This page last updated
10.02.2023
I do not assert that anything of what follows is true, or that any person described bares any relation to any real person, living, dead, or working for a German engineering company, which is somewhere between the other two. If anyone thinks otherwise, I would be too polite to argue.
Ten months to go. I'm slowly coming to the end of a decade as a software engineer at a famous German electrical engineering and electronics company, and to the end of more than thirty years residence and work in Germany. My work is finished. The regular reorganisations that are a common feature of life in all large companies (particularly this one) have ensured that those with a longer shelf life have got the new management positions. But agreeing conditions for leaving the company before the appointed time would require a management decision, and since we are in Germany this is hard, if not impossible, to come by.
So here I am, sitting on the sidelines - a management lame duck - observing events like the chorus of Greek tragedy. It's obvious what will happen, the fates insist on it but the main characters haven't noticed. Warnings are as effective as a voice crying in the wilderness, prepare ye the way of the next cock-up.
I shall use the time to record the fate of those around me, and when I'm awa', safely owre the friendly Rhine (no need to cross the Main, or the main) to get from there to here, I shall put it on my web site. Which is what I am now doing.
Extract from Mail from project leader:
"Der Hinweis auf die Handlungsfähigheit ist bekannt und kritisch. Ich halte es für unumgänglich, dass wir ein Konzept erstellen und dokumentieren, wie wir damit umgehen wollen."
Roughly translated:
"The reference to our operational options is well known and critical. I consider it vital that we define and document a concept for dealing with the situation".
What he actually meant was "the software we have delivered doesn't work and I don't know why".
Further treasured remarks of the same project leader:
During a performance review with an underling: "I don't understand why I'm paid so much, either".
In a discussion about product features: "I don't care about the client - I have a political problem".
It's important to document the company hierarchy: there are three sorts of employees.
Friday is the day of the status meeting.
That means all team leaders present a slide in a standard format showing their current development status. Today everything was either "on hold" or "information not available" (to busy to prepare). The meeting still lasted over two hours. The project manager did however inform us that a software module, let us call it DNC, should now be called "Manage MyPrograms". This was the result of an all-day meeting at headquarters yesterday.
The main question - "Why doesn't the software which we have to deliver next week work at all?" was postponed until this afternoon.
In the afternoon it was decided that the software works after all. But no-one had noticed because no-one knew how to work it.
Kick-off for risk workshop in five minutes. No-one knows what it is, but it's most important.
A consultant from corporate "enterprise process consulting" presents slides showing three pillars. He speaks of processes and personnel, explains that he will speak both with senior management and with people who actually do things. The question as to how the results will be presented, or what will happen to them, is not answered. It is to be decided by senior management, but not yet.
A bird just came past and asked me my name. It seems she's a schoolgirl with a holiday job as an office assistant. She has the job of finding out who works here and where they sit - in case someone's disappeared without anyone noticing, I suppose. She said there do seem to be a lot of empty desks
I and four others were called to a meeting by the project leader. He didn't say why. As soon as we sat down, his Blackberry rang. He looked, went outside, spoke, came back in and told us to proceed without him, as he now had another more important meeting. He still didn't tell us why we were there.
A new Hungarian appeared. I asked him (in German, like you have to) what he's doing here. He said "do you speak English?". I asked him again in English. He explained that someone unconnected with the project had sent him to work on certain component. He was to take over the development and maintenance. I asked how he could manage if he couldn't read the German documentation. He said "No problem - there isn't any documentation".
Hungarians have been appearing at regular intervals for the last year. They're supplied by a firm in Budapest, and we get them because they're supposed to be cheaper than Germans. Added to which, being subcontractors, we can throw them out any time we need to save money. Sorry, I mean we can manage our resource balance without recourse to outplacement measures for company staff.
Milestone meeting (as defined in the development process definition) for start of a new product development. "What product are we talking about?" I ask. "That's a good question" says the project manager.
I had a meeting at 9 o'clock. On arriving, I was told that the meeting wasn't cancelled, but that I wasn't invited any more
Had another meeting - a teleconference with head office - at 10 o'clock. The communication was established at 11:15.
We have a Hungarian here whom we wanted to enter in the project planning list. Then we were told we can't, because she's already entered in another department. The question no-one could answer was, is this the same Hungarian, or do we have two with the same name? No-one seems to want to find out.
A most important meeting of about ten people. Should start at 11 o'clock. Starts late, of course, because no-one comes on time. First we decide that, to save time, we'll talk through lunch and get some food in. Its decided that we order pizza. This decision takes until 11:30. Then the question, what sort of pizza? The secretary has the menu of the take-away. Find the secretary, get the menu. Then a long discussion ensues about the relative merits of quattro stagione, diavola, etc. Everyone has to decide what sort of pizza they want. A list is prepared. It's now 12 o'clock. The list is taken to the secretary. Five minutes later she comes in to the meeting. The pizzeria is closed on Tuesdays. So we go to lunch anyway.
The consultant doing the project risk analysis presented his report. It had three pillars on the first slide. All presentations by consultants have three pillars on the first slide. It was generally polite, which was pretty difficult.
Also had a status meeting. One product to be delivered next Tuesday has been put back two months, I discovered after the meeting that two other products to be delivered today don't actually work. Well, they do, but not at the same time, which was the object of the exercise.
At 17:00 the project leader noticed that the software he had explicitly ordered cannot work - various functions can be activated that cause a crash. He had said this was irrelevant - the user shouldn't use them, but has just noticed that this is rather silly. Crisis meeting (in the corner of the development office, without preparation). Decision: redesign the system. Pity the system test has just started.
A team leader was surprised to discover that a Hungarian whom he didn't know had been working on his project for a while. The software manager had assigned the tasks and forgotten to mention it.
A crisis meeting was held to discuss what to do about a product whose delivery date has to be postponed from the end of this week (August) until next April. Some features had been overlooked. In the end everyone was so interested in the technical problems of the forgotten features that they forgot to discuss what to tell the client.
Return from holiday to discover that a re-planning of all activities has occurred.
Received a ceremonious notification that my contract expires at the end of April 2012. No sign of a successor yet - "but we're working on it".
The day before yesterday the software manager spent an hour at my desk asking me questions. He made copious notes. He then left his notebook on my desk, covered by a confidential document (which didn't concern me at all but which he happened to be holding at the time). I needed space, so I moved the pile to my visitors' chair. Today he came again, and said "can I move your pile, I want to sit down?". He then wasted another two hours of my time.
We've just finished a review of a largish functional specification. The last, extensive, comments came from the person responsible for a special hardware variant. He'd obviously read the spec carefully and put a lot of work into his reply. The answer he got was: "Sorry, didn't anyone tell you? The product doesn't run on your hardware anyway. I hope you haven't sold it yet".
The software manager came this morning and said that all planning done in the last four weeks was invalid because he had forgotten that we have a contract to deliver a system (not in the planning until next March) to a Very Important Client, and that it is already two years overdue.
It turned out this didn't matter so much, because although it wasn't in the planning, the engineers had completed the development anyway, although the management had stopped it 18 months ago.
Crisis meeting about delivery for above-mentioned Very Important Client - we have to name a date today. System test reports that they are not sure exactly which functions have to be tested. There are three different versions of the feature spec. Development team leader: "I have to analyse the code to see what we've implemented, then I'll write that in the release note".
Quality assurance (me): "What's in the contract?"
Development team leader: "What contract?"
Software manager: "Dunnow. Hr. Sowieso from the client looked at the prototype and said it was probably OK, but they may want a few other features as well".
Grand reorganisation was revealed. This became necessary because the project leader has got himself promoted to better things, the product manager likewise. And they've decided to demote the software manager for incompetence. Result: I now have the job I had before the last reorganisation. There are now - excluding two wallies - exactly three technical staff left. Nine months ago there were eleven, two years ago there were about twenty-five. This saves money. The Hungarians are mostly still there or have been replaced by other Hungarians. As a newly appointed manager, I enquire of my boss what authority I have when its a matter of telling these people what to do. She says none.
Just finished a meeting to confirm the planning for this year. The document has been available for about four months. The general tenor of the meeting was "we have to decide", or "when I agreed to that, I didn't think you meant it".
The office boss is back from holiday today. I reported on the situation and asked for a decision. She said we have to wait for the status meeting on Friday, so the (new) project manager can be involved. I went back to my desk and found a mail from the project manager saying he was ill this week and in the USA for two weeks after that. Bad luck.
We had a one hour meeting today about "the new co-operation model". It consisted of lots of slides (in English - we have to be modern and dynamic) with words on them like "empower to enable" and "strategic decision though knowledge". I also transcribed the following gems of management-speak directly from the slides:
ensure agile steerability of the department
ensure widely autonomy of divisional sites
use synergy effects between sites to reach goals
Cost Leadership by raising efficiency potentials
Inovation leadership by ensuring fast time to market
Quality leadership by providing best products at lowest cost
Common processes and effective PLM tools to increase productivity and quality.
and finally (surprise surprise!):
Project leader is responsible for project
I ask myself, is there a secret Powerpoint add-on, known only to Blackberry users, that generates this sort of crap automatically?
The are also new "Competance Leads" and " Local CoF Managers". At the end of the presentation I ask the presenter what relevance this all has for the average software developer, i.e. the audience. He says "none".
Needed to contact the configuration manager, who hadn't turned up for work after his holiday. No-one knows his telephone number at home. Why not? Office manager: You can't expect us to know! We don't keep personal information about employees! The personnel department (in Bratislava) should know his address".
Arrived at work early. Computer didn't work. No power on desk. The IT department didn't have either a voltage tester or an extension cable. They said "oh dear".
The setup for one of our products asks the user to specify which of two third party databases he wants to use. Both database software packages are delivered with the product. It now turns out that one of these databases is part of windows and is always there, the other has to be installed by downloading from the suppliers web site. We're not allowed - per licence - to deliver either of them. I try to get to the bottom of this.
Question: "Why do we make it so complicated for the user by delivering two databases?"
Answer: "Because the first doesn't work properly"
"Then why don't we just deliver the second?"
"Because that doesn't work properly either"
The project status meeting was a disaster. Ten people sat around for an hour and a half and decided that all decisions that were required had to be taken by the project leader, who wasn't there. His deputy did however decree that no-one but the project leader (who wasn't there) is allowed to tell the sales department that the product they're expecting next week will be delayed for four weeks.
Had a silly meeting at 9 o'clock this morning. A presentation of the last staff satisfaction survey. Everyone said the behaviour of management was shit and the general atmosphere in the office was no better. The boss wanted to improve things. The result of the meeting was that a further meeting was scheduled.
Yesterday we delivered a new system to the Very Important Client. Today they rang and said that their database has been destroyed by the new software. We wanted to find out what was going on, but the Hungarian who programmed the changes has spent the entire morning on the phone to Budapest, trying to get her crashed email account to work again. Bad luck.
Just received directions about the time reporting system for this year. The data has to be input monthly by a certain day (3 days before the end of the month) but has to contain the data up to the end of the month. Why do they do it like that, knowing that people have to make up data for the last three days? "We can only handle the data for complete months but management needs the data on the first. Never mind if it's wrong, no-one will notice".
They also requested that we record the time we don't work. I'm still trying to find out why.
Had two meetings this afternoon. Both lasted an hour.
In the first, the chairman forgot what the meeting was supposed to be about after the first ten minutes. After an hour, everyone drifted away.
In the second, the meeting decided that a decision would have to be taken.
Tried to recover data from the effort recording database. The time recording system has only just gone live again after the start of the new fiscal year on 1st October (its now 29th November). In the meantime, everyone had to note (on paper) what they'd done for entry later. It now turns out that there's a new rule that says that project leaders - the only people who might be interested in the data - are not allowed to see it.
Tomorrow and the day after we have the great team meeting (in a hotel somewhere, so we wont be disturbed). I am not aware of any preparation except that cars have been organised to take us there. It seems we won't be expected to contribute a lot. There will be various motivating presentations from assorted Blackberry-users from Head Office, but there is no sign of anything useful.
What you expect is what you get. We got what I expected.
Had a meeting this morning arranged for 8:30. Got to work at 8:15 so. as to be in good time. Was then informed that the meeting had been brought forward half an hour and was already over. Time for coffee.
Status meeting this morning (not at 8:30). First there was a half-hour discussion about an error reported by the Very Important Client. The discussion was not about how to correct the error but about the concept of the organisation that would enable us to specify who had to know whether the error should be corrected or not. Since in this case everyone had known about the error in the previous version and the decision had been taken by the project leader to deliver the system anyway, the whole discussion was fairly irrelevant.
Then we looked at the product compatibility matrix. One chief developer said it was wrong, three developers asked why they hadn't been consulted and everyone was of the opinion that we should have a special meeting to discuss it. I had to point out that this wasn't a good idea because everyone present had looked at this matrix in the three previous status meetings and had seen no problem, and everybody had participated in the discussion / meeting that had given rise to it. They had all forgotten.
Had two important meetings today. The first was about product configurations. The software designer responsible didn't have much time, so he said we should discuss the most important things first, so he could then leave. After he had spent 20 minutes explaining to the assembled eight people why an obvious requirement couldn't be implemented, the man who writes the documentation remarked casually that the feature didn't need to be implemented because it was already present and had always worked.
The second meeting was for planning the co-operation between two development groups. After an hour, many diagrams of committees and reporting structures had been drawn. But the names of the people who actually had to do something were still "name 1" "name 2" etc. in the diagrams.
I got a mail telling me that there is now a new system for accounting for IT services. Everyone has to check their own bills, which are then paid centrally. The mail said to go to a web link to get my personal bill. I went to the link, it logged me in automatically. Then it said "database error".
Not a lot on. And it's still an hour to go till lunch. I think of Rupert Brooke "A dim watch tells two hours, two aeons, more ...Opposite me two Germans sweat and snore. Except that, because the heating doesn't work, no Germans are sweating at the moment (only Hungarians, theyre hacking away cheerfully). But sleepy the Germans look to be. Of course, it could be hypothermia, not lack of enthusiasm.
Had a meeting (called by our office manager) to discuss the success or otherwise of our subcontractors in Hungary. We discussed for an hour. The conclusion was that we should have another meeting in January and that someone should make some slides.
The was also some discussion as to whether it was legal for the team leader to tell the subcontractor what to do.
We just had the status meeting. The project leader agreed that it would be a good idea to give a favoured client a copy the new software - it's ready for shipping but not yet officially released - for test purposes. Everyone nodded. When I tried to get the software after the meeting, everyone who could have given it to me refused, on the grounds that the development process doesn't allow for this and the project leader isn't entitled to change the process. It was agreed that the software could be delivered if an appropriate authorisation was provided by a person entitled to do this. But no-one knew who such a person might be. In the end I just made a copy and dispatched it.
The problem is that I'm a manager (and therefore unable to actually do anything), but not a Blackberry-user (and therefore unable to tell anyone else to do anything). The company is very particular about such rules.
Two days before handover of a new product version, there is some discussion as to whether the Hungarians have delivered the software as required and ordered, or whether they still have work to do. They say theyve implemented everything in the spec. they were given. The team leader then sends the Hungarians a mail. "die Feature-Spec. können Sie in der Pfeife rauchen". (Roughly translated: the spec is rubbish anyway).
Statement from a development team leader the day before hand-over (of a different product) to system test:
"I can confirm that the development is complete and that there is nothing more for us to do. The system test could start - but unfortunately the software doesn't work"
I am given a pile of invoices for work done by Hungarians and asked by accounting to check them. I discover that it's not possible to identify what each invoice is for. They just say xxx Euros please. I ask accounting why this is. I am told there's an agreement in the contract that says we're not allowed to know what the invoices are actually for. I ask "then why did you ask me to check them?". Answer: "We have to control our expenditure". I ask how we're expected to do this if we don't know what the invoices are for. Answer: " Dunnow - I suppose we can't".
Was in the office at 8:15 because I had a very important planning meeting at 8:30.
Unfortunately the boss had forgotten all about it, because her Blackberry had crashed over the weekend and she'd lost all her appointments. So she came ten minutes too late. But it didn't matter, because the company network had crashed too, and since we're not allowed to hold the data we needed locally, we couldn't do anything anyway.
Important principle mentioned casually by said boss: "Discussing the point of the activity is useless - we have been given strategic goals.
By 11 o'clock the network still isn't working. I go to IT support, and ask them when the problem will be corrected, so I can at least read my mail. They tell me I can read my mails because there's a work-around for Outlook. They sent a mail telling us what to do. I asked the man whether it had occurred to him that this was a fairly useless activity. He said "yes".
Have a silly meeting with the project manager at 8 o'clock this morning. He wants to know the status of planning for the next software version. The feature group leaders are agreed. There isn't any. The rest is waffle. The meeting is planned for half an hour. It lasts until 9 o'clock, when I say I have to go because I have another meeting (and so do the feature group leaders). The project leader then remembers he has a meeting as well.
I had to get to work for a meeting at 8:30 - planning for this year. At one point I had to ask: "Do I understand correctly, that what we are doing is trying to calculate in our heads what numbers we have to input to the planning tool so that it thinks it has a valid plan for an engineer who doesn't exist in a project we're not responsible for?". They all said "yes".
Got to work at 8 o'clock today because I had an important meeting with the project leader and the system test manager. Unfortunately the system test manager had forgotten to mention that he is not in the office all this week because he has a course at head office.
Very important visit by very important person from head office. He came with a retinue of five sub-managers, all of whom were more important than anyone in the office here. Unfortunately, it took about twenty minutes to get the video for the projector working. It always does. Then he showed slides with things on them like "To leverage the positive trends of our market environment we have to use all levers for growth".
By the time he'd finished, it was 11:30, so everyone went for lunch.
I was asked by the secretary for some help. She's been given a list of products that we're supposed to support and she needed (for an authorisation process) to know what the next version number of each product would be. That should be easy. Only when I looked at the list, I couldn't relate about half the things on it to anything that we're developing. I enquired. No-one else had heard of them, either. It turns out that the product manager had an idea and presented this on a slide to various Blackberry-users, but he hadn't bothered to ask
We have a super document management system calls DOORS. Some Blackberry-user decided it would be a good thing if the entire division used the same tool, and obviously this salesman invited him out to lunch first. There's no other rational explanation for the decision, as the software is for practical purposes unusable.
I had to pass my knowledge about use of the software on to my successor. He asked reasonable questions, like "I want special administrator rights to do this or that, how do I get them?" I passed this on to the department's special DOORS administrator. She said "I don't know anything, I only fill up forms and pass them on to so-and-so. So I then discovered who so-and-so is, and sent the question to him. He said "you have to ask the person who's responsible for you".
Later, another Blackberry-user decided that we don't have to use DOORS at all, so the whole effort was wasted.
Received the minutes of the approval meeting for the planned software development for this year. The procedure is defined explicitly in the company development process, including which documents have to be made available to obtain management approval. These include (you might think "obviously", but actually because some process-definer read an American book on the subject) a development plan and a cost estimate. I was therefore rather surprised to note that the development plan consisted of a few Powerpoint slides - which had not been discussed with any member of the development staff - and there was no cost estimate at all. I investigated. It turns out that the new in thing is agile development - some Blackberry-using manager has read a newer American book. There is therefore a new alternative "agile process definition", and projects are allowed to choose which they use. This says that you don't have to know what you're doing, or what costs you're committing the company to, when you start a project. The idea behind agile development is of course that there are certain things that you can't know, so there's no point in pretending you do. However the interpretation of this in the process definition is that, when a project starts,
either
the people responsible have to know what they're going to do and what it's going to cost, and have to commit to it,
or
it doesn't matter if they haven't the faintest idea.
Made a bad mistake. I went do do my shopping on the way to work and didn't arrive until 10:15. Then I discovered that I should have had a meeting at 10 o'clock. Went sheepishly to the conference room - empty. Went back to desk, loaded windows, loaded outlook, checked room. Meeting postponed until Friday.
Then got a mail, send to about 300 people, informing us that the department (let us say) "J ET MC MT" - with which we have nothing to do - is now called "J ET MC MTS". this should have a significant effect on company profits, if you discount the productivity loss of 300 people reading the mail.
Also got an invitation to a meeting for "setting priorities for the next hotfix for ..". 11 people are on the attendees list. Why it takes more than one person to decide that errors which make software unusable should be fixed as soon as possible is something I still find hard to understand. But this is "the process". It's probably necessary because as a matter of principle, those who know about anything are not not allowed to make decisions about it.
The final results of the "workshop on staff satisfaction" have just been emailed to everyone.
Nothing very exciting. Basically, the obvious will be done, provided it doesn't require a decision to reinterpret some directive from head office in a creative manner. That might seriously damage one's career prospects (it wouldn't, because no-one would notice, but why take the risk - whoever got promoted for thinking?)
All important people have withdrawn for another workshop ("workshop mission/vision"). They forgot to tell the rest of us, so two of us turned up for a meeting that was otherwise unpopulated - thus breaking the rule for behaviour in meetings promulgated as a result of the "staff satisfaction" workshop.
I've been trying to help one of our projects buy some software. It's an old product that needs an update of a component that was originally bought from an American company. Now we need an update of their software and we don't have a maintenance agreement. No problem, we just have to pay. Only the supplier says he wants to negotiate a contract, our purchasing says they're not empowered to negotiate, only to pay. So I have to convince the seller to demand a reasonable price which will then be paid without further argument. Who signs the contract I do not know. But by then it won't interest me.
But how do I explain to a supplier that a company the size of this one isn't able to negotiate a contract for about ten thousand dollars, because the purchasing department is afraid of making a mistake? In the end, I leave the problem to my successor.
The time has come to say good-bye. I am now old enough to be dispensed with without the need of a decision. They send me off with good wishes - which I reciprocate - they need them more than I do. The last service I can render is of course the traditional one of scapegoat. Those who can convincingly demonstrate that all cock-ups of the next 18 months are actually due to me will get bigger Blackberries.
I leave the building for the last time. Spring is in the air and a pair of ducks are thinking about making a nest by the office pond. They come every year, and they deliver chicks on time and presumably with the duck-planned effort. No committee has to approve their production process.
I walk on towards the car park. I do not look back.