That Old Familiar Feeling

Booting up for Monday, and what a Monday it is.

Sick as a dog, voice sounds like Barry White after a week long scream, and I've got four things on deadline for Dragonman.

I like Dragonman. Aside from their tendency to be unabashedly fit, they are thoroughly intelligent and great to work with. Dragonman has put me on notice that my action items must get done today.

I'm 99% of the way there. But the Dragon team is very particular about how their work is captured and they are backend with a capital B. I'm front end since forever - so you know, different worlds. Dragonman pairs me up with a tech resource who will help me try to speak their language of foreign keys and normalized values. It's slow going - but then, I'm UI and don't need to know all the backend stuff.  I just hate feeling stupid.

And the Dragon team will pounce on you hard if they feel you're not up to par. Their experience with UX to date has been pretty choppy.

While I'm thinking about that, I get an invite to a meeting from Product Actual. Today.

Alarm bells start ringing in my head, but I stifle them. This is NerdHaven. We are different.

I check the invite. Sent 10:43am - the meeting is for 12:00. The subject is Quick Team Update. Okay, that's three out of the four signs of truly bad news. I open the invite list for number four. It looks like the entire list of Product and UX (now part of Product), except...

Heater is not on the list.

Of course. Product Actual just took the reins, and Heater has been on the bubble for a while now. Gumby had them on some kind of probation and it looks as if Product Actual is closing their account. All of this is theory, of course.

So I go over towards the Dragon room and see if Heater is in. They aren't. I ping Pepe, a Dragon QA: Hey, is Heater in today?

Pepe looks confused. "No, come to think of it."

I text Runner - who is way ahead of my speculation. They are certain that Heater is gone. I consider asking how they know, but figure I'm already too far along down the old way of thinking.

*   *   *

I feel bad for Heater. I think they were just getting over their head, Dragon is a really tough assignment, but I think Heater was struggling with some memory problems. Dragonman lost his patience with Heater in a discussion with me - which to know Dragonman is one hell of a rare event. Heater 's got all kinds of family issues at home as well, and this will not make things easier at all.

The meeting didn't have a room set up - it was booked as a phone conference only. I meet with Dash and Red in one of our breakout rooms. Red was wondering what the meeting was about and I unthinkingly blurt out "Heater's gone." Red seems stunned by this - they are new enough to not know that Heater had performance issues.

"By choice?" they ask.

No.

We end up doing a mad scramble to find the room that everyone else has grabbed, Product Actual is in the office today, so it makes no sense for anyone to be remote except Sprint and Data. We pile into a small conference room and Product Actual makes it official.

"This organization has not met its commitments for last year, so there must be consequences."

What the...? This was not on my script at all. This sounded bad.

"As a result, there will be Force Reductions - which is a fancy way of saying layoffs. Heater is no longer a member of this team. They have been contacted and they will not be returning to the office."

So it is about Heater...but...

Product Actual presses on, "This should not be viewed as any reflection of Heater or the work they were doing. The organization cannot continue funding at the prior levels and unfortunately this group needed to lose a position."

Wait, I thought Heater's work was poor - that they were going to be axed because of it...

I've tried to be as direct as I can at NerdHaven. I ask "So, this was a budgetary decision and not performance based."

"Correct. Other departments will be asked to lose positions as well. The full scope of these decisions will not be made available to the larger group until tomorrow's all staff meeting."

Sh!t, sh!t, sh!t. Now I'm sweating who else is on the chopping block. There are so many great people here at NerdHaven. People I'd want to hang out with on weekends kinda people.

Dash asks a pertinent question about our team's having lost Noddy, Ahhh, our Director and now Heater: Is there something we should know about the future of UX here...? Gumby launches into some corporate babble about how UX "isn't going away" and my mind is flashing back to a conference room back in CorpWorld.

Me, Din, Ruby, Stimpy all sitting around a table after Black Wednesday. Smiler is looking me in the eye in a very unnerving way... "CorpWorld is not getting rid of your group."

Eight months after that meeting, we were all gone.

UX isn't going away...

Product Actual takes over from Gumby and clarifies that we will be working closer with the SMEs and Juice's group. That we will be more collaborative.

I like collaboration, but it does not speed things up when it takes the form of final sign off meetings and late requests for design changes. This will not make us faster.

Mostly, I'm thinking what on earth is going on. Our corporate masters have reached down and established that they can hurt us. This we knew.

Now we know they will hurt us. And that they want us to change how we do things and go faster.

As a result, we will add process - and we will go slower.

And then they will punish us again.

On the way out of the room, the hairs on the back of neck go up - and stay there.