This is a story about chronic fatigue...

Smart bosses have figured out that happy employees are more productive. If you don't have the right culture in your organisation, you will make people very sick. You will be burning people out in order to achieve your unrealistic targets.

Forward thinking organisations are letting people have dogs at work. They are promoting more flexible working arrangements. They are seeing their employees as people and not just numbers in a spreadsheet.

I wrote an IT Roadmap for a company which had just been spun off by its parent company, and sold. I took one look around the little company, and I knew immediately that they had got the culture spot on. I wrote my roadmap with this culture as the guiding principle.

I urged the new CEO of the spin-off company to preserve the culture, in order to maintain the high productivity and excellent morale of the staff. I tried my best to pursuade him of the benefits of investing in technology that would support the staff, that would preserve the brilliant working environment. He ignored my advice.

I quit that job, because my opinion wasn't valued. You can't pay me enough to rubberstamp the wrong decisions. If you're looking for a "yes" man, a sycophant, then you've got the wrong guy.

So, after I left, the culture was destroyed, money was burnt on stupid vanity projects, all the good people left. The profits dropped 90% and naturally, the CEO was fired. I take no pride, only sadness, in saying "I told you so".

But one cool thing happened. At a conference a little over a year later, the CEO of the parent company presented my ideas. They had implemented them. Ideas are worthless, and the implementation must have been very hard - although I had done a proof of concept with my team - so I can take no credit. But it was so nice to be vindicated that I had to pinch myself to see if I was dreaming.

I've been bumping along like this for quite a few years now. The problem is, that I'm exhausted. I've got enough energy to do the job, but not enough energy to endure the idiots. I tend to get the important stuff done, and then I have to bow out and allow the sacking of the egotistical dead wood to happen.

Fundamentally, I burnt out in 2008, working on JPMorgan's #1 project. Instead of going off work sick, I decided that I needed to change jobs and as soon as I did the wall of exhaustion that I had been holding back hit me like a steamroller.

I was so flattened by it, that my doctors thought I might have AIDS. We tried every test under the sun, but fundamentally, I now believe that I was simply overworked. I had worked hard and played hard for far too long. My body & brain just couldn't cope anymore.

I was a bit of 'swan'... looked very serene and calm on the surface, but my legs were going like crazy beneath the surface of the water. During some 'time out' I remember playing golf, trying to putt with my phone jammed to my ear while I attempted to resolve some issue a team member was having.

I am so passionate about my work that I tend to dream about it. I even have 'eureka' moments sometimes and wake up and start writing code or an email. There is no switching off when I'm in the 'on' position.

My commute to the office (September 2007)

It's not very healthy, but my parents, school, partners, lazy friends, bosses, society and the surrounding culture has driven me to this unsustainable level. People say 'take it easy, slow down' but as soon as I do back off the gas, they soon start complaining. People get used to a certain level of contribution. They start taking you for granted.

What am I living for, if it's not for work? Nothing is ever good enough for my parents. I haven't had a nice caring kind girlfriend for far too long. I haven't got any kids. What's the point of life if it's not to make some kind of epic contribution?

It's not about heroics, and I really don't expect anybody to get the violins out and say "ooh, poor you". It's literally that work fills an otherwise empty void in my existence. Without work to dedicate myself to, do I really exist? My day to experiences would suggest not.

Yes, I know that work is a dangerous addiction that is damaging my health, but it's the only place that I ever hear "well done" or "thank you". My parents and ex-girlfriend/ex-wife would never sink so low as to actually show me any respect. It's expensive, apparently, to show somebody some appreciation.

During seemingly interminable periods of fatigue, depression, you can obviously reflect and see that you are repeating the same vicious cycle. It doesn't mean that you can beat it though. Nobody stops the world so that you can get off the rollercoaster.

So, everybody will be very relieved when I'm 'recovered' from a crash, but the fact of the matter is that recovery actually only starts when the exhaustion and depression have passed. All that time in bed is not recovery... it's staying alive. It's surviving, not thriving.

Yes, I'm surviving, but I'm not thriving. Nobody will let me get that far. When I have an opportunity to thrive, everybody says "Oh, you're fine now. We don't need to help you, we can go back to taking from you" not that I really receive help anyway.

My friend Klaus brought me a bag of stuff in hospital. That was one of the kindest things that anybody has ever done for me in a couple of years. Does that mean I owe him a favour? Well, he was already living rent free on my couch so I guess we can call it quits!

I do keep a very careful eye on my karma balance. I have paid it forward big time, and I always want to run a net karma surplus. If you do your accounting with some surpluses, with contingency, then you don't have to sweat the small stuff.

There are some people who feel hard done by at my hands. My friend John who thought it was OK to use me for free rent, spending money and as a personal life coach to help him over his gambling addiction and general idleness, for example. When life became unmanageable, I chucked him off my back to save myself. Am I supposed to be sorry about that? Why was I carrying him in the first place?

I don't really understand why I attract klingons. I guess it's because I'm a kind and generous person who gives off an aura of success and I make what I do look quite easy, so other people think there's not much effort required to achieve the same things. That's the thing about being good at what you do. You make it look easy.

I certainly have suffered from the "I could do your job" mistake. When CxOs and managers have been fired because they didn't listen to my expert advice, I certainly wouldn't want to take their place. I'm not trying to steal anybody's job. When I was younger, for sure I thought I could do my manager's job, and do it better. The fact that I have proved it, does not actually mean anything... I hated doing those managerial jobs!

Yes, management really is not for me. Somebody else can have the pressure and stress and responsibility. I think it's a vocation, not a job title. I think it's a demotion not a promotion. Those who can, do. Those who can't, must depend on others to do for them, and must be more organised themselves to compensate for the fact that they can't both be both organised and productive.

So, I'm exhausted by having to design, build, lead, argue with idiots who don't know what they're talking about and make dead wood losers look good.

I'm laid low with depression, fatigue.

Sorry about that, klingons.

That is all.

Frankie loves being tucked up warm in bed. We all do during winter. Fatigue and depression are much more serious. I'm suicidal and I can barely get out of bed (November 2007)

Tags: #career #banking #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #frankie

This is a story about cat & mouse...

Catch me if you can. But why are you chasing me? I'm not a bad guy. Trying to prove someone guilty who is innocent is a bit ridiculous. Perhaps you should consider your own guilty conscience.

So, I'm well aware that I have rattled some cages pretty hard. I'm also aware that the slow, lumbering and dimwitted sleeping beasts that I have awakened, will take a while to kick into gear and mobilise against me. I'm aware that my privacy is being infringed (using back doors) in the name of so-called justice.

What the hell am I talking about? Well, as a matter of professionalism, I told my end-client - HSBC - some hard truths that they didn't want to hear, about the fate of their #1 project. Plausible deniability is rather hard to maintain if a highly paid consultant is giving you their expert opinion. Also, my ex-wife, who said that she'd rather that I was dead, has recently received the rather disappointing news that I'm still alive.

I don't actually wish either my ex-wife or HSBC any ill will. I want the biggest bank in Europe to succeed with their #1 project and retain value for the shareholders, and remain as a profitable entity that employs 245,000 people. Those jobs are important: many families are depending on the income from those employees. I want my ex-wife and me to be able to both move on with our lives.

My occupational health doctor at JPMorgan urged me to try and make an ally out of my ex-wife. Sadly, she said that she would divorce me if I accepted life-saving hospital treatment. It's a bit hard to make an alliance with such a person. She marked my suicide note in red pen, with many abusive remarks written in capitals all over it. I'm a good diplomat, but that's kinda hard to deal with.

So, my ex wrote to me and said that she wanted to deny all knowledge that we had ever had a relationship. That's going to be a bit impossible, given that the record of our marriage is in the public domain, and so is our divorce. Anybody can look those things up in the register of marriages, and the court records.

Denying history, like pretending there was no holocaust in World War 2, is not going to work. Pretending that things didn't happen, is not going to lead anywhere good. Her guilty conscience will always follow her around, and there's nothing I can do about that. It's not my fault that she acted in an immoral way. I can't absolve her of her sins, although I do forgive her.

Fundamentally, this is about forgiveness. I always turned the other cheek. I have absolutely no idea why she is violent and aggressive and abusive, but I forgive her. I have no idea why she wants me dead and buried so badly, but I feel sorry for her. I pity her.

So am I bitter? Am I hanging onto things that I should just let go of? Am I agonising over things that were said and done so long ago, that my feelings are invalid?

Actually, it can take a long time to surface things, when you have been abused for a long time. She will claim that she is the abuse victim. Yeah, that makes sense... when I'm the one who was self harming, suicidal, couldn't work, was totally isolated from my friends and family.

She used to boast about hitting ex boyfriends. When she started hitting me, I didn't know how to deal with it. I trashed our flat. Then I started cutting myself. I was going to kill myself. It didn't really fix things.

She has been very quick to forgive herself, to excuse herself.

Frankly, there is no excuse for perpetrating violence and abuse against somebody. I feel very guilty about the times when I have lashed out. It's driven me to the brink of suicide. For her, it seems to have made her cultivate a holier-than-thou fake self image. I don't buy it. Start with kindness and go from there. If you're not kind, you're not a good person, in my opinion.

Every part of me feels like not publishing this. Every instinct tells me not to share these inner demons. That's why I'm going to do it. I'm going to keep pushing myself to share more and more of my inner turmoil.

Obviously it would be really easy for me to just bring out the big guns. It would be really easy to lay out all the evidence that I have collected of the years of abuse that I endured. That kind of character assassination would just be sinking to the same level as my persecutor though. I don't think that's the right thing to do.

Fundamentally, I could just say that I was victimised, and use that as an excuse for what happened later. I didn't do anything to defend myself for a very long time. I got battered but I turned the other cheek. It was beaten into me, to expect violence and abuse to be perpetrated against me, as a passive and kind, soft, caring, innocent confused and trapped victim.

However, my reaction was wrong. I should have been stronger. I should have walked away. I didn't. That makes me an accomplice. That makes me complicit. I helped to perpetuate what was going on, by not removing myself from the vicious cycle.

So, guilty people can be pretty sneaky. They will collect 'evidence' that will support their warped worldview. They will prepare their ammunition for the day that karma catches up with them. They will try and build a base of support, and cultivate an image of guilt-free innocence.

I'm guilty. I'm guilty of sticking around and trying to fix things. I'm guilty of caring too much. I'm guilty of not protecting myself. I'm guilty of letting my defences down. I'm guilty of making mistakes. I'm guilty of hitting back.

Don't let anyone tell you that I'm an abuser. Don't let anyone tell you that I'm out to control anybody. I'm a kind person. I'm a caring person. I'm a loving person. If somebody is telling you a negative narrative about me, you need to consider what their ulterior motive is. You need to consider what guilty conscience is being covered up.

Yes, I'm no saint at all. I'm guilty, not innocent. I'm exposing my conscience to the world. I'm very disappointed with myself about the way I've acted, in a whole bunch of ways. I could tell you all the reasons why I am who I am and why I acted the way that I did, but it's probably better if I just say that I accept responsibility for my actions. I know that there were better ways of going about dealing with things. I know that I would do things differently today. I feel guilty about a bunch of mistakes, even though I know that it was impossible for me to act differently in the circumstances at the time.

If anybody wants to blame me for things, be my guest. I'll even help you. I am going to provide the world with all the evidence and an open account of my wrongdoing. My gut instinct is to start with the rationale behind things, the reasons, the circumstances, the pressures and the stresses. However, that might seem like I'm trying to justify my actions.

Hurting somebody is always wrong. I'm sorry if I've ever hurt you, whoever you are. I really didn't mean to, and I do feel guilt and empathy. You can come and take your pound of flesh if you think it will help. I'm beating myself up, but if you want to inflict even more blows against me, be my guest... I'm used to being a punching bag.

So, is this self-pitying drivel? I have no idea. It's the beginning of a journey for me. Either there will be liberation or there will be death.

That is all.

Frankie the cat lives with my parents. He's pretty much the only living reminder that their son is still surviving, somewhere in the world. Please don't take that away from them (November 2012)

Tags: #divorce #career #banking #suicide #privacy

This is a story about psychoactive substances...

Here's an example of the kind of run-of the-mill parties I used to throw for all my friends. I once spent £700 on sparkling wine during one particularly lavish garden party. I think I was a bit of a 'lush'.

Drinking culture is sometimes celebrated. Certainly throughout the City, we thought it pretty normal to be slightly sloshed at our desks after lunch quite often. After work was carnage. A copious amount of alcohol was consumed by all involved.

I worked for HSBC for a little over 4 years, and JPMorgan for a further 3 and a bit, before my body really needed a break. At my leaving do I was downing shots at 4am with an alcoholic who later needed a liver transplant. The consumption was unchecked and rampaged out of control.

So, I've not been drinking for 52 days and I don't go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, so I can't be an alcoholic, can I? The definition of somebody who is an addict or an alcoholic is somebody who can't stop taking a substance, despite the detrimental effects on their life. Seeing as I don't drink or take drugs, I can't be an alcoholic or an addict. Quod erat demonstrandum.

In fact, I'm not somebody you normally meet. I don't drink tea, coffee or other caffeinated beverages, such as Coca-Cola and Red Bull. I don't smoke. I don't drink. I don't take any medication. I don't take any legal or illegal drugs. That makes me a real oddity.

People like to say "I can quit anytime I want" and are particularly adept at avoiding their most obvious addiction... caffeine. I've written about it before, but it's worth reminding people... you're probably addicted to caffeine but in denial. You need to give it up for over 3 days to really experience withdrawal, because you have reached steady blood-plasma concentration which means that it will take that long before you start feeling the withdrawal and cravings.

So, basically, don't lecture me on addiction until you reach the level of clean living that I have achieved. I'm not lecturing you. I'm just giving you the facts and telling you why I won't listen to a hypocritical word you say until you prove your 'willpower' to me.

On the topic of mood stability: I self-medicated successfully for years using caffeine to fight depression & somnolence, especially during winter. I used alcohol to calm my anxiety and racing thoughts, and treat my insomnia. I had a high-powered job and successful career throughout, so it's hardly like anybody can argue that I was not extremely adept at self-medicating.

Except that one day, my body decided it had enough. I was struck with extreme fatigue and depression that was completely debilitating. If you say "oh just get out of bed and stop complaining" after somebody has worked as many hours as I have done, don't be surprised if you get punched in the face.

It's not a competition. Except that it is. There's an arms race in the City. Who can stay later than their boss to try and impress and get that big bonus. And then when everyone has stayed later than the boss, the game is to stay later than each other. How late can you send an email to the boss, basically saying "just leaving the office now [you should know that I won the prize of working hardest]".

Sadly, that's pretty much how the bonuses and promotions get decided... who's worked the longest hours and raised awareness of just how hard they've been working, louder than anybody else. If you want to get to the top of the pyramid scheme you have to clamber over the other clawing bodies in the pit with you.

Getting ahead in your career is also dependent on how well you handle your ale. Yes, there is a lot of machismo in drinking culture. Going home and not going out drinking can damage your career. You need to be seen to be seen. You have to wait until everybody is so drunk that nobody remembers you leaving, before you slope off home.

So, between strong coffee and lots of beer & wine, that pretty much fuelled the first 11 years of my career. It certainly worked, in terms of pay & promotions, but it cost me a lot in terms of health. Not obvious health, like having to have a liver transplant luckily, but more subtle than that. My body & brain are just not very good at managing without stimulants and depressants to manage my mood... I've been drinking heavily with workmates since the age of 17.

So, if you think I'm less of a person for struggling with my moods and you are looking for an obvious thing to point the finger at, you are going to be disappointed if you want to point at drink & drugs, because I'm abstinent from both.

You might also want to consider your own relationship with alcohol and caffeine before you brand any labels on anybody. You would be surprised to learn about your own 'addictive personality'.

There's actually no such thing as an addictive personality. We are all programmed to like food, sex, gambling. Our brains are all affected by plant alkalis and alcohol and other substances that will cross the blood-brain barrier. You're no different from me.

That is all.

Cheers! (July 2009)

Tags: #addiction #drugs #mentalhealth #career

This is a story about being an activist...

The streets of London are home to a huge population of runaways, refugees and other homeless people who have been marginalised by society. We tend to ignore them and their struggles. There are so many, we can't help them all, right?

I'm not OK with people freezing to death on the streets, right under the noses of the wealthy. I'm not OK with just walking past human suffering on a daily basis, on the commute to the office. There are people huddling in shop doorways for a little shelter from the elements. It's brutal out there, and things are getting worse.

There are no words to describe just how cold it is, sleeping rough. I have slept on a glacier. Millions of tonnes of creaking ice. That's cold, even with a decent sleeping bag, sleeping mat, and a tent. Sleeping out on the streets is just as tough - most homeless people don't have equipment that cost hundreds of pounds. The most vulnerable people in our society don't even have enough money for food, clothes and other basics that they depend upon.

Normally charities will expect you to reach for your wallet. Normally charities will expect you to donate money. The whole fundraise & spend model of charity has failed, sadly. People and corporations are just not giving enough. People and corporations are treating charitable giving as a way to absolve themselves of personal responsibility for the wrongdoing in a society that they belong to.

Let's start with some empathy, instead.

If you haven't roughed it ever in your life, or it's been a very long time since you were truly soaked to the skin, freezing cold, shivering, and with chattering teeth... then you have lost touch with what some of your fellow human beings are going through. There are people freezing to death, here, in a supposedly civilised advanced Western econonmy. I'm not OK with that.

Please, try and make it to West India Quay with some warm clothes and a good sleeping bag, and sleep out with us. 7pm to 7am on Thursday 12th November 2015. It's incredible that this can take place when Canary Wharf Estate don't really want a whole tent army right under the noses of rich bankers!

The Centrepoint charity has worked incredibly hard to make this possible, and only by agreeing to do things in the most unbelievably controlled way. There is private security for the event, as well as Canary Wharf's own private security force, making sure that the wrong sort of people are not protesting about the abhorrent situation of young people being left freezing to death on the streets of London.

Sadly, in the 3 years that this event has been happening in Canary Wharf, my ex-employer JPMorgan Chase & Co has donated a paltry £70,000. That's a disgustingly small amount of money considering how this bank has wrecked lives. One of my colleagues was driven to #suicide by the insanity of what Global Banking is doing to the world.

I absolutely do not want to see this event lose credibility, so please sign up for an official ticket and donate whatever you can afford: https://www.centrepoint.org.uk/news-events/events/sleep-out/west-india-quay

Whatever happens, please please please tell everyone you know about the plight of the homeless and support this event.

7pm to 7am, Thursday 12th November, 2015.

So, last week, I was working for HSBC on their number one project. The biggest bank in Europe at the moment is HSBC. They just declared quarterly profits have risen 33% to $6bn. That's a substantial amount of cash that they have extracted from the world's pockets!

So, how much do HSBC care about the homeless? Well they employed a homeless person (me) but their due diligence should have prevented me from getting that job and working my way out of poverty and debt. I should have been trapped into living on the streets.

We can't have the wrong sort of people getting ahead in life, can we? It's all about the rich getting richer, at the expense of the destruction of society by people who already have more than they need.

I made sure I got this email from the HSBC Group so that nobody is going to get sued! Hurrah!

I've got a bunch of other emails that prove that Corporate and Social Responsibility is a joke. These companies pay a pittance in order to try and cover up wrongdoing on an unimaginable scale. The institutional corruption is disgusting.

I'm being warned by journalist friends to flee for my life for whistleblowing. You'll be able to find me... sleeping rough somewhere in London. If the Safer Streets teams can't find people, then good luck to the banks with their teams of lawyers out to gag me!

Come and sleep rough with us!

That is all.

 Tags: #homeless #frankie #london #banking #capitalism #notanonymous

This is a story about ethics...

The difference between a white hat hacker and a black hat hacker is that the former is ethical and the latter is not. A black hat is out for fame or personal gain.

I signed the Official Secrets Act when I was 17, which means that I can't tell you that I hacked British Aerospace's servers when I was 18 and released details of everybody's salaries, as a protest about wage inequality. They covered it up anyway, but you can never stop loose tongues wagging, and I wound up on a watch list at GCHQ. Oops.

I did something similar at Barclays. Again, people tried to cover it up. If you try and cover up an ethical hacker's work, you normally end up in trouble yourself. Just be ethical yourself... nothing to hide, nothing to fear.

I've had the opportunity to defraud my employers out of millions of dollars and be living on a beautiful coral sand island, safe from extradition provided I never set foot back in Europe or North America. At JPMorgan, I knew about a rounding error with Derivative settlements and I knew that our reconciliations weren't picking it up. There were literally billions that were missing and nobody knew except for a handful of programmers.

I'm not a bank robber. I'm trying to help the banks.

At a security briefing for a higher level of clearance, with DERA (Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, which is now QinetiQ) I was told to mistrust attractive women, Chinese people... I was told these people were probably spies. Lolz.

I decided that I didn't like working for the defence industry. They've got dirt on me. They have photos of me sleeping with my male boss. I was only 18, like I said... it was too easy for them to do something like that. Like taking candy from a baby.

I worked on two software systems that were linked with a fibre-optic cable and used quantum entanglement to verify that there was no man-in-the-middle snooping attack going on. That's paranoid, considering that I worked on a military site guarded by Marines with guns, and my car was searched every day.

So, if I seem a little paranoid, it's because I've been trained to be.

I've stood above the working nuclear reactor on Swiftsure and Trafalgar class submarines, and peered into the core and seen the Cherenkov radiation. I've seen the propulsion units that no civilian is supposed to see. These are hunter-killer machines that run seriously quiet.

I know things that I'm not supposed to know. Oops.

So... please leave me be. I'm just trying to do the right thing. I'm trying to be more grown up and consider the wider ramifications of everything I do, but sometimes I feel like nobody wants to act ethically.

Look at the vast number of refugees fleeing wars. Look at the vast number of families who are financially struggling. Their need is greater.

That is all.

Tags: #career #computing #privacy #politics #hacking #civildisobedience

This is a story about human nature...

What kind of pose does one pull at the birthplace of Silicon Valley? Imitating the undead seemed somehow fitting. There is an incredibly powerful global brain drain at the moment.

Money does not trickle down, it concentrates in pools. If you want me to show you how to make a million dollars, give me 100 million and a year. I must be some sort of financial genius, right?

I'm alarmed by just how hard all the engineers are working, and how little of the reward they share. In fact, they are getting burnt out by an industry, which seems to care very little about the lives it's destroying. Get rich or die trying seems to be the order of the day. Very much more of the latter going on than the former.

Anybody who tells you that Americans don't understand irony is completely wrong. They not only understand it, but they play with it, and it's hilarious. The tongue-in-cheek humour I have had the pleasure of experiencing is delightful.

The entire world, including America, has been misled about the American Dream. Hollywood tells us we can all been rich and beautiful: take taxis, fly in jets, stay in 5-star hotels, have swimming pools, helicopters, speedboats and sports cars. We can't. There are far more people watching those movies and buying into that dream than the space available for helipads on the planet. It's a con.

Some of my super super smart engineer friends have even been taken in by the simplest con of all: getting somebody to do a load of hard work for you, while you pocket all the profits. It breaks my heart to find out just how diluted their shares are by the time they've built a valuable company for a bunch of Venture Capitalists.

However, my friends have gotten to scratch that "engineer's itch" and work with great people doing intersting stuff. I guess my remuneration is based on boredom and danger money for working in a tall building on an airport approach path, in a rather hated industry.

We used to talk about the 'golden handcuffs' at JPMorgan Chase & Co. We knew that what we were doing was completely insane, but we had big houses, kids in private schools and pretty wives with spending habits that were proportional to their good looks. We were locked into the system. We were prostitues and junkies.

However - as is always the case with human nature - people got greedy. They started getting young, idealistic and hard-working people to do more of the work for less of the pay. They even started getting massively underpaid Indians, straight out of University to to all the work for a tiny fraction of the pay. That doesn't work.

If you undervalue a person, they become a zombie. Zoned out.

If you wave a ridiculous cash reward under someone's nose, but chronically underpay them until they 'win' the prize that they can never seem to quite reach, they become burnt out.

Or they get really cheesed off with it all, and come back and kick your ass. The fact is, they've worked a lot harder than you, so they'll fight a lot harder too. They're probably smarter than you too, because they've had to be resourceful. Getting fattened by the labour of other people makes you lazy and soft.

Why people think that they deserve a big salary for forwarding emails is completely beyond any sensible comprehension. The laziness in middle management is incredible. Nobody can be bothered to do any typing. Nobody can be bothered to collate any figures, let alone do any math. Nobody seems to have any relevant knowledge or experience. They are just blundering fools.

So, I need to go back to London. The company that I'm officially contracted to at the moment desperately wants to terminate my contract but hasn't found an excuse to do it yet. I really wish they had the backbone to just do it so I could spend some more time with friends out here in California. I really could do with the money from the contract, and I really don't have any money to spend staying here, but I'm not being allowed to do anything approaching useful to help HSBC deliver the #1 project on time, on budget and to a decent quality.

"I told you so" is so completely useless. I just want to do a good job. My normal approach is to do the right thing, get in trouble for it, but then at least the problems are solved, things are delivered and the client is begrudgingly accepting of receiving exactly what was needed.

I can't be arsed with that anymore. Time for some honesty.

I'm actually completely exhausted by the relentless crappy compromises that are demanded by ass hats that result in death by a thousand cuts. Why do idiots feel they have to 'add value' by undermining the experts? Why do little hitlers feel that they are adding value by encroaching into people's lives? What I wear to work and when I turn up is none of your business if the work is getting done. Certainly my private life is completely off limits if you're not going to be sympathetic when I get sick.

I'm aware that people from work might read this, and I actually hope they really do. It's interesting to me to see how social media sourced data might be unethically used against me. Again, it's about a complete spinelessness in corporate culture. Why not just call me out... I've given so much to my job to try and get a late project back on time, and then when I needed a week out, I got accused of being "unreliable" and was told I was acting "cloak and dagger"... that's such utter horse sh1t.

Was I unreliable when I was amongst a handful of people who always got phoned every weekend? Was it cloak and dagger when I was working 7 days a week and clearly not sleeping because I was answering email around-the-clock? I couldn't possibly have concealed anything as I was forever in the eye of my team, and the client. No cloak, no dagger.

Frankly, you picked a fight with the wrong guy. I'm coming back to the UK, and I'm mighty p1ssed off... and you don't want to see me p1ssed off.

Here is an unrelated picture of Frankie the cat. I like the feel of grass under my feet. It calms me down (July 2012)

Tags: #banking #career #computing #frankie #mentalhealth

This is a story about thought experiments...

I had 50 minutes to draw something while in hospital. I drew this. I have been thinking about it since I lay dying on the floor, unable to move a muscle except my eyes, diaphragm and heart. My urine was like orange juice and full of blood.

I considered that dying would be a regretful waste, because I wouldn't be able to tell anybody what it was like to die. I decided that if I discovered I was immortal, it could corrupt my morality and I would eventually use that knowledge to my sole advantage. I also considered how embarassed I would be to 'meet my maker' in the full realisation that I p1ssed away my chance to learn anything from the situation.

Bizarrely, I then conceived a thought experiment, as I lay on the floor. This addresses The Measurement Problem in Quantum Physics. The problem is this: how do you separate the experiment from the scientist who is conducting the experiment? By taking a measurement you are actually part of the experiment. We see this in every experiment that attempts to measure Quantum weirdness.

Then, seemingly 'miraculously' enough of my muscle was broken down by my body so that I had enough energy to get up and phone for help. I wasn't out of the woods though. I nearly lost my kidneys. There was a lot of muscle damage too. So, just biology, and not really a miracle. I'm not a God bod now... although I did become agnostic at this point.

My thought experiment is a variation of Schrödinger's Cat, where two brave (or suicidal) scientists willingly enter a soundproof box, with a soundproof wall separating them. They then have to press a timing device for each other that must be pressed once every 2 minutes or else the timer will reach zero, and a captive bolt will pneumatically be driven into the brain of the other scientist. Given that there is a co-dependence on each other, if one scientist dies, so will the other.

As an additional twist, if the two scientists press their buttons at the same time, within n milliseconds of each other, then they are both killed by the captive bolts.

We can then start to tweak the parameters of the experiment so that we dial in a known probability of our scientists being killed. With 120 seconds of possible button push time, and 1,000 milliseconds in a second, we might hypothesise that there is a 1 in 120,000 chance (0.0008%) of both buttons being pushed within the same millisecond, which will trigger the event that leaves our scientists dead.

So, what if our suicidal scientists press the button 60,000 times? Well, then the probability that the 2 scientists will be dead when we open the box is 50/50 . This is equivalent to Schrödinger's Cat, except that 2 scientists are both alive and dead, rather than 1 cat that is both alive and dead, until we open the box.

So, what if our suicidal scientists press the button 120,000 times? Well then the probabilistic prediction is that there is a 99% chance that the co-incidence would have occurred. We would be very surprised to open the box and find two living scientists. However, there is still a possibility that - no matter how slim the chance - they could have played Russian Roulette with a 100 bullet revolver loaded with 99 bullets, and somehow managed to fire the empty chamber.

So, what if the scientists playing the game keep playing and playing and playing and playing. What if they eventually grow tired, having run many millions, billions, trillions, quadrillions of iterations, and they are still alive and button pushing? What if they decide to rip off the equipment and step outside the box? What would they know?

They would know that Quantum Theory's prediciton of immortality is very likely to be correct (Many Minds interpretation) and also know that this can be communicated beyond a single conscious surviving mind.

I know that this is very messed up. Similar thoughts troubled another JPMorgan IT bod to the point where he took his own life.

However, we can't ignore the predictions of a fundamental theory that seems to be borne out by the experiments that we can conduct ethically. But why are we asking intelligent people to do stupid jobs? Is that ethical?

I have always had a passion and aptitude for science and art, but we are all in a debt trap. Without the brain draining work of Global Banking IT, I could never be debt free. My myopic ex-wife got greedy. She now has a paltry amount of rapidly devaluing fiat currency, rather than a tangible freehold property asset.

This is the kind startup I really want to be working on.

I started building this but my divorce nearly destroyed me (October 2013)

Tags: #physics #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #NHS #startup #career #divorce #banking #capitalism

This is a story about being patronised...

This is my cat, Frankie. He was the kitten that nobody else picked. He's the most loving cat you could ever hope to meet. He loves humans. He thinks he's a little doggy, and follows you around and licks your face and stuff.

I think that I provide a nurturing and loving home for people and animals. I don't have a lot of evidence for this, but my friends used to love coming to my house, before it was sold, and Frankie used to call it home, and be a happy well-adjusted kitty there.

I'm going to switch this blog from telling you about me, and tell you the story of two Franks. First, there is Frankie my cat. Second, there is Frank: my homeless friend from Primrose Hill. I promised Frank that I would tell his story, and in telling Frank's story, I inadvertantly became entwined in it.

This is me climbing the hill, where I met Frank. I had no idea I was going to meet him. I was just taking photographs of London's skyline at daybreak. I sat down to rest on a park bench, struck up a conversation with a stranger, and our story began.

Frank's needs were not hard to understand, and seemingly not hard to address. As a firm believer in direct action, I was galvanized into a blur of activity. Who was I trying to save, him or me? Who cares... nobody else was there for Frank. Were you there for Frank? No. A lot of people had let him down. I had the time and the means to be able to try and help him.

Try is the operative word here. I'm going to try and not spoil the ending - which is going to be easy because we are writing the future as we live it - but I should let you know that this is no fairytale. I'm certainly not the knight in shining armour here. Despite my initial patriarchal attitude, it was me who learned from Frank, not vice-versa. He ended up helping me more than anybody could surely have predicted. I will leave it up to you, dear reader, to judge (with your super judgey-judgey face you reserve especially for people like me... whatever box that is you've tried to put me in).

So, what did I do? Well, we had a normal human conversation. Who knew that this is how human relationships are formed, and bonding and empathy can occur when we do such a thing. This so-called 'human connection' seemed to somehow transfer some understanding of Frank's fears and needs, into my brainbox, whereupon I somehow naïvely imagined that with whatever surplus I had, I might be able to help with some of his basic needs.

I defend thinking that I could help. You can't just throw money at the problem, but what have YOU tried yourself? Sure you read in a newspaper that we spend X on dealing with problem Y, and you think "that sounds like a lot of money" but really is it? How much direct support actually reaches people on the streets?

We absolutely can not criticise those who are trying to help, and take it from me, there really are not enough resources (shelter, food, volunteers, money for full-time workers and the real estate that is needed) to go around. This might sound anecdotal, but just use your eyes. Do you think people choose to sleep rough on the street? Are you stupid?

While you're digesting the fact that I just insulted your intelligence for being so prejudiced about the homeless, here's a photo of the view that Frank and I were enjoying on our park bench. Seems like a pretty sweet life, huh? Imagine waking up to this view every morning.

Have you noticed that it's not sunny every day? Have you considered that it rains a lot in the UK? Are you aware that it's pretty cold for most of the year, especially at night? Have you thought how you would stay warm & dry, if you had to sleep on the street year-round? How would you keep your clothes and sleeping gear from getting sodden with rain and dew? How would you stop your stuff from being stolen? Have you thought how much of your life you take for granted?

Is this too challenging? I know that it is, but I don't really care if you want to bury your head in the sand. I don't actually care if you switch off, disengage. I'm not writing this for you. I'm writing this for me & Frank. Maybe I'm just writing it for me, but it's still about Frank and it's still true. Try and dismiss me, try and dismiss this... go on!

JPMorgan Chase & Co investment bank employee and home owner tries to help homeless guy... coincidentally becomes homeless himself and follows in the footsteps of Frank. This is the true story I'm going to tell you.

I asked a member of Her Majesty's Constabulary (a Metropolitan Police Officer) to be a witness to me fulfilling the first of Frank's needs, right there and then, on the spot. Frank did not have a mobile phone, as he had been mugged. Without a means of contact, the Safer Streets team have very little way of finding people, except if they are sleeping somewhere obvious where they are preyed upon by muggers... Catch 22. I gave Frank my iPhone, and had a passing Policewoman witness the giving of this gift, in case he was ever accused of theft.

This was just the beginning of a journey that entangled the tale of Frank with mine, as we travelled on a similar voyage, through the same social ecosystem and his story became our story.

I took photos, and made notes throughout, but you have to believe me when I say that nobody would choose to go through what Frank and me went through. Nobody could plan for it. Nobody would want to experience it. Nobody should have to go through it, and I plan to share our journey, in the hope that people can empathise, rather than dismiss.

If you think "I've heard it all before" please share any links to those stories in the comments section below. Don't you think that the people who fall between the cracks should have their stories told? I do.

From high up, we see just how far we can fall (October 2013)

Tags: #homeless #frank #frankie #london #banking #career #police

This is a story of two different investment strategies...

The guy on the left is Junior Banker, William Marshall. The guy on the right is Senior Analyst/Programmer Banker, Nick Grant. We are both professionals in Global Banking, economists, and philanthropists, who have read law and practice accountancy.

We have followed very different strategies for the banks that we have worked for. William is 'old money' and has practiced the buy and hold strategy of passive investment in the world's biggest companies. Nick is 'new money' and has practiced active investment in startups and disruptive companies.

I would say, that as we are well into the 21st century, and we have seen many cycles of boom and bust, that we have enough economic data to make a bold pronouncement: passive investment has failed.

Having large amounts of capital locked away in pension funds, where the fund managers are old and lazy, is not a good strategy for anything. In the 1980s it lead to asset-stripping of profitable enterprises that had employed a lot of people and were generating wealth. This made the Mayfair Set very rich, but left Britain with huge numbers of people laid off, and factories closed and sold off for the land and asset value. In the 1990s and beyond, it has led to boardroom excesses that frankly disgust me.

Male-domination of the boardroom, and eye-watering salaries, bonusses and golden parachutes that are paid to our company executives. This is a situation that must change immediately.

Both William and I share a common belief that we need to see more women in the professions, and we need to smash the glass ceiling that woman have been held beneath for far too long. Both of us have supported our partners to the fullest possible extent to allow them to be the Wonderwomen that they are.

William's wife is a Rocket Scientist, working on Europe's most important Space Missions. My ex-wife quickly became an amazing software developer, outclassing me in every company that we have ever worked for, including Research Machines and JPMorgan. I supported us delaying starting a family and her retraining to become a Teacher. With incredible speed, she rose through the ranks to become Head of the Chemistry Department at one of the best State-funded Grammar Schools in the United Kingdom. The admiration she has of staff and pupils, and the exam results that she has helped achieve are amazing.

Our boardrooms, our corporate culture, are starved of women, and a non-macho feminism in the thinking of the way that we build businesses. We are not being diverse enough in selecting the best minds in industry. We are still sexist in our thinking and our hiring. Myself and some colleagues had to fight tooth-and-nail to retain one of the most brilliant women that I have ever worked with, on the most important project in the biggest bank in Europe. That's not right.

Law, accountancy, medicine, journalism and IT are all lacking in women, while teaching, childcare, events, hospitality and catering are lacking in men. Meanwhile, strong independent intelligent women are being short-changed in their careers and sidelined into roles that they are totally underused and undervalued in.

Myopic business leaders are also short-changing our young people too. By investing in old dying people, rather than energetic young people, the pyramid of society has been stood on its head. Retirement is not a right, it's a priviledge. You only get to retire if you have left the world a better place than you found it. Sorrry, buster... you don't get to spend your hoarded cash until you fix the environment and create some damn jobs.

It's time to do the right thing.

We do need to respect our elders, but that should be strictly in a non-executive capacity. Should these people receive huge remuneration for such positions? Absolutely not. Only those who have already managed to build enough wealth, and can therefore afford to not have to keep working, are entitled to sit on the boards of companies.

The most enterprising and hard working individuals are implementing and executing large-scale changes to our economy, creating jobs, creating wealth and inspiring the next generation. The value of sitting in a chair and criticising everything is precicely zero.

Tags: #banking #career #gender

This is a story of a noncompetitive person who became a winner...

In September 2008 I won the Poole Animal Windfest. I then got into a waiting taxi and flew to India to work with my team on the DTCC project for JPMorgan. I didn't even have time to collect my prize or wash off the salt from my skin.

I didn't even realise I had won. When I reached the shore, I had travelled far downwind from the spectators, and it wasn't until I dragged my board and kite back up the beach and started to pack up that people said I had won the final heat

That year, I wrote a software testing framework called Message Oriented Testing (MOT... a pun on the UK's certificate of roadworthiness test for cars and other motor vehicles) as well as designing and leading the coding of the confirmations engine for Credit Default Swaps, that would work with the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation's API and the Financial Products Markup Language.

This test-driven approach delivered the project on time, despite me having to do it with completely inexperienced offshore resources, and the low number of defects left my bosses gobsmacked. I didn't realise any of this until somebody told me this a long time afterwards.

The truth is though, that was the last good code I wrote, and even that was a bit hacky. I don't really go in for Rolls-Royce solutions. Generally I'm useful when the client or customer needs something doing yesterday. When all the 'architects' have done fart-arsing around and the project is really late, that's the time that I ususually wake up and start hacking something together to get things over the finishing line.

Does that mean I'm a good hacker? In truth, not really. Doing these 'heroic' acts generally leaves me burnt out, and leaves the team with a pile of code which I'm the only person who understands. The deadline is met, but everybody else is left holding the baby, while I sleep off the 'hangover' from a work binge.

So what am I good at? Well, I'm honest - brutally honest - and I also really dislike the salesmen in software who promise the earth and then go back to their development team to give them the 'good news' that they have made the sale... provided the whole team can work for 25 hours a day, 9 days a week, for the next 17 months, and deliver in a year. We just need to make a little adjustment to the Gregorian calendar, no?

I do have a good background in Mathematics thanks to incredible teachers (my maths teacher at school taught me Matrix Mechanics after school, so I could write a 3D ray-tracing algorithm) and Computer Science (the same maths teacher also taught me and a few friends an extra GCSE in our lunch breaks) and I'm enough of a fast learner to pick up any new technology that's required of me to learn to a 'competant hacker' level... a colleague once kindly said I "hit the ground running like Linford Christie" but I think I will probably also fall over like Usain Bolt, unless I stop taking on these sprints.

I also love design and technology. I had the most brilliant D&T teachers throughout my school years. At age 15 I designed and built a motion-tracking device that fitted over a person's arm. I demonstrated it, along with the software I wrote, at Brunel University, as part of the Young Inventor of the Year competition. I think I got a prize, but I can't remember! I definitely think I have a certificate from the competition - which was awarded to me by the Rotary Club, in Lyme Regis - somewhere in the archives.

Now, what would be the perfect job for such a person? I actually have no idea. I've been trying everything I can possibly think of. I actually think, I'm pretty good at pursuading people to back other people's ideas. I guess that makes me a salesman?

The logos displayed are companies that the Hubflow platform was demo'ed to. We partnered with Video Arts, who then took it to their large customer base. Standard sales bullshit (July 2011)

Tags: #kiteboarding #kitesurfing #startup #entreprenuer #computing #banking #career