In the Den of the Wolf, Ram, and Hart

Update: 2½ years later, I've realised how naïve this was and outlined that naïvety in a separate post.

I made a career decision a few months ago that I've meant to document here for a while now. I left my previous job at Workfinder that was making me miserable, for an amazing job with a green energy company called Limejump.

The people I work with are wonderful. They're both technically capable and respectful human beings. I'm not just talking about my immediate colleagues either. In my 7 months with the company, this has been my experience with everyone I've worked with there -- all the way up to the CEO. People are friendly, enthusiastic, and professional. The team collectively owns mistakes and works together toward common goals that we (the business and engineering) establish together. Seriously, it's pretty great.

I cannot stress enough how powerfully black & white the move has been for me. To come from a job where the higher-ups regularly micromanaged, second-guessed, and belittled everyone and then shoved us under the bus when things went wrong, to where I am now is really quite jarring. I'd spent so much time being miserable that I'd forgotten what it was like to work with decent people.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, I'm here to remind you that not every company is as toxic as the one you're stuck in. If you have options, get out while you can! Hell, if you can roll code, I might be able to find you a spot with us.

So yeah, that's the good news: I'm finally happy in a job again. I'd forgotten what that was like, so the experience still leaves me a bit giddy, even after 7 months.

"So why the dire-sounding title?" I hear you asking. Well, Limejump comes with a significant piece of baggage that I had to unpack and come to terms with before accepting the job. That's the real topic of this post: Limejump is owned by Shell.

Yes, that Shell.

If you know me personally, it's likely that you know that I have some hard lines I don't cross for employment. I don't do guns, I don't do fossil fuels, and I certainly don't do anything illegal. The reasoning behind this is one of conscience, but it's also rational: gaining financially from destroying the world you have to live in makes absolutely no sense. Shell violates the fossil fuel rule fundamentally, and historically has a long documented history of Evil under its belt.

And yet, here I am, taking a paycheque from Shell, and to my mind, doing so with my morals intact. That probably sounds antithetical, so let me explain:

The way I see it, Shell is a publicly-traded company that must, like any other, do evil. It's insane, but this is how capitalism works: a publicly-traded company can't knowingly refrain from doing evil if doing so means that it will make less (or even lose) money for its shareholders. If your goal then is to save the earth from companies like Shell, you have but two choices:

1. Make Shell illegal. Sue them into oblivion or figuratively kill them by revoking their charter to exist.
2. Find a way to make doing evil less profitable than doing good.

To be clear, I am all for Option #1, but no amount of screaming from my blog is going to work on that front, so unless activists and human rights lawyers have a need for some high-level software design, I'm afraid I'm not much use to that cause. I have however been offered an opportunity to move on option #2.

Limejump is doing something extremely ambitious and technically difficult: we're developing a framework for consolidating disparate green energy sources into a sort of distributed power plant that compensates for all of the fluctuations inherent in green energy solutions. Sometimes the wind isn't blowing, and the sun isn't always shining, and yet you need power for your laptop at 3am.

The number of companies on the planet even bothering to try to solve this problem is tiny and almost none of them have the sort of resources that Shell brings to the table. If we can prove that this is viable (spoiler alert: it definitely is, we're doing it), then the reality of free, limitless energy becomes a serious "carrot" to pull companies like Shell away from fossil fuels. Combine that with the "stick" in actions like Extinction Rebellion, law suits, rising fuel prices, and political pressure, and I believe that you can steer this earth-killing beast of a ship into a force for Good. Not because I believe that a company can have a conscience (it can't), but because that's where the money is.

Until or unless Option #1 can happen, this sort of work needs to be done, so I took the job. I hope it was the right choice and that I'm not being naïve. I suppose that's a question for Future Me, but for right now, it honestly feels like the Right decision.