Jaded

I wander back to my desk this afternoon having made myself a cup of tea to find the team leader of the mob across the corridor from us (let's call him Berk for now) excitedly chatting to my project manager.

What is the cause of all this excitement.

Well it turns out that Berk has had this brilliant idea (that he's nicked from Failbook - so you know this isn't going to end well) to get a team together to deliver some application to our users in one 24 hour period, that is starting first thing in the morning, working all day and then pulling an all nighter.

I was just about to say "what the fuck have you been snorting Berk" when I see my PM nodding his head faster that the Churchill Insurance dog on crystal meth. "Wow yeah, it's great, we can really show what we can deliver."

What you will deliver if you go ahead with this is a pile of cack built of compromise, quick hacks, hard coded "variables" and so many fudges you could open a branch of Thorntons; further more said "product" will perform like a mastodon on quaaludes and have all the grace and functionality of a 1960's era Trabant. And this abomination you are going to put onto a trader's desktop 24 hours after the project starts and expect them to use it live??? Jesus this just has "EPIC FAIL" written all over it in eight foot high neon pink letters.

I just could not believe sane IT Professionals were seriously going to go ahead with this - this fuckup in the making already has a venue booked where the 8 "volunteers" will be doing the coding - but there they were, thinking this is the greatest thing since the invention of the database. Bert has even got the head IT manager to stump up for the pizzas and coke.

I think they could tell by my expression that I wasn't really buying into this plan so Bert tried "Well we'll be strictly using Extreme Programming techniques! Paired programming! Test driven development!" - Yeah cut your hands on keyboards by 50% before you even start, why not handicap the team even further by paying someone to come round and kick them in the goolies every hour whilst you're at it. "Oh and I'm going to be making a time lapse film of the 24 hours" Hey and why not put that Benny Hill "Yakety Sax" music over the top of it, that'll make us all look like the highly trained and experienced artisans we are won't it.

Anyway after a while my PM started to realise that I wasn't going to stop making my "If Berk says one more fucking word he's getting a dose of the breath weapon set to 'Heart of the Sun'" face and decides to save Berk from immolation and goes "Oh maybe this would be a good thing for our graduate coder of all of 2 years experience". I nod and project passive-aggressive body language making it clear that everybody better leave my workspace right now and leave the grumpy dragon to his tea.

I don't know, maybe I've been too long in this gig and I'm just jaded. I just cannot see this being anything other than a stupid stunt to raise Bert's profile which will end up being a complete train wreck and will take a hell of a lot longer than 24 hours and more than 8 people to put right. Maybe when I was younger this might have seemed interesting to do but at my age there is no way on this little ball of mud and rock that at my age I am going to voluntarily put in a 24 hour shift, certainly not for a day off in lieu and a "bonus" of a 50 quid M&S voucher and a mention in some "What IT did this week" bit of the company website nobody reads anyway.