A doggie and his program
Suppose you need to convince a client to buy your company’s product, so you decide to take him on a hunting trip - and you bring along your dog. While jawboning to the client about how great the product is, in order to emphasize your company's ability to complete its projects, you shoot a duck out of the sky. The duck lands in a marsh, so your dog goes and fetches it for you. As you take the hunk of meat from the dog, you give him a small prepackaged treat and think, “What a stupid trade this dog just agreed to.” But who is really getting the better deal here?
Suppose instead that you fail to shoot any ducks, so your dog has nothing to do - yet he still gets his dinner when you go home, just like every day. The dog gets heating and air conditioning, food, vet care for his boo-boos, and an appreciative boss. He gets fed regardless of whether you end up pulling off that deal with the client. He got no worries, hakuna matata!
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In other news, I gave another lecture at that monthly programmers’ meet-up, which is sponsored by a company that I guess I’ll refer to as “ℙ” on this blog. I talked about my never-completed doctoral thesis and how it relates to my difficult-but-eventually-completed move to Canada. (I skipped over the part about how the USA is not actually a “free country” because previous meet-ups clearly indicated that these Canadians didn’t want to hear such talk about our neighbour, friend, and ally The States.) I talked about the professor that I had hoped would supervise the dissertation and how I had designed the program to match up with his personal proclivities. I showed some code and discussed how it connected to certain foundational theorems of computer science.
After my speech, a fellow I had never met before, who apparently does not work at Company ℙ, asked me if I was a professor at the local university. “No,” I replied, “I just sound like one.” He asked to see my résumé, so I showed it to him. He was apparently not expecting to see that I have spent the last seven years doing web-monkey work at Company 𝔾, so he never did talk about whatever job he had wanted to offer - which is too bad because the fellow seemed to be quite well off and I could sure use some dough.
The Company ℙ manager asked many questions about my project, but continued to avoid saying anything about possible employment. My impression was that my presentation had convinced him that I was not a suitable candidate for his own part of the company (perhaps to be called ℙℓ here?) because his group is all about the “awesome user experience” and my program clearly demonstrates that my visual-design skills are not “awesome”. Damn it, I’m a content guy, not a pretty interface guy! But apparently there are other positions accessible through the Company ℙ network, so it still seems worthwhile to go back next month.
The Company ℙ guy who’s big on Haskell wasn’t there this month. In fact, there were less than a dozen people in attendance because so many ℙℓ people were on vacation for August. But one guy announced that it was his first day on the payroll so he had brought free beer for everyone! So that was nice.
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Doesn’t anyone need a doggie to go fetch a program for them from the marsh after they’ve convinced a client to buy it? I can fetch really meaty programs and I don’t need especially-fancy treats for them! And I can and have fetched from areas of the marsh that most doggies wouldn't dare enter.