My Personal Experiences

On my first job for the government, I finished the work three weeks ahead of schedule — I'd preordered materials and had the remote site prepped and staged so I could start working the moment I arrived, saving on per diem and other travel costs that were ultimately funded by taxpayers.

I came back early expecting to be praised for doing the job faster and more efficiently. Instead, my boss pulled me into his office and yelled at me for an hour about how I'd screwed up his budget — if he didn't spend that money, he wouldn't get it again next year, and he wanted me to spend what he'd planned, not save costs or time.

I quit that week. I couldn't be part of something that looked down on efficiency, cost savings, and doing the work better.

A friend and I started our own company and built a real-time scheduling system for automotive service centers — this was back in the early 2000s. It dynamically learned employee behavior and throughput, and estimated wait times based on which employee would actually be doing the work, so shops could get more done and customers didn't have to wait so long for repairs.

We didn't know how to sell it, so we went store to store. Eventually a company in California heard about us and called, interested in buying us out. They loved the software — it was ahead of anything they'd built in-house — but once they found out we were two recent college grads living in an apartment, they changed their mind. Within a month, they'd sent reps to nearly every service center within driving distance of us, handing out free swag and talking themselves up, so that by the time we walked into a shop, people would ask if we were "the same group." It tanked our sales.

It was a good strategy on their part, if a bit dirty. We stopped the business after visiting nearly every store we could reach and hearing the same story each time. What I realized much later is that we never should have stopped — we should have found a different way to proceed.

I went to work for a major airline — my dream job. Free travel, a great company, genuinely kind people who cared about the place. I was on a high-performing team that met or exceeded every deadline, until, after a year, an executive decided to buy a solution instead of letting us keep building one in-house. That wasn't our call. What was strange was what came next: instead of keeping a team that worked well together, they broke us up and scattered us across other teams — a management blunder, in my view. You don't split up a team that's playing well together any more than you'd break up a winning sports team.

A friend and I ended up on the same new team, brought in to improve the scan rate of a system that tracked mail moving through the airline's network. That mail had to be scanned at a required accuracy rate to be paid by USPS — tens of millions of dollars a year rode on it. The system had been built by a consulting firm whose head was brought in as the airline's CIO shortly after the purchase. The airline had paid millions for it, and its scan rate was far below the requirement. USPS was giving every underperforming carrier an extra year to hit the number before losing the contract.

My friend and I nearly doubled the scan rate, but it still wasn't enough — the system's design and hardware were fundamentally too complicated, and required far more training than baggage handlers could reasonably absorb on top of their regular work. We realized it would never get there, so on our own time and our own dime, we got certified in RFID, and I designed and built a system that pinpointed packages through triangulation scanning, automatically, and it hit the required rate almost entirely on its own.

We shared the results with our direct manager, who thought it was great. Then with the stakeholder in operations, who agreed. Word reached the CIO and our manager's manager, and they called a meeting. When we said all we wanted was to lead the team that would build it out — and that we'd hand over everything we'd built on our own time, since it belonged to us, not the airline — there was silence for a few days. Then the CIO, a former lawyer, had us served with legal documents claiming we'd violated company intellectual property and privacy policy, that everything we'd built belonged to the company, and that we needed to cease and desist or be fired.

The same CIO, as head of the consulting firm, had sold the airline the original system for millions — and was the one telling the company that USPS was paying for 100% of the mail. That was technically true, but not because we were hitting the required scan rate; it was because USPS had granted a grace period to improve it. That distinction was being quietly left out.

Their lawyer called us. We spoke, and the lawyer admitted they had no case — we'd built technology that didn't exist anywhere else at the airline, so it couldn't be IP infringement, and it wasn't built for or patterned after anything the airline already had. The suit was dropped, and they couldn't fire us. We asked our manager for help; he was afraid, since his boss was friends with the CIO. We asked to meet with the CEO, who agreed — then cancelled the day before, saying that since our issue was with the CIO, we'd need to resolve it with the CIO ourselves. Two employees being pushed out by a CIO, and HR wanted no part of it either. Same answer, every time: work it out with the CIO.

We believe the CIO split us up after that. My friend, already a manager, was reassigned to report to someone he used to manage. I was moved to a team that barely touched software, under a manager with no technical background. My friend quit immediately. I stayed, stubbornly, for a few months, even though everyone told me the CIO was trying to force me out because he couldn't fire me any other way, and that he'd never let anything good happen for me there. Eventually I handed in a 30-day notice. The CIO offered to pay it out if I left that same day. I did.

The title gave him the power, and the company did nothing to protect us. Ironically, they lost the mail contract — and the revenue that came with it — not long after.