Allie was just finishing up her CTO job description when she got a text from Rob.
“Free? I haz sleepies.”
“Y”
She met Rob at the lobby.
“Coffee or walk?”
“Can’t I have both?” replied Rob.
They stepped outside. It was drizzling a little bit.
“Winter is coming,” Rob pronounced direly.
“Ha. Not around here. This is just an aggressive fog.”
They crossed the roundabout and went into the design center building across the way. On the ground floor was a very good coffee shop. They walked over and Rob ordered a latte. Allie ordered a double espresso.
They took the drinks from the barista and Rob grabbed three sugars. He placed them next to each other, then ripped them all open in one go, pouring them into his cup.
“Don’t you like coffee?” Allie inquired for the hundred and first time, as straight-faced as she could manage.
Rob declined to answer, merely rolled his eyes and headed upstairs. When the weather was bad, they’d walk the halls of the design center, looking at the little shops of the interior designers.
“What’s up in QuiltWorld-land?” asked Rob.
“I posted the job descriptions for all the people George stole.”
Rob guffawed. “They were his people. He had them first.”
“Thanks, Dad.” She slugged him lightly on the arm.
“Can you hit me somewhere else? I’m starting to bruise up there!”
“Baby.”
They walked down the hall.
“So. I’m thinking . . . I hate hiring. Too much risk. Can I promote? What do you think about Noam as CTO after Yosi goes?”
“Noam?”
“He’s a great programmer. He’s been killing it since he got here.”
“He’s pretty young.”
“Who isn’t?”
“Hmmm.” Rob sipped his latte. “Maybe. Have you talked to his team?”
“No. Should I? Will they be jealous? Is that weird?”
“Well, maybe, but mostly to find out if he can people manage.”
“Argh! I don’t know how to do any of this!”
Rob stopped in front of a slightly bigger shop, full of couches, chairs, and tables that all looked like they came from the set of Star Trek. “Mind?”
“No, go ahead.” Allie followed Rob into the store.
Rob sat on each piece of furniture. “I hate our couch,” he said by way of explanation.
“And all your chairs?” She grinned as he struggled to emerge from a deep armchair.
“I like things to match,” he replied. He sat on a long modernist couch and patted the spot next to him. Allie knew he was going into professor mode.
“Programming is not managing. It’s an orthogonal skill.” He got up from the couch, and sat on the one across from her, the same model in red.
“How does color change the comfort?”
“Red is much warmer.” He wiggled his eyebrows at her. “Lots of individual contributors can’t get the handle on managing. The skills are different. For example, if you are in meetings all day as a programmer, you aren’t doing your job. If you are in meetings all day as a manager, you’re doing your job perfectly. You have to be able to talk to people. Give them feedback. Broker deals with other teams. You go from typing code to speaking it.”
Allie thought about that. She’d spent this week in a spreadsheet. Was she spending her time wisely?
“Talk to Noam’s team, see how he manages their time. He’s the lead of his pod, so he manages the work.”
Rob looked over the room. “Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope,” he said, as he pointed at each piece of furniture. He waved at the salesperson as they walked out.
“Also, talk to Barak over in Backgammon. I hear he’s unhappy.”
“Thanks!”
They walked back downstairs and past the coffee counter. The barista waved at Rob and he waved back. He made friends everywhere he went.
Allie thought about that and wondered if it was part of his management-fu. “Always be networking,” he’d told her more than once before. Speaking of, “So how is Bagboy Race?”
“Complete shitshow.” He sighed. “I’ve been there one week, and I can’t tell you how I’m going to get anything fixed.”
“Why is it so bad? I thought you scoped it out before you went in?”
Rob flopped down on one of the coffee shop couches. He gestured at the couch across the glass coffee table from it. “Got time?”
She nodded and sat down. “Is this one for sale?”
Rob grinned. “I wish! It’s actually comfortable!”
“So. Spill.”
“Young is the most unscrupulous GM I have ever worked for. And I worked on 21town.”
“Ew.”
“He’s all about the hack. He took over the studio and he’s optimizing the holy hell out of the game, misleading dialogs, spamming people’s network and breaking TOS. He’s going to have the lawyers on us.”
“And the codebase?”
“It is an epic mess. Luckily, he knows he can boost numbers by reducing speed, or else I wouldn’t be allowed to attempt a cleanup. But I’m not sure I can. The programming team is a bunch of kids who graduated San Jose State a year ago. As far as I can tell, my predecessor just hired them all, and has been firing as they turn out useless. They are adequate, but they don’t know what to do, and I desperately need a lead who can level them up. But no one is going to want to touch our codebase. It’s worse than a ball of Christmas tree lights. Tangles within tangles.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“We’ve got no headcount. It was slashed when our numbers went into freefall. I’m going to PIP out at least two of the worst and try to place a couple of more senior folks in.”
“PIP? That will take forever.” A PIP, or a performance improvement plan, was the type of cover-your-ass strategy HR preferred. First, you let the employee know every way in which they had failed the company, then gave them ninety days to turn it around. You had to document every infraction to create an airtight case against the employee suing the company for wrongful termination.
“I know. I’m going to talk to Patricia, see if she has any more ideas.”
Patricia was the head of HR. Allie had had maybe two encounters with her, once when she was being recruited, and once at a company party. “What do you think of Patricia?”
“I’ll be honest. I don’t have an opinion. I’ve mostly worked with her recruiters, and they seem fine. They source good folks for me. And the person who helped me set up benefits was super nice.” He shrugged. “You don’t know anything about HR until there is a crisis.”
“I’ve heard mixed reports.” Allie wasn’t really sure if she should spread gossip, but it could affect Rob. “Christie told me when she was pregnant, she was told she could take two weeks off or quit, and come back when she was ready to work again. I couldn’t believe it. Christie designed our best game.”
“And that’s illegal.” Rob sighed, sinking more deeply into the couch. “And yet they get away with it. It’s just like Ephemeral Arts here. Except you don’t know whom to trust.”