Between the Lines

I had an interview today that told me a lot. It wasn't any one of these things, but the combination of them that gave away what working for this company was like.

When they said,
"The typical work-week is 40-50 hours"

They meant,

"The typical work-week is 50+ hours"

You can tell this because they also said,

"We're not clock-watchers here."

meaning

"If we were clock-watchers, we'd all be miserably depressed at how much time we spend here."

"People can come in as early as they like: some enjoy being here at 6 A.M. and others stay 'til sometime in the evening."

In other words,

"Most people do both"

or

"The typical workday is distracting and frustrating, but you need to be here. It's the times before and after the users and stakeholders get here that you'll be getting anything done."

You can't always infer these things this way--but in this case, the combination of the above phrases, and the way the Development Manager looked when they said them, told me the truth.

There's nothing wrong with hearing, "We need someone who can hit the ground running", but I'm coming across a lot of shops who seem to have cranked up the treadmill and everyone's trying to be George Jetson: "Help! Jane! Stop this crazy thing!"

A lot of times this is because the company has been running on a binge/purge model of staffing: developers are a dime a dozen, so let's get a dozen or two, run them on projects, and if/when things start to get tricky--deadlines slip or developers push back on the requests--we'll let them go and look for some new ones. This is reasonable, given the circumstances: it's hard for a non-technical person to interview for a technical position and know that a person's skill-set is what is needed. And there are a lot of programmers out there who talk a good game.

What happens when you have so many hands on the code is that you have so many different ways things were accomplished that the applications become more of a mess the more they are worked on. In this case a lot of the in-house work was going to be to bring everything to one platform. Matters were made worse by the fact that the company had acquired two other companies very quickly, and to keep things running smoothly and make the mergers happen as quickly as possible, they had simply maintained all three separate systems...of everything. Billing, HR, Auditing and more were performed three times over because nothing had been merged yet. Three cheers to them for wanting it done, but a chorus of boos for waiting for everyone's jobs to reach critical mass before acknowledging it was needed.