There is a project at work now that is so very Office Space.  I guess a sales per­son promised a client a cer­tain piece of soft­ware.  We vaguely knew that this was com­ing down the line–a piece of Win­dows soft­ware needed to be ported to Unix and some func­tion­al­ity needed to be changed.  Stan­dard stuff, really.  Now, the sales per­son made this deal a few months ago, and I guess thought it would be appro­pri­ate to tell nobody about it.  The client was promised a demo to be given Wednes­day (a few days ago) and a work­ing beta a week from today.  The devel­op­ers learned about this Mon­day, leav­ing 2 days to develop the demo, and a week and a half after that to build the full-blown beta–unless QA is to get into the action and ver­ify it works.

Basi­cally, the whole sit­u­a­tion is a clus­ter­fuck.  Nobody is really in charge, there is no project man­ager, as far as my boss or I can tell.  There are about five peo­ple run­ning around dic­tat­ing how the thing needs to work and look.  Every­one wants to con­trol it, but nobody wants to take respon­si­bil­ity when (notice I said “when” and not “if”) it fails.  I’m try­ing to do the best I can.  My boss is a lit­tle upset because this project was not on any cal­en­dars or roadmaps, so pulling me to work on it is impact­ing the stuff I really should be work­ing on.  My friend in Research and Devel­op­ment, who is sort of my boss but not really, is start­ing to get all the blame and finger-pointing aimed at him for no read­ily appar­ent rea­son.  There is no real plan for what needs to hap­pen and what need to change, so I build some­thing and am told “no, that’s not quite right, change it,” so I do and some­body else comes along and says the same. 

The whole sit­u­a­tion is frus­trat­ing.  My dotted-line-boss friend in R&D said I should just go to lunch and take the rest of the day off.  Instead, I am doing what any respectable cit­i­zen of the work­place would do.  I ran home, made some pasta, and am about to watch Office Space.  I’ll be back to work in about 2 hours to see what has exploded while I was out.

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Tagged as: rant