The End of the World as We Know It

I wasn't concerned about finding a new job after I was done with Fjord Systems. Chucky had been hassling me for a resume; they needed someone like me at his new gig. Two of Fjord Systems' rivals had also approached me. I was pretty sure I could find work without any trouble, and I had my entire three month notice period to do it in.

About two weeks later, a Global Financial Crisis was declared and suddenly all of those opportunities went away. But it was October, and I was tired, and I still wanted to see the product out the door.

First thing I did was tell the team that I was no longer available after hours, and I was not working any more overtime. The immediate ramifications of this were that I was not going to conference into development meetings and I would not be returning to Sweden for the company 'conference'. The conference was a marketing gimmick; a holiday party that would last a week and would see customers from all over the globe descend on the offices in Sweden. I also knew, from the previous year, that almost nobody would be doing any work whatsoever for the entire month of December and half of January. I that wanted to leave quietly.

My work was pretty much done. Chucky had finished the drivers before he left, and I had finished integrating them when I gave my notice. Mostly my job consisted of writing unit tests and fixing bugs that arose because Anders starting messing around with the drivers. His changes were minor and really served only to break the interface or the unit tests. I suspect that this was a way of taking credit for Chucky's work by putting somebody else's name all over the version control system, but I stopped caring. Chucky had agreed to do any urgent maintenance that was needed in his drivers for six months  after his resignation (he did not give the required three months' notice), but there weren't any issues beyond the new ones Anders introduced, and then demanded that I fix in the interface. I complained the first time, but after that I gave up. They were minor changes. Many of the changes simply showed that the team had not understood the design as I had laid it out for them, but the software still worked well enough... it just meant that many of the features I had written sat dormant.

About a month later Martin sent me an email saying that he wanted to talk to me. He said he'd been trying to call me on my office line, but I never answered. I had been turning the phone off after 6pm, and there was no voicemail set up. I had said in my letter of resignation that I would no longer be available after hours. It took Martin six weeks before he thought to email me.

We arranged a time and I got on the phone with him, but I found that I wasn't really listening to whatever it was he was filling my ear with. I sat there remembering him making fun of my friends behind their backs, and I wondered what he'd said about me. I told him that I was tired of the work. I told him that I'd already done this same project when I had worked at ATB Software, and that the team's refusal to honour their promises meant that this product would not be as good as the one I had worked on two years prior. Even if it had been, it wasn't the work I had signed up to do. That work had departed when Jacob had been let go.

The product was released in January. It was substantially better than the prior version, since the new design, even compromised as it was, was at least cleanly-written and fairly efficient. The drivers worked and integrated into the software seamlessly. Despite my reservations, the UI team produced a very nice
new front end for the application from scratch and the product looked quite polished. Certainly, it presented a much shinier facade than the product I had built at ATB Software...

But it just wasn't as good. My product for ATB still rated in the top three of its kind when it came to performance and efficacy, and the new product from Fjord Systems stayed well below it.

But that wasn't my problem. I had quit my job at the middle of the biggest economic downturn in decades, and I was feeling fine.

Back to the Future

I accepted the job that Jacob offered me at Fjord Systems, but not much happened for a while.

I didn't tell anybody at Outerlink, I just kept showing up at work while Fjord got their act together. I kept up a lively correspondence with Jacob, but I couldn't start work until human resources had sorted out the paperwork... and they took their time getting to me. They asked me for a 'salary history'; something I'd never had to do before. I figured it would be a good place to start negotiating from, though, so I made one up and sent it to them.

Time passed and a whole lot more nothing happened. One day at lunch the Butcher grilled me about working in the States. "There's no challenging work left in Australia," he lamented. I couldn't help but agree with him.

I was sick at home when the phone rang early one morning. Eventually I established that the lady on the line with a thick accent that I couldn't identify was calling from Sweden, and that she wanted to negotiate salary with me. She offered me a lot less than what I was currently making--which she was well aware of, given that I had provided her with a salary history a few weeks prior. I was confused fuddled. Were we talking Euros? Pounds sterling? Swedish kronor? No, Australian dollars.

Eventually I bargained her back up to the salary I was currently getting and she told me she would send me a contract.

Time passed and nothing happened. I became more and more concerned about my poor productivity. Surely somebody had noticed how slow I'd gotten? At my job with ATBSoft I would write more code in a day than I was now writing in a week.

Eventually a contract arrived. I signed it, sent it back, and... nothing. I didn't have a start date and I didn't have a reciprocally-signed copy. I kept working at Outerlink and I wondered if I had hallucinated the whole thing... but no, I kept receiving email from Jacob. He was still based mostly in the US and he didn't know what the holdup was.

I got on the phone with HR and asked what was going on. "Oh, I have your contract here. It's been sitting on my desk for weeks."

We agreed on a start date, and I wrote up a letter of resignation for Outerlink. I'd been there for barely six months and I felt bad about it--I liked the people and I knew that it was expensive to recruit and train a new developer. I was the second developer to resign in that timeframe and I knew they'd been having a hell of a time replacing the other guy.

I couldn't help but remember that the last time I'd been in my manager's office with the door closed it had been for a dressing down about using the flexibile hours I'd been promised a few months prior.

"I hope that's not what I think it is," said my manager, indicating the envelope in my hand. He looked genuinely unhappy. "I'm afraid it is."
"You can't leave, you're the guy who gets things done!"
I gave him my letter. He read it.
"Would you stay if we offered you more money? I can do that, now that we know what you're capable of, and everything..."
I couldn't quite believe that he thought I was working so hard for him. "Um, no. This isn't about money... this is the work that I want to do."

I broke it to Sinclair first. He took it personally. "This is about the people, isn't it? This is personal." I felt terrible and I told him that it absolutely wasn't. I think he believed me.

The rest of the team had mixed reactions. The Butcher approved. Chop was thrilled for me. Chitra quietly wished me luck. Ross sniggered about how long it would take to train up a replacement.

In my couple of days, Outerlink hired a contractor to pick up some of the slack. He was wild and woolly and bore a fair resemblance to Doc Brown from back to the future, so the team started to refer to him as The Professor.

The Prof would be immediately picking up some of my workload, so I did a hand-off to him. I spent two days locked in a conference room with him, most of which time was spent listening to him describe his exploits at his prior job. I don't know why he felt the need to impress the guy who was leaving, but he failed to. The Prof espoused everything I disliked about the way the software business had been heading: writing inefficient, resource-hungry code with out-of-the-box tools that don't scale. He described to me in excruciating detail how, at the start of the project, his team was told that they could never get their app to perform using that methodology, and when they were done with it it didn't... until they quadrupled the number of CPUs running it. This, he cited as a victory.

I kept telling myself that I didn't care, it wasn't my problem.When my manager asked me what I thought of the Prof, I could only say "Keep him away from the server." But Doc Brown was a good sign. I was leaving the past; all this old hat stuff and heading for a research gig. I was indeed going BACK TO THE FUTURE.

I finished up, and Jacob had the logistics manager at Fjord Systems draw up some travel plans for me. "I'm flying you out for two weeks," he said. "So we can get everything rolling."
"Sweden must be cold this time of year, " I said. It was the start of December. "I'll have to buy some long underwear."
"Sweden's cold, but you don't have to worry about that just yet," he replied. "We're going to do the briefing here at my place. In Vegas."

I was the happiest I'd been pretty happy with the way this was shaping up. I ordered some very expensive technical books from amazon, with expedited shipping, so that I could really  jump into the research end of things. I wanted to be able to demo some ideas once I got over there.

Then was when my laptop died.

Looking back on it, I already had all the information I should have needed about how things were going to turn out.