Mike Lee is a product engineer in the Netherlands.
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“You’ve made it very clear that you never want to return to the United States,” my friend said to me. I was surprised to hear that, because I certainly never meant to give that impression, but as he pointed out, sometimes what people hear the loudest are the things you do not say.
Yes, I quietly doubled my rates for working within the US. No, I didn’t explain why. Frankly I am terrified to talk about it, but now I’m afraid that by not talking about it I’ve added a wrong impression to the pile of wrong impressions about what I am doing here, and how I feel about the US.
You have to understand that I am not trying to make a statement. I’m just trying to get better at business. I’ve come to understand that when you assume risk, you should be compensated. It’s risky to give people honest feedback about their apps, which is why I require payment for that. Similarly, it has become risky to enter the United States, so I require compensation for that as well.
The last time I went to the US was last June, for WWDC. My flight required changing planes in Detroit, so I went through customs and immigration there. I went looking for a missing suitcase, and found it sitting like a trap in the middle of the floor. When I approached it, I was apprehended by law enforcement, denied a request to inform my partner I was being detained, then put in a cell, questioned, and aggressively strip-searched.
I was left feeling completely dehumanized, but what terrified me most was not how they violated me, but why. By their own admission, it wasn’t that they thought I might be smuggling something, but that they hoped I might have forgotten something. “Maybe you left a bud in a jacket pocket, or half a joint in your jeans.” That, to me, is a terrifying redefinition of the rules.
I have always believed that the intent of law enforcement was to root out criminal behavior, not to find excuses to reclassify good people as criminals. I don’t want to participate in a system that looks to bust people not for poor judgment, but for obvious mistakes. I don’t want to subject myself to arbitrary power, to unreasonable search and seizure, or to entrapment.
“I know you’re an engineer. Well, so am I.” the customs officer growled menacingly. They read every stamp in my passport like an indictment. They seemed to imply that the system is unnerved by intelligence, by thinking, by any attempt to improve your mind or expand your horizons. They seemed to find dedicating myself to learning about the world suspicious, even threatening.
I don’t like being afraid to enter my own country. I don’t like being terrified to talk about my experiences, for fear of retribution. I don’t like living in a world where the government can and will use their power to drive people to destroy themselves, where the very act of being investigated can be an extrajudicial death sentence.
I cannot travel without terror, because I cannot assume that they will not take me, and if they do, I cannot say when they will let me go. I cannot say that I will never make the mistake they need to bring about my downfall, despite my best intentions. I cannot deny that there is risk in crossing that border, in entering that country, despite being its citizen.
Where I cannot eliminate risk, I must ameliorate it with compensation. I don’t know what else I can do.
First of all, thanks to the staff of NSConference: dedicated people like Scotty, Dave, Claire, Simon, and the rest. Thanks as well to the staff at the venues who hosted us, such as the Athena, the Exchange, and Manhattan 34.
It’s no small feat to take something beloved, change everything about it, double its size, and yet somehow have it end up the best its ever been. I am amazed at what you’ve all managed to pull off. Genuinely amazed.
Thanks to Alex and Maxie Repty and Judy Chen for convincing me to stop working on the game, get out of my own head, and go to NSConference. Alex and Maxie went so far as to pick us up in Amsterdam and drive us to the UK and back.
Thanks to Scotty for having Judy and me as his guests. All this saving the world takes a financial toll, and we really couldn’t have afforded to come if not for his generosity, and the generosity of many others.
Thanks to my brother, Hernan Pelassini for coming to Amsterdam a couple days early to buy me a nice dinner and unwind all this enough that I could actually go where I needed to go and do what I needed to do.
Thanks to George Dick for giving the resolve to talk to my colleagues when I felt alone, like I had died and been forgotten, my work in vain. Thanks to John Fox for helping me articulate those feelings with his supportive perspective.
Thanks to Dan Pasco for giving me the man to man talk I needed, for answering the question of how I had gone wrong—by being too hard on myself, and forgetting that I have friends who want nothing more than the chance to help me.
Thanks to Oliver Fürniß for a thousand reminders of how much we rely on each other. Thanks to all the people who were kind to me, who spoke to me, who thanked me, thereby reassuring me that I have done some good in the world.
Thanks to the many people who played with the improvements we’re making to Lemurs Chemistry: Water, and who offered most excellent peer review, feedback, and ideas. Thanks to the people who’ve offered to help us make it even better.
For me, the message and theme of the NSConference 5 became the kindness of others, and calling on that kindness when things go wrong, a lesson that driving home from Leicester only drove home further.
Thanks to Volker Mohr for providing for our rescue when our van broke down, leaving us stranded in the middle of stupid Flanders. I kid—Veurne was just the most charming little village to be stuck in, full of the nicest people.
Thanks most of all to the exemplary proprietor of De Loft, whose kindness and generosity in the face of Judy’s sudden, ferocious illness was the only thing that saved us from disaster—and thanks to ADAC for finally getting us home.
Finally, thanks to Evan Doll for giving me the chance to sum up my life in 140 characters or less: Been better. Getting better. Making games is hard. I’m glad I have friends.
It happened last night. First the battery icon on my iPhone went from green to red, popping up the 20% warning. I was looking right at it when it happened, like a pot of water boiling as I watched it, or a piece of toast popping up just as I look at the toaster. Maybe it was because it had caught my attention, but a kind of anxiety gripped me.
I saw in that icon the human condition, our own batteries running down, and 20% never seemed so small. The red line like the spot of blood after a coughing fit that tells you the inevitable is near. Maybe you’ll get one more warning but certainly you’ll reach that point where the spinner barely has time to register before the whole thing shuts down.
After a while I plugged the phone in and felt a sense of relief. We may run down, but we can recharge. We may be damaged, but we can survive. This phone whose warrantee was voided years ago by a Cambodian toilet, whose glass was smashed to bits and replaced, yet wore the cracks of years of hard work and world travel.
Sitting there, reading for a while more, just a little while more, in the middle of a sentence, the screen went blank. A bit of frantic troubleshooting as we confirmed the charger was working, and tried another charger, many confused minutes of button pushing and holding, and finally, resignation.
The world’s toughest iPhone gave up the ghost, and I can’t afford a replacement right now. For the first time since 2007, when I slept on the sidewalk in front of the Apple Store for the phone I already knew would make my career, I am alone.
I was thinking about my friend John Wilker today. According to my calendar, it’s his birthday, and I wanted to wish him a happy birthday, but I wanted to do it by talking about him, which got me thinking about some other people I wanted to talk about.
John Wilker and his wife Nicole organize the 360 conferences at which I am a frequent speaker. They’re great conferences run by really nice people. There are people who are genuine in their dedication to community and colleagueship, and there are people who are capable of running a successful conference, year after year. John and Nicole are that rare combination that manage to do both, and I really admire that about them.
Klaas Speller has been my right-hand man through the creation and running of Appsterdam, into the New Lemurs, and the ambisonics project besides. I’ve recently nominated him for the Europioneer award, on the principle that his entrepreneurship is exemplary in that, in pursuing his dreams, he has enabled other entrepreneurs to achieve theirs.
Guy English and Chris Parrish are two old friends from when I was coming up, back in the Mac days. I mention them together because they’ve been working on a new app together, Napkin, which looks to be indispensable. These are two of about a handful of people without whom I would simply not have my career. They have shown me the value of colleagueship, and friendship.
Mike Lowdermilk I’ve saved for last because he, more than any other, reminds me that I don’t deserve the friends I have. He’s shown me nothing but kindness and generosity, and why? He doesn’t need anything from me. He’s an absolute hardware genius who impresses the hell out of me. I call him Hardware Mike, the implication being that he makes hardware like I make software.
I should be so lucky. I’m so selfish, it makes me sad that he’s a new dad and has to get a real job in California instead of hanging out in Amsterdam with me. Because I’d love to hire him. It’s my dream to work on a project with Hardware Mike. The frustrating thing is, he’s available and I have a hardware project, but no. He’s an adult. He makes his own people. They need him in California.
I used to think that when people treated me well, it was because of some innate goodness that made me worthy of their esteem. I’ve come to realize that the magic is not in me, but in people like these. They are the ones who are good, while I am the one who is lucky. Moreover, I should be paying that forward, which I suck at.
It’s true. I suck at friendship. For example, John’s birthday is on the 13th. Hell, I suck at all kinds of social interaction. Maybe you can all help me suck a little bit less. Help Hardware Mike find a job. Try Guy and Chris’ app. Vote for Klaas. Wish John a happy birthday (preferably on his actual birthday). And hey, I’m sure you have your own people to think about today.
I’ve been blogging a long time. Longer than the word “blog” has existed. Back then it was just my web journal, and since I was talking about my private life in a public way, and that wasn’t something that had really been done before, I adopted a strict policy of never mentioning other people except in an indirect, anonymized way.
Later on I found myself involved in a lot of secret stuff where people didn’t necessarily want to be named. This is one of those platform things since back in Mac days. Some random Apple employee might see fit to do you a favor, but you’re not doing them any favors by calling attention to it, or them. I extended that courtesy to everyone I worked with.
That got me in a lot of trouble, though. I’d write about projects in a general way, not mentioning the team members or their roles, figuring they’d write in their own blogs if they cared. People started accusing me of stealing credit, or of thinking I was a one man shop, two ideas that were so absurd to me, I failed to even take them seriously until the damage was done.
So, sometimes, when I feel a bit of emotion toward one of my friends or colleagues, I’ll write a little bit about them. I never warn them about this stuff or run things by them. That’s another one of my little blogger’s quirks that might also be annoying, but it does come out of love.