Cube Farm

Sarusa writes "Stop me if you've heard this one: Bright, innocent, bushytailed overachiever geek, inexorably crushed by the harsh realities of corporate America, turns into paranoid shaven-headed slacker (and Church of the Subgenius minister) who sees conspiracy theories under every rock. 'Heard it?' you sneer, 'I've lived it!' So why would you want to read a book about it? Cube Farm by Bill Blunden proves that if nothing else, you can always serve as a bad example." Read on for the rest of Sarusa's review. Cube Farm author Bill Blunden pages 150 publisher Apress rating 7 reviewer Sarusa ISBN 1590594037 summary Welcome to Hell, here's your cube.

The book chronicles Blunden's travails as a fresh Cornell grad finding out his degree is useless. After waiting tables, he discovers Java is hot, and gets a job in the incredibly dysfunctional R&D department of Lawson Software, one of those companies that makes horribly dull but necessary business software. Young Blunden is shunted from one doomed project to the next as internal divisions compete with each other (and internally) for territory. The code base is millions of lines of ancient K&R C with all the comments stripped out (!) for speed of compilation. Only a few people understand the entire system to any degree, and these Illuminati crush any attempt to create or disseminate any documentation since that would erode their power base. Any projects that might threaten their monopoly are dispatched by the simple expedient of not responding to any emails or phone calls or attending meetings.

Cube Farm is written in a conversational, semi-edgy style that I found very easy to read, though occasionally annoying when it gets too hip. The subject is technical, but the theme is purely human foible, and Blunden makes an effort to make things understandable even by the non-geeky. So you don't have to be a nerd to understand the book - it would sure help you appreciate it, though.

Important characters are assigned descriptive names such as the Puppet Master, the Godfather, the Wax Master, Mike and Ike, and the Mad Hungarian. This may sound a bit cheap, but works well and makes it easy to keep track of the defectis personae. Everything is well partitioned, and Dance of Death woodcuts enliven the pages.

The obvious question, Why you would read something so horribly depressing? There are only negative lessons to be learned here. Well, in many ways Cube Farm is the informal, nasty version of what you'd get by reading books like Death March (Yourdon, 2003 2nd ed), Herding Cats (Rainwater, 2002), and Software Runaways (Glass, 1997). You can learn a lot from a bad example, like what it means if they won't say Yes or No. Perhaps it'll make you feel better about your own company, which is probably not quite this screwed up. Or there's always good ol' schadenfreude.

Would you give this book to an eager young programmer? Either it would be a bit like taking a sledgehammer to a kitten, or (more likely) it would just all cascade off, unheeded -- "obviously, this could never happen to me." For everyone else, if you've had at least one job or failed project under your belt you might find this horrifically fascinating, similar to watching Repligator. It might help with your next (knock on wood) fine project. Finally, it's a quick read, so I felt my time was well (or at least enjoyably) spent.

You can purchase Cube Farm from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Everyone everywhere sucks and I am great

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent poster reminds me of a Tim Wilson line: been divorced four times? Hell, maybe its you.

Re:Disenchantment

[ltbarcly]

I doubt it. More likely you are just a prick who thinks everyone is dumb if they don't see things exactly the way you do, or if they disagree. I find it very very unlikely that you knew more than your professors in college, and then went on to a cookie cutter cube-job. Are you just that much of an underachiever? Something about your story just doesn't add up. You're smarter and more competent than everyone else, just like everybody else.

Welcome to the world, hotshot.

It is alot harder to be competent than to point out the incompetence of others. Noticing incompetence only requires the right knowledge on one topic at one moment in time, BEING competent requires the right knowledge/skill on every topic you deal with all the time, and the energy to actually do it.

Re:Disenchantment

[Phixxr]

Then you suddenly realized that it was you who was incompetent all along, but you were just in denial...

-phixxr :)

Re:Disenchantment

[microTodd]

I got a job and realized that almost everyone I worked with, worked for, or had to suck up to was incompetent

Do you consider yourself above average intelligence? If you are, that means that by definition most (i.e. more than half) of the people you meet are dumber than you.

A fleeting thought

[asliarun]

You know, i've realized that it's easy to write sad shit, but incredibly difficult to write happy stuff. The funny thing is that most of us, at least the self-fashioned highbrows, deign to write favourable critiques only if it's depressing enough for you to slash your wrists! This penchant for despair is also something that i've been noticing in some of the /. comments and posts.

I've been there and lived through that. I'm also sure that most of us have had our periods of depressions and frustrations too (choose your timeframe: junior school, high school, college, limbo between college and first job, stuck in a dead-end job etc.). I just want to say this, and i'm quoting here: THIS IS AS GOOD AS IT GETS.

Jobs will never come easy, and they'll never be a perfect fit for your skills and your interests. Money'll not come easy either. As for love, heck, we're all geeks here. We'll manage to find someone if we're incredibly lucky, brave and desparate enough to go through the trial and error process, and only if we're reasonably good looking to boot! What's left? NOTHING, except for unconditional love, perhaps, if you buy a dog. Yes, this is tabula rasa and it always will be.

What i do, or at least try to do nowadays, is to stop reading this kind of depressing garbage and just focus on the little things. The joy of coding is not to be found in managing to decipher uncommented legacy code or what have you, but in managing to decipher a gem in the uncommented legacy code. It's not sneering at the 101 coding errors that we can find in someone else's code but in finding the one inexplicable construct in someone else's code and the thrill of discovering a new thought pattern.

Or, as the Hagakure suggests:-
"Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige's wall there was this one: Matters of great concern should be treated lightly. Master Ittei wrote: Matters of small concern should be treated seriously."

I'm sorry if i've completely digressed here, as this is supposed to be a book review. However, i do feel an undercurrent of depression in most posts nowadays and just wanted to share my thoughts with all of you.

Re:A fleeting thought

[shostiru]

(I'm not directing this at the parent post so much as making observation on issues raised therein).

For the vast majority of people out there -- including us geeks -- all it takes to find a good partner, a good job, or most anything else in life is an understanding of primate social behaviour and courage. You can either wait around to "get lucky" (with relationships, jobs, etc.), or you can go out and put your ass on the line *every fucking day* until confidence with social skills becomes natural. You don't need to *be* the alpha primate, you just need to fake it in appropriate situations well enough to fool everyone else.

No, there's no unconditional love, at least not outside of family and pets (and you can screw up either if you try hard enough). Seriously, why would you expect any different? Would *you* stick around in a job or relationship no matter how much it sucked? People respect you more when you expect the best of them, not tolerate the worst, and once you lose people's respect in a relationship or on the job, you're shark bait.

You don't need to be "reasonably good looking" to find a relationship; even if your appearance is well below average you can more than make up for it with attitude and experience. You *do* need to act like you've got a pair. That took me a long time to figure out (damn shame Heartless Bitches International wasn't around then), even longer to put into action, mostly because I didn't want it to be true. As if the world cares what I want.

What's certainly not going to work is expecting the rules of the game to change because we want them to. People -- all people, including us geeks -- are animals first, rational second, and behave accordingly. Either play that to your advantage (ethically, one would hope) and win, ignore it and lose, or do your best to opt out completely.

For a lot of people out there, being depressed may be out of one's hands, but *staying* depressed isn't. I have great sympathy for those who cannot get medical or psychiatric treatment. I have absolutely none for those who can, but refuse to do so (or who see a shrink but won't do any of the hard work). Having been there myself I don't think I'm too far off the mark. It is my belief -- and I realize it won't be shared by all -- that some people go through periods in life where we'd sooner stay depressed and whine than get off our asses and fix things. I was there, many of my friends have been there. All the pity in the world doesn't help as much as one person saying "suck it up, everyone's got problems."

And "suck it up" applies to bad IT jobs as well. I like reading about peoples' shitty IT jobs, I think most of these Death March stories are funny in a sick sort of way. But if you're in that position, either get (or create) a better job, or detach yourself emotionally, slack off, and think of it as absurdist humor. Either way *try* to remember that there are people in this country getting paid minimum wage, or worse, to do things you probably wouldn't do for many times your current salary.