Thirty-nine Steps

Well actually there are none. People are getting fired, everybody has to save money wherever they can and over-all the morale is not as good as it could be. No, a downturn like we are experiencing now, doesn’t have real advantages. But being in a company that has some “serious problems with the current economical situation” so to speak, has some minor side effects that can be considered as “not negative as such”. Let me explain…

It brings back memories actually. All of a sudden we have some work time that our customer (the bigger company above us) doesn’t (want to or can) pay for. Being real programmers, there is no such time as “wasted time” or “idle time” and we use it to do some “stuff we have always wanted to do” (always improving the current system of course, albeit not always visible to the users). Back in the old days of our system, we have also had such opportunities and that’s why stuff like: fiddling about with barcode hand scanners, doing code changes in ancient 1997 COBOL programs and putting them in production without real testing and doing changes in programs that weren’t asked for in the first place, bring back some real good memories from times when such practices were generally considered as being “normal everyday things to do”. We like to call those days “The Container Times“, mainly because that was where we were housed back then, in some temporary and highly rudimentary grey boxes, stacked together like over-sized LEGO blocks. Actually we were a bunch of geeks (known to the general public as The Rebels) put together in a place where we wouldn’t disturb anyone else but ourselves. Of course we have matured by now and our cowboy-like actions, although we still perform them sometimes, have been decreased to a minimum and are never as ill-considered as they were back then. But in our hearts we are still hard-core geeks

Our way of working back then may seem like inappropriate or “not done” to the outside world now, but bear in mind, it was back then that the foundations of a now highly popular and widespread system were made. Thanks to those days, where moving an unofficial server was an ordinary part of the job, we now have users all over the globe and maintain the back-end of the system in a fairly effective way. It is the very proof that our analytical capabilities of the container times were more than sufficient to last until now and provide us with enough useful heritage to last some time more in the future.

As a proud member of my team I hereby officially declare: “No f***ing way, the Rebels are her to stay“. We will continue to fight the downturn and carry on to do what we think is best at all times. Although we (have to) work according to more strict development rules nowadays, it’s nice to play The Bastard Programmer from Hell sometimes. CO-Pilot Rules!