And that’s really saying quite a bit. It started in the middle of my second most stupid programming project, but there were two of those separated by 10 years of other jobs, so I suppose that in itself it will require a bit of explanation.

The Second Most Foolish Project Part – 1
Way back when I was an analyst for ‘The Lab’ one of the projects I was working on was the ‘Front Office Accounting Project.’ This was some sort of programming, to help out in some way with double extra secret financial matters that may have been for the company, or may have been for the personal finances of the company’s owner. The company’s Comptroller was very blunt in informing all of the computer geeks that we didn’t have the necessary security clearances for him to reveal even the name of the project to us. In addition we were all apparently so untrustworthy that we wouldn’t be allowed to see any of the numbers involved in the project, or the names of the categories which contained the numbers. There was a long, and rather uncomfortable silence after which the lead programmer asked, “How are we going to know if the programs are adding up the numbers correctly if we’re not allowed to see the numbers, or even know the names of what the numbers represent????

This was followed by a brief, but exceptionally loud and unpleasant interlude in which the Comptroller explained to all the programmers present just how unimportant we were in the great corporate scheme of life, and that he was the chief financial officer in the company, and how we would all do what we were told, and he would input the numbers himself in the double extra secret Comptrollers only financial room, and then he would tell us if the numbers added up correctly.

When the lead programmer asked how the Comptroller would then know if the numbers were correct he informed us that every month after he ran the program to add up the numbers he would then get out his pocket calculator and manually add up those same numbers just to make sure that the program was doing it correctly. The lead programmer then made the mistake of asking, “Why are we bothering to write a program to add up numbers that only you can see, if you’re going to be adding up those numbers manually every month anyway???? This was followed by longer and even louder interlude in which the Comptroller explained how our significance within the company had sunk to even less than it was at the beginning of the meeting. So once that was done and we were all sufficiently chastened and demoralized we shuffled out of his office to start work on the project.

Over the next six months the Comptroller was fixated on this programming project. Well, actually he was concentrating on two projects. The first was making sure that his retired father was finally hired as the manager of the warehouse, but his second most important project was to harass us about our slow progress on writing programs to add up numbers the source of which and the nature of which we were never allowed to know. Once or twice a week he’d come down to the Data Processing Department and we’d have esoteric meetings with conversations like;

Comptroller
OK, this report looks pretty good, but the number in column 1 is wrong.

Lead Programmer
Wrong?

Comptroller
Yes, it’s wrong. You need to fix it.

Lead Programmer
It’s wrong. How?

Comptroller
Umm….

Lead Programmer
Is it too small? Is it too big?

Comptroller
Yes, it’s too big.

Lead Programmer
But it’s only a Buck 25. How can that be too big? Is it supposed to be a negative number?

Comptroller
Well, yes.

Lead Programmer
Oh, so then this is a payables column?

Comptroller
Ah… I’m not allowed to tell you that, but I think that you get the idea. I’ll come back tomorrow and by then you can have the program getting closer to what I want.

By the time I left the lab the project still hadn’t been completed, but the Comptroller acknowledged that he was ‘really happy’ with the progress that had been made. A few years later I had drinks with the Lead Programmer and he admitted that the way he’d fixed the problem with column #1 was to have the program make sure that the result was always a negative number. If the result was –43.18 then do nothing. If the result was 45.10, then multiply by –1 and print out –45.10. This seemed to make the comptroller happy, although no one understood how the nonsense totals produced by the program could ever match up with the numbers that the Comptroller manually totaled up every month. Unless he was so happy with the program that he stopped making manual calculations and now depended entirely upon the nonsense numbers that we were generating for him.

The Second Most Foolish Project – Part II
So round about 10 years later I was working at a catalog sales company. Actually, it was probably the largest, worst run mail order firm in America and thus the know universe. I was in the middle of writing a program to make some sort of moderately nonsensical calculations, I think that it was supposed to compare warehouse square footage to customer’s zip code, when my supervisor and the company comptroller came into my office. It seemed that the Vice President of Accounting had an extra special programming project, and he was very angry that no one in I.T. would volunteer to take it on. They explained at great length how much political clout this V.P. had within the company, and how they were just going to have to do something, programming-wise, but that they didn’t know what to do. It seems that this project was highly sensitive, dealt with enormous dollar amounts, may have been calculations based upon the company owner’s personal wealth, or designed to make long term strategic projections, but they didn’t know, because no one was allowed to actually look at the numbers.

I told them that this all sounded pretty familiar to me, and that I’d worked on a project exactly like this in the past. They both became very concerned, because how could I have worked on a project just like this, when I didn’t have a security clearance to know what the project was about, or to even see any of the numbers involved. I then described the Double Extra Secret Project that I’d worked on at the lab, and they agreed that it sounded very similar. I reminded them that we’d never been able to make the code really work at the lab, that we’d only be writing a program for the V.P., and that everyone would be happy as long as no one expected us to produce anything that could actually do any meaningful work. But at least we’d have the V.P. off of their backs for the next 10 or 11 months. They agreed that this was a brilliant plan, because, and I was sworn to secrecy, they were engineering a political coup against the V.P. of Accounting and they expected him to be out on his ear within the next 6 months.

They were of course wrong. In the end their 6-month conspiracy failed miserably with the result that the V.P. was even more firmly entrenched in a position of political power than ever before. However, after 9 months of pointless programming on his pet project, including many conversations much like the one from the lab project which I’ve described above, the V.P. suddenly announced that he was retiring to the south coast of France, and he left the company.

The following week our Division Chief pried himself out of the arms of his exceptionally attractive receptionist, every now and then whenever you showed up too early for one of his scheduled meetings she would burst out of his office blushing and readjusting her wardrobe, and paid us a visit down in the I.T. department. My supervisor arranged an impressive dog and pony show involving everyone under her direction, with each and every employee striving manfully to make it appear as if they were keeping their noses to the grindstone on a series of projects absolutely critical to corporate profitability. Except me. All I had to show for my time for the past 9 months was a series of reports, written for the retired V.P. of accounting. Reports that when I printed them out contained nothing but zeros everywhere, because I didn’t have access to the real data.

This was, apparently, just what our Division Chief wanted to hear, because it gave him a grand opportunity to impugn the competence of the recently departed V.P. for having wasted scarce programming resources on useless projects. He then turned to the assembly of programmers and launched into a pep talk about how a new broom was going to sweep clean, how we weren’t going to waste programming time on superfluous projects, how we were going to concentrate all of our programmers’ efforts only on projects that would have a guaranteed payback for the company.

The Most Foolish Project

Division Chief
…and that’s why from now on I will be personally involved in the assignment of programming projects. No one will start a new project without my signature on the paperwork. And what I want to concentrate on is company wide employee morale.

Programmer (me)
Employee morale?

Division Chief
Yes

Programmer
Um, how are we going to do that?
I mean, how are we going to do that by writing computer programs?

Division Chief
Well, right now Human Resources tells me that their biggest problem is the inability to motivate the employees through the Birthday Party Surprise Program.

Programmer
What?

Division Chief
See, the head of H.R. feels that birthday parties are really good for employee morale, but only if they’re really a surprise.

Programmer
Uh-huh.

Division Chief
And since our time and motion guy says that having more than one party a month would adversely impact company wide efficiency H.R. can only hold one surprise party a month, on the first Wednesday of every month.

Programmer
Uh-huh, but every employee knows what month his birthday is in. So if you’re birthday is June 28th you just know that on the first Wednesday of June the H.R. department is going to throw a party for you and everyone else who was born in June.

Division Chief
Exactly! How can we address this serious issue of employee morale from the programming standpoint.

Programmer
Um, you can’t

Division Chief
C’mon. Let’s have some innovative thinking here.

Programmer
But everyone knows his own Birthday. You can’t surprise them, unless you throw their party in a month that doesn’t contain their Birthday. I mean that would surprise them, but how are you going to do that. You can’t do that, unless you want me to write a program that uses a random number generator to create a new and super secret official employee company birthday that’s kept hidden in the H.R. files so that the employees never know when their birthday is coming…..

Division Chief
Brilliant!
That’s just the sort of outside the box thinking I was expecting from you guys down in programming. When can I expect the Random Number Generated Birthday Party Project to go online?

Programmer
Um, first Wednesday of next month.

Division Chief
Great, great. I’m letting everyone in the corporate offices know that we’re expecting great things from you guys down here in programming.

Comment RSS -