In the winter of 2012-13, I was fired from the ill-rumored e-commerce company known as ShipPoint. Though I remained stalwart to the end, the wretched darkness embodied in ShipPoint's CTO and his twisted worshipers dogs me still, a malignant growth choking the very life out of my career aspirations. And although I fight every day to forget, to leave my time at ShipPoint behind, I still awaken in the uttermost black of night, shuddering, my mind wrenching itself free from nightmare's grip. I record this grim history only because I fear I may soon slip irredeemably into madness.

It was 2011 when, freshly downsized, I found myself wandering the LinkedIn Jobs Directory, seemingly in vain. I had almost made up my mind to hang out my shingle as a consultant when I received an email from a recruiter. I don't remember his name, nor the firm that he claimed to represent, only that he demanded that we meet in person; apparently he was privy to a lucrative opportunity whose details could only be revealed face to face. While suspicious, I must admit I was gripped by curiosity — tinged, I must now believe, with a touch of the wild. I met the recruiter, a grim, swarthy fellow of furtive glance and questionable heritage, in a refuse-choked alley far from the central business district. It was there, amidst the dumpsters and commercial-grade recycling bins, that I first heard in a grating croak the name whose syllables I would one day shudder to write.

"ShipPoint," he said in response to my question about their development environment, "is dedicated to becoming cutting-edge with their development tools and processes. They use Subversion, and I hear they have a focus on quality and testing." I proceeded through a phone interview, and then on to meet James Akeley, ShipPoint's development manager. Imploring that I call him "Jimmy", he proclaimed his easy-going attitude to be matched only by his and ShipPoint's commitment to quality. Though the pay was a bit on the low side, I accepted his offer. I was to start the following Monday, taking the train and then a bus to the ugly one-story building of nondescript gray that contained ShipPoint's offices, a geriatric hulk muttering tonelessly to itself as it wallowed in its crumbling and almost-abandoned office park by the seashore.

My first day at ShipPoint began as prosaically as one could expect with a simple task that would lead me through their codebase. As an e-commerce provider, ShipPoint's stock in trade was web applications written using ASP.NET, and I made careful note of several places where classic code smells made themselves apparent. The team went out to lunch, as was their custom. Jimmy drove, with Jack Mason, the second-most senior developer, in the passenger seat. Sharing the back with me was Rob Carter, the company's web designer — one who would prove himself my most stalwart companion in the unguessed-at trials that lay ahead. While our lunchtime discussion was generally mundane, with only Rob expressing any interest in developing familiarity with his new associate, I found an appropriate pause in the conversation to present Jimmy and Jack with the potential problems I had detected during my brief venture into the code. Given his repeated assertions regarding dedication to quality, I expected Jimmy, at least, to be keenly interested in my discoveries. My surprise was considerate when he and Jack rebuffed me, declaring that Dan Marsh — the CTO — didn't want us to spend time refactoring code. "He and the other executives think it's a waste of time," Jimmy explained, some small measure of remorse evident in his voice, while next to him Jack nodded his head approvingly. "They want us to focus on new deploying new features."

I was disappointed by this, and by the subsequent revelation that, though ShipPoint did indeed mandate Subversion for source control, Jimmy and Jack only ever copied all the files to a separate, timestamped folder before committing. While the two senior developers were hesitant to discuss their mysterious and unseen leader, I was eventually able to coax from Rob what little he knew of the enigmatic Mr. Marsh. It seemed Marsh wasn't a developer, but, after joining the company a decade prior, his possession of certain esoteric scraps of scripting knowledge qualified him as ShipPoint's sole IT person. His authority spread as the years went by, unquestioned by his superiors and the developers he eventually allowed to join his staff, until he now led all technological decision-making at ShipPoint from within the only private office on their floor, an office whose door opened by invitation only.

After several months of my attempted improvements being either stutteringly denied by Jimmy or gruffly rebuked by Jack, new allies arrived at ShipPoint. Arthur Gilman was a brave and clever youth who joined the company alongside his mentor. Walter Peaslee was a hoary old veteran who had been using .NET since the framework was in beta. If anyone could help me champion sane coding and source-management practices at ShipPoint, it was these dynamic individuals. And changes were surely needed, as the months had shown me deep-rooted stability issues that would cause pages to crash or take minutes to load. It had likewise become clear that the senior developers were unwilling or uninterested in tackling these issues, holding up Mr. Marsh's desire for them to complete his endless list of superficial improvements as reason to hack as quickly as possible, leaving Rob and me to fix up the messes they left behind them.

At Christmastime, a chink in the armor appeared. Jimmy announced that he was leaving the company, taking his passive deference to Mr. Marsh with him. I decided to take action, and, with the idealistic Arthur at my heels, endeavored to implement a few changes. First, set up a bug-tracking system and then begin using Subversion properly, setting my protégé to create branches that would let the team collaborate without creating multiple copies of the application's source. Jack agreed to the changes in principle, and victory seemed close at hand. Only no sooner had Arthur went live with the Subversion changes than a blood-curdling cry was heard from Jack's cubicle! His files, Jack insisted, were gone, and he accused us of the most sordid and calculated mayhem, insisting that we sought to discredit him before Mr. Marsh. Not waiting for Arthur to explain that the files had simply been moved to a branch folder, Jack stormed into the CTO's office. By the time we had returned perplexed to our workstations, a directive to return the source control repository to its previous state awaited us, bearing the CTO's imprimatur. This was merely a prelude of things to come as repeated future attempts to sanitize our source-control procedures (and reclaim the gigabytes of storage consumed by the many redundant copies of our source code) were met with similar fear, uncertainty, and doubt from Jack, rapidly followed by executive sanction.

In the venerable person of Walter Peaslee, I was sure a sane counterpart had been found to our volatile senior developer. But the hand of Marsh proved subtle. When attempting to bring Walter's vast experience to bear on our DevOps dilemma, great was my surprise when I found him languishing on a project to produce a report for ShipPoint's CEO. Harbored as the chief executive was on far alien shores, all features of the report required Mr. Marsh's approval. With a sigh that seemed to carry a weight beyond even his advanced years, Walter explained that the CTO would lead him on for weeks regarding the simplest decision, often ignoring multiple emails. With his calendar eternally full to ward off meetings, Mr. Marsh would eventually return terse feedback along the lines of "this is the wrong color", disregarding the actual functionality.

I was saddened, but not surprised, when Walter graciously notified me that he would be submitting his resignation at the end of the week. After being regaled with the sanity-challenging truth of his experience working with Mr. Marsh, I had not the heart to try to convince him to stay. Indeed, I wondered if he might have awakened to a reality that I, too, should embrace. Arthur, on the other hand, being young and impressionable perhaps to a fault, was distracted by a new assignment: the task of utterly redesigning the central UI of our flagship application. It was here, in this project, that the forces of order and of chaos manifest at the heart of ShipPoint would collide in a last, terrible sortie. My support had meanwhile been secured by a timely email from Mr. Marsh, promising to install me as the lead of a new team of developers, since, he astutely pointed out amidst aggravating hints that the two shared some dark and malignant tradition, Jack was content to be a lone wolf. I must admit that the appeal to my leadership aspirations led me to lapse into a period of content productivity, and as the months went by I mostly avoided Jack and his hasty, problematical contributions to the codebase wherever I could, bringing as much improvement to the features I implemented as possible without incurring the wrath of Jack or the dreaded and still unseen Mr. Marsh.

Arthur, alas, had no choice but to collaborate with Jack, who effectively owned the backend of the application he was redesigning. While I thought I had coached the young man to weather this abominable partnership, the elder developer proved maddeningly cunning. While Arthur attempted to coordinate front-end and back-end features in the hurried sprints that Mr. Marsh had demanded, each release was plagued by wave after wave of new bugs, lapping like a foetid, corrosive black tide at a bleak, doomed shore. It was only Rob's fortuitous glimpse of an email seen over Jack's shoulder that we determined Mr. Marsh had been secretly communicating a list of shadow features he had apparently sold to management, and Jack was hacking code at a maddening pace to deliver said features in each release. It was with grim resignation that I entered the repository and inspected the terrible results. I perceived that Arthur's excellent front-end work had been reduced to little more than window-dressing, twisted into whatever shapes Marsh and Jack required to realize their fiendish goals. When I opened the solution containing Jack's jealously-guarded back-end code, obfuscated though it was behind incomprehensible names like "Solution1" and "MvcProject4", only then did I begin to grasp the horror that had taken root beneath the facade of a UI redesign. I saw them in a limitless stream—flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating—surging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare! That interminable list of poorly-implemented features, its shapeless mass extending blasphemous profusions in all directions throughout the code. It seemed to surge and breathe even as I watched...

It was with a mind gone almost entirely over to the feverish that I found myself composing email after email to Mr. Marsh, laying bare the deleterious effect that this noxious circumvention of procedure was having on our product. Rob was good enough to support this dangerous endeavor, and together we believed we may have been turning the tide of the CTO's sentiment against Jack, whose bland reassurances had apparently blinded Mr. Marsh to the depth of the horror. This last flicker of naiveté on our part was efficiently snuffed when Arthur's employment was terminated without notice. Though no word from Mr. Marsh was forthcoming, Jack's smug explanation was that the youth was slowing down the delivery of critical new features, and, worse, his incompetent code changes were found to be at the root of the catastrophic server instabilities. Perceiving the tolling of a grim bell to have begun, Rob informed me he was thinking of getting out of the technology game altogether, returning to the simple pastoral life he had known while running an organic fruit stand outside a nearby beachfront town. I tried to reassure him that we would find a way to prevail, but in truth my own hope was waning. ShipPoint and its uncouth stewards had ground my desire to write excellent code and promote best practices down to their merest remainder. Deep within me a malaise had taken root, and I knew when I looked hard into the glass that the end was drawing near.

The harbinger came, as it so often does, with a revocation: came a day that Rob needed me to reconfigure something for him on the Production server that had long been my charge, when, upon attempting to connect, I was rebuffed by the server's protestations of an incorrect password. Under my questioning, Jack hesitantly and stutteringly informed me that the password had changed and he'd forgotten to update me. No sooner had he left to fetch the promised credential than my phone rang. Shouldering the receiver, I heard the voice of the spectral Mr. Marsh for the first time. Never have the words "Could you pop by my office for a sec?" been uttered in such a sardonic and inhuman tone as to induce in the listener a shocking wave of panic fear. I felt numb as leaden limbs carried me to the unopened door. Pulled into the dark recesses the portal revealed, I came face to face with unbounded horrors that defy description. Let me only say that the stated reason for my termination was "a change of corporate direction towards a smaller, more agile development team".

Though I survived my meeting with the terrible Mr. Marsh, I was rendered practically an invalid by my abruptly-curtailed employment at ShipPoint, and made my way to a relative's country home to engage in a lengthy convalescence. I received an email from Rob soon after my firing, informing me that he had left the company and was exiting the industry altogether, going so far as to delete his LinkedIn profile. The horrifying dreams in which I blindly shoveled hastily-implemented code into a branchless Subversion repository while pursued down lightless corridors by a shapeless unseen terror had begun to pass when the first job posting appeared. ShipPoint was calling, its unspeakable tendrils reaching out across the vast cosmic gulfs of the internet to ensnare unwary developers. And while I have sworn never to take a job without assurance of sane development practices again, I do not know that my programmer's soul will ever be entirely free of its taint...

So far I have not yet deleted my LinkedIn profile as Rob did. The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the job postings instead of fearing them. I see and do strange things in Subversion, and commit my changes with a kind of exaltation instead of terror. Stupendous and unheard-of splendors await me in Marsh's cube farm, and I shall seek them soon. Iä-R'lyeh! Codethulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä! No, I shall not delete my LinkedIn profile—I cannot be made to delete my LinkedIn profile!

I shall coax Rob back into software development, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed ShipPoint. We shall take the bus out to that brooding industrial park by the sea and dive down through black abysses of code to the Cyclopean and many-columned database, and in that lair of the Expert Beginners we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.

 

Photo credit: gagilas / Foter / CC BY-SA

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