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corporate insanity
Monday, June 28 1999
An internet startup under orders to delude itself.
Now is the season when companies seeking to appeal to the college-student demographic scramble to get stuff in place on time for the new school year. Complicating the particular case of the company for which I work, suddenly lots of competitors are popping up from nowhere onto our radar screens. At the weekly company meeting this morning, the Grand Pooh Bah's voice had the tambour of a hunted man's. And almost on cue, as if to demonstrate how much harder we need to be working, a groovy new application written by Eric the Web Developer (being demonstrated by the Director of Web Development) suffered from a paralyzing JavaScript Error.
Immediately following the general meeting was another meeting with just the Grand Pooh Bah and the engineers. Here we were told that we'd have to set aside our weekends and work long hours so that our goals could be achieved. The only incentive presented was the value our stock options would have if all the work was done on time. If, however, all the work was not done on time, everything for which we had worked would come to naught. The Grand Pooh Bah now had a menace to his voice. He rhetorically asked a few people if they were up to the challenge, and (despite all the lip service paid to open communication) it was readily apparent that the only acceptable responses were those of agreement. There was no room made for rational thought, and certainly no time was allocated to consideration of the ridiculous axioms being postulated. Here are some of the things we had to accept on faith as being possible to do in a month's time, things for which we had to implicitly agree to sacrifice our summer:
- Several entirely new sections duplicating the complex functionality of various major sites on the web. Though many of these are to be outsourced, the integration hassles alone (a place where my expertise happens to lie) will probably be of Biblical proportions.
- A whole new front-end redesign, affecting every page on the site. This is another place that will demand my expertise.
- A whole new back-end. Not only does this new back-end depend on largely untested principles and seek to do things which well-funded engineering teams at Microsoft repeated tried and failed to do (with acquired engineering entities such as Hotmail and WebTV), but its data models and means of operation are completely alien from the existing system. For example, instead of using SQL stored procedures running on the database server, the new system will rely on dynamically created SQL statements created by compiled Visual Basic objects on the web servers. Though the methods used in this back-end are not within my current expertise, much of the programming I have done will need to be translated into compiled objects under this system.
As I said, no incentive was mentioned except the possible future value of our stock. The motivation was lots of stick and not much carrot. It was the exactly the sort of patronization that makes the workers of the world hate their jobs, occasionally rising to overthrow their cruel masters. By the way, there's a great article in this month's Utne Reader about the sweatshop-like conditions of internet startups.
But now I'm wise and experienced in the ways of new-media exploitation. Well I recall the deceptions that led me to sacrifice my weekends back in January. Back then I was promised money and a laptop and God knows what else if I completed a roster of projects in a month's time. Immediately one of the major, completely unrealistic items was yanked from my roster. I was to learn later that when that item was yanked, the possibility that I could get anything for my extra time completely vanished. There's a lingering bitterness from that experience. No one has ever made good on that injury. So I don't think I'll be spending many sunny San Diego Saturdays at work during July.
At some point I expect to be called into a room and asked whether or not I can accomplish the goals drawn out for me. I don't know what I'll tell the boss who asks me. I'm sure the expectation will be that I will say I can do anything I'm asked to do. Whether or not I say I can is pretty much irrelevant. It's all insanity. I doubt a quarter of the "essentials" will be complete by the end of July.
All this corporation-wide emphasis on deadlines is missing an essential ingredient to any creative task: the need to play. At work we are placed on such a hurried schedule that we never have a chance to perfect the things we make. Any time we linger over something, exploring the possibilities, we're quite obviously failing to do something else, something no doubt of higher priority. Indeed, much of the company's philosophy revolves around the so-called "80-20 rule." The 80-20 rule states that 80 percent of the functionality of something can be accomplished with 20 percent of the work. We're encouraged to slam things together in 20% of the time that we really should, with hopes that 80% of its users will be satisfied. Our site definitely reflects this philosophy throughout. We're shoddy to the core. Nothing is shiny, nothing is truly cool. Indeed, if the site actually was cool, you can be sure I'd let slip with the name of the company a bit more often.
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