Beholding the Swath of Destruction in My Wake

The job application asked for a URL to a site to which I’d made a significant contribution to in quality assurance. And I played an exchange from the first episode of the British comedy Red Dwarf played in my head:

Holly: They’re all dead. Everybody’s dead, Dave.
Lister: Peterson isn’t, is he?
Holly: Everybody’s dead, Dave!
Lister: Not Chen!
Holly: Gordon Bennett! Yes, Chen. Everyone. Everybody’s dead, Dave!
Lister: Rimmer?
Holly: He’s dead, Dave. Everybody is dead. Everybody is dead, Dave.
Lister: Wait. Are you trying to tell me everybody’s dead?

It makes my resume sound like a litany of carnage, but many of the companies I’ve worked for full time with products of their own have been acquired by other companies or rolled into parent companies, and the products I worked on might remain in bits and pieces deep within the tech debt of legacy code somewhere, but they’re not readily available, and my contributions are no longer readily apparent. Or the startup shuttered after a couple years or was bought by another company no one has heard of. Or the consulting company rolled off a contract I worked on, a contract with 250 people, most of whom would have forgotten my name if they ever learned it once I was no longer on the list of meeting attendees.

• The Enterprise Information Integration solution? Rolled into the bowels of a RedHat offering somewhere, maybe.
• The pharmaceutical modeling company? Changed names, maybe still does the same thing, but I was working on a special project for a German client that was not public facing and might not have ever seen the light of day.
• The digital marketing agency? Acquired by another and probably no longer serving the brands that kept us up late into the night.
• The library software company? Bought by a larger firm, its desktop offerings thrown overboard for cloud solutions most likely.
• The online marketplace we launched defect-free? Shuttered after a couple years of obscurity.
• The major apparel retailer where I was a subcontractor to a subcontractor on a small upgrade project? Still around, but the bits I worked on, briefly, have probably been replaced by now.
• The government contracts? The first was a contract looking for something to do; the second was not actually a development contract but a managing contract, so it was not clear what to do with the testers on it. The government contracting company itself has gone through one of the periodic pupae stages where it goes into the chrysalis as a company with hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts and then emerges again as a small, probably service-disabled woman owned company available for contracts preferring small companies.
• The Jumbo mortage servicing company where I worked for only equity? Apparently, it still has a Web site, but it’s not clear if it’s doing anything.
• The company I just left? Merged into its parent company and its product was shut down about this time last year. I worked for a while at the parent company while they tried to think of what to do with the engineers from our company, but I left as they did not actually have QA engineers in the parent company, and the automated test suite I wrote for what our engineers was working on probably didn’t end up in use.

Et cetera, et cetera.

The worst is applications that want contact information for your supervisors. I mean, some of them are retired by now, if I could find them. And the minute I stepped out of the government contract, I was forgotten.

I brought this subject to my beautiful wife, and she pointed out that the two contracts I currently have are up and running, and I guess that’s correct. But one is a team lead position for a test suite that is not publicly available although the product is (it’s complicated) and an edtech that is members-only.

Jeez, Louise. It’s bad enough that long-term remote work can be very isolating and kills your professional network (distant work colleagues are not like people you see in the office every day, no matter how many Zoom happy hours you throw), but I look at my resume full of workplaces and offices I actually visited, and it looks almost like something made up. No big companies (not many tech companies came out of St. Louis and retained their identity).

But, man, what have I been doing here?