So one day, the build was broken. The guy that was running the project freaked the fuck out. He said the client needed to have a nightly build or really bad things would happen.
Now, to manually produce a build of this project was an intense undertaking. It usually ran overnight and it was a long, fiddly process that took several hours. I proposed to him that I just fix the builder instead, and they’d get a build tomorrow. No, he said. It has to be today.
I spent the entire goddamned day making a new build. Finally, at the end of the day, I got a build. We could give it to the client.
He said, good news, I got you some extra time. I told the client we’ve got some new features we really want to show you, and they’ll be in tomorrow’s build.
You can see where this is going.
Four days in a row this happened. Four days of making a new build by hand, never with the time or permission to just fix the builder. The client never received the build they kept getting promised, because there were always new features waiting, tantalizingly close, that they absolutely had to witness for themselves. But alas, these features had just been implemented, brand new, and we had to make a build that would include them. Tomorrow. It was always just in the works, tomorrow. And yet… tomorrow, when everyone came in, the build was broken! This was a surprise to no one, except the guy running the project. He seemed genuinely not to grasp the idea that if no one fixed the autobuilder, the autobuilder would continue not working. He lived in a perpetual state of fear and anxiety, driven to wild agony by the prospect of an unhappy client. I wasn’t privy to the conversations, but I suspect the client was genuinely unhappy with whatever he was telling them. I have no idea.
Finally, on the fourth day, I happened to talk with one of the higher-ups, and filled him in one what was going on on my project. His conversation about it with me was fairly brief, but it was fairly clear that he wasn’t happy.
Within a few minutes, I was officially told that I had permission to take some time to fix the autobuilder. Oh joyous day it was.
Once the project was over, there was a very, very short delay before the guy who’d been running the project had been offered an exciting new opportunity at some other company and we all wished him the best.
I mean, generally speaking, I do think it’s better not to publicly humiliate anyone if you can avoid it. The fact that some people think this doesn’t apply to “underlings” doesn’t make it any less true as a general rule.