I interviewed someone the other day for a position on my team. It turns out that I had done a sales call at his place of business 5 years back. When I walked into the interview, he was just telling the director of my group that the only experience he had with Sagent was a sales call demonstration. He mentioned that a Sagent competitor had come in and the sales people were hard to work with. I asked him what he thought of the Sagent sales people knowing that he didn't recognize me. He said, that they were very good and the he liked the product better than Informatica. At that point, I showed him his own business card that I had kept from that sales call 5 years ago. It was a good start to my portion of the interview.

This guy had been working at a small startup that processed information from Doctors to be presented to Pharmaceuticals. The gentleman said something about the business that got me to thinking. He said that there was nothing wrong with the business and that it was growing but the IT department was shrinking. He said, maybe he was being paranoid, maybe the business execuitives always meant for their service to mature and then reduce the force. He said that he was looking for a job where the company would grow and so would opportunities for IT. I had to wonder if where I worked matched the same criteria that he feared.

In some cases, I feel like a worker bee fixing the hive while being watched be a queen bee. I've been feeling accountable for all the issue of my small team, more than others perhaps since I am the senior on my team. I feel like the minute I stumble and can no longer fix the hive, the queen bee will come out and terminate me and feed me as protein to new larva.

Another metaphor is a writing technique called reduction in characters. The beginning of a story can many times start with a whole host of characters. As the story progresses,  characters can move away or die leaving the author to focus on a small set. The human mind works better with small sets any way. My own team has been almost completely recycled and I am the oldest original member.

Is this where American business is headed? If so, hopefully those cast members who were called off the island can come back in a different reality series that is more popular than the one they were kicked off on.