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The exotic and exciting life of the world-traveling contractor wasn’t exactly what Angie had been expecting. It mostly meant living in a dreary apartment on the outskirts of some city in a short drive from an industrial park where she’d go to try and keep 30-year old C code and their new ERP from fighting to the death. Six months later, she’d be off to the same apartment near the same industrial park in a different country.
When the crash came, it came hard. Hard enough that Angie ditched IT and got a temp job working in a customer service call-center for a greeting card company. She wasn’t exactly the best person on the phone, and nobody was giving her stellar marks for her cheerful demeanor during her quarterly review.
What her boss did notice though, is that when she did order entry, it was accurate. This was surprisingly a big deal, because the number of orders with typos coming from the other reps was remarkable. “We really appreciate your attention to detail,” he said. He offered to make the temp job permanent and start working on some career advancement within the company.
Angie took it. Over months, she spent less time on the phone, and more time putting her attention to detail to work: cleaning up order entry processes. Since Angie was a developer, she wrote some scripts to streamline the process and shared them with her team. Now, her boss was praising her attention to detail and her initiative.
Within a few months, the dev team offered to bring her aboard. The salary bump was nothing to sneeze at, and they didn’t care that she knew C and Java and Ruby, but not their language of choice- C#. So she moved departments, and started working for Liam.
Liam was the lead architect, and back in the early days, he was their only developer. Most of the software was home-grown extensions to their ERP, or their CRM. Since engraving printing plates was itself pretty complicated, he’d whipped up a program that could generate output to control the engraving system that made printing plates.
Like a lot of smaller software teams in large companies that don’t view software as a priority, the code quality was… special. For any given program, most of the code was in one gigantic do-everything class, or worse, just in the main method. Version control was naming files “Foo.cs.old” or “Foo.cs.dontuse”, and release management was hitting “build” and copying the output to a network share.
Liam, as the lead architect, didn’t want Angie wasting her time on the “big picture” stuff. “You’ve got such a great attention to detail,” he said. This meant she ended up being the SQL and regular expression expert who also tested the programs (often in production, because that was the only way to test). The result was far fewer bugs, fewer accidents from testing in production, and happier end users.
The work was messy, but it wasn’t hard, and the card company didn’t really expect a lot from their software team. Angie appreciated sleeping in the same bed every night, and actually having a social life.
Late on a Friday, the head of the company’s charity efforts burst into their cube-farm. The charity team had just run a major fund drive, and now needed to send out custom “Thank You” cards. There was only problem- the template they used (which drove Liam’s program to control the engraver) needed space for one additional line of text. “We need to get these running on the presses tomorrow so we can send them out next week!”
It was a four-alarm, hair-on-fire crisis, according to the charity chief. They were more than happy to provide dinner for the team who worked late, but it needed to be done. Since Angie was “detail oriented”, she drew the short straw, but she needed Liam’s help to get the changes made. “I don’t understand any of this code, and I can’t follow the logic.”
“Well,” Liam said, “I can’t say that I do, either.”
“But you wrote it!”
“Okay, yeah, let’s take a look.”
Over some surprisingly high-quality Thai takeout, Liam and Angie did their best to trace through the logic of the code, understanding how it consumed the template and converted it into something the engraver could understand. Because there was a lot of code-reuse by copy-and-paste, they identified three places that needed changes.
“Are you sure that’s it?” Angie asked.
“Yeah, absolutely.”
“Okay… but how do we test this?”
“The only way to test it is to send it to an engraver.”
“Okay, well… let’s go through it again and make sure it’s right,” Angie suggested.
It was rubbing up against 10PM, and Liam had enough of that. “Let’s just run it and get the plate engraved. I’ve done this sort of thing a bunch, it’ll be fine.”
It wasn’t. By the time anyone had noticed, however, the plate was already off to the presses. The resulting run cost the company $10,000 in materials, and delayed the sending of the “thank you” cards by three days, which the charity team warned could seriously hurt their charity efforts in the future. The big bosses stormed into the development team’s office, demanding: “Who’s responsible for this?”
The bus was coming, and Liam was ready to throw Angie right in front of it. “We assigned that project to Angie,” he said. She was escorted out of the office that day, and on her exit paperwork, the reason for termination was "insufficient attention to detail".
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