Nothing unusual about that. I’ve known exceedingly few software projects that complete on time. I even came up with an addition to the traditional grammar to cover the problem, a new tense I called the ‘future present’. You use when you say something like “the system does this” when what you really mean is “it will do that thing long before the time you slow lot get around to deciding to order it.”
This isn’t a lie. I was firmly convinced that the software would do all we claimed for it and more. Sadly, I’m not certain my audience shared my conviction. Nor did the executives of the company, though many of the colleagues working on the project with me certainly did.
Sadly, both they and I turned out to be cruelly misled. We never completed the project. I had naively believed that the owners of the little company for which I worked were keen on delivering a high-quality system to their clients. In fact, in a perfect illustration of all that the Left denounces in capitalism, they were only interested in maximising the gains they could make by selling the company.
The company’s systems, of which my project was only the latest module, had started off pretty damn smart. But time had passed, technology had progressed, so what had at one time been dynamically innovative had eventually become old-hat, and been overtaken.
What’s more, it suffered from the problem that afflicts a great many ageing systems. It had been tinkered with far more than was good for it. So bits had been added to correct problems or to improve functions, but no one had bothered to document any of those changes or check whether they might, in fact, solve a problem in one area but create a far worse one somewhere else.
By the time I came to work on it, it was a colossal mass of what is technically referred to as spaghetti logic, a maze of interwoven functions which it was beyond the capacity of the human mind ever fully to understand. Somebody wanted a button to be orange over here? No problem. We’d make the necessary changes. And only afterwards would we discover that we could no longer enter a date over there.
Fixing all this was a huge task that would have involved the company owners in a considerable investment, and a delay in realising their capital by selling their shares to someone else.
The far simpler solution was to fire a whole bunch of us and sell the company as it was, with its products as they were. Of course, they didn’t call it firing. We were made redundant but, believe me, anyone who’s been made redundant knows that it doesn’t feel any different from being fired.
You’d think that a company with a piece of software that really didn’t work any more wouldn’t fetch a high price. You’d be wrong. The executives of bigger companies like nothing more than buying smaller ones. It gives them the sense of having far bigger external genitals than the people around them. I think that’s even true of the female executives, despite the obvious biological problem that their genitals are internal. Don’t ask me to explain.
So the executives of the company that had just fired me and my colleagues sold it for a princely sum, making themselves really quite wealthy. That included the laziest executive I’ve ever come across, a man capable of disappearing for weeks at a time and doing nothing useful even when he returned, who actually made more money than anyone because he held the most shares.
The software module I was working on disappeared without trace. As far as I know, no part of the company’s software is still in use anywhere. But a few people made a lot of money while a few others lost their jobs.
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| Glorious setting for a hotel |
