A matter of IQ?

This is the company where I work: At my company, we try to make the best ERP software possible for small businesses. Three departments work together to reach this goal: Department of Evil (responsible for writing requirement specs and tracking time), My Department (where all the programmers are), and the Department of Fucking Things Up (the Quality Assurance folks).

The Evil people have no idea what it takes to run modern system development projects. The specs we get from them are nothing more than delusional text-only ramblings from confused minds, trying to cope with increased complexity in systems long overdue for termination. Lots of the Evil people have no experience or education in the field of project management and requirements analysis for software development, nor can they present any kind of technical knowledge. Most of them have actually heard some IT buzzwords, such as UML, Agile development, Web Services and SOA, but pretty much none of them know what they mean. Those are the ones telling the people at My Department what to do.

The Fuckers-Up don’t know diddley-squat about testing methodologies. Unit-testing, automated tests, TDD, SixSigma and other modern ways of securing quality are unknown to them. The bug reports that we get from FU reflect brilliantly off that fact.

The combination of ignorant Evil specs writers and unorganized Fucked Up software testers makes for a dangerous soup of not-so-tasty ingredients.

Of course, there are exceptions. Some of the Evil people are not so much the “Hail o Evil Emperor, the Prince of Darkness, Damn you to Hell for Eternity” kind of evil. Some are rather at the “Hi there Naughty Mid-Manager, the Duke of Murky Places, Darn you to Heck for 15 minutes or so” level. Those are the ones that do have the education and experience from projects in the past, that probably ran smoother and delivered higher-quality results. They have now been sucked in by the combined incompetence of the company as a whole.

The same goes for the Fucking Things Up people. Some of them tend to actually think sometimes, especially the latest additions to the department – those who have yet to be as disgruntled as I am.

Sometimes, when everything is more evil and fucked up than usual, I can’t help thinking in the lines of:

“If the stupidest person in my department would transfer to the Department of Evil, the average IQ would raise in both places”

That, obviously, is more than anything an expression of general dismay. It is not fair, but it feels so goooood to think that way at times!

If I could only device a way of finding out which ones are really Evil and just Fucking Things Up, and which ones are actually really clever but oh-so-disgruntled co-workers . Maybe the disgruntled among us could start a club. We would meet for beer and nachos, throwing darts at pictures of our CTO, plotting to start our own business where everything would be done just right… Anyone up for it?