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Editing journals/2017_12_15.org

* Friday, 12/15/17

** 06:07 Flight
On my home this morning. Slept pretty poorly on the red eye from SFO. There wasn't a lot to be done. THe woman next to me kept her light on the entire flight which was not awesome, but I suppose as tired as I was there were worse things that could have happened.

My interview at Elation went about as well as one could hope. The only funny piece was how much they seemed to hem and haw over my salary range. That said, it's a negotiation and they seem interested enough to come back with something competitive. At this point, even if it's the lowest number or below my low range, I'll probably still accept. In many ways Elation is where I thought Ridecell was. Fast moving and looking for people to make an impact. I have never really felt that to be the case at Ridecell.

While I sometimes think I could assert myself more and take on more at Ridecell, the reality is that there is a culture of marching to the drum of the people above you. At one point I think someone even said that if you don't have a ticket open for something, you should not be spending time on it. I understand where that policy comes from, but it suggests deep mistrust in people to do the right thing, and even more importantly means that they have do not trust that they have aligned everyone to point in the same direction.

An interesting article showed up in SWLW this week about Elon Musk describing every employee as a vector, and the speed and ability of a company to succeed is a sum of those vectors. Get everyone pointing in the same direction and enthusiastic and you will have great velocity which just needs to be gently pushed to keep it on track. I suppose alignment is what it comes down to. Teams at Ridecell are not always very well aligned with the vision of the company.

In the meantime, I'm flying home to help Emma clean the house and get ready for our holiday party. First time we've done something like this, and I'm sure she'll stress herself out over it tremendously.  Despite that, I can't wait to be home. It's easy sometimes to dwell on the things that are superfically important. It matters where I work so long as I feel passionate about the direction, have positive and encouraging co-workers and that they respect my time with my family and obligations.

After Asa's most recent doctor's appointment, where Margie harped on his delayed speech, it's occurred to me that it's not enough to just be there with your kids, you have to have quality interactions, and I'm not always sure I do that. I wouldn't rip into myself for being a workaholic, but I do tend to default to the phone or my computer when I'm in the house, and that cannot be the best behavior to model.