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why work when waste will win?
Friday, June 8 2001
Another day, another free-bagel Friday, and most importantly, another payday. Reading FuckedCompany.com for the past few days had me a little nervous that perhaps the shit might be going down today. But no, it's the afternoon now, and everything seems to be going normally. Joyously, I've noted that the full value of my paycheck has been credited to my account via direct deposit. These days one has to be thankful for the things one used to take for granted.
Back in the good old days when I was a kid living on a farm in rural Virginia, wastefulness was a rare and terrible thing. What sorts of things could be wasted in the 1980s? The occasional gallon of milk would go bad, a two by four would split, or a loaf of bread would turn spotty with green beachheads of mold. So sensitive was I to waste that I spent most of my free time during the summer of 1986 figuring out ways to put usable memory locations into neglected little corners of my Commodore VIC-20's 64 kilobyte address space.
Thus you can imagine how I felt as I acquainted myself with the wasteful excesses of California dotcom companies during the months of the bubble economy. The waste I have seen in the past three years has been nearly on the scale of what one witnesses during war time. Now for some examples.
For starters, there was the vast multi-100 thousand dollar site architecture redesign for CollegeClub.com during the summer of 1999, spearheaded by quirky & contentious Marty Masri. This project, based on a homebrew Microsoft-powered solution, was quietly scrapped in the Fall of 1999 only to be replaced with a far more ambitious project whose goal was to port the site's database to Oracle. The Oracle project plowed along into March of 2000 and employed a big room full of expensive Oracle contractors on the scenic 10th floor of a San Diego high rise office building. Many of these unfortunate individuals never saw their last paycheck.
My current workplace is still climbing up out of the hole it dug for itself back when it moved its architecture to the dubious Vignette platform. A typical installation of Vignette burns at least a million dollars. Its many drawbacks were successfully glossed over by one of the biggest and most impressive business-to-business marketing campaigns of the entire dotcom bubble. From my experience, the Vignette StoryServer architecture doesn't scale worth a damn and it requires programmers skilled in the obscure LISP-like TCL language. Still, the process of replacing an entrenched architecture is far more expensive than buying a new one, and, as Vignette began to be dismantled, seeing the Microsoft consultants swarming through the offices carrying away vital investor money was enough to sicken anyone aware of what was happening. And, more depressing still, most of what the Microsoft guys left behind needs to be replaced.
But the most galling waste I've personally experienced has been the ill-fated UK project. I worked for seven months with a dedicated team of very bright people from the UK. These people were flown back and forth half way around the world several times (at enormous expense) to join with me in building an entire UK version of the US site. What we developed was elegantly-architected and visually-compelling, built all in one go as a complete system (unlike the kludgy evolutionary beast upon which it was based). But then, due to funding issues, the project was killed, all its staffed laid off and I was salvaged to work once again on US projects. For as long as I live, I'll never be able to get over the fact that we of the UK team could have spent less money and had more fun simply drinking margaritas on the beach instead of building a site. But no one can predict the future, and uncertainty is the grandfather of waste. If the Nazis could have looked into a kristall ball und seen their schicksal, would they have invaded Poland?
I was listening to Marketplace on KCRW this afternoon and heard an amusing commentary about AOL Version 6.0. It seems that the fine people at AOL have started concealing the message about connection speed that normally appears when a telephone connection is made. To get to the information now you have to go to the "About AOL" screen and hit the secret key combination comprised of "control-Y," at which point you'll see that your connection speed is half what it was reported to be under version 5.0.
This is just yet more evidence of a phenomenon I've seen throughout software development. Versions seem to improve gradually with each version above 1.0 only to peak at (or around version) 5.0. Subsequent versions above 5.0 suddenly become buggy, bloated and slow. Think about this for a moment. Remember when you upgraded from Microsoft Word 5.1 to 6.0? Have you upgraded yet to Netscape 6? Remember how dreadful Nightmare on Elm Street VI was in comparison to the masterpiece that was Nightmare on Elm Street V?
My pattern for Friday nights has changed. For the past few Fridays my habit has been to stay home and work on solitary projects. Tonight I spent some time getting Vodkatea to use cascading style sheets instead of the vintage 1997 method I'd been using to set font sizes, colors and faces. I also furthered the implementation of the user rating system, which (hopefully) will have a troll-suppressing effect.
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