Now I’m an Embarrassed Cow – But Not Stupid
This morning a trader came up to me and pointed out that with the latest release of this ground-breaking, seminal, enterprise VB app that's the core of the business at The Shop, one of the key features was removed because Ralph, my manager, wanted to look like we were accomplishing something useful. You see, this VB app really isn't great, it's everything but that, yet it's proving to be very hard to retire primarily because (in my opinion) the strategy to retire it is horribly planned, poorly managed, and completely ineffectual.
So Ralph decided that it'd be a great idea to have as our group's plans to help retire this app. Well... this is a dodgey goal in the first place as there's no way we can do it alone, but still, doing even little things should yield impressive brownie points with the upper management. So he's all about shutting parts of this app down.
He shut one down early. Too early.
With this latest release, he had them remove an important component to this one trader. My code wasn't through Q/A yet - and probably not into production for another few days. When it does arrive, it has all the features he needs, but today, it looked like I took away the one useful component of this old VB app without giving him a replacement.
Nice.
He was kind about it, but still... I could tell... he wasn't happy. I wouldn't be. He's stuck and can't see his positions, and it's something I (seemingly) took away from him for no good reason whatsoever.
The truth of the matter is that Ralph took this away, all for the pathetic, useless, brownie points that we now have more than burned up because of this horrible miscalculation. I advised that we should have waited until everything was done and ready and then tell the VB app group to shut off this component, but Ralph wouldn't hear of it.
"Nope", he said "That'll put us back at least a month."
How incredibly short-sighted.
Thank goodness it's Friday - I'm leaving early because I just can't stand to be here. It's one thing to make me a piece of meat - I had a hand in that by being too efficient and not demanding enough. But to make these ridiculous decisions all for the sake of some lame belief that it's a Holy Mission to retire this app, and in so doing, inflicting this kind of collateral damage... well... that's just too much for me.
I'm not a stupid cow.