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more on KD
Tuesday, August 3 1999
I did lunch with Eric the Web Developer, mostly so I could find out more about yesterday's firing of KD (the plump eccentric programmer dude). I was relieved to discover that KD's firing hadn't been nearly the bolt from the blue (or the message from management) that I'd orginally thought. It seems that all the guys on the "engineering team" (which is technically different from but still bleeds into my "product team") had been conspiring against KD for at least a week before his removal. Indeed, my two closest chums at work, Kevin and Eric, had evidently been instrumental in his removal, though neither had ever said a thing to me about it. Basically, the story according to Eric is that KD hadn't been productive. He'd been working short hours and accomplishing very little. The one thing he did accomplish, the development of a virtual file system in C++ (a language no one in the company uses), had no actual practical application. What was more, KD was notorious for fielding extended phone calls on his cellular phone for mysterious things during work hours. One such call interrupted his presentation at the weekly engineering meeting, conveniently cutting short his pathetically uninformitive update. Everyone in engineering seemed to know these calls were for outside clients on matters unrelated to our company. Eventually the Director of Engineering told KD that he had to stop answering his cell phone, something KD refused to do on account of a "sick grandmother." Then, following a week of covert observation by his colleagues and yet more warnings, KD was fired on Monday. It was sad to see him go; he was such a nice dork. But at the same time, I have to agree that I can't really recall anything particularly useful he did for the company aside from his modest (and, in retrospect, unnecessary) help with the much-hyped Elizabeth Dole cybercast.
KD was, however, terribly conceited, even for a C++ programmer. As Eric sees it, that conceit was probably the thing that got him hired to begin with. At a job interview it seems one can make up for an awful lot of professional failings with a good dishing of extravagant self-confidence.
In the evening, Kim and I watched a flick called Rocket Boys about a group of West Virginians who were inspired enough by Sputnik to launch their own rockets. That was back in the days when Space was seen exactly as the Internet is seen today. The movie was okay, but it wasn't great. In Kim's opinion, it was harmed by heavy-handed attempts to shove it into the mold of typical Hollywood cinema. The regional West Virginia accents were okay, though not sufficiently convincing to someone like me familiar with the region.
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