While I was completely engrossed in my work, I began to see through the veneer, and it disturbed me that others couldn't or, more likely, didn't want to. But as much time as I spent breaking down the psyches of my colleagues, I spent more time working. My doorman would sometimes greet me at 2 a.m. and say, "Oh, you got off early tonight." Every moment I spent at the office was valuable; my thoughts and ideas would trickle down the corporate decision trees and affect hundreds of thousands, possibly millions.

Although my official title was technical program manager, my background and talents made it extremely difficult to put me in an appropriate pigeonhole. Where do you put a schmoozy sales guy who knows how to program? Primarily, I was responsible for client-side and middle-tier architecture (in layman's terms, figuring out how the technology would work), but I ultimately ended up working with sales and marketing. At one point two of the founders, who also happened to be our only two programmers, decided to head to the West Coast for short vacations. Unfortunately (and primarily because of our low salaries), we hadn't hired any additional programmers. This was a software company? Before leaving, they took me out to lunch and asked me to write the next application. My stack of tasks was so enormous that I didn't see the harm in adding something else to the pile. Besides, what could go wrong? They'd be back in a week.

Four days into the project, I had written 90 percent of the code. All of my other responsibilities were put on the back burner, since our application cycle lasted only two weeks. I walked into the office thinking in C++ and blocked out anything that didn't relate to programming. By the time the CEO and his sidekick returned, I was ghost-white -- but more important to them, I was almost done. The spec (the blueprint for the application), which should have been completed before I had written a single line of code, was a work in progress. I watched it evolve and became a practitioner of technical Darwinism. I mastered the art of "No." "No, we can't do that. No -- the underlying architecture won't allow for that. Shouldn't this have been ready before I started?" Despite my protestations, I spent hours retrofitting my code, which became, in programmer's jargon, "spaghetti code." It was virtually unreadable -- even to me.

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Our CEO/Svengali came to my rescue, filling in bits and pieces while teasing me that my eyes looked glazed over. I had passed the point of diminishing returns to scale and been rendered almost completely unproductive. I was expending whatever energy I had left on deciphering what I had written so he could make minor changes. I felt a tinge of bitterness in spite of his help. It was my project, and I wanted to finish it on my terms. However, I was well aware that my intellectual faculties were far from where they needed to be to produce new algorithms or solve complex problems.

We left the office, the two of us, at 4:30 a.m. I had become fairly used to this routine, and sliding into bed at 5 a.m. didn't strike me as anything but normal. As the taxi pulled up, I remember feeling drained, slightly unsatisfied and sick to my stomach. The office's midnight dinner wasn't agreeing with me in the least. I don't remember how many trips I made to the bathroom, but I do clearly remember watching the sun dance through my Venetian blinds at 7:30. At 10:15, my alarm went off. Feeling "not quite right," I got on the subway and went to work.

The application I had written was finished, but I received no kudos from the management at the team meeting. Despite the lack of praise, they were sufficiently impressed with my work to ask me to write another. All the while, I looked at my colleagues and wondered, "How can you not see through this?" The irony runs thick and deep, for while they were charmed, I was the one who was buried in work. But I pressed on, waiting for some sort of recognition, desperately wanting someone to realize that I had exceeded expectations. When I was hired, I was told that there was a rating system -- another Microsoft practice -- used to determine salary and equity position in the company. I fell just short of "superstar." It wasn't for lack of intellect, I was told, but for lack of focus. Overdelivery was my coping mechanism; I figured that no one would be able to overlook the fact that even though I was spread far too thin, I kept hitting deadlines. Perhaps I didn't put my boss on a pedestal like my colleagues did, but who was I to cast the first stone? I had abandoned my social life, and my body was on the verge of falling apart.

Feeling "not quite right" had become routine for me. I was constantly nauseated and often felt like I was going to pass out. My attempts at returning to physiological equilibrium consisted of sleeping for 30 hours on weekends. Still, I worked well into the wee hours of each morning during the week, convinced that it was a sacrifice for the greater good, and that in the long run, this would hardly register as a memory.

Like my body, Camelot would begin to disintegrate a few months later. Although people kept showing up at work, most were not completely sure of their responsibilities. The staff grew disgruntled and unfocused. Tasks had been pushed up the hierarchy, and all of the people who had been hired for their great potential were left with little to do. We were hemorrhaging, and management could not apply the Band-Aids fast enough. Despite the valiant efforts of our fearless leader, philosophical and structural reorgs and group-bonding games were not going to save us. Our CEO had gone from drinking buddy to respected leader to Napoleon to Colonel Kurtz (or maybe Colonel Klink) in nine months' time. People -- and by people, I mean the "proletariat" -- questioned their faith in him and came together, forming some semblance of a union. Guess who was lucky enough to be appointed ombudsman? You guessed right.

The Free Software Project
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