Deutsche Bank was the client of our current project at work. Within minutes all the critical systems of the bank went down and several systems remained down for several weeks. It turns out DB did not have any backup systems or they too were damaged during the attack. The scale of the event was apparent to all of us in New York City but looking at this incident from a German Bank's perspective, the lack of preparation could not be excused. Needless to say the big Bosses were quick to send a few of the administrators in NY to the firing squad pretty fast.
All of the bandwidth of DB NY was overnight redirected to bringing back the system. Of course no one cared about the training software Sapient was designing for them. Sapient team took three days off after 9/11 but then the next Monday we were back at work --with nothing to do. The client was scheduled to deliver us the content that would go into the training software and they were nowhere near ready. What was worse is they could not give us an ETA for the completion of the content. My team was sitting on their hands. At first it was a good thing after our hectic pace in the last few months. Then it got old and we started overanalyzing everything. I can not tell you how many redundant meetings I sat in during this time. We were all going through something and my cooperation was necessary so I played along.
During this three-week hiatus, I engaged in my own form of therapy. On one side I was building towers with the huge stash of LEGO blocks we had in the office, on the other I started writing some code to create automated templates for some of the presentations we were preparing. I was just coding away, I had no development plans and definitely no intentions to use this code in the client project.
I have a bad habit of showing my code to my producers often. This is a remnant of my childhood days; I have always been hungry for attention and approval. This little pet project was no different; I frequently showed it to my producer, Courtney. She was very impressed with it and encouraged me to keep working on it.
The more I worked on it, the more it seemed we could use this code to win some of the time lost once we receive the content. I do not blame any of us really but at some point we went insane and showed my work to the client. The client loved it, and said: "Yes, now you have delivered, this is the scalable solution we have been asking for since the beginning of this engagement."
While I thought to myself that this development was sure to bring me the kind of recognition I have been craving in this office, a storm was already brewing.
Once the client asked for this change, a quick meeting was held with them to renegotiate the price tag since we were now giving them more than we had originally promised. The client agreed to pay us $50k in addition to the original project bid for what we called the "Blackbox".
Blackbox, while sounding quite fancy, was actually a template implemented in Flash 4.0 that had within it a bunch of dynamic text fields and capability to load external graphics. It enabled relatively untrained users to create PowerPoint like presentations within the visual design Sapient had designed for Deutsche Bank's training presentations.
I went to work on the code, to make it more stable, and add the finishing touches to it. I thought I was pretty close to finishing it when without a warning a committee of directors from an unseen location within the company descended on our team and particularly on me. They called the whole process a "project review" and my bit of it a "code review". The idea sounded great except we were under extremely tight deadlines that had already been stretched to the limit.
The directors asked for all this documentation about the Blackbox, that as you guessed it, did not exist. I had to write the documentation in no time; luckily I got some serious help from a fellow coder.
Then I was asked to provide copies of my source code. The directors of technology looked at my code and made recommendations. As I said I am sure the intentions were well placed but these people had never programmed in Flash and did not know anything about it. During our review meetings, I had to answer a bunch of ridiculous questions.
When the dust settled, I finally understood what had just happened. Instead of being praised for spending my personal time in addition to office time to write a piece of code that literally saved a doomed project, I was blamed with a whole bunch of nonsense such as my code's inability to scale up and talk to databases in the future. The list of things I did wrong seemed to keep going and going. Perhaps some of this was my own fault, I was somewhat internalizing some of the angst that was around me. Maybe these people did not really blame me all that much, maybe they did. Sometimes one needs the equivalent of a Greek chorus to tell what the final verdict is because most of the time life never really does.
All I know is, I did not get a bonus that quarter and Sapient got its extra $50K from DB. The project was a success, and DB actually loved the Blackbox. This success story created a whole new set of demos and more work for us from DB.
Just when we thought we had a long trail of projects ahead of us, Sapient made a drastic move and laid off 40% of its New York Office. Times were sure changing, the invincible architects of the new economy were now out on the street, still tipsy from their large severances but when no one was looking fear laid in one corner of their eyes like a dusty old curtain.
I was laid off too, along with the other fifteen people Sapient moved from Austin to New York less than twelve months ago. The severance was nice but not nice enough considering I had eight months of unemployment to look forward to.
