paused to look him square in the eyes, “we’re not going to make any improvements.”
“Alright, starting with the five of you, get focused on it full time,” David said, ignoring Mike’s protest. “After we hit our next release milestone on Thursday, we’ll see where we stand.”
Mike sighed and left the office.
Chapter 2
“How’s it going?” David asked, coming into Mike’s office a few days later, and taking a perch on the windowsill.
“Excellent,” Mike replied, looking up from his screen. “Everyone on the team has finished their tasks for the iteration, code is checked in, and the integration tests are running. We should know in a few minutes if everything passed.”
“No, no, on the performance front?” David said, frustrated. He crumpled up a sticky note and threw it into Mike’s garbage. “If we don’t have a performance gain, we’ve got bigger issues than our checkpoint.”
“I’m not expecting anything, I’m afraid,” Mike answered. He looked down, where David had missed the basket.
“You had people on it right?”
David looked out the window, ignoring the paper on the floor. Mike sighed and picked it up himself. “Yeah,” he said. “I explored a few possibilities myself, and as we planned, I had four other engineers try some performance tweaks. Everything we did either had no effect or made the performance worse. We backed out most of the changes, and kept a few of the minor tweaks. Net gain, less than one percent. I’m sorry. We’ve been banging our heads against this for months. I know you want a miracle, but it’s just not likely to happen.”
“Damn, damn, damn.” David sighed, and turned the other way to look at Mike’s whiteboard which, like his own, covered the entirety of one wall. One end was covered with a checklist of features, fixes, and enhancements planned for the current software release. Interspersed through the remainder of the whiteboard were box diagrams of the architecture, bits of code, and random ideas. David stared intensely, as though the solution to their performance problems might be found somewhere on the board.
“It’s not there, I looked,” Mike said in a depressed tone.
David grunted, admitting that Mike guessed his thoughts.
“I hope you’re not thinking of canceling the snowboarding day,” Mike said. “The team has always had a snowboarding day when we hit our release commitment on time and there’s snow on the mountain.”
David glanced out the window. December drizzle. That meant fresh snow on the mountain. Damn. This project was too important to give everyone a day to play. “We’ve got to --” He turned back to Mike, and saw Mike’s look, and trailed off mid-sentence.
“The team is expecting it,” Mike said. “Some of the guys were here until two in the morning last night getting their work done. They deserve their day off, and they’ll come back refreshed and ready to tackle the performance issues. You can’t ask people to give their all and not give them something back.”
David felt sick over his lack of control over the situation. He felt a huge pressure to meet Gary’s deadline, but he knew Mike was right. Besides, he rationalized that one day wouldn’t make a difference with a problem they’d been struggling against for six months. “Fine, but when we get back, we need everyone focused one hundred and ten percent on performance. Take everything off the backlog except performance improvements.”
David leaned over and slapped the button on the alarm clock. Then he rolled over onto his other side and looked at Christine, still sleeping. He gave her a kiss on the cheek, watched her breathe for a minute, and slid out of bed. Dressing quickly in the dark, he slipped downstairs where his duffel bag and snowboard were waiting by the door.
A few minutes later Mike pulled up quietly in his Jetta, exhaust vapors puffing out of his tailpipe in the cold morning air. David went outside, bringing his equipment and locking the front door. Wordlessly, Mike opened the trunk, and helped David get his gear loaded. David climbed into the passenger side, and smiled. In the glow of the dashboard lights, he could see that Mike already had two steaming, insulated coffee cups.
“You’re fucking brilliant,” David said, reaching to take a sip of his coffee.
“You’re welcome. The snow report said six inches of fresh powder on Mt. Hood. Should be good.”
“Where’s the rest of the team?”
“Ah, they’re driving up in Melanie’s new truck,” Mike answered. “I thought the two of us would drive together and give the rest of the team a break from their manager and their chief architect.”
David smiled at Mike. “You’re getting people-wise in your old age.”
“Well, I’m not old yet. I’m certainly not an old married man like you.”
Mike headed towards Mt. Hood, about an hour drive away. For a while they drove in companionable silence, heading east on I-84, enjoying the coffee, and the early morning light.
“Where do you want to be in a couple of years?” David asked suddenly, breaking the silence.
Mike glanced sideways at him. “Woah, dude. That’s a weighty question for oh dark thirty.” He paused to consider it. “You know, I’m happy now. I’m working on the most interesting project I can imagine, and, with great people. I’ve got a good manager, even if I have to keep you in line from time to time.”
David smiled at the compliment.
“I’d be happy to be doing more of the same,” Mike went on. “I don’t think I could ask for more. More servers maybe.”
They both chuckled at that.
“How about you?”
“I’ve been thinking about it.” David was quiet for a moment. “Worrying about Gary and his deadline keeps me awake at night.”
“Man, you don’t have to do that. We’ll solve the problem. Or we won’t, and Sean will give us more servers somehow. It’s not worth losing precious sleep over. We all need more of that.”
“It’s not just that. Yes, of course I want ELOPe to be released and the project to be a success. Being hired to run ELOPe was a great break for me.” David paused and shook his head. “No, the real thing is that I don’t want to be under anyone’s thumb like we are with Gary. We’re doing all the work here, and sure we’ll get some credit, but in the end, all of it will go into Gary Mitchell’s bottom line. Meanwhile, we have to take shit from him.”
Mike paused. “What are you thinking?”
“I think we can take the credibility we have right after we release ELOPe. We can build on that, and get the support to do something big from the ground up. A brand new product for Avogadro. Something that won’t get subordinated to Gary. Something that can change the world.”
Mike nodded. “Sure, that would be nice, but --”
“Not just nice,” David cut him off. “It’s what I’m meant to do. I know it deep in my bones.”
Mike glanced over at David, hoping it was just coffee talking, but fearing worse.
Sixty miles east and an hour later, Mike slid down the lift ramp, and then snapped into his bindings. David had already started down the run. Mike jumped to get some forward momentum and followed him down the mountain.
He just didn’t understand David sometimes. David was blindingly brilliant and fun to be friends with. On the other hand, he was so driven, always focused on what was just beyond the horizon, that he seemed to lose sight of where he was.
Damn, David was far ahead of him. Mike bent further to pick up a little more speed. The cold mountain air whistled around the vent holes in his snowboarding helmet.
Mike was amazed how he and David could be immersed in the same situation and see it two completely different ways. Mike was having the best time of his career working on an exciting project with great people. Sure, folks like Gary came along, but that just added to the challenge. David looked at the same situation, and took personal affront at Gary’s influence. Worse, he was starting to see the project as merely a stepping stone to
