1967 Visibility, Part 4 - Peter and the foils

Friday, August 22, 2008

The Company had two big-iron operating systems that were very similar, the older one supported in Endicott, NY, and the newer, which took advantage of newer hardware technology, in Kingston, NY. The Company decided to combine them on a base generated from the newer system, and to "transition" all customers to the new combined system. (Partly because they wanted to retire the old hardware.)

It was a major effort. Functions that existed on one system and not the other would have to be combined on the new system, so there were a lot of new line items.

Externals - messages, responses, return codes, command syntax, etc. - would be hit hard. Although I owned the externals, another design department was in charge of identifying what would have to be done, writing the specs, making the projections, planning, etc. There was a team of five, with Peter C. as the team leader.

I went to Peter, and asked what it looked like so far. He confessed that he had no idea how big it was. He was looking at just comparison of text of commands and messages. I pointed out that there are differences in function, too. The same command didn't necessarily work the same on both systems, because they are based on different hardware, and that there are user applications that capture return codes and responses "under the covers" and perform different actions based on those return codes.

He turned green. He didn't know where to start.

The problem interested me. On my own time, I wrote a super-generator that allowed me to execute every variation of every command in both systems, and then it automatically compared the results. It was a super-human effort. In total, going after all options on all commands, and all responses, messages, and return codes, there were over 30,000 variations. Then I obtained some examples of user applications, and scanned them to identify which externals were heavily used, and which had less impact. Major, major effort. No sleep for weeks.

When I had the results, I asked Peter to call a meeting of his team, where I presented foils of my results, identifying all differences between the systems, sorted as to impact, including a recommendation as to which were mainly used by the old-system applications, and which the new, plus an estimate of the man-hours required to consolidate and test them. Peter's manager attended the presentation.

A few months later, Peter got a HUGE monetary award, one of those corporate-level things, PLUS a huge promotion, for his work in identifying and prioritizing the external differences.

It turns out that he had made presentations to the management chain, all the way up to the product owner level.

Although none of us "grunts" had been invited to, or even knew about, the presentations, my friend Edith had somehow seen a copy of his foils. She came to me and asked if I had seen them. I said no, why. She said I should ask Peter for a copy. That's all she said.

I asked him, and he kept putting me off. He'd get them. He'd make a copy. It was a long time ago, he didn't have it anymore. So I found me someone, a manager, who had been at one of the meetings, and whom I was able to bamboozle into locating a copy for me.

It was my foils. Exactly. My name had been removed and replaced by his, and my name was not mentioned anywhere as so much as a contributor. Not a whisper.

I immediately marched straight over to Peter's office. I stood in his doorway until he looked up and noticed me, and I said, "You don't have to keep looking for those foils for me. I got a copy." He turned white and actually literally shook. "They're very interesting," I said, and I turned around and left.

I was furious. Not simply at what Peter had done, but his manager had been at the meeting where I had presented those foils, and she had to have known what Peter had done. His team and department knew what he had done. Within days of the award announcement, most of the several hundred people working on the operating system knew what he had done. Edith was the only person who actually said anything to me. Everybody else just looked at me funny.

That was MY work, and should have been MY award, MY acclaim, MY promotion, and everyone knew it.

I waited a while to see if he would confess. He didn't. I knew there would be no benefit to me in raising a stink. But for the next year and a half, every time he saw me in the hall, or in a conference room, he shook. He couldn't follow a thought if I was around. He stuttered. He dropped things.

Me? I smiled at him. I was pleasant. I looked him straight in the eye, as his eyes shifted off. And because I owned those externals, I had a natural interest in the activities of his team, so I made it a point to attend every meeting he called, every presentation he gave, for the rest of my time in that lab.

You know, it would not have occurred to me to have taken the presentation up the line. It wasn't necessary. No management approval was necessary to act on that material. They didn't even need to know about it, and I'd have seen it as wasting their time. There was no other reason for Peter to do those presentations except to draw attention to what a wonderful job he'd done. Too bad he didn't do it. I did. And it wasn't even my job - it was his job, but he was incapable. Of everything but taking the credit, I guess.

Heh heh - he lives near me. Twenty years later I still run into him in the pharmacy or grocery store, and he still quakes when he sees me, and I am still pleasant. I'm almost (but not fully) content with that. He knows what he did and he's suffering his own hell.

------------------------------------

Phooey - I'm gonna put his name here. It's all true, and I've got witnesses who will back me up so I can't get in trouble for it. Hi, Peter Chenevert! Yeah, I'm still pissed.
.