Sunday, October 08, 2006

The World As Best As I Remember It : Broken Windows Theory:

Deep in the bowels of Windows, there remains the whiff of a bygone culture of belittlement and aggression.  Windows can be a scary place to tell the truth.

When a vice president in Windows asks you whether your team will ship on time, they might well have asked you whether they look fat in their new Armani suit.  The answer to the question is deeply meaningful to them.  It's certainly true in some sense that they genuinely want to know.  But in a very important other sense, in a sense that you'll come to regret night after night if you get it wrong, there's really only one answer you can give.

After months of hearing of how a certain influential team in Windows was going to cause the Vista release to slip, I, full of abstract self-righteous misgivings as a stockholder, had at last the chance to speak with two of the team's key managers, asking them how they could be so, please-excuse-the-term, I-don't-mean-its-value-laden-connotation, ignorant as to proper estimation of software schedules.  Turns out they're actually great project managers.  They knew months in advance that the schedule would never work.  So they told their VP.  And he, possibly influenced by one too many instances where engineering re-routes power to the warp core, thus completing the heretofore impossible six-hour task in a mere three, summarily sent the managers back to "figure out how to make it work."  The managers re-estimated, nipped and tucked, liposuctioned, did everything short of a lobotomy -- and still did not have a schedule that fit.  The VP was not pleased.  "You're smart people.  Find a way!"  This went back and forth for weeks, whereupon the intrepid managers finally understood how to get past the dilemma.  They simply stopped telling the truth.  "Sure, everything fits.  We cut and cut, and here we are.  Vista by August or bust.  You got it, boss."

Every once in a while, Truth still pipes up in meetings.  When this happens, more often than not, Truth is simply bent over an authoritative knee and soundly spanked into silence.
8:09 PM