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Aug 13Visionary Leak
by in Feature Articles on 2013-09-19Tom worked for a Belgian insurance company, which meant he knew how to say “We’re not covering that” in three languages. He was a Java developer who’d spent many years building and supporting web services. His only real complaint was Maxime, a “visionary” who’d shown up months earlier. Maxime had been hired as a project lead, and wowed business users and management alike with authoritative, buzzwordy pap. Such a snake-charmer was Maxime that he wasn’t just leading projects anymore- he did all of his own designing, coding, and testing. No one else in the entire company had such one-man-wrecking-crew privileges. Tom had never been impressed with Maxime’s drivel, but his attempts to inject reason were repeatedly shot down. Tom resolved to ignore Maxime, but that became more difficult as Maxime’s “improvements” encroached upon Tom’s domain.
One painfully bright and painfully early Monday morning, the boss didn’t even wait for everyone to grab coffee before commandeering a conference room.
“The GTS01 server slowed down considerably over the weekend,” he told them. “The network team assures us the problem’s not on their end. There are only six applications running on that box.” He called up a PowerPoint slide with a bulleted list. “Maxime, any thoughts as to what’s wrong?”