1/ Officially ended my last day as a government employee (I have been on leave while starting the NDA gig). Laptop, cell phone, badge returned. I'm walking away from a 6 figure salary, with a pension, in a protected union position where I've been entirely free to speak my mind.

2/ Over roughly the past two years, I helped to build and ship something really important: @PaidLeaveWA economic security for the people of Washington state, which provides critical funds to people in need during some of the most vulnerable times in their life.

3/ We're only the 5th state to have anything like this, and the program we built means that if you get cancer, it doesn't necessarily mean that you'll also be bankrupt. It means that a mother who gives birth isn't expected to be at work the next day. It's economic dignity.

4/ Look - I am usually pretty modest about my accomplishments but with a booming economy, 13 years at Microsoft and two startups under my belt, I didn't have any shortage of opportunities. But someone on the engineering team there followed me on Twitter and reached out.

5/ The idea of working in state government, for about half of market salary, seemed absurd to me until the @PaidLeaveWA folks explained what they were building and why it mattered. They were so passionate and mission-driven. The vibe was like a startup with impossible timelines.

6/ From the time I interviewed, they had until January 1, 2020 to have the program designed and IT systems built to pay approximately $1B in benefits per year. It was pretty much all in the planning stages. Technology pieces had been selected, but there was no working platform.

7/ This was an absolutely impossible timeline. Nothing in state government ever gets built this quickly. Also, much of the product management team had no product management experience, people were trying to both learn and use Agile at once, and--oh--they also needed security.

8/ There was budget in the program for ONE information security architect. I became that person. A lot of folks would try to do everything themselves. I knew that would never scale, so worked with pretty much every team to help them think about what was important in their area.

9/ So, the really cool thing about impossible deadlines is that projects like this attract very good people, and we had really incredible management--some of the best people I have ever worked with. I know, it's state government, and that's probably crazy to hear, but it's true.

10/ The attitude of management was pretty much "get out of the way and let people be their best" AND IT WORKED. It may sound crazy but by diving into product management discussions, information security ended up baked into *business processes* avoiding many problems "up front."

11/ The DevOps team designed their infrastructure for secure credentials management and least privilege access right from the beginning. This not only made everything more secure, it also made infrastructure far easier to automate. Good security helps teams ship faster!

12/ The really cool thing about working somewhere like this is that I had more or less total freedom to try pretty much any security initiative I wanted as long as (a) it didn't slow us down, (b) it didn't require spending money and (c) I could convince people to do it.

13/ So why am I leaving? Two reasons: The project officially ended today. It's turning into a program and that's just a very different #infosec job, which is much less architecture focused and more compliance focused. I could stay, but why not build, which is what I'm best at?

14/ The other reason is the new NDA gig at the place that shall not be named. I'm mission driven, and the opportunity was just too important (globally!) to pass up. They have a social media policy, so I'm keeping work entirely off of my personal account. Please respect this.

15/ P.S.: @PaidLeaveWA met all of its milestones, and shipped early and under budget. It's the first IT project of its size in state history to do so. Hopefully this will set a benchmark of what is possible for other state agencies to accomplish if they only believe they can. :)