Should Have Paid Me More

Note: You may wish to read The Utilization Report to gain context.

“How does the utilization report arrive at its numbers?”

It seemed like a simple, straightforward and innocuous question at the time. Unfortunately, it opened an institution-sized metallic food storage container of blind, soil-ingesting invertebrates.

You see, the person who’d commissioned the development of the utilization report didn’t really understand what he was building. He had vague amorphous ideas about what he wanted – perhaps he’d seen a report at some other company that was used to determine how well the employees were being utilized and decided it was a good idea. Based on second-hand knowledge and investigation into the reports themselves, here’s how I picture the utilization report’s progression in my head: continue reading…

A utilization report is essentially a view of hours worked vs hours paid – simple, right? You can determine appropriate staffing levels by understanding how much work they’re performing and how much work needs to be performed.

It turned out “the utilization report” at my company actually meant six distinct reports. Here’s how the system worked:

• At the beginning of every month, a user would submit an IT ticket as a reminder to “run” the report on the 15th of the next month
• Somewhere near the 15th of the month, a specific developer would navigate to a directory on his machine and double-click an Access database
• The developer would then locate each of the six reports in the Access database and run them all in turn, exporting them as RTF files when they finished
• Each report was extremely resource-intensive and completely took over the IT guy’s computer, rendering him useless for hours – and even longer if the Access database crashed
• When all reports had been exported, they were attached to an email and sent to the user from Step 1

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Everyone’s seen at least one enormous red button with a label like “GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR INITIATOR VALVE – DO NOT PUSH!”, oui? Of course there’s always a villain around to press the button and ostensibly end the world, but the general concept prevails.

Given the tendency of Plus users to do the most illogical things possible while refusing to read or apply any kind of instructions given and then blame the software for behaving “unexpectedly”, it seemed only fitting to provide them with the one thing they couldn’t screw up: the Do Not Click button. continue reading…

Code comment written less than a month ago:

/**
 * Added 10/7/2009 by specific request of sjohnson. Of course there's no HD
 * ticket or other documentation for the request because everyone knows
 * normal rules don't apply to the field staff.
 */

Code comment written today:

/**
 * Removed 11/5/2009 by specific request of sjohnson. Of course there's no HD ticket
 * or other documentation for the request because everyone knows normal rules don't apply
 * to the field staff. sjohnson swears this is a showstopper and must be removed because
 * now that he actually has to work in Plus on a daily basis he understands how
 * ridiculously foolish it is to clear out the time entry fields after every entry is
 * added to the table.
 */

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