Disaster? Or Training Opportunity?

Joe had a project for me. Requirements in the program had gone off the rails (not that anyone was admitting that yet), and management was clamoring for him to come up with some solutions. So he threw a nebulous ball of problems at me "Go solve the security problem. All of our applications need to use the same security system."

The thing I learned about Joe from watching was that Joe was a nice guy, he just didn't know how to act. Brought up in a blue-collar family, his idea was that he had to "crack the whip" to keep the workers moving along. Idle minds and all that.

So I took the problem and dove into the project. the more I got involved, the more I realized that since requirements for the main program were still undefined, there was no way I could get enough information to build a traditional security system. I thought we would go rules-based instead, to allow for maximum flexibility. This would have worked fine, except the people who were architecting the main system did not want a rules-based system. This caused me several weeks of delay while I tried to negotiate a solution that would make everyone happy.

Joe was not pleased. He had me in his office one day, and started drilling on why the project was late. So I told him: stupid BS from the other developers was keeping me from finishing. Joe kind of perked up (I guess he had a new target), I left and that was that.

A few weeks later I delivered the system, under schedule and under budget, and we sat down with Joe again to see how he liked it. He was not happy. This was off, and this didn't work. So the team carefully walked him through each feature, how he requested it, and what the impact was. At the end of the meeting, he was congratulating us for doing such a great job. He was very pleased.

I checked around with the other groups and managers. Everyone thought I had done a bang-up job. Except Joe. When you first asked him. If you spoke with him for a while, he'd say so too. It was a strange thing.

When I left the group a few weeks later, I had the chance to sit down with Joe for a going away talk. "Joe," I said, "I appreciate your letting me work here. It has been a real honor. But I almost left when you yelled at me a couple of months ago."

"I know Dan," Joe admitted, "I'm sorry. Things weren't going so well and I didn't know what else to do."

I think Joe admitted a lot in that one statement. He didn't know what to do, and the negative response was getting him the results he wanted: people moved quicker, people said nicer things to him, he got better reports.

Many a time I've seen somebody's ego take over a technical project. It's never led to a happy ending. A year after I left, they canceled the project. There hadn't been a lot delivered for the millions they had spent.

I emailed Joe and asked him how my code was doing. He was full of complaints: system ran too slow, everything was over deadline. I offered to work for free to fix any problems that I might have caused. He never responded.

Joe was in over his head, and didn't know what to do. He was a nice guy, and it was a great training opportunity. Obviously somebody in the executive suite took a liking to Joe to put him in a position of such power. If only they had taken the time to mentor him a bit as well, they could have saved their company a lot of money. And Joe would have enjoyed himself a lot better too.