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co-location tour II
Wednesday, October 13 1999
Dan the Man is a "networker" at work. He's a little Vietnamese guy who for months has served as the Grim Reaper, being the one to revoke permissions, lock workstations and tell people they've been fired when the decision to do such a thing comes down from on high. Recently he found himself a much better-paying job up in San Jose, so on Friday he's planning on bidding us all adieu. Today he took a good fraction of the Product Team on a tour of the downtown co-location facilities. It's all housed in a climate-controlled server room on the 13th floor of one of the tallest buildings in San Diego. I'd been there once before with Kevin the DBA, but everything is different now. There are bigger, more expensive, and overall more machines. The most expensive of these are only there to track statistics. I've gradually come to realize that our project-based management system is a needy parasitic fungus pervading and sapping the strength from everything in the company, adding bureaucracy and demanding huge resources and personnel for its sustenance. Everything our company does must be quantified, but in so doing, that which is quantified is disturbed in such a way as to be, in aggregate, rather unquantifiably different from before. The project management system has made considerably better progress than, say, the ill-fated "new architecture." But most of the time it seems more bother than it's worth. I hate the fact that if I was doing things as it demands, I'd be spending most of my time filling out forms and talking with uninterested managers instead of rolling up my sleeves and doing what I do best.
In the evening, Steph made us all a vodka, squash and pasta dinner. Later on EJ showed us some videotape of his skateboarding adventures back in Plymouth, Mass.
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