<< Scatterlogic Part Three

John's tale continues with...

Aspiration, Inc.

April 7, 2002

A Change in Pace

Aspiration, Inc. was a strange company by any means. When John was introduced to them by their in-house, incubated job agency, the company was described to him as a "successful, rapidly expanding, incredibly busy Systems Integrator."

At first, he actually turned the job down, as the salary increase, when tied in with the extra commuting time (plus the interesting work he was doing at Scatterlogic), did not really justify such a big change. However, the agency immediately came back with an offer of an extra £10K.

"Brilliant," thought John, "they must be really keen to get new people in there. And the extra money means that we [he and his wife] can finally have some spare money lying around. We could even buy a pet - perhaps a hamster."

So off he went, having been at Scatterlogic for an entertaining two years.

The agency told him, excitedly, that he would have to be prepared for a big change in pace, and that he would be "dropped in at the deep end, with an urgent project in mid-flow."

On his first day, however, no such project was in evidence. In fact, the vast roomful of programmers and architects were mostly sitting around murmuring conspiratorially, looking a bit bored, listlessly clicking through websites about toasters and kettles, and spreading the word (via email) about how great and life-changing MSN Messenger really is.

Desperate, bored eyeballs glanced up in silence as John walked in, studied him levelly for a few seconds, then switched sullenly back to their silently flickering screens. Dusty sunlight streamed in through the rows of bay windows, casting unbroken shadows where there should have been bustling activity.

This was a definite change in pace, but not quite what John had been expecting.

John could not help but wonder exactly what company the agency had been describing. It sure as hell wasn't this one. This initial experience was to set the tone for a company that described its current state in terms of its aspirations:

"We are great, we are different, we are world-class, we are highly successful, we are unstoppable, we are rapidly expanding, we are a cosmopolitan consultancy with blue-chip clients all over Europe."

All these self-aggrandizing descriptions would be 100% accurate, if "we are" were replaced with "we want to be".

Even "we have customers" would have been an exaggeration. In fact the only statement that was truly accurate was "we are rapidly expanding", although - just weeks after John had been virtually begged to join - a sudden freeze was put on recruitment (and therefore expansion), never to be lifted.

The Customer

Aspiration, Inc. had many chances to actually win some paid project work. Most of the time the potential customers ran away as soon as they realised how steeped in bullshit the company really was.

The closest that the company came to actually winning a customer was with a flaky, struggling dotcom startup whose flagship website was in desperate trouble. It had been stumbling on for 18 months with its in-house J2EE development team, and the resultant mess simply didn't work. The problem was that it didn't scale beyond 5 concurrent connections (I'm not kidding!) - at that point the whole server just ground to a halt, and had to be restarted.

So Aspiration set to work. They had not won the contract yet, but as part of their bidding process they decided to write the project in its entirety. Their hope was that this would not reek of desperation.

And so the allocated team set to work, having decided to replace the dotcom's failed, badly thought out and badly implemented EJB system with another EJB system, prior to gaining a full understanding of the requirements.

John watched from the sidelines with horror. As a relative "newbie" to the company, he had not been asked to get involved in this project (which he found very frustrating, as he could have completed such a system with his eyes closed). However, he was torn between the natural urge to actively make himself involved, versus the equally natural urge to steer clear of such a chaotic, inherently doomed death-march project.

If he got involved, he could attempt to instil some common sense into these people (primarily, just stop programming until you know what you're doing and why you're doing it!). He knew, however, that these pleas would fall on unappreciative ears.

Eventually the dotcom CTO caught on that Aspiration, Inc. were effectively producing his entire website and backend system for free, so he assigned five of his in-house developers to work more closely with the Aspiration team, in the Aspiration office.

And so the team proceeded to produce reams of unpaid Java/EJB work.

A month later, the dotcom customer suddenly pulled out. However, the development team was in full flow, and not wishing to stall the momentum and great feeling of "doing actual work", carried on programming for another three months until they had finished the project. Of course the customer never got to see any of this bonus work.

Try Telling a Stupid Person That They're Stupid...

Faced with his own dilemma of whether to try and get involved or not, John did gain some tacit involvement near the start of the project, in helping to define a tailored software lifecycle that could be used if/when the customer finally decided to commit to Aspiration and the project could finally get under way in a more official (i.e. paid-for) capacity.

During this stage, he also reviewed the project's so-called architecture document, which two of Aspiration's architects had quickly "bashed out" in an attempt to woo the customer with their undoubted brilliance.

John's main concern with this document was that it was utter rubbish: for example, without a clear idea of the requirements, it launched into a discussion of XSL, obviously in an attempt to impress the customer with the architects' "up-to-the-minute" knowledge of emerging technology (never mind the fact that XSL had already been around for several years). To make matters worse, the document's XSL discussion had obviously been lifted straight out of a "what is XSL?"-style web page, and did not relate in any way to the project. It simply warbled on for several pages, describing what XSL is, its origins and so on.

The rest of the document was not much better. It didn't help that, as a customer-facing document and an essential part of the "sales pitch", it was littered with spelling errors, inconsistent formatting, and sudden irrational font changes.

Concerned that this so-called architecture alone could potentially blow the whole deal (for a company that was already desperate for paid work, and absolutely could not afford to lose this valuable customer), John arranged a meeting with the two architects who had written the document. The meeting never happened though. In justifying the meeting, he explained to them that he had some issues with the architecture document, and asked if they would mind if he offered some suggestions for its improvement.

The response was one of cold, bristling denial, and a challenge of: "I can't see anything wrong with it. How exactly could it be improved?"

Surprised, John replied: "Well, err, most of it's fine, but some of it is just a bit... crap." He surprised himself with this odd mixture of tact and steamroller ethics, but the architects' "closed ranks" response had caught him genuinely off-guard. For the rest of the day, the two red-faced architects strutted around the office like petulant peacocks.

Several weeks later, the deal was lost - the reason given by the dotcom's CTO was that he was "uncomfortable" with Aspiration's technical capability.

Several months later, John learned by chance that the architects' resentment of his "meddling" was even more deep-seated, and they had been bad-mouthing him to the rest of the department - blaming anything but their own ineptitude for the loss of such an important deal.

Upon further enquiry, John also learned that their prolonged anger with his momentary criticism was not because they felt the criticism was unjustified (that was not an issue, they knew full well that the architecture document was crap), but that John, as a relative "outsider" to the project, had dared to stick his nose in and offer to help improve their work.

Comments such as "Just 'oo does 'ee think 'ee is??" and "I bet he couldn't do any better!" were doubtless batted back and forth across the water cooler.

>>> Next Chapter: Aspiration, Inc. Part Two

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