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Saturday, October 17, 2009
From The Bit Bucket: Some Saturday Morning Levity
Fran here. I've just endured the proverbial Week from Hell, and decompressing adequately will require a few laugh lines. But these will be occupationally related vignettes, so any non-engineers among my Gentle Readers shouldn't feel bad if one or two of the giggles don't register.
The Attack Email.
Time was, the term memo grenade was familiar to all office workers. Before email became ubiquitous, workers bent on savaging one another did so through cleverly worded memos: paper instruments detailing some problem in a fashion that reflects poorly on a co-worker. In those halcyon days of yore, such instruments were normally typed up by the originator's departmental secretary, copied onto company stationery, and then dispatched to whoever was on the list of primary addressees or "CCs." It was obligatory that the target of such a vilification receive a copy, of course, but if at all possible as a "CCer" rather than a primary addressee; that way, he might think it didn't concern him and toss it without reading it.
Gone are the days. Today, we send attack email. The overall scheme is the same, but the departmental secretary is no longer involved, and there are many, many more possibilities for skullduggery. For example, Smith could "accidentally" send his attack email to a much wider distribution than the problem detailed therein would normally interest -- a distribution involving corporate officers and (in extreme cases) their spouses. Alternately, and somewhat more insidious, he might "forget" to include targeted Jones on the distribution list. Since no one but Smith sees the thing before it makes its rounds, he can always mount the "honest mistake" defense: Smile and say "my finger slipped," or "my mousing is getting sloppy."
(At this time there's no jurisdiction in which such actions are considered legal justification for homicide.)
Because I do laboratory simulations, I'm the frequent target of such emails. They usually allege that I agreed to do something that I thereafter failed to do. One who is less than scrupulous about saving all his communications can easily be victimized thus...but I am not one such. I print out all email and file it by date, purging the file only at the beginning of each new year. (No, there isn't much room left in my desk for office supplies.)
Recently, one of my corporate enemies caught on. This...person has put considerable effort into harming my reputation, for nearly a decade. When he realized that I empty my email file on January 1, he tried to exploit the phenomenon by alleging that he'd failed to meet a critical schedule because I'd sloughed a requirement he'd laid on me two years previously. That attack email went to his management, my management, and the vice-president of our division; I was "CCed."
Uproar. Phone wires hummed. Meetings were called. For the first time in eight years an actual paper memo was sent, from our vice-president's office, tartly reminding all division engineers of the centrality of laboratory simulation and the importance of meeting agreed-upon requirements.
But they don't call me Super Fran for nothin'. As is the case in most corporate environments today, all email sent to, from, or within the company is archived on a big honkin' server used for nothing else. If you can make friends with its administrator, you have an asset of unique power.
Of course, it's also the case in most corporate environments that the IT administrator for such a facility is a nasty bastard -- think Don Rickles, but entirely without the humor -- who's about as available as the Pope. So to goose as much as a smile out of him, some ingenuity and effort will be required.
Super Fran isn't averse to ingenuity and effort, but he prefers to do things the easy way when possible. So I made note of the IT guy's schedule, and made a point of running into him in the parking lot.
Literally. I clipped his leg with my front bumper as he was walking toward his Hummer. (I wasn't about to hit his car; it's an M1-Alpha, with the armaments package.)
A few heartfelt apologies and a night of drunken debauchery afterward, I had both the IP address and the administration password to the archive server. And my enemy spent the next several weeks sleeping on the couch as he struggled to convince his wife, a harridan of legendary stature, that there's no such person as Estrellita Malvaux working, ah, under him.
Revenge is a dish people of taste prefer to eat cold. -- Dennis Price, as Louis D'Ascoyne Mazzini, in Kind Hearts and Coronets.
Sparking The Creativity Gap
Over at Ace Of Spades, Purple Avenger cites a few of the conditions that impede his occupational creativity and productivity:
Ringing phones, people banging on the door, etc. are a total buzz kill.
I have solved this massively annoying problem, common to all office environments, by being physically and electronically unavailable:
- I have no fixed location; I consistently misinform others about where I expect to be at any specified time. You'd think my management would have learned better by now. They haven't, which might help to explain why I get paid way more than they do.
- I refuse to carry a cell phone or a pager. Those things, I have explained repeatedly to my pursuers, would only impede and endanger me on the many occasions when I must go under the raised flooring to check the radiation levels, feed the rats, or perform the sacred rites of my Satanic faith.
- In a burst of extreme defensive creativity, I slipped our campus phone tech a hundred bucks to re-route my voice mail to another company. You'd be amazed at what that does to the zeal of many a supplicant who's vowed to pursue you to the ends of the Earth.
- I run my E-mail agent twice per day, at precisely 6:30 AM and 1:00 PM. Between those stops, I regard the work day as...well...a time to get work done.
- I attend zero meetings. If commanded to attend a meeting by my management, I refuse, with detailed reasons, and CC the refusal E-mail to their management. (I sometimes schedule a meeting with my management for the sheer pleasure of not attending it.)
You have to whack 'em across the snout a few times -- a rolled-up magazine is adequate; a tire iron is declasse -- before they get the message, but if you refuse to do that, you're not working; you're just a butt boy for self-absorbed idiots who think meetings, schedules, cleverly formatted spreadsheets and animated PowerPoint presentations are the supreme achievements of Mankind, whereas actually making stuff is for the hoi polloi.
Alphabetize, Then Burn
Over the two years just past, my group has been whittled, by layoffs, transfers, and departures for greener pastures, down to just me. It won't stay that way forever, of course; lab simulation is too important to treat that way. But it gives emphasis to one of my perennial problems: keeping inadequate engineers out.
My group has been a software Mecca since the early 90s, because I run a "loosely tight" ship. I tell each of my subordinates:
- Don't worry about anything but what I've asked you to do. Dealing with outside forces, including management above our heads, is my job. If someone other than me comes to you with a request, demur and send him to me. Politely, if possible.
- Keep whatever hours you want.
- Use whatever development methodology you want.
- If you need equipment or software, let me know and I'll see that you get it.
- If you need reference books, let me know and I'll see that you get them at once. If necessary, I'll purchase them myself.
- If you need help, or someone to brainstorm with, consider me available. Try not to disturb the other group members; they're all very busy.
- My home phone number is XXX-XXX-XXXX. Feel free to use it if you need it. If you give it to anyone else, the gendarmes will find your mutilated body in a ditch the morning after I learn about it.
- My job is to see to it that you know what's expected of you, to make sure it's not beyond your powers, and that you have what you need to achieve it. I take those responsibilities very seriously...and you had better take yours equally seriously.
...and I do my best to ensure that they all believe every word.
That sort of environment is close to unique in defense engineering, and it's damned near irresistible to the engineer who fancies his own abilities. However, most such persons are wrong. Most are wrong about themselves: they don't have the horsepower to function under the sort of stress my group routinely experiences. Some think the work is entirely free-form, which is another kind of error; in fact, it's the most demanding, meticulously specified of all the tasks any defense engineer must undertake. And some, including some very envious first and second-tier managers, think my gang is a group of privileged goof-offs.
I had one unsuitable young man dropped on me recently, against my express recommendation. (No, I don't always get the last word.) He failed my requirements on all three counts: he has a poor record as an engineer; he thought he'd be allowed to do entirely as he pleased; and he displays a remarkable tendency to goldbrick.
I knew he was a loser within ten minutes of meeting him. But the company was trying not to lay him off -- I still don't know why -- and I had open desks and budget I wasn't burning, so I had to get clever.
At such times, a front-line manager has to make the problem employee want to get out from under him. There are numerous tactics within that strategic framework: meaningless but unending make-work; projects without customers, that can be protracted until Judgment Day; and so forth. But some such tactics require active, continuous supervision, and I had a schedule to meet, an unusually demanding one whose principal customer was outside the company. I had to pick an approach that would allow me to get my own work done.
So I gave him the famous "alphabetize, then burn" assignment.
In the Army, a penal assignment that used to be handed to recalcitrant privates was to take charge of a large mass of papers, alphabetize them by the first -- or second or third -- word on each page, and then present the results for review. When the sergeant had approved the pile, the private would then be told to tote it to the incinerator. In this day and age it's somewhat antiquated, given the ubiquity of electronic communication, but as a pattern to be followed it has many virtues.
I gave my new subordinate a modern equivalent: For each program and callable procedure in my group's 900,000-source-code-lines repository, he was to generate interface documentation, timing diagrams, and a set of test cases. Why? "ISO-9001, Kent. We're all required to do it."
(No, I hadn't bothered to tell him that ISO-9001 doesn't apply to non-product software. Nor did he bother to ask anyone else.)
He lasted two weeks. At the end of his second week, he tearfully told me that he'd accepted another opportunity, and would be taking his leave with much regret. I was, you see, "the best boss I ever had," and "by the way, Fran, would you mind writing a recommendation for me?" As his new opportunity was at another company, I did so with pleasure.
I might not be a paragon of candor, but I got the job done, didn't I?
Comments
Heh. Love it.
M
Posted by Mark Alger on 10/17/2009 at 08:06 PMRemus here. I wish to lodge a complaint with the management. In fact, I may request you refund my subscription. Goes like this: Eternity Road graced my day with wit and insight in portions matching my ability to absorb, um, same. Since you recruited a full compliment of co-conspirators (I suspect blackmail)it’s like having a philharmonic show up in my living room. With free baklava. I mean, it’s not like I can ignore them.
Yer on notice, I shall not take this lying down. Oh. Wait a minute, I am lying down. (Stands up). There. I shall not take this lying down. Now if you’ll excuse me, I gotta go lie down.
Posted by Ol' Remus on 10/17/2009 at 08:08 PMWell, yes, Remus. I must admit that it’s been rather lively here lately. But all things wax and wane, according to schedules only One can know. When we come into a period of drought, as we inevitably must—I think some of my Co-Conspirators have actual lives, however stoutly they might deny it—I hope you’ll look kindly upon us.
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 10/18/2009 at 08:26 AMI so wish I was qualified to work in your shop. Really. I do.
Sadly, until I gain citizenship, all is moot.
(And thanks to Katrina, that application has been delayed by close to 2 years.)
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 10/18/2009 at 04:24 PMNote to self: Don’t get on Fran’s bad side!
“You’d think my management would have learned better by now.”
Ha! HAHAHAHAHAHA!
Management’s density might be a constant
Posted by Russell on 10/19/2009 at 11:35 AM
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