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outing corporate taboos
Tuesday, July 13 1999
My friend and colleague, Eric the Web Developer, pulled off an impressive feat today. He's been concerned for weeks about the new architecture being developed in an isolated back room by his nemesis, The VP of System Architecture, along with a staff of "Navy Seals." There are concerns that the new architecture won't meet the scalability needs of the enterprise, that it will be more susceptible to programmer error, and that there's no way it can be delivered within the unrealistically aggressive deadlines coming from the congenitally irrational makers of deadlines. What Eric did was covertly organize a meeting of the majority of the engineers, including the powerful VP of IT as well as one of the de-facto founders of the company (both of them female), to discuss our various "challenges" with the new architecture. It turned out that a large fraction of the engineers, including both DBAs, had strong issues with the new architecture and even the qualifications of those building it. As one of the engineers from a recently-acquired company put it, "Unless [the guys building the new architecture] have experience building operating systems, I wouldn't trust them." We went through a litany of issues, most of them either pointing to an unscalable architecture or a delivery date months beyond the current deadline. It was, I must say, the most refreshing meeting I have ever attended at my current place of employment. No issues were taboo, no one was expected to speak from a script or reflexively agree with what had just been said. If anything, devil's advocate views were solicited. But, you must understand, we were in rebellion, we were going against a faith-based decision made by the company more than a month ago.
In the end we all reached a consensus that the female co-founder should present our case, our challenges concerning the new architecture. Given the reality of the male domination of our industry, our company and (particularly) our engineering department, one of the DBAs, a guy who has only been with us for a few weeks, was recruited to support the female co-founder.
For the past two days I'd been discussing these issues with Eric, advising him to make his case as impersonal and fact-based as possible. He has, you see, a lot of accumulated personal issues with the VP of Systems Architecture, and, as young and inexperienced as he is, he has a tendency to allow these to poison his legitimate concerns. Today, in presenting his case, Eric did an excellent job in appearing objective, even though he has a reputation for being a hot head. It payed off. By the end of the meeting, all of us were in a mild state of euphoria. We'd somehow slain a dragon. We hadn't even brought our issues to the attention of anyone outside our rebellion yet, all we'd done was agree on some facts that had been taboo to even discuss previously, for example, that completely redoing the site front to back was impossible in the time available. We'd all known this in our hearts, but no one had been comfortable enough to say anything. The release of actually saying the obvious truth had made our day. It definitely made Eric's day. He was jazzed all afternoon. And he deserved to be.
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