Professional Insult

I've been pretty busy with work and setting up a new Linux box after work these days (more on the latter in a later post), but today, I was served with such a huge insult at work that I just had to write about it. Allow me to provide you with some background.

I have been working on a project whereby we had originally expected to deliver code production yesterday. As it so happens, our UAT team took so long to start testing that there was no way we would make that production date, and we told them so. Unfortunately, our clients went ahead anyway and announced that we would be in production yesterday. You can imagine their shock when they realized that they made a boo-boo.

At any rate, the big kahuna at my company gets a whiff of this and says we'll get to production by next Tuesday (day after the Canada Day long weekend) instead. This of course would mean that we need to have it to our test team by tonight, so that they can test all of tomorrow (a Friday). This would leave the entire long weekend for UAT. Getting dev done by end of day today is a reasonable thing to say, provided that when we break down the outstanding tasks, we conclude that this target is in fact realistic. The thing is, it's not that realistic. These things take time to investigate and therefore to get things done by the target date (end of day today), we would be putting in some long hours. Not a nice thing to see just before a long weekend. To make matters worse, the big kahuna said that if we get the work done by EOD today, we get an extra vacation day.

I was only completely floored by this comment. After the shock subsided, I just felt plain insulted. After all, I was just bribed to get work done more quickly. We all realize that there are client pressures. We are all professionals here, and we know what needs to be done. We try our hardest to get things done in the allotted time. I don't need someone dangling a carrot in front of me in order to motivate me. Not only that, why were other teams who also had experienced similar crunches never similarly rewarded? This was just very unprofessional on his part, and the worst part is that he didn't even realize how unprofessional it was.