The Metrics and the Man

🎯 Context

Many years ago, I worked in frontline technical support at Commvault. It was my first real immersion into the technical side of IT, having previously come from a background in sales — a field that, in retrospect, suited my temperament far better.

The company had just established a technical support centre in Reading, Berkshire, as an extension of its main support operation in the United States. Although physically located in England, the culture, expectations, and operational philosophy were unmistakably American.

Everything revolved around performance metrics.

Every Monday morning, reports would arrive summarising the previous week: ticket quality, response times, customer satisfaction scores. Those numbers mattered. They defined your standing, your competence, and implicitly, your worth within the organisation. A single negative survey from a customer could undo a week of good work.

For someone like me — a native Italian speaker with only basic computing experience at the time — it was an immense challenge.

I had to take calls from IT managers, understand complex infrastructures I had never seen before, diagnose issues in real time, and document everything clearly in English. Not conversational English, but precise technical English — the kind that engineers in another continent would later scrutinise and judge.

The pressure came from two directions.

Customers expected immediate competence.
Engineers expected flawless documentation.

There was little room for uncertainty.

And yet, despite the difficulty, that period became one of the most educational experiences of my life.

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🧠 The Vice President

During those early days, senior leadership from the United States frequently visited the Reading office. Among them was a vice president who would occasionally sit at one of the desks in the open-plan workspace.

One day, struggling with a support ticket I did not fully understand, I approached him and asked for help.

He refused.

The interaction was brief and polite, but final.

I remember feeling disappointed — not resentful, but aware of an invisible boundary. There was a hierarchy, even in an open-plan office. He existed at a different level of abstraction within the organisation. His role was not to help individuals open support tickets.

At the time, I rationalised it. It was probably an unreasonable expectation on my part.

And life moved on.

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🏥 The LinkedIn Post

Many years later, I saw a post from him on LinkedIn. He was in a hospital bed, wearing a medical gown and mask, recovering from what appeared to be a serious health episode.

His message began appropriately, thanking the doctors and nurses who had cared for him.

But then, almost immediately, it shifted.

He expressed gratitude to his team for continuing to create value while he was offline. He spoke of productivity, customers, partners, and the importance of returning stronger.

That struck me.

Here was a man lying in a hospital bed, and yet his narrative was still framed in terms of work, value creation, and organisational continuity.

Not recovery.
Not mortality.
Not the fragility of life.

Work.

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⚙️ The Culture of Measurement

This was not a personal flaw. It was cultural conditioning.

Modern corporate systems, particularly those influenced by American enterprise culture, operate on measurement. Measurement creates comparability. Comparability enables management. Management enables scale.

Human beings become components in a larger system of value production.

Metrics become proxies for competence.
Performance becomes identity.

In such environments, it is easy — almost inevitable — to internalise the idea that one’s primary purpose is to produce.

Even illness becomes an interruption of output.

Even recovery becomes a narrative of returning to productivity.

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🔧 The Foundation It Gave Me

And yet, I do not regret that experience.

It forced me to learn.

It forced me to think clearly, communicate precisely, and understand systems far beyond my initial capabilities. It gave me the technical foundation that would later allow me to operate independently — to run my own servers, my own nodes, my own infrastructure.

Today, I run Bitcoin and Monero nodes on systems I control. I manage my own backups, my own power resilience, my own network services.

I no longer depend on institutional infrastructure.

The knowledge came from that world.

The independence came from stepping outside its culture.

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🧭 Technology as a Tool, Not an Identity

I love technology.

But I have never seen it as an identity.

Technology is a tool. It expands human capability. It enables autonomy. It allows individuals to operate outside traditional structures of dependence.

But it should never replace life itself.

Work can be meaningful. It can be creative. It can be intellectually fulfilling.

But it is not the measure of a human being.

Health, freedom, curiosity, and peace of mind exist outside metrics.

They exist outside systems.

And perhaps the greatest success is not climbing within those systems, but reaching a point where they no longer define you.

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🧩 Retrospective Insight

Looking back, that difficult period at Commvault was not a failure, nor was it a misstep.

It was an initiation.

I entered that world as someone uncertain and underprepared.

I left it with knowledge that would later allow me to build my own technological sovereignty.

The pressure was real.
The culture was demanding.
But the knowledge endured.

And in the end, I did not become a product of that system.

I became independent of it.