Would You Like To Buy a Vowel?

So I'm sitting in front of a computer loading up a new system when my cell phone rings. It's my buddy Mike. It turns out that the new Screw the Employees program at TCIDNN (The Company I Dare Not Name), is more widespread than I thought. I originally thought it just pertained to my little organization. Obviously I was wrong. My organization was the only one that told all their employees it was coming. Mike's organization didn't do that. It just nailed the employees one by one and Mike was one of them.

I've known Mike for about twelve years. We worked on two projects together back when we actually used synergy. We also got things done without a lot of overhead bullshit. We couldn't do now what we did back then and that's one of the reasons we are so much more "pricier than our competition". It's not that we pay our employees too much money (with the exception of managers who are horribly overpaid), it's that we have thrown up so many bureaucratic roadblocks and built walls between organizations. A fine example of that is the Reverse Synergy Non-leveraging of Hardware project that I'm working on now where we are segregating hardware and building a big wall between two organizations in our building.

Hey TCIDNN, here's a novel way of saving money: Quit reorganizing every two or three years. I've been in the same building for 18 years and I've held two jobs and my organization has merged, unmerged, remerged, demerged, and changed its name at least 6 times. That's some sort of a reorganization once every three years at a minimum. I've probably forgotten a few. I wonder how much money has been wasted that way? And I wonder how much money has been wasted on Quality Programs? Howza 'bout Diversity Town Hall Meetings?

A fine example of wasted money is Death Spiral ( the German project that I have written about many times). My clueless manager did not realize that we were being used as a bargaining chip to get the Germans' outsourcer to drop their price. I tried to tell him this to no avail. We wasted lots of time in meetings and going through pricing models while letting the Germans yank us around. This should have been a two month process. Here's our price. Take it or leave it. Instead it has dragged on for ten months and my clueless manager still thinks we are in the running even though the German outsourcer has undercut every proposal we have made. When we waste time on a manager's fantasy of enlarging his empire, we also waste a lot of money in lost man hours.

Back to Mike. He is a real sharp programmer. While working on the two projects with him my programming skills improved at an exponential rate. He was a major reason I'm the programmer I am today. He thinks I know a lot more than I do. Heh. Heh. Heh. I've tried to tell him this, but he just thinks I'm being modest. Heh. Heh. Heh. He's worked his butt off for as long as I've known him and his reward is a demotion and a pay cut. Like me, he can retire anytime he wants, but like me, he also wants to set aside some more money before he retires. He still has a daughter he has to finish raising.

And then, to top it off, I hit a snag on my system install. I've had this identical bug on a previous install and I'll be damned if I can remember what the heck it is. It pisses me off!

The way this week is going, I'm beginning to feel like this guy.