A true story.
Back in 1999 after a couple of years working with my first employers, I wanted to see more of the job market so quit and shifted to a medium-sized (~350+) multinational company instead, working in the Testing department.
All nice and vibrant. Some of the Testing would buddy-up with some folks from Development in the adjacent building and we’d head down the local pub for lunch most days. Heck, groups of folks would head back down said pub again in the evening as well.
Within a month they whisked me off for a weekend in Miami, sitting in the basement of the Hilton hotel listening to Marketing talking crap. It remains my opinion that the only difference between Marketing departments and the snake we saw in the hotel pool is the snake’s fundamental honesty of purpose. Fake team-building “exercises” happened – rolling-up newspapers into a long cylinder to carry an egg, as I recall.
The next summer there was another all-hands conference meeting in central London. Starting on a Friday, running into Saturday morning. I had booked some of the next week off on holiday to go hang out with Dad in the Lake District. Leaving the conference at Saturday lunchtime, people were surprised I was not sticking around for extra social activities.
Note the “weekend”. Weekends are sacred. Me-time.
Then came the invasion of the Quality Consultant.
I have no idea what caused management to bring him in apart from some deluded desire for ISO9001 certification, and forget his exact wording, but I well recall sitting with most of the combined two departments in the conference room when he walked in and, in the course of two sentences somehow managed to insult the inherent capabilities of everyone present. The rest of the talk was no better – everything said grated one way or another, in particular the idea of trying to encapsulate all of Quality in a few processes and procedures – as if Robert Pirsig hadn’t spent long enough trying and failing to pin the concept down in an entire book (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance).
A handful of weeks passed and the guy came back for Part 2, going from desk to desk talking to everyone individually in the department.
When he came to my desk, I didn’t give him time to sit down before pinning him to the wall and said “It is said that those who can, do and those who can’t, teach; well, those who can’t even teach become Quality Consultants”.
Harsh, perhaps, and an unfair insinuation against teachers, but it got the message across loud and clear. He had the decency to take it on the chin, but obviously realised right there I was going to be a hard nut to crack.
A few months later the manager emailed me to ask if I could arrive more promptly on time as it “reflected badly on the hard-working members of the team”. So much for flexible working hours – of course I was putting in the time – 8hr/day barely an hour out of sync with everyone else on account of having to take two trains to get in & out of the place every day – and they supposedly didn’t care when I did the hours, apart from when they suddenly did.
Another few weeks later and there was this conversation with the manager early one morning:
Me: hey, how do I go about vesting my permitted quarter stock options?
Boss: have you been here a year yet?
Me: 366 days, not that I’ve been counting
The next week I called him into the small conference room, slid an envelope across the desk and said “that’s the letter you’ve been wanting”. His response was to call up the head of Development and say “we’re going to need another Testing resource”.
Yup, he called me a “resource”.
I jumped straight out of that job into a tiny Linux consultancy firm for a happy 15-18 months. Then the first company I ever worked for called me and said “we want you back”. I’ve been there ever since.
The multinational lasted another ~5 years and were gobbled-up wholesale by IBM, their products rebranded under the names of former competitors. All those lunchtimes of “power-living” going down the pub together, the artificial sociability of “free-pizza lunch Fridays” and conferences, all the wasting of life and soul on corporate bull-crap – and particularly, the “quality assurance” idiot – gone.
I never vested the stock options – saw them as blood money.
But now, 20 years later, I still go on.
And I remain increasingly firmly of the opinion that Quality is not a thing that can be encapsulated in “documentation” by Management. It’s far more ineffable, more transcendent, than that.
No. Quality is a little mouse carved on a wooden table leg – the signature piece of a Robert Thompson “mouseman” piece of work. All the craftsperson’s pride in their work, their guarantee, their seal of approval, their understanding of acceptable variation between instances, their satisfaction and hopefully yours – encapsulated in microcosm. That’s Quality.