Monday, August 25, 2008
[Continued from Part 1] So the battle is on.
The problem of externals exposure existed not only in the particular product that had been copied, but throughout The Company's products.
A group was pulled together in White Plains to act as the coordinators and first level interface between the legal eagles and the software labs. They did most of the prep work for the attorneys. Four "Litigation Labs" were set up, northeast (us), southeast, west coast, and the other side of the world. Our jobs were many.
We received code from the competitor, and tore it apart to identify the copied portions. That, actually, was the reason for the high building security. We reviewed every manual for every product, to identify exposed internals and direct the publication departments in removing those references. We reviewed all new design documents to ensure that proper user exits were provided, and no new internals were exposed. We translated "legalese" into terms the lab programmers and design folks could understand, and translated lab concerns into terms the attorneys could understand. We educated pubs people and programmers in the whys and wherefores of the new rules. We had final approval on all new releases, and were very strict - schedules be damned. (I was finally in my element!)
I, personally, had responsibility for compliance of 35 products in 5 programming labs: 3 large operating systems and 32 major applications.
Now, the saying is that if you have a hammer for a tool, everything looks like a nail. The first claim of the competitors was that it was the manuals, the publications, that exposed the internals. So when corporate set up the departments to contain and correct the problem, they recruited pubs people. That whole top layer in White Plains were pubs people. They wanted the manuals cleaned up. All presentations and lab education was aimed toward what should be documented, and what should not. We in the Litigation Labs were not allowed to put together our own presentations or classes - we had to use foils developed by them and approved by the attorneys. At first, the only people we were to work with were the pubs people.
Fine. I agree we had to start sensitizing the publications departments. BUT - the folks in White Plains seemed to think that when the pubs were clean, the job was done.
I was shocked. The problem was not simply in the publications, it was in the design! Internal control blocks were exposed to the customer because no other means for debugging or plugging in had been provided. A few of us in our litigation lab had come from programming and design, and I was able to convince them that unless the design area in particular was sensitized to the issue, the concept of "black box", they were going to continue to design transparent functions. This would put the pubs people in a tough spot - design is going to continue to hand them transparent customer interfaces, which the pubs people would then not be allowed to document.
We HAD to get to design, too.
Well, surprise. Everyone who had come from design understood the problem, but none of them were willing to take it on as an issue. Do the assigned job and get out.
I fought it, all the way. Eventually everyone in White Plains also understood that the problem was larger than initially thought. We still had customers out there plugging right into the code. We had to identify them, and provide proper exits, otherwise we were still exposed to the argument that all that code was an external interface. We had to teach the design departments to provide proper "plugs", and hide everything else.
Everybody understood, that is, but Sue. Sue was one of those people who somehow found herself in rarefied air, and knew deep down that she didn't belong there. She seemed to be deathly afraid of being found out. She constantly "ran scared", freaked out daily. I heard, but don't know as a fact, that her previous department wanted to get rid of her, but she wouldn't accept transfers, so when White Plains was looking for pubs people, they figured that was one job she wouldn't turn down. I also heard, but don't know for fact, that she was hired in because she was Asian, and they needed someone who could read Japanese, and then after she got there, they discovered she could neither read nor speak Japanese. It could be both.
Sue was, of course, my interface in White Plains. I'm lucky that way. She was a complete ass. I had called a meeting with design in Endicott one time, and she decided to attend. The topic was the design for some function whereby they required that the customer know how certain algorithms worked and what bits were set in certain control blocks in order to use the function. This was an obvious violation. I was sitting down with the designers to explain what was wrong with it, and to figure out with them how we could redesign the function so that the internal operation would be hidden. All it required was a front-end, and we were talking about what the front-end could expose.
Well, Sue objected. She insisted that the design was fine as is. All they had to do was NOT document the customer interface. "Just don't say this, and don't say that...." She didn't understand that that would make it completely unusable, and force the customer to reverse engineer the code to use it, which is the worst scenario imaginable.
Because her desk was in White Plains, she decided she outranked me (she didn't), and she thought this meant she could interrupt me and "correct" me at will.
In short, I finally lost it. She and I ended up both standing on opposite sides of the conference room table, leaning on the table with our faces about a foot apart, screaming at each other. The lead designer called a break, and during the break, he said that I'm right, anyone can see that, and, um, how 'bout we end the meeting now, and resume in two hours without telling Sue. Which we did.
I spent four years fighting with her. My coworkers had occasional dealings with her, and they asked me how I could stand it.
In the third year, my manager put me in for promotion. It had to be approved by the director. The director asked the person in White Plains who worked most closely with me whether I deserved promotion. Of course, Sue said no.
In the fourth year, my manager put me in for promotion. It had to be approved by the director. The director asked the person in White Plains who worked most closely with me whether I deserved promotion. Of course, Sue said no. (Sue wasn't getting promotions either. Had I been promoted, I'd have been a higher grade than she.)
And then The Company, who under previous CEOs rarely fired anyone - they'd shift people around until they found the right spot - warned the world that there would be major cuts in personnel. "RIF"s. Reduction in force. The Mid-Hudson Valley was going to lose several thousand jobs. Transfer somewhere else now, or die.
They offered packages to people who were willing to quit or retire. The "easy out" retirement package included lifetime medical, and five years added to your time, and a very healthy severance check (for me, it was a year's salary), and assistance finding another job. If you didn't volunteer and were RIF'd, you got next to nothing. Just fired.
Our litigation lab headcount was under White Plains, not the Mid-Hudson valley labs, so no one in our group was going to lose a job (although I understand two people were strongly advised to take the offer since it would probably be the best they'd ever see). However, since our payroll paperwork was handled in Poughkeepsie, we were eligible for the package anyway. The cuts would be announced on April 1, 1993. Jay and I were planning to get married, so we waited until the end of the day on April 1. If he was RIF'd, I'd keep my job. If he still had a job, I'd volunteer for the retirement package.
More than nine thousand local people lost their jobs that day, but Jay wasn't one of them.** On April 2, I went in to my manager, and told him I was taking the easy out, and he freaked. Six of the ten** in the department planned to take it, including him. He said that he was afraid that if Martha and I left, they wouldn't let him leave.
We all kind of figured that the spotlight was going to turn on headquarters sometime, and since we were under their headcount, we'd all be sacrificed before any of them, and there'd never again be a package as good as this one.
And that's why and when I left the company. In constantly pissing off Sue, I broke rule #10.
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** The next year, 1994, they did it again - RIF'd a few thousand more people, including Jay and the remainder of the Litigation Lab. From April 1993 to April 1994, about 13,000 local folks were out of work. The real estate market tanked. Job losses rippled throughout the surrounding communities. Thirteen thousand computer professionals were turned loose on a depressed job market, and even if they did manage to find another job, they couldn't sell their house to move.
The second severance package was much much MUCH less attractive. I did really well taking the first one when I did.
Remember Peter, from Visibility Part 4? Uh huh. And Sue? Disappeared. I don't feel at all guilty gloating. For once, I got something good at the right time.
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