The insidious bug we fought to fix for three weeks
was finally found. It was due to one line of code
by a friend of mine, J. Too bad he left the
company two weeks ago. A temporary "fix" was made
so that we could release the product. It was
interesting when I examined the code history and
found that the culprit was checked in on a
Saturday evening.
Over the past 10 months, J told me many times that
his boss and the senior colleague whom he worked
with were pushing him very hard. He got calls from
them on weekends. His requests for vacations were
turned down several times and he had to take sick
days off now and then. I told him he was too damn
nice to give them his cell phone number. But I
knew that he perceived that he had no choice. In
other words, he worked under fear and pressure.
As they say, everyone is fighting something. J was
extremely frugal. He had five kids and the
youngest one was only one year old. His wife gave
up work and home-schooled the kids. An
Afro-American family, they must have felt it when
police brutality against black folks were
constantly in the news.
J's solution to the problems was to go back to his
home country in Africa, taking his family, and
become a farmer there. It sounded almost romantic
but I didn't know how that would work out in this
crazy age. I probably would hear back from him
again. It was great fortune for him that his wife,
born in the US, was faithful and the two of them
could hold it together.
I digressed. But maybe factors more than J's now
obvious blunder had a hand in creating that bug?
Did his boss knew about any of these? Or none of
these was the manager's business?
This reminded me of my professor Mike who, upon
hearing I needed money, got me a summer intern job
and sent me to the Bay Area in 2000. I remembered
when I told him that some prof at a faculty
meeting said the graduate students' personal
problems were not his business and Mike replied:
"that prof probably would himself soon go out of
business." That's the kind of leadership I'd love
to work under. It was rare as I was lucky.
