I've been drinking the Kool-Aid.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, I think it's a reference to the Jonestown mass suicide from the late 70's. The whole of the cult drank Kool-Aid laced with cyanide. Cyanide is fast-acting, and supposedly quite painful as it takes hold. IIRX, it binds to the red blood better than oxygen, so the net effect is akin to cramping. All over.

There was no way everyone could drink it all at once, so the scenario is that one batch drank it, convulsed and died, then the next group, and so on. The first one could have been ignorant, but the latter ones knew what they were ingesting.

And did so.

Idiomatically speaking, to say someone is "Drinking the Kool-Aid" is to imply that they've had their reasoning suborned somehow, that they believe in something that is obviously contrary to either known fact, common opinion, or even personal safety and self preservation. It's usually a veiled jab.

I've been drinking the Kool-Aid. My employer shall remain unnamed (as is SpouseKitty and Kitten) but it's an Open Secret. It's not the largest company on Earth, nor is it the most valuable. It is certainly one of the more well-known, famous or infamous.

I've been on both sides. I was an Open Source advocate, though from the sidelines. I used the software, recommended it to friends and coworkers (and even complete strangers online.) I discussed and debated the idea and ideals behind Open Source as opposed to freeware, about GPL vs. BSD licensing. No, IANAL, so I'm sure I didn't do a great job doing so. I might not have even done a good job doing so.

But I thought my current company was Evil. It was Evil for how it conducted business, for how it prioritized, say, market share over quality. I heard many things about the company, how it was a "turn-and-burn" shop, how reviews were emotional slugfests sometimes leaving the subordinate in tears, how it was driven by marketing.

Ten years at a company obsessed with destroying my current company will do that to a person.

It's different here. Some of it may be "drinking the Kool-Aid," but it's not that bad at all. I don't feel faceless, as much as I may want to. My jobs at my old company are 'infrastructure' jobs. Infrastructure is stuff like the wiring in your walls, your broadband, foundation.

If you have to worry about it, it's doing something wrong. Same with me. In an infrastructure job, you want to be absolutely invisible, making sure nothing breaks so no one notices what you're doing. Of course, that also means no one thinks you're doing work, but that's another story.

It's different here. I'm very loyal to the company not out of fear, not out of malice to the rest of the software community, but because they treat me very well and show that they respect my contributions. I'm amazed at the depth of some of their tools. (I'm still fed up with the inadequacies of others, lest you think I'm completely brainwashed.)

It's just different talking to my old friends, ones made during my Open Source advocacy days. I still use Open Source, and I still recommend it when my company doesn't make a competing product (or when the person I'm talking to doesn't work at my company.) However, I'm impressed with the level to which this company has exposed the API to the operating system, for example. That was one of the volleys my old company leveled against my current one, that the OS APIs were constantly changing, kept secret, deliberately manipulated to break competing products and otherwise exert an unfair advantage over the marketplace.

When I talk about how amazing their compiler is, my friends think I'm proselytizing. When I rave about the OS API set, they mutter about how I'm buying into the hype.

And then there are articles like this one from CrunchNotes. I wonder if I should even mention my work anymore. To hold a single employee as representative for a company would be like me holding the author of that post as representative for all bloggers.

Yes, my fellow employee (whom I've never met, don't know aside from this mention) was foolhardy. From what I read in the comments, his intention was not to deface or defame CrunchNotes or the article's author, but to point out the difficulty in getting a correction about yourself (whatever entity 'self' happens to be: corporate, civil, religous, or person) in Wikipedia, given their ban on self-editing.

Yes, it's a bad way to show it, and it's a bad place to show it. I think it's a valid issue, but one that isn't being addressed in that blog. The author seems to hold the employee as representative for the company.

Look, I won't be so foolhardy as to pull a stunt like that; I don't think 'performance art' is a good way to prove a point, especially in as charged an area such as Wikipedia politics and governance. That's not my point. I can disclaim that I don't speak for my species, my race, my city, my creed, my family and everyone will believe me. But if I say I don't speak for my company, some people balk.

I like working. I like working with computers. I like working where I did. I like working where I do. But I didn't speak for my old company when I advocated Open Source solutions (in part because my old company didn't "get" Open Source until my last year there) and I don't speak for my current company when I talk about what it offers.