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some bad assumptions
Tuesday, September 14 1999
You can't imagine the sheer numbers of engineers swarming through the offices these days. We're talking people I've never in my life seen before and (owing to the depressing nature of their work and the unrealistic demands being placed upon them) I may never see again. A good fraction of them appear to be fresh off the boat from Russia and/or India: awkward little style-challenged white guys or swarthy men with bad skin and socially-repressed gazes. Their job is to move our old ad-hoc architecture to a new untested object-based homebrewed-redundant model (I'm absolutely serious!). For the most part, they have no idea how the old site works; indeed, they've been systematically discouraged from talking to anybody who might tell them. This has been an issue of considerable bitterness amongst those of us who, at the expense of our weekends and social lives, built the existing site under the old architecture. The thing that many of us believe (but no one can say) is that, if there's any justice in this world, the mega-dollar "new architecture effort" must fail. Sadly for the company, I fear there is some justice in the world. This was all made very clear to me yet again today.
For the first time ever, the new architecture team called me down to their 2nd floor interrogation room to find out what, if anything, I knew about the existing system. Evidently they'd been led to believe (by the VP of Architecture and his crater-faced principle henchman) that I didn't have much to contribute. They'd been consulting a lot with my colleague Jay while seemingly making a point of avoiding me. Perhaps it was the unfriendliness in my eyes; it's been awfully difficult to disguise my disdain for their well-financed arrogance. Pragmatically, though, I have to wonder at the foolishness of their ignoring my contributions to the existing architecture. After all, my productivity is an established fact in the company. To imagine that I had nothing to say about the existing system seems like a terrible oversight. Worse still, it's an indication of an underlying failure of research by a team charged with rebuilding our architecture. It's important to remember that this is an architecture in which the company is officially placing (in typical idiotic fashion) its unquestioning faith.
Today, though, the architecture guys (in this case, a sub-team I'd never met before and had only rarely seen) were in for something of a rude awakening. I sat there and explained all the parts of the site into which the tentacles of my code reach. Lots of my code involves the File System Object, a way to make data persist on web and file servers outside the overly-protected databases. The architecture guys didn't really even know what the File System Object was, and they were clearly terrified by my every mention of it. All they were doing at this point was trying to assess how much work they have ahead of them, and as they marked everything "H" for "hard," I got the feeling that my interview was doubling their assessment of the amount of work they'd have to do. In its own sick way it was enormously satisfying. Whoever got us into this disaster really ought to be hired by Microsoft.
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