Peter St. John looked across the table as if the world would crumble around his feet. The strategic meeting had been now progressing for the better half of the day, and yet no discernible forward motion had been attained. Peter felt as if he was trapped in some geological age that was planning to last for another ten thousand years. He was suddenly gripped with visions of grade school, watching the clock go forward one agonizing minute at a time, all the time thinking that fifty minutes never seemed so long.
Peter looked across and down the table at Todd McCormick. Todd's eyes were already beginning to glaze over, and his head was acquiring a distinct lean to the left. Peter kept looking at Todd until their eyes met. A small smile slowly crawled across Todd's mouth. The same thought crossed both their minds at the same time: "We really, truly, shouldn't be here."
Of course, it hadn't started out this way. In fact, this was the last place that Peter and Todd expected to find themselves. Fresh out of college in England, Peter and Todd had met over an all-night binge of warm beer and cold scotch after a rained-out weekend of rugby. They discovered that both of them were newly burdened with electrical engineering degrees, and utterly devoid of any idea of what was to come next. Sometime around dawn of the following day, they struck upon the idea of starting their own company and striking it rich before they reached their thirtieth birthdays.
This was actually quite a radical thought in the old country. As opposed to the colonies, with its well-defined venture capital community, England was not exactly endowed with a built-in mechanism that rewarded individual spirit and innovation. However, Peter and Todd were lucky enough to have inherited certain financial advantages, and several uncomfortable meetings with parents later, they were in business on their own.
All was fine and good up to this point. Peter and Todd hired a bunch of friends from college, laid in enough beer and frozen food to feed a small Mongolian army, and six months later were able to hit the market with an unassuming but rather complex piece of code. Sales were marginal, but something even better than public acceptance happened. A large multinational corporation decided in a fit of corporate hubris that they couldn't live without Peter and Todd's code. This was akin to a millionaire walking into your tract home and suddenly deciding that they must have your grandmother's china come hell or high water.
Peter and Todd were not fools. They knew a good thing when it fell into their laps. They bargained, they walked away from the negotiating table at least four times, and even in one occurrence Peter had to coax Todd off the table after a night of screaming at the other side. However, through all their theatrics, they had no intention of killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Finally, through much hemming and hawing, Peter and Todd relented to their insistent suitor.
What they hadn't seen coming, and in fact they couldn't have seen coming, was the fact that their new owner would insist upon the two of them staying on with the firm for the first year after the acquisition. Officially this was to ease the transition, but unofficially Peter and Todd felt they knew the real reason for this treatment: they were being punished. Two independent and wild thinking engineers were suddenly being asked to neatly and politely fit into the corporate machine. This did not just happen without certain mental anguish and psychological trauma.
This seemed at first like a good trade-off. Peter and Todd were all of a sudden awash in liquid equity, and a rather large company had given them the seal of approval. However, all was not wine and roses. In fact, Peter and Todd discovered that working within the boundaries of a large corporation was worse than then hell they had left behind them at school.
And so they found themselves staring at each other across a conference table in the middle of a large corporate campus. It was not exactly where either of them wanted to be at the moment. It seemed that corporate life was spent orbiting around the myriad meetings that broke out at any given moment around the company. This wouldn't be so bad if it didn't seem that Peter and Todd were required to be at every single one of them. As the newly designated toys of the far flung corporate empire, they were trotted out at every opportunity to show how enlightened the corporation was, and how truly brilliant they were to invest in such a cutting-edge company.
Peter and Todd quickly tired of the attention. They found themselves at more and more events, showcasing their talents for the sake of the empire. Yet slowly and clearly they began to understand that all these presentations had absolutely nothing to do with them. They had been bought off, purchased to eliminate a minor irritant. Peter and Todd had brilliant technology, code that could cause trouble for the empire down the road. The corporation took the easy way out: they eliminated the irritant. They bought Peter and Todd out and moved on with an unobstructed path ahead of them. So went the course of history.
Peter looked down the table at Todd and gave him a quick double wink. This was their secret signal to start making themselves as much of a nuisance as possible. Todd cleared his throat and focused his attention at the marketing executive at the front of the room. The marketing drone had just switched slides and was about to launch into another spectacular but ultimately empty prediction.
"Excuse me," said Todd. "I know I'm still rather new to this company, but could you please put the previous slide back up?"
The marketing executive looked momentarily confused, and then fumbled around the projector for a moment before putting the previous slide back up. To his credit, it was a milestone list. To his everlasting regret, Todd was about to poke a thousand holes in it.
"Okay," said Todd, "now I see that you plan to have the SDK available by the end of the second quarter, correct?"
The marketing executive could feel a noose starting to close around his neck, but he had no idea why. The SDK was shorthand for Software Developer's toolKit, a software package that allowed other companies to blend the corporation's technology into their products. By definition, it had to be brainlessly easy to use, even to the point that an idiot could use it. Of course, as the old saying went, as soon as you made something idiot-proof, someone just went out and made a better idiot.
The marketing drone was the idiot. He shuffled back and forth at the end of the table as Todd moved in for the kill. "So, let me see if I have this right," said Todd slowly. "This particular technology is just entering beta phase now. In other words, it's not stable enough for us to ship as a real product, correct?"
The marketing drone looked around for help, but he could feel everyone at the table pulling away quickly from what was obviously becoming a disaster zone. He had become toxic waste. "Well, I have been assured that we can ship this product with confidence in the second quarter."
Todd theatrically looked at his watch. "Today is March 17th. I'm assuming that in traditional marketing-speak 'shipping in the second quarter’ means the first box crawling out of the warehouse at 11:59 p.m. June 30th, yes?"
There was a round of unsympathetic laughter around the table. Although this had all the earmarks of a looming disaster, it did have a certain high entertainment value associated with it. Todd was now gearing up for the final assault. "None of the really important software has been exposed on the server yet. Not one paragraph of documentation had been written. The installation program is just a figment of someone's imagination. You wouldn't happen to have a project timeline handy, would you?"
The drone stalled by pawing through the pile of papers to the side of the overhead projector. Everyone in the room knew he didn't have the timeline, but it made for good theater. Finally the drone looked up. "I don't seem to have the chart with me..."
"Oh, that's okay," said Todd quickly. He got up and purposefully walked to the front of the room. He found a green marker and approached the wall. As was true for all the front conference walls in the corporation, a large whiteboard was mounted on the wall. Todd wrote in large letters on the top "SDK." Then he drew a line across the white board. He glanced at his watch and then wrote "3/17" at one end, and then "6/30" at the other end. He turned and smiled at the marketing drone. "Is this okay?"
The drone nodded without saying anything. Todd turned and faced him. "Now, who is going to be writing the documentation?"
The marketing drone felt that suddenly he could answer a question. Sadly, he was under the impression that someone had thrown him a lifeline. He brightened visibly. "Well, we are going to contract out that task since it is essentially temporary in nature."
Todd mused over this for a moment. "Yes, I think I buy that. Have you hired this person yet?"
The drone felt he had reached dry ground. "No, we have the search firm working on that right now."
"And how long did they say it would take to fill the headcount?"
"Approximately three weeks."
Todd turned to the white board. He drew another line under the first one. He dated the beginning at 3/17 and ended it at 4/7. "Great. Now how long do you think it would take this person to get up to speed on the technology?"
The drone scrunched up his face and stared up at the ceiling for a couple of dramatic seconds. "Two weeks max."
There were some snickers around the table, but Todd continued. He drew another line under the second that started at 4/7 and ended at 4/21. "And how long to write the documentation?"
"Four weeks."
The marketing drone had allowed a smile to creep onto his face. Maybe he would get out of this with his skin intact after all. And the stupid engineer was doing all the work for him. Todd suddenly looked concerned. He turned to Peter. "How long till we expose the APIs on the servers?"
They had now quickly gone over the drone's head. API was engineer shorthand for Application Program Interface, the software "socket" that other companies could plug their code into to interact with the SDK software. Exposing the API was necessary so other companies could have the door to get into their code. And only Peter and Todd knew that this had not occurred yet.
"It's not on the schedule," said Peter simply. "We are still finalizing the beta client code. Until we do, the server APIs can’t be worked on."
Todd smiled. "But if the APIs aren't final, how can the contractor start writing the documentation on 4/21?"
The marketing drone tried to take control of the meeting back. He walked over to Peter. "When do you anticipate the APIs being finished?"
Peter twirled a pencil around his fingers as he mentally counted out the days. "Nine weeks," he said finally.
The marketing drone looked like he had been shot. "Nine weeks? Why so long?" he wailed.
Peter smiled sweetly. "Four weeks for code, five weeks for QA."
The drone leaned in. "Isn't five weeks for Quality Assurance a little much?"
"Not really. Two weeks to build the testing tools, three weeks to run them. I'm actually giving you a break on that." Peter smiled up at the drone again.
Todd was looking at the board. 'So we actually can't start the contractor until 5/24, correct?"
The marketing drone suddenly saw the trap that had been set for him, but he was powerless to prevent himself from going into it.
Todd turned his attention to the lines that he had drawn on the board. "So we are now starting the contractor on 5/24. And you said that it would take two weeks to bring them up to speed, correct?"
The drone nodded.
"So that is approximately 6/7. So a month of work from that is 7/7. "
The marketing drone tried a desperate gambit. "Well, one week late is good enough."
Peter looked up. "How are you planning to deliver the software?"
The drone knew the answer to this one. "On a CD-ROM along with the documentation binder."
Peter smiled. "That's another week, sport, to burn the CDs."
Todd continued to feverishly erase numbers on the board. He swiped at 6/7 and replaced it with 6/14. He suddenly looked at the drone. "Have you done the request for the contractor yet?"
The drone shook his head silently.
"Make sure high typing speed is a requirement."
The room dissolved into uncontrollable laughter.