When Meaningless Forms Affect Your Salary

Our super duper director, the one whose bright idea is to require engineering to design a zero-bug prototype, has been hard at work implementing new ways of doing things this past year. New ways of documenting. New ways of presenting data. New checklists. New ways to track schedule. It's all part of the zero-bug effort. And how did he come up with all these new ways of doing things? By not asking, even once, the people who were to actually going do these things -- the engineers.

When we mentioned that all these new processes will cost a lot of schedule overhead, he insisted that it would not. In fact, it'd be barely noticeable above what we're already doing today, he tells us. One of those fun new it-will-take-no-time documents is filling in the design checklist. Often, he'd get angry when he'd check our design documents repository to find it sparsely populated with these checklists. He'd threaten us, telling us that he doesn't want this intransigence to show up on our annual reviews, but he's willing to go there. The checklist is filled with useful items, like "Are all input and output labels spelled using all capital letters?" The answer for us is no, as we have been using lowercase for all of our designs for the past 7 years. There are many, many other useful checklist items, like "Has the design been simulated across all possible corner case permutations?" The answer is strictly no, but we do simulate a relevant subset. Else, the design will take ten years to complete.

So basically, the checklist is meaningless. We already have internal checklists and design reviews that are much more useful than this new fancy schmancy crap on which we were never consulted. And the only thing our director does with these checklists is to see that they exist. He doesn't actually look at them. Process for the sake of process. But if your annual review and salary is still important to you, then process is what you shall do.