The Three Laws of Business

Fail usually follows a pretty standard lifecycle, starting from a embryo of an idea in someone’s mind, until it grows into a beautiful rainbow chrysalis in their wild fantasies. Then comes the implementation, and the results are usually hilarious. Lets take a guided tour through the genesis of an epic failure, as our random noob wakes up one morning hoping to change the world.

National Epic Fail

Mr Conroy wakes up one morning and checks his email. “Sweet Baby Jesus!”, he exclaims, “3laws said ‘Fuck’ on my kids’ internet, and something must be done!”. Then he realizes that despite having the technological ability of a goldfish he has somehow ended up as the Minister for Communications. He thinks of his daughter reading on the internet about his failures regarding the National Broadband Network, and knows that some content must be blocked. For the children!

Suddenly, in an orgasm of misconceptions, confusion, and desperation a Fail is born. You see, a noob will always attack a problem with a predefined plan: “I need to achieve X by doing Y”. The Fail will swim around in the mind slowly growing and strengthening, until the parent is utterly convinced of how he will change the world with this exact plan.

The experts are called in. We tell them that achieving X is more difficult than they thought, and that Y definitely isn’t the way to go about it, for several reasons. We offer alternatives, but they aren’t Y, so our recommendations are ignored.

Parental Advisory: Do Some Fucking Parenting

Noobs seem to be able to continue to build truly epic failures, despite clear evidence that things are just not working. They beaver away, singing “Tra-la-la-ladies-blocking-the-ladies” with a big dumb grin on their face. The bemused look on their face when the monster they have built turns around and starts violently raping them is quite hilarious. Guess that dream of being able to go fuck a mistress while the magic technology looks after your children for you isn’t going to happen Stevie?

Conroy is looking surprised that his blacklist leaked, and isn’t 100% illegal content. The lead developer here is still confused when the ‘push messaging without rate control’ sometimes chokes up servers. Fuck. We told you retards this would happen.

There is a silver lining to this cloud. The experts got paid. First Law.

What the hell is it with you fucking role-players, anime lovers, fanboys, furries, etc? Its hard enough to find what I want on the internet without your inane and pointless bullshit cluttering up the place.

You’re the one whose choking Trojans

All it takes is a robot in an insignificant little cartoon aimed at 10 year old kids in Japan to collide with a real life product code for something worthwhile, and everything is ruined.  All you can find on the internet for that product code is a bunch of fat geeks discussing how many dice Optimus Prime would have to roll to determine if he was capable of raping said robot while wearing a fursuit.

The internet is for Serious Business. If all of you lovers of make-believe crap and sexual deviants could kindly form a line and GTFO in an orderly fashion then the rest of us will be able to get some useful things done.

Its full fucking steam ahead here. The client has seen the final product. Release day is imminent. Version numbers have been updated to indicate the official status. Directors are fellating each other excitedly in the boardroom. Birds are singing, butterflies are circling around…

You are doing it wrong

I have a huge goldfish bowl of coffee, and a feature request. This feature requires so much reworking of the core model that very little of the app will be unaffected. Large sections based on lazy assumptions and slack requirements capture will have to be chucked out and rewritten. It will take two months.

It won’t take two months. We don’t have two months, the client wants it now. The music swells to a crescendo, and we are about to begin the hilarious dance with management known as the Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. Lets watch…

Madam, may I have the pleasure?

Its not my place to make business decisions around trading off product quality against time. That role is reserved for the guy who is going to be held responsible when it all fails. The first steps of the dance is for him to say things like “just use your judgment”, “do what you think is best”, and “allow me to blame you when I suck cocks at the project management”. Playing the part of the ho, I then follow his lead with a list of costed and risk-assessed options.

Expensive, late, or crap. Pick any two. Next time you might want to try some foresight with your low-ball estimates.

I had a lovely evening.