Frank's mom works here!

Its gotten even crazier. So we have this just Frank guy on the board. Basically his role is to advise on what the "kids" want from our platforms. So far its been a stream of Facebook this, MySpace that, FourSqaure the other. Anybody from TechCrunch could have come up with that list!

So it turns out that Frank's mom just started working here. Basically she got the role of looking after all the Apps teams. I'm sure the managers must have been pissed, since they must have been sizing up that position for themselves! Its where all the fame and glory is. Nobody, especially Henry cares about the Architecture team or Platform teams, we are the cost of doing business in Henry's mind, or so that's how it appears to me. Henry gets off on the Applications, and Frank's mom now runs all of the Applications teams.

I was confused that the Mobile and Popularity teams did not get folded in as well. That might have been some of the slamming of doors that went on last week in Henry's office. Poor Henry, it must suck being him. One week its Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir and then the next its a good chunk of the rest of the Engineering Directors. They are such a bunch of pussies.

I think it all got worked out in the end. Henry is great at the balancing act of keeping everybody happy and moving the business forward to the success we all deserve.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 8 (same as last week)
Shots : 10 (same as last week)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 188 lbs

The land that time forgot!

I love our Ops team, they sure know how to get things done and most of all preserve cash. During the first bubble burst they were buying and selling hardware on uBid for profit for the company, but I hear these days they are ensuring that we stay on biblically old products. Take for instance our Databases. 11g. Nope far, far too modern. 10g anybody, 9i or even 8i. Nope. We run 7.3.4 because, well I don't really know why. Apparently DJ is super friendly with the Sales Rep and he gets great dinners in return for us running on something that pre-dates the internet. There is some sort of uplift on the license for running something that old!

Then our O/S. Well RedHat 5, the defacto choice for a web company, we don't have that either. CentOs. Too good for us. We have some hand built Redhat 3 from the sources no less, because we are that cool.

Then our storage. WooHoo. Sun was way too expensive. EMC, super safe choice and they have a great executive incentive package, otherwise know as DJ gets a few rounds of gold at Pebble Beach. So we brought Kodak , Fuji or some other camera makers dusted off disks. They had a special that week for buy one get one free and a weekend in Vegas thrown in.

It gets better. Our servers. Dell would be nice. SuperMicro cool, Rackable even better. We have HP! Who on this Earth deploys HP? Oh I forgot, they have an incredible package that includes strippers at the Gold Club in San Francisco.

Awesome. Its not what you buy, its what the sales rep is willing to "throw in" that counts.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 8 (down 2 from last week)
Shots : 10 (same as last week)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 188 lbs

QA has vanished!

Well, saying that all of QA were marched away Nazi style, taken to a field, shot and then their bodies placed in a deep hole and then covered up would not be a real reflection of what went down. That would not have captured the whole Tony Soprano "whacking" thing, in that Italian mobster "Iz far da family".

The reality is that the layoffs are brutal. QA lost 70% of their staff. And that's not just my team that across the whole company. The VP was taken out (it took some days to find him) and all the teams folded back under Engineering. The justification seems to be that they had completed all their automation and so were excess baggage, given the economic downturn were a drag on our cash position Henry said.

Now a bunch, if not all of them, were on Visas so they are totally f**ked. Sun, Cisco and every other man and his dog on Techcrunch are slimming down right now. A few old timers said it would be great, the commute times of the 101 would come down and life will be easier.

I'm not sure that computes. If we don't have QA and we are still adding features how on earth will be maintain our exemplary customer satisfaction record? We are going to be that moth heading towards the bug zapper without QA!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 10 (same as last week)
Shots : 10 (down 6 from last week)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 187 lbs

Oh shit! We are dead!

OMG we are dead! It was a total Tarantino movie here. Men in suits, blood all over the walls and floors, Uma Thurman kicking butt. I was head down working my own butt off. I've seen all the Directors, VPs and assorted "gods" locked in meetings all week. Sure, they must be planning the next years roadmap for the platform and applications was my thought.

Morning started off great, Geek Babe was looking hot in a short black skirt and pumps. The build was not broken. Three lattes later I was feeling fine, I'd been drinking with friends in the city and had one to many Cosmo's the night before.

Bam! I start seeing people being pulled off their desks and marched one by one towards the stairs. They would come back 20 minutes later with a green Hank folder, like the one I got when I came for interview. Sweet I thought, more options!

Then I saw them take a box and start to pack. A guy over in the site operations team was shouting and swearing and causing a huge ruckus. Then I see Berkeley-kind-of-dude-who's-done-it-all come back. He is throwing things around, Lucy from HR looks kind of scared so I step in. Wow that guy packs a punch, this black eye will take weeks to go.

So what the hell happened? We had a team meeting afterward, Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir said that the "coast is clear" and that "this is it". Phew.

Henry explained it all in the company meeting on Friday. Basically its part two of "Nuclear Winter". I did not get the reference, but something to do with when the "dot com bubble burst". I was not even in college then, so like its some sort of ancient history lesson or something. Whatever.

Bottom line is that Henry is here. He's staying. He thinks the future is so bright it scares him. But to make that future happen we need to let go of the weakest to make us stronger. He wanted it to happen before thanksgiving, basically anybody who has left now has the opportunity to change the world in the same way that Henry is doing right now, they just need to do it elsewhere. I had not thought of it like that, but its pretty cool. Never figured Henry for such a humanitarian.

So we lost some people, you know, many had been taking it easy, taking lunch breaks, not working through the night or reading blogs like Tech Crunch thinking they all of a sudden become Web 2.0 savvy by just reading a blog! Everybody knows that you have to live it to really know it.

As Henry said many times, we need to "mourn our fallen comrades" (I thought we was a Republican), but we need to re-focus on the American City Bank launch coming up at the start of the year.

The "mourn of fallen comrades" was really helped by the stock option letter that I got. Sweet, I can share more in Hank's future success and dominance! We will be the next big internet story, despite the rift.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 10 (up 4 from last week)
Shots : 16 (up 12 from last week)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 186 lbs