John Burkholder

  I signed up for Twitter on December 3, 2009. Today I closed my account. I was very hesitant to do so but after thinking long and hard about whether I felt the platform was the right place for me, without moderation, with a rapidly dissolving corporate hierarchy, I felt it was time to move on. But to where? Mastodon? Hive? Post? I can't just join all of them and companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, and my local governments haven't adopted another platform. So back to when it was "harder" to contact them. "Harder"... Like picking up the phone to call a human being. Yes, the human is now often a computer. Yes, now the company doesn't have a physical phone, but the point is, many of them have some way to contact them directly instead of through a social media platform. But "harder" could mean it is mentally harder for you to make a phone call. It could also mean your preferred asynchronous method of communication that allows for you time to thin

  What have I done? Why am I doing this? Over the past 7 years, I have been a manager of platforms, people, and knowledge. Prior to that,  #management  has always been part of the job, but not the entire job. When I became a manager I was told to "make a choice... you can't do both." Now that I have been doing it, I understand why they said it. Being an effective manager means you aren't building it, fixing it, or maintaining it. You help your people gain the knowledge, resources, and communications necessary to succeed. But what kind of impact has that had on me personally? Yeah... there is the rub. I don't like it. As an architect, developer, or engineer, you build things. You have a solid result. I would have built a new website and I could show someone I built that. I created a new software, I can show it. I built a new network operations center and could show how it was effective in preventing issues before they happened. As a manager or director, your people