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Nov 06Best of 2006: The Customer-Friendly System
by in Feature Articles on 2006-12-28I've heard that many still have nightmares from this article, originally published 2006-Aug-18 ...
Every once in a while, some one shares with me the story of an unimaginably convoluted system. A system so complex, so twisted that the mere thought of maintaining it has driven many a men insane. A system so heinous and so evil that the souls it has claimed are outnumbered only by COBOL itself. So, in hopes that its presentation might offer some consolation to John and its other unfortunate victims, I will share with you the story of The Customer-Friendly System.
It seemed like any other job: "Java/J2EE contractors needed for a one-to-three month contract to maintain proprietary supply-chain management software." Sure, James C could have waited around to find something more interesting, but the pay was fantastic and, being such a short term contract, he figured he had little to lose. That is, until he came face to face with Codethulhu.
It was only 9:15 in the morning and Neal was ready to write the day off as a complete loss. Neal's day started off with him accidentally pressing the "Alarm Off" button instead of "Snooze," missing his morning workout, driving downtown through the tail-end of a traffic jam, and arriving forty-five minutes late to work. But when he stepped in the office, it was oddly vacant: Was it a company holiday? Did he miss the field trip memo? Was today actually a Saturday? "Neal," the president shouted from his corner office, interrupting Neal's workless fantasy, "get in here; come see this!" 
One of the advantages of being a contractor -- well, aside from getting paid nearly twice as much -- and aside from not having to work unpaid overtime -- is that being "on call" is generally not part of the job description. The whole 2AM-Oh-Crap-A-Batch-Job-Failed call followed by a six-hour I-Have-No-Idea-How-To-Fix-This-Crap debug session that's chased down with the Oh-Crap-It's-8Am-And-Time-To-Go-To-Work realization -- that pleasure is reserved for full-time employees. That's what Ivan D. believed, right up until he got a 2AM call of his own: we desperately need your help to find a screw in the warehouse; none of the full-timers are responding!
There's always a risk in hiring employees straight out of college. It can be pretty rough adjusting to a normal adult lifestyle (shaving, bathing, not beginning and ending every sentence with the word "dude"), let alone taking in all the wondrous monotony of the 9-to-5 office job. Many large companies will bring in graduates with the goal of attrition: they'll instill such hopelessness in their impressionable minds that they'll never have the desire or motivation to leave. Other companies, such as Federico's, hire recent grads as a "community service", giving them the skills and experience they need to excel in their career. Well, that, and those with no work experience tend to work for next-to nothing.
It was a heck of a party and everyone was invited, from the executive vice president to the janitorial staff. There was champagne, shrimp, cake, and even a string quartet. There were door prizes, balloons, and all sorts of bank-branded knickknacks being given away. And it was all for good reason: the bank had just completed its high-tech, sixty-five story downtown corporate headquarters, and it was the tallest building within a three-hundred mile radius.
"I've been hacked," Dan M's boss said frantically as she arrived to work one Monday morning, "I don't know how it happened, but I accidentally left my laptop on at home, and now there's all sorts of adult-oriented pop-ups and desktop icons!"
M.A. is one of the world's foremost experts on neural networks. His undergraduate specialty was artificial intelligence, his master's thesis was about genetic algorithms, and his doctoral dissertation covered evolutionary programming. Such an extensive computer science education opened up a wide range of career options, ranging from a professor at a university to ... a professor at another university. When someone outside of academia sought out his expertise for a project, he jumped at the opportunity.