The Corporate Runs

Ride the Tide

Tripper was never in the mood to suffer fools, but this afternoon, his tolerance was lower than a baritone with a cold. He would have preferred to slip by his manager's office quietly, but the door to Jacob's room was wide open, propped with the foot of a guest chair. In fact, Jacob was reading e-mail at an angle that allowed him to see who was passing. Sure enough, as Tripper slunk by, Jacob started to yell, getting louder with each word.

"Tripper! Hey, Tripper! Tripper, can I see you?"

It took a moment, but the weary Tripper slouched into the doorway, his trademark cricket bat, insignia worn to the willow, slung on his shoulder. A quiet "'Sup?" with an upward tilt of his chin was all he managed to get out.

"Tripper, how are you? Nice that you could join us," Jacob announced like a late-night talk show host, only sounding less sincere.

"I need caffeine," Tripper mumbled as he tried to pry himself free from the office doorjamb.

"Hold it! Have a seat," Jacob said pointing to his visitor's couch. "I want to talk to you."

Jacob's visitor seating arrangement (aside from the chair holding the door open) was a low, yellow, garage-sale couch that had perhaps made a comfortable companion to smoked mirrors and stringy orange shag carpets in the 1970s. Since then, it had overstayed its welcome in civilized company. Tripper always assumed it was Jacob's doomed attempt at being "edgy."

As Tripper sighed and plopped himself down on the couch, Jacob pounced.

"When were you planning to check in the code for that usability feature we talked about last week?"

"Let me check my task list," Tripper said without moving a muscle. Then, "Never."

"Excuse me?" Jacob said with more than a hint of worry.

"Never. I thought about it and decided it's a lame feature. It totally insults the intelligence of the user."

"Tripper, there are downwind dependencies here. Documentation people are already writing it up, marketing is already working up the campaign. We talked about this, and you agreed it was a beneficial feature," Jacob admonished. "Usability testing ..."

"Whatever," Tripper interrupted. "Like I said, I thought about it some more. It's beneficial only for morons. If they can't figure it out, then I don't want people that stupid using this product. The rest is just noise. Scrap the docs and screw marketing." Tripper continued his lecture while jabbing his bat in the air toward Jacob. "We should be enlightening our users, not exploiting their worst qualities. Hey, look, don't take this the wrong way, but you probably won't understand this, I actually care about leaving the world better than I found it."

Jacob shut his eyes tight and scratched his head really hard.

"But your job is to leave this product better than you found it," he reasoned. "When did you become judge, jury, and usability feature executioner?" Jacob suddenly stopped scratching. With a suspicious tone, he asked, "So what exactly have you been doing the last week?"

"Actually," Tripper said waving his bat toward the door, "someone showed me that lame networking code we're using from Building 7."

Jacob prodded, "And?"

"I rewrote it."

Jacob threw his hands up and let them fall to his sides. "You've got to be kidding! Who told you to do that? I worked hard at getting us that code from Building 7. They didn't want the dependency, but I convinced them it was the best thing for the company if we reused their code!"

Tripper opened and closed his hand as if he were making a sock puppet speak. "Blah, blah, blah, their code sucks!"

"Then tell them to make it better!"

"They couldn't if they wanted to. Their code is an insult to spaghetti."

"Fine, Tripper, but yours had better be as compatible with that spaghetti as meatballs!"

"It's pretty close - and my version is over 14 times faster."

Jacob was not impressed. " 'Pretty close'? What am I supposed to do with 'pretty close,' Tripper? Am I supposed to go to Weiner and tell him we're never having that usability feature I've been selling to him for six months? That we have duplicate but incompatible code with another team - even after we promised to use their code? We're already in danger of slipping the schedule."

Tripper was firm.

"Don't blame me if you sell bogus features upstream to management, make lousy deals for lousy code dependencies, and commit the team to unreasonable ship dates!"

Ignoring the counter assault, Jacob tried to avoid full panic mode. "Tell me you haven't checked in the new code yet."

"Okay: I haven't checked in the new code yet," Tripper answered routinely. He was looking down and tapping the floor with the bat as he spoke.

"Now tell me the truth."

"Oh. The truth is that I checked it in about 4 o'clock this morning."

Jacob's eyes grew wide. His face started to glow red. Then he sighed with a large dose of resignation. "I'll call Weiner and see if he notices a 14X speed improvement. Hopefully, he won't ask too many questions about how we got it."

By the time he found the nerve to dial, he was surprised that the VP had only one question: "Wow. So which developer gave us this boost in performance?"

In the weeks that followed, events played out with a sound and fury that surprised even those used to the din of re-orgs.

A few days after the spaghetti discussion, a team from Building 12, headed by a new architect named Simon, presented technology to the CEO with the code-name "Bond." Having been invited to the presentation as a courtesy, VP Hank Weiner recognized that Bond was actually a better version of Jacob's project without Tripper's performance enhancements but including an enlightening usability feature he had been hoping Jacob would have delivered by now.

That usability feature sure does make things easier to understand, Weiner thought to himself as he watched Simon demonstrate it in Bond. He scribbled a reminder on the yellow legal pad in front of him and circled it: Jacob: Where is usability feature?!?

Shortly after the presentation broke up, Tripper got a call directly from Hank Weiner asking him to give Simon a rundown of his performance enhancements.

"What for?" Tripper asked the VP.

"I think Bond should use your code," Hank Weiner said flatly.

Jacob got wind of this and was livid. It was bad enough that "the Bond swine" were stealing his ideas and presenting to the CEO first. But worse, Hank Weiner, his own VP for heaven's sake, was sharing Tripper's performance code behind his back.

During the technology exchange, Simon and Tripper hit it off, which made Simon wonder how Tripper could get along working under those "gits" Hank Weiner and Jacob, and wasn't Tripper worried about getting "sleazy by proximity osmosis."

"I hang on the wave, do a floater," Tripper laughed, and swayed his bat as if it were a surfboard. "Ride the tide until the next wave of re-orgs crashes on the beach."

Simon was skeptical.

"I'm still washing off the slime from the last time that Hank bloke made contact with me. So thank you for the code, but you'll excuse me if I run very fast back to Building 12 and lock the door behind me."

Two days later, however, Hank Weiner announced in company-wide e-mail that Bond was now his project and that the whole Bond team, especially their "bright star, Simon," was to re-org under him. Simon was aghast at the thought of working for Weiner, and he cried on Tripper's shoulder. "This is my worst nightmare. Do you know if the shower at the gym has a 'fire hose' setting?"

"Just go to the source," Tripper suggested. "There's no way Weiner did this on his own; he must have had the CEO's approval. Use your leverage with the man."

Simon took his advice, but it was too late. By the time he made his horror known, the CEO closed the issue with, "Give the guy a chance, Simon. Besides, I can't undo a genie."

"No one mangles a metaphor like that man does," Tripper observed when Simon retold the encounter.

Jacob picked up on Simon's wriggling and drew a bit of got-what-you-deserve, back-handed satisfaction from knowing that Simon felt stung. He couldn't resist poking a thinly veiled sarcastic e-mail at Simon. When Simon forwarded the e-mail to Tripper, he added the comment "This Jacob character gives diplomacy a bad name."

"Who gives diplomacy a good name?" Tripper said in his reply.

One day after the Bond re-org was announced, Hank Weiner sent division-wide e-mail that started, "As part of our division's ever increasingly important role in the strategic future of this company ..." and gleefully ended by explaining that since Bond was "ahead on usability" and now "on par with performance," Jacob's project would be "consolidated" and Jacob and Tripper would now report to Simon to figure out their "new roles moving forward."

In fact, Jacob never reported to Simon. According to rumors that swirled around the campus for weeks, Jacob was seen literally kicking the dirt on the way to his car in the parking lot as he left the office for a "previously planned for but unannounced" sabbatical.

Meanwhile, Simon characterized the sum of these re-org hijinks as "the deal I made with the devil," a reference to the quid pro quo he had stumbled into when he accepted Tripper's code from Hank Weiner in a blind exchange for having to work under the vice president.

A week later, when much of the re-org mayhem had died down, Simon ran into Tripper's office and closed the door.

"'Sup?" Tripper said with a half a nod.

"You're not going to believe this," Simon was panting. "I just got done talking with the CEO, and he started laying into those gits in Building 7."

"Deservedly so," Tripper said. "Is he going to do anything about those goofballs? Make them do something useful, like wash my car?"

"Even better, mate. Listen to this: At first I thought he was going to ask me to take them over and I was going to politely tell him to shove that idea. But he was just looking for advice. He said that team 'couldn't get traction into solid footing,' so he wanted to know if I could recommend anyone, even at the VP level, for the job!"

"Did you even pretend to think about the answer?" Tripper asked.

Simon smiled.

"Let's just say it was the longest eight seconds of my life."