In the early 2000s, before .NET had solidified and JavaScript was still dismissed as a “toy language,” I worked at a small firm developing kiosk-based HR systems. The company was a skeleton crew—just the owner, a senior developer with a long corporate background, a part-time contractor, and me. The entire technology stack was VBScript, ASP, ActiveX, and IE6, dictated by a belief that staying deeply embedded in Microsoft’s ecosystem was the only “serious” way forward.
One of my projects was an on-screen keyboard generator. The initial version in VBScript was bulky and slow, so I rewrote it in JavaScript, dramatically improving speed and maintainability. The next day, I was written up. Not because the solution didn’t work—it did—but because I had violated an unspoken rule. JavaScript was forbidden. It was, according to the senior developer, a “toy language,” and more people knew VBScript anyway.
I sat across from him in the owner’s empty office, as he placed the write-up on the desk in front of me, taking the owner’s chair as if staging a corporate tribunal. The absurdity of the moment hit me then—he had no one but me and a part-time contractor to rely on. He depended on me entirely. Yet, here we were, engaged in a theater of control over something as trivial as which scripting language was used to accomplish the task.
This pattern repeated when .NET entered the conversation. I suggested we explore it. The contractor agreed. But the senior developer shot it down without discussion. When the company’s one major client fell through, a potential buyout followed—only to collapse once the buyer realized the technology stack was already obsolete.
The company folded soon after.
In retrospect, that moment in the empty office encapsulated the entire downfall. A leader so preoccupied with controlling the present that he was blind to the future. So certain of his authority that he refused to see the walls closing in around him.
I walked away from that experience with a simple lesson: sometimes, the greatest risk isn’t change—it’s refusing to change.