be there...well, I decided to move on.  Vince was a bit surprised by my decision, but he understood.  He did tell me about a few things coming down the pipe that would get me interested, but he also said it was secondary stuff and took a back seat to their core business...and I knew that, as interesting as this new work would be, it was something that would not be enough to counter my ennui with my current core tasks.  Vince and I had a talk about things, and we completely understood where we were both coming from.  I spent the next few weeks trying to make sure that everything would be pretty smooth for my departure, and I left.

One of the things I wasn't prepared for was the anger from my team.

My team, for some reason, thought I was being pushed out of the organization - this wasn't the case at all!  I admit, there are people in the organization who would have loved to see me go, but the folks at the top were the ones making the call, and they were not about to bow down to people in that fashion.  They knew me.  Perhaps they didn't know everything I did around the office...but they knew me well enough to know that I'd poured as much as or more of my heart and soul into that place than most of the people in the office.  We left on good terms and I am glad that we did.  I have a load of respect for Vince and Steve and for the people who brought that organization up from the ground where we started, back when there were only 6-7 people involved.  They worked brilliantly to put together a great team and a great company with great product.  Like anywhere there are ups and downs, but on a whole, I'd say those guys have done something revolutionary within the animation industry and I'm proud of them.  Fiercely proud.

My team didn't see it that way.  It took some convincing, but the phrase I kept hearing in those weeks after I announced my intention to depart was "are there other positions?  We want to leave too.  If you're not here, we don't want to be here, either."  Ironically, this wasn't just from the tech team.  I had to really convince a few people that this was a great place to work, and good people to work with.  At the end of the day, I don't think any of
the people who left after I did left because of me, and I'm glad about that.  I still get calls/emails from some of the folks, though, asking
to come work for me wherever I am.  Still, I've been glad to see them make something of themselves at that company.

Anyway, I joined Eidenai in the summer/fall of '07.  Right off, things were weird, as I was hired for a specific position...but the person currently in that position was supposed to be shuffling to another area of the business.  Or, at least, this was the impression I was given.  Later, I was told he was going to be let go.  Either way, he'd not been informed of this, which was all kind of a shock to me.  I felt like a real heel, because I felt like I was pushing someone out of the business.  Worse, the position I'd been hired for was actually going to disappear, because we got acquired shortly after I joined.  Needless to say, I was ready to walk.  I felt like I'd been ill-used and, frankly, abused by the whole situation.  I was ready to walk out and take one of the other offers that were on the table.  That's when Sunil, one of the founders of EI (and a great guy), had a talk with me, asking me to stay on.  He knew the position wasn't what I'd expected, nor what I'd really signed on for, but he said that with changes happening in the merge, I'd be able to carve out a really good niche.

Well, I stuck it out a bit further, and I'll be honest - for the first few months, I absolutely loathed working there.  I hated waking up in the mornings.  BUT...I did really like most of the people I was working with.  It was a bit of  change.  I went from somewhere were I loved what we did as a company to a place where I didn't care about what we did as a company...but I also went from a place where I didn't like most of the people I worked with to a place where I did like the people.  It was strange.  I couldn't figure out what the plusses and minuses were too easily.

Anyway, a few months in, I was again finding that I was getting the shaft.  During a trip to Seattle with Sunil for a conference, we ended up having a long talk about the situation.  He said that, while I'd originally been pegged for a certain role, he wasn't sure if I was the right person for it.  During the conversation, I proved to him that I was not only the right person for the role, but I was actually the guy doing most of that work already.  He decided to give me a shot officially in that role, and within the next few weeks, I ended up taking my place as the Director of the PMO.  Not quite the VP role I'd been hired for, but it was definitely better than the work I'd been doing.  Between Sunil and the two Daves, I was getting more support, and I was also left to make a few more decisions unilaterally.  Sunil and I started working quite closely together.  With us working so hard out in the West, and Dave working hard in the East, and the other Dave passing his reins to me and taking a new set of reins up in the North, we started seeing a major turnaround.  It was still painful in terms of working hours, and in terms of trying to get the ugly, nasty, time-and-money-sucking projects off our docket, but we were making a large difference.  We were getting better work.  We went from laying people off to hiring again.  We went from failing at 90% of what we took on to succeeding at 70%...then 80%...then 90%...the company was turning around, and quite rapidly, too.  Sunil, Dave T. and I started working very closely together and I'd like to think that we made a large difference in a short period of time.  Sure we had some bad engagements (and those that were bad tended to be really bad), but we had a lot of good ones, too, where we made a huge difference.  On top of that, we'd managed to turn some clients who had been furiously angry EI clients into fiercely loyal CX clients.  There's nothing quite so satisfying as inheriting a bad relationship and turning it into a good one.  We couldn't do it in all cases...but we did it in enough that I really started to believe we could do it across the board as long as we had the right teams backing us up.

You see, a lot of the issues EI had were that we kept bringing on the wrong people as stop-gap measures to try and plug holes where we didn't have enough people with the right skillsets.  We either kept running our best people in too many directions, or plugging in not-so-great people to fill the gaps.  Wrong thing to do...but there was no choice with EI.  When CX took the reins, we thought we'd have more options...but we didn't.  So Sunil, Dave and I had to get creative.  And creative is exactly what we got...first, Sunil, with the help of Matthew, changed the SMB group to being more mid-market focused...that gave them better cash-flow, keeping certain resources a bit more secure.  This gave the Enterprise group (the group Dave T and I led) the ability to use those resources to help plug the holes, allowing us to build internal skillsets and use the right people for the tasks.  This helped alleviate some of the resource-plugging we were doing with outsources.  Finally, we were getting to a point where we were building up our juniors to a point where they could start working more independently on projects.  The last bit was to try and make sure our senior/intermediate resources were not taxed, and were able to properly plan and deploy projects.  That was where we were when I realized something: unfortunately, my personal life was now non-existent.  I'd worked myself ragged.  On top of that, I'd realized that I was, to put it bluntly, very depressed about where my life had ended up.

Sunil and I ended up having a long conversation about this, and it became very evident that I wasn't going to be able to get my life in order by working these hours.  At the same time, an offer ended up on the table (this is a story I'll leave for another time) from OICR.  I went through a lot of back and forth as Sunil and Geoff (the CEO of CX) tried very hard to convince me to stay (and very nearly did convince me) but they completely understood and supported my reasons for leaving.  My personal life was a shambles, my own personal goals (a few of you know the comix stuff, and many of you know that I'm a comedian on the side) were falling to the wayside, and my health was deteriorating...again.  They all understood that I needed to do something which allowed me to get all this in order.  We left on good terms, under the understanding that the door was always open for me to return.  In fact, I've continued to help them out whenever possible.  It's still a place where people have to work their tail off for what sometimes feels like very little return, but the experience you can gain in 3 months there will probably equal what you would get after two years elsewhere.  I look back on the team and my time there fondly...not because it was all roses and sugar while I was there, but because I saw changes that we managed to make happen fighting hard every step of the way.  Sunil has become a very good friend and someone I trust and care deeply for, and I've built up some other great friendships with EI/CX and ex-EI/CX people as well - probably more than anywhere else I've worked in the past.  People like Maril, who's at Microsoft, or Susie at Non-Linear, or David and Mano who run Digiflare, or Jigs and Mehrdad and Addisu who are still at CX...the list goes on and on.  I've got to say that CX breeds some of the best and brightest - and while they may not always stay at CX, I'd like to think they take away a lot more than they walked in with from the skillset perspective, the work ethic perspective, and the personal perspective.  It's a place where you will work your tail off, as I said, but it's a place where you'll walk out knowing you made a difference.

All this brings me to where I am now, which is OICR.  I've only been here for almost two months...and already I've seen a huge difference in my life.  I'll get into that another time, perhaps, but for now I just want to say that I think it's been a good decision to move on.  Will I miss the animation industry?  Definitely.  What about the people at CX who were 99% heart?  Of course.  How about the senior-level roles I filled?  Without a doubt.  But I think the fact that I've actually had time to write this and am actually going to be spending New Year's Eve with friends...that's a change that many of you thought you'd never see.  So for those of you who haven't seen me in a while, I'm back, baby!  Expect to see me more often, because I'm trying to get my life back in order.

Happy Near Year, everyone, and have a great time!  I hope to see you all in 2009, and keep watching this spot for more changes which are to come!

Cheers,
Deep (just a guy)