November 18th, 2005

Chaucer used to write apologia to precede his works. Sometimes informative, often disingenuous, always entertaining, (this over-simplifies the case) they set the tone for what followed. Here is my apologia for today's rant.

I've been pretty silent in this blog lately, and that's for a very good reason: All my thoughts are about a poor friend of mine, and his growing stress and struggle associated with his workplace. He's losing the impetus to even be there any more, and I am sure that for certain co-workers of his, that fact will come as a great joy. They will cheer the day he is gone, despite the damage it will do to the core product (they don't see any value in the one product that actually sells and makes money; they're just after making newer and more improbable—and un-sellable—crap ... but I am getting ahead of myself).

He wouldn't normally write about this stuff himself, just because of those prying eyes, but since it's unlikely his coworkers read this rant, and since he is losing sleep over it, I might as well just lay it out. I suppose his coworkers can be weasels and use it as fuel against him all they want. His demeanour always seems to give smaller minds the impression that he is arguing with them (when he is not) so over the years he has developed a talent for being able to gauge how truly interpersonally stupid someone is just by how much his statements of facts make them argue with him.

I am sure those bozos know who they are, and in the unlikely event they are reading this: [sound of buzzer] You lose, morons.

Right, so where my friend works they have never built a profitable product. In fact, they have never even built a commercially viable product. They've sold so little of their hastily-designed and chicken-wire-and-chewing-gum developed software, that the total sales would not pay 1/2 a year of one of his company's employees' salaries. They've even given away integrations and other products in the ridiculous hope that the recipients will be so grateful as to buy a truckload of the other shit they are trying to shovel. According to my friend, it'll never happen. He says it's more than a little bit sad to see them wistfully waiting for the day when someone will phone with a an order for 18 bazillion seats of Product B because they were so empty-headed as to give away Product A. (Loss-leaders don't even work in the supermarket business; they are a sign of desperation. In the software business, the competition must salivate when it hears tales of such doormat behaviour from its enemies.)

The one product that has a proven record and has an audience (growing ever more confused and frustrated at the lack of further core development and bug fixes) had to be bought by that ship of fools many months ago and since then it has been mostly neglected, except to see its price raised. Sales are, not surprisingly, down.

And what is really striking terror into my friend's heart is that, after spending six months building a very poorly-designed and viciously over-engineered product that sold miserably, they moved on to another product, designed for a market best described by something those old text adventure games used to say: "The niche is too small to allow passage." Crap Product X followed by Crap Product Y.

And right around the time my friend thought they were all saturated with the humiliation of building all this crap, they came up with the obscene idea to make Crap Product Z, which is a combination of Crap Product X and Y together. But he figures that nobody cares, since nobody is buying any of his company's crud anyway ...

What I'm most worried about with my friend is that he can't go on pretending that any of this shit is worth anything at all. I'm afraid he's going to do or say something soon. I've advised him to just quit; no company is worth losing sleep over, and this one is worth less than most. I am also afraid that he will stand up and shout the truth over the workstation walls one day: "We are all building complete crap, and we are stupid for pretending otherwise!" I'd hate to see him burn out in a blaze of glory like that; he claims it would feel good, I remind him that such good feelings are fleeting.

Though I could hardly blame him if he did: The chowderheads at his company continue to announce huge interest in all this shit, as reflected by their assertion that seminars are well-attended and meetings are overflowing with people asking "good questions". It is pretty much daily that another empty-headed piece of masturbatory email comes spewing out of my friend's inbox about how such a wonderful reception there was and how such excitement was being generated ... and always these emails come from the same people who are gonna look mighty stupid when the products they put their miniscule hearts and fully-mortgaged souls behind are called onto the plastic by the people holding the purse-strings. They are either pathetic in their self-delusion, or complete assholes for pushing hype they themselves don't believe.

My friend is a straight-shooter. He is even more that way than I am: He is totally honest and willing to expose himself to the rest of the world by speaking his mind ... he burns to say the things that many others wish they could say, but are afraid to. He is constantly the target of weaselly behaviour and stinky actions because he generates resentment from those people without the moral fortitude to say what they believe. In short, he is the person who has more ethical rectitude than most, and is punished by the little minds for being that way. The trolls destroying the superior and all that.

So you can imagine how he gets tired of hearing the used car salesmen constantly telling him how great their Hyundai Pony or Ford Pinto is. The proof is in the pudding, and their pudding tastes like shit.

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