Give thanks!

I have a lot to give thanks for this Thanksgiving. Here's the short version

• I did have a well paying position, lately its not looking so great
• I did work with some great people, after two rifts and departures most have gone
• I have worked on a number of projects, most delayed or canned
• I did get a bunch of stock options, I don't think they will ever be worth a dime
• I did get put on a performance improvement plan, but I beat that rap
• I do have a manager who has a split personality, I mostly get the crap half
• I do get the pager, the pager always rings all the time, endlessly
• I did get food until they took that away
• I did get alcohol, they took that away, but I started drinking at my desk anyway
• We did have some cute girls, they are all getting married, rifted or got a real job
  
• I did work on some cool technology, until I started converting PL/SQL into JavaScript
• I have more changes in senior management that hot lunches recently
  
• I do work for a technology company that won't adopt new technology
• I do have a CEO that spends too much time in a tanning salon

So thank you, I'm in a special place and I know it.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more official drinking!)
Shots : 8 (i'm trying to cut down!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more official eating!)
Weight : 194 lbs

More graphs! Awesome!

Another week and another weekly all-hands meeting. I don't really get the point. Sure, I love open and transparent communication. It lets us see what is going on, give us data and then shows us ways to analyze it to allow us to draw our own conclusions. Pretty sweet if we have data to talk about.

Don't give the same graphs, just changing the colors or fonts we can see through that. What is says is that you have no idea on what is going on. I did give credit this week, all the graphs were different. Wow, things must have changed! After my initial enthusiasm I was drawn back to the slough of despair when I see that they changed the scale to make the growth look more impressive. As they say there are lies, damn lies and then there are statistics. Henry loves his statistics.

So news to report this week? Well Geek-Babe is "glowing" and I am shocked how much she has got done this week, especially being slowed down by the size of that ring. If ever we need to break a window to escape (like a fire or something) I know what I'm going to use to cut the glass.

We had another release, it was pretty much along the same lines. QA sign off, PMO sign off, Frank's-Mom signs off. Customer use it, many production tickets, stuff being broken, integrations not working, people can't change their passwords, new functionality plain not working. We get through to the "Monday Peak", which basically means that lights dim across the eastern seaboard as we crank up the CPU horsepower simply to process a few dozen transactions. This is also know as "the same old shit".

Its all rather depressing. I'm still eating the Diwali candy from our "celebration" the other week. I was shocked that Iron-Mike from HR did not ban the whole thing. Think about it, especially working in California. You arrange a work sponsored event. You ask staff to spend time decorating and preparing events. You then ask for "volunteers" to take part in the "competition". Basically that involved a number of partial clothed women dancing in a provocative manner while the judges (aka F-Staff) "judge". If Frank's-Mom was a man she would have been taken away to San Quentin, no questions asked, do not collect $200. How come women get away with this shit?

Anyway, Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir seemed to enjoy himself a little too much by the display and could not seem to walk straight afterward. That would seem another HR violation.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more official drinking!)
Shots : 9 (the shame of it all!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more official eating!)
Weight : 193 lbs

Geek-babe is getting married!

I bet that got your attention. You may be thinking, lucky guy. I know, I know. How did a geek pull off the coup of the decade and get the hottest, geekiest girl in the valley. I would like to say it was something to do with the awesome party in Cyprus.

The truth is much more difficult. After our last argument on our first date on the merits of District 9 versus Alive in Joberg our paths split. We, sorry she, hardly even acknowledged me at the Latte station in the morning, and certainly there was never an open seat at the company meetings next to her. I got the cold shoulder, but I was in it for the long term. I could turn her around, just like Henry is doing for the company.

I made sure there was an extra Dunkin' Donut left on her desk, a flower on Valentines day, just your regular stalker stuff, nothing overkill. Perhaps washing her car during the lunch break was just slightly over the line.

And then the true horror of it all. I got word that there was a secret party being planned. Sweet! There was going to be food and plenty to drink. Sweet! It was to congratulate Geek-Babe's engagement to Beam-Me-Up. Sweet!

Hey, hold the presses. What the f**k is going on? How did he muscle in on my girl? Why are they holding hands? Why does she look so happy in the wrong mans arms?

Things just could not have gotten any worse.

Sure, lets be happy for the happy couple. I just have a pile of PL/SQL to convert into JavaScript with the debugging capability of a drunk Ops guy. My life sucks and it sucks today because I'm trying to drink away the pain that Geek-Babe is trying to get away from me! She will see her mistakes, I can turn this one around, just don't let me say "told you so".

Another Henry, blah-blah-blah presentation. Bar charts have not changed in weeks. Who's he trying to kid?

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more official drinking!)
Shots : 18 (the shame of it all!)
Dinner : 1 nights (marriage celebration!)
Weight : 192 lbs

New VP!

Well f**k me. Franks-mom is made VP. I did not see that one coming. Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir is pissed, he thinks it should have been him since he had given so much already. He's happy that's its not Euro-fool. We went drinking in the city with him after the announcement and he slurred about how he got one over Euro-fool. He did not make a lot of sense after his seventh Whiskey, but something about the "Three Amigos" and the deal of a lifetime with the devil.

Made me think after I got over the hangover. It was probably something to do with all the closed door meetings I saw him, Stacy and Lonely-James in, and then later with Iron-Mike and Henry. I guess they must have been planning for weeks on how they would get leverage for what they wanted. That's a pretty sweet and balls-to-the-wall move.

Nobody has seen Euro-fool, guess he got f**ked by just about everybody. Shame, but that's what happens here. The old guard back themselves up and have a gun against Henry's head.

Things have not changed much with Franks-Mom, the schedule is still impossible, the every other week release followed by the daily patching. She seems a little more stable than Constantine but she does not code so its going to be tough to see who drives the direction. Sure was can have the Henry-deal-of-the-day-feature or some more shuffling pixels around the screen. What has to change is architecture of the dot-com-era. Stored procedures? No thanks!

Mood is pretty somber around here since Constantine's departure. Hope Franks-Mom can make a difference.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more official drinking!)
Shots : 12 (We just drink at our desk now, who cares, but we have a VP now!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 192 lbs

Yo! I need cash too!

Ethics are a funny thing, especially in a startup. Its not unusual for a founder to take money out during a round of funding. The basic theory is that they have been paying themselves almost nothing to get the company going and have been putting their hearts and souls into it, company first themselves second. They get funding for the company, they get some cash in their pockets. Not a big problem.

So lets say hypothetically that you get a round of funding. You take out a nice phat pile of cash. Who knows what you spend it on, but that tan sure suits you and that's one sweet ride you have now.

Then lets say 6 month later you have to let a whole bunch of people go because you have over extended yourself. Not a problem, these things happen right. Economic meltdown-blah-blah-blah.

Then lest say your cash position gets tight again, its only been 9 months but you spent too much. So you get another round of funding. During that negotiation you manage to take some more money out again. Its just over a year since you last took money out, but you have such an elegant and extravagant lifestyle that you really need that sort of cash. Oh, you have to cut staff in this round as well. No problem.

You run the numbers just before you fire your CFO and then find that there is not enough headroom for you to take more cash out. So what do you do? Give up on your cash? No, what you do is give your managers a cash figure that they need to cut in addition, covering the cash you want to take out. How do they do that? Well cut the thing that eats the cash... staff.

The moral dilemma. You have to raise funding twice in 18 months. You have two rounds of rifts. You cut extra deep on the second. You take cash out twice.

Is that great leadership? Probably not. Can you claim the morale high ground? Probably not. Have you been managing your cash position well? Probably not. Do you put your staff first? Probably not.

Henry would never do that sort of thing, if he did there would be a riot and everybody would start leaving. His new Aston Martin is rather nice though, kind of a baby blue.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more official drinking!)
Shots : 9 (We just drink at our desk now, who cares, we still don't even have a VP)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 193 lbs