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08/12/2003: "With a Knife?"

Back in the wild and woolly days of Big Iron, when I was just a spud, I was working for Spiegel as a systems programmer. Yes, that's the mail-order house Spiegel, like Sears, Wards, and at that time, Aldens. If you think for a moment about what a mail-order house does for a living, it's pretty easy to imagine why we, in IT, IS, Data Processing, or whatever you want to call it, pretty much ran the show. Successful retailers had all figured out by then that they were actually in the credit business so..., but wait, I want to tell you about the guy with the knife. That's a story about corporate "also-rans" trying to topple the mighty. And, that's a lot more fun than credit. Did they win? Let's ask the guy with the knife. Click more..below.

The HR department hated us. That's kind of funny because they spent 90 percent of their time hiring programmers, and if they had thought it through, they would've realized that 90 percent of them owed their jobs to us. Right? Well, they didn't think it through; they spent their time in smoke filled rooms, creating a profile of the perfect programmer, and therefore, in their minds at least, a profile of the perfect programmer trainee. They did this behind our backs, reporting only, as it turned out, to some toady in upper management, who afterward denied all knowledge of the project.

The clowns in HR thought they had found our weakness. And its name was nepotism. They were still smarting anyway because management had circumvented them, calling in consultants to try and reduce turnover. The consultants' recommendations were to throw money at us, 20 percent across the board; we were flying high. The HR people, you see, had been pushing a training program to feed the programming staff, from the bottom, with a never-ending supply of cheap, easy to hire, cannon fodder. Less work, but then, they hadn't gotten a 20 percent increase. The programmers, on the other hand, felt that if you're going to have to work with cannon fodder anyway, you might just as well keep it in the family and kill two birds with one stone.

Every techie who swung any weight, it seemed, had a brother-in-law, brother, sister-in-law, sister who was a teacher, social worker, professional student, retired military person who needed a change, and more money. This is good, and since it went from Modie J. Spiegel on down, it was hard to attack. But where did it leave HR? Out in the cold. Hence, the profile of the perfect programmer. Then, like the sneaks they were, they hired him, the guy with the knife.

To their credit they didn't know, yet, about the knife. They sold the "perfect programmer profile" plan with the logic that, though it is a good thing to hire your needy family members, history teaches that when you go, they go; besides they didn't fit the perfect programmer profile in the first place and, therefore were less likely to "work out" in the long run. It was on the strength of this highly suspect claptrap (the toady bought it) that they screened and hired their first "perfect programmer".

He looked good, and when word got around, people looked at him a lot, real hard. Did he "work out"? Well, yes, for the whole first week. That weekend, the poor guy took a cab ride and was arrested for trying to stick up the cabbie with a knife. Not white collar crime, or even "oh well, who would have guessed" stuff, like being a closet pervert, but sticking up a lousy cab with a knife. It was a long time before you could find anyone in HR; they were always in meetings or something.



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