Upper Decker

The Magical, Erratical, Sometimes Tragical Money Shrinking Machine

2008-03-30T14:01:00.000-07:00

It should come as no surprise, given the fiasco I've been documenting on this blog, that my company isn't profitable. We burn through an amazing amount of money per month. Given our bottom line, our only viable option as a business would be to become money launderers. Although, I'm not sure a 10 to 1 exchange rate of dirty to clean is all that good.

I know the person reading this blog is wondering how they too can successfully waste tons of investor money. Well, luckily for you, I'll give you a sneak peak of some of the business strategies that have made us a negative profit powerhouse.

Never Say "No"

The first has to do with the fact that we're giant pussies when it comes to dealing with our customers. As an example, we had one of our installers call our technical support line when he was having a problem configuring his network. We didn't sell him anything dealing with his network. We weren't responsible for his network problems. He was having problems configuring his DSL modem. Initially we said we wouldn't help him.

The installer then called the CEO directly and pitched a fit. Since he's an A++ customer (our customers are rated A, A+, A++, A prime, and A++ super prime I believe) the CEO assured him we'd fix the problem. We spent a couple of days trying to figure out what his problem was and how it could be fixed, all for free.

Fly Someone Out

The next tip I have is for you to fly a person out to babysit any install, free of charge. Any time an installer has an issue with our product we like to fly someone out for free to do the install for them. Sure, we could try and work them through it over the phone but that wouldn't waste enough money. We could even require them to complete our training program before helping them. Again, that's just not realistic. We could even bill them something for the fact that they couldn't do their job. No, the better plan is to provide a way for them to get free consulting and install labor whenever they want (and it turns out they want it quite a bit). On a plus note, all of our sales and support guys have shit loads of frequent flier miles that they've amassed on the company dime.

If You Burn It, Just Return It

We resell some hardware components from other companies as part of our overall solution. We frequently have installers that don't understand electricity wiring up these components. As you might guess, they often fry the components by wiring them incorrectly. What's an installer to do? They can just return it to us, claim it never worked, and get a free replacement shipped to them overnight.

We then spend more time testing the returned equipment to verify that it is ruined. If we don't have time to test it, we throw it in a bin of test equipment for our QA department to use. Inevitably, they grab the damaged equipment, things don't work, then they report bugs on the software. The developers then spend time chasing non-existent bugs. It's all very well planned from the perspective of wasting money.

Sell It, Then Make It

The other way we screw ourselves is that our sales people promise customers that our product will do anything and everything (who doesn't have that problem?). On the rare occasions that they close a sale we're then on the hook for implementing something that didn't previously exist (for free of course). And, since it's already been sold, the time line for implementation and testing (ha! testing...) is extremely short. Finally, it's often a feature that no one else cares about. But, once it's in the product, it costs us money in terms of code complexity, maintenance, and testing time. It also prevents the developers from implementing features that a larger group of people want, which could theoretically increase the product's ability to compete long term. It's sweet, sweet genius.

Sustaining This Model

How can we afford to keep doing things this way? You might be tempted to think that we make it up in volume, but you'd be wrong. We usually just find a way to dupe investors into giving us more money. This is usually sold to them on the "Amazon Land Grab" model where you spend a lot of money to be the first business into a relatively virgin market. You build your customer base so large, so quickly, that it becomes very difficult for people to compete. Then, you crank up the profit machine and hire people to count your money.

The problem is we're not Amazon (those guys are smart), it's not virgin territory, and there's not enough money in the industry currently for us to make up the amounts of money we're wasting. Sometimes investors still fall for it. But, what happens when they get tired of giving you money? We'll talk about that next time.

Who Wants Some Popcorn?

2008-03-23T15:21:00.000-07:00

I've mentioned Ike the sales guy before: "We'll call this sales guy Ike because 'Ike' has one good 'I', much like the sales guy." Upon further reflection and discussion, I think I have to rename this guy "Popcorn" because his mind works kind of like a bag of microwave popcorn. Nothing. Nothing. Then suddenly, a pop here, a pop there and then a flurry of activity. "Okay, now that that's done--Pop! Pop!" And then back to nothing. It's next to impossible to have a discussion with him in the room. For example, I decided to put up a PHP based content management system for internal discussions and such. For the next week Popcorn would randomly say "PHP-Nuke!" several times a day.

Our product integrates with some third party software that keeps track of some hospital related stuff. Let's say it's prescription history. This prescription history software uses an Access "database" to store its data. I don't consider Access a real database, that's why it's in quotes. We integrate by creating a view of some integration table in their Access install. The whole thing is very ill conceived and brittle. The version of the product that we integrate with supports exactly one station for updating and viewing this prescription information.

Our sales manager, that frequently hangs us out to dry and injects last minute requirements into upcoming releases, sells an install of our product that will integrate with the latest version of this prescription history software that supports multiple stations. He is, on some level, aware that we need a new version of the third party software so he orders a copy. Trent then schedules Popcorn to head out to the customer site four weeks later to make the install work. He apparently feels this is the end of his responsibility on the matter. Popcorn sits on this information for three weeks while the microwave heats up his idea factory.

Finally, a week before the install date, Popcorn mentions to one of the developers that he's planning on dropping this new, untested version of third party software into a new install. He holds the ignorantly optimistic view that it should "just work." The developer expressed some concern since it sounded like the third party software may have changed a bit. It may also have been several major versions of theirs since we used this integration feature. "*pop* *pop* Yeah, I'll probably try it out here first *pop*." The Friday before he flies out we ask him how the test went. "*pop* Oh, I haven't tested it. It shouldn't be any different. PHP-Nuke!!!"

He is once again warned about the fact that the developers all feel that it is a significant risk. "I agree," he says. "I'll probably try it out this weekend just to be sure." Well, he goes the weekend without trying it out, flies out to the customer site on Sunday and begins the install on Monday morning. Tuesday afternoon the developer gets a call on his cell phone. It's Popcorn. "Hey man, this shit doesn't work." The developer starts asking some questions about what's going on with the install and Popcorn hangs up on him. Thirty minutes later Popcorn calls back. "Do you guys have any ideas?" You can practically hear his little bag a-poppin'.

Again, the developer tries to get information from him and is hung up on. The next time Popcorn calls back we ask him what the hell is going on. "Sorry dude. The customer keeps coming into the server room so I'm hanging up so they don't think anything is wrong. You know what? Don't worry about it. I think I can get it working."

The next day we're in the middle of a department meeting when Trent bursts into the room and says, "Hey, this new install with the prescription history integration is blowing up all over the place. They're threatening to cancel the deal and rip all of our stuff out if we don't get it working by tomorrow." Given the circumstances I express to him the very real possibility that this won't be fixed by tomorrow and that he should begin thinking about alternatives. "Sorry guys, but we don't have an option on this one. We need to get this working. The whole deal is riding on this. We're painted into a corner," he says. You know, it'd be a little easier to take shit like this if 1) we ever learned from "our" mistakes, 2) we took risks seriously ahead of time, and 3) the person saying we were painted into a corner didn't have a wet paint brush still in his hand.

The development department breaks up the meeting, gets a copy of the new software, and begins to try and figure out what's going on with it. We get to the point that we've duplicated the problem when Popcorn calls again. "Any progress?" he asks. We tell him the situation so far when he tells us that he's gotten a patch from the third party and he thinks it fixed everything. We should "stand down" whatever the fuck that means. Trent tells us that he wants us to keep working on the solution. We can't seem to get the patch out of Popcorn but that shouldn't matter since he thinks it "just started working." The next morning we get another call from Popcorn asking how we're doing with the patch that he still hasn't given us. "It's still broken here, but I think this third patch is going to work." Since none of us locally have the first patch, aren't aware of a second patch, and obviously know nothing about the third patch we're all pretty much just watching the train wreck at this point.

Sadly (on some level), the third patch does indeed seem to fix the problem. This is the least satisfying resolution to the problem from my standpoint. Once again, the sales people chased a sale and their commission without thinking. They sold us into an install that we weren't prepared for. They didn't take the QA process seriously since in their mind our product hadn't changed. The sales guys didn't bother using their ample lead time of four weeks to try and resolve any of the issues, with or without development help. Then things blew up, we became a "team" and lucked out on the resolution. All this means is that from their viewpoint it was a success. Let's do it again on the next one. Yay.

In the aftermath the dev manager, Fredo, said that Trent felt really bad. Since I was feeling particularly mouthy I said, "Unless he feels bad because he's been fired and he's come to the realization that he doesn't have a sufficient skill set to get another job then I don't particularly care." Fredo is one of those managers that likes everyone drinking healthy doses of the Kool-Aid so I'm sure he didn't particularly like it. Luckily enough for him though he was able to read my not so subtle hints and keep his mouth shut about the matter. PHP-Nuke!

Character Study: Scooter/Bear

2007-12-02T20:08:00.000-08:00

Since I'm so far behind on posts, this is likely the only mention of this person you will ever get to read. You should be sad at this as he was a rich source of material.

I have no good way of introducing this person, so I'll just do it through a kind of character study. I'm torn about what I should call him. He's a short, very hairy, homophobic, ultra-conservative, borderline racist developer that rides one of those Rascal-style scooters around the office. Apparently he's got really bad knees. I never miss an opportunity to make fun of the handicapped, even if it's something as minor as "bad knees." Therefore, I'm tempted to call him "Scooter." I know it's not very imaginative, but fuck you--get your own blog. Fine. We'll call him "Bear" instead.

Bear is a company man, through and through. He labors under the theory that there are smarter people than him with more information making intelligent decisions. I mentioned at one point that my unofficial contract with the company is that they don't make stupid decisions that jeopardize my job or the business. His response was to say, "Having a contract is all well and good until the situation changes and the company can't hold up their end." Huh-wah?

My primary gripe with Bear is that he sits in the cube next to mine and constantly talks to himself. It's not just that quirky "I'm a genius that thinks out loud" bullshit either. They're conversation bait. "Oh! I wonder what that means." "Oh! That's interesting..." I'm supposed to hear these and probably responsd with, "What's that, Bear?" An inane one sided conversation is sure to follow. When I ignore these long enough he generally moves onto, "Greg? Can I borrow you for a second? What does this non-error, non-warning message mean?" He adamantly refused to believe there was a timing bug in his code even after I tried to lead him through the overwhelming mountain of evidence. Several days later he was hobbling around like a proud little hairy peacock saying, "I know what it is. Yes. I found it. It's a timing bug." I want to slash the tires on his scooter so bad I can taste it.

Instead of vandalizing his ride I decided to just create a label using our label maker and stick it on his bumper. The first draft read "Honk if you're horny." After sneaking into his cube on my stomach to apply the label I decided that could lead to a whole sex talk with Bear that I wasn't emotionally equipped to handle. I snuck back into his cube on my stomach and pulled the label off. The final version that was applied was "The Rubber Duck. Puttin' the hammer down!" I was pretty sure he'd find it and we'd all have a good laugh at his expense. He went several weeks and never found it. He then vacationed to China and took the scooter with him. He still never found it. He came back to work with his airport cargo tag still attached with that stupid sticker still on his bumper. He worked several more months with the thing on it, got laid off, underwent surgery for a subdural hematoma (not related to the sticker), collected unemployment, found another job, and finally returned to the office to pick up some of his crap. Sure enough, that fucking sticker was still on the damn scooter. In my daydreams I picture people calling out "Hey there, Rubber Duck" as he rolls by wondering what they're talking about. It makes me sad that I'm not there for the payoff, but such is life.

As we follow an Agile methodology, we have a daily stand up meeting. Bear sits, of course, because of his bad knees. He also gives the longest summaries of the group that tend to have nothing to do with work. One meeting he brought in some piece of wood from a crib that he was building for his grandchild. He then proceeded to bang and slide it around the table while we were on a conference call and tell us all about his little woodworking project. Whenever someone is late to the meeting they pay a whole dollar. It's a minor punishment to remind people to show a little more respect for their co-workers' time. Bear decided he was going to pay all of his fines in change to further "punish" us for him being late. On several occasions he refused to pay rather than simply explaining that a work related activity had made him late. He often refers to his wife as "my sweetie" rather than by her name (I'm assuming she has one). He carries a cane and frequently mock threatens to beat people with it. Secretly I yearn for our work relationship to take a violent turn despite the fact that me standing over his limp body and beating him with his own cane would probably cause me to have to have a long talk with our HR person.

As I alluded to he eventually got laid off in a massive restructuring that unfortunately didn't eliminate my position. More on that in a later post.

While You Were Out...

2007-10-28T01:18:00.000-07:00

Right before I had gone on vacation one of our sales guys, Trent, had sold a feature that we don't actually have. He assured all of us that if we couldn't get this sale the company was done for. It's always nice to be painted into a corner.

As background, we're at the end of a pretty big rewrite of our product. We just need to do some QA work and minor bug fixing and we'll be shippable. It'd take a month or two if we weren't constantly being called upon to implement customer one-off solutions for deals that never actually close. Meanwhile, the shipping version of our product is an accident waiting to happen. It'll do the job most days if you don't ask too much of it. However, it seems to be the goal of our sales guys to sell it into situations in which it is doomed to failure. This new deal was a great example. Not only did the functionality not exist in the product but adding it would expose some well known issues (namely that we use database transactions).

This was brought up repeatedly to the sales guys and upper management. Their solution was to implement the new feature in the shipping product and sell the buggy version with the hopes that the customer wouldn't get around to installing it until next year. By then, we will be able to put the requested feature into the new product (which should be shipping by then--keep your fingers crossed). When the customer is ready to install our product, we'll explain that one of their use cases requires the "enterprise" version of our product. Then we'll switch out the old version for the new version. Ta-da! Try as I might, I can't find any flaws with that plan.

Vacation

2007-10-28T00:07:00.000-07:00

Just as HABSOC was ending, I went on vacation. I had postponed vacation until after HABSOC intentionally. I wanted the company to look good at the major trade show for our industry. The first Monday of vacation I woke up to a ringing cell phone. When I answered it I was greeted by the product architect telling me he had just been laid off. "They're laying off a lot of development. Deep cuts. Have a good one!"

To put this in perspective, the architect tends to exaggerate and I don't really care all that much about losing my job. It's a pretty good market these days. Plus, getting laid off on vacation would make for a great story. Alas, it was not meant to be. I dug through the list of numbers in my cell phone and discovered that the only number I had was for a member of the team in another office. I called him and asked him about the lay offs. "We're laying people off!?" Oops. I got the number of one of the programmers at the main office and called him. "Man, it's crazy here. They laid off the architect and our only QA guy. They also got rid of some sales guy. Fenrir's meeting is about to start. I've got to go."

Fenrir is the CEO if you'll recall. I shrugged it off and went about vacationing. At the end of the day Fredo gave me a call and said I shouldn't worry about my job and that we were making some necessary cuts. It all lacks a certain amount of excitement and suspense when you don't really care. I went about my vacation for the remainder of the week.

When I got back one of the other developers on the team was eager to tell me of Fenrir's meeting. The meeting was about how well HABSOC went, how it was creating huge opportunities, and how we had to lay people off. He apparently had a chart whose X and Y axes might have been time and how much money we have respectively (there were no labels or units of measure). There was a steady decline in money, a squiggle, and a sharp increase in money. You see, money was running out (the decline) so we laid people off (the squiggle) thus allowing us time to increase sales mysteriously (the sharp increase). The good news was that the schedule for the increase is "A+", whatever that means. He also screwed up the name of one of the people that was laid off. Unfortunately the name he gave is the name of one of the people that still works here. I'm sure that got a good laugh.

Lay offs concern me most when it's a whole position or department that is eliminated. To date we had lost all of our QA guys (we still have a manager), our dev manager, our docs person and our architect. Luckily we still employ the people responsible for booking travel for the sales people, roughly one executive staff member per regular employee, and the person that orders all of our sodas, granola bars, and Rice Krispie Squares. Thank god. For a minute I was almost worried that we weren't being A+ about these lay offs.

The Show Must Go On (Part 3 -- Finale)

2007-10-23T21:27:00.000-07:00

The day after the Dancing Bear demo, Friday, everyone needed to get out to HABSOC and set up the booth on Saturday and Sunday for the first day of the show on Monday. Ike took off and left the borrowed card reader for someone else to take. I hunted down another sales guy and loaded him up with it. Next, the IT guy took the new printer with him so he could use it at HABSOC instead of the one that was already out there. He thought it would somehow be a better demo with the new model. He's wrong, but whatever.

I get a call Sunday from Ike at HABSOC. Apparently the card reader's configuration changed in order to get the boardroom demo to work. He hadn't paid attention when I explained that I had already set up the HABSOC demos to configure the reader, just in case they needed it. He just needed to click on the shortcut that said "reconfigure reader." After that was out of the way he let me know that the IT guy was having problems with the new printer and had unfortunately done something that caused the old printer to no longer work. But not to worry. Getting the new one working "should be easy." Eventually they got the printer working to everyone's satisfaction. Never mind that both the reader and new printer were risks that could have been easily avoided. If everything actually turns out okay then your risks were only another case of developer "chicken little" syndrome. It kind of makes you wonder how these people make it this far in life.

While at HABSOC we bought a large plasma screen for presentations in the booth. We bought it and shipped it straight there. It arrived, we used it. The show went well. At the end of the show, someone boxed up the plasma in the original packaging (also known as the "steal this box" box) and left it on the trade show floor. Oddly, when we got back to the office in San Francisco the display was missing. Upon further investigation, no one knows where it went. Oops. It doesn't help that all of the sales guys were joking about stealing it before the show.

Before all of this crazy shit started happening, our doc person quit. We just moved those duties onto the development manager. Our support guy quit. We moved those duties onto sales and development. We laid off / fired the development manager (and doc writer now) and moved those duties onto the architect. We let everyone know that sales were a little flat. We put the HABSOC booth together. Two developers quit. And finally, I went on vacation. I could hardly wait to see what happened next. Surely nothing bad?

The Dancing Bear

2007-10-21T18:42:00.000-07:00

After the HABSOC booth setup shipped we had a week of time to actually work as developers. Or so we thought. Since the CEO had said that he wanted a duplicate of the booth demo in the board meeting room someone had to put that together. Sales hadn't really participated in the construction of the demos or configuring the equipment for the booth so they didn't really know how to set up the board demo. That meant that it would likely fall to development again. Which again meant that some of us wouldn't be programming for a little while longer. The secret codename given to this demo by our architect was "The Dancing Bear." The idea being it doesn't matter how well the bear dances, it's a miracle it's dancing at all.

Another developer and I along with a sales engineer (we'll call him Blinky since he has a nervous twitch that causes him to blink almost constantly), Fredo (my boss), and the CEO all had an impromptu meeting to iron out the details. We need a nickname for the CEO who happens to be from Norway (as far as you know). Fenrir seems good enough. Descended from the god of mischief and strife, bound by the gods (the board members), but is ultimately destined to grow too large for his bonds and devour Odin (our company). Yeah, that paints a pretty accurate picture. Fenrir tasks Blinky with putting together the board room demo. Since Blinky simply can't do it, it's understood by all that the other dev and I will do the work and show Blinky what we did after the fact so he can maintain it and improve it. Of course, Fenrir doesn't really want a duplicate of the booth, even though that's what he said.

To get to the bottom of what it is we'll be doing, I ask Blinky to rank the seven demos in order of importance for the board demo. That way, we can work in priority order and we are more likely to successfully deliver the most important items. This is called "common sense" in some circles, but not this one. Blinky takes the out of date Excel spreadsheet with the list of five demos the sales guys were supposed to deliver (and didn't) and begins working on it. After a few minutes he says he thinks he's got it. He proudly explains, "I've marked these demos with a check and these other ones with a check plus. This one is a check minus."

I look at the other dev who looks right back at me. We both look at Blinky. I look at Fredo who smiles and nods with satisfaction. Although I'm very impressed at this new "base check" numbering system he's invented, I try again by saying, "Okay. Oh, those demos are out of date. Here's a list of the seven demos that are going to HABSOC. Just number those one through seven with one being something you feel you must have for the demo. Item number seven is something you would still like to have but is less important than the numbers that come before it."

After a few more minutes I get, "These three are number one. And this other one we really need. And I'd like the other ones."

"Great. That's a very good start. I'll just go ahead and number these in the order I think is most important. We'll go through them one by one and you can let me know if it should be higher or lower." I figure this is close enough to The Price is Right to make sense. I'm just hoping he doesn't make the connection and mysteriously bid $1. We finally get through the list and determine that we are on the hook for delivering items one through four. The rest can be done later but they don't have enough "sizzle" to be high priority. That's their word. I'm sure they had a meeting and agreed to begin working it into sentences because I heard it roughly ten times over the next five minutes.

The other dev and I pounded out an equipment list over the next fifteen minutes or so. Since we'd depleted our stock of "extra" stuff (also known as stuff we stole from other less important departments--like QA) while building the HABSOC demo, we felt we would need to buy this stuff. We all looked at Fenrir who smiled and said, "Of course. Money is not an object. Look guys, this is something we can show that people will say, 'Fuck! Look at how fucking good this is!' That's something. Let me tell you." Apparently he loves to swear when he's making up dialog for fictional people. Plus English is his second language (at least) so I think the swearing has less impact for him than the people he's talking to at the time. It doesn't bother me personally since I love to swear but I could see how it might not be a great trait for a CEO.

Blinky was tasked with getting us the necessary equipment. A fact that he was quite happy with since it meant he could rack up some airline points with his personal credit card. Before the meeting ended Blinky turned to the other developer and I and asked, "So when will you guys be able to get started?"

"We can start doing something when we have the computers. When will we have the computers on the list?"

"That's what I want to know," Blinky responded.

"Dude, you're the one buying them."

"That's right. Okay. Like I said, I can have the stuff by Tuesday." I guess if something isn't actually on fire it's very hard for some people to pay attention. Go figure.

We all ended the day feeling like we had made the best of a bad situation. Dev would create the demos in priority order, buying equipment as necessary, and the other groups would stay out of the way this time.

In the morning Ike, the head sales engineer, came in and once again got his panties in a knot over development trying to steal the show. He nixed everything on the equipment list and determine he could do nearly everything with equipment borrowed from other departments. He then stole the card reader from the HABSOC demo (see previous post) with the intention of using it for the board demo and smuggling it onto the trade show floor. The only item that had to be bought was the special printer we needed for one of the demos.

Next, he added the only HABSOC demo he actually worked on back onto the list of priority board room demos. So now there would be five demos. We could work on them all simultaneously to save time. He explained how this wouldn't add to the risk since we had already cobbled together the demos for HABSOC. This time it "should be easy." The other dev and I washed our hands of this and told him to go ahead and let us know when he needed our help.

This was on a Friday. The demos needed to be done by the following Thursday. The IT guy spent most of Tuesday getting the new printer working. It was a later model than what we sent to HABSOC so he had to figure everything out again. Late Tuesday Ike discovered that he needed to buy a bunch of equipment from the original list. Apparently we didn't have most of the stuff he thought we did. He seemed mildly confused at how the other developer and I had missed this fact. He finally got the equipment together and working on Wednesday. He was still having problems with his extra demo but he was now ready for the other dev and me to go ahead throw together our four demos. We put our stuff together and walked him through using them. He managed to get his stuff working and the demo was ready for Thursday.

Fenrir made the little bear dance for everyone. Happiness ensued, despite everyone's best efforts.

The Show Must Go On (Part 2)

2007-10-21T14:17:00.000-07:00

One of the demos we decided to send to HABSOC involves a special printer for printing things related to hospital billing stuff. I know that may be getting a little too technical and may even be giving out some of our trade secrets, but I think it's important to the story. Development had seen the need to get one of these printers about a month out from the trade show. No one had gotten this printer to work with our system to date. No one had really tried. It was a big unknown.

Every time we brought it up though someone would say that it was covered. One of our executives has a demo unit on loan from the company. We can just use that one. We just need to flash the firmware and do some special configuration magic. And then, no one would do anything about it. When confronted with the fact that we'd never tried to get the printer working the response was, "It should be easy." Of course, it actually won't be since it's not a normal printer.

It went on this way until the week we were supposed to pack stuff up and ship it to HABSOC. Finally, one of the sales engineers starts looking into it. She prints out 17 pages of instructions on how to get this thing up and running. When she gets all the way to page 2 she comes to get me to let me know that she doesn't know what the fuck is going on. Luckily for her neither do I. When I bring this up with her boss he assures me that she's on it and that "it should be easy."

Finally the IT guy stepped in to get the job done. In order to do this he needed to get on the exact machines that the demos were on. Now. Right now! He needs on the machine!! Not a machine like it, THAT MACHINE!!! MOVE!!! This derails devs' work effort of putting stuff together for a day and a half while he gets this printer working. When he finally has it working he let's me know that it was easy. You know, once he got past the day and a half of the hard stuff.

At the end of the day on Tuesday (we have to pack on Thursday, ship on Friday) we are done. We hand it off to Ike the sales engineer who then does his dry run for the first time in front of the executives. He stumbles through the demo, but overall it comes off pretty well. At the end I can hear everyone present saying sentences that begin with, "You know what would be cool..." Yeah, I do. It'd be cool if you had paid fucking attention a month or two ago when we were talking about these demos. Then we could implement some of these ideas. Hell, I'll even say that it's hard to know what you want until you see a first draft. In that case we should have worked on these demos a month ago and gotten feedback then. Bringing it up now is pointless.

Finally, the CEO begins rambling incoherently about how this is a world class demo. He should issue a press release. And he wants the exact same demo set up in the conference room so he can demo it to the board exactly one week from that day. He also wants to have an "always ready" demo of all of this cool stuff. This whole adventure warrants its own post and will be seen at a future point on this blog. I mention it here because a one point will become important for HABSOC in a short bit: he'll need special card reader we use in the billing software. It's a simple reader that we can order from a variety of vendors and get well within the week if we expedite it. Total cost would be $2,500. However, we've really needed another one of these for some time as we only have one in house. The CEO says it won't be a problem because money isn't an issue.

The booth setup is proclaimed as done. We begin packing things up on Thursday as per the schedule. At this point Trent, the sales manager, wanders in and says, "Um, did we remember to get screen shots of everything?" You know exactly what that "we" means, don't you? All the developers point out that it wasn't on the schedule and that today is the day we are supposed to tear it down so it can be packed tomorrow. He wanted screen shots in case the board room demo didn't get done in time. He just either expected us to guess that and do it for him or he didn't pay attention to the fact that there was a schedule. At this point he starts strolling around the area while talking loudly on his cell phone. It's obvious that we're intended to overhear that he's tattling on us to some unknown party. When this fails to elicit a response he gives up and wanders off.

The thing to realize about HABSOC is that the equipment delivery and setup is a very tightly controlled union job. You aren't supposed to bring in equipment from the outside--it has to be delivered in the crate(s). If they catch you bringing stuff in they apparently get very angry. Originally we were scheduled to deliver one crate of stuff. This was estimated from when the sales guys were in charge of the demo. When dev got involved and found out how much equipment it would actually need we found out it would require two crates. Not a huge problem, just a pain in the ass for our operations guy. The fun part comes into play when he starts packing things up on Friday and I notice that the card reader is missing.

Someone swiped the card reader from the HABSOC pile so they could use it for the boardroom demo. HABSOC is once a year and is very important to our industry and therefore our company. The boardroom demo happens once a month and in my opinion could have waited. The other option was to spend money and buy another reader (which we need any way). All of the sales guys and their managers assured everyone this would be the best way to do it. This way we don't have to spend the $2,500. Do the boardroom demo next Thursday, then smuggle the reader onto the trade show floor and wire it up. I bitched about this as a wildly unnecessary risk to my manager, Fredo. He's been looking for an opportunity to prove his worth. Fredo, puffed up and "confronted" them. After the confrontation he assured me that it would be best this way and that it actually made sense to take that great of a risk with the trade show. You see this way, we get to shop around for a better price than the $2,500. Hell, maybe we'll find a coupon or something. I finally let it go, comforted only by visions of sales guys getting their fingers smashed by hammer wielding teamsters. A vision that sadly didn't come to pass.

Be sure to join us for our next and final HABSOC installment. I'm desperately trying to catch up to the present here so please be patient.

The Show Must Go On (Part 1)

2007-10-07T17:52:00.001-07:00

For those of you that don't follow the fast paced world of hospital billing systems there are, let's say, three big hospital management trade shows throughout the year. The big one is at the end of August--the Hospital Administration and Billing Software Convention or HospAdminiBillSoCon for short or HABSOC for super short. Our company was going to have a booth at the convention this year which is held in Topeka, Kansas (the hospital billing software capital of...Kansas, I guess). Of course our sales guys were responsible for putting together the booth which was to contain several demos of the exciting functionality in our application.

You have to ship your booth contents to the show a week before the convention. We had to have a manifest for the equipment we were shipping on a Friday, pack the equipment the following Thursday, and ship it the Friday immediately following (to be delivered a week later and set up by the sales guys since no developer would be attending the show). That's one week to get our shit together. The sales guys were adamant that they would handle putting together all of the demos, about five in all. They pissed away a month and had a list of five demos that were pretty much identical to the same shit we always demo. They weren't too firm about assigning responsibility for putting together these demos, acquiring equipment, or even coming up with any kind of a deadline. They did, however, have the list in Excel which made it feel pretty darn official and efficient. Finally with two weeks until the show the development team began to express some concerns. We drew up a list of potential issues and ran them by the head of marketing along with some much better (flashier) demo suggestions. We were assured that no one was interested in our cute little demos. As for the concerns, one by one he "addressed" them by saying that it was being handled.

The only thing the sales guys had done up to this point was get a server. Of course, it was a bleeding edge powerhouse with four 700Mhz processors that our IT guy was trying to sell us from his private collection. Normally I would be worried about a heat problem with a server that has almost as much horsepower as my desktop, but luckily it had a CPU fan that was only slightly louder than a jet engine--sure to be a hit within the confines of our booth. And as another plus, maybe we could hand out free earplugs with our company logo on it. Our company name has a ring to it, just like your hearing. Zing, zap, pow!

The remainder of the concerns were going to be handled when several of the sales guys would sit down on a Monday (the Monday after the Friday when they were supposed to have had the equipment list) with a couple of laptops and throw something together. We'd learn later that our competition showed up on site with carpenters and built a two story booth on the trade show floor but that's only important to illustrate our company's extreme incompetence.

Suddenly it began to feel like a big game of "responsibility chicken." Anyone willing to accept the very real possibility that our company would look like shit at the trade show would be off the hook for doing the work. Development blinked and started putting together the demos from some previous work we had done as iteration demos. One by one each demo became dev's responsibility as a sales guy would mention in passing that they wouldn't be doing one of their demos and that they'd be using ours instead (which they had insisted they didn't need or want us to work on).

Finally we just started putting together the mock up of the booth. We taped off an area the size of the booth and duplicated the booth layout, complete with multiple tables matching those that would be provided at HABSOC. At this point the loudest and most abrasive guy from sales got his weenie in a knot because development was trying to take over his stuff, as if he couldn't do his job. We'll call this sales guy Ike because "Ike" has one good "I", much like the sales guy.

From that point forward, Ike would "help" us out by doing things like changing the VNC passwords on the servers (the servers that had no monitors because he insisted he didn't need them or a KVM (to which he later said he never said that)). Ike was also useful for doing things like taking rack mounting hardware from our production servers to put in the small mobile rack we had for the show--the one we bought from the IT guy from his large collection of surplus Soviet era computer equipment.

Ike was also great in that he tasked us with buying some more RAM for "his" server. A developer paid for it out of pocket (to be reimbursed later) along with another $350 of assorted "oops we need one of those" items. This happened because everyone with a company credit card mysteriously disappeared when it was time to go shopping. The real fun began when the developers installed the RAM and sat the old RAM on top of the server rack. The QA guy grabbed it for the QA lab since it wasn't being used. For the next week Ike would ask several times a day where his RAM was. No one seemed to know. So, Ike waited until one of the developers went on vacation and accused her of stealing the RAM. Yep, that's what happened. She stole his fucking RAM! That was the only logical conclusion. He then went up and down the hall talking loudly (even for him) about how that damn developer stole his RAM. The RAM reappeared after this of course. When Ike was asked about maybe apologizing the response was, "For what?"

"Well, you accused her of stealing when she wasn't even here to defend herself. Where was your RAM?"

"That's what I want to know," Ike replied.

"Don't you have it now?"

"Yeah. Exactly."

There you go. In all fairness, he thought she was a dirty stinking thief. Why would you apologize to a thief?

So ends Episode I (maybe I should start with IV) of the great HABSOC debacle.

So Long and Thanks for All the Features

2007-10-07T11:49:00.000-07:00

Most of what I know about the actual firing of the development manager has been pieced together after the fact, mostly by infiltrating sales department happy hours (company sponsored, of course). After numerous sessions of stuffing my face with pizza shooters, shrimp poppers, and even the dreaded extreme fajitas I found that the perception is that the development manager was a huge barrier to progress.

The DM had an annoying habit of insisting that people rank desired functionality (and no, not everything can be tied for first) and then trying to work top priority items into the next two week iteration. This was described directly to me as "not agile enough."

Back when Trent (the sales guy) ran development we used to have sales guys call programmers directly from the site of potential customers. The sales guy would then describe the one feature our product lacked that was preventing the software from virtually flying off the shelves. The programmer would then take up to a week to implement it, cut a build, possibly increment a version number (not required), and we'd install it for a customer. Inevitably we'd turn up problems either during QA or at the customer site (pretty much the same thing). So, we'd patch it up a little (by changing multiple things at once) and cut some more builds. When that wound up breaking more things the customer would then threaten to pull all of our software out and kill the deal (for which they still haven't paid any money). We'd fly out more sales guys and try to babysit the install. Eventually the "customer" would calm down and agree to not rip our stuff out. They typically would never buy any more of our stuff, probably never paid for the stuff they got, and could be used as a neutral referral at best. After 6 months or so this would internally be held up as a success story.

Failure by the DM to stick to this proven method of delivering the product caused a lot of friction. So did starting meetings on time without "rounding up" all the interested parties that can't manage their own calendars. So did trying to stick to meeting agendas and not allowing everyone's time to be wasted by marketing stream of consciousness incidents. So did telling people their ideas wouldn't work and that there are better alternatives. So did trying to insulate developers from repeated interruptions by other company members (this got him the nickname "the Iron Curtain"). The ultimate final straw though appears to have been a personality conflict with the new VP of engineering.

The previous VP of engineering fled the scene of the crime and hand picked his own replacement who happened to be an ex co-worker / buddy that needed a favor in the form of a new job. The only person I found that interviewed the new guy recommended against hiring him. The new guy had zero technical background, didn't understand the industry, didn't understand the product, had screwed over some of the current developers in previous jobs, and had a somewhat weak personality. If Fredo Corleone had succeeded in taking over the family in The Godfather: Part II, I think it would have looked a lot like our engineering department. In fact, we'll call the new guy Fredo in honor of that theory.

Fredo had a problem with having a non "team player" reporting to him. Team players don't just drink the Kool-Aid they help mix it. This company has no place for people that won't delude themselves and those around them. The theory is that Fredo called up Hyman Roth (the previous VP) and was instructed to cut the cancer out. The DM's ominous sounding prediction that he was about to be fired came true a couple of days after it was made. The all new Dark Ages of the company were about to begin.

The Adventure Continues

2007-10-06T20:48:00.000-07:00

I always thought it was ironic that Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins didn't have a sequel. Sure there may have been a pump fake of a television show, but I won't count that. The adventure began and ended all in one movie. Having enjoyed the movie greatly, or at least somewhat, I always wanted more. Were the makers of the movie smart enough to know that an attempt at a sequel (or a trilogy) would only ruin the characters and leave everyone with a bad taste in their mouths? Sadly for you, I am not so wise as the gods of Remo's universe. This is my sequel and my meandering, profanity peppered stories detailing the decline and fall of all things reasonable and logical is what will likely become the bad taste in everyone's mouths. I apologize in advance.

Now, if I just came out and told you that I was a frog sitting in a pot of boiling water you wouldn't have much sympathy. That's why we have to go back a little to when I was a frog sitting in a pot of lukewarm water. Everyone didn't suddenly go bat shit crazy on me. It happened a little at a time.

I took this job about a year ago. I'm still a web developer working in Java. Let's say that I work on a billing application for hospitals to bill people for hospitally stuff like heroin, band-aids, enemas or whatever it is that hospitals bill people for. We're a startup, which is to say we're an 8 year old company that still hasn't figured out how to make money but can still somehow fool investors into giving us more of theirs.

Up until about 2 months ago, the development team had been working away at fixing the product. Years ago, we were a company with people that could sell things that didn't exist. The head of development was a silly little man who we'll call Trent. He has a CS degree (although I think it's printed on a lobster bib so it may not count) but no real understanding of how software is built. When our turd of a product finally made it to the customer, all hell broke loose. My favorite story is one in which one of our company representatives was escorted from a customer site by the police. Good times.

To fix this, Trent (after maximum damage was done to the product) was moved from development to sales. Mostly reasonable people were hired to unturdify the product. We then turned into a company that couldn't sell anything we actually produced. Trent would swear up and down that we could sell anything we didn't currently make, however. This lead to numerous attempts to prematurely jam new, radically different, functionality into the existing product. The development manager and architect managed to keep these changes off the feature list while we slowly paid down our technical debt (racked up primarily by Trent).

And this is where the water started to heat up, however slowly, on our heroic frog (that's me for those of you too lazy to recall the boiling water analogy from earlier). I was talking to one of the other developers (all developers in this story are logical beings) about how this was now the best product I had worked on to date. I was on an iteration high. Our nearly year long feature parity, rearchitect-in-place effort was bearing fruit. We were slowly adding an API to the system. Life was mostly good.

Not five minutes after I was sporting wood at how everything was coming up Greg (that's my name, remember?), my manager walks up and says, "Well, I'm about to be fired." If this was a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book you'd be told you could get the hell out by turning to page 89 or you could ride the wave by turning to page 105. I'll see you on page 105...

Yoink!

2006-06-10T19:27:00.000-07:00

We recently had one of our main QA guys quit. He gave two weeks, but the company decided he could go ahead and leave at the end of the day. Right or wrong, I feel when companies do this they're often acting out of spite. All of the developers at my company, with the exception of the two on my team, all have large flat panel LCDs.

The day after the QA guy left, the other developer on my team decided he might like having his external display be an LCD. When he went over to the guys desk the sales guy was already there grabbing the LCD. "Man, I sure hate to see this go to waste." He then left with the LCD.

I'm not sure how it sitting there for 12 hours meant it was going to go to waste. I'm not sure why, if he felt the need to have an external display for his laptop, he didn't already use one of the many CRTs laying around. Then he could argue that he needed extra desk space. My real problem with this is that he's out of the office over half the time. Why put yourself ahead of the people making the products who are in the office all the time? It just seems selfish and petty.

Derek-isms 2

2006-06-09T11:01:00.000-07:00

Here's the latest collection of statements and conversations I've heard from Derek lately.

(sneeze sneeze) Bless you...I sure hope you're not getting sick...(expressed with "genuine" concern)

Derek: Hey, where did you just come from?
Other: While your detailed interest in my travel plans is always charming, let's just say I'm here and leave it at that.

Derek: Hey, Greg. I'm done borrowing Tom's books. Did you want to borrow them before I gave them back?
Me: No, that's alright, thanks.
Derek: Ok. I'll just put them on his desk then.
Me: Um, ok.
Derek: Which desk is his?
Me: Just put them in the cube next to me.
Derek: Ok. Hey, his keyboard and mouse are in this other cube.
Me: (Sigh) Yeah he was sitting over there last week because he likes the light better. I'm sure he'll find them whichever cube you put them in.
Derek: Ok. I'll put them in the one next to you. They're right there if you want to borrow them.

Derek: How's it going?
Me: Oh, I can't complain.
Derek: That's funny. I knew a guy who said that. I said, "Sure you can." He assured me that he couldn't. It was part of his job description. He actually wasn't allowed to complain.
Me: (walking away) That's funny.

Derek: I just heard you're leaving. Good luck at the new place.
Me: Yeah, I'll keep my fingers crossed.
Derek: The only problem with that is it's hard to type.
Me: Er, yeah.
Derek: Well, keep your chin up.
Me: Ok.
Derek: Otherwise, someone might sock you in such a fashion as to cause you to have to keep your chin up.
Me: Yeah, I guess that could happen.
Derek: I'm mainly staying here out of a sense of loyalty to my co-workers. And my immediate manager.
Me: Oh? Well, that's good.

There are more, but you get the idea.

Let the Good Times Roll

2006-06-05T20:56:00.000-07:00

I put in my two weeks notice and I will be moving on to a hopefully better situation. I'm sure that can't really be much of a shocker to anyone that reads the frustrating situations I've been dealing with at my current company.

My manager called the other developer (before even talking to me) and asked about how we were going to transition things. Of course, he seems to have forgotten that the other developer will be out for a week long vacation. If only we had some sort of calendaring application available to keep track of those things...

This will leave the current team staffed with exactly one developer who is still relatively new to the language and the architecture, a manager that seems to always have some other more important project on his mind, a sales guy that is convinced that this product will sell itself so he doesn't really need to understand it, and a product that has a distinct lack of resources, requirements, and customer feedback. If it wouldn't require me to share the pain (or take the brunt of it), I'd almost be tempted to stick around for that first commercial ship date.

While the developer will be fine without me (I think he's fully up to speed) I think the other problems are going to blow up soon. Couple that with the fact that the developers are doubling as support staff for the new stuff as well as a previous product line and it gets a bit bleaker. If I told you that we can't even build the old product would that make it sound worse? And that it's written half in a language we don't work in and half in a proprietary language neither of has any experience with? What if I said neither of us has ever even installed it? Now what if I got a non-trivial support call on it today? Did I mention that we ship the new stuff at the end of this month?

Yeah, I bet it's going to be fun to watch. The sad thing is both developers have been mentioning all of these problems in every meeting, at ever opportunity, for the past 3+ months. If only developers weren't such whiney little bitches, maybe someone would listen.

Anyhow, I'll be wrapping up my job duties over the next two weeks as well as finishing up any half-published material on this blog. I'll also try to eavesdrop a bit more to get one or two last juicy tidbits. After that, I foresee this blog going dark for a while. At least I fucking hope so...

Quick Bad Management Analogy

2006-05-25T21:53:00.000-07:00

I was talking with the other developer today and the subject of our lack of management came up, as it always does. Our suspicion is that somewhere in the project transition there may have been a decision that we were perfectly capable of doing our jobs with very little interaction from them. While this is true, they seem to have taken the old adage that the manager that manages least manages best to an unhealthy extreme. The analogy I came up with is it's like someone driving one of those big 1970's custom vans discovered that if they briefly took their hands off the steering wheel the van seemed to drive itself. So they decided to put a cinderblock on the gas and go to the back to make themselves a drink.

It's That Time Again

2006-05-24T10:42:00.000-07:00

Recently, the new management for my team has stopped the daily status meeting, changed the weekly planning meeting to every other week, and now refer to the planning meeting as an opportunity to "touch base." As if we don't really need the meeting for anything other than a quick status update. Awesome. I feel so over-managed already.

We started the meeting 10 minutes late of course. I was determined that I was not going to lead this meeting. So, we sat in silence in the conference room for several minutes while the manager busily typed some emails on his laptop and the sales guy played with his crackberry. Finally I was asked what I had been working on. I did a quick summary, showed them one screen and that was that. They spent a couple of minutes trying to form meaningful questions, ultimately failing, and in 5 short minutes the whole demo was over.

The other programmer on my team has been spending most of his time working on another startup type of project. He's been doing a lot of research, explaining the overall strategy we should take for the new stuff, doing some initial designs, etc. When he mentioned briefly that he spent the iteration working on the other stuff, both the managers' faces lit up like Christmas morning. This they could understand. They fell over each other asking pertinent questions, offering assistance to keep things moving, and expressed a deep interest in being kept in the loop on things. It was all very fun to watch.

When I brought the meeting back to my project and that we should plan the next iteration I think I actually heard crickets. I spent the next several minutes reiterating our need for test equipment that our product supposedly works with, some sort of requirements (preferably from a customer), and my continued concern that we may be dropping the ball on this product.

The sales guy said, "Now it was my understanding that you guys were supposed to put together some sort of product roadmap." The developers informed him that in fact, we're not supposed to be the ones that do that, although we had suggestions. He then mentioned that he needed us to update the product data sheet. Again, we informed him that, technically, someone on their side is supposed to do that. Finally, he expressed concern at my concern, as if this was all new news to him (despite the fact that I bring it up all the time). "Well, I'm a little concerned to be honest. When the lead developer tells me we may not be making something we can sell." My sneaking suspicion is that this is supposed to have a somewhat accusatory tone to it. That somehow I am not living up to my grand title and pulling everything together for them.

Blow me. Could I instead write about him being the pied piper of ineptitude playing my meat whistle and leading us all to a disastrous end? Yes, I could. But I prefer the simple effective thrust of a succinct "blow me."

He continued on trying to regurgitate technical terms he had heard us use. This is a vain effort to either appear competent or to speak our "language." Of course, when you use all of the terms incorrectly it just becomes comically sad. He has put no effort into learning anything about the product or what it does. He either thinks he doesn't need to or that he'll just absorb it somehow. I felt like interrupting him and suggesting we schedule a training meeting where I can give him the 30 minute HTE of the technology. HTE is the phrase my co-worker and I have been using. It's a summary of something that even someone with severe head trauma could follow--the "head trauma explanation." I decided to let it go since we had been in there an hour and he looked like he was getting sleepy. Maybe I'll try again in a couple of weeks or a month or whenever it is we next need to "touch base."

Derek-isms

2006-05-23T00:13:00.000-07:00

Here's a collection of Derek-isms I've been sitting on for a bit. Not too terribly funny, but they help communicate the overall weirdness of the person.

"I also heard you use the word swizzle, which I'm not too fond of, given the origin of the word." He said this to one of his co-workers. I suppose he's referring to his suspicions of the alcohol related origin of the word. Alcohol is wrong, kids.

(Riding in the elevator with a complete stranger) "That's an interesting looking name on your badge. How do you pronounce it?" This just struck me as a "mind your business and ride in silence" moment.

"Do we have a banner with the company name on it so I can put it in my front yard tonight, so people can find the house?"

"If anyone's interested there is some leftover food in the fridge from our work lunch on Saturday." This is said to communicate to anyone that didn't know that he worked this weekend.

If you mention you have something like a doctor's appointment at 2:00, he'll be sure to remind you 30 minutes beforehand, because he cares.

If you're in your cubicle and your phone rings, he'll still say, "Your phone is ringing."

And finally, someone I know contributed this fine image to the HIT (hang in there) collection:

Busted by Deduction, Baby

2006-05-16T15:15:00.000-07:00

There I was, headed to the bathroom and minding my own business when I pass one of my co-workers almost exactly at the threshold to the bathroom. We exchange mumbled courtesies and I head into the bathroom. As I'm entering, I distinctly hear the urinal still running and then cut off. You know where this is going.

After I'm done with "my business" I flush the same urinal and walk briskly to wash my hands with soap. The urinal is done before I can even get to the paper towels to dry my hands. Always one to give someone the benefit of the doubt, I re-ran the less appetizing, but still mostly acceptable, scenario of the "quick rinse" this time. This time the urinal cuts off as I'm just starting to dry off my hands.

And finally, just to confirm it, I tried the flush and run. Accounting for the fact that the co-worker in question uses the "fat guy shuffle" as his primary mode of transportation, I managed to make it through the door as the urinal was finishing up. Being a nut I had to give the hands one more hit with the soap and water before heading back to work, ever leery of all the piss soaked surfaces on the way.

Were at my previous place of employment, I'd have to tape a sign on everything he touches, warning other people about it. I have not yet reached that level. And sure, there are dumber and nastier cases of people not washing their hands, but I don't have to work with those freaks.

They're Baaaack

2006-05-09T12:54:00.000-07:00

Everyone is back from their trip to MA. While they were out, they had the network guy move their cubicles (probably a little further away from me) for whatever reason. Of course one of them had to write a big gay "Thank you!!! for moving us!!!" on the network guy's whiteboard (actual punctuation).

As soon as they got back, I found myself riding up in the elevator with Mr. Kitten (aka "I'm hanging in there"). For the first time since I've been working here (maybe even ever) he was cheerful. He had such a swell time in MA doing all sorts of fun team activities. They went bowling together, went to a baseball game together, ate at the best restaurants together, etc. I really missed out. But on the plus side, I got to learn that even without the dreary self-pity, Mr. Kitten still annoys the shit out of me.

Unfortunately, the other programmer on my team has been out sick since they returned, so I can't get the real story. Doubtless the 24/7 force feeding of syrupy sweet rah rah extreme teamism may have had something to do with his illness. I just hope he wasn't at the bottom of the hill when the snowball came around, if you know what I mean.

Today is also demo and planning day. I went to the meeting and found that it was only me and my "manager." The other programmer is out sick as I mentioned and the sales guy just plain isn't there.

I didn't bother demo'ing anything since no one cares anyway. When it came to iteration planning, I laid out a high level plan for a two week iteration. I got the passing nod followed by some overly general "maybe we could do <blank>" statements. Meanwhile, no one has gotten us the market research, beta test customers, or equipment access we've been whining about for months. So pretty much business as usual.

Since we're only meeting every two weeks, it seems like someone thought we should cut the available meeting time in half (I'm fine with not meeting at all). I found this out when I heard the sales guy bellowing about how he's likes college basketball in the next conference room, so at least he had a good reason for skipping the meeting. He then poked his head in and reminded my manager that they have a meeting scheduled with someone else. I really have no why no one knows what's going on on this project.

Why So Many Meetings?

2006-05-02T08:01:00.000-07:00

I got an email from my manager canceling today's demo / planning meeting. I expected this since everyone is out of town this week. He then asked what we were working on this iteration. Again, I should expect this question since he wasn't present at the last demo / planning meeting and hasn't attended a daily standup meeting since he took over as manager. He's also apparently forgotten about the planning tool we use to track these things. He then had the suggestion that we have the weekly meeting every two weeks instead. Presumably, that is so he will miss half as many meetings. That's an outstanding increase in efficiency.

I fired off a reply stating my task list (half of which is what I would consider product management) and said I didn't have a preference in the area of one versus two week iterations. Of course, I actually think a one week iteration suits us better, but who the fuck cares at this point. Next, the sales guy chimed in and stated that he does have a preference and that it is for meeting every two weeks. That way he can better spread out that uncomfortable combination feeling of uselessness and ignorance he has to suffer through every meeting.

I'm hoping we can somehow resolve this so my attempt at developing a product won't cut into their nap time. Wish me luck!!

Would You Like to See My Organ?

2006-04-26T14:00:00.000-07:00

I sometimes wonder if my co-workers actually want me to make fun of them. They keep doing the most ridiculous stuff. The butter troll just sent out some email spam that he is going to rent a nearby concert hall so he can have a little organ recital of his own. He wraps it up by saying:

I'm a classical and church organist, and likewise my repertoire will be based on such pieces. I hope folks understand I'm not trying to advocate for certain religious views or sects, but will play some pieces that originated in church out of respect for the tune, arrangement, or both. I will also endeavor to provide some information that isn't generally known about the organ, how it is constructed, and its unique musical capabilities.

What a pompous ass. One of my co-workers told me he tried to talk to the guy when Jimmy Smith died, thinking that butter troll would be familiar with another famous organ player (I wasn't btw), albeit from a different genre. Of course, a simple "I'm not familiar with him" would have been acceptable. However, he took it upon himself to say, "That kind of music derives from the theater. I'm a classical organist." What a douche.

Further, as best as I can determine, this little one man show of his (presumably so he can show off his talents) is going to cost him somewhere in the neighborhood of $700. That makes it one of the more expensive masturbation sessions I've ever heard of.

Just the Two of Us

2006-04-26T07:36:00.000-07:00

We had our end of iteration demo and planning meeting yesterday. Exactly two people showed up: me and the other programmer. Upper management and the sales guy were all conveniently out of the office. There was no request to reschedule, no request for a remote presentation, nobody calling in, nothing. And yet, every time I see these people they continue to ask just what it is our product does, what new features we're going to have next release, and even when the release is going to be. I find it all highly motivating, as you can imagine. I guess it could be worse. They could be treating us like we're a family. A highly dysfunctional family whose meetings would go a little something like this:

Manager: Why don't you tell us what you did during the iteration today?
Sales guy: Yes, dear, how is the iteration going?
Me: Like you care. I don't have to tell you shit, you're not my real manager.
Manager: THE HELL I AIN'T! As long as I'm here putting plans on the table, I'm your manager. Your real manager left. He didn't want you. I'm all you've got, bub.
Me: Shut up! I can go and work with him whenever I want!!!
Manager: The sooner you get it through your thick head that as long as you're at my company you'll work by my rules the better off you'll be.
Sales guy: Why can't we just have a normal, quiet demo meeting like other companies!?
Manager: Why can't you be more like your co-worker? I don't hear him complaining.
Other programmer: Actually...
Manager: Oh, here we go. I always thought you were the good one. Now this bad apple has you talking like him. You two better straighten up and fly right or else.
Me: I hate you, I wish you were dead!!!

...and scene. Yeah, I guess it could actually be worse. The environment here is not very demanding. However, it's also not very productive or enriching. I think my skills are going to atrophy if I'm not careful. I think I'll just start overengineering and gold plating everything using whatever technology I feel like learning more about. It's not like anyone would know the difference or even be present to stop me.

Profile of an Ass Clown

2006-04-25T13:13:00.000-07:00

Project A is the "other" project in this location. It is staffed almost completely with emotional defectives. One of them, we'll call him Derek, may be one of the most pathetic individuals I've ever met. He's the one in all of the conversations you've read on here that is super-psyched about things, feels we're a family, is over-complimentary to his co-workers, and does any number of other things that annoy the shit out of normal people.

My favorite thing he does is whine about how bad he's feeling. Just ask how he's doing and you'll get the long, overdramatic sigh followed by the, "Oh...I'm hanging in there." You poor little bitch. Does our pussy hurt today? You may also get a, "I'm doing okay. I wish I was doing better, but I'm not." Or you'll get a short story about how his friends are dying or he has chest pains or whatever. Talking to him is draining and depressing. It sucks the life out of you.

The other programmer on this project spent the better part of a year listening to this shit. As such, he's developed a strong allergic reaction to it. I think it may cause him physical pain to hear it. Ever the team player, I thought it'd be nice to let him know that he too should "hang in there" much like Derek. That's when I started a little contest with myself to see how many syrupy feel-good bullshit wallpapers I could send him.

It started a simple picture and an email subject line of, "You hang in there, buddy":

Followed by the more complete:

I think I sent him three or four more cat pictures over the next week. I'm not sure what it is about cat owners that make them want to torture their pets, but I'm sure glad they do. After that I petered out a bit and had one last hurrah with a non-cat picture:

Last week I got to thinking that it's a shame that all this beautiful Derek content can only be included as background information in most of the posts. Maybe I'll start doing a weekly top 5 list of the generally idiotic and annoying things he's allowed to spew forth from his mouth.

Better You Than Me

2006-04-25T08:42:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned previously the management here has been trying to convince the other programmer and I that we should be a part of project B--another Java project based out of our Massachusetts office. The other project here, we'll call it project A (it's Perl based), is sort of being replaced by project B. Of course, they tell all of project A's developers that that is not the case. Project A is still very important and will continue to shape our direction as a company, project A will exist for the foreseeable future, etc. This is what they tell people on dying projects when they can't afford for all of them to quit at the same time.

Next week, a bunch of the programmers from project A are heading up to MA to swap spit with their new Java overlords. I was informed that this would be a great opportunity for me to get familiar with project B. After the demo meeting debacle I was informed that I had made my position clear and that I didn't need to go to MA. However, they still wanted someone on this team to go and since there are exactly two of us that means the other guy was strongly encouraged to make the trip.

The funny part is that he used to be on project A and can't stand most of those people. Now he'll be spending a week with them. They've even got a team night planned so they can bring everyone closer together AND a van rented for ground transportation. They may even be sharing hotel rooms, though I cannot completely confirm this. As you can imagine, he's dreading the impending trip. Rather than dread it, I suggested he do the exact opposite. For one week, he should be the complete absurd hard-core team player. Then the entire thing becomes a game and you get to witness people participating whole-heartedly while you're making fun of them to their faces.

I imagine him showing up to the departing flight with a coach's whistle and a collection of team building exercises. Start off the pre-flight entertainment by asking everyone to gather around and "grab a knee."

"You know in the last few months I really do think we've become a family. And that guy over there, our manager, you know who I'm talking about...he's like our dad. He's the leader, our provider. I'd just like to say, 'Thanks, dad.' Everyone? Let's hear it for dad. Okay, it looks like we're about to take off in a bit, so if I could get everyone to put one of their hands in the middle here. Let's have a big 'team Perl' on three: 1, 2, 3 TEAM PERL!!!!"

During the flight he should move from seat to seat for some one on one time with each of the team members, making sure to touch them on the hand while talking to them. Then, once off the plane and in the rented van, he should stand up and blow the whistle to get everyone's attention.

"We've got a few minutes before we get to the hotel, so I thought it would bring us closer together if we went down the line and had each member list one fear and one hope for this new project. The little me inside is afraid that I won't be able to live up to these new expectations. That I'm going to let you guys down. My hope is that we'll show these guys up here in Massachusetts just what we're made of!!! Dad, why don't you go next?"

Now if it winds up that they do in fact have to share hotel rooms, I think he should insist that he only sleeps in the nude. Another bold move might be to drop a deuce with the door open. Of course I know none of this will happen, but I can dream, can't I?

As for the good news I mentioned last post: I won't be going on this trip and the office will be almost entirely empty. That means I can "work from home." You know what those quotes mean, don't you?

Business as Usual

2006-04-24T13:03:00.000-07:00

One of the upper level managers just asked the other programmer on my team when we are planning on shipping the next version of the product. Not when is the next release planned, but when are WE planning the next release. The list of programmer job duties now consists of market research, write/manage the requirements, plan the iterations, write the product, write the end user help, assemble the necessary sales training materials, and pick the release date.

Our daily standup meeting consists of just the two of us. Since we sit in bordering cubicles and work with each other throughout the day, you can imagine we don't have much left to say to each other during these meetings. I keep thinking a manager, maybe even our manager, might actually show up.

At the last iteration planning, we "assigned" tasks to the execs to get us a Gartner report on the industry and look into getting us some beta testers. Of course, it's now the day before the end of the iteration and we still don't have the promised report. There's also no known progress on the beta tester situation. If I had a manager, it might shock him to know that I'm not doing any work either.

In my perfect world we'd be able to use the old house moving analogy of programming. We're moving a two story house on the back of a wide load truck. The programmer is driving it and the managers are the ones up ahead taking down power lines and closing intersections. Their responsibility is to get everything out of my way. My job is to drive the truck. Oh, but my world is far from perfect.

In reality it's more like I'm driving a Greyhound bus full of retarded people. They periodically try to get my attention so they can tell me that Timmy backed up the toilet by going number four or to show me their booger collection. Meanwhile, I'm motoring down the road in a bus leaking raw sewage and what appears to be some sort of medical waste all over the highway. Eugene is screaming that he's hungry but he can't have dairy when some freakshow with a mohawk and a pair of assless chaps jumps onto the front of the bus and starts making all menacing-like with the cub scout edition crossbow he's got strapped to his wrist. About this time I blow a tire, flip the bus which goes skidding down the highway on its side. As we skid to a stop the bus bursts into flames and explodes, throwing me clear of the wreckage. I come to to see Eugene leaning over me asking "are we there yet?"

Hey, they can't all be gold. There's some good news in it all, but I'll save that for another post.

T-Shirt Idea

2006-04-19T14:45:00.000-07:00

Someone suggested a t-shirt based on some of the content of the last post, so here it is:Now who wouldn't be proud to be seen wearing that?

Sell It to Me, Baby!

2006-04-18T15:27:00.000-07:00

I had another end of iteration demo meeting today. Why bother? Once again, the same cast of characters had the same questions they always do. But, as an added bonus, this is the first real iteration planning meeting with the new bunch of people. However, if you don't really know what the product does, you will not be able to plan what the product should do in the next version. As such, more of the product roadmap and iteration planning will fall on the only people that know what is going on--the developers.

Here's the sole nugget of planning wisdom I was given (no fewer than five times): if you find a way to handle more scenarios in a generic fashion then we should do that. Thanks. My questions about what the market wants, where we should be heading, if we thought about finding early beta testers to get feedback and requirements from, or if we've made any progress on the equipment problems we've been having were all met by, "yeah, we should look into that." I've made a point of asking point blank who is going to follow up on that. "Follow up on that." That's a goddamn manager phrase. I'm a motherfucking programmer, bitch. If I have to ask that then something is wrong. And if I look over one more time and see the sales guy not paying attention to these issues while he idly plays with his cell phone, I swear I'm going to piss in his mouth. And by "piss in his mouth" I mean I'm going to urinate where he masticates.

We finished up the "planning" meeting with a "keep on doing what you do, whatever that is" mentality from management. The sales guy came out of his daze long enough to say he needed annotated screenshots from the developers explaining what the system does and why that is a good thing. This is so some other sales group can make an attempt at selling the software. If you've ever heard a better argument for not listening to a sales person, I'd like to know about it. Someone is going to try and sell me fantastically expensive Enterprise software after being handed screenshots by some other sales guy that just had some programmer piss in his mouth? And that's the extent of their experience with the system? What an industry.

And just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. We have another Java project, Project B, at this company. The other developer and I were asked if we would like to work on Project B. I thought about dancing around it but decided to go with the honest approach: "Project B is based on too much proprietary code, the tech lead seems to be too controlling, it has a bad architecture, a messy code base, and in all likelihood is doomed to eventual market failure. I CAN work on it if need be, but it is not something I would ever choose to do willingly." Now, proprietary refers not to their vendor specific closed source stack, but rather to the fact that they re-implement every open source offering imaginable (like their own SSH client, HTTP client, etc). Mr. Sales looked like I had just cream pied his only daughter and forced her mother to felch her then to snowball her own daughter. Yeah, I'm watching too much internet porn these days...

Mr. Sales pointed out that I would get domain knowledge and that our domain is HUUUUGE. It's apparently the only domain that is growing, made money last year, and will get me paid and laid to my heart's content. Yeah, he's a sales guy alright. He also went on to say that he'd much rather hire a domain expert and teach him to program later than hire a programmer and teach him the domain. That of course is how you wind up a situation they're experiencing in their non-Java project. An unarchitected, underengineered, non-scaling steaming pile of shit in its last throes of death.

He went on to explain to me that customers buy a product regardless of what it is written in if the consultants tell them to buy it (which is true) and that boy, oh boy all the consultants are going to recommend our product (which is salesy). Fantastic.

I went on to point out that someone smaller and smarter will come along in the same problem domain and realize they can make a better solution faster and cheaper than you can because they don't need to re-implement the SSH client, the HTTP client, etc etc and can instead focus on solving the problem their software is designed to solve. They'll be more stable, more secure, and more scalable than you will ever be since they've got a free army of developers and beta testers all over the world for their core non-business logic technology. They'll be able to find additional developers that are already familiar with most if not all of their application stack and those developers will be productive more quickly than yours (especially since yours are really domain experts playing developer dress up). Once all of that happens, no force in the world can stay the hammer that'll lead to your, your product's, and your company's eventual extinction. You'd at least be better off locking yourself into various vendors' closed source offerings.

Mr. Sales ended the meeting by saying, "Well, don't decide now, think it over and let me know."

I'll leave you with: Confucius say, "The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell." And sometimes not even that...

The Java Sea

2006-04-18T11:26:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago I got one of those emails from my new manager that just makes my skin crawl. It boiled down to, "Why don't you do a couple of lunch time sessions for the other development team on Java." My thoughts on most brown bags / lunch 'n' learns being a bad idea aside, I don't particularly like this other group. As my teammate says, they're a bunch of obscurants. Good word. Mind you, this other group includes the person that said, if you know assembler, you know Java. Given my lack of eagerness, I tried to ignore the email.

The other manager decided to chime in and say that Mr. Assembler could also teach a session since he's "very strong with Java." Also, some other whiner on his team could do it since he's "pretty familiar." Could I be this lucky? Are these desperate retards bursting with a desire to prove they know something so much so that they'll willingly reject the opportunity to actually learn something? Oh, you bet our sweet ass they are. Part of learning is accepting that you are ignorant on some part of a subject (if not the whole thing). This is a feat well outside the repertoire of these pompous imbeciles.

The other manager then re-enters the fray and says he doesn't think they even need Java to work on this other internal product. The lead on the other product then replies that they actually do (since it's like totally written in Java), but doesn't get specific as to what they need. You might as well say they need to know how to "program and stuff" and leave it at that. The other manager then makes the statement that giving his team time to self study would be more productive than someone trying to teach them Java. With normal programmers I would agree. However, with this group it's more like thinking monkeys will eventually develop gunpowder, given enough time. Still, I don't want any part of it, so I keep my insults as to their disturbing lack of mental prowess to myself.

Mr. Assembler finally made his much anticipated entry into the fracas, to settle it once and for all. I'll paraphrase:

His hunch is that Java is the least of their worries. By the way, he's done heavy JSP, Java library, and Servlet programming. He's even converted an "organic Perl product" into J2EE. He's more concerned with learning the proprietary technology in the other product they're transitioning to. But even that is but a subset of the problem. No, no, the real problem is if "TLC (three letter customer) wants" our product then he needs to know the architecture and the API. "It is a container which will hold our value." (Done laughing? Ok, we'll continue.) His advice is to get the experts to start "spilling their guts into documentation. Commando programming works, but there is something to be said for actually engineering a product. Engineering requires knowledge, and if you can't touch the API documentation you don't have knowledge, you can't engineer--you hack. I believe it goes without saying it isn't in our best interest to sell TLC a hack job."

Bold statements. He may have inadvertently almost made a coherent point in there somewhere. To analyze his gobbledygook, he has a mighty Java penis, no really. If he wanted to, he could literally stab it straight through .NET with but a single thrust of his mighty pelvis. He transmuted an organic product (aka shit) to a better form of shit, depending on his exact definition of the overly nebulous term "J2EE." He has determined that to program on a product, he should know how it works first. I'll skip the container holding value bullshit and point you to the Mission Statement Generator instead. The comments on engineering are funny, because he's a notorious hack that intentionally obfuscates his code to make himself feel superior and indispensable. Qualities any organization would be lucky to have in a programmer. He sums up by saying we shouldn't sell our customers a crappy product. Now that...that is a bold statement. As with anything emanating from Mr. Assembler, I find the whole affair has sullied my delicate sensibilities.

On the plus side, after his half baked monologue, there has been no more mention of me having to teach a lunchtime Java session.

Interesting Times

2006-04-12T15:34:00.000-07:00

I've been in a living hell of meetings lately. After my manager announced he was quitting, I had the replacement manager and president of the division come to the end of iteration demo meeting. They're both very nice guys, I actually get along with them quite well. However, they are both very easily distracted.

During the demo, I kept getting interrupted with random questions and comments. "Wouldn't it be cool if you also did this?" Yep, already planned. "Isn't one of those a logical distinction and the other physical?" They're both concepts under the overall entity, so, who the fuck cares. STOP INTERRUPTING ME!!!

The product I'm demoing is an extension to another company's product, so they then wanted me to demo the other company's product. That's fine, but can't we schedule something later to do that? Plus, this will mark the third time that I know of that they've had the other product demoed for them. They just keep forgetting about it. My 5 to 10 minute demo went an hour. Super guys, though.

Then today, the CEO flies in for a set of meetings, one of which is the "all hands" meeting. I am required to attend. I walk up to the meeting room 1 minute early to see someone coming out of the room to come find me. Oh, I'm sorry, am I wasting everyone's time? I mean, am I wasting it without using PowerPoint? Ass.

Right off the bat, the president of the division announces he's resigning. I was shocked in the same way I'm shocked during crappy horror movies. Sure I know there's a transgender Eskimo Kenny Rogers impersonator hiding in the closet with a weed eater full of piano wire, but once he/she pops out it's still pretty shocking. This marks the second such shock in under a week. The previous similar shock was when my manager resigned.

But on the plus side, they re-announced that the butter troll is hired back on. Everyone had to clap for this even though it was announced two days ago in another meeting. Yay!!! They then handed out awards to the hard working team--not my team of course, because we're all lazy fuckers. The awards are some little Kinko's made up award in a crappy little frame. The new project leader for that team read the whole description for each unique award, each of which took about a minute. They bestowed fake titles on each person like "database goddess", "system savant", "team hero", etc. What better reward could there be for giving up your nights and weekends to further the product along? Oh yeah, cash, bitch. But I guess they would just lose the money playing some dice game in a back alley. This way, they get to proudly list "awarded the title of Original Binary Ninja" on their resume.

The meeting wrapped up with the numerous bullet points on the last slide boiling down to lots of exciting excitement happening in addition to other exciting things. The CEO then said he hoped that all of the personnel shuffling (aka leaving) had finally leveled off. He was looking forward to having the teams stabilized and didn't want to lose anyone else. If you would like, please feel free to get some one on one time with him in the next couple of days to see what he can do to keep you happy. Odd since he's the one that said "if you don't like our way of doing things, there are plenty of other opportunities out there for you" in a similar meeting a couple of months ago. I guess if people actually take you up on that "offer" you feel pretty stupid afterwards, huh?

Another One Rides the Bus

2006-04-10T13:23:00.000-07:00

It's official, my manager is leaving for greener pastures. This continues the steady decline of normal people at this organization. One of the higher ups had a quick meeting to announce the departure of two people (my manager being one of them). I so look forward to being in these large meetings with all of my fellow co-workers. It's an interesting challenge, much like trying to fit my own fist in my mouth. Of course, since we're a "family" here, there's no shortage of the good natured ribbing. I'd recount some of it but I think I blacked out for a bit.

On the plus side for these morons, one of their own (the butter troll) is returning as a permanent employee. He was laid off and hired back as a contractor when the new project leader pulled some strings for him. At the news of his friend's rehire, my favorite dipshit actually threw his fist in the air and let loose a very loud "YES!" The same shitwit later cracked a joke, trying to determine if the req to hire a new person was "req" or "wreck." He was then playfully hit by a stress ball. He then had to explain to the person on the phone that he was just hit with a stress ball for his remark. I feel gayer for having witnessed it.

On the plus side for me, they're doing an early happy hour tomorrow. That means not only do I not have to put in my full 6 hour workday but that I get to drink around my co-workers. Surely that can't lead to anything inappropriate happening...

The rest of the mercifully brief meeting was spent by the moron twins trying to blow the boss' meat whistle. This started with, "Now don't do too good a job on support or they won't want to deal with anyone else. You're so good at it." Insert some additional ball cupping here, and finally finish with "I'm sorry to hear you won't be able to attend the happy hour tomorrow. If you let me know what you want, I can drink it for you." The guy the phone then had to actually respond! He wanted a frozen margarita with a little salt around the rim.

So there you have it. Tomorrow, one of the eager beavers will spend the afternoon licking the salt off his boss' rim.

Rebel Scum

2006-04-06T13:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday and today one of the sales guys walked down the "programmer aisle" with a Darth Vader toy. He pushes a button on the base and the Imperial Theme starts playing. It also spits out a Darth Vader quote. Why is this jerk off over here sullying my work environment with his quaint little display?

Well, it turns out to be a little ritual here. Every time he closes a sale he comes over here with his Darth toy and plays the sound effects clip. This piques everyone's (or almost everyone's) curiosity. Inevitably one of the fuckers (the same bastard every time) eagerly asks, "Oooh, oooh, who did we sell? Did we just close a deal?" He does this repeatedly while the sales guy ignores him, waiting for both the clip to finish playing and for everyone to pay full attention to him. He then says something to the effect of "We just closed FubarTech." The eager puppy dog programmer then exclaims something like, "All right!!" I imagine he pumps his fist or holds up his hand for a non-existent high five while saying this, but I cannot confirm that as I sit on a different row. I die a little on the inside each time I witness this veritable extravaganza of idiocy.

He's putting on his one man parade to announce that he has finally managed to successfully complete part of his job duties and is therefore receiving additional financial compensation (his commission / bonus). I assume the reason that I was unfamiliar with this overly obtrusive ritual until a few days ago is that he's just not very good at his job.

In the "boy I wish I had the balls to do that" department, I thought about getting a talking Yoda doll and marching over to his area every time I manage to check in a few lines of code--you know, to keep him in the loop. I'll of course need a Marv Albert doll to play the roll of the officious douche bag programmer by exclaiming "YES!!" on demand.

Teamwork, Yay!!!!

2006-04-04T08:56:00.000-07:00

It's not enough that someone used the word synergy in the all hands meeting, but today someone was talking about how much they enjoy working here. Gosh that's just swell. Anyway, they uttered the phrase (in all seriousness mind you) that "synergy rocks." They also constantly talk about "how excited" they are about what they're working on and how they stayed here late last night because they couldn't tear themselves away from what they were doing. An officious cliche dropper with a sugary sweet coating and an even more sickeningly sweet gooey center. Mind you, he's working on a pretty shitty project, teetering on the edge of obsolescence so he's got absolutely nothing to be excited about. I swear it's like working with Teletubbies around here.

All Hands, No Content

2006-03-31T10:34:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the length, skip it if you like as it won't be on the test.

I came in late today and saw a 9:00 email for a 9:20 "all hands" meeting (I'm glad our execs know how to plan ahead). Since it was 9:30 I took it as an opportunity to skip a useless meeting. Around 9:45 someone tried to round up any stragglers that were skipping the meeting. Reluctantly, I attended.

Fortunately, I missed most of the early rah rah and came in during the "let's go around the room and say what we're working on" portion. Whether or not I deserve to be, I am confident that I do what I do well. I don't feel the need to use a status report to artificially inflate my importance or justify my job. If you want details, ask and I'll give them. If you decide my job isn't worth keeping around I don't particularly give a shit. The same can't be said of the other people in there.

When I first got to this company we had a daily scrum (targeted at 10 minutes) that was taking 45 minutes to get through. Almost everyone else in that meeting had to tell you everything they worked on yesterday and had to go down on everyone that made it possible. "Oh, and Ted, thanks for all your help yesterday. It really helped me for you to help me out like that and I just wanted to say 'thanks.' So, thank you." I'm all for giving credit but the 15 minute "you're special" monologues make my wiener hurt.

Given my poor attitude, in today's meeting I just said something like, "I'm still working on the such and such. It's going well." This elicited a few muttered, semi-sarcastic remarks that my summary was too brief.

Look, pissant, when the conquistadors came to this continent, they didn't try to explain the chemical composition of gunpowder, exactly how a musket works, or its military significance. No, it's enough that you cower before my boomstick!!! That or taste the rainbow when I drop my particular brand of terror upon you. So cower, jizz-bitch. I'm supposed to explain what I'm doing to people that can't code their way out of a wet paper bag? Compared to them I look like the kind of developer you drop out of plane in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a dry erase board and expect to see shippable, revenue generating software in 3 months. Suck it.

There I go again. I'm not like this with competent people. I'm the epitome of humility when given the opportunity. These people have got my ego on steroids. Their goody goody attitudes and need to feel like someone valuable could turn any normal person into rage filled monkey swinging a bag of hammers. Someone actually used the word "synergize" in the meeting. Come on!

One of the other developers filled me in on the early goings on that I missed. It boiled down to 1) there's a lot of opportunity to sell a lot of our stuff, 2) given the amount of opportunity we're going to go ahead and overestimate our future success, thus ensuring we fall short again, 3) this means a lot of money for the execs and the sales guys, and 4) this means a heavier workload for the developers.

It's comforting to see that other people here are annoyed by these meetings. Oddly there is a direct correlation between my view of their competency, their disdain for these meetings, and whether or not I like working with them. Go figure. As for the other people, I just want to throw hot coffee in their faces.

Estimated total runtime for the meeting 1 1/2 hours.

Impressive, Most Impressive

2006-03-30T10:56:00.000-08:00

I have a copy of Design Patterns at work. Today I loaned it to one of the good co-workers. Now, in my opinion it's not the best work on patterns out there, but it is certainly still useful and is one of the (if not the) first serious books on the subject. The guy I loaned it to took it to the break room and one of the other "programmers" saw it. He says, "Interesting book, but there's really nothing new in it." Brilliant! It reminds me of when people say they don't like Shakespeare because it's too full of cliches and hackneyed plots. It's typical that the nutbags around here make some effort to sound intelligent and fail miserably.

Isn't That Precious?

2006-03-30T10:45:00.000-08:00

We had an IT guy that got laid off, then hired back as a contractor for a couple of weeks once the powers that be realized they were fucked when he left. Now, this could be a discussion about being careful not to foster a culture where people can make themselves indispensable. You know, follow procedures, document things, have some transparency, etc. But unfortunately it's not.

This guy just got a new job. I know this because my co-workers thought it'd be cute to call him up, put him on speaker phone, and then sing "Happy New Job to You" to him (to the tune of Happy Birthday obviously). After this they all giggled (yes, they fucking giggled like little girls) and formed a big circle jerk where they reminisced on how good their idea was. Lucky me, I had just gotten back from lunch and didn't have my headphones on yet.

What kind of sick world is this? Their minute worth of syrupy cuteness has inevitably scarred me for years to come. Can I sue?

In a Family Way

2006-03-29T12:20:00.000-08:00

One of my co-workers let this one fly earlier:

"I don't know about you guys, but I think our little department has become a family."

That just makes my skin crawl on so many levels. However, in my case it may be accurate. I'm not particularly wild about most of my family members--just like I'm not too fond of my current group of co-workers.

I've always been disturbed by employees that feel some overdeveloped sense of attachment to their workplace (just as I'm suspicious of companies that try to instill a familial since of loyalty in their people). It's all well and good to like your co-workers (I have in the past) but I think putting the family moniker on it is a bit strong. But if you must, then sure. We're one big family. I'm the bitter disillusioned black sheep son and you people are my retarded cousins. When I "move out" you can bet your ass this is one set of family re-unions I won't be attending.

The Saga Ends

2006-03-28T13:17:00.000-08:00

I mentioned in another post that I had been trying to get access to an internal system of a partner company. It took 2 weeks, 52 emails, 4 help tickets, and involvement from approximately 6 people but I now have access. Who says big companies are inefficient?

Intelligent Until Proven Otherwise

2006-03-20T13:20:00.000-08:00

I'm working with another company and during the course of my day, I have to connect to their network and use their intranet systems to get things done. Inevitably, my credentials don't work for a few of their systems, despite the fact that I'm supposed to have access.

After emailing my contact at the other company, I get helpful emails like, "did you try typing in the correct password" followed by "well, I guess try it again and let me know if it doesn't work." My problem with these emails is that they assume I'm retarded. Oh, I have to use the right login in combination with the right password? I had no fucking idea.

Her advice was that I should enter a help ticket in their system. BUT THAT'S ONE OF THE SYSTEMS I CAN'T GET ACCESS TO!!!! "Did you try logging in with your username and password?" Why yes, I did. I know that I don't have a user in the help system because you get a different error message when you try logging in with a valid username (but the wrong password). "Did you try your original password when the account was created?" Have you ever had a foot in your ass?

It reminds me of the Prisoner's dilemma. In this version, if we both assume the other is intelligent until betrayed by their overpowering stupidity, we stand to get more done than if we start out each assuming the other is an idiot (I also firmly believe that only idiots or arrogant / insecure ass clowns routinely assume others are idiots). Now, of course, if one of us is actually an idiot then my version of this Prisoner's dilemma breaks down. Do I think that one of us (not me) is approaching idiot status? Does the Pope shit in the woods?

Blogs, Captive Audiences, and One Way Conversations

2006-03-09T08:51:00.000-08:00

The CEO of our little company has his own internal blog. I guess he started it because blogs are "way cool" these days. I love it when people try to do the right thing but don't understand the underlying reasons for doing it. It always seems to lead to some oddly inconsistent behavior in relation to the "right way" of doing it.

For example, he sends out an email telling everyone in the company to go read his latest blog entry. This is essentially the same as if he had just emailed the text to everyone. What's the point of putting it in a blog post? It's an internal blog, so no one else can subscribe to it. His theoretical maximum of people that give a shit (actual number far lower) is exactly equal to the number of employees at the company--all of which he just emailed and told to go read his blog. The blog does actually have an RSS feed, but what's the point if he's going to email me every time he updates it?

I went to his blog like a good little drone and read what he had to say. It boiled down to "A-B-C. A-always, B-be, C-closing. Always be closing! Always be closing!!" Well, I'm not in sales and have exactly zero customer interaction at the moment. Am I supposed to be closing something? No? Then why the fuck did you include me in your little email blast? Ass.

If I were incredibly stupid I could leave a comment to that effect on his blog. Oh, wait. There's no section for leaving comments. They're not just turned off for this post, they're completely unsupported on this "blog." I realize that a lot of public blogs don't allow comments for whatever reason, but I think most of the valid reasons don't apply here. If he intends to use his blog for something other than a persistent record of his email blasts, I would think he would enable comments. Maybe start a dialog (you know, a conversation) with your employees like the blog gods intended.

Now if only there were a way I could get away with emailing him to come read my latest blog post...

Miles Above You

2006-03-08T12:17:00.000-08:00

Today I found myself the recipient of an email sent to a group of people in the company. Apparently one of the higher ups will be visiting the office next week and has scheduled a bunch of meetings for the various people on the distribution list.

The email came from the guy's administrative assistant. In its body it says "please mark your calendars", etc. Everyone that needs to mark their calendar is included in the email list. Her job description is administrative assistant. She took the time to get the list of everyone to send it to, put it in a table in the email, and then tells me I need to enter the meeting? I didn't ask for a fucking meeting. Shouldn't the responsibility of scheduling the meetings in the shared calendaring system we use be on her. Did the exec even look at everyone's' calendar to determine if they were free for that time period, or is he just assuming his hour long bullshit session takes precedence over everything else in my day?

I starting "having issues" when people have an overly self-important attitude and think that the rules of courtesy that everyone else chooses to observe don't apply to them. I'm sure whichever conference room he grabs for these little meetings won't be scheduled in the system either. If someone has the room scheduled, they should probably just fuck off because he's a goddamn executive. Suck it.

Brown Bagging

2006-03-02T08:14:00.000-08:00

One of the guys on another team just announced that he was going to be doing a brown bag training session on something (how they can better teabag each other or somesuch). I dare say there is a palpable sense of excitement among them. I don't particularly care to attend as I'm really not interested in the topic and I doubt that anyone in that group could teach me anything other than how to engage the "bear defense" as my career slowly dies. Great bunch of guys.

My real, bitter point in all of this is that brown bag sessions suck. Employees give up their lunch hour to learn something on their own time that is presumably relevant to their job. Nevermind that these guys pick irrelevant topics in an ill fitting technology on a dying product. If they really think what they're learning about is important, why is there a need for them to do this on their own time? No, if it has to do with my job I'll go ahead and learn about it on company time--I'm not writing their products for my own amusement. Brown bags should be saved for things that are 1) orthogonal to work in general but still fun or interesting, 2) things that are helpful to my career but not my job, or 3) something so earth-shatteringly powerful and enriching that I'll gladly take one for the team to learn about it.

These guys should be spending that lunch hour either getting even fatter or learning a language more appropriate to building software and better design skills so they can wind up somewhere other than the state.

Thinking Caps

2006-02-24T07:50:00.000-08:00

I mentioned in another post that one of the people that screws things up around here was recently put back in charge of the team he has been unable to manage in the past. His latest innovation is to have everyone on his team bring in a hat of some sort. This will be your "thinking cap." When you walk into someone's cubicle and see they have their thinking cap on you shouldn't disturb them. This is his great secret of productivity. A fucking thinking cap. Nevermind that they're still in cubicles, unable to escape the inane chatter that goes on around here. Nevermind that he's the crazy sort of manager that will just eliminate iterations and give one off changes directly to customers without rolling them into the product. No, no. None of that matters because now they have their thinking caps.

Wakey Wakey Eggs and Bakey

2006-02-24T07:31:00.000-08:00

One of the guys in the office brings in breakfast tacos every now and then. Now, I'm not complaining--just observing. The guy is dangerously overweight and has been having heart related problems. So, why is it that he only buys one kind of breakfast taco: egg and BACON. They all cost the same and he's surely not going to eat all of them. They're pre-made where he buys them so it wouldn't take any additional time to grab a couple of handfuls of, say, egg and potato perhaps? And is bacon really what he should be eating in his condition?

Send in the Clowns

2006-02-21T08:56:00.000-08:00

This morning, I'm in my cubicle minding my own damn business when some sales guy starts asking some questions on the other side of the aisle. The questions boil down to the fact that he doesn't know what he's talking about and doesn't want to look like a fool in front of a potential customer. He starts asking all sorts of questions about how the product works and where certain information comes from.

Of course, none of the developers know any of this off the top of their heads. That's not to say that they can't find out. It's just a matter of whether or not you want them spending their time doing that. However, the sales twat seems to think that somehow that's a deficiency on the part of our development staff. How can we not know how our own product works?

Then he starts doing to typical sales guy fluffer bullshit by trying to sum up the situation in a way that points more blame at someone else. "Well, it sounds to me like we can't answer this guy's question. It sounds to me like we don't know how this stuff works. Listen guys, I really need to not come off like I don't know what I'm talking about. Are you going to be able to help me find these answers or not?"

I don't know which part bothers me more. The fact that he wants to needlessly start slinging blame in a non-critical situation or the fact that he, in typical slimey sales turd fashion, feels the need to do a song and dance for the customer rather than be honest. Man, I hate sales and marketing people.

You're Fuckin' Crazy

2006-02-08T12:02:00.000-08:00

Yes, a reference to a Guns 'N' Roses song.

Recently at work, we've been having quite the shake ups. About a year ago, the company I work for was in a terrible state. Their one and only product grew out of a set of scripts that the founder had used when he was a systems administrator. The scripts were so handy, they became a product. To quote another developer here, "It's like someone found a good place to set up a tent and later decided to put in a chimney." As you can imagine, the product didn't boast the best architecture. To make matters worse, the original guy would visit customer sites and write code on-site for their one off changes. Try figuring out how to support / upgrade that!

At some point they were acquired and everyone decided they needed to play grown up and act like a real IT organization. They hired a development manager that then proceeded to try and straighten this snot-fest out. Of course, this is a "two steps back three steps forward situation"--things were going to get worse before they got better. People would have their "freedom" to be bad developers sharply curtailed. That's a good thing in my eyes.

Well, recently the acquiring body decided shit just wasn't going right. They needed to get sales of their steaming pile of a product back up to desired levels. The solution? Put the original fuck up back in charge of the project. During the meeting to announce this, that little fucker was just as excited as can be. Finally, he was going to get to do things his way. Of course he could straighten things out (never mind that he was the original cause of all of the problems). Step one? No more iterations, regular releases, etc. We'll just do everything in one big waterfall-like chunk. Brilliant!

Now, that brings us to the "crazy" part from our title:

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. -- Benjamin Franklin

Have fun storming the castle, you hump.

Compensating Your Potential Competition

2006-02-06T13:47:00.000-08:00

It's funny, but almost every place I've ever worked seems to feel the need to get their employees to sign hard-core anti-competition agreements. You can't start your own company in the same domain or go to work for a company in the same domain for X amount of years. Of course, these agreements are usually unenforceable, but that's not my point.

If you are so convinced that specific people in your organization could become a serious threat to your livelihood were they to go out and create a competing product, perhaps you're doing something wrong. Specifically, maybe you should listen to some of those people. Evidently you're scared that they know how to do something better than you do.

And, if their input is worth listening to, maybe you should compensate them fairly. Programmers in general get a good salary for their work but very little in the way of compensation for the IP they contribute. It's very hard to expect loyalty from your key people if they have no long term stake in the company (no stock options, no per unit royalties, etc).

File it under random useless thoughts I had this weekend.

Oops, Pow, Surprise!

2006-01-03T14:34:00.000-08:00

I'm in a meeting today where another developer made the statement that everyone on the team knew Java and that, "if you know assembler, you know Java." I would say that almost no one in the room programs in assembly language and those that have did so because of a college course requirement. I suspect he wanted his reference to an arcane programming language to somehow elevate him in the eyes of everyone in the room. However, since it was crazy stupid inaccurate it had the opposite effect for anyone in the room that actually knows Java. It was such an idiotic comment that I think it made my brain lockup for a moment.

Flush

2005-12-23T06:40:00.000-08:00

As I'm about to leave yesterday, I hit the bathroom and am practically punched in the nose by the most powerful, foulest smelling piss smell I've encountered outside of a rest area bathroom. Some freak with a kidney problem filled the urinal with some ice tea colored urine and then didn't flush. It was gag-worthy. Where the fuck do these people come from? And would it kill you to drink some water during the day to take the edge off of that battery acid you're spewing out of your member?

It's the Little Things

2005-12-22T14:25:00.000-08:00

I've been at the new job for about a month and a half and we've left work early as a company several times. The Christmas party was better than at my last two jobs--they actually paid for the food (with 2 drink coupons), they had somewhere under 10 free raffles for assorted prizes (I don't remember the exact number because in addition to my 2 drink coupons, I used my wife's coupons and bought a couple with cash), and they gave everyone a gift with the company logo on it. Today we had a free pizza lunch and tomorrow the owner has invited any employee to come by his wife's coffee shop in the morning for a free coffee and pastry.

Don't get me wrong, the my last job did in fact do things for its employees. It's just that, generally, when you are at a bigger company either the perk is smaller or a smaller number of people receive it (in fact the best perks I got were a couple of parties that were only for an office location or a particular team). When you get into 5,000+ person companies, I think you see that absolute dollar amount and balk. It doesn't matter what tiny percentage that is of your profits. If I'm giving everyone a $10 thermos with my logo on it, I'm out $50,000. That's real money. I could hire a professional ball washer for that kind of scratch. Or better yet, I could buy 10 XBox 360s and give them to the top contributors and save myself around $45,000. This of course leads to the awkward moment when nearly everyone at your company outside of those 10 people begins to feel under-appreciated.

This is where I think the individual manager should step in. They need (and usually have) the flexibility to handle perks at the local level. But this leads to all sorts of problems. Anywhere from "my manager's a selfish asshole" to "these incentives don't motivate people" to "Derrick's manager did more for his team than my manager did, so now they both must die." That's another major problem at a big company--it's us versus them, baby. If someone gets a new computer, you can bet everyone will be sniffing around and someone will want to know why that guy's computer has an additional 512 megs of RAM. It's like ants in a bowl--you don't need to put a lid on it because the ants will just keep dragging each other back down. That's just the momentum of bitterness and resentment in action. Couple that with the fact that every middle manager is too busy crapping his pants because either he's about the be "flattened" out of existence or be put in charge of a bunch of contractors halfway around the world, trying to manage people he can't see or talk to and the situation begins to look dire.

Look at that. I start by writing about the good things and here I am whipped into a frenzy about something I'm not currently dealing with. So, what's the solution? I don't know for sure. It's probably something like "treat your people fairly and the bottom line will take care of itself" or somesuch. Sounds easy and apparently that's what a lot of successful companies already do. Unfortunately, it takes a while to gain back the trust of your employees--turning this ship won't be easy, but ultimately I think it's worth it. That is if the stock holders and/or executives would let it happen.

del.icio.us downtime

2005-12-19T08:49:00.000-08:00

By the way, I think this blog will just be my general bitching dumping ground, whether that is work related or just my disappointment with people in general. I'll try to save funny or useful (at least what I consider to be such) stuff for my other blogs.

It seems that delicious experienced a little downtime this weekend. Out of curiosity I headed over to their blog. Besides all of the lame attempts at jabs by people referencing the Yahoo! acquisition or people recommending this as an opportunity to switch to digg, there were several idiots whining that they had multiple browser windows open and were waiting to for delicious to return so they could bookmark those sites. It'd be nice if they were kidding, but assuming they're not, do people really become that stupid that quickly? Every browser still supports bookmarks. Just make a delicious folder and drop them in there. Then, when delicious is back up, add them. And if you want to piss and moan about how your bookmarks are inaccessible, try using something like Foxylicious next time.

Watch for Flying Customers

2005-12-19T07:56:00.000-08:00

Someone here at work just threw out the "C" word--customer. If you know me at all, you know that that is not my favorite "C" word, although "customer" can be used in more polite conversations than the one I really like. It's not that I hate the customer as an entity. I do however hate it when they're irate little babies, but that's another issue.

What I hate about the word "customer" is that as soon as someone uses it, I know there's a 90% chance that someone is in the process of justifying doing something stupid. Usually it has nothing to do with what the customer really wants. It's more likely some pet feature of the person speaking and, in the face of not being able to justify the idea on its own merits, they throw out the vague and unassailable phrase, "Our customers really want this."

Even if that were true, I don't really care. I'm not as interested in how the customer thinks they can solve whatever problem they have than I am in what the problems are in the first place. That is to say, tell me the problem, not your idea of a solution. I'll listen to the solution you have in mind, but don't expect it and hopefully if you're a sales guy don't fucking promise it to close the deal. That's how application rot begins.

Now bitching is all well and good, but how does this boil down to something that is my fault and that I should work to correct? My job (the one I'm not doing) is to demand several specific scenarios from the speaker. What customer needs this? What is the specific problem they're trying to solve? What alternatives have we considered? Who else will this be useful to? Who died and made you boss? The list goes on.

I have of course tried this in the past and it ultimately fails in many cases. Those in the know will recall the big customer functionality of pasting non-ID values from an Excel spreadsheet directly into a text box to accomplish some task. My new supplementary job on top of this is to be a siege master. Sure, you repelled my initial attack, but now I'm going to dig under your walls and catapult diseased meat into your courtyard. In general, I'm going to keep making it difficult for you to drop the "customer" trump card and make sure that every discussion ends with you feeling like a fucktard that won't want to open his mouth in the future.

Switch Swap

2005-12-15T09:14:00.000-08:00

Probably not surprising given the amount of vitriol in all of my job related posts, but I've changed jobs. I'm doing similar stuff, just with fewer people (both ones that I like and ones that I hate). One of my former co-workers suggested I not let this blog completely die, so I'm going to try and determine how exactly to do that.

Just Get Away From Me

2005-10-21T12:23:00.000-07:00

One of my pet peeves reared its ugly head again today. I had to help some other developer on the team figure out why his dev environment wasn't working (again). I sat at his machine, did my normal routine, and things just magically worked. At this point I was ready to head out, since everything was fixed. But, he just had to stop me and swear up and down that I hadn't done anything differently than the way he had been doing it. I just shrugged and said, "Well, you're all good now..." But, no, he had to continue with his little rant about how he had been doing that all along.

You asked for my help, I helped you. We're done. I don't care about your theory that all of reality or computing in general is conspiring to make you look like an idiot in my eyes. I already consider you an idiot. And don't mistake it for some friendly, "Now, how do you suppose that happened?" exchange between friends. We're not buddies, we're not pals, and we're not friends. If I liked you and/or you were competent it may be a different story. You have neither of those luxuries. Communicating with you in any way is an effort that makes my skin crawl and my nuts ache, let's not tax poor Greg any more than is necessary. Please drive through.

Share and Share Alike

2005-10-19T15:03:00.000-07:00

My group has a machine that is apparently crashing every few days or so. Someone has to keep opening up a help ticket with our internal IT department to get them to "fix" the machine--this, more than likely, consists of them walking into the server room and turning the machine back on. Since we don't actually use the machine any more, no one has entered a help ticket for the past week or two.

I know there are other groups within the company that probably need additional hardware badly enough that they would diagnose the problem and gladly take possession of the machine. Unfortunately, there's no budget for them to buy their own machines and, if my group gives up the machine, we'll likely be in the same position as they are in the near future--in need of hardware but unable to get through the red tape to acquire it. Of course we wouldn't be able to count on someone else's generosity for the same reason we ourselves are not generous. What a sad situation.

More of the Missing Manager

2005-10-19T08:24:00.000-07:00

Just to update people, my manager has missed the first two daily meetings of the iteration. It's a good thing we're not trying to release this thing any time soon...

You'll Work on Crap, and Like It

2005-10-19T07:21:00.000-07:00

So I find more and more that if you are a capable developer and can think your way through normal problems, your reward is often that you get the crappiest assignments. Very rarely is there ever anything interesting and/or fun for me to work on at my job. In the few instances that there is something meeting this description it is usually given to someone less capable because they can't seem to handle some difficult task we have to do during the iteration. Who gets the tasks that no one knows what to do with? Why, that'd be me.

I think this is bad from a personal standpoint of course, but I also think it hurts the product, the company, and the other developers over the long run.

It hurts the product because if you regularly cannot give a majority of assignments to developers because it is "too hard" for them then you obviously have inferior developers on your team. I know there are exceptions to this--some people are domain experts or just much better at different parts of the technology or maybe the developers are still being trained on the product. Hopefully you're not having to train them on the technology--that means you're hiring / retaining the wrong people or that you pay so little you can't attract good people.

It hurts the company in multiple ways. Not only are you putting out a crappier product but you're either boring or angering your competent developers. No one wants to work with people that can't do their job. Plus, since they're getting the crap detail 90% of the time, the good people are typically not getting to work on anything exciting. Let's face it, developers like to work on cool things (almost as much as they like to refactor code). That brings us to our next point of how it hurts the developers (and the company at the same time).

It hurts developers because they're unhappy and unfulfilled (poor bastards). If I know that my tasks every iteration are 1) do the programmatic grunt work these other morons can't figure out and 2) "mentor" the morons (also known as watching a group of retards try to hump a doorknob) so they can work on something easier/more fun (but get paid close to the same amount) then I'm not going to be a happy camper. That makes your good developers a little more likely to quit. We established that you can't hire or retain the proper people in the first point and therefore are unlikely to be able to replace them with another good developer.

Now you begin a long downward spiral of technical incompetency and non-innovation in a long, boring maintenance cycle of a crappy product--at least until you have your next IT revolution (happens every 6 years or so, I think). If you're making money it means you can buy smaller, more nimble companies that are working on cool stuff and suck the life out of them too.

Your Solution is Part of the Problem

2005-10-13T08:02:00.000-07:00

My group is at the end of an iteration. We are supposedly done with our work for this iteration. The code is frozen. No more changes. But, in today's stand up meeting, the tech lead was very insistent that we could sneak a few more changes into the code. The items he wants to put in are very minor pieces of functionality that we didn't quite get to in the time allotted. Nothing will be broken without these additional changes, it's just not 100% complete.

In a shocking moment of good judgment, our manager actually expressed his opinion that it was too late, the iteration is over, long live the next iteration. So now we're going to get to witness the classic battle of wills between the manager and the tech lead. This is the first instance I've seen of a real disagreement between the two of them. It should prove very interesting and educational. I say educational because, although I think my team is just plain rotten at the top, this will be a great opportunity to see what kind of commitment the manager has to the agile process in addition to whether or not his tiny tech ignorant boat can weather the storm of the superior product knowledge. Will he be beaten into submission for fear of appearing stupid / confrontational or will he stand his ground? It's so exciting.

Incidentally, this leads me to believe that the attitude of the tech lead in combination with the looming issue of story card acceptance reports are acting as a substantial barrier for my group getting jiggy with agile. It is also the first direct evidence I've had that the tech lead is a much bigger part of the problem than I had initially believed.

Update: And the tech lead wins by a nose!!! We're adding in just one tiny little wafer thin feature. You know, only because it's so small and technically the iteration isn't really really over. It's more of a slush code freeze than a rock hard code freeze.

Not That That's a Bad Thing

2005-10-12T15:14:00.000-07:00

If you ask many of the people I work with what it is they like about our little company, a sizable chunk of them will say, "the people." In general, we have a pretty competent and cool bunch of people here--besides half of the ones I work with directly. It is a pleasure to work with intelligent, reasonable people with a similar sense of humor to your own. As an employee, I can think of nothing better than having co-workers that I consider friends.

From a company standpoint, that is probably trouble. It means that your employees may be more loyal to each other than they are to you. They probably don't give a shit about your long term plans and generally don't want to be part of any pep rally that involves drinking Kool-aid (a very overused metaphor that isn't entirely accurate).

The big problem for a company isn't that you don't have rabid supporters, it's that when one of the "cool" people leave they are more likely to take the people they have enjoyed working with with them. This continues as each exiting member suddenly looks around one day to find that they don't particularly like many of their co-workers (the replacements). And if you believe that your people are your greatest asset (as some companies purport to do) and if you train your new hires through some form of shared tribal knowledge passed down from worker to worker, then it only gets worse from here. Suck it and smile, sweetheart--there's trouble on the horizon.

Stepping Up

2005-10-11T08:06:00.000-07:00

As I've mentioned before, my project inherited some sub-par developers a few months ago. Well, recently, one of them decided that we were going too slowly with him. He wanted more responsibility, more freedom, etc. You know--to be a real programmer. I, of course, am opposed to this until he demonstrates his ability to "do no harm" to the code base and the ability to think and act for himself. How should he demonstrate this? Fuck him. That's his problem.

Well, this iteration we gave him a couple of tasks. One was to add some controls and information to an existing web page. The other was coordinate with a member of another team about some issue. Halfway through the iteration, I find out that he's "blocked" on adding the controls. We have a brief team meeting and discover that his issue is that he wants to have a philosophical debate about whether or not the controls are needed. After a few minutes we pound it into his head that they're needed but that it is irrelevant as its not his call and it's a simple task--just do your fucking job, moron. Well, then it kind of comes out that he doesn't know how to do the task. So, it sounds to me like his whole debate was a cover for the fact that he doesn't know how to do something. Fair enough. However, I just got through doing the exact same type of work last iteration. He could have copied the damn code straight out of my stuff.

His next issue was that the member from the other team wasn't available. So, we picked up the phone and called the guy. He answers and we start trying to go through the questions our noob was supposed to be asking him. Well, it turns out that the noob doesn't have his questions ready. So, his second blocked issue is also due to him not doing his goddamn job.

That's a great way to get more responsibility, by the way--fuck up the easy stuff I give you then try to hide it. Genius.

We're Off Track

2005-10-07T08:25:00.000-07:00

Well, the manager finally showed up to the daily meeting today only to discover that most of the tasks we're working on are blocked and possibly at risk for delivery. Furthermore, the senior person on the team is now a bottleneck and the potential blockage on most of the tasks. This happened because that person was handling some of the management duties and cross team interaction. As the manager was MIA for several days, that burden increased meaning they had less time to work on "real" work. Also, typically, this person is usually the catch-all for any set of tasks. You don't know who has time to do task A? Throw it on the senior member of the team. The overdelegation by the manager (or downright incompetence if I'm being honest) coupled with the underdelegation of the senior member makes for a nasty situation.

I'm sure at some point everyone will be asked to work a little harder and come together as a team to help get us back on track. I wouldn't mind doing such a thing if it was for a good reason (not just someone failing to do their job), but me busting my ass to cover someone else's leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Why Can't People Follow Instructions / Think

2005-10-06T08:49:00.000-07:00

We upgraded a library yesterday, so it requires each developer on the team to follow a couple of steps to get their environment up to date with the latest changes. Inevitably two of the people I would fire (if it were up to me) send emails that the changes don't work for them. In addition, the body of the email is basically, "It didn't work on my box." No information about how they tried hard to solve the problem themselves OR any useful information like a log snippet.

I decided that I didn't feel like helping them any time soon. Someone else stepped in and said, "You need to do get the latest from source control." Then the person sends an email saying that fixed it, followed by another saying, "Oh wait. No it didn't." Then another saying they did a "full update" and that that finally did fix it. Why, oh why, can't people a) use some common sense and debug a problem themselves, b) provide adequate information to get the help that they "need", or c) actually follow the instructions for the fucking solution. The whole email exchange took 11 whole minutes. After the first email, who doesn't spend more than 11 minutes trying to determine if they're being an idiot (except of course an idiot).

Day Three Without a Manager

2005-10-06T07:57:00.000-07:00

For the third day in a row, my manager did not attend the morning meeting. He's apparently off with his other team doing some planning. I think this demonstrates either an unwillingness or an inability to juggle the two projects simultaneously--he has the ability to move at least our meeting to a more convenient time.

How Very High Tech

2005-10-05T14:00:00.000-07:00

We have a real rocket surgeon here that prints out UI screenshots on a color printer. He then tapes the printout to his wall, for quick reference I guess. Unfortunately, he doesn't have a scanner. This would allow him to scan the printout into the computer so he could store it electronically...Remember, thinking outside of the box is only good if you're not a dumbass. Otherwise, the box is there to force you to think in a way that will keep me from killing you.

More Management MIA

2005-10-05T08:10:00.000-07:00

The manager of my team has missed the last two daily meetings. Luckily for him, this team pretty much runs itself. Unfortunately for us, I'm sure he's getting some measure of credit for the team being "successful."

Maybe Another Computer?

2005-10-04T11:46:00.000-07:00

So I go to help out a member of another team with some problem a couple of weeks ago. While I'm helping him out, I can't help but notice that he has two desktop computers and two laptops in his office. I don't have a laptop of course but that doesn't really bother me unless I have to sit through too many meetings. Then it would prove useful to get some work done while listening to people ramble. What struck me as funny is that when I commented on it he just said, "Yeah, but that laptop is a couple of years old." Well, fuck you. I'd take a piece of shit laptop just for the fact that I could drag it to a meeting and browse the web or actually have a computer to do a presentation on if I needed it (not that I want to give presentations). Maybe if you had a couple of more laptops you would have been able to debug this problem your own damn self. Ass.

Architects

2005-10-04T11:30:00.000-07:00

For the past couple of months, the developers around here have been pretty anti-architect. It's not that we don't value what the role should be, it's just that the people in that position don't seem to do anything. As near as I can tell, they play around in PowerPoint all day and go to meetings. They're there to make upper management feel better by showing them that we have "experts" on staff. They don't actually solve any architectural problems. In the rare instances that they interact with developers they seem to just nod and say things like, "Ah, yes. SQL. Interesting. You could do it that way, I suppose. Yes." When they're not making asses of themselves in person they're writing articles about Egyptian magicians not knowing how to design software or some such shit. You know, things that are supposed to make me go, "Hmm."

Well, we filled out a survey for management as to how effective we thought the architects were in their role. The answers must have gotten someone's attention because for the first time ever, I've seen architects attending the daily status meetings as well as the iteration planning meeting. They still don't fucking contribute anything to the architecture of the product, but now at least they're present to try and sidetrack the meeting in a vain attempt to demonstrate some measure of technical competency. Is this an attempt to impress me or intimidate me? Because frankly I just find the whole thing sad. It can't be a good feeling coming to work every day scared that you're going to be exposed for being the fraud you are.

The Downside of T-Shirts

2005-10-03T08:41:00.000-07:00

Don't get me wrong. I love to get free stuff, especially from my company. Unfortunately, whenever we give away a t-shirt, everyone gets one and then they all wear them to work. So, if I don't want to look like one of the moron triplets, I either have to never wear my freebie shirt or find another tech worker and trade them for a shirt from their company (because presumably they've got the same problem). Maybe someone should write a website to coordinate this--SwagSwap?

Consistent Technical Interviews

2005-10-03T08:13:00.000-07:00

I guess in any organization of non-trivial size, it's hard for different groups to communicate any information at all. Also, even in the instances that information is effectively communicated it may very well be ignored. There's a lot of tribalism at large companies, especially those built through acquisition.

A recent incident of this came when a group close to mine interviewed people for a technical position. One of the candidates was underqualified so he didn't get the job. The surprising thing is that he then interviewed for a higher technical position with another group. In theory they would have found out that he had already interviewed here and gotten input from the group that had done the interview. In practice, they interviewed him and went ahead and hired him as an architect--even though he wasn't qualified to be a developer.

We've already got a company of angry developers and MIA architects that are grossly underqualified to do their job. A brilliant strategist would realize this and hire not just another inane architect, but one that the developers have dealt with directly in the past and for which they have no respect. This saves time. I don't have to go through a honeymoon period where I pretend they know how to do their job only to discover (after many weeks) that the most complicated thing they've ever designed is a PowerPoint presentation. I can start resenting them immediately. Think of the cost savings.

Any Other Contributors?

2005-09-30T13:40:00.000-07:00

If anyone reading this feels like bitching about their company and/or the IT industry in general, just shoot a comment this way and I'll see about hooking you up with posting access on this blog. I'd recommend creating a different blogger account and remembering to properly anonymize your information. As always, I am in no way responsible for any harm that may befall you.

Be Careful What You Measure

2005-09-30T06:51:00.000-07:00

Management loves to measure things. It's what they do. You can't manage it if you can't measure it, baby. And what better way to incentivize your employees than to tie some sort of reward to the metrics you have? Unfortunately, you usually wind up with a lot of metrics that are completely orthogonal to your real behavior and performance goals. For example, tracking whether or not an employee submitted their time sheet in a timely manner, while valuable, is not your core business. Therefore, any reward or penalty should be extremely small. In the grand scheme of things, there are much more important things to worry about.

Conversely, you need to be careful about how you measure the things that are important to you. As soon as you measure it and tie it to a reward system, you've created a set of rules that can be manipulated and abused, often to the detriment of your real goals.

On my current team, we've started tracking how many story cards we complete each iteration. Somewhere we've lost a little bit of the link between feature and story card, but that's ok. The real shame of it all is that the acceptance of a story card is handled not by a strong product manager that really understands the product and the features his customers want to see in it, but by a quality control group. This group doesn't even know how to test that a story card is complete except by asking the developer that implemented it. Since the completion of stories and tasks directly reflect how well you and your team are doing, you are "encouraged" by the system to deliver lower quality work in a timely manner and then perform a little misdirection when you're explaining how to test a feature to the QC group. Sure, we delivered shitty quality, but man, look at all those check marks next to our story cards. We rock.

You're Fired, Stupid!

2005-09-29T13:29:00.000-07:00

What the fuck ever happened to firing people that couldn't do their goddamn jobs? These days, thanks to some product lines being EOL'ed, we're getting all sorts of idiots in our group. In this case, management's heart is in the right place--they're trying to re-assign people rather than simply laying them off just because their product died. I can even go along with trying to train or transition existing developers to new technologies they've never worked with. God knows that if Java went belly up tomorrow and C# became the shit, I'd like a chance to transition to a new group before being laid off. However, I certainly wouldn't expect it and you can be damn sure I'd bust my ass trying to get up to speed on the new technology. This group of shit-wits we have working on my team have been here seemingly forever, and they still can't wipe their own asses. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against stupid people--the world needs Visual Basic programmers, too.

Here's something I think every manager should do. If you know who the truly great people are on your team, ask them separately to pick one person that should be fired. If you get the same answer from each, think seriously about firing that person. They're dragging down your talented people and you can usually hire someone better for the same money. If your talented people balk at the idea of firing just one you might need clean house. I would recommend doing it one at a time. There is something to be said for having even an idiot on staff. However, now that you have identified them as being an idiot, delegate only simple tasks to that person. If you don't really know who the talented people are on your team, then you have no business managing them and probably work at the same company as I do.

Respect My Time

2005-09-29T11:13:00.000-07:00

It's always been a pet peeve of mine that, at many of the places I've worked, management thinks that the personal time of a salaried employee can be used at will to make up for a lack of adequate planning. I realize in this industry that estimates will frequently be off, the job still needs to get done, and that it is often my job to work longer hours and / or the weekend in order to get something finished. I can accept that.

The part that I cannot live with is when people fail to plan or even ignore potential pitfalls and risks and expect the development staff to continually work longer and harder to make up for it. The "long hours and weekends" safety net has been abused too often where I work.

The most recent incident of this happening at my work was when two members of my team received new laptops. They were supposed to spend a day each setting up the new machine at the beginning of the iteration. The setup time was pretty much unavoidable and had to happen before they could work their tasks for the iteration. I pointed out that this was going to cost us time in the schedule and that we should account for it by trying to cram fewer tasks into the allotted time. The response I got back from the development manager was, "If they have to come in on the weekend to set up those laptops, I guess I'm saying they can go ahead and do that." This wasn't make-or-break the product functionality and we were talking about a known risk / schedule impact. The fact that he wanted to ram it through anyway by using someone's personal time was simply due to the fact that he wanted to look good for his boss by having more tasks complete than other teams.

What better use of my time could there possibly be?

Management on Autopilot

2005-09-29T06:51:00.000-07:00

My latest complaint is about my management. On my current team we have both a product manager and a development manager. Both roles are filled with people I would consider inadequate to the tasks they should be performing. This problem is made worse by the fact that the product manager is actually managing the products of three teams while the development manager is managing two teams. This leads to a lot of conflicting meetings and a general sense that both managers are missing in action quite often. My product manager hasn't made it to a daily meeting in months and my development manager missed the morning meeting the day before our code complete day.

As you can imagine, this leads to a situation where developers are often guessing at requirements (the responsibility of the product manager) and spending too much time coordinating dependencies and clamoring for the necessary resources (the responsibility of the development manager). Of course, the metrics used to determine how things are progressing are very centered on how the developers are doing (rather than the management). Sure, the management may be "blamed" for poor team performance on some level, but ultimately the developer's ass is the one on the line.

In recent weeks (on my team at least) this has lead to a noticeable drop in quality with an increase in effort. Any situation that causes longer working hours with a final product that you can't even be proud of has a tendency to sabotage morale. To me, the solution is fairly straightforward. Hire additional management for the additional teams / responsibility and revise the metrics. Hold management more accountable for their team's failure to deliver. And don't let them just roll the shit downhill onto the developer.

I'm doing my job, I just wish other people would too.

My Bitch Blog

2005-09-28T08:50:00.000-07:00

If you ask anyone that knows me, they'll likely tell you that I'm an incessant complainer (if they're being nice). This of course has a negative impact on the attitudes of some of the people around me. I'm going to start using this blog as a dumping ground for my complaining (primarily work related) in an attempt to spare some of the people that would rather not hear my bullshit in person. We'll see if it helps.