Saturday, January 11th, 1997

Dear God,

This following I wrote this morning.

   The last number of months I spent at Carfax, a portion of the work I
was doing there was to challenge management to look at the philosophies
of how they were going about managing their projects and resources,
their meeting-times and lack, and in large measure, how they were
managing me.  (Especially based upon the fact that I never made any 
claims for being a quick software developer; instead my reputation 
being based on my being a thorough one.)  I was challenging mamagement 
in accountability towards their underlings.  But management never likes 
to be challenged by their underlings; especially doesn't like to be 
made accountable to their underlings for their actions or inactions.  
It's a matter of principle and, more than anything else, a matter of 
understandable human pride.  
   People naturally want to take pride in the work they do, so it is 
a matter of injured pride when there is a person who consistently 
points out that there is (and where there is) room for improvement 
when such pointings-out are not wanted.
   The injured pride does not value these pointings-out, and finds all
kinds of ways to ignore them or deem them counter-productive, which,
in fact, they may well be.  But such deemings do not take away the 
grains of truth available in those pointings-out; they deny them, and 
in the long run tend to remove the source of them, the source of ir-
ritation.
   To be quite frank, I challenged what I deemed as stupidity among the 
actions of management of the Columbia office.  But all I really accomp-
lished was enabling management's focus, no doubt, on what they viewed as 
my stupidity and/or lack of productivity.  Canada wasn't getting done ac-
cording to the time-schedule that was dictated to me, the time schedule 
I was being lead to believe was in place (a time schedule I still resent
not being a participant in creating nor determining, incidentally).  That 
Canada couldn't be done in a quality way according to the constraints I 
was lead to believe were mine to work under [**], especially time con-
straints, was given little or no creedence, heeding, or, quite frankly, 
hearing.  
   The ability to hear of and understand these constraints by the people 
who mattered to the project was systematically denied, and that denial 
practically guaranteed the marginality of the Canada product, were work
to continue on its development with as little information as I had and
as little prospect for gaining good access to relevant information about
the Canada data as I had, in my opinion.
   Through all of this, I had earned the right, it so seemed, to be viewed
as the "boy who called wolf," with all the privileges thereof.  I had even, 
towards the end of my stay, earned the right to be denied access to Ewin
Barnett's door (for whatever reasons he felt at the time), to be disal-
lowed fair hearing from the man who founded this company to exist, being
a company which carefully put out a quality product, a man who promised me
on my birthday that his door was always open to me.  
   A pinnacle of incongruence (or management-perceived incongruence) is 
what I had achieved in terms of appearing congruent to the goals of Carfax
as they related to their perceived immediate needs of me as an employee.
That is, it seems I was not perceived as doing my job.  Defending quality
ways of doing things on the projects I was given was not ever perceived as 
my job to do; it certainly never was rewarded by anything but negativity
from my management.  But if assuring quality the only way I knew how was
not my job to do, then whose job was it?  And was it being done?
   I find that most incongruities happen more as a matter of lack of 
communication and lack of basis for good communication than anything else.
I own to the best of my ability my own lack of communication skills; but
is Columbia management willing to own (or own up to) their own lacks?
Are they willing to own the fact of the existence of their own unarticu-
lated agendae, their own particular habits of need to maintain a lot of
control, and their own individual fears which inhibit open & full commun-
ication and participation by all concerned parties?  For their own sakes, 
I hope they do learn them and learn to own them.
   There is a wish I have to offer Carfax management the benefit of a
few parting observations that I wrote on my last day of doing work
in the corner office, closing out Kentucky and Canada.  Along with these
observations, I also wish to share with them a bibliography of works that
helped me to form the opinions stated therein.  The sharing of these
observations may well rankle, just as a lot of what I did in interact-
ing with Carfax management at the end seemed to rankle and precipitate
subtle and non-subtle door closings.  This is a risk I am taking in 
the same way that lovers quarrelling with one another is a risk that
people take in relationships with one another.  For my quarrel with
Carfax has been and always will be a lover's quarrel:  I have spent
far too much of my life working with and helping nurture the growth
of Carfax to hold no love for the company I've worked with for so long.

---------------
 ** Many of the constraints were communication constraints limiting 
    the effectiveness of the developer of being a good researcher to 
    base programming on fact rather than on surmise:  constraints 
    dictated by a relatively new and confusing management style more 
    interested in making a "professional appearance" of development 
    efforts and development staff to the rest of the company in general 
    than it was interested in allowing developers access to facts 
    and people relevant to the needs of obtaining facts in the develop-
    ment process, in my opinion.