Lewis Carroll described how oysters were led to their doom. Today, it's engineers...
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The boss was whining angrily,
Whining with all his might.
The ceiling bathed the boardroom
In a sharp, fluorescent light-
Ensuring wakeful discourse in
The middle of the night
The coffee bubbled lazily,
The hard disks whirred and spun.
Consultants each remained in chairs
As sleepy, hired guns.
The project was a misery
Of budget overruns.
The talk was dull as dull could be,
The tasks were dry as dry.
You could not see the devs because
No coders were nearby,
No sacrificial lambs to bid
An undeserved goodbye
The tech lead and the manager
Were seated on their hands,
They wept as they considered
The position of their brands,
“Could any team achieve the board’s
Impossible demands?”
If seven teams with seven devs
Arrived this fiscal year,
“Do you suppose,” the C-suite asked,
“We’d find another gear?”
“Of course,” replied the manager,
(He sounded quite sincere)
“O engineers, come work with us!”
The posting did beseech.
“Refactor schlock for shares of stock
And stretch the product’s reach.”
(The latter lines were anodyne-
The standard corporate speech)
A senior dev reviewed the post
With post-traumatic dread;
He scrolled on by without reply
And shook a wiser head,
As if to say, he’d rather sleep
On broken glass instead
But four young engineers were signed,
All eager to compete,
Their laptops shipped, each well-equipped-
The latest Office suite.
Add this was odd because, of course,
They all used Google sheets.
But four more coders joined the team,
And yet another four,
Each youthful mind, each docu-signed,
And still they hired more,
Each opened up their IDE,
The codebase to explore,
The tech lead and the manager,
Reviewed the user flows,
They started drawing wireframes
And other portmanteaus:
The devs began their ticket queues,
But progress still was slow,
“The time has come,” the tech lead said,
“To talk of many things:
“Of minima and maxima,
Concavity, and springs-
Of pull requests and late-night asks
And unrelenting pings.”
“So where’s the shares?” the coders cried
On each internal chat,
“They’re options.” said the CFO,
A corporate plutocrat,
“They’ll vest in future years, we’ll raise
And exit after that.”
“The pace is unsustainable!”
The engineers would plead,
“For software is complex and not
Some impudent stampede!”
The manager just shook his head,
“That’s not the talk we need.”
And so morale degraded fast
It turned a deeper blue,
The manager could not foresee
The corporate deja vu-
A lamentation on a loop
Each exit interview.
Departures came in droves, at first
The talent was enticed
By outfits less dysfunctional
And offers market priced
The C-suite thought the lesser devs
Should surely have sufficed.
“It seems a shame,” the tech lead said,
To give these devs a kick,
“We’ve overworked them day and night!”
(A bit impolitic)
“We still need twice the heads we have,
It’s just arithmetic.”
The manager, implacable,
Refused to agonize,
“The software isn’t shipped, my friend,
You’ve missed your KPIs.
Your budget thus is altered
To a palatable size.”
“Dear coders,” said the manager,
“Your software doesn’t run.
Should we attempt another sprint”
But answer came there none-
And this was scarcely odd, because
They’d fired every one.