We had our team meeting this morning. This was a bit odd since our Product Architect and temporary team director (did I mention that there's STILL no executive in charge of Development yet?) is in Hawaii. The reason became clear when Project Manager Girl ran out of things to say and admitted she was dragging it out because President Guy had said he wanted to stop in on the meeting. For all y'all who aren't in a corporate setting this was the equivalent of Project Manager Girl standing on the conference table and screaming out "This is a set up! This meeting was only held because President Guy wanted y'all for a captive audience while Product Architect is away!"
Except she's stubbornly clinging to her Pennsylvania speech patterns so she wouldn't have said "y'all".
He wanted us to know how proud he is of our product and how important it is to the company. He went on and on about how the quality of the product is so fantastic that we are in a position to leverage our synergies to extemporate our marginalizations, or something like that. The vast difference in product quality since release X.0 was mentioned a couple of times. How life was horrible at X.0 and earlier but that now we've only got legacy issues left from the bad old days. Everybody who's using X.1 through X.4 loves us to tears and wants us to have babies with them.
Know what the big addition was after X.0? The big change that was made to address the massive quality problems? The one constant that has been in place during the increasing reliability and decreasing incident versions of X.1 through X.4? A dedicated Quality Assurance Analyst. Me. I came in to a product that had devastating quality problems. Now we have a product that is so reliable they don't even need to think about quality any more. So they're getting rid of the QA Analyst position.
Stupid mother fuckers.
I'd like to say that I don't hope the product tanks when I leave but that would be mostly a lie. It doesn't really matter what I hope for anyway. Programmers working as part time quality people are not going to put out a reliable product. They already proved this in the pre-Jim versions.
History will repeat itself and by version X.6 this product is going to be a dog again.
I hope their stupidity bites them in the butt.
Thanks, Susie. The rest of my team seems to feel the same way. They sure clammed up when President Guy came into the meeting. He kept trying to get them to ask questions or show some interest but they were silent to the point of rudeness.
I love those guys.
Well, someone pointing out the obvious would have been more helpful than clamming up, no?
No, it was a set up and everybody recognized it. He wanted somebody to broach the subject so he could give his compassionate response that would slowly morph into a motivational speech about how great things were going to be with the new organization (though it's so painful to let go of me).
That's the real reason he was laying on the "Quality is fantastic" rap. He wanted somebody to ask why we are eliminating the Quality position if Quality is why the product is so successful now.
Nobody gave him the slow pitch he was waiting for so eventually he stopped talking and the meeting was over.
Gotcha. I hate corporate politics. I'm too straightforward or naive or something, I guess.
Hardest lesson I've had to learn, Suzie, is that in a corporate environment, being straight-forward and honest is not well-rewarded. Actually, if you DO speak your mind you can expect to, at best, be labled a trouble-maker and, at worst, be terminated, but usually somewhere in between.
Everyone else will be highly-amused and happy you did it, but it still sucks to be you.
hmmm... I wonder if I could be an executive in charge of development.
Wait, for a second, I forgot about my technology allergy. Never mind.
It's no comfort but at least you know you were the difference and your co-workers recognise it. I agree with Jen - it'll all come and bite them in the backside one day soon.