Friday Diary · Week 2
Perfectly wrong
The week the data went to hell, quietly, without setting off a single alarm.
We tell people what level of qualification sits next to their job.
On Tuesday we measured it. Ninety six in every hundred were too high.
I looked at the number and felt sick.
The whole promise is that we tell you the truth about where you stand. For months we told people to aim three floors higher than they needed to. Some of them will have read that and thought, not for me then.
One line. One file. Two days to find it.
The bottom rung was set to the wrong level. Somebody typed it in years ago. Nobody looked again.
That file goes into every job we generate. So every job inherited it.
Nothing was broken. Nothing crashed. No alarm. No failing test. It ran beautifully every day for months.
It ran beautifully on a wrong number.
Every bug that has really hurt me looks like this. Not the ones that fall over and shout. The quiet ones that work, and go on working, and take a year off you before anybody thinks to check.
Then I was wrong about the fix. I said relabel them. No. Four in ten records argue with themselves. Pick a side and you get something that looks right and is not.
Forty thousand have to be rebuilt.
Being wrong for an afternoon saved me a month.
The one that upset me
Somebody told me their changes were not there.
They were right. Built, tested, finished six days earlier. Never put live. In that system, finishing your work does not put it live. Nobody knew that was still true.
So for six days they used a tool with none of their work in it. They drew the only conclusion available. Nobody had listened.
That upset me more than the ninety six. A wrong number you fix on a Tuesday. You cannot fix the other one with code.
Six in the morning
I worked through to six the night before we launched.
You are alone for hours. It is dark. Nothing works. At three you wonder what you are doing with your life.
Then the Philippines come online.
Then India. Then Portugal. Then the UK.
Somebody has already fixed the thing you were dreading.
I sat there with the light coming up, wrecked, and watched my company wake up one country at a time. A thing I built, being carried on by people I have never stood in a room with.
Twenty years ago that was impossible for a company my size. Now it is Tuesday.
Kam
I have talked about building a company and not said how it was possible.
Her name was Kam. She was our nanny and housekeeper. She ran our home while I ran the business.
Cosmo was born in 2003. I started the company in 2004, so he was one. Xavi came in 2005. I worked through all of it. The only reason I could is that Kam was there.
We say businesses are built by their founder. This one was built by two of us. Only one of us was ever asked about it.
She died of cancer a couple of years ago. We miss her so much.
I thought about her all week. On Tuesday I was upset that somebody had spent six days believing nobody had listened. And there it was. I had spent twenty years being the one who got asked.
One thing about working with Claude
The best thing that happened this week is that it told me I was wrong.
I said relabel the records. It went and checked. It came back and said that will make it worse. It was right.
The value is not that it types fast. It is that it will go and look, then tell you what you did not want to hear.
And the good thing
I joined a knitting group. I have never knitted. I am fifty four and this is the year I learn things that have nothing to do with a screen.
I am making a blanket. A blanket is only squares. Get the easy shape right, do it forty times, end up with something warm.
Which is what I spent all week failing to do at work.
Fifty four, and I have started something I am certain to be bad at for months. That turns out to be the most useful thing I do all week.
Next week: forty thousand job descriptions, properly. And one square.