Originally published on my old blog March 12, 2019
After Joe Ranieri quit* & moved to a new job I think everyone felt stressed. I know I did. It felt like so much more was expected of an ever smaller group of developers.
By Dec of that year I’d had enough of the forums and some of the general dumping on Xojo as a product. I’d made a post, I forget about what, and decided later to remove it. And I removed a bunch more of my posts.
And that lead to https://forum.xojo.com/44831-norman-s-posts
So my account was altered so I could read but not post delete etc
Fast forward to last week.
Internally we had a Slack question about how everyone learned to code.
I replied as did Dana and others.
Dana mentioned that she’d learned HTML and CSS (I think)
I replied that they aren’t for application coding and and while lots of devs know them those aren’t quite the same.
And there was a reply about how it was expected that maybe a customer might do this “gatekeeping” it wasn’t expected of someone internal.
I replied to the effect “nm forget I said anything”
Later I decided that post was not suitable, nor the gatekeeping one so I removed them. And I was editing my previous one about how I got started and managed to delete the thing. Not sure how but I did. Maybe having a granddaughter around when you’re at your computer is a bad idea. I don’t honestly know but Slack really needs UNDO (maybe it has one and I don’t realize it?)
Anyway it was gone and I didn’t think it was a big deal as I could repost how I learned if necessary and the other two did not need to be revived.
Monday morning I got up. Grabbed a coffee. Sat at my machine. And since I had slept in a bit started Slack preparing for the usual morning meetings we have.
And there was a message from Travis asking “Hey you there?”
Now he NEVER pings a person before the morning huddle. And I mean never. So this was weird.
I answered him and he called. Right from the outset I had a bad feeling as his tone and what he said made it obvious this was a “Bad Day”
We talked a bit – but it was obvious the decision was already made and out of his hands. I truly had to laugh at the … pettiness … not sure thats the right word .. the sheer insanity of being fired for removing a few posts that I had come to realize probably should not have been posted in the first place. The was a passing mention of “abrasive to customers” or something along those lines but it was obvious that wasn’t THE core issue.
And that is why I’m no longer at Xojo. Deleting posts that I realized probably should have been posted in the first place.
At least thats how I understand things.
Things will, eventually be ok here.
At Xojo I don’t know as the IDE code base, never mind everything else, is large complex and can be very hard to move in any particular direction and NOT break a lot of things along the way.
*Joe continued to work for Xojo on contact for a few months after this because his work on Android wasn’t finished.