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10 Jan 2008 Showing a bit of sympathy for the working man in an evil corporation
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It been a difficult few days at work recently. We're in full swing of the 'Test it, debug it, rinse and repeat' stage of our products life cycle. Because of this tedious process the level of team moral is getting a bit low. During one of my breaks I pondered over the possibility of over companies that are going through the same process as we are.
Then I thought about the evil corporations of TV and film. It occurred to me that most of the time their products, from the Mega Death Ray to the Super Soldier, failed when it mattered the most.
You've seen the scenarios. Some evil corporation has created this diabolical product that they claim is perfection and will allow them to fulfill their evil scheme, whether it be world domination or total annihilation. Yet when the hero arrives he manages to find the one fatal flaw in the system that completely ruins the evil corporation's notorious scheme, thus 'saving the day'.
A good example of this is the movie Drive. In the movie our hero, Mark Dacascos, is a prototype enhanced human and he faces his successor, who is suppose to be superior to him in every way. And yet the superior model developed a simple fault during the fight, which allowed Dacascos to overcome and defeat the superior model.
With such a fatal flaw with the evil product, you'd think that the creators and the development team would have ironed out those kinds of problems long ago. However if you think about the conditions and the pressures that the workforce are faced with, then you starting thinking that maybe it's not their fault.
They slaving away long hours over the labour of love (or tortured into it, either way), they have an obscene series of deadlines to meet, they going though fixing various bugs (which can be hard to fix if the bugs are attacking you), they don't manage to test every scenario (after all, it can't be easy to recreate the 'hero scenario'), it's no wonder that the ultimate weapon has a few kinks when the time comes to expose it to the world prematurely.
Of course its not like the developers don't know that it'll break. In fact they warn the big boss, they beg with the big boss not to release their creations too soon because 'it's just no ready yet'. But they get told to release it to the hero and, of course, it gets destroyed. I can imagine it being soul-crushing to see their hard work, their blood, sweat and tears get destroyed in front of their eyes. Those poor people.
So I raise my cup of tea in honour to all those poor development team members who have to see all their hard work being ruined because there just wasn't enough time to fully debug it all. Whenever I watch an evil corporation collapse and crumble on television because their doomsday device failed, I'll think of the people at the bottom of the work force muttering under their breath "I told the boss it just wasn't ready, it needed more time. No one ever listens to me..."
May their careers lead on to more fruitful things.
... Y'know, so long as they haven't been killed for 'their' failure.
Posted at: 22:15 PM
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