Back to the Grind

As of today, I am back at Microsoft Consulting–or, as it’s known these days, Industry Solutions Delivery, in the role of a Principal Program Architect.

And even with today being a local bank holiday, I already had two calls and have a deadline for Monday.

The first time it happened I completely re-vamped my office, the pace of things changed markedly and I finished the fiscal year pondering about how moving to consultancy and advisory was something that didn’t really sit all that well with the engineer in me.

I know I will go through all of those mindset changes again–a bit more willingly this time simply because I need to get my kids through college, although it does come with the bittersweet benefit of working with people whom I’ve known for a long time now.

The scenario is a marked change, again: Instead of doing niche technical stuff in the telco industry (AI-centric, but with very tightly focused use cases), I’m going back to large-scale, cross-technology program management.

And instead of doing it with US engineering and product teams for a global market (in the telco industry), I will be doing it with Western European folk for the “local” market–but cross-industry and focusing on improving our customers’ business, which seems like a great way to leverage the soft skills I’ve picked up in the intervening years doing startup advisory at Bright Pixel and the odd bit of industrial systems design.

So yes, there is going to be a lot of Excel (and Powerpoint) in my life again. And calls. And discussions about governance, processes, timelines, people and outcomes, with tech going back to being “just” an enabler and having to field a fair chunk of sales madness and constant, short notice pivots.

And it is going to drive the engineer in me absolutely crazy, because I really liked the engineering bits of my old role and I’ve always known what I like to do.

But things change, and these days you can’t just commit to doing bleeding edge technology in a niche. I’ve always been mildly skeptical of LLMs and where Generative AI is going, so even though I would love to do pure ML/AI work in a few very specific use cases where I know it makes a difference the truth is that there just isn’t an opportunity to do it outside the US.

And sticking to a single industry (especially one with growth pains) isn’t a good survival strategy, so this would ordinarily be a good thing.

Except that I am currently freaking out about the fact that, somehow, we’re back to the completely stupid idea that we need to have to take an assorted set of meatbags, fly them thousands of kilometers across a continent to a single location by leveraging the most time-wasting and environmentally-unfriendly processes known to our civilization (at which airports still excel), and then fly them back home after a set of meetings that could have been an email.

This is the bane of consulting, especially since it is still done at too short notice and without even considering the meatbags might have a life–and personal plans, and a family, a pressing need to unwind, daily, in the face of a stressful occupation, or just health issues that make flying (and disrupting their personal routines) an ordeal.

So yes, it seems that face-to-face meetings are back on the menu, and I am going ballistic since I happen to both hate traveling for business purposes and the hypocrisy of building vapid pseudo-relationships.

It’s as if a part of the industry has forgotten we’ve spent the past five years being almost supernaturally effective working remotely and sharing information much more effectively through video calls (and never mind that audio conferencing has been with us for many, many decades).

It is not an auspicious (or even sane) way to start a new role, and I am already dreading the first time I have to fly somewhere for a meeting that could have been a Teams call, seniority be damned.