You Are So Fired
I've been pretty quiet recently because work has been spiraling downwards into new depths of fire, brimstone, pain and Paris Hilton. I've been trying to avoid talking about it online because of the proud tradition of work-related blog and journal posts resulting in dismissals, but it's sucking up enough of my soul that I can't really think about anything else. I'll avoid using real names and keep things nice and vague, just to be safe.
So, I'm working for a web advertising company... as a programmer. This is probably enough information to chill the heart of any experienced coder, as marketing / advertising types are pretty much our natural enemies. This position is usually mistakenly awarded to business types, because of the ongoing, continuous and violent holy wars between suits and techy types throughout the ages, but I disagree. Good suits make sense - they follow plans, they act logically, and they like building and working with systems. They understand the value of details and the dangers of complexity, and only really come to blows with boffins when the joy of savage, untamed utility impacts their hunt for profit. Their rules are different, but they're consistent, methodical and they learn from their mistakes.
Advertising folk, on the other hand, seem to be the agents of chaos. Almost every project I receive is badly defined, poorly planned and ridiculously scheduled. Most have huge parts missing, or sections that simply don't make any rational sense. I try to nail down the outline, but crucial details are added, altered or even removed so often that any kind of design or definition is completely pointless. It's like building a house without any blueprints, from random and mismatched materials, in a cyclone, with an owner who keeps making changes, and who is completely insane.
My situation is exacerbated by the fact that the project I'm working on right now is the king granddaddy of all disasters. It's a "refresh" of a lifestyle website - a site that has been the bane of our existence for my entire time at the company. It was originally built using ASP.NET (a language that I've concluded is a kludgy, inconsistent, overly-complex pile of crap) and comprised of the worst, most jumbled, most confusing tangle of code I've ever seen. Even small changes would usually cause the site to explode, which would mean extra hours of digging through the mess to fix it. This sucked twice because I couldn't really spare the time with all the other craziness going on, and I didn't get paid extra for working evenings, since I'm on a salary.
We would never get a better chance to fix things, so I decided to rewrite the entire thing in good ole ASP. All by myself. In about three weeks. This may sound like a monumentally stupid idea, but it was balanced by the pure screaming terror of the existing site's code. It was such a festering pit of unholy slime that doing the refresh with it might've even taken longer (I'm nearing the end of the rewrite, and I now think it would've been a day or so quicker with the old crap, but we still would've been stuck with crap). As Milton said: Long is the way And hard, that out of Hell leads up to light. Quoting the bad guy from Se7en is probably not a good sign.
For some unfathomable reason, I thought that the people at work would be of some help in this situation. I thought they might say "Whoa, Hamish is rewriting this entire site in three weeks. That's insane! Perhaps we shouldn't bother him with other projects. Perhaps we make sure the copy deck makes sense, and isn't missing anything. Perhaps we make sure the layout is consistent, the graphics are all the correct size, and that no-one screws around with anything in the last week before completion. Perhaps we should get him coffee and a backrub by a pretty swimsuit model." Unfortunately (and unsurprisingly), they didn't.