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Cube Farm
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.
The tracy kidder book is quite good, about the creation of a new Data General Computer. Although that book too will likely make anyone reading it question if they want to be an engineer. Won a pulizer prize if I remember correctly.
All my previous jobs have been positions where I was in control of what happened. I was the sysadmin and primary developer. I was the regional MIS Manager. etc.
Now I work at S**** F*** and I'm just a Technical Analyst. The shock of going from ruler on-high to "cube occupation device" has been tremendously shocking.
It took weeks to get admin rights to a machine I have physical control over. I cannot install any software on my own, under any circumstances. The only software that can EVER be installed is done remotely via SMS issuance. I do most of my coding in Notepad because I don't want to waste seven weeks on an absolute beginners Java course so that I can install WSAD.
The rules in place here are unbelieveable. I can't even run FireFox from my USB key. (I can't use a USB key at all!)
If Galilleo worked here he would have never discovered anything. He would waste away and the only thing he'd have to look forward to is his 30th anniversary ceremony, which lasts an entire 5 minutes.
Now I'm becoming a conspiracy theorist.
We buy all our software (all of it, even pay-for software) from a company of unknown origin (more on that in a second) who provides indemnification for us. We can't even use Perl unless we buy it from this company and have them provide us a binary. Same for every other common-sense utility or peice of software that I used to install with reckless abandon at my previous employers.
This company (known as STA) charges hundreds of dollars PER LINE OF SOURCE CODE to provide indemnification, including lines that consist entirely of "}" or "{". I believe that STA has been formed by some of the higher up lawyers in S**** F*** and since they mandate that ALL software (even things like MS Windows XP) be purchased through STA, that they stand to benefit from its existance. Whoever decided to start up companies to provide indemnification against software was a genius. I wish I'd thought of that. I woudln't be a cube occupation device, I'd be a tropical beach occupation device.
So yeah, *takes drink of 35th cup of coffee* you can say I've changed. My company has over 130k employees. I simply cannot change anything, and am forced to spend my energy coming up with reasons why I can't do the things I'm so very used to doing.
I read this book in a single setting on the airplane (Salt Lake City to San Francisco, so wasn't that long) and it was a fun one to read. It's basically an auto-biography of a guy who graduated with a degree in Physics to find out his best job opportunity was waiting tables at a local restaurant.
The interesting thing about author's career at Lawson, as he emphasizes that in several places in the book, is that he always managed to work for departments that have never shipped a product. A lot of the time was spent in maintenance, planning, high-level design and then high-level redesign, office politics and what not.
There's also a funny story about back-stabbing inside Lawson with some guys separating from Technology department and creating the Advanced Technology department (as if to imply that the other one is some kind of non-advanced, backward, technology).
Heh, the god(s) must be watching over me. I literally just finished writing a journal entry about my sad, pathetic situation, and the first news story I come across is about more people like me. At least I'm not alone in the world!
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say I can relate to this story. I started 5 years ago working desktop support for a large international bank, at the time I had desire to learn and drive to succeed. In my relatively short career, I've accomplished more than I imagined I could. I made it out of desktop support, worked in the server support group for awhile, then became a SQL DBA. No matter what job I did, I always asked the right questions, and worked my butt off to get to the next level.
The problem is I worked too hard and was pushed into management. They said I was the only person with the broad range of skills. I thought, "cool, another job challenge to overcome", besides "they need me". Little did I know all of the bureaucracy I would have to endure... Meetings to talk about work but never actually get things done. I have no authority of other technology groups other than my own... so I get screwed when other groups aren't doing their jobs. My new boss doesn't care about my desire to return to be a technology resource, so I'm left swimming on my own. I now official HATE MY JOB!
Moral of the story for all you young people just starting out, don't be disenchanted for by corporations. If you find the right one, you have the potential to learn a lot and go far. But you have to realize when enough is enough. The corporate bureaucracy can kill your soul if you stay too long.
As for me, I will be resigning in a few more weeks after my 401k official becomes vested, and won't look back. It's time to get out of the farm and move onto greener pastures.
I'll have to read this book. I'm an ex-Lawson employee. Laid off in 2002.
I need to defend something here. Although Bill might have been fed another story. The K&R code base did not lack comments for compilation speed. Back in 1997 I was told that it was because the code was meant to be "self documenting", that is, it was meant to be plain enough that you didn't need comments to understand it and comments got in the way and made the code more difficult to read. Also unless you are talking Universe 2.x or earlier it wasn't K&R any more, it was a mix of ANSI and K&R. We adjusted the compiler flags on the Unix platforms to allow for the mixture of syntaxes.
Bill might have been fed a different story though. I always added comments above functions that I went in to maintain. I was never told that I could not comment my code, just that I shouldn't litter the code with comments.
I liked working for Lawson up until the end. Lawson started going down hill when they started focussing on their IPO. Once Lawson focussed their goals on market cap rather than producing a quality product, the company started to spiral, IMHO.
I also feel the company lacked vision. Since '98 we had a Linux product that Lawson refused to market or offer to interested customers. I doubt it exists any more as I was the only one maintaining it when I was laid off in 2002. The last official line I got for The Godfather (if it is who I think it was) was that offering the product would offend MS and Lawson would never risk offending MS. Lawson's Web product used to be browser agnostic until some MS zelot got in control of the project and decreed that it would only work on IE. There was no real technical reason for that limitation.
Sadly Lawson was the best employer I ever had. I came from a worse environment and the one I'm in now makes Lawson look really good. Sigh.
Become an architect. A creative job, in which you design something that people use every day, solving difficult constraints all the way. If you do a good job, you'll get wrote up in trade magazines, and even books. Plus you'll have the satisfaction of building something that'll outlast anything you can build in IT.
It doesn't matter how smart you are, it matters how well you do things right. Not what you think is right. Big difference.
It reminds me of the saying along the lines of "When you're a child, people judge you on potential. When you're an adult, people judge you on what you do."
I think some people forget this. (I'm not specifically having a go at the grandparent poster here...)