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.
------------------------
** 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.
.
Showing posts with label ignored. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ignored. Show all posts
Monday, August 25, 2008
Friday, August 22, 2008
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.
.
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.
.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
#612 Kitchen Is, uh, Usable, Sorta
I worked most of today on clearing out the kitchen. I won't have enough counter space for making cookies for a while yet, but at least I can move around in there and get the lower cabinets open now. And I cleaned a bit.
I spent several hours removing hard water deposits from the laundry room john. They must have changed CLR, made it weaker or something. It used to work, but I finally had to resort to draining the bowl and filling it with vinegar, and then scrubbing with a stiff brush.
The rolloff is so full I don't think I'll be able to fit the dead dehumdifiers in. They require special handing because of the freon, so I was supposed to put them on top. But I'm afraid now they will stick up past the fill-line. Next load, I guess.
-------------------------------------
The friend who is setting up the charitable endowment in my name is driving me crazy. She has decided that she wants the payments from the investment to go to "program", not "administration". I explained to her that if she gives $1000 restricted to programs, and someone else gives $1000 unrestricted, and if the administrative costs are 20%, then they will just use $400 of the unrestricted funds for the admin costs, so restricting the money doesn't accomplish anything. She says she understands, and that she agrees, and then five minutes later she's going on again about how difficult it is to restrict the money.
Then she complains that the charity I chose, Heifer International, has unusually high admin costs. I point out (over and over) that low admin cost can be simply creative bookkeeping, and that you can't compare admin costs without knowing what is included. Heifer does a lot of research to find the most effective locations for the programs, so is that considered "program" or "administration"? She says she understands and agrees, and then five minutes later she's complaining because Heifer's admin costs are so high. I got so angry with her this evening I told her to forget Heifer and send it to Doctors Without Borders. (DWB was my second choice only because they already get a lot of contributions.)
There were a lot of other points that we disagreed on, and I explained, and she agreed, then she went right back to as if she never heard me. She really ticked me off this evening. The kicker is that she keeps saying, in reference to restricting the money, "Well, I want to make sure that the money goes for what you and I both want", and I keep saying, "**I** don't want it restricted! I explained that to you. It's your money, and if you want to restrict it, fine. But it doesn't matter to me!"
You can be in the middle of a sentence, and she will interrupt or talk right over you. The woman doesn't listen. A long time ago, she was my fifth-level manager. Yikes! This evening I was so annoyed that when she interrupted and talked over me, I just got louder and kept right on talking.
I had to fake another call to get off the phone. By then I was shouting, and I was afraid of where it was headed.
I want to tell her to forget it. Leave me out of it. Most of her money will end up going to charity anyway, and I don't see why having my name on it has any meaning worth all this annoyance. But I don't want to hurt her feelings.
I spent several hours removing hard water deposits from the laundry room john. They must have changed CLR, made it weaker or something. It used to work, but I finally had to resort to draining the bowl and filling it with vinegar, and then scrubbing with a stiff brush.
The rolloff is so full I don't think I'll be able to fit the dead dehumdifiers in. They require special handing because of the freon, so I was supposed to put them on top. But I'm afraid now they will stick up past the fill-line. Next load, I guess.
-------------------------------------
The friend who is setting up the charitable endowment in my name is driving me crazy. She has decided that she wants the payments from the investment to go to "program", not "administration". I explained to her that if she gives $1000 restricted to programs, and someone else gives $1000 unrestricted, and if the administrative costs are 20%, then they will just use $400 of the unrestricted funds for the admin costs, so restricting the money doesn't accomplish anything. She says she understands, and that she agrees, and then five minutes later she's going on again about how difficult it is to restrict the money.
Then she complains that the charity I chose, Heifer International, has unusually high admin costs. I point out (over and over) that low admin cost can be simply creative bookkeeping, and that you can't compare admin costs without knowing what is included. Heifer does a lot of research to find the most effective locations for the programs, so is that considered "program" or "administration"? She says she understands and agrees, and then five minutes later she's complaining because Heifer's admin costs are so high. I got so angry with her this evening I told her to forget Heifer and send it to Doctors Without Borders. (DWB was my second choice only because they already get a lot of contributions.)
There were a lot of other points that we disagreed on, and I explained, and she agreed, then she went right back to as if she never heard me. She really ticked me off this evening. The kicker is that she keeps saying, in reference to restricting the money, "Well, I want to make sure that the money goes for what you and I both want", and I keep saying, "**I** don't want it restricted! I explained that to you. It's your money, and if you want to restrict it, fine. But it doesn't matter to me!"
You can be in the middle of a sentence, and she will interrupt or talk right over you. The woman doesn't listen. A long time ago, she was my fifth-level manager. Yikes! This evening I was so annoyed that when she interrupted and talked over me, I just got louder and kept right on talking.
I had to fake another call to get off the phone. By then I was shouting, and I was afraid of where it was headed.
I want to tell her to forget it. Leave me out of it. Most of her money will end up going to charity anyway, and I don't see why having my name on it has any meaning worth all this annoyance. But I don't want to hurt her feelings.
Monday, March 13, 2006
#601 Pity Post
Monday, March 13, 2006
Marge Simpson: We can't afford to shop at any store that has a philosophy.
----------------------------------------------------
You know, one of the things that happens to me over and over, and always distresses me, is that my accomplishments get ignored. Over and over at work, people got awards for things I had done to no acclaim the month before. One summer at work I turned in over $3,700,000 in cost effectiveness achievements, the most they had ever received in one year from one person ever. Six months later, they started a "Millionaires Club" for anyone who did a million or over, with awards and bulletin board recognition. They didn't make it retroactive. I was never mentioned. No one ever knew. (I didn't even know until then that over a million was something special.) Stuff like that happens to me all the time.
So I went to the spa last Friday, and there's a board, "Congratulations!" to the following members, who had lost 2" or more over the past month. I lost 4". I wasn't on the board. And I'm a lot smaller than anyone else, so it's proportionately an even greater accomplishment. Left out and forgotten again.
It didn't surprise me. Sometimes I feel invisible.
-----------------------------------------------------------
The man came early today to clean the furnace, so that's out of the way for another year. While he was here I took the torn tire off the garden cart. If I take it to the tire store in Rhinebeck, they can order a new one for me. I really want to use that cart to get stuff up the hill from the basement to the dumpster, but I'm afraid I won't get the new tire in time. All I can do is try....
Marge Simpson: We can't afford to shop at any store that has a philosophy.
----------------------------------------------------
You know, one of the things that happens to me over and over, and always distresses me, is that my accomplishments get ignored. Over and over at work, people got awards for things I had done to no acclaim the month before. One summer at work I turned in over $3,700,000 in cost effectiveness achievements, the most they had ever received in one year from one person ever. Six months later, they started a "Millionaires Club" for anyone who did a million or over, with awards and bulletin board recognition. They didn't make it retroactive. I was never mentioned. No one ever knew. (I didn't even know until then that over a million was something special.) Stuff like that happens to me all the time.
So I went to the spa last Friday, and there's a board, "Congratulations!" to the following members, who had lost 2" or more over the past month. I lost 4". I wasn't on the board. And I'm a lot smaller than anyone else, so it's proportionately an even greater accomplishment. Left out and forgotten again.
It didn't surprise me. Sometimes I feel invisible.
-----------------------------------------------------------
The man came early today to clean the furnace, so that's out of the way for another year. While he was here I took the torn tire off the garden cart. If I take it to the tire store in Rhinebeck, they can order a new one for me. I really want to use that cart to get stuff up the hill from the basement to the dumpster, but I'm afraid I won't get the new tire in time. All I can do is try....
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