For My Thoughts Are Not Your Thoughts
Neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord — Isaiah 55:8
Me against my brother; me and my brother against our cousin; me, my brother and my cousin against the stranger. — Bedouin proverb
Cisco Systems, Inc. is legendary for its appetite. Since its founding in 1984, Cisco has acquired 239 technology companies. I was a software engineer/manager at acquisition #52. That’s how I ended up at Cisco.
Fast forward several years, several dozen more acquisitions. Cisco acquired a company that made client security software — meaning it ran on Windows PCs — similar to a product my team produced. Eventually, our two teams were joined, along with another client engineering team. The mission was to unify Cisco’s client security software.
The other team had a product I’ll call Bytelock. It was a revolutionary intrusion detection product. Unlike the anti-virus software that ruled the day, Bytelock could prevent Day-0 attacks. These are attacks the anti-virus companies didn’t know about, and therefore couldn’t prevent.
Several years after the Bytelock team’s acquisition, around the time our teams were joined, Bytelock was end-of-lifed. In high tech parlance, that means the party’s over.
The reason was simple. Bytelock’s software’s user interface — or UI — was dreadful. It was gray. It was ugly. It was a riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma.
Typical users had no idea how to configure Bytelock. They lacked the technical knowledge to act on the information it communicated about security threats. This rendered Bytelock useless. All because of a UI that could have been designed by a high school student.
Yet Bytelock was not your garden variety crappy software. Its dismal UI was in stark contrast to what lay under the hood. Bytelock was a Porsche engine trapped in a Yugo body. Its security algorithms were extremely sophisticated. The engineers who designed it were not only outstanding coders, but were creative, thorough, and had an enormous amount of domain knowledge in the area of security. They were masters of the craft.
Given how much Cisco paid for the company that made Bytelock, it’s what engineers call an epic fail. Cisco was never big at learning lessons. This time was no exception. It was easier to just cancel products, reorganize, and move on to the next acquisition.
To understand why Bytelock failed, let’s turn to anthropology.
In The Dawn of Everything, authors Graeber and Wengrow shake up our unfounded ideas about early human history. The book is encyclopedic in scope and contains dozens of examples of early culture. One comparison sought to explain why two indigenous American cultures — whose people lived in the same region and had similar lifestyles — had radically different concepts of money, property, gift-giving, and conspicuous consumption.
According to Graeber and Wengrow, cultures sometimes diverge when a group intentionally defines itself as different from its neighbor, as a way of declaring its identity.
Let’s consider that in the context of software user design in the early 2000s. User design’s criticality was emerging. But good user designers and good software engineers have dramatically different skills. Good user designers have exceptional visual design ability, often have a background in psychology, understand how humans think, are exceptional listeners, are keenly observant of how people use things. None of those skills are needed to be a good engineer. Typically, engineers have skills that are orthogonal to those of designers.
Nobody on the Bytelock team understood user design or its value. The UI was an after-thought. The invisible engine was the crown jewels.
In Bytelock’s culture, software engineers were at the top of the pyramid. Other disciplines needed to make a product successful in the market, including but not limited to user design, were regarded skeptically and considered to be of marginal importance. It was not unusual for Bytelock’s technical leaders to make disparaging remarks about non-engineers, whom they regarded as less intelligent and less important.
My engineering team had a different culture than Bytelock’s. We regarded other disciplines — like Customer Support or Product Marketing — as equal partners. I suspect most Cisco engineering teams did. We generally cooperated with those disciplines. We didn’t always cooperate with other engineering teams, but that’s a different story.
The most striking thing about Bytelock’s failure was that the engineers on the Bytelock team didn’t learn anything from it.
Consider their reaction several years later to a controversial blog post written by our Vice President, extolling the virtues of a liberal arts perspective. He cited the example of Steve Jobs, who studied fonts in college and later used his esthetic sensibilities to turn Apple into a technology design powerhouse and ultimately the world’s most valuable company.
The Bytelock engineers were outraged. They regarded the blog as a slap in the face to their engineering-dominated culture and engineers in general. They still believed that in a tech company, engineering is most important and everything else is secondary. They still believed this even though that view led directly to Bytelock’s failure, despite it being a brilliant piece of engineering. They never forgave the VP for his blog post, and they clearly missed his point.
The Bytelock culture distinguished itself from other groups by putting engineering at the top of the hierarchy. Just like the cultures described in Graeber and Wengrow’s book.
I think this was an intentional choice, if not a conscious one.
It was a way of staking out turf to define their identity, in contrast to other groups.
This story isn’t about engineers anymore than it’s about radiologists, point guards, third graders, corrections officers, or fashion models. It’s not about technology teams any more than it’s about church choirs, daycare centers, pirate ships, the Seneca Bear Clan, or a band of Paleolithic foragers.
This story is about people, their groups, and their institutions.
As we look at polarization in America today, as in many other countries, the tendency of groups to stake out identity turf by intentionally defining their values as a way of contrasting themselves from other groups carries enormous risk.
In the end, Bytelock’s demise didn’t much matter. Most of the Bytelock engineers went on to have successful careers in other ventures, ones which likely had more balanced cultures but still left room for engineering excellence.
Would anyone predict the rest of our polarized world will be so lucky?
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