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Escaping the Enterprise

2021-12-12

There are numerous different portrayals within the media of what working (or _not_ working) in a large corporation is like — be it Office Space, The Office, or Dilbert. Somehow though, if you haven't experienced a very specific niche of industry you might not actually believe it. You may instead take such stories as hyperbole used for comedic effect or to make a broader point.

I took my first job quickly and gratefully after graduating, panicked to find the degree I obtained wasn't sufficient to garner interest in the field I studied for. Instead I went to work in a mid-size company that had been around for decades and while not exciting seemed to be on a solid footing financially.

People will tell you that the interview process is a chance for the candidate to size up the company as much as it is for the company to assess the candidate. As a kid fresh out of school it did not occur to me to do any such thing. I thought it was curious when an interviewer gave me a puzzle about filling a five gallon jug with exactly four gallons using only a three gallon jug. Curiouser still, I told them honestly I was pretty nervous and couldn't remember how to do it. I did remember there was a solution, having seen it in the movie Die Hard 3 — which I told them. We transitioned smoothly into talking about Die Hard and let the question go.

It was that interview that landed me my first full-time job as a quality engineer responsible for testing a large Java program and automating those tests using Python. The product did extensive number crunching to produce results for a very technical customer base in a niche industry which I was totally unfamiliar with.

I was a little worried because I didn't know what software testing entailed, also concerning was the fact that I didn't know how to program in Python or Java. Truth be told I didn't know how to program at all. It hadn't really come up in the interview though so I assumed this was par for the course. I was assigned a cubicle and seated near the folks who interviewed me and after getting a laptop I was pretty much set. I could get started on the work of engineering quality.

It was a slow realization that I knew even less than I had thought. The chasm of unknown unknowns was unfathomable to me in part because of how detached it turned out my entire department was from the work being done. I might dutifully attend a meeting, take notes, and return to ask the other attendees about the finer points of things said only to find they had no idea.

At first I played coy about the fact that I didn't actually know how to program, sure that outing myself as an impostor would get me fired. It was only through a series of comically oblique conversations that I started to piece together the fact that my coworkers couldn't program either. I thought perhaps they were instead domain experts, the kind I had read about in books. I would go to them with questions about how the product worked and was dismayed to find they didn't know that either.

The department was struggling to keep managers for what you might see was a struggling team. I don't know if they were fired or left after realizing how dire the situation was but it happened that we might go through three or four managers a year.

With no one to really speak with about the whole situation I took my cues from my coworkers. Perhaps the only difference was that I was still new and demonstrated more enthusiasm, thinking I would eventually get the hang of things. I might volunteer to test a feature and then spend days trying to figure out what it was or how to make it work. I would ask around to my seniors and peers. We were all pretty much stumped but they would never say so outright.

The development team would complete a cycle and meet to discuss progress and I would truthfully report that I had found no bugs. Sometimes the developers would find and fix issues, or customers would report problems that we were assigned to triage. I could not work out what the problem reports were describing, let alone assess their validity so the issues would inevitably be passed on to developers to investigate and fix.

You might guess that this was a tremendously boring job. I could not dream to understand the product, millions of lines of code for a product I could not run, developed for an industry I didn't understand. Instead I set to understanding what I felt safe poking around on, the test servers. We had a host of different UNIX machines but the most common were Red Hat servers with huge processors and ample memory (for the time).

I eventually worked out that there were man pages installed on all the machines and a funny command called apropos. I read voraciously to fill the days, weeks, and months I was supposed to spend testing software.

It is around this point that my story tends to diverge, depending on the audience. The preceding bits can be dressed up as a colorful story of gumption for how I got into programming. Maybe a silly story about corporate waste or bureaucracy. The truth of it is more bleak though. I spent years at this job and managed to teach myself a thing or two but the experience was tremendously isolating. I couldn't exactly tell everyone I wasn't working, not without explaining that I had never worked. My coworkers were intent on looking busy for the workday and had families and lives to consider; they didn't need me messing with what was probably a good thing.

Instead I tried a number of different petty tactics in what I wouldn't admit was a hope of being fired. I could never quit because it was inconceivable to anyone I talked to. I was making the best money of my life, what was wrong? Instead I tried pushing boundaries to see where the line was.

I resolved at one point that I would not open my e-mail client until someone at least mentioned it. I was expecting something like "I sent you an email, did you read it yet?". I can see now I would have said "No" and nothing would have changed. But the question didn't come.

I realized my plan was too subtle and changed tactics after a week. I would not open my computer and start the day (meaning reading man pages and browsing the internet) until it was remarked on that I hadn't yet. I would bring my laptop in, set the bag down and then wait. After the first day I realized how very boring this was. I had made a dozen trips to the coffee machine and staring listlessly out the window of the lunch room. On the next day I brought a book ostensibly related to work (probably "UNIX Power Tools" or something). After a few days of this I was bored again and started reading paperbacks. I remember reading all of Starship Troopers in a single day and lamenting that I hadn't thought to bring a second book.

In another week I broke down and gave up. No one ever remarked on the fact that I wasn't even logging into a computer. Literally no work had occurred and it didn't matter. Rather than improving anything this made it worse for me. Being reasonably young and being so wrapped up in this weird idea that this job was important because it paid well and meaningless because nothing ever happened did weird things to my head.

I started coming in later and taking long lunches. I remember stepping off an elevator at eleven in the morning and coming face to face with my latest manager. He gave a cheerful greeting and seemed to note my bag, as I was just arriving to the office. Later that day he stopped me to ask (I thought pointedly) what time I typically arrived and what my core hours were. I don't know why but I told him I worked 9 to 5. He accepted this happily and never mentioned it again.

I already knew you can afford to walk twenty minutes over lunch for good tacos when there is no work to do. Gradually though it occurred to me that you can order a beer or a mojito and the walk back is time enough to clear your head. The unrelenting meaninglessness of it all pushed me to start taking several hours for lunch. Why not go sit down someplace nice? Why not order dessert?

Taking multi-hour lunches, ordering copious drinks, and slowly traipsing back to the office was fun at first and quickly turned depressing. On one occasion I drank too much and didn't really realize it until I was back at my desk. I hurried to a bathroom where I ended up falling asleep for the rest of the afternoon. I learned my lesson though and the next time it happened I went directly to my car in the parking garage to sleep it off.

Obviously the above is not so much fun. The small bit of good that I will try and wrap up with is the fact that I did finally get a different job. Crazy as it sounds after years of this other companies saw me as having been vetted by the industry and posessing sufficient experience.

When I quit I tried to account for what years of my life meant at this company. It turned out that I never made so much as a commit to any of the projects or repositories. No automated tests, no test framework changes, no typos fixed. I never filed a single bug report or wrote a single test case. I did find out that I had been filing my timesheet wrong and billing the wrong department for years. No one ever noticed.

For a long time after I thought that I had somehow fallen through the cracks, my story seemed exceptional. No one I knew had ever heard of anything like it. "You're joking. So what, they just paid you to do nothing?" or "I'm sure you're underselling the work you did there, they wouldn't just keep people around for no reason". To these sorts of questions I have no answer. I only know that it happened and I swore I wouldn't go back once I made it out.

In the intervening years I have had plenty more jobs which proved perfectly ordinary. I have done real, entirely mundane work at a variety of different companies of differing sizes. It was pure chance that landed me at a recent position where I had a validating and horrifying second look into this weird niche of the corporate world. That though is a story for another time and involves my second escape from the enterprise.