Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

so, today, i had to go to work to attend a technology summit sponsored by the company’s CIO — chief information officer. i was psyched because our extremely cheap company tends not to spend a lot of money on our development, so when they fronted the cash for this — a lousy $500 plus lunch for 35 — I was on it. :)

plus, a noted web standards and usability guru was going to be speaking, among other cool people.

it was a long ass day. we sat in the gorgeous training facility with state of the art technology, that hardly any of us peons ever get treated to. why? no idea. they built this gorgeous place and then we hardly ever get to actually use it. there was an hour long presentation, delivered by webinar technology, projected on three screens for our viewing pleasure — and confusion, as I sometimes looking to one of the other screens thinking I’d find something else.

but really it was all just a massive powerpoint. the way this webinar technology worked, they weren’t able to show you the face of the trainer *while* you actually got to see their freakin’ slideshow. i am sooooooooo over slideshows. i currently have a poster i bought for my cube, by this famous information designer, Edward Tufte. It’s called the “Cognitive Style of Powerpoint” which Tufte likens to Stalinism. ha.

one of the things with these webinars is that they usually have a little chat sidebar to the right where people can ask questions. True to form, though, while some people asked questions and provided feedback (like “Yes, I can hear you fine” when an instructor asked if their mic was working), a bunch of the others just used it to shoot virtual spitballs at each other, flirt, gossip, and whisper in ascii while the trainer trained away.

*rolls eyes*

you know, it was almost like watching a rolling feed of a facebook convo, or a twitter convo. short snippets of smart ass remarks.

then this one presenter was up, Zoe. some idiot decided to let everyone know he thought Zoe was hawt hawt sizzle hawt. This was followed by affirmations and a bunch of stupid guffaws. then, the guy who appeared to be the moderator said something about how people ought to keep it on topic.

that sent out major “I am Alpha Male” signals and it was all over but the crying. Another male responds by going after alpha male. the moderator then pointed out that he had a “banHammer” (so geekly, huh? camelcase it. christ). The beta male challenger said something stupid like how the moderator hit people with a banHammer but he had a banana to hit people with. This prompted the moderator to say something stupid back.

*rolls eyes*

to which another guy gets even more obnoxious because, well, ain’t no alpha male going to sit in the treebranch, being challenged by a beta, without jumping in and giving it to both the alpha male and the other beta male.

chimpanzees, monkeys, gorillas and orangutans o my.

meanwhile, as people are making comments about the trainer’s hawtness, and the buoyz are having a circle jerk with, oh yes, the hawt hawt hawt woman as pivot babe, some of the women in the chat sidebar started typing “lol” and “ha! ha!” One woman even started dropping stupid emoticons like >_<, o^0, ~o^o~, and other dimbulb crap like that.

I wrote in my notes, totally bored by the content of the conference, reminding myself to tell R about what shitastic wipes these people had been. sure, the guy I was sitting with, we exchanged little notes and made comments to one another throughout, like "geez, I wish the designers were here. they need to understand fluid designs more than *we* do." Or, we'd snicker and roll our eyes when someone said something that totally resonated with our experiences, or that indicated we weren't the only ones dealing with uckfupped management. Ys, I admit it, I was sometimes bored and nudged my buddy next to me and made little facebook style commentary in a whisper.

but these people just kept it up, right out in the open, for all to read.

jeez, with it all splayed out there in the chat sidebar, everyone's ids totally protrate and spread eagle, I was kind of disgusted.

I mean, why the hell is it that a woman can't get up there and be wicked knowledgeable, a recognized expert with a boatload of experience to share, without having to have some assholes in the audience publicly going on about her hawtness? and then the display of alpha male-beta male contestation, further turning her into a pivot babe for their circle jerk, the endless traffic in women, where the exchange between men must always take place with a woman-as-thing between them. she's reduced to their double dildo. As such, she legitmizes their mutual assfucking sans lube.

why this leads me to mention two things that drive me batty, i don't know. but here it is: it won't be too soon when the word "utilize" disappear from the english language. Moreover, it won't be too soon when I never ever again hear the phrase, "moving forward."

just fuck me dead already.

speaking of, for some reason, i decided to hit up the company library and ran across project management books. so i checked one out. reading it reminded me what bunch of horse shit it appears to be. it's as if some honor students spent his or her career struttin' around with his or her big britches on, trying to show everyone what a big person s/he is. The goal seems to be to prove that project management is, like, totally a real, evidence-based, empirically-oriented science -- at the very least, like some really important type of *engineering*.

or something.

all these charts and graphs. this objectivating and objectivizing language of inputs and outputs, and lots of stupid ass measurement devices that mask the fact that it is *all* total guesses in the fucking dark.

and you know why i think that? in a fit of pique, after the ten bizillionth time I and my developers were interrupted to go work on some drop dead important project, and knowing that, for some stupid ass reason, the web director gets confused and wonders why we aren't getting thigns done as quickly as he wants, because he fucking forgot that, 9 times that week, he asked us to stop all development to work on some stupid drop dead problem, or some pet project from the Bad Idea Zombie zone, usually soled manned by the VP of the division, I swear to dawg. (for more on bad idea zombies, check it: http://blog.tenablesecurity.com/2009/03/ranums-rants-the-anatomy-of-security-disasters.html )

so, i came up with this tool. it would list the entire project backlog, each miniscule deliverable, with convenient places to click to start time and stop time and indicate why you had to stop by selecting from any number of typical stupid ass shit that we are often asked to stop for.

then, i said, we would have a really clear idea how long it takes to build a typical form or navigation element or what have you. then, more, we'd have a ratio of time it take to build something :: time spent working on other, non-related zombie stuff. and then we'd know exactly why we didn't get projects done as quickly: because the very boss complaining is the same one who yanks us off projects.

but no one wanted that tool, which would have pinned down some numbers for sure.

and because of their systematic hostility to my idea, I concluded that they all love the *appearance* of science, empirical evidence, charts, and graphics and numbers and statitics and ratios and measures and metrics and kachings and kachangs.

why would they not want something that would make it more measurable, more metrics, more numbers, more charts, graphs, and scatterplots. why not the aura of practically, science, evidence, hard numbers, etc?

because it would have exposed truth and they didn't want that. because it might mean that the answers aren't so simple.

meanwhile, a cool thing happened today. The CIO, who I hadn't met yet, but had seen at some after work get together, an initiative sponsored by our new COO. CIO stopped me out in the lobby and said, "Are you shag?"

I turned around thinking, "was it my ass that gave me away?" ha

I said, "Oh, hello Jo! Hello!" and strode over to shake his hand and tell him that I'd been at his gathering but never found an opportunity to go over, introduce myself and R.

We chit chatted for awhile and I regaled him with the tales of my accidental tourism in IT, how it was never meant to be, how I was doing something totally unrelated, but there I was, finding myself caught up in the wave. I mentioned something about learning on a Unix terminal and he said, "You didn't have a stack of pucnch cards"

Oh no, said I. In fact, I am not even going to bullshit you and tell you I had a trash-80. 3o year olds like to tell you they had a trash-80 which is usually so much horse shit. So no, no trash 80 for me. Just that darn unix terminal which I happily walked away from the next year when Microsoft and Apple took over, especially Microsoft and the knock of IBM pcs that became cheaper and cheaper by the year.

one thing led to another and he asked if i'd want to head up some sort of UI inititative across all the businesses within this larger company.

Oooo Oooo. I was like ARnold Horshak. Pick me Mr. Kotter. Pick me! and the typical over enthusiastic, over, uh, intense me was there, going on about my plans for this and that, and how, if I had the reigns, I would implement this project and that program and get this initiative started and still another over there. I am such an ass, going on like that.

I realized I had to get back to the conference, so I said, "Here, let me give you my card. Email me next week and let's get together."

I was especially thrilled because he basically said that he was going to see to it that my bosses were going to be happy with this new role. Which is saying something because what he was saying was that I was going to be actually allowed to do this stuff as part of my work day, not an add on to it.

awesome.

So, I'm looking for my card case and he says, "No worries. you're all over the place."

I said, "I am? really? how is that? I've been trying to be really low profile." (I was being a smart ass of sorts, but yeah, I was a little puzzled how I might be well known in this company when it seems to me that I'm mostly just toiling away obscurely and quite fine with that. I mean, i don't mind being in the spotlight, it's just that it's not likely to happen in a company like this, which is totally silo'd -- a bunch of smaller businesses within this large hulking structure. One business doesn't interact with the others very often. The graphics people, the web developers, the product developers, the DBAs, etc for one business all work together and have no reason to interact with the same types of employees who work for another business altogether.

So, yeah, why anyone like him, who I don't even think is in a chain of command over anyone for whom I work, would actually know who the hell I am. And yet there he was, asking my ass if I was "shag", looking for me for some reason, and apparently doing so because, with any luck, he wants me to take on a project that will mean that I wno't be nearly as bored as I am now.

I mean, I've got plenty to do, and easily find things I can do, but the challenge of UI, well it's not much there given that we are over the major structural developments and now it's all tweaking. So, boring boring boring. Which means my focus has to be on other things, unless I want to be bored to death. So, i work on getting better documentation systems going, or work on developing skills-- but without anything to ever practice on really.

So, if any of this pans out, and its not all just pie in the sky talk, this should be kind of fun! a productive challenge, rather than the stress inducing nightmare of the lead developer role lately.

ha! i had to laugh. I'd always wondered exactly what a lead developer is. i googled it once, but didn't find much. i wasn't sure, when they gave me the title, exactly what i was supposed to do. i knew what i'd done in other jobs, but ... we never had names for any of it. i have been project manager, lead developer, production manager, team lead, product developer, business analyst, technical lead, software analyst. you name it. I just never knew what it was -- except for concrete things like web developer or ui developer or web master.

poking around on Teh Goog (tm), I read this:

One of the characteristics of a development lead is their ability to create their own tools when no tools exist to solve their problem. Their toolbox may be much like a junk drawer in that you never know exactly what will be in it. You can, however, almost always guarantee at least a few of the tools will be their own unique creations.

ha! that is so true. I am so glad to learn that what I have been doing, winging it making up the tools for what I need as I go along, is exactly what other people end up doing too!

here’s where the article was: http://www.developer.com/java/other/article.php/3507886