Being Geek

Chapter 12. The Enemy

The $150,000 mistake, the discovery of critical and unfixable architectural flaw three weeks before shipping, and the Really Bad Hire (aka, we’re being sued).

These are not screwups,^[2] these are fuckups, and they aren’t about to happen—they’re here. They’re guaranteed. When you discover them, the air leaves your lungs, the back of your head tingles, and there’s an odd metallic taste in your mouth. Your mind goes blank except for the crisp mental picture that is a fuckup of your own making.

Initial personal discovery is shocking, but what I want to examine is secondary discovery. This is when your boss learns of the fuckup, and you shouldn’t be worried whether there’s an odd metallic taste in his mouth; you should worry about who he’s about to turn into.

Management Transformations

Ideally, your boss is the levelheaded type, and he’ll manage your fuckup cleanly and easily using his years of experience, but fuckups knock people off their game and out of their comfort zone. Fuckups create unusual stress, and stress can mutate normally sane people into unrecognizable caricatures of themselves. Let’s talk about some of them.

The Interrogator

The Interrogator’s approach is an endless stream of questions: “When did the customer first call?” “Who triaged the bug first?” “What were the results?” “How did we proceed from there?” It goes on and on.

What’s annoying about the Interrogator is that he actually only wants to ask one question—THE question—but he’s putting you through ...