The highest point in the Netherlands

It’s a year since Cisco made me redundant, after 25 years.

I’m not going to make the case against them here. I did write that one, at some length, with sources, and it turns out that having written it was the point. This is the other half. What it actually did to me, and what I did about it, which at one stage involved mushrooms in the Netherlands.

The phone call Link to heading

One moment you are inside the company, the next you are not.

It’s an extremely well optimized process and you almost have to admire the craft. Script, timing, outplacement firm. Harm priced and settled. The thing I actually lost was never on that ledger.

The process felt too standardized to be accidental. Every piece of that call functions to contain what happens to the person on the other end.

The layoffs there arrive like the flu. Most years, sometimes twice, occasionally a year off. Some are announced. Others just happen, and you find out because somebody isn’t in the meeting any more, and then isn’t in the next one either.

You can’t set your calendar by it, and that is the part that does the work. A date would let you brace. An irregular season means you never quite stop listening for it. Every reorg rumour, every meeting that appears without an agenda. Twenty-five years of that, and I still picked up the phone like it might be about a meeting.

I remember hanging up and sitting there. Laptop still open. Calendar still full of things that were no longer my problem.

I didn’t tell my wife for several days. Too ashamed.

It’s hard to come to terms with being disposable.

The company as a balance sheet I can almost shrug at. HR I still hate. Not abstractly. The function, the script, the practice it takes to fit twenty-five years into a checklist. None of that is improvised. I get angry about it, and then I get angry that I still get angry. I’m aware how that sounds. It also just hurt.

They are the executioners, not the judges. They deliver it, in their own style, which landed as inhuman, and I assume that is partly to protect themselves. I learned a phrase for it: instrumental empathy. Warmth as a tool, scheduled and budgeted. Knowing all of that has not redirected the hate.

Why did it hit so hard? Link to heading

It was not unexpected. A career there is an escalator. You go up, and at some point you fall out the top. Nearly all of my friends and colleagues went at some point during my tenure, a lot of the people who actually built this industry among them, and what I saw was often newer, cheaper labour coming in behind.

I had tried to prepare. Only work on things external employers would also pay for. Open standards, open source, keep the network, keep the work in the open so the interesting bits weren’t trapped on one company’s disk. Very clever of me. That is the sort of advice you give yourself at 2am and then congratulate yourself for being strategic, while still showing up to the same badge reader for another decade. It did not make the phone call any easier.

The joke is that Cisco paid for all of it. They funded my IETF work for years, which suited both of us perfectly well. They funded VPP and paid to open source it. That turned out to matter when I left: the project belonged to a community rather than being trapped inside one employer. The work could continue, and so could I.

And I had hated the place for years. The last three or four especially. I was sidelined, gradually and then fairly obviously, and more and more of the work I was given was work I did not believe in. After a career spent on open standards and open source, being pointed at things that are not value aligned is its own quiet insult. It was miserable. I wanted out.

Somewhere in those years, in the circles I moved in, I stopped hearing much pride in working there. Not angry, not rebellious. Stagnation does interesting things to management culture, and interesting is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

So there I was, leaving a job I no longer wanted, at a company I had been trying to talk myself into leaving for a decade. Rationally I should have been delighted.

I was not delighted at all, and that puzzled me for a long time. I kept poking at it the way you poke at a loose tooth.

After 25 years, not a single thank you received. I’m aware that wanting a thank you from a corporation is like wanting a hug from a vending machine. I wanted it anyway. What the spreadsheet could not hold got pushed outward — onto me, onto my family, onto the welfare state.

It’s easy to say that a corporation has no morals and no feelings, and that expecting it to have them is like expecting an avalanche burying you to feel bad about it. Knowing that helps less than you would think.

The logo looks like a double birdie, two middle fingers, so I had stickers made. One for the company and one for the customers, I suppose. I’m aware of how that looks. I had them made anyway. It helped for about a day and a half, and I still have most of them. Anger is useful fuel. It is a terrible destination.

But then I think it also hit me very personally. Childhood traumas where being told you are worthless, you are disposable. Hits old wounds. Which I had compensated for by being a perfectionist and a high performer, and that was never a personality so much as a coping strategy that happened to get excellent performance reviews. So the call went straight past the professional part of me and into the shame and the unworthiness circuits.

I gave them nights and weekends for 25 years and they never once had to ask. The trait that made me useful is the same trait that made the phone call land the way it did. If the work is who you are, then removing the work removes who you are. Hole filled with work, surplus taken, hole handed back. I don’t think anybody sat in a room and planned it. It just turns out to be profitable, which is worse.

And of course the exclusion. Inside a group, then outside it. People I ate lunch with went quiet. The chats went quiet. I became a story other people told carefully.

So how much of this is the corporation and how much of it is just me? I honestly don’t know. The call wasn’t unique to me. The sentence I attached to it was mine, written long before Cisco existed.

What I think now is that I did not lose the job on that phone call. I had been losing it for years, one reassignment at a time, and the call was just the receipt.

And there is a difference between leaving and being removed. Leaving would have meant deciding for myself that 25 years were enough, which I could never quite bring myself to do. They made the decision for me, which spared me having to make it and humiliated me for not having made it, both at once.

The tunnel Link to heading

The closest thing I have found to describing what those years felt like is a short story from 1961 by Alice Glaser, called “The Tunnel Ahead”. You are in the car with your family, you know perfectly well what the tunnel does, and you drive through it anyway. A Norwegian filmed it, which pleases me more than it should: André Øvredal’s Tunnelen, fourteen minutes, shot in a studio in Oslo with everything outside the car added afterwards.

I read it long before any of this and thought it was a clever piece of science fiction.

Then I lived it. Paycheck, badge, interesting colleagues, enough good days to keep going. You see people disappear and you tell yourself you are different, or at least later, or at least ready. You are not ready. You just keep driving.

The story gives the programme an official name. Depopulation without Discrimination. I have sat in meetings where that would not have stood out.

Mushrooms Link to heading

So, have I gotten over it? Not really. Am I working on it? Yes, and last month that involved a mushroom retreat in the Netherlands.

I went because the ordinary tools had run out. Talking helped a bit. Writing the long angry piece helped a bit. Neither moved the thing that still sat under the ribs at odd hours. So I booked something I would previously have mocked. Flew down, and drove the last stretch with the other participants.

On the way there I asked one of the facilitators what the highest point in the Netherlands was.

His answer: “You tomorrow on mushroom.”

He was not wrong. The Netherlands is very flat. I was not.

Mattresses in a big circle on the floor of an old barn, in a small village in the middle of nowhere. A big bowl of truffles. The absurdity of the whole thing.

Then the visuals. Music shaped the feelings — made you one with whatever was moving through. When the live musicians sang a love song, the love was extreme, all-encompassing, embodied. I surfaced hugging myself.

A facilitator came over and asked if I wanted a top-up. He looked like the Wizard of Oz.

I laughed for six hours. Others had very different experiences, including feeling their own death. Don’t try this at home.

And when the ego was out of the way the answer to the phone call was trivially simple. Love and kindness. Towards myself. Towards my family. Towards all living beings. And accepting and receiving love from others.

After spending a couple of seconds on that (time is hard to track while being on mushrooms) my brain decided it was not a problem worth dwelling on. Solved. Next.

My ego did not attend that meeting.

At dinner afterwards I watched a woman peel an orange. Within a minute there were three of us at it, entirely absorbed. Getting every last bit of the white bitter pith off. Inspecting the sidewalls. The peel became an elephant.

Nothing important was happening, and it was the best part of the day. Remove the bitter parts carefully, make an elephant out of what is left. Make of that what you like.

The grievance was still available if I wanted it. I noticed I did not have to pick it up every time.

It doesn’t exonerate anybody and it doesn’t forgive anybody. It just showed me I don’t have to relitigate this for the rest of my life.

Getting that to stick when the ego starts up again is another matter. 50/50 success rate so far. If this were a product we would call it GA and ship it anyway.

It was the most useful thing I have done about any of this, and I would not do it again.

Where I am Link to heading

The desired state isn’t only to not care. Not personally, not as competition, just a former employer. Not caring is the floor, though, and it’s a grey place to live.

The 25 years weren’t nothing. I sat in rooms with the people who invented the routing protocols, and with some of the people who invented the Internet, and I got to argue with them and occasionally win. The work took me most places on the map. There were years in Japan where I lived like a king. Cisco made some of that possible. The people, the work, and what I made of the opportunities were mine.

What I actually want is to be able to laugh at it. Corporate life is absurd and I spent a quarter of a century inside it without ever quite finding it funny. Instrumental empathy. A logo that reads as two middle fingers. Depopulation without Discrimination. That’s comedy, and I was sitting there taking notes for a tribunal. I managed it for six hours once, chemically. Not a repeatable process.

Eventually a decent anecdote, then, rather than a grievance I keep current.

I have a new home now where we build networks, and none of it is about them.

And the network came with me, in the other sense of the word. Twenty-five years of culls scattered the people I worked with across the whole industry, so what I have now is spread over dozens of companies instead of concentrated in one. That is a stronger position than I was in a year ago. They built it for me, one round at a time.

I’m writing this, so obviously I’m not there yet. I’m working on it.

Seeing it coming didn’t help in the slightest. I checked, thoroughly, for 25 years.

Am I bitter? Yes. Am I grateful, the way you are supposed to be on LinkedIn? No.

Love and kindness for the inner child. Better regulation for the outer world. And no, I’m not going to post a sunrise about it.