We'd Like To Reward You
The Gift Guide at work is about as baked as it is going to be, which is to say “Half”. Today was the final fit of script and layout editing. How do I know it was final? Okay, so I don’t… but I have not until today seen any kind of remuneration. When store credit in dollar amounts came up, I could see we were basically done. (Store Credit: I’d complain, but I already knew that was how it would be… And, I suppose I’ve got uses for Monopoly Money - I have in the past.)
I don’t want to sound like I’m getting down on my employer, relative to the rest of the world. My ideals of perfection keep me rocking back and forth in the corner muttering to myself most days, so anything that results in finished product is a win… right?
So in that spirit, I would like to explain a situation that I assume is fairly common: Today was bearable. The change requests were not absurdly difficult. The scope of the Gift Guide was more manageable compared to previous years, which meant less brute-force work like entering titles and formatting artwork. Knowing this in advance, I was careful to think through my ideas and not rush to act. I decided to try a PHP script, and I let the idea ferment in my mind for a few days before attempting it head-on. This is one of the few times I could see the path ahead clearly. I intended to take small simple steps, ensuring that each bit did what I wanted it to do. I entered a few titles and made sure the look was right. I listened to feedback (most of it was way too cosmetic - nobody ever commented on the program logic or block level arrangement), and kept my options open the best I could.
That is how we could arrive at today. I was like the main character in a samurai movie. They kept sending me ninjas one by one, and I kept slicing those ninjas to ribbons. I had reviewed the mechanics of my code very well, and within minutes of any oddball request, I could say how it could be done, or argue why it could not be done. A few minutes later, I would do it, hacking out a compromise where necessary. The compromises usually generated a new round of oddball requests - fundamental design issues, sometimes. But I had both my programmer hat and my consultant hat precariously balancing together on my head. I could talk up strengths and weaknesses, I could suggest easy ways out just for the sake of comparison, and the few minutes talking it over practically allowed me to code my way out of a jam in the back of my head before I even sat down to do it.
Now, all of this flies in the face of what I learned in college. Which is probably why I had trouble taking anything seriously in those Web Design or Project Management classes. That wasn’t so long ago - I put on a brave face with “This all sounds great, but do real people actually plan things out so carefully?” - but more importantly you could say it was a cry for help: “Can’t you people with your Good News about rational planning rescue me from this living hell?” You see how it’s a two way street? They claimed my experience would serve me well as I learned more, and they would have been right, if only my experience didn’t contradict what they tried to teach me.
It’s all very spectacular to throw all kinds of oddball requests at your competent programmer - but is it worth it? At the end of it, the Marketing Director feels obligated to reward me because she threw so many ninjas at me. Don’t you think it all could have been in a day’s work? Normal levels of effort? - Because I do. If they had come to me in plenty of time, with a design - or at least some guidelines, I would not have required any special effort; I would not have had to alter my schedule, or push my other responsibilities aside. Today it was as if they had finally decided they should design the thing. Much of that design is arbitrary decisions I was forced to make early on. They even apologized for not starting with a design. I feel strange complaining about it, because I wound up sharpening my skills in the process, but when I think about the bottom line - loads of effort that has to be rewarded vs. normal effort in the course of a normal day - all that pressure cost more in money and stress. It doesn’t sound like a great way to run the show.
But come to think of it, I see it all the time in the book ordering department: Customers - the institutional folks mostly, I guess they’ve got bureaucracies to content with on their end - come to us with tight deadlines. You have to wonder about people who run to you, out of time and out of breath, looking for rush shipping on obscure items. Did they really not know until now that they were in a hurry?
This is a culture of dread.
Posted by Evan Bittner Thu, 06 Dec 2007 00:24:00 GMT
