Day 218 – The Mistake of Positivity

Tuesday August 24, 2021

I saw a piece from a Kansas City newspaper the other day. It was a veteran who had served two tours in Afghanistan. He said that he had reported that things were not as good as had been stated. He gave lower marks than the current status. He was not allowed to change to the lower status!

This sounds preposterous, that is until you’ve been in the corporate world, and let’s consider the military as a corporate entity for this discussion, because they are a fighting force but that is only the tip of the iceberg. The Pentagon is a huge building devoted to management just like a corporation. It is big, slow to change, and mired in red tape. In such environments looking good is more important than being good.

I was in a corporation and they had been sold a new system. At the time the buzz words were “Better, Cheaper, Faster.” You had to be at least one, if not all, of these things in order to bring change. Or so the current crop of gurus spouted. The system they were purporting to bring in was none of these things. It was not promised to be faster. In fact, the sales people and technical folks that accompanied them would not say what the speed of the system would be. It was bloated. Anyone could see that. There were technical analysis done by the corporation’s own technical staff that said it was bloated, slower, and more expensive. They saw no reason to get it. Yet, that didn’t matter. The decision had been made. Who made the decision was never clear to me.

I watched as more and more equipment had to be bought to support the new system. I kept asking why. 

In this corporation the tech heads laughed and said that no system ever failed here. Everything was a success. Stop trying to fight it. They want it. Screw the cost. Yeah, it makes no sense, so what? Put it in.

There were documented cases of other companies who had put in the system. Same thing. Expensive, confusing, terrible design, slow, and yet somehow this piece of garbage was seeping into the infrastructure.

I was raised by my father to believe that as long as you were making money for the company and improving things for the customer you were doing a good job. None of this was true in this case. You basically had to hold your nose, say everything was great and keep trudging forward. It was soul crushing.

To make matters worse the manager of the project for the software company putting in this system got hired by our company and within a few months he found ways to deliver an ultimatum to me. 

I had done the cutover, moving the old data to the new system. It was over a weekend and went off without a hitch. This despite the software firm telling me that I needed to stay up all night and bring a sleeping bag because they did the transfers manually through a PC. I didn’t. I used big computers and direct transfers. I wrote a script to do it automatically. I got little credit for that.

The managers really didn’t understand the technology and had no interest in learning. This was obvious because if they had understood they never would have gotten this monster. The thought of upper management was they’d make decisions and if it was a problem someone would bail them out. In the meantime they’d put up green lights, 95% completion status reports, and attend endless meetings.

Then the new system went into effect.

It was a joke.

Everyone who used the new system treated it as a black box that would respond in the next five minutes or so. The old system had been instantaneous. 

But the new system was hailed as a success.

A success until it came up against reality. And that is, and was, the problem in Afghanistan. For twenty years.