Lost in the fog of history, there was a man whose only sin was his strong passion to get things done. He just wanted to go from A to B following the straightest line possible.
But the Universe had other plans. Zigzagging plans.
“Requirements are not clear!” someone said, and stopped him from continuing. “But I know what needs to be done”, he replied. He couldn’t convince them. “You can’t verify it if there’s no requirement for it”, they argued. “I will make sure it works”, he suggested. “That’s not how things are done around here”.
Strange ceremonies of requirements analysis took place, and once all that was finally over, he felt that he could finally put his hands on the thing and get it done.
But no. Too soon!
Someone pointed out that there was no justification for the path he was planning to take. He commented: “I have done this before, I know how to do it!”. “Justify it”, they insisted in a monochord tone.
There he went to write a document that would go to great lengths to justify what didn’t need justification while knowing by heart that no one would actually read it. Diagrams were drawn, acronyms were invoked, and alleged compliance with arcane standards was declared. As he was printing his document, he thought of the tree that was cut down to make the pulp that eventually became the A4 sheet of paper on top of which all that vapid nonsense was written, and felt sorry for it. He delivered the document, and it was approved.
“Finally”, he thought, “it’s time to do it”.
But he was wrong again.
This time it was Quality Assurance, or was it Product Assurance? The difference was never entirely clear. They questioned he lacked a Product Assurance Plan. “What about critical items?” They said with a worried face. “What about verification matrices?” they quipped, increasingly nervous. “Won’t somebody please think of the children?”
Our man started to grow emotionally detached from the job he once loved.
He used to engineer. Solve problems, draw circuits, build things that worked. LEDs used to blink. Capacitors used to blow up in the most beautiful puffs of smoke. Now he was spending most of his days updating status in JIRA tickets that kept flowing like a stream of fetid, steamy horse shit.
Every now and then, he would still open Altium to see his old designs, admiring the orderly beauty of his schematic diagrams. Inputs to the left, outputs to the right. He would run a SPICE simulation to appreciate the colorful plots as the differential equations evolved delightfully into solution. Promptly, a JIRA notification would bring him back to reality.
And thus, our friend saw the practice of Engineering become an eternal pursuit of total auditability of fictions: a collection of documents, tickets, and memos, where building stuff was not a priority anymore, confusing the real thing with the picture of the real thing.
In the end, he had two options: adapt or leave.
He considered adapting. Playing the game. Learning the dialect, speaking in frameworks and deliverables, joining the ritual dance of inefficiency. It would mean safety, predictability. But it would also mean letting go of the thing that made him tick: the joy of making something work.
So one morning, he packed his stuff and silently took off.
Essentially, he was another victim of the inescapable Putt’s Law, which observes that technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.