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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.
And the sequel Hypercube... and it was just okay.
The last thing I want to do after living this for 8 hours a day is to go home and read about it.
"Would you give this book to an eager young programmer? Either it would be a bit like taking a sledgehammer to a kitten..."
Goodness, how graphic. If someone wants eager young programmers to knock off kittens, there are alternatives.
I was disenchanted, frustrated, and paranoid in middle school (6th-8th grades). It got worse in high school. In college I gave up on learning anything in class because most of my profs were idiots. When I graduated, I got a job and realized that almost everyone I worked with, worked for, or had to suck up to was incompetent.
I complained about all this, and you know what they told me? Welcome to the world.
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.
...and rent Office Space.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
There really are no conspiracies, however 'THEM' is surreptitiously trying to make us believe that there are conspiracies in an effort to draw our attention away from what is actually going on. You see if I actually believed in copnsipiracies, then I would be waisting my time trying to prove said conspiracies, instead of trying to uncover the REAL truth. However, since there are no conspiracies, 'THEM' cannot conspire to create conspiracies, and therefore I do not have to waste my time trying to figure them out. Then again, if 'THEM' is trying to make us believe there are conspiracies, when there are really no conspiracies, then there is a conspiracy to creat conspiracies. Hah, they will not fool me - Since there are no conspiracies, there cannot be a conspiracy to create conspiracies, therefore I will still be able to focus on discovering the truth.
Wheres my tinfoil hat, and my 712th printing of Catcher in the Rye, although I don't know why I need another, but I do know that I need it because it hase the new extra black ink.
.. been writing it now for 20 years, still going strong ..
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Parent poster reminds me of a Tim Wilson line: been divorced four times? Hell, maybe its you.
1. Get hypnotized, kill therapist halfway through session.
2. Hatch grand scheme to fleece company with couple of geeks at work.
3. Wait for scheme to go horribly wrong...if possible engage in flirting, drinking, movie watching and general merry making during this period. Heineken and Kungfu movies are the preferred varieties of entertainment.
4. Engage local frustrated employee to burn up office and evidence of scheme hatched in (3). Members of said species are easily found in office basements usually mumbling to themselves.
5. Quit software job, and obtain employment at neighbor's construction facility.
6. ???
7. PROFIT!!!
I don't have a cube, I have an area. But it's quite disconcerting to think that corporate America has thrown us into this "worker bee, sit at your desk and produce" model. It sucks. But on the other hand, I get paid to sit right here, so I'm good. I'd be interested in reading the book, however, I am afraid it would discourage me more than I already am.
But he can have it. I've got a new one, trolling on blogs.
The pay isn't great, but the complete lack of any sense of accomplishment makes me feel guilty for what I get anyway.
sigs, as if you care.
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 just can't enough of that. Honest.
conversational, semi-edgy style
Translation: Usenet readers will feel at home.
--- Ban humanity.
Get a job at a college or university.
I ended up working full-time in the IT dept of the university I graduated from. I didn't plan on, it just kind of happened. The salary isn't as good as "corporate" IT salaries, but it does have other benefits. I can take classes at the school free of charge (not counting the textbook). I can take one class a semester (3 semesters in a year) at another local college for my Masters degree, tuition free. And the benefits are pretty good to. If I had any college age kids, they could go to school tuition free here as well. All in all, a good job without the stress that seems to go hand in hand with corporate IT jobs.
I thought this was going to be about a beowulf cluster of GameCubes.
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
Bright, innocent, bushytailed overachiever geek, inexorably crushed by the harsh realities of corporate America, turns into
A corporate former-programmer evil brain who uses his monopoly to crush the competition!
Yes! That'd be a wonderful story - oh, wait...
And no they do not do a good job of it.
Nor do they do an inspiring job of sales management either.
In fact the only department which has put forward a successful sales initiative or proposal in 15 years has been the technical group.
And teetering over it all is a peroxide blonde Manager of IT with delusions of CIO-dom, courtesy of a class she found on the back of the matchbook she lights her bong with, dismissed by her subordinates as incompetent, and her peers as "hyper-thyroid." I almost forgot, she is as territorial as all get out, can't manage machines, people, office politics, or even to fill the coffee machine, and makes banker's hours look like double-overtime...
Don't get me started on the accountants, or the Dept of Leguminosae Enumeration as they insist on being called...
Cube farm sounds like an upbeat bed-time story to the denizen of this cubicle.
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
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).
Why do we always come back to this movie? Other than a few funny sequences and lines, it's basically boring. Yeah, I said it, but we're all thinking it!
It's because we've got nothing else that even comes close to the sad truth that is our life. It sucks so bad we've elevated the one movie of closest relevance to cult status.
As for books, 80% or more of the people here could fill volumes on the subject with anecdotes about management, TPS reports, shitty office hardware etc, etc, etc and if we did, you can bet they would always be compared to this movie.
Even my company's chief strategist (whatever the fuck that is) think's it's the greatest movie ever and never fails to quote it.
Spinal Tap is closer to geek life than Office Space.
R(k)
Witness their News tab here.
Perhaps it's OT, but would you buy enterprise software from a company that can't even manage a web site?
apple nipple hungry
I got a job and realized that almost everyone I worked with, worked for, or had to suck up to was incompetent
That's the Dilbert Principle in action. Or I suppose the Peter Principle really (where *everyone* is incompetent, not just managers), but Scott Adams made it funnier.
Things could work out well:
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.
Did anyone else go to that guys' (old?) company, Lawson Software, just to see if there were any jobs available? Or was I the only one?
I for one welcome our new [insert main topic] overlords.
... Why did you go to such a shitty school?
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
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.
Bill Bluden is my data structures TA at UC Davis. I had him for discussion at 8am this morning. He spent about 10 mintues at the beginning of the quarter telling about his book. Small world.
I started out working for a small company experiencing, what seemed to be, exponential growth.
It was owned by a really smart guy who just cared about results and understood that people are a package deal: if you like the good things about a person (like skill at coding/design), then you have to take that with the bad (like keeping odd hours, forgetting to attend meetings cos you are so zoned out in a coding trance).
Our team consisted of about 5 guys who liked to have a good time at work. There was lots of noisy horseplay and practical jokes. The thing that infuriated everyone else is that we (5 guys) worked on a project that made 1/3 of the revenue for the whole company (which by then had grown to 300+ people) so there was no way they were going to fire us.
Because of our highly unique work style, they decided to isolate us one one floor of an old building (the company had grown so fast that it had to lease space in several buildings)
That's when the fun really started. While we never made pretesne of keeping normal business hours now we came and left any damn time we chose. Sometimes I'd come in to work at 11:00 hack a bit of code and take off at 2:00. I remember my boss telling me that we had to come in by at least 10:30. We'd hoot holler and yell inside jokes at each other and past anyone who dared show up on the floor.
The end came when were were bought by a large borg like software multinational. Then the old gang kind of split up some fired some trying unsucessfully to get fired some drifting off to become consultants.
Since then I have bounced from one contract to another, making a lot more money, but really missing the camaraderie we had back then.
If I had any advice to offer it would be to pay as much attention to social factors when choosing a job as the salary. You want a nice team of people you can have fun with at work. In the end it makes your life a lot better than some extra cash.
Ah, good point. But there is a reason you're missing for why people might not drop out of the system. Alimony, and child support.
Very true. Once you have a kid, you're screwed. You've got to support that kid for at least 20 years. That's a hell of a lot of pressure. I didn't even think about that. But then again, people only have kids if they're well off enough that they can afford the kid... right?
I don't respond to AC's.
"Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar."
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
And a list of EVIL companies that do stupid stuf like the one you're in.
Just a question. This reminds me of the battered woman syndrome. Battered women would hate to sue their husbands because they have "nowhere else" to go.
Is yours a similar case? How long before the company brings you to tears and turns you into a complete mess of person, blaming yourself for everything?
Quit the damn company and screw them! Start selling your own software competing with them, and put them to shame.