Feels very relatable. A couple of years after Y2K I was asked by the employer at the time to join an multi-billion internal project that was run almost exclusively by contractors. I think the task was to convert a Fortran monolith into Java, but after 20+ years it could also been Cobol.

The biggest contingent of contractors came from a company of the AA universe that has survived the Enron scandal. My task was to advise on how to interface with a certain internal system. Easy job. The amount of actual code written was minimal and theses folks were big on generating class scaffolding from UML paintings.

Funnily, there was a constant rotation of contractors and they didn‘t realize I was internal. So, I was treated by them as one of their own. And it was six weeks of education that you can’t get in university or business school.

I learned the art of being billable which is miles away from doing any work. Matter of fact the hour didn’t have 60 minutes but a hundred. And whatever you faked doing, you did it with double digit precision. You documented that you documented someones proposed, ie. documented, code change that day. Two minutes spent, 1.89 hours documented. Yes, Github and stuff would only come the following decade. We are talking word documents here. Being billable meant that people would propose changes and retract the proposal with another one proposal. At least, the amount of side effects was limited.

I also learned the art of fake process. The contractors didn‘t necessarily know what they were doing. But they knew of doing things. So, lots of meetings were happening and random „specialists“ and „experts“ were flown around the planet to delight meetings with stuff they knew of. Having these people disseminate some talking points from recycled slide decks was .. uhm .. fashionable.

Third was the art of faking yourself. I vividly remember the guy coming in from Tuesday to Thursday who would bring and arrange the same set if golf balls at his desk. I must have asked him if he played or something. In the end it turned out some important dude made him caddy for an offsite golf event of some partners. And he picked up the balls that were lying around the course. Some consider that a big nono. But apparently it gave some status since every thought the guy had played at said offsite.

Highlights from the weeks being embedded with the contractors include a contractor-only dinner. No idea anymore how I managed to be there but some partner gave a rousing speech how they were at the fore front of innovation with this project. And that everyone frenetically clapped at the end. Memory has that the red wine was good, the food less so. Another highlight was an educative session by one of the flown in experts on what a FIFO queue was and how that aided in-order processing of arriving events. Frenetic clapping ensued.

Now this is all 25‘ish years ago and perhaps memories are more pointy than reality was. What is certain though is that the number of lines shipped into production was zero. Zilch. And that was not because someone realized all of it was fake. It was because the company went out of business eventually and was bought, sold, merged for its customer base and not its systems.