Yesterday, I met a colleague from my last company for a tea break. We hadn’t seen each other since I left the company, which by now, was over two years ago. I think we had made several attempts, but she had to cancel on me last minute a number of times. And when that happens after a certain number of times, I kind of stop trying. But then, she’s been really kind and generous and has donated to my AFSP fundraising drive for all these years, even with nearly zero communication with me, so I figured I would try to make it finally work. And we finally did.

She’s still at that company, despite how dysfunctional it is. She’s in a smooth-sailing mode, and I certainly know what that is like. Two rounds of predictable layoffs have happened since I left the company, and they’ve gone through a lot of rebranding/re-visioning work. Many of the delusional people I knew while there are still working there, still believing that they work for a real tech company, which is really amazing to me. When I look back on how much I learned about software as a service since coming to my current company, I realized, slowly but surely, exactly how terrible it was at the last place.

It was an awful place to work, but at the end of the day, it was a stepping stone to get where I am now. I don’t really have any regrets about them. Where I am now is in no way perfect, but it’s closer to being “normal” than the other place ever could have even attempted to be. There are so many horrendous places to work out there that are far behind the times, even in 2019 today, that after we parted ways yesterday afternoon, I felt incredibly lucky to be so far away from that place and where I am today.