If you haven't read the earlier chapters you really ought to go back and read them now. Otherwise you'll feel like the only guy in the conference room who doesn't know what the meeting's about.
In case you missed my earlier warnings, there isn't any explicit sex in this story.
Hans
*****
NO GOOD DEED SHOULD GO UNPUNISHED
In the wake of the great entry and exit overhaul, morale seemed to pick up a notch. The place looked a lot more professional, less half-assed and temporary. It was like moving into a real house after having camped out in the backyard. The neat, finished appearance said that somebody cared about us, that we mattered, and what we were doing was really important. But just as we were feeling so good about our project, we experienced a catastrophe that cast a pall over the whole lab, and the abrupt change from glee to gloom almost crippled us.
We lost our leader.
George had been the lab supervisor from day one, and was simply the perfect man to get the geeks and nerds herded together and keep them marching in the same direction. He was patient and consistent, and he had earned a unique position in our minds, not quite as our father, but more like everybody's supporter and protector.
A brief memo was distributed to all of us, saying that he had died in an automobile accident. We later learned that a Dodge sedan had lost control and collided with George's Chevy, which then went off the road and hit a tree. The Dodge had been stolen. After the accident it was abandoned and its driver was never found.
The confusion and pain that George's loss caused in our project was intensified by the way we were working. Our system was ultimately to be adaptable to a wide variety of users, including federal government agencies, banks, insurance companies, local governments, virtually any place that terrorists might want to infiltrate and disrupt. The whole system consisted of building blocks that we called modules. To equip a given user, we would take the core modules and adapt them to the user's needs, first by picking and choosing from dozens of accessory modules and attaching them to the core, and then making user-specific modifications to special skeleton modules that were mostly input and output functions. When George's accident happened, we were working long hours to get three of the core modules ready to demonstrate to our advisory committee. But on hearing the news, our productivity came crashing down to the ground.
Our team resembled a bunch of private subcontractors. Everybody began with the specification for a piece of module and supplemented that with his own notes, which usually were so sketchy that they'd be meaningless to anybody else. Then they headed off into the wild blue yonder, writing code while carrying some of the key information in their heads and nowhere else. If that sounds like a haphazard way to work, you're missing two key points. Truly creative people work in flashes of inspiration, building a structure of logical transactions that don't mean much until they are all linked together at the end. And to make it more confusing, every one of these near geniuses marched to the beat of his own drummer, had since early childhood, and had a unique way of organizing his creative work that was incompatible with regimentation.
For a day, not much got accomplished. I talked with a lot of my friends, and they all complained of feeling tired, not being able to solve simple problems quickly, making mistakes and having to go back and do large amounts of code over again, and not being able to remember where they had parked important variables. Things began to pick up on the day after that, but nothing like the blinding pace we'd all been working at before the accident.
Glenn Carlson came and used George's office to interview several of our key people, and I was the last one he talked with. As I walked into the office, he gestured to a chair and sat for a minute with his head tilted back and his eyes closed. Then he sat up straight and faced me, looking grim. "Jack, you knew George as well as anybody here. He talked about you so often, and he told me that you're the youngest man on the team but the one he depended on the most. So I need your inputs. How do we get back on track? How can we get over this awful loss?"
How do you answer a question like that? How do you tell the Captain of the Titanic that he doesn't have enough lifeboats? I took a deep breath. "Dr. Carlson, this project will live or die on the quantity and quality of work the programmers do, and their productivity depends mostly on how they feel about the project and about themselves. So I'd like you to try to see this from where we all sit. I'm young, but in a lot of ways I feel more mature than most of the people here. We were all hired because of our ability to create, and that's what we do, starting with nothing and then piling one brick on another, with no regard for the rest of the world. Growing up, we depended on our mothers and fathers and siblings to handle the rest of the world for us, and when we came here we saw George as a surrogate for them. He was older and wiser and he'd let us come in here, close the door to shut the world out, and do what we do best, what we love to do. With George to watch over us and protect us we could work miracles, and the working environment he created and maintained was exactly what it took to make us happy to work here.
"Now we need a new George. Not a professional manager, full of business school vocabulary and pie charts and clever stunts to manipulate us. But not exactly a nerd, focusing on the flyspecks. And he can't try to micromanage us. That would spell the end of any useful output. We need somebody who can see the big picture without losing sight of the details. He needs to respect the nerds and geeks, to encourage and guide them without stifling their creativity. He needs to give us direction, the way a father does for his family, and then let us take the job in our teeth and run with it. And he needs to understand and appreciate and protect his flock of brilliant children, the way a mother does. I haven't any idea where you can find somebody like that. But until you do, I'm afraid that very little of value will be produced. And unless you do, I'm afraid that you're going to lose a lot of your best workers, and possibly your whole program.
Glenn looked astonished, as if I'd just slapped him in the face. He said nothing, and I felt as if I'd dumped this all in his lap too abruptly. "Look, Dr. Carlson, I didn't mean to shock you. I'm sorry if I hit you too hard with this. I never meant to . . ."
"No! No! Jack, you just told me exactly what I came here to find out. You've shown me what I need if I'm to find my way out of this problem. All the people I've talked with so far have told me exactly nothing. They're very sorry to lose George. Holy Mother of God, I didn't need to come here to find that out. I'm sorrier to lose him than anybody! But you've just made sense out of what it takes to run this lab, and why George was so good at it. You've given this problem some definition, added new dimensions. What you've said doesn't make my problem seem easy, but you've given me a yardstick to measure possible solutions against. This is the first light I've seen at the end of this tunnel! I could hug you."
I didn't know what to say or do, so I sat still and kept my mouth shut. Glenn stood up so I figured maybe the interview was over, and I stood up too. "I've been in here long enough," he said as he flexed his arms and legs. "It's about lunchtime. Let's go find a quiet place to grab a bite. Any suggestions?"
"How about the Green Goose? It looks terrible but the food's good, and I'm pretty sure that the FBI has it swept clear of bugs."
"Green Goose it is!" He led the way out of the lab to where he had a parking space with his name on it. When we got to the Green Goose I was chuckling as I got out and closed the passenger door. Glenn asked me what was so funny, and I replied that this was probably the first Lexus ever to be parked in their lot.
The proprietor called out to me from the kitchen. "Hey there, Jack. Jerry coming?"
"Not that I know of. Got a minute?"
"Sure." He came out, wiping his hands on his apron.
