Below is a hypothetical note written to BOSS
about the reasons for an employee’s exit.
Read on, if you can relate J
Subject: The Action Plan
To : Dave Dumbbuffalo
From : Andrew Freebird
Attached : Resignation.doc
Hello Dave,
This is in response to your email that you
sent last week, regarding the schedule slippage of your “boon to this world”
product. You asked specific reasons for the schedule slippage and an action
plan for you to track it down to closure. (Either of the staff or the task)
Please note that I have attached my
resignation letter and hence feel no pressure to be politically correct and
provide you worthless suggestions.
I was one of the developers on the team, and
contrary to your strong belief, we were not surfing the web for porn, rather
than churning out code. Neither the team was full of pumpkins. Engineering was
treated with contempt and disrespect.
We clocked close to 70 hours per week,
valiantly trying to tame to raging bull. So, once in a while surfed the web,
checked emails, did some pressing personal work on the office laptop, big deal!
Yet, bosses like you prowled our desks looking for evidence of slacking.
Professionals cannot work in an environment lacking trust.
Let me tell you one thing, PROFESSIONALS are
always mostly driven by intrinsic motivation factors that come from within;
feeling of being a part of the team, desire for the organization’s success,
wanting to deliver a great product, et al. Extrinsic Motivations are those that
are imposed from bosses, mostly without any buy-ins from the professionals
involved. Artificial measurements are ranked high in extrinsic motivations.
Metrics heavy extrinsic motivations push out
the intrinsic ones. Professionals shrug in frustration and work to meet the
numbers, rather than trying to make things work the right way. Your imposition
of “number of lines of code per day” metric was one of the key examples. Did
you even realize the amount of crap that was coded, just to make the numbers? One
of our brightest developers, Frank Igiveup, wrote his suicide note in the
exception handler function, and reached almighty’s feet. His untimely demise
brought in Mary Tenderbabe, a naïve but equally bright newbie to the team. Her
name was on the project planner even before her employee ID was created. She
neither knew the process nor the coding standards. Poor soul is already
contemplating a career in philosophy and yoga.
Your fanatic obsession to use C++ made our
software a bloated monster nobody could comprehend. And your decision was based
on a business week article? Who makes such fundamental technical discussions?
Don’t get me wrong, the article correctly reported the advantages of using OOP
in generation of reusable software. Do you remember our lead Nick Guineapig?
The one whose wife came on a horse in the middle of the night to the office,
wielding a sword, asking him for some family-time. He was the only person on
the team who had credible experience in OO based design. Given the tight
schedule, you handed us the “C++ for Dummies” books during one of the team
building activities at the cafeteria and expected us to deliver production
quality code.
People learn a language by working on in-house
projects, developing skills before using those skills on production quality
code. Nick had requested at least a month of C++ training for developers before
we started on the project. You cited schedule pressure and axed it. Now we are
a year late, and still the system doesn’t work.
Our earlier projects were small embedded
systems, with around 10K lines of code. Dramatic heroism for such small system
may work sometimes, but for a behemoth of a system running to more than 250K
lines of code, this simply doesn’t work. The heroics are very appealing to the
management because the engineers seem so obviously dedicated, but this simply
doesn’t scale.
Decent debuggers provide the right set of eyes
for developers to debug code. Yet, the $10000 debugger was an unnecessary cost
to the project, according to you. “Instead of spending $10000 on the debugger,
just stop making bugs” sounds so naïve, doesn’t it? It was uttered by you
during the project planning meeting.
And what about schedule? Instead of making one
from the set of requirements followed by careful design, you capriciously
assigned a date, picking one from a random number generator running in your
head. Shamefully, instead of walking out en masse, we nervously tried to make a
meaning out of that date, editing the project planner, all the while knowing
that each milestone was a charade, and the product a blatant lie.
Finally, if someone makes a movie on the
Dilbert comic strip, you sure have a role, Pointy-haired boss! (You are a
perfect fit, the only thing pending is the pointy-hair)
Utterly disgusted,
Andrew.
============================================================
Subject : Re : The Action Plan
To : Andrew Freebird
From : Dave Dumbbuffalo
Dear Andrew,
With the new feature demand in our latest
product, I was little too busy to read your email, but I am sure there is lot
of useful information, in there. I will get to it soon, no doubt.
Meanwhile, I have promised the customer we can
deliver another upgrade next month. So go ahead, update the schedule and get
started. We can discuss the specs next week.
Yesterday, during my morning jog, I realized
we don’t have any code base in JAVA. And JAVA lets it run on many platforms! I
figured out that it even has a garbage collector, for all the buggy code that
you guys write, how cool can that be? So I suggest we migrate all our code base
to JAVA starting from this product. Also, port this JAVA code on that old 8051
after you getting Linux running on it.
I have been thinking of ways of keeping this
new project on-schedule. So from now, all you developers will bring packed
lunch from home, and eat at the desk. That, and some overtime should do the
trick!
Sincerely,
Dave
Here is a disclaimer, just in case : All the character names are fictitious, and as a matter of coincidence, if the names match,I am sorry about that! Either get better at handling people or use this as a covering letter to your resignation letter. And if you name is Frank, please rest in peace!
Here is a disclaimer, just in case : All the character names are fictitious, and as a matter of coincidence, if the names match,I am sorry about that! Either get better at handling people or use this as a covering letter to your resignation letter. And if you name is Frank, please rest in peace!