The Culture of the Workaround

At one job I once had, I noticed very quickly that the coffee was more terrible than even the usual office swill. I learned not to drink the coffee for the most part, because the pot was usually full. On the occasion I discovered an empty pot, I’d make more, and make it my way.

Except, well, it wasn’t that simple. The company used a coffee service, so all the coffee came in single-pot packets. Except the packets were sized for a smaller pot than we had, so there were also filters, and you were supposed to cut open the packets (with the scissors kept in the same drawer as the packets) and fill a filter with the now-loose grounds. Except it turned out (to my dismay) that if you used the entire contents of two packets, the thing would overflow, creating a mess of coffee and wet grounds all over the counter.

Now. Not to be discouraged, the receptionist had spent a little time and figured out that you could use about one and a half packets without any overflow. That this process still produced weak, entirely undrinkable coffee-tinted swill didn’t really matter to her. The official process for making coffee was that you’d cut open two packets, use about one and a half, and throw out the rest.

This solution, however, was unacceptable to me. My job involved running software tests that could take a long time, so during one such test I experimented with the coffee maker and identified the source of its overflow problem. Somehow the hole at the bottom of the filter basket was too small. It couldn’t drain fast enough to keep up with the pump filling it. If you made especially weak coffee the total volume of grounds and water would stay just below the edge of the basket and there wouldn’t be any overflow. Fill the basket too much with grounds, however, and the combined volume would be too high.

I proposed widening the hole, and I’m pretty sure the receptionist thought I was crazy. But she mentioned it to the coffee service the next time we broke a pot (we broke a lot of pots) and their guy looked at the coffee maker.

We had been given the wrong filter basket. The guy from the coffee service brought us a different filter basket and the coffee maker never overflowed again.

I could draw a number of conclusions from this, but I will end with another anecdote about the same job:

I was called in to interview for the job by a recruiter I’d worked with in the past, and there was a strange moment in the interview where I wasn’t entirely clear if I’d been hired or ruled out, as the technical portion of the interview turned into the “chief architect” defending the faults in his design to me as I sort of tore the whole thing apart, exposing a few major security holes just from a quick look at the whiteboard.

As should be clear from the chronology I did get the job, but I then spent most of it being confused at how the coders at the company went along with faulty concepts instead of challenging them. The base idea of the company’s product was brilliant and audacious but much of the execution came down to a few poorly considered design choices. There was such a chain-of-command structure in place, though, that employees (like me) were actively discouraged from pointing out errors so they could be fixed:

Doing so would make one’s bosses look bad;
Doing so might cause delivery dates to slip;
What the customers don’t know won’t hurt them.

I was let go after the company failed for a second time to get another round of major investment capital, and shortly after that its backers sold it to its biggest rival (“We’ll invest in you instead if you’ll also take this other company off our hands.” “Um, okay.”). If your company is happy with lousy coffee, is that a sign that the company’s management is as lousy as its coffee?