I see ghosts of Don Skirvin all around Seattle. Not just in Ballard where I picture him, but all over... Fremont, downtown, and even around Green lake, where it would be preposterous to see him, since he would have to walk, and he wasn't much of a walker. It’s never him, but it always makes me do a double take. If you see me looking at overweight bearded guys you now know why.
Don was a manager of mine at Adobe. He is a good guy, a talented composer, and a hell of an arguer, but he likes security, safety and repetition, and that wasn’t what I was interested in when I worked for him. I was working on a small feature that was going to be dropped into a a big product. The lead developer and I would talk and expand the feature or make changes and take on new bits and it was working great, and then we got the bigger team involved and it went to hell. Don didn’t want to take any fixes or add anything because that meant risk. Most people view the risk reward thing as a tradeoff, you get rewards for giving users a feature that works well and does what they expect, but sometimes you have to take risks when you take fixes or make changes. Don just argued that risk was bad. He often won, and Chip and I learned to work around him and not tell him what we were doing. After two product cycles like that I had a pretty healthy dislike of Don, but then the manager on my happy little team left and the team was in chaos, so I started looking for a place to go. I fell into Don’s lap. He said I’d get to do fun work and he’d give me a lot of room. It seemed fair. Sometimes that happened other times he kept me on a short leash. Don was so controlling he asked for status reports to be submitted only in a specific font, and it was courier, which was nuts. I like Helvetica a lot, but I couldn’t imagine demanding that people resend work in the right font. Some of his control stuff was easy for me to blow off and avoid by just doing things in the way that worked for him and ignoring the overly controlling stuff that was going on. I also did a lot of work that was just never mentioned, I would help people out with weeks of work that I would never mention to Don because he would tell me I didn’t have time to do it, but I always did. He left eventually, because the work was too stressful.
While Don and I didn’t like each other much, he one offered me a promotion while he was yelling at me, I refused it, he did do some good things for me. He did a great job protecting his people and creating a fiefdom of his own, which was good and bad.
I have no idea what he’s doing, but I hope he is doing well and is finding success with his music and is doing something that brings him more joy than making software did.