Able & Tireless

Thomas David Baker 1:17 pm [+]

'People protect themselves from frustration by deciding not to care. So you end up with people whose attitude is, "Well, I showed up for work today. That's all I have to do. If I can't make progress, that's not my problem; that's the bosses problem.'"

RMS is actually talking about frustration with non-free (speech not beer) software but it describes Adam's problem perfectly. Adam clearly felt frustrated. And if you're frustrated you can either not care or become very annoyed or remove yourself from the situation. He took the latter option.

You can see in C&W Think Tank one of his efforts to become unfrustrated.

I'm not saying I agree or I care but when I read that this morning I really understood it's essential truth. And I strongly relate it to Adam's decision to quit. He wanted very much to care but was finding it increasingly difficult to do so (remember when he used to go meet little user groups and they loved him? What happened to that?) Could he have done more is of course the counter-question.

1. Free Software: Freedom and Cooperation is a talk RMS gave at New York University and is printed in Free Software, Free Society.

Thomas David Baker 9:19 am [+]

(Yet another) end of an era. Mr. S is leaving us to become Technical Head of Exposure Interactive. With his level of frustration reaching epic levels recently (see this blog) you can't be surprised.

He will be missed, of course. And who's going to look after PAL and Escalation?

Thomas David Baker 2:52 pm [+]

Closing 124 Theobalds Road.

In many ways the closing of Red Lion Square which held more people and realer people was worse but closing 124 really is the end of an era.

When I joined Cable & Wireless in 1998 we had 65,000 employees, two big offices in WC1 and big interests in Hong Kong, Australia and the US. Now we have 20,000 employees, are based in Bracknell, and have none of those interests. We have even yoyo-ed in and out of the FTSE-100. Admittedly we still have stuff going on in the Caribbean, the Cayman Islands, Panama and so on (although our activity around VoIP in Panama seems on the surface to be despicable).

It's a real shame more redundancies have been announced because it gives the sense that the company is still in decline. And I think that feeling had been just about stamped out. And for just 600 jobs seems like more will be cost in bad feeling than will be saved in costs. Still it will probably work with in the City which is the whole point anyway.