week 2 of the winners from this year's "do my job for me" contest. wuuza wrote:

How about how gay it is to give a developer 4 weeks to finish a 6 week
project?  (Abstract as needed to included how gay most of the country 
is for getting people to do too much work.)

according to studies, most americans do not get a full recommended 8 hours sleep at night. i know i don't. i'll get 8 or possibly more on weekends, but during the week i get maybe more than 6 a night, if i'm lucky. there's only so much time in a day, & too much of it is taken up by having to go to work. after that, hardly any time is left over for doing anything worthwhile.

we live in a consumer-based economy. let's face it, regardless of where you work, your job revolves around some kind of product or service. maybe you create the product (most likely just some tiny part of it). perhaps you spend your workday thinking about new products & ways to improve the old products. maybe you cold-call people at dinnertime, refusing to take no for an answer until you've gone through your entire script. or more likely, your job has no direct link to the end product at all, with no demonstrable effect on the outside world whatsoever, pushing papers around a desk to (allegedly) make things go smoother for the people who do create, design, or market the actual product. your employer isn't there to give you money. the employer's only around to provide the product, & the only reason your employer wants you around at all is because it thinks you'll somehow be able to help it do that.

this is not to say that your employer doesn't care about you. sure it does; it just doesn't care about you as an employee. but as a consumer, you're a valuable asset. after all, the only reason your employer puts out a product at all is because it thinks people should want to pay for it. (there are few exceptions. & even those areas that don't precisely fit this model [military, religion, monopolies, civil services, open-air broadcast media] operate in a similar fashion.)

but there's an obvious conflict here... everybody is trying to sell something to everybody else. we can't all buy everything; there's not enough time after work & we don't get paid enough anyway. so everybody has to fight it out, & because everybody's involved in the fight, everybody gets caught in the crossfire.

so your employer will do whatever it can to obtain & keep those customers. time to market is just one trick of many. marketing types know that the timing of a product can be crucial in its success or failure. usually that means being earlier is better. how long it would actually take to do a job properly is hardly even a factor in these types of decisions. often, the people making these decisions have no understanding of the product at all aside from how to market it to people. that's why so many products (especially software) are released late. microsoft is at least a couple months late with every release of every product... seemingly because its marketing people have an utter disdain for the actual programmers & production workers, & pick release dates out of thin air.

the hierarchy can go up for miles. your employer probably has its own employer, which owns 100s if not thousands of smaller companies & subcompanies. some of them will put out products that compete with yours. in fact, your employer most likely releases products that compete with each other. that leaves you struggling against your own co-workers, trying to one-up them by being the best. but if either wins, your employer still gets the money. this is good for your employer, but is it good for you? doesn't the "co-" in co-worker mean you're supposed to be working together?

this is how the system works (or fails to). that's why you can go into any office in corporate america & find dilbert cartoons on the wall. think about the people whose jobs are supposed to be helping co-workers: human resources. even the name gives it away. humans are just resources to be allocated toward corporate goals. when those resources are used up or become unprofitable, they are disposed of. there's a lot of that going around right now because of the alleged downturn in the economy. which just means that those who remain employed have to work that much harder...