What's the biggest example of the domino meme in my life? I'm gonna have to go with "I got bored on the sleepy overnight shift at the data center -> Russia invaded Ukraine".
Struggled to think of something that fit... most of the cause/effect stuff in my life has been pretty straightforward.
I think: AOL Chat Room -> owning a champion schipperke.
1. I got bored on the overnight shift and started volunteering for LiveJournal's support team.
2. I kept getting put in charge of more and more shit, because I got shit done
3. I got laid off from said overnight shift, and since it was the tail end of the dotcom burst, decided to try college again.
4. I told everyone I was going to have to pick up a job that would work around classes, probably waiting tables, so I was gonna have to stop volunteering.
5. Like three LJ employees went to Brad and said "I know you have no idea what she does, but if she stops doing it, bad shit will happen."
6. Brad hired me and told me to keep doing it.
7. I spent the next 2 years cheerfully doing like 7 jobs so Brad didn't have to deal with a lot of the things he hated.
8. This freed him up to work on interesting technical problems, including how to best support text in non-Western Latin encodings.
9. This being before widespread UTF-8 adoption by US services, LJ wound up with a substantial population of Russian users living in Russia who wanted a service that wasn't under Russian government control/influence, including journalists, largely turning LJ into the Russian free press.
10. Brad sold LJ to Six Apart, where I continued to do like 7 jobs except the CEO was a lot more terrible at listening to me than Brad was.
11. So terrible, in fact, that he ignored me when I said "if you do this, your site will be dead within 18 to 24 months" and did the thing anyway.
12. The thing caused a massive drop in revenue (almost like I knew what I was talking about!)
13. The CEO hired a dude with no relevant experience to "fix" it and sprung this on me with no notice (after having been making noises about putting me in charge but not wanting to pay me more).
14. I quit. (I am still proud of myself for quitting in a calm and professional fashion without burning down the entire volunteer program on the way.)
15. Unqualified dude flailed around for three months trying to "fix" it, made it much worse, revenue decline accelerated.
16. CEO decided to ditch product he couldn't understand and didn't know how to monetize, looked for buyers.
17. Russian oligarch with strong ties to Russian government made CEO buyout offer so Russian government could get its hands on the information of various Russian bloggers.
18. Buyout weakened Russian political resistance and anti-corruption movement, scattering them across multiple sites, and led to arrest of multiple formerly-anonymous critics and activists who were deanonymized by the government getting access to the data they'd previously given to the site.
19. This is one of the many (many, *many*) factors that culminated in the protests against the 2011 rigged election failing to make any significant changes in the way elections were administered, which resulted in the 2012 rigged election that installed Putin as president. (*)
Wildly tangential, but this buyout led to the end of a friendship with someone I once loved like a sister. She got FURIOUS with me about my concerns and called me "unreasonable" and "paranoid" for leaving the platform. (But it was also when I went to DW fulltime.)
One of the other doc admins and I had an actionable plan for how to torpedo the FAQs; when I explained it to him he said he'd take the high side while I took the low side and we'd meet in the middle unless we got shut off. We hoped we'd never have to use it.
I have told this story in greater detail before on Twitter but it came down to a three week fight that ended in "if you make me do this, we will never recover" / "do it or you're fired", and, well, one of us was right and that person was me
Why do you think he was so determined not to see that you were right?
Like, to be clear, no answer to this makes it not his fault, I'm just very curious about what makes people be so incomprehensibly boneheaded about stuff like this.
That link is entirely written by outsiders-to-LJ's-*employment*, so has some bits where it's from the pov of what people Experienced rather than the backend decisions, but... still useful.
*twitch*
That week is mostly a blur of shitshow capped with my then-boyfriend dumping me when I got to the home airport, but I remember very clearly being detailed to drag you to a casino to get you a break away from the screen
I can’t prove a direct connection to either of these things, but shortly after I pointed out a fundamental flaw in the execution of the core product made at the company for which I worked, I was in the first round of layoffs and a year later the company was gone.
Crap. I was, er, a bit distracted when that all went down (from meeting my now-husband) and don't remember the Strikethrough business. I do remember being *deeply* suspicious of the sale to SixApart and thus deeply cynical about the subsequent sale to "it's not ACTUALLY the Russian government".
