Mooo… I’m a Cow, Get It?
Today I've been working on adding more functionality to Hemlock, specifically, adding a few features to the existing objects to significantly reduce the complexity of the JSP pages that generate the XML for the data. It took the vast majority of the day as I needed to update hours of JUnit tests that had absolutely no relation to reality, but that's been one of my biggest complaints of Hemlock in the first place.
Anyway...
My manager comes by to ask me if I could adapt the real-time alert system I built for the portfolio-level data to the trader's data we also capture. I said "Sure, but it's not trivial, it'll take somewhere between two days and two weeks. Hard to say exactly how much."
"Two days?! Come on, you sure it's not one?" was his response.
"Nope, two days is a pretty minimal bet - the original implementation was weeks, and if we want it to work for portfolios and traders, and then other data streams, well... it's going to take some time." I then tried to lay out what the technical challenges were so that he'd understand them.
"OK, but if you didn't do it right, just crammed it in there - how long for that?"
At this point, I was getting a little pissed at this display. I knew what the point was - there was a new trading system that had no controls on it, and if this alert system of mine could be used to provide that feedback and control then he'd look like a Savior. Sadly, it was going to take two days.
Let's think about this... he's upset that something is going to take two days to deliver. He already knows it'll be rock-solid and work like a champ, and for this, he can't wait two days?
Yeah, right.
It was at that point I realized that he sees me not as a team member, but a piece of meat - a machine for making him look good. I only exist to make him look better in the eyes of his fellow managers in the Shop.
Amazing.
I'm a cow.