There were now five groups in the company. Admin, composed
of two women, looked after personnel, and payable and billable accounts. The
sales group consisted of two men: one of whom worked on developing new
clientele and the other who worked on our current account. John, assigned to
the current account, spent his days on the telephone with the clients in
Michigan going over their requirements and promising delivery dates. However,
he never discussed his agreements with me. It would have been useful to know
what our clients were expecting and what John was promising them, but the only
conversations I had with him were in our weekly status update meetings with the
president, Peter. John would present his Gantt charts and I would update Peter
on the progress my group was making, but there was no relationship between
John’s charts and my reports. The third group was operations support. This was
the team of people who input the raw data into the database and who ran the
applications to produce catalogues. I worked closely with the head of
operations, Tom. In fact the only area of cooperation and coordination in the
company was between Tom’s and my groups. There was the group working on a CD
version of our software, headed by Greg; and there was my group writing the
computer code that made everything work. The Quality Assurance woman was still
there, supervised by and reporting to no one. My group did our own QA.
It should be apparent to anyone reading the above
description that this was a company in deep trouble. The sales group was
contributing nothing to the daily operations. Greg’s CD group was isolated,
apparently by choice, from the rest of the company. The QA position was less
than useless. The only ones producing any actual work were my group and operations
support. Our client had already paid a million dollar advance and the company
was burning through that fairly quickly. By November, I was aiming to have a
version of the software able to stand up to rigorous testing on the client’s
part by mid-January. Except for the long promised bug-free database loading
package—which was not actually critical to our success—the application was
taking shape as a robust and easily customizable application. Almost all of the
previous work in the frontend had been scrapped and replaced by code that was
efficient, easily maintainable, and user friendly. Fortunately, for my part,
Charles’ code to which I had been entrusted was well-designed and thought-out,
meaning I had to make very few changes and my previous work in documenting it
made that work even less time-consuming, leaving me free for supervisory
activities.
In my last piece I mentioned the battle between a member of
my team and the CD development group. They recovered from the set-back of the
initial disastrous release of their CD and worked their way back into Peter’s
good graces. Charm worked. But the failure of my team member to produce the
database loading code he had promised months before was beginning to wear thin.
I looked at his code on a weekend when he wasn’t there and concluded that any
other member of my team could take over his work and complete it, possibly
within a week of taking it on. It was just a matter of time now before I
approached Peter with the idea of letting my employee go, but, with Christmas
approaching I was reluctant to take that step right away. If Peter asked, I was
also going to recommend that we did not need the person occupying the QA
position.
The first week of December, Peter threw a Christmas party
for the staff. It was a Friday. I thought it significant that no member of the
CD development team attended. Once again, they were giving the rest of the
company the finger. We had a good time and I was delighted to meet family members of my team. The Tuesday following as I readied for
my weekly 10:00 am meeting with John and Peter, John told me that Peter had to
postpone the meeting until 4:00. I thought nothing of it, but then, as 3:30
arrived and passed, John appeared to be getting agitated and was pacing inside
his office, glancing frequently at his watch. At about five minute to four John
appeared in his coat and said he’d have to skip the meeting; he had something
important to attend to. I felt relief that I’d finally be able to have a
private talk with Peter about some of my concerns. At four as I went towards
Peter’s office, the personnel director stopped me and said Peter was busy and
she’d let me know when he could see me. Odd, but okay. Five or ten minutes
later she fetched me.
Peter began by telling me that he had decided to merge the
two development groups into one. That made sense to me; the CD development
group had been performing poorly and had made it clear they had no respect for
either the company or Peter. I knew I could take over that aspect of the
software and get it on track. But, Peter went on, in his experience he could
not have one former manager working for another and Greg was staying. I went
cold, knowing what was coming. Before I knew it Peter was talking about the
severance package he had prepared for me. It was generous—double what the law
required—plus he offered to keep me on salary until the end of January and told
me that he had lined up an opportunity for me with the now-separate consulting
branch of the company. In other words, depending on the start date in the new
situation, I could be earning a double salary for while on top of the severance
pay. But, I really wasn’t listening to any of that. I was going over in my mind
what Greg had just pulled off with his audacious duplicity.
When Peter finished his speech he invited me to call him
names. “I don’t want to call you names, Peter,” I said quietly. “I just think
that you have been getting bad advice and are making a mistake. And, when you
realize it two or three months from now, give me a call.” I left his office and
the nervous woman in charge of personnel accompanied me to my desk and watched
as I removed my personal items and then she escorted me to my car. She gave me
a hug and wished me luck. When I got out onto the street I called my wife on my
cell phone and said, “I think I just got fired.”
I did go to work for the new owner of the consulting branch
(and had a double income for about three weeks), but I continued to mentor my
group, frequently having coffee with them, and they invited me back to the
various going-away parties as they each moved on. It was a bit less than the
two months until I got the call from the old company asking me to help them out.
I agreed to work on contract at $100 an hour on a piecemeal basis. Over the
next two years or so I put in 10 hours or so a month at $100/hour; not a bad
second income. By chance I ran into Peter on the street about a week after he
had fired me. When he saw me he looked as though he wanted to run away, but I
really had nothing against him. I asked him who else he had let go and he told
me the two people who I had been going to talk to him about. “Well, I agree
with you there,” I told him. The new owner then took me for a coffee about two
months after my fateful meeting with Peter and told me that he had just let
Peter go. As for Greg and company: once Peter was out of the way, they stole
the software the company had been working on and set up their own competing
business. I had been tempted to tell Peter that December evening in his office
that Greg would never rest until he occupied Peter’s office, but I always had a
problem with people who try to get ahead by “tattling” on others. So, I had
bitten my tongue and went on to earn almost double what Peter had been paying me. Still, I would rather have continued with the team I had built producing slick, tough, and error-free code.
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