Like most of you I am still working. Meaning - not retired, yet. Meaning -- I work to buy groceries and pay the internet bill.
That in of itself is amazing given my health destroyed my work schedule last year. I think I may have put in 25% effort to my job, which was all I could muster under chemo & COVID. It's amazing my employer didn't force me out on disability or early retirement.
So I still have a job and an income and all the responsibility that comes with that.
I work for a major European corporation. It didn't start that way. I used to work for small and small-ish tech companies in silicon valley. For the past 10 years I worked for a medium-sized tech company. Then we got bought by this European monster. Now I'm part of the borg, to use a 90s cliche'.
My job is to be a senior manager for an international software development team. Our team members are mostly not in the US. We have a small team in SoCal but more people in Armenia, Taiwan, Egypt, and Russia.
I have been doing international software development for most of my adult life. I'm used to working with people on all sides of the planet. I'm used to 11.5 hour time shifts when working with Mumbai and having to communicate with people for whom English is a second, or third, or fourth language.
Over the years I have been acutely aware that geopolitics plays a big role in the productive output of my team. In 2008 there was a near revolution in Armenia. Russian tanks rolled in and the Armenian army quelled a riot.
Well, first the Russians started the riot. Then they machine-gunned a crowd of 100,000, killing countless Armenians who to that point were peacefully demonstrating.
All of that happened simultaneously with Russia starting a fight with Georgia and rapidly taking over a country that didn't fight back.
I went to Armenia right after the shooting stopped. (I'm no dummy. I'm allergic to war). I believe I wrote about that experience here on E2. There were stacks of sandbags in front of the Marriott hotel in Yerevan where I stayed. There were armored personnel carriers parked in the main square. Down by the Opera Plaza, where the conflict happened, there was hardly a sign of the horror that happened just a week before. They cleaned everything up.
When the shooting started, most of my Armenian management team was in the dining room of my house. We all watched the situation from a distance on our blackberries. Cable news did not show any sign of what was happening in Armenia. It was the families of my managers sending texts - "We are under the table. Tracer rounds are going past the window. What do we do?"
No kidding. I will never forget that.
My job was to keep things running. Keep the software product updates flowing, despite the reality happening 6,000 miles away.
How do we do this? Are we shallow and callous?
Denial. We simply move forward in denial.
--
The conflict ended quickly. By the time my team got back home to Armenia, it was done. The official count was 11 dead. That's what all the media outlets reported because that's what the Armenian government told everyone.
Meanwhile, every single one of our managers and developers knew someone killed. The number was much bigger than 11. Just ask around the office.
And all the team kept working. Writing software. Because that was their job and that's how they got paid.
I went back to America and nobody even knew anything had happened in eastern Europe. It was a page 3 headline.
--
Some years later I went to Cairo during a coup. The candidate from the Muslim Brotherhood had won the presidential election. Mohamed Morsi. He had been a student at Stanford and knew America well.
The Egyptian military did not like this guy and they had all the guns. So they arrested him and put him in prison where this perfectly healthy, able man died several years later. At the same time the president who Morsi defeated, Hosni Mubarak was under house arrest in a hospital on the Nile.
I wrote about that experience here as well. I got to see the pyramids. We were the only people on the Giza plateau that afternoon.
Everyone else knew to stay off the streets.
I would say we were almost killed by an anti-American mob, but I don't know if they were anti-American. They just wanted to get our attention by destroying the car me and one of my US managers were in.
Meanwhile the software kept being written. The product flowed.
The fact that the army was shooting protesters in the streets was not my concern. The fact that police cars were being burned in Tahrir Square was only in my peripheral vision.
I did the job. Kept the team working.
And I went home and watched it on cable news.
--
At this moment about 1/2 my software development team resides in Moscow. I have not been to Russia, though there were many times I had the opportunity.
My Moscow team does amazing work. Their output is effective. Their productivity is high.
These are the things we measure.
I don't have a team in Ukraine, but my boss acquired a small company in Kiev some years back, and so our group has a connection there.
And now, geopolitics.
America has declared significant economic sanctions against Russia. One of those sanctions is that I am not allowed to work with my Moscow team. They are not allowed to view, edit, or create any software, even the stuff they wrote. I can speak with them via Microsoft Teams or Zoom about anything I want, as long as it is of a non-technical nature.
Needless to say, I don't have much to talk about with them that is non-technical. And the last thing I would do is to bring up the current political situation. No telling who is listening.
My Russian team members are engineers like me. It's not that engineers are apolitical, but rather, that politics is usually not the main thing we are thinking about. We usually have a juicy technical issue in our heads. It simply doesn't come up all that often.
Not even now. Now we have to be sure not to bring up the situation in eastern Europe.
Not sure what happens next. At this point, my software development team is severely hobbled. Not sure any of us has a job anymore. At least - at this moment there is no work we can perform that someone would pay us for.
--
I am not sure what we do about the Moscow team. With the sanctions on banks, I'm wondering how we even pay our people. At this moment they are still employees. They are still my colleagues. They are good guys to work with.
None
of this is for me to decide. I simply have to go into denial. My job
is software, not human capital. My job is not political. We help
companies design and implement electronic chips. It's physics and
engineering.
All I can do is to try to adapt.
Still, I wonder if I'm deranged. I wonder if my trying to pretend all of this is about software and not fuel-air bombs is a sign of a lack of a moral compass.
Heaven willing, I will retire someday. I will think about the things I have done and the jobs I have had.
Did I really put my fellow man first?
Prayers seem not enough for Ukraine and even my Russian colleagues who will suffer at the hand of a deranged leader.
Did I really worry more about my paycheck than the people I used to keep my career going?
Or was I myself just a cog in a bigger wheel of commerce? Did a higher universal power put me in these geopolitical situations to offer me an opportunity to excel at aiding my fellow man?
I don't have an answer. I just know that when I go back to work on Monday, everything will be different. Lots of people will be hurt.
These things are in my head.
What could I have done? What could I do, more to help?
So far I've done nothing, and far as I can see, I will do nothing.