(comic) Keep improving your craft

This happened almost verbatim.

One company had three subsystems, each with their own architecture. Two of them were fairly grounded, but the third was overrun with architecture astronauts. You know, the type of architects who implement bidirectional stateful subflexion via multi-delegate topographic inheritance and neotransflexive subordinated surrogates. There's barely a line of documentation, because they consider it intuitive.

Of course, the entire development team was completely confused, and struggled constantly because they couldn't understand any of it. Management's response was to say "just ask an architect". The architects said "I'm busy, just read the code". And then when things don't work, despite following the comments in the code (if any existed), they'd say "oh yeah, that's how it's named/described, but that's not what it actually means. You'll need to read the code to see what it really does".

So developers had to try to understand why a protected abstract virtual base pure const virtual private destructor had been converted to a protected virtual abstract base pure virtual private const destructor instead. If they got didn't understand the implications, the app could crash. Which it did. Frequently. Management was demanding to know this kept happening. Of course, the architecture was rock solid (posters on the wall proved this), so clearly it was the quality of the developers.

Eventually, senior management asked "what kind of training is there for all of this nonstandard and abstracted code?". The answer of "just ask an architect" was not well received, so management was ordered to implement a mentoring program.

Senior developers (not the architects, of course, don't be silly) were assigned the role of mentor to junior employees. It was their job to explain the architect's code (which they rarely if every understood) to the juniors. There was a huge meeting, where management sternly told seniors that it was their responsibility to ensure that juniors learned the undocumented design, and that it would be part of their annual evaluation. They were expected to spend at least four hours a week with their mentee, and keep logs of the knowledge transfer.

The supposition was that management would take the seniors notes to generate documentation that the architects couldn't be bothered to write in the first place.

Since every hour was billed to a project, developers had to account for them. So, the first question that was asked was what the charge code was for this activity that was going to take 10% of the team's time.

The answer was "there isn't one. You can mentor the person during lunch, or take walks with your mentee". In other words, it was required work, but they weren't going to pay for it, you were expected to do it for free.

When my manager complained to senior management that I hadn't started mentoring, senior management asked me why not. I said that I hadn't received the charge code for it yet, and since (as per their edict) I had to account for every hour, that was holding things up. They agreed, and asked the middle management chain what was holding things up with the charge code. The answer of "there isn't one, we expect them to do it for free" did not go over well.