In 2010, I got fired. I deserved it. I wasn’t wrong, but I deserved it. And I think there is an interesting lesson in that dichotomy.
I was managing a team of developers at a once-great Silicon Valley firm that had fallen from its peak. The development team was very good—elite, even. Our product was a once-popular but fading software development tool. Our management team—we called it “the Core Team”—was a great bunch. I enjoyed the job.
The product was monolithic—a single, large install that had to be built and deployed all at once. We shipped about once a year, and all development was geared around building new features and fixing bugs that would all culminate in that big, annual release. Being a development tool, it had many complex components, including a compiler, a run-time library, a visual framework, and an IDE. Getting everything pulled together and built was no mean feat.
