He works in one place. I work in another far away from him. We’ve worked together on a project for several years.
We were talking on the phone about an idea he had, something to fill in now that our project’s being cancelled. But it was an idea that didn’t work out, and so our conversation was really “good bye”, since we won’t be working together anymore.
“You know this really makes me sad,” I told him.
“Well, it’s a small community,” he said. “We’ll run into each other again.”
He knows. He’s been doing this for a very long time.
“You know I started in this business during the downturn of Apollo. I’ve seen this happen before. But this was different. It just wasn’t handled right.”
Too many people not only feel sad about this, about the loss of the distributed, badgeless team that the project built, about the loss of the hardware, software and processes they’d begun to build. They feel betrayed, and they feel as if they were deceived.
You see, this was going to be the real deal. A project done right, built well, built to last. But it was never properly funded and so expectations were always well beyond what had been paid for. And the managers were constantly fighting a losing battle against too little money and too much mass. In the end, those who failed to provide the funds ended up taking pot shots at the technical people in the trenches, slandering their work, trying to pin the funding shortfall on them.
“It was vindictive,” he said to me.
A very sad ending.