how much is a man worth (like a dollar)

it is 'administrative assistants day', so the old man bought us pizza.

when lunch arrived, he gave a speech that began with:

'asinine inc. is doing ok. not great. not as good as this time last year. but it will likely get better this year.'

apparently we'll be getting raises this year. small ones.

after most people had eaten, there were two boxes left on the table. the old man walked by diane's desk:

the old man: it looks like we're going to be about two pizzas over, so factor that into your equation. maybe get less salad.
diane: they aren't done yet. people are still coming back for more.
the old man: it looks we'll be about two over. factor that in.

so, two pizzas cost $25.98. divide that by twenty employees to get ~$1.30. none of us is worth that extra buck.

play to your strengths

sometimes, writing penalties into a contract can be a good motivational tool. if there is a chance that you won't get paid, you may be motivated to do a better job and ship on time.

however, if your track record is such that your company has

a) never shipped on time, and
b) never shipped a good release

it is generally a good idea not to sign a contract that says you're going to start knocking money off the bill for each day you are late and for each bug that is found.

also, be sure to stop at $0. you don't want to have to tell your employees, 'there is a possibility that we'll be sending a check with the release.'

that which has no value...

'we can be as low-cost as anyone in this business.' -- the old man.

that's not the story. that's just something the old man said recently that really sums up asinine, inc's approach to business -- charge less.

don't make the best quality software. don't offer the best technical support options. don't deliver on time. just charge less. we do a lot of stuff for free that most (all) other software companies would (justifiably) charge for, and when someone says, 'hey, we could charge for this,' there is a lecture about how sometimes you have to do free stuff to create customer goodwill, and we 'don't understand the business side of things.'

not long ago, a customer called in and asked for an enhancement. kelly forwarded the request on to people who make decisions and told the guy he would hear from them soon. the guy was emailing every day -- he was very excited about the enhancement, and had even gone so far as to come up with a design.

he specified, repeatedly, that he was willing to pay for this enhancement.

the decisionmakers decided it would be better to put this enhancement in, for free, 'by the end of the year.'

the guy said he would pay to get it in sooner.

asinine, inc said 'no thanks.'

(pause)

the guy also asked for two other enhancements. he was willing to pay for those as well.

we're making them a part of the original enhancement request and doing them for free.

(pause)

nothing says, 'our product is worthless' like an unwillingness to accept payment for it.

write down the process for not talking anymore

i can't even begin to wrap my head around the exact details of what happened, so i'm going to set you up with some background and then show you what i tweeted.

regina, the admin assistant, went to tom's desk to ask him what his process was for 'running the backup tapes.' his process was pretty difficult:
1. remove old tape
2. insert new tape

the next 20 minutes consisted of a lot of repetition, including the following gem:

"so are they actual tapes?"

i messaged kelly in tech support to ask if that was seriously happening behind me. it really was.


and now, my tweets:
admin assistant is questioning the IT guy about the backup tape process. NO, there is no written process for "remove tape. insert tape."

wow, she seriously just said that there should be a written process so "other people could do it" if IT guy isn't here. OTHER PEOPLE KNOW.

apparently the boss is getting lists of everything everyone does so when they leave he can replace them easily.

I'm no business dude, but it seems like a better place to focus would be on job satisfaction. But what do I know.

I am going to make a noose out of ethernet cables 

not that kind of meeting

jim and i have an interesting department. he created the testing department from nothing -- asinine, inc. never thought quality assurance was worth a separate department until after they started releasing horribly broken software. i started testing about a year after jim did. there is no grizzled qa vet to mentor us in the ways of excellence, so we just kind of figure things out as we go.

one week, we found a number of awesome articles at cio.com, including an audio presentation called (something like) '27 ways to improve your testing'. we went into the conference room and gave it a listen. the narrator of the piece was female.

after about 20 minutes, the old man pokes his head in and says:
'i heard a woman's voice in here and thought you guys were looking at pornos! i was going to join you.'

awkward laughter and jim and i kind of look at each other. 'did he really just say that?' jim said, once the old man was gone.

naturally we told a few people about it, and it became a running joke for us.

then, about a year later, the old man made the same joke twice within the span of a week. perhaps it's his only joke?

like a ninja, but obvious

the old man likes to make periodic internet runs. basically, he walks by, stands directly behind me for a few seconds, turns around and checks jim's monitor, and then goes back in his office.

i don't need to turn and face him to know this.

al brought in a friend's computer to try and get tom to work on it. despite his various certifications, which are included in his email signature, he couldn't make it happen. the old man didn't give them a second look while he was making his most recent internet sweep.

real eye for productivity, that one.

like favoritism but with hate

i will relate this story as i experienced it. this happened today.

my supervisor (jim) and i spent the morning and the first part of the afternoon in the conference room because there were some software specifications that needed to reviewed and we also needed to write test cases for them. the reason it took both of us was because they were huge, poorly planned, and poised to unleash devastation upon the programming and testing departments because they were contradicting each other. also, they didn't meet half the requirements that the customers wanted, but oh well.

we get out, and one of the programmers had a question about a flowchart i had made. it turned out that since we had changed some other enhancement, that flowchart was inaccurate and needed to be updated. i was hungry and wanted to take my lunch, but it was time-sensitive, so i grabbed my food and kept working.

but then my brain was shot, so i decided to take my lunch.

at 1:53, the old man appears behind me.

the old man: "what are you looking at, stan?"
me: "uh, google reader."
the old man: "why?"
me: "i'm on lunch."
the old man: "at 2 o clock?"
me: "i'm wrapping up lunch."
the old man: "what time did you go on lunch?"
me: "about 1:20." *glance at clock* "i guess i'm about 3 minutes over, so i'll shut this down."
the old man: "i'm not looking at 3 minutes over, i'm looking at 2 o clock."

then he turned his back and started talking to al, then walked away. i emailed that conversation snippet to jim, because it's the sort of thing we simultaneously laugh and get really mad at. he wasn't at his desk, but when he got back, he instant messaged me:

jim: O
jim: M
jim: G
jim: he pulled me into the conference room just now

except it wasn't in response to my email. he took me out into the hall and told me what happened...

the old man had walked by my desk and seen that i was on the internet. instead of saying something to me, he talked to jim:

the old man: what time do you all take lunch?
jim: people take their lunches at different times. who are you asking about?
the old man: you, stan, and tom.
jim: we typically take late lunches, around 12:30 or 1.
the old man: well, i was just at stan's desk and i saw him using the internet.
jim: okay..? so he took a later lunch, it seems.
the old man: it really pisses me off when people use the internet. you need to set a lunch time and make sure everyone takes it at that time.

naturally, i was livid, but i had to stuff it deep down because we had a 2 o clock meeting. when we got out of that around 3:15, i asked jim if there was a copy of the employee handbook on the network. he had a hardcopy handy, so we flipped through it and found the lunch policy.

all it says is that lunch is an hour long and should be taken between 11 am and 2 pm. technically, my lunch is half an hour so i can leave earlier, but i was still well within the 11-2 window. the old man was just being petty and controlling.

in other news, i saw an awesome video this week that is pretty much exactly like what working at asinine, inc is like.

enjoy!

the accidental meeting

a long time ago i was actively looking for jobs in virginia. a co-worker convinced me that i should tell the old man, so i did. he was ambiguously supportive (the reason i was looking was because my wife's parents are out there), but also said that if i stuck around, he would make it worth my while.

at that point, telecommuting was permitted for a few of us if the weather conditions were sufficiently dangerous, and i was still under the impression that something formal was in the works. the weather policy came about because i spun out on the way to work one morning, and it was providence that there were no cars in the oncoming lane when i got there. i talked to the boss and he was okay with telecommuting when the weather was like that.

the job search wasn't really panning out anyway -- i interviewed for two different staff positions at a university, and they both took their sweet time turning me down. i wound up sticking around.

the employee handbook was revised. it now says that telecommuting is only available on a pre-approved basis, and that 'modern weather forecasting technology' is good enough for employees to plan ahead and still get to work on time. i wasn't clear on whether an employee was allowed to get pre-approval if the weather was looking bad, so i asked -- there was supposed to be ice the next day. no one got back to me in time. there wasn't ice the next day, but the roads in my city are horribly engineered, so you tend to hydroplane when they are wet. i stayed home and learned the hard way that no, that doesn't count as pre-approval.

two days later i hit a patch of black ice and rear-ended a guy.

that led to a meeting. the old man, the accounting guy, jim, tom, and me. we wanted to try and fix the telecommuting policy. this is how the old man opened the meeting:

'i am confident that this will be a good meeting, but i'm not confident that it will be resolved in the way that you hope it will. in fact, i can guarantee that it won't, but i'm open to discussion.'

awesome, right? he then launched into a story about this factory he used to own, because that is analogous to a software company.

he started going off on how there needs to be an objective standard of 'bad weather' and 'unsafe', at which point my rage boiled over and i started shouting -- 'why does it have to be objective? if someone gets in their car and says, holy crap these roads are dangerous, why isn't that good enough?'

he kept interjecting 'not to me' (referring to things being dangerous), and i flipped out. 'it happened. last year i spun out. today i rear-ended someone. it happened.'

he yelled, 'then move to virginia.'

classy.

the meeting was a huge waste of time in which three people tried to convince an old man that technology made it possible to keep people accountable if they were working from home. he used horrible logic to keep his blinders on. whatever works.

chaircanery

one morning i came in to find that my chair had been replaced by one that leaned back too far, as though it had once been owned by the guy next to me who ruins chairs all the time (al).

so i asked, 'hey, did you guys steal my chair for your meeting yesterday, and then give me the wrong one?'

al told me to ask diane about that. she told me that the old man took it so all of the chairs in the conference room matched (apparently the backs are slightly different sizes). she made me sit in her chair for a minute, and it was awesome. i said it was possibly the best chair ever and that it didn't hurt my back. she wound up getting irritated on my behalf and getting the old man to say he'd get me a new chair that didn't cause me back problems.

she and tom went to some place that sells used office furniture from businesses that closed and found several $400 chairs for $50. it seemed like a done deal.

except the next day, the old man went over there to haggle.

the old man is big on trying to get things free or cheap when he doesn't deserve them and there is no logical reason for the other party to lower their prices for him. this was no exception, and the guy selling the chairs said he wouldn't go any lower.

so the old man walked, saying he was giving the guy 'time to think about it.'

when diane pointed out that the chairs would be gone before he went back, the old man said, 'that's a risk i'm willing to take.'

this was only two days after saying my back was worth a brand new chair. way to inspire confidence, chief.

time and again

we log all of our time using the magic of computers. each task we perform has a work order to apply time to. we have reports that show what everyone has been doing for a given week -- the accounting guy uses that to pay us.

however, we also have to write our hours on a pink sheet and turn it in. because, you know, how can you know someone was working if they don't write the hours? or, if they write the hours, how do you know they did anything unless every task is logged?

this is supposed to be done by 8:30 am every monday. i took a monday off once and forgot to put my time in on the previous friday. i got a wake up phone call telling me to log in and enter my time.

jim took a monday off, and no one cared that he didn't have his time in. he logged in on tuesday, of his own accord, and entered his time.

hmm...

the best way to write a software specification

i hired in as a programmer, but after a little over a year, when i became full-time, that changed. they said i would be programming half the time, and splitting the rest of my time between writing software specifications and testing. what really happened was that i started alternating between full time testing and full time spec writing.

spec writing isn't hard, but it's time-consuming if you're going to do it right. for the longest time, i was handed a rough outline and expected to flesh it out into something comprehensive. the more time i spent, the better things ended up, but they were still lacking.

i started running things by jim, my supervisor, before passing them back to the programming department. he would think of things i had missed and that would trigger more ideas on my part, and the quality skyrocketed. we decided to look into it further, see what other companies did. we knew immediately that our company would never go for it.

see, other companies get nearly everyone involved. there are programmers, testers, marketers, support people, customers and pretty much anyone else with a pulse. they spend as much time as is necessary to hammer the thing to near perfection before a single line of code is written. the time investment is worth it, though, because the cost of a single bug getting to a customer is so high that anything caught on the front side is a savings, period.

we pitched this idea to the people who mattered, and were repeatedly shot down. we were told it was inefficient. we were told that it was impossible to get the proposed group together on a regular basis (though later that day, an even bigger impromptu meeting was called ).

specs had to go on hold for a while as the testing department got overwhelmed. at some point, the tech support guy who likes to get his hands in everything (until he gets bored with it) started writing specs. they were atrocious, so jim and i stepped in and got ourselves involved.

they still wouldn't go for the meeting. they thought the ideal way to go would be for each spec to pass from person to person, each doing their part, with the end goal being an awesome spec. if someone had a question or thought something was wrong, they would pass the spec backwards so the appropriate person could make the changes. there are a total of (i think) ten steps before a programmer starts working on it.

well, we started to notice that each spec takes 10-20 hours, all told, and they still come out with huge holes in them. finally, someone said this:

'since these things are taking so long and they're still lacking in some ways, we should maybe just have a meeting after the initial designs are done.'

hahahahahaha