What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning is like all other mornings in the last year, and in that, it's horrible. While I like the idea of teamwork and togetherness as much as the next person, the space I currently work in is the absolute worst space I've ever worked in. Seriously, all kidding aside. This is the bottom of the barrel for working conditions for a developer.

I like the vast majority of the people I work with - which is a real plus. I think the work is, for the most part, interesting enough, and while not really good work, it's good enough, and I can live with that. Again... most of the time.

No, this morning I'm really just sick and tired of the environment I'm working in. It's not a sometimes thing, or an occaisional problem - it's a daily, constant, reminder that my management doesn't have the first clue what it takes to be a developer delivering the kind of results that they are constantly asking for.

It'd be one thing if they didn't ask for much, and then the lower-than-average productivity of this space would be offset by the lower-than-average expectations. But that's not the way it is. Nope... I get hit daily with more things to do, and even two days is too long for major functional enhancements.

The Conditions

To give you a glimpse of what The Shop really looks like, this is the main floor of the Chicago offices. We are in the middle of a move to newer space - just one building over, but the space there is a carbon-copy of this picture. The furniture is all custom-made and at least ten years old. It's falling apart in places, and cobbled together in other places, but it works, and it hold up the sea of monitors and keyboards.

and I'm in one of those long, flat desks at the bottom of the picture. Here's a different view showing me in the center flanked by my manager on the left and a teammate on the right:

I'm sitting on a 6' long, 3' deep desk with one to the left of me and one to the right. I have three other desks facing my "row", and then behind me the same thing repeats across the entire trading floor.

I don't have any privacy. I don't even sit out of the way in some alcove where no privacy might not be so bad, as it might be quieter, but I don't get that. I'm sitting right next to one of the loudest group of traders I've ever seen. I understand that it's their job - they need to yell and talk all day long. That's what they do. But to think that I need to be next to them for some reason - well... that's where I beg to disagree. As much as they need to have the noise and the walls of monitors, I need quiet.

But I'm out in the open.

Clean and clear view of the entire office.

Not a single piece of foam or wall to stop even one bit of the noise of the traders on the floor.

I found a reference to this Joel on Software article where he discusses the keys to writing better code:

The Joel Test

1. Do you use source control?
2. Can you make a build in one step?
3. Do you make daily builds?
4. Do you have a bug database?
5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule?
7. Do you have a spec?
8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
9. Do you use the best tools money can buy?
10. Do you have testers?
11. Do new candidates write code during their interview?
12. Do you do hallway usability testing?

I might expand Question 8 to read: Do programmers have the right working conditions? Because right now, I'm wearing three layers of clothes and thinking about putting on my winter coat to stay warm. Being cold, hot, uncomfortable in any way, is going to hurt productivity. But that's what I'm thinking about lately. I'm thinking about simple peace and quiet.

Giving it the Ole College Try

When I started a year ago, I had never worked on a trading floor. I had visited plenty, did little bits on the floor, but never really worked day after day on the floor. I had no idea. And primarily because I had no idea, I thought I'd give it a try. I have always liked working with the traders and I thought it might be nice.

Well... when I found out what the reality of this situation was, I was still willing to give it the ole college try. Stick with it... maybe it'll get better in the future. Maybe I'll learn to tune it out. After all, lots of other folks work in this noisy environment, why can't I?

The answer to that question was I have no idea, but I can't. This noise level means that I have to play music to tune out the distractions on the floor, but that's not really good for concentration, it's just familiar, and a little better than the constant, random noise of the floor.

What Could Have Been

In the new space, we could have moved into nice quiet space. I say could have because we're going to be down on the floor again. My manager wants to be in the thick of things. I can understand his motivation, it's understandable. But that's also because he doesn't need to have peace and quiet when he does his emails and his best gopher impression to pop up and interrupt me to ask me to do something else.

There's no solution here. I've tried to make this point time and again. I've sent links to studies, and even this morning I sent my manager the link to the article. But it's not going to help. This is how it is. If I want something different, I'm going to have to move.

Crud.

I was thinking about Bean this morning and decided to see if they had updated anything recently, and indeed they had! Bean 2.4.3 was released back in February, and includes Czech localization along with various enhancements.

Nice to see it's still getting updates. Pages and TextEdit need competition on the Mac desktop and OpenOffice.org is too generic to be a good Mac app.

I noticed this morning that JollysFastVNC 1.10 was out, and given that I might need a VNC client to get to some Windows boxes, it's the VNC client I've decided to have on hand. It's not something I've had a lot of use with, but it looks solid, and minimalistic, and that's good enough for me.

This morning I saw that ClickToFlash 1.6b8 was out with a few fixes for YouTube, so I upgraded it within the plug-in. It's very convenient. I have to say that I have really enjoyed using ClickToFlash, and don't miss all the Flash adds that used to clutter all the pages I went to. Now it's boxes, and if I want to see it, I can. But the vast majority, I don't.

Can't get any better than that.

Once again, it's Pi Day. The kids celebrated in their schools on Friday, but it was fun to remind ourselves on this Daylight Savings Time day as well, that there is more to today than just the time change.

Happy Pi Day!

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.

This morning I was reading Daring Fireball and John pointed out an alternative to the Google Finance widget - the Google Visualization AnnotatedTimeLine. The HumbleFinance widget is a nice looking alternative to the AnnotatedTimeLine, but in it's current state it's too limited to really replace the AnnotatedTimeLine in my work.

First, it allows only two datasets. Normally, this is probably just fine as in a lot of finance you may just want to see an instrument price, or one instrument against an index - but for my graphs, well... I've had to limit the data in some pages to 64 datasets. It's just a different use-case when you're looking at risk across an entire firm.

Second, there are no annotations, and that's one of the most useful pieces of my web app. I'm able to overlay external events and trade events on the data to allow the users to see why the data is behaving as it is.

I'll certainly keep an eye on this as it gets better, it might get to the point that it can unseat the AnnotatedTimeLine. Then again, with Google dropping Gears in favor of HTML5 features, maybe it won't be too long and the AnnotatedTimeLine will be in HTML5 and we can get rid of Flash for the web app.

This morning I noticed that Apple had released Safari 4.0.5 on Software Updates. It requires a reboot, which is still annoying in my book, but so it goes. In the same update we get updated HP Printer Drivers, and those don't require a reboot. Drivers? No, Browser? Yes.

Go figure.

This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev 5.0.342.3 is out and it seems to have fixed a few of my concerns about getting connected to servers, but maybe that's just my faster home connection versus the connection at The Shop. In any case, it's an improvement in something, so let's stay up to date and see if it's improved enough to be my secondary web browser.

I haven't used this guy in a while, but it's still the first graphics app I used on a Mac all those years ago and this morning GraphicConverter 6.7 was out. It's solid, has a great feature set, and reads some of the most odd-ball graphics formats I've ever heard of.