Tales from a slowly graying beard

I am closing in on 30 years in the industry. One thing I did not imagine when I just started out was that the list of “things I have seen” would constantly grow over the decades. How naive I was, believing people know what they are doing, management making decisions based on data and the market not being a dice roll for who can lie the best. On the bright side this makes for some really good stories.

Usually these are stories to share over a scotch or two. To help people save face. To not expose them to any form of liability. To not make them look bad. And to acknowledge it happened a long time ago and everyone at this point surely matured and grew into a more responsible professional who would not make the same decision again.

Some of the stories are simply funny and I still laugh thinking about them. Some are a testament to how broken and stupid our industry can be - who would not want to hire a team to write an internal SSL library just because you think auditing OpenSSL is to bothersome? Some are, let us be generous in the framing, not 100 percent to the letter of the law.

So here are some ground rules for any story I will post as part of this series.

1. All names will be changed - obviously.
2. I will not tell you when something happened - to make sure it is not too easy to look at my past client list and figure out who I am talking about.
3. I will most likely change the domain of a company, except FinTech, for the same reason as 2.
4. NDAs and possible liabilities have to be expired.
5. If you expect character assassination or dirty laundry about individuals you are out of luck.

Five is an especially important point to me. I might not have always agreed with everyone. Sometimes we might be on opposite ends of a debate. But except for two people I believe I can still have a beer with most folks I worked with. I respect them as professionals, as human beings and I appreciate calling many of them acquaintances, some friends and a few even good friends.

So grab a beverage of your choice, lean back and warm up your face muscles for all the eye rolling and face palming that is to come in the next parts of this series.