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Brevis esse laboro.
Obscurus fio. Horace, Ars Poetica, 25. |
Dominic Vautier
6/2012
In Renton I got a very interesting job that dealt with assembly drill-downs, where you can look at components of an assembly. I really liked my boss until they changed him, which they did all the time to managers. I think the company didn't have enough manager desks, so someone had to be in transit all the time. I studied the obnoxious system the guys had to support, which took three or more programmers just to run, much less maintain. I rewrote the thing with some special software called Essbase that supported drill-downs, along with a new database design. This happened under the strong support of my manager. I think it was a work of art and the users loved it because they got their reports in five minutes instead of several days--really. But it would eliminate the job of those three programmers. I was conflicted, and couldn’t go through with the implementation and I didn’t know what to do. When my boss was moved to another position, and the new one did not know what I was doing and didn't seem to care so nothing happened.
At that moment a good friend called me out of the blue. He was a 2nd level manager in spares and asked me about Oracle 3 forms and HTTP. I told him I knew both like the back of my hand. “Well in that case Dominic, I need you now.” I couldn't say no to a 2nd level so I went to work the next day for SONIC.
SONIC is a spars online ordering system,
It's an acronym for something because Boeing liked acronyms for
everything that moved. It
was converted to an IBM type IMS (Information Management System) data base several years before.
I remembered proposing to do the project with a team of 8 of my
choosing, and I estimated we could complete the conversion in one year.
The SONIC folks instead decided to get a team of 65 and it took
three years to do it. Such is
life at the company.
Old SONIC used IBM IMS and it only worked on IBM terminals. They wanted it to work in HTTP, the language of the internet. I got to do a bunch of dynamic HTTP. This is where HTTP code is generated on the fly as you need it. The SONIC page project completed on schedule. It was the first of it’s kind according to the Wall Street Journal.
Then I
wound up in limbo again--big time. I got stuck with a real looser.
It was a system that would have taken a team of two about 6
months to complete. Instead
it took two years using a team of eight, and never really did get done.
In the end the user refused to use it because it was not what he wanted.
Complicating all this, the company began to use a project management tool called DMR. Now I have nothing against using project management tools, in fact they are very useful, but this DMR thing was utterly ridiculous, and involved countless forms and documentation. Every nook and cranny of a project had to be heavily documented twenty different ways. It took much more time to fill out the forms than it took to program or implement a system. The DMR consultants were aghast at what Boeing had done to their wonderful DMR system, and quickly tried to revise it. Too late. It had become entrenched in the Boeing culture. They egan singing "Look what they've done to my DMR."
Things came to a head when my lead asked me to
look at a program that was taking ten hours to run. It was a terrible program so I threw it away and started from
scratch, which by the way I had found long ago was the best way to do things.
I got
my program to run
in 30 minutes and was actually very proud of the work. When the guy who was maintaining the program looked at the new
program he was offended and quite indignant, so he talked to the lead.
The lead told me to throw away my program and they would
continue to use the old one. I
was absolutely furious and had to take the rest of the day off. I immediately applied for a transfer, because I had seen enough of that
crazy place. Thus
I became the product of my
emotions.
I took a job in product support. It wasn’t a programming job. Rather it was difficult to even define the job except to say it was largely taking care of stuff that nobody else wanted to take care of. It was a garbage dump of a job, a dead end. I organized and scheduled classes, and took care of system interfaces that nobody knew much about. Most of the time I sat around looking at the internet. My boss, who happened to be not only smart but enabling, wanted me to apply for a company fellowship which would make him look good, and secure a solid place for me in the company, so I applied and spent some time going through the paperwork to prove to various committees and boards that I was a suitable candidate for fellowship and that my performance was excellent, which it wasn't at that time because I had time time on my hands to apply for such foolishness to begin with. However I did provide copious documentation for my past accomplishments, exploits and intrigues. When I was half way through the procedure I began to wonder why I was wasting so much of my time on something that won't help my career one bit, so I dropped out of the program.
After a year of idleness I went back to WIRS which was to be my CEM (career ending move).
I think of all the stupid things I did at the
Boeing Company, the move back to WIRS (wiring systems) was the absolute worst possible one.
It continued to be a place of subtle attraction like the wail of the
sirens, where everything looks good from a distance but isn't. The management was very bad and the leads
were unqualified, and all they wanted was a grunt to keep has head down
and keep a chair warm. I spent a
year there. My lead was a
former schoolteacher. I
think he probably taught 3rd grade or something at that
level because that's the way he thought. He showed his past by being overbearing and extremely condescending, and as expected,
treated us like 3rd graders. My life
was miserable. I was
stripped of my assignments. I
applied for a transfer to get out of another madhouse.
Then 9/11 came and the company started laying off. My transfer came in but I knew my number had come up. I would get laid off.
My new
temporary job was in airplane testing. It was a
great learning experience and an even greater opportunity to do things.
They would roll up machines to an airplane and conduct diagnostics to
see that everything worked as advertised.
It was our job to keep the software going.
This place was like a car repair shop only ten times more sophisticated. It was a great opportunity but my number was up. When I got there I immediately began working on some of the systems that were older than Methuselah, and in dire need of upgrade. But my time had run out and I was laid off.
